BrooklynVegan’s Top 55 Albums of 2020

The Mobile, Alabama, newcomer gets a new hater every single day (or so she raps on “Pockets Bigger”), and guess what? She’s loving it. With her brash, bratty delivery and supersized confidence, Flo Milli comes off like the cool girl at school—complete with a mouthful of braces—on her debut mixtape. A 12-track blast through swaggering boasts and bubblegum trap beats, Flo’s got punchlines for days on breakthrough hit “Beef FloMix,” hands for anyone who wants ’em on “Send the Addy,” and no time for thirsty dudes on the SWV flip “Weak.” Short and not-so-sweet, *Ho, why is you here ?* feels like the 20-year-old rapper’s official arrival.

*Read the Canadian singer and composer’s recollections of the tracks on this career-spanning collection.* Beverly Glenn-Copeland possesses the kind of voice and songwriting sensibility that comes around perhaps only once a generation. A heartfelt tenor whose voice soars from the spoken rhythms of folk to the quivering vibrato of an operatic contralto, he has provided in his 60 years in music a little-known yet vitally important catalog of late-20th-century musical movements, as well as a consistently futuristic purview which has always set his creations on their own track. Emerging in the late 1960s as a classical singer, Glenn-Copeland soon had “an understanding,” as he tells Apple Music, that this was not the life he was meant to lead. There followed two beautiful folk-influenced albums on the GRT and CBC labels in 1970 before he seemed to retreat from the limelight, self-releasing synthesizer-based meditations in the 1980s and ’90s while appearing as a regular guest on children’s television and as a writer for *Sesame Street*. Following a recent crate-digger-fueled resurgence, 2020 was the perfect time for a retrospective release. “Oh, this wasn’t my idea,” he says, typically understated. “It was my label and publisher who went through all of my music and came up with these choices. They are excellent, though.” Read on for his commentary on *Transmissions*, track by track. **La Vita** “My mother had said the refrain of this song to me so much during my lifetime: ‘Enjoy your life.’ I always found it really encouraging and I really got what she meant. As far as she was concerned, you have one life on this planet and so you have to enjoy the fact that you are alive, since you will suffer, you will encounter difficulties, and you will have wonderful things happen, but you must overall just enjoy the fact that you actually had the opportunity to be alive. I woke up one morning and this song just came through. One of my very dearest friends, the late Maggie Hollis, was an incredible singer, and you can hear her on this.” **Ever New** “I have lived most of my life primarily in the woods, in the wild. These pieces on *Keyboard Fantasies* in the 1980s were created in that environment and it was speaking to me. I never go in with any idea when I write music. It just comes to me. In this particular case, I was checking out making music on computers, which was wonderful because it allowed me to actually flesh out and orchestrate the sounds that I was always hearing in my mind, inspired by that space.” **Colour of Anyhow (CBC Q Live Version)** “CBC said that they wanted to do an album with me in the late 1960s, and I was accompanied by this beautiful orchestra, mainly of classical players. At that point in time, I was thinking of myself as a folk musician and I was writing music on guitars. When you really listen to this album and the 1970 release on the GRT label, though, you hear it\'s not actually folk music. There\'s a couple things on there that are folk-influenced, but there\'s also one thing that\'s avant-garde classical music of the 20th century, there\'s stuff that\'s jazz, there’s so much difference.” **Deep River (Live at Le Guess Who?)** “I hadn\'t toured since the early ’70s and I was never with a band, I couldn\'t afford that. It became obvious that if I wanted to be able to come anywhere close to the music that was on the *Keyboard Fantasies* album live, I was going to need a group, because I didn’t want to go onstage hitting buttons and playing the computer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to get a band together for this live performance in 2018. I sing ‘Deep River’ often in live concerts because it comes from my Black tradition in the United States and we\'re still experiencing slavery now. It\'s not just Black folks, it\'s mostly women now who are being taken—thousands a day, actually. It\'s really a very sad commentary on the reality of our current situation that we still objectify people as commerce, and it’s important for me to talk to my audience about it.” **Don’t Despair** “I have lived in silence for the past 40 years, ever since I left university and I stopped taking classical music lessons. I was initially a classical singer for approximately two years, and things were going quite well; I was representing Canada at Expo 67 as a classical singer, and I was doing concerts for CBC. But I had an understanding one day that I was reliving a life that I\'d already lived. That\'s why it had all felt so familiar for me, as well as the fact that my father was a classical pianist. At that point I decided to start writing my own music and I ceased to listen to almost anything else. I wrote this in 1969 when I was in my early twenties and after I had stopped listening. It was a time when the most important thing going on for me was relationships. It was a song with a relationship in mind.” **Durocher** “This was written in 1968 and it just made its way onto my first album. The thing to understand about that record was that I was still extremely influenced by my classical tradition then. In the classical tradition, everything is bigger than life, most especially tragedy, or heart, or loss. That had been my world for so long, it was natural for me to write melodramatically in that way. But it wasn\'t until the second album, which also came out in 1970, that I actually switched to who I was at this time in terms of my musical expression.” **River Dreams** “I\'m constantly receiving music from the Universal Broadcasting System. In terms of what gets recorded, it\'s always something that suddenly comes to me when I\'m busy doing something else. Then I have to run to put it down as fast as I can and also try not to overwork it and not get overly involved. I have to allow it to be what it was when it came to me. That was the case for ‘River Dreams,’ a new composition for this album.” **This Side of Grace** “If you\'ve listened to the album that this track is on \[2004’s *Primal Prayer*\], it\'s actually a devotional record to that which is spiritually common to us all around the world. It\'s all talking about the fact that we have to look at ourselves honestly and understand that there is a universal reality. We humans may have different paths, but it\'s all coming from the same place, it\'s just translated according to our cultures.” **Sunset Village** “When I was between the ages of 12 and 17, I listened to every kind of music that existed in the world. I listened to a lot of Chinese music, music from India, Black funk music, everything I could find, as well as my father, who was playing Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven for five hours a day on the piano. And so ‘Sunset Village’ may sound like it has ‘Eastern’ melodies to your ears, but it is just an expression of who I am. Everything on this album \[1986’s *Keyboard Fantasies*\] is all synthesizer music. The wonderful aspect of the synthesizer is that it can create sounds that no musician can. I could imagine what a star might sound like and then approximate my concept of it.” **In the Image** “I had a drum machine at the time of making this track and I loved it; I was programming it like crazy. I also had a hand drum machine that you played, and while I was jamming with it I realized it had some prerecorded things in it. I didn\'t know enough about what was going on in the world to know that they were prerecorded beats from other people, so I just began layering my own drumming on top of it, and that’s how ‘In the Image’ came to be and came to be so rhythmic.” **A Little Talk** “‘A Little Talk’ is very Buddhist in its orientation. I\'ve been practicing Buddhism for 27 years, and it really speaks more from that perspective; it has what I interpret as a Buddhist energy behind it, and the song feeds into all the different cultures of spirituality I was exploring on *Primal Prayer*.” **Montreal Main (The Buddha in the Palm)** “This is a song that I wrote for an underground movie that I was asked to score for in 1973. The film’s name is *Montreal Main*, and it still continues to have resonance today. The inclusion of this composition nods towards the different ways that my music has been created and used over the years.” **Erzili** “This track was the expression of my West African heritage. It was my own personal way of relating to my roots. I wrote all these songs for the GRT 1970 album in the course of maybe a year and a half. The producer who approached me to record them, Doug Riley, just gathered a bunch of jazz musicians and we all got into a studio. I didn\'t know who these people were, I just played them the songs and then we would record. The whole album was first takes, live off the floor. It was unheard of, and the experience was incredible. I had no concept of what brilliant company I was keeping, in their ability to hear something once and know exactly what it was and know exactly how to finesse it. It was unbelievable.”

Transmissions is a career-spanning album that includes compositions from Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s early works and his cult-status release, Keyboard Fantasies. It also includes both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. It includes the first pieces of newly recorded music that Glenn has released in almost 20 years with the track ‘River Dreams’. The album is nominated for Best Outlier Album at the A2IM Libera Awards. Transmissions is available now on vinyl, CD and all streaming platforms featuring extended liner notes written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. Stained Glass Cover Art of The Raven by Evelyn Wolff, www.wolffglass.ca

Of the many meanings behind *Dark Matter*—London jazz drummer Moses Boyd’s debut LP—the most vital comes from above. “It’s astronomy,” Boyd tells Apple Music, “this invisible fabric that brings us all together. *Dark Matter* isn’t meant to be a negative record; it\'s meant to unify, to make people think.” It’s also the rare political record that doesn’t lean entirely on lyrics. As both a producer and bandleader—contributors include Poppy Ajudha, Obongjayar, Joe Armon-Jones, and Nonku Phiri—Boyd wanted to capture the gravity of our current moment in both rhythm and atmosphere, by combining elements of Bjork’s *Vespertine* and Aphex Twin’s *Selected Ambient Works* with the funk of James Brown and Tony Allen. “I wanted nuance,” he says of the album\'s many textures. “That air and earth feeling. Floaty bits that are kind of beautiful, but thickness and weight, where it\'s like, if I put this on, it\'s going to hit me right in my stomach, and it\'s going to move me. I don\'t see myself as overtly political, but I guess I am. I\'m just responding to what\'s going on around, which maybe all art should do.” Here, he walks us through his debut, track by track. **Stranger Than Fiction** “I had just come back from holiday in Sri Lanka with my family to what was going on in the UK—so from palm trees and beaches to Brexit. At the moment, in the world, you can pick a country and look at what’s happening and just be like, ‘Is this actually real?’ I wanted to mirror what\'s going on around me musically. When you listen to it, it’s like, ‘What is real, what\'s not? Is that a real drum kit? Is that not a real drum kit?’ I wanted to really blur the lines and make people have to really listen carefully to decipher what\'s real and what\'s not. That was my musical metaphor for something stranger than fiction, which is also just referencing what\'s going on in politics, in nature, in life—full stop.” **Hard Food (Interlude)** “Amongst all of this craziness, you realize there\'s so much you have in common with the person next to you. Hard food is a Jamaican term—it\'s a type of dish that might consist of boiled dumplings, boiled plantains, a really hearty meal that brings people together. I’d reached out to \[jazz composer/bassist\] Gary Crosby, one of my mentors. That recording is our conversation. He\'s grown up with his own struggles and challenges in the UK. He used this analogy of ‘I’m from West Indian background and I defy anyone, from anywhere in the world, whether they know about my food or not: If they\'re hungry they\'re going to eat it, and they\'re going to enjoy it, and it will fill them up.’ He was trying to say, ‘Look, we\'re all similar. We all want the same things in life. We\'re not different to each other. There\'s far more that unites us than separates us.’” **BTB** “‘BTB’ is one of only two tracks that are complete live takes. BTB stands for ‘blacker than black,’ another play on dark matter. Just being me, and my experience being a young black person in England—it’s a celebration of culture. I\'m from the West Indies, and I really wanted to have my sort of take on those sounds and those rhythms. So it\'s very sort of soca, calypso-driven. Also quite dark—you couldn\'t play that at carnival, but it makes sense to me, as somebody that\'s grown up in that culture, but not necessarily born in it and from it. It might be like being born in New York, but your family is from Puerto Rico. You have a very different reference in the way you visualize and present your culture.“ **Y.O.Y.O** “‘Y.O.Y.O’ stands for ‘you\'re on your own,’ and ‘yo-yo’ in the sense of just like a yo-yo goes up and down and round and round, and if you listen to the drum beat, it\'s like a cycle of a loop. But when I was making this music, I was thinking like, \'Man, all of this is going on. You really are on your own in this world.\' And I don\'t necessarily think that\'s a bad thing. When it sort of hit me, it was like, ‘That at first is very sad, but it\'s also very liberating.’ You are in control. You go as far, or as close, as you want to go. You can\'t rely on anyone but your own brain and yourself, and in that there is power. It was influenced by sad things I was seeing around me, but out of that came positivity.\" **Shades of You** “I had the bassline and the drum beat, but I felt I’d given as much as I could to the song and it wasn\'t done yet. I was thinking about vocalists, and I\'m quite good at kind of hearing somebody\'s voice on it. That was it—I heard Poppy’s voice. I just knew she\'d understand it musically. And as I sort of explained it to her, she went away and came back without any direction from me. I’ve known her for a long time, I’m a big fan of what she does, and I wanted to try and push to see if she could try something different to maybe what you\'ve heard from her, because I\'ve seen her do loads of interesting things that aren\'t recorded or aren\'t on YouTube, and I just wanted to kind of get somebody that would get it, and I think she did.” **Dancing in the Dark** “What\'s the word when someone can read your mind? Telepathic. I had this loop, and even before I exhausted my part on it, I just heard Steven Obongjayar. He’s got this kind of raspy tone that could just cut through and make it kind of feel almost like Afrobeat and punk rock. We got in a studio together, and I played it to him, and then after two seconds he was like, ‘Man, can I have this for my album?’ After about an hour arguing: ‘No, you can\'t have it.’ What was crazy was that I had not explained anything to do with *Dark Matter*, or the subjects. He just got it. I was like, ‘Man, look at that. There\'s something going on. There\'s something in the air.’” **Only You** “I was talking to Theon Cross, who\'s a tuba player, and I remember playing him some sketches. He’s like, ‘Moses, man, why do you never feature on your music?’ And I think because I write it, because I produce it, because I help mix it, because I\'m putting it together, to me, it just feels a bit weird to then have solo stuff. And also, I don\'t want it to sound like a drummer\'s record. I don\'t want it to sound like you can tell who I am on the record. But he managed to convince me. I was in the club and I had an idea: I love listening to techno and garage, but why do I never hear a drum? I know it sounds weird, a drum solo through a sound system. But I didn\'t want it to be like a typical feature—here’s the song and it\'s framed just for me. I wanted it to kind of exist in its own sort of texture, to take you on this journey. Like you could close your eyes and sort of vibe to in a club. Maybe I got it, maybe I didn\'t. But that was the vibe.” **2 Far Gone** “There\'s an album by Herbie Hancock called *Inventions & Dimensions*, and Herbie doesn\'t need help, but it just showcases him so well. It\'s got these incredible grooves, and he\'s just going at it on the piano. I was like, ‘How do I do that with my thing?’ I remember going around to \[composer/producer\] Joe \[Armon-Jones’\] house and he had recently got a little upright piano in his front room. Typically, if you go to a studio and you record piano, they\'ll have really good stereo mics, and it\'s really pristine, and everything\'s got to be good. What was great about this one was he just had this one microphone and it wasn\'t the best microphone. He just put it somewhere and did one take at this upright. People were walking around the house—it was so rough and ready. But it worked so perfectly. Even when I was trying to mix it, the rawness of it sounded so great.” **Nommos Descent** “A lot of this stuff started as me really experimenting with loops. That one wanted a vocal. On a trip to South Africa last year, I was working with a friend of mine, Nonku Phiri. She\'s from Cape Town, but she lives in Jo’burg, and her father was a musician on *Graceland*, back with Paul Simon, so she knows everybody. While I was hanging out with her, a lot of the music she was showing me, people like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a lot of folk music, vocal music, really fit the sound I was going for when I was experimenting. So when I got back to England, I sent her the track. Even if I took all the music away—I might do that one day—and just release her vocals, it would be so beautiful. It’s referencing the Nommos people, really talking on the element, the metaphor. \'Dark matter\' is a reference for the plight of the diaspora, black people, and sort of how we\'ve come from greatness and whether you choose to do with that what you will. What was cool: We\'re never actually in the same room. I sent the music to her and she did her thing, and it just worked.” **What Now?** “It\'s easy to feel helpless, but I\'m not really like that—I’m very solution-based. There\'s no point in sort of posing the statement without thinking about a solution. \[\'What Now\'\] was a nice summary for me, because I wanted it to be very meditative. It’s that real strong mix of trying to have the acoustic and the electronic worlds coexist without battling each other. You’ve got this 808 sort of vibe going, as well as horns that sound like they\'re almost suffocated. I was messing a lot with modular synths, and I think I sampled a note on a piano and sort of held it and saturated it a bit. I remember just listening to it in my home setup, and it just put me in this real trance. I think music has that power to cleanse and make you recollect, think, hope—all that stuff. Across the whole album, I could\'ve just recorded things in a very normal, clean fashion, but it was more about how do I get that vibration? How do I get that texture, that tone? And I wanted to end the record on that sort of note: ‘Well, where are we going from here?’”

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.