The New Yorker: Amanda Petrusich's Ten Best Albums of 2017

In the wake of their arresting debut album, Big Thief find further beauty in ever harsher realities on *Capacity*. It\'s bound together by singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker, who’s achingly fragile and coldly confident within the same song, as she shares vivid, intimate details of kisses, crashes, and a long-lost brother. Stark acoustic numbers like \"Pretty Things\" and \"Coma\" glow with a warm, vintage sheen, making them timeless, while expansive heartland rocker \"Shark Smile\" gives Lenker\'s wraith-like presence room to truly soar.

After the storm comes a clearer, brighter morning. In 2015, Björk channelled a painful breakup into the dark, tumultuous *Vulnicura*. On this follow-up, she turns toward warmth and optimism. With flutes and harps weaved around glitchy electronics and sampled voices, her music is as expressive and unique as her vocals. “The Gate” welcomes love back into her heart amid a hymnal, delicate soundscape, and the sense of a new dawn is accented in the birdsong that hops across graceful flute melodies on the title track. “Sue Me” returns to the sorrow and recrimination of broken love, but where there was once vulnerability and despair, Björk now seems charged with resilience.

Utopia is the ninth studio album by Icelandic singer-musician Björk It was primarily produced by Björk and Venezuelan electronic record producer Arca and released on 24 November 2017 through One Little Independent Records. The album received critical acclaim from music critics for its production, songwriting, and Björk’s vocals, and later received a nomination for Best Alternative Music Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, becoming Björk’s eighth consecutive nomination in the category. Utopia is an avant-garde and folktronica album. With fourteen tracks in total, the album clocks in at 71 minutes and 38 seconds, making it the longest of Björk's studio albums to date. Björk began working on Utopia soon after releasing Vulnicura in 2015. Upon winning the award for International Female Solo Artist at the 2016 Brit Awards, Björk did not appear as she was busy recording her new album. In an interview published in March 2016, Björk likened the writing to "paradise" as opposed to Vulnicura being "hell... like divorce." Speaking to Fader in March 2017, filmmaker and collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang said that he had been involved with Björk on her new album, stating that "quite a bit of it" had already been written, and that the "new album's gonna be really future-facing, in a hopeful way that I think is needed right now."

www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-031 www.paradiseofbachelors.com/jake-xerxes-fussell ALBUM ABSTRACT Entrancing guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell follows his celebrated self-titled debut (produced by William Tyler) with a moving new album of Natural Questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. Featuring art by iconic painter Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans—Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn), Nathan Salsburg (Alan Lomax Archive), and Nathan Golub (Mountain Goats)—as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah). ALBUM NARRATIVE “Thus is nature: beyond all things is the ocean, beyond the ocean nothing.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from Natural Questions, c. 65 AD Roger Brown, whose preternaturally vivid paintings grace Durham, North Carolina guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell’s second album What in the Natural World, is usually associated with the loose confederacy of artists known as the Chicago Imagists, but at heart he was fundamentally a Southern boy whose Alabama origins root his work. (He grew up in Opelika, about thirty miles northwest of Fussell’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and counted Elvis Presley as a distant cousin.) Influenced both by comics and the folk and self-taught art he collected, Brown’s distinctive landscapes—which oscillate between architectural and natural, urban and bucolic, busy and barren, depicting the incursion of culture on our environment—are meticulously rendered in a stylized idiom of alien symmetries: recursive, patterned terrains as saturated with vibratory color as with psychological and political subtexts. Both Brown and Fussell approach their art as a consequence of their practices as collectors and scholars of Southern vernacular culture—material culture and music, respectively—imbuing their own inventive work with the clarity and vigor of folk traditions, while reframing their durable, multivalent strangeness for our own times. Fussell has become a masterful interpreter and mutative performer of American folk and popular music, always allowing the songs he selects to breathe and swell with oceanic ambiguity, never closing them off to contemporary contexts and sonics. It’s the result of a lifetime dedicated to apprenticeships with master storytellers, from Piedmont blueswomen Precious Bryant and Etta Baker to documentary artists Les Blank and Art Rosenbaum. So if What in the Natural World feels both several shades darker, and unsettlingly funnier, than Jake’s self-titled 2015 debut (produced by brother-in-arms William Tyler), you need only look around at our national predicament in 2017 for clues. Since then Jake has played around the country, opening for Wilco, dueting with Tyler, and touring with Mt. Moriah, Nathan Bowles, and Daniel Bachman … and the territory he’s traversed, for many of our fellow citizens, doesn’t brook much hope. This time round Fussell has sourced his repertoire from beyond his primary Southeastern foraging grounds, including songs from the Southwest (“Canyoneers”) and even Wales (“Bells of Rhymney”). He encounters monsters, literal and figurative, everywhere in this landscape of loss and longing—from the hellhounds of “Jump for Joy” to cruel Mr. Brown in “Furniture Man” (“a devil born without horns”); from the oppressive mine owners (“they have fangs, they have teeth”) of “Bells of Rhymney” to the demons and dragons on “St. Brendan’s Isle.” Unlike his debut, the majority of these songs are not nominally traditional; they don’t hail from what Jake calls “the weird void of folk anonymity and the dark, fertile past.” Five of nine are attributed to specific artists, both canonical (Duke Ellington) and obscure (Helen Cockram), and all are recast in vibrant, assured recordings that elide genres and dissolve the false binaries of tradition and innovation, folk and modern, old and new. What in the Natural World was recorded by Jason Meagher (Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman) in Orange Co., New York, and by Nick Petersen (Horseback, Mt. Moriah) in Orange Co., North Carolina, and features contributions from three notable Nathans—Nathan Bowles (drums, banjo, piano, melodica; Steve Gunn), Nathan Salsburg (guitar on “Pinnacle Mountain”; Alan Lomax Archive), and Nathan Golub (steel guitar; Mountain Goats)—as well as Joan Shelley (vocal on “Lowe Bonnie”) and Casey Toll (bass; Mt. Moriah). Throughout, Fussell poses Natural Questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. These nine elliptical riddles, spare but sturdy, driven by Jake’s limpid guitar and understated singing, both absorb and reflect the conditions of their listeners, refusing to offer easy answers. Though the album title lacks a question mark—it can be read as exclamatory or interrogative—all of these songs contain axial, and anxious, questions about the Natural World and our tenuous position within it. “All the hounds, I do believe, have been killed/Ain’t you thrilled?” The minimally arranged “Jump for Joy” (from Duke Ellington’s eponymous 1941 “Sun-Tanned Revu-sical”) and “Billy Button” (an odd relic of nonsense verse with likely roots in medicine shows and minstrelsy) anchor Sides A and B with mutual echoes. Fussell’s nimbly fingerpicked chord progressions, buttressed by Bowles’ piano and melodica, hew an achingly bittersweet mood of yearning from rough doggerel about “groovy pastures” and “hog meat”—transforming their absurdist lyrics into affecting statements about mortality and the distant promise of paradise. What to do when we finally “stomp up to heaven and meet old St. Pete,” when we arrive in “the happy land of Canaan”? “It’s a long way to travel, and the money for to spend.” “Have you ever seen peaches growing on a sweet potato vine?” Can nature yield further fruits? Instead of a response to the titular paradox we get sleepily affectionate flirtation: “Wake up, woman, take your big leg off of mine.” (“She’s a married woman, but I love her just the same.”) Bowles shuffles winningly. “What kind of business has the poor man got/dealing with the Furniture Man?” “Furniture Man,” a desperate tale of poverty, dispossession, and imminent homelessness—its cascading guitar refrain descending into a quiet pit of resignation—is as relevant and heartrending now as it was when first recorded in the 1920s. “What’s in a man to make him thirst/for the kind of life he knows is cursed?” “Pinnacle Mountain Silver Mine” (by Appalachian Virginia singer Helen Cockram) and “Canyoneers” (by Arizona producer and Lee Hazelwood associate Loy Clingman) explore the rugged topography of risk and impossibly remote rewards. Pinnacle Mountain holds a “secret I may never know” (intimated by Salsburg’s charming, filigreed guitar), but the “lonely river rats” of “Canyoneers” seemingly toil for purely existential reasons. “Have you ever wondered what you’d do when all the chips were down?” “‘Is there hope for the future?’/Say the brown bells of Merthyr.” The arcane coal miner’s lament “Bells of Rhymney” shares its text, by Welsh poet Idris Davies, with the song popularized by Pete Seeger and the Byrds, complete with personified, protesting bells, but here Jake supplies his own gospel-tinged musical setting. “St. Brendan’s Isle” offers a faux-Celtic companion piece by Arkansan Jimmy Driftwood, wherein monstrous mine owners are replaced by actual brimstone and scaly “monsters that be.” “How can I live, how can I live?/You wounded me so deep.” The hero of “Lowe Bonnie,” a chilling Alabama variant of the Child murder ballad “Young Hunting” (aka “Henry Lee”), is slain by his jilted lover (voiced here by Joan Shelley) in a deathly embrace, as he watches her “pen knife” spill his “own heart’s blood” onto his feet. Jake’s guitar shivers. In his first-century scientific and philosophical treatise Natural Questions, Seneca interrogates his environment for answers, venturing some, but warning that “a single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject.” Maybe the meaning of a thing reveals itself only through tradition, through time, through iterative summoning and study. You get the sense, listening to Fussell’s music, and looking at Brown’s paintings, that they would agree. + Available on 150g virgin vinyl as an LP, with heavy-duty 24pt matte jacket, color labels, and high-res download code for the entire album. + CD edition features heavy-duty matte gatefold jacket and LP replica artwork. + Artwork features two paintings by iconic Chicago Imagist artist Roger Brown (1941–1997). + RIYL: Michael Hurley, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Dave Van Ronk, Jim Dickinson, Raccoon Records, Joan Shelley, Nathan Bowles, Nathan Salsburg, William Tyler, Daniel Bachman, Wilco. PRESS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A singular combination of pedigree, experience, education, and talent. – The Oxford American 8/10.Finest worksongs reworked. Beautifully loose arrangements of playful, resilient songs.” – Uncut 9/10. It takes a lot of work to sound this relaxed. On his buoyant self-titled debut, North Carolina-based, Georgia-raised folksinger and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell wields guitar chops gleaned from years of apprenticeship and deep study to spin the most vibrant yarns. Although the songs are Fussell’s adaptations of traditional folk and blues material, in Fussell’s curatorial hands, they sound neither old nor self-consciously shiny and new; they simply make you want to dance. – Sarah Greene, Exclaim! A lively and wholehearted gem of folk, country and bluegrass… not only gorgeous, but also a hell of a good time. Quietly, but unmistakably, the poignancy of this group’s paean to the vistas and spirits of their land take hold of you. And you don’t want it to let go. – Chad Depasquale, Aquarium Drunkard A human jukebox, a raw and penetrating voice out of time, a genuine bluesman with the heart of a mystic. His debut, Jake Xerxes Fussell, just out from Paradise of Bachelors, is pretty damn perfect. This is the kind of record I feel like I was born to listen to. That voice. That guitar. Man. – William Boyle, No Depression ARTIST TESTIMONIALS Jake isn’t just a rare bird, he’s the professor you always wished you had, the friend you never get tired of epic hangs with, the human jukebox, the guitar player and singer who makes any band that he’s in better. He’s a southern scholar and gentleman in the tradition of Jim Dickinson, George Mitchell, and Les Blank. He’s a Dave Van Ronk for SEC country. – William Tyler Jake is one helluva bluesman: my favorite of his generation, in fact; and, in my opinion, the best young traditional blues artist performing today. – George Mitchell Jake X. Fussell is certainly one of America’s finest young tradition-based songsters and guitar pickers. He had an ideal start: as a kid traveling the back roads of Georgia, Alabama, and even out to the Indian regions of Oklahoma with his folklorist dad, hearing and absorbing not only the vocal styles and guitar licks of such greats as Precious Bryant, but also developing a sure sense of the expressive core of Southern roots music. From Georgia’s Sea Islands and Chattahoochie Valley to the Mississippi Delta to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jake is still listening and learning, and coming up with music that takes us to a deep place in the American spirit. – Art Rosenbaum Jake Xerxes Fussell is one of my brothers in song. A finer guitar picker, and more heart-centered interpreter of American song you will rarely find. – Jolie Holland

In the two years since *To Pimp a Butterfly*, we’ve hung on Kendrick Lamar\'s every word—whether he’s destroying rivals on a cameo, performing the #blacklivesmatter anthem *on top of a police car* at the BET Awards, or hanging out with Obama. So when *DAMN.* opens with a seemingly innocuous line—\"So I was taking a walk the other day…”—we\'re all ears. The gunshot that abruptly ends the track is a signal: *DAMN.* is a grab-you-by-the-throat declaration that’s as blunt, complex, and unflinching as the name suggests. If *Butterfly* was jazz-inflected, soul-funk vibrance, *DAMN.* is visceral, spare, and straight to the point, whether he’s boasting about \"royalty inside my DNA” on the trunk-rattling \"DNA.\" or lamenting an anonymous, violent death on the soul-infused “FEAR.” No topic is too big to tackle, and the songs are as bold as their all-caps names: “PRIDE.” “LOYALTY.” “LOVE.” \"LUST.” “GOD.” When he repeats the opening line to close the album, that simple walk has become a profound journey—further proof that no one commands the conversation like Kendrick Lamar.

Music for desert picnics. Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar delves into his more sensitive side with a minimal studio recording of dreamy ballads. Thumping calabash, droning guitars, and vocal overdubs evoke an imagined desert soundscape. All instruments and vocals performed by Mdou only, creating a very personal and auteur sessions. Emotive and introspective, exploring themes of religion, spirituality, and matters of the heart. After his underground success on the pirate mp3 networks of West Africa with his first release, the psychedelic autotuned “Anar,” (2008) he was featured on the Sahel Sounds compilation “Music from Saharan Cellphones” (2011) and launched a successful touring career. In 2012, Mdou relocated from his village to Agadez, the center of Niger’s guitar scene, and formed his band. Over the past years, he has become well known on the international circuit, playing high energy electrified music in festivals and clubs across Europe and North America. In 2013, he released his first international album, “Afelan,” rocking and raw sessions recorded live in Niger. In 2015, he starred in the first ever Tuareg language film, “Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red In It,” a Nigerien remake of “Purple Rain.” In the past years, Tuareg rock music, particularly that of Niger, has gotten faster. There is a preference for this new sound - both in the raucous weddings of Agadez and in Berlin rock clubs. The wavering guitar solos, rapid fire drums and heavy distortion has become characteristic of the contemporary sound. For Mdou, this was not always the case. Self taught in a religious region that eschewed the guitar, Mdou was forced to learn music in secret. And when he did begin to play, there were no weddings or festivities. His early oeuvre was developed to play at informal private sessions with his friends. In these “takits” or picnics, Mdou and his friends would pass the lazy days together sitting under a tree, drinking tea, laughing, and singing songs. For his new record, Mdou revisits this “music for desert picnics,” taking his compositions from his youth, and bringing them to the studio (his repertoire of “takit” songs were never recorded and only exist on warbly cassette recordings compressed into low quality mp3s). From love ballads (“Nikali Talit”), religious praise (“Ilmouloud”), to life counsel (“Amidini”), the songs are intensely personal, both in content and in structure. Constructed around the guitar, Mdou plays everything on the album in lush layered overdubs, singing both call and response vocals, playing rhythm guitar, and drumming on the calabash. Produced in collaboration with Christopher Kirkley (Sahel Sounds) and longtime associate Jesse Johnson (Boomarm Nation), the light touch pays respect to the origin of these ballads. The result is a very different side of Mdou Moctar, that of quiet introspection, lifted out of memory for one last time.

Until a late flurry of percussion arrives, doleful guitar and bass are Solána Rowe’s only accompaniment on opener “Supermodel,” a stinging kiss-off to an adulterous ex. It doesn’t prepare you for the inventively abstract production that follows—disembodied voices haunting the airy trap-soul of “Broken Clocks,” “Anything”’s stuttering video-game sonics—but it instantly establishes the emotive power of her rasping, percussive vocal. Whether she’s feeling empowered by her physicality on the Kendrick Lamar-assisted “Doves in the Wind” or wrestling with insecurity on “Drew Barrymore,” SZA’s songs impact quickly and deeply.

After his breakthrough *Lost in The Dream*, Adam Granduciel takes things a step further. Marrying the weathered hope of Dylan, Springsteen, and Petty with a studio rat’s sense of detail, *A Deeper Understanding* feels like an album designed to get lost in, where lush textures meet plainspoken questions about life, loss, and hope, and where songs stretch out as though they\'re chasing answers. For as much as Granduciel says in words, it’s his music that speaks loudest, from the synth-strobing heartland rock of “Holding On” and “Nothing to Find” to ballads like “Clean Living” and “Knocked Down,” whose spaces are as expansive as any sound.

The Weather Station has been acclaimed for her “measured, perceptive storytelling… an unmistakable and communicative voice, able to convey hope and hurt with equal clarity” (Pitchfork). With The Weather Station, Lindeman reinvents her songcraft with a vital new energy, framing her prose-poem narratives in bolder musical settings. It’s an emotionally candid statement – a work of urgency, generosity and joy – that feels like a collection of obliquely gut-punching short stories. “I wanted to make a rock and roll record,” Lindeman explains, “but one that sounded how I wanted it to sound, which of course is nothing like rock and roll.” The result declares its understated feminist politics and new sonic directions from its first moments. There are big, buzzing guitars, thrusting drums, horror-movie strings and her keening, Appalachian-tinged vocal melodies. Reaching towards a sort of accelerated talking blues, she sings with a new rapid-fire vocal style. After two records made in close collaboration with other musicians, including Loyalty, which FADER called “the best folk album of the year,” and Exclaim!echoed with a stellar 9/10, Lindeman self- produced for the first time since her debut. The band comprised touring bassist Ben Whiteley, drummer Don Kerr, and guests, including Ryan Driver (Jennifer Castle), Ben Boye (Ty Segall, Ryley Walker), and Will Kidman (The Constantines). But the heaviest thumbprint on the record belongs to Lindeman; she wrote the dense, often dissonant string arrangements and played most of the wending, tumbling guitar lines.