GrumpWizard

I made an effort to begin 2024 with a distillation of my listening each month into a single playlist of seven songs. I chose seven solely for its alliterative nature. If you have followed this project for any amount of time, you have seen the stupid bullshits I take with each month’s naming conventions. I wanted to choose seven songs each month, January through November, and then choose from those seventy-seven songs a final seven representative of my favorite songs from the year.

You can find those seven songs here: The 7s of the Seventy-Seven (Apple Music)

If you missed the other month’s playlists, you can listen to them here:

Me on Apple Music and me on Spotify.

I also like to choose a favorite new record of the year and a favorite “new to me” record. So much great music came out this year that I struggled to boil it down. So, lets start with the best “new to me” record:

I WANT YOU TO KILL ME by Alex Walton (Apple, Spotify)

This needed little deliberation. I don’t know how it was that Walton remained off my radar for as long as she did. These tunes (and not just this record, like, all of it) are just so filled with beautiful artistry and honest, wrenching admission – delivered tongue in cheek and flavored with a kind of gallows humor. It feels like Ben Kweller’s garage-punk project. They are toe-tappers and screamers. They are late night introspectors. They are pretty damn magic, all of them.

Runner-up: Boston by Boston (Apple, Spotify)

Just hear me out: this record is amazing. It abounds with radio hits and sounds like you have fallen into some cliche ROCK BLOCK on your home town’s hit classic rock station. But…but, these songs are so brilliantly crafted. They come from a time when the best of popular musicians were tight craftsfolk building something beautiful with their proficiency. More and more, I am amazed by rock and roll in the early 70s. After the release of the Beatles “Let it Be,” bands just followed their hearts and made music new and fresh and interesting, spanning from Black Sabbath to Steely Dan to Boston. I love it. I love it so much. If you have a copy of this on vinyl please just send it to me now.

Before I choose my favorite new record of 2024 I want to talk about how hard it was to decide upon. I managed to boil it down to a pool of four records which I wore the hell out of this year: TANGK by IDLES, Poetry by Dehd, Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman, and Nobody Loves You More by Kim Deal. Deal’s solo record came out on November 22nd and burned so bright for me that it just landed on the shortlist. Each of these could be a best record, but I had to get it down to a favorite and a runner up.

I organized these four records into two camps: breadth and depth. Kim Deal and IDLES having breadth while Dehd and MJ Lenderman have depth. The songs on Nobody Loves You More and TANGK are a spectrum. They go from bouncy dance tunes to quiet and soft whispers focusing on words to build the architecture. They are all over the place. From Dancer to Grace, IDLES stretch their legs and show what they are capable of. Kim Deal? Kim Deal has been doing this for long enough that she is making music for herself first and foremost, she is keeping it interesting and inventing new ways to be in love with this process she has spent her 63 years working at.

On Poetry, Dehd goes deep into what they are doing. The Chicago trio keep blasting away and their newest record reaches for heights exponentially past their previous iteration. Kempf somehow continues to make her already astonishing vocals more interesting, more intimate, more honest, and more powerful. Jason Balla has been playing the same surfy-pop guitar line for half a decade now and it still shows up nuanced and engaging and Eric McGrady’s percussion somehow continues to remain driving while slipping in extra beats. They have all grown and they are growing in a beautiful direction. But, man, Kempf’s vocals just do something to my heart. Give me something rough and tumble indeed. The combination of it all is the reason why this album is my runner up for best new record of 2024. (Apple, Spotify)

Then, there is Manning Fireworks

Best New Record of 2024: Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman (Apple, Spotify)

This fucking kid is like 25. I had listened to a few of his other records over the last few years, works which terrify me to consider his age at the time. But Manning Fireworks brings a new level of polish and construction that take these little ditties to another place. Lyrically, Lenderman still develops his short, circuitous poems in a Malkmus/Dylan style – building meaning by placing disparate scenes right next to each other and then laughing at them. They are playful, hilarious at times “Deleted scene of Lightning McQueen // Blacked out at full speed.” They are crass, honest, and a little too much and to true at other points “Draining cum from hotel showers // hoping the hours pass a little faster.”

As funny and polished as these songs are, they are unhinged. They are ethereal and messy. They are a fireworks display smudged with an oily thumb and they leave you with the wandering last track feeling like you have done everything wrong but somehow made it through. I played with thinking one of the other three last records could be my favorite for the year, but I was being untrue to myself. I always knew that this was going to be the one.

“It falls apart // we all got work to do // it gets dark // we all got work to do”

I have always had a complicated relationship with alcohol and drinking. This time, I decided on Saturday, May 11th, that I was done with alcohol, again, for a bit. Besides a small indiscretion for the Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, I had spent the entirety of the month of April alcohol-free. This hiatus joined a string of past attempts to clear my head and purge a growing dread. April ended, then my classes concluded, and I joyously resumed drinking. Untethered by boundary, I forsook restraint. By the time I met up with my friend Sean on the Roaring River in southern Missouri to camp and fish, I think I had pushed it to a limit.

We gave it our best the first night on the river. Gulping Busch Light and chain-smoking around an open fire so close to the sound of the river on the rocks that it soothed my edginess and perpetuated a release from the confines of a month's temperance. I did not feel hungover that next day, just a little slow. But, my heart palpitations returned. My palpitations cause a flutter. It feels as if my heart has skipped a beat. In 2021 I went to the emergency room because they were so disconcerting. Admittedly, I had a lot going on that year and I think the stress triggered it. I went to a cardiologist, I wore a monitor, and they said that I was fine. Even with the doctor's assurances, the flutter made me uneasy.

But, the river was magical. We fished in perfect weather; hovering between almost cold and almost hot. The river talked to us all day. We barely caught any fish, but what we did catch we filleted, cooked, and ate. We enjoyed ourselves so much that there was apparently a missed borealis right above our heads.

Driving to Little Rock the next day, I thought a lot about my life and where I had gotten to – specifically with the graduate program I was completing and the dedication I was pledging to a craft I had given lip service my entire life. I had spent most of April really considering my relationship to alcohol. I wrote a great deal about it. I wrote about working hard and seening those efforts rewarded. I feel no longer in the business of chasing obliterative freedom.

Roughly when I was coming to this conclusion, my phone notified me that a new record by the Chicago band DEHD was available. One of the band’s songwriters, Emily Kempf, is an absolute badass of a rocker. She is so young and so powerful, so tattoo-covered, so embodying of the ecstatic joys and vibes she peddles, and strangely so sober (I think). It felt like a sign. I believe in signs in the way that I believe we make our own. You interpret the world around you as it happens in real time, and occasionally you come to the conclusions that you need. This was that sign.

So, I stopped drinking and I have not yet missed it; not like I did in April. I don’t know how long this will last, but I know that the last four mornings I have woken up and written 900 words a day. I feel that I am getting closer to understanding the relationship. I feel that I can see where the joy was sitting at a bar with a Stag and a shot of Jim Beam. I get it. I know that joy is still there, still waiting for me. But, I think, at this moment in my life, that is not something I need. I am fine taking a break from it. I feel like there is something just on my heels, something I am going to not try and not call mortality, but it is pushing me forward and driving me to try more.

Who knows, next week I may be back here hungover. But, somehow, I don’t think that will be the case.

RSR