The Releases: Styles We Paid For (LP—GBVi, 2020)
Studying the history of rock/pop journalism reveals a longstanding fascination with The List. Finding a rock scribe that doesn’t partake in the practice of list-making is like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Perhaps this is a product of an industry whose earliest printed criticism came from sources that were far more interested in quantifying sales than having a nuanced discussion on artistic merit. And let’s face it: lists sell. Even when a publication as blatantly big-tented as Rolling Stone publishes an updated list of their ‘500 Greatest Albums of All-Time,’ I take the bait—either by buying the overpriced magazine off of the rack, or by clicking five-hundred times to get through the online version.
And even for those of us who consider our work—or in my case, a passion project—to be above the fray of lowest-common-denominator music criticism, lists are still too tempting to avoid. I can clearly remember my first (circa 2001) attempt to create a list of my fifty favorite albums of all-time. While any evidence of its existence has been lost to antiquity, I could probably correctly identify at least forty-five of the records that made the cut. And while present-day me would be quick to denounce a few of them, most of those forty-five are albums that I still treasure, without reservation.
In 2002, I began a tradition of compiling a numbered list of my favorite albums from the current year. That was a particularly solid year for new music—even for someone whose tastes were still very much in the process of being refined. While there were probably a few questionable inclusions toward the bottom of that ten-item list—facts that I can assure you were not just ‘conveniently’ forgotten—I’ll still gladly stand behind the four albums that made it to the top: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Sea Change, and Lifted. That young version of myself hadn’t yet discovered Sleater-Kinney, The Mountain Goats, Spoon, Sigur Ros, Tom Waits, or Boards of Canada, but he still did a decent job.
It was the following year, 2003, that I began sharing these lists with other people. At first, this just meant putting it into the form of an overly-long email, and sending it off to my two oldest friends: one of whom would typically reciprocate with a list of his own; and another who (as the aforementioned haystack needle) would find a relatively-polite way of saying that “lists are stupid.” I can remember the inner turmoil that hit in mid-December, as I would have to commit to either The Meadowlands, Hail to the Thief, Chutes too Narrow, or the just-acquired Michigan as my coveted ‘Album of The Year’ pick. The Shins won out that time, though I’d give the nod to The Wrens in a present-day recount.
Over the next few years, this list became an annual tradition—and often turned into a battle between competing impulses as an increasingly-serious music listener. 2004 pitted a sentimental pick (Brian Wilson’s resurrection of SMiLE) against an album that felt era-defining from the very first time that I heard it (Funeral). In that case, it was the old-timer that won in the moment; and again, Modern Day Me would argue that Younger Me got it wrong. In 2005, Sufjan Stevens won outright with Illinoise, though Gimme Fiction and The Sunset Tree each made a compelling argument—in this case, I’d argue that the instincts of a younger Matt Ryan were correct. 2006 was a letdown. At the time, I gave the nod to The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America, feeling that Tom Waits’ sprawling Orphans project was ineligible; and I was yet to hear Donuts, process Yellow House, or accept Ys.
In 2007, my annual lists went public on a much larger (but not really) scale. It was that summer that I discovered RateYourMusic, and thus, stumbled upon the ability to publish my opinions to an unknown number of complete strangers. Aught-seven was a heady year, as there was a plethora of outstanding new albums from the likes of Panda Bear, Of Montreal, LCD Soundsystem, The National, and Animal Collective—yeah, both I and the pop music zeitgeist were firmly in their indie rock phases. Of course, we all knew that Radiohead had released the year’s best album, and even though I didn’t want to go with the consensus pick, I still did—and was right to do so.
Over the next several years I became a little more self-conscious of the fact that other people—most of whom I would never meet—were seeing these annual lists. And as much as I’d like to think that this didn’t factor into my decision-making process, I can’t necessarily guarantee that it didn’t. There were choices that were easy (A Moon Shaped Pool), hard (Black Messiah—only because it came out in the last two weeks of 2014), right (To Pimp a Butterfly), and wrong (Bad as Me).
2020 was the last year that I made one of these lists. Maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was starting Strange Currencies—and particularly working through the A Century of Song project. Maybe it was because I was way more into discovering ‘new to me’ music, by way of labels like Numero. Maybe it was the fact that I had reached my forties; and suddenly, keeping a finger on the pulse of new releases felt distant for the first time. Either way, my heart wasn’t in it in the same way that it had been even a few years prior. And it shows too. By 2020, my annual lists had grown to include thirty albums; and of the ones that made that year’s entry, I’ve only returned to a handful of them in the years since.
Most of those repeat listens were concentrated toward artists that I already knew well, prior to 2020: Bob Dylan, Stephen Malkmus, Ichiko Aoba. When I scanned over that list today, I estimated that fifteen to twenty of them would be mostly-unrecognizable to me just a half-decade later. Even the album that topped that list, Fiona Apple’s masterful Fetch the Bolt Cutters, still doesn’t get spun as frequently in my household as some of the earlier records in her catalog.
Guided by Voices released three albums that year—none of which made my list of thirty records. And as I’ve returned to those albums over these past few weeks, they’ve felt surprisingly unfamiliar to me. I know that I listened to them at the time, but they never really stuck with me—in a way that even the handful of legitimately outstanding albums that came out in 2020 similarly struggled to do.
The thing is, I can still remember songs that I haven’t heard in forty years, simply because they were tied to formative childhood memories. I can list all seven albums that two friends and I listened to twenty-five years ago, during an impromptu evening of aimless driving up and down the switchbacked roads of Northern Arizona. Even aside from the music that I was listening to at the time, I can still remember the beads of condensation on the airplane window as I sat next to my wife on our honeymoon flight to New England—and the similar ones that formed on a rental car as we drove through rural Scotland twenty-two years later with our girls.
I started teaching psychology a couple of months ago—partially as something of a mid-career challenge to take on a subject that I haven’t engaged with in a serious academic manner since my undergraduate studies. In a recent lesson on the topic of memory, I explained to a class of thirty-two high school students that we tend to struggle committing new information to our long-term memory when we don’t form meaningful connections to it.
And as trivial as the details of a song might seem, when that song is encoded alongside something with more intrinsic meaning, we become far more likely to remember its nuances. Therefore, it stands to reason that when we encounter that same music in a state of isolation or stasis, we might struggle to recall much about it. Aside from Surrender Your Poppy Field and a couple of highlights from Mirrored Aztec, I’ve never really latched onto any of the Guided by Voices records from 2020.
But with that said, I’m at least partially willing to chalk these ones up to circumstance.
Rating: Styles We Paid For (6.8)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “You specialize in neck ties / And you’re not acting / Dressed for a king / A spoiled child to be exact” (“Megaphone Riley”)
Next Week: Robert Pollard returns to concept albums, with the first GBV record of 2021.
