Extremely Honorable Mentions

People in my family were all asking me for music recommendations, so I’m going to basically plagiarize my own email to them for other albums that I loved in 2020 but maybe a bit less then my top 3 above.

leon chang, return to bird world. An album which is a soundtrack to a video game which doesn’t exist, which is itself a sequel to another nonexistent video game which had its own soundtrack. The first bird world was fun but this one is just as good if not better and there’s even more of it. Despite that it’s pretty light and fluffy sounding, it’s also (to my ears) really compositionally and harmonically complex and interesting.

Open Mike Eagle, Anime, Trauma and Divorce. This is a very funny rapper’s account of his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, which was apparently actually 2019 though this album came out late in 2020. OME has done a lot of good stuff and I think this is one of his strongest albums. Most of the tracks on here are a mix between the total despondency of “everything ends last year” and the wisecracking of “wtf is self care” but I like those two as the extremes on either end of the range that this album sits in.

R.A.P. Ferreira, purple moonlight pages. R.A.P. Ferreira used to be known as milo but changed his stage name sometime in the last few years. I haven’t listened as closely to this as I want to yet, but every time I put it on I’m struck by how often he reminds me of Kool A.D. but with better quality control. This album is dense but I like “LAUNDRY” as a more plain-spoken (pun intended) way in. Hard to pick a fav though as this is pretty consistent.

Destroyer, Have We Met. I’m a longtime Destroyer fan, and this is one of my favorite Destroyer albums in a while. Big kinda 80s synth vibe to this, but no one writes an opaque-but-still-engaging lyric like Dan Bejar and he’s in fine form here. I don’t know if the opener “Crimson Tide” is the best thing here, necessarily, but it’s up there, and it’s certainly this album in a nutshell. Shout out, also, to “It Just Doesn’t Happen,” which despite that I can basically never make heads or tails of Destroyer lyrics, contains my favorite lyric of any song in 2020: “I find the silence unbearable / What does that say about the silence.”

The Mountain Goats, Getting Into Knives. Another band I’ve been into for years and years. This album is very good, not their best; a couple tracks would be skippable for me if I ever skipped tracks. For uptempo songs I think I prefer the more abstruse “As Many Candles As Possible” to the lively and horns-driven but straightforward lead single “Get Famous.” For chiller tracks I love the series of snapshots of a cross-country trip in the melodic “Picture of My Dress” and the subtle but unmistakable menace in the superficially pleasant-sounding title track and album closer.

Owen Pallett, Island. A sequel of sorts to a previous high-concept album. From the first track, which spaces out about 80 piano notes across three minutes, it’s clear this is gonna be a moody album, but it’s really rewarded repeat listening for me and it’s not as dour as that intro makes it seem. Pallett plays a lot of guitar on this, which surprised me at first, but they’re still an amazing composer and arranger and both the fully soundtrack-esque treatment of “A Bloody Morning” and the tone-block flourishes on more straight-up folk songs like “Fire-Mare” are magnificent.

Carly Rae Jepsen - Dedicated Side B. I started dipping my toe into pop music a bit last year with Side A of this album. Side B is more of the same - really catchy, light and frothy pop music with a couple possible duds. Opener “This Love Isn’t Crazy” is probably one of the best tracks here, just a real sugar blast. But I also like “Heartbeat” a surprising amount for how mellow it is. The album has the strange decision to put two versions of the same track (“Felt This Way” and “Stay Away”) back to back, which I found confusing at first, but it’s grown on me as the distinctions between the two songs became clearer.

Other Releases From Previous Years I Liked In 2020

Moonface, This One’s For The Dancer & This One’s For The Dancer’s Bouquet (2018). Very long, as it’s basically two albums interspersed with each other, but those two albums are so sonically different it holds my interest for the whole runtime. The “Minotaur” songs are generally my favorites, somewhat surprisingly, based as they are on what I think my brother — who initially pushed this album on me — called “mallet percussion” (vibraphone, marimba, steel drums, etc.) and vocoder’d vocals. “Minotaur Forgiving Knossos” is the closest thing to a single and an easy song to love.

Christine and the Queens, Chris (2019). I got pretty into this for a couple months and then put it down but I’m still pretty fond of it. Dancey, synth-y pop music but with really fascinating lyrics about gender, aggression and alienation — and there’s a whole alternate version with the lyrics in French! For a song about despair, the melody in “Doesn’t Matter” is such a jam.

Musical To-Do List

Finally, some albums that I listened to a few times and liked ok, but not enough to say anything substantial about them, and that I want to revisit in 2021:

• Run the Jewels, RTJ4. This certainly doesn’t seem to be of any lower quality than their previous stuff, but I might be at a point of diminishing returns with these guys.
• Moses Sumney, græ. Definitely a demanding listen. I think it’s probably worth the effort but I haven’t cracked it yet.
• Fleet Foxes, Shore. Pleasant enough, but nothing on it has really grabbed me yet.
• The Microphones, Microphones in 2020. Another demanding listen. 37 minutes of continuous narrative is a pretty big commitment, attention-wiseAnd that’s after you get past the seven minutes spent strumming two chords.
  
  , and the more I listen to this the more I fear it’s a bit too explicitly navel-gazey to be worth it for me.

Captivating Performances on YouTube

There are some incredible musical performances on YouTube. Here are a few that I found fascinating in 2020:

• bbymutha performing “Heavy Metal” for COLORS. COLORS is an absolutely spectacular series of single-song shows which puts each performer in a room with colored walls and a mic and that’s about it. So they tend to sink or swim on the charisma of the performance. bbymutha just spits straight fire with studied insouciance for 150 seconds here, and it’s the filthiest and most transfixing performance I’ve seen since Azealia Banks’s “212” video.
• Another COLORS show: JPEGMAFIA’s performance of “Thug Tears”. I’m still working out how I feel about JPEGMAFIA in general; he’s definitely got huge personality and tremendously forward-thinking beats and rapping, but his albums are a bit too sensory overload for casual listening. This single song is a perfect amount to take in, though. Whereas bbymutha’s COLORS performance was lowercase, JPEGMAFIA’s is spellbindingly all-caps, a stark contrast to the much chiller album version of this track. Over a glitchy, constantly confounding beat, Peggy dispenses histrionics with laser precision: he screams into the mic, looks on the verge of tears, vamps outrageously, and caps the whole thing off with a perfectly timed… well. Just watch it. I cannot stop watching when I put this video on.
• mclusky’s “To Hell With Good Intentions” is a compact, snotty classic chunk of nasty noise. July Talk’s cover somehow manages to improve on the original in some ways, bumping the tempo a little and bringing a different, more focused kind of intensity to the lead vocal. There’s nothing groundbreaking about it but it’s another video I can’t stop watching thanks to the overwhelming energy of the performances.
• My friend linked me an artist named Shawn Wasabi who performs lively and involved music — sort of halfway between 100 Gecs and bird world — on a grid of 64 (or, sometimes, 16) indistinguishable circles. His videos keep the focus on his hands, where it belongs, and they are fascinating. I almost can’t imagine how one would learn to perform something like this in real time; when I do imagine it, though, the dedication it must take seems off the charts.
• In 2007, Owen Pallett performed a cover of Destroyer’s “An Actor’s Revenge” which was so nice he had to do it twice, the second time with a special guest. OK, I’ll spoil it: the special guest is Dan Bejar, looking like he’s having as much fun as he’s ever had in his life, which is to say: a tiny, nearly imperceptible amount of fun. Clearly the gleeful exuberance of the other two participants is such that it breaks down even the defenses of Mr. “I’m not really into funny shit” himself.
• Moving a little further out into the realm of the esoteric, this Zs performance is probably actually a pretty standard one as far as Zs performances go, but it’s notable for being a decent recording, which seem to be in short supply. Here they’re playing the last three songs on their 2015 LP Xe. Zs plays pretty “difficult” music but it’s still remarkable to see it performed. The transitions between uncannily precise rhythms and free-jazz freakout breakdowns in the opening twelve-minute “Corps” are seamless and astounding. So are the jarring shifts between the mechanical-sounding substrate that makes up most of “Xe,” its outbreaks of thudding cacophony, and the melody that gradually appears, as though fighting to be heard amidst all the other goings-on. Every transition between the three motifs seems to happen at random, but the three band members execute it in lockstep every time, with no sheet music and only infrequent eye contact to indicate they’re even playing the same song. It’s often atonal and occasionally quite a squall, but also virtuosic and fascinating to watch.
• Out in the far realms of unlistenability, there’s this totally bewildering performance of a Brian Ferneyhough piece by Séverine Ballon, on an absolute punching bag of a solo cello and with some electronics that amount, as far as I can tell, to some several-second delay on some portions of the piece. The piece itself feels like it’s pushing the serialism of Boulez to the breaking point: maybe there’s some structure buried in thereIn fact there almost certainly is some structure. Samuel Andreyev, who has a wonderful channel in which he analyzes some incredibly recondite music, gives a Ferneyhough string trio the old college try in this video. It’s about as straightforward as you’d expect from listening to the piece.
  
  , but it’s abstracted beyond recognition to a casual listener such as myself. But it’s also dynamic to the point that the performance could be easily described as athletic. Ballon scrapes and slaps the cello’s strings, whaps its body for percussion, plays pizzicato and harmonics, and then finally actually picks up her bow two and a half minutes in, whereupon things really get interesting. Overall, the amount of concentration required of the page turner seems superhuman, to say nothing of Ballon herself, and while the music is obviously way out in the outer reaches of modern incomprehensibility, it’s amazing to watch it performed.
• Reeling it in a little, there’s Zebra Katz’s video for “Ish”. I’m not gay and I don’t go to clubs, so I’m trusting the word of various Internet denizens that this is basically gay club music. The bass certainly sounds like it would rattle the eardrums of anyone in a club playing it, and Katz certainly dances like a man possessed in the video, but there’s something more to this video: I don’t think I’m misreading it to say Katz and the director are bringing some real creepy, unsettling energy here. But it’s captivating too, so here it is.
• Finally, and maybe most normie, there’s this Phoebe Bridgers + Arlo Parks cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees.” It lacks the showiness of basically everything else in this list. But few people these days do sad like Phoebe Bridgers, Arlo Parks is a lovely pianist and harmonizer, and this is just a quiet stunner of a cover song.

Roguelikes and Thoughts Thereon

Continuing in my tradition of playing mostly roguelikes or -litesHenceforth just “roguelikes,” in the broad sense of procedurally generated games with permadeath, with or without metaprogression. I’m aware of the contoversy surrounding this term, this is how I’m using it here, don’t @ me.

, I enjoyed Dead Cells a lot. But I already wrote about that.

Like everyone else in the world, I also played Hades and loved it: all its gods and mortals are so charmingly rendered that you just want to keep spending time with and developing your relationships with them. So while the core gameplay loop is engaging and well-executed, I think where Hades really raised the bar for video games is in its successful marriage of narrative and procedural generation. So many other roguelikes have sketchy storylines: some that might be interesting but are only hinted at or dispensed in scraps without getting in the way of the gameplaySee: Dead Cells, Nuclear Throne, The Binding of Isaac.

, some that are basically just generic and uninteresting skeletons to hang a game onSee: almost all roguelikes, honestly, but Crypt of the NecroDancer, Slay The Spire and Rogue Legacy as a few high profile examples. You get it, if you know any of these games. The same kind of “story” the original Super Mario Bros. had.

. Hades was probably the first roguelike I’m aware of to really put its story front and center and succeed. I take some issue with how it drags its game-ness out even after its own epilogue; this was easily solved, in my case, by simply not playing anymore rather than submitting to the Heat grind, but I wish it had just ended, decisively, rather than petering out in this “until you get bored” kind of way.

I guess that Dead Cells, and before it Nuclear Throne, had a similar kind of unsatisfying deflation when I stopped playing them, but it maybe took Hades, a game that seemed more like it could have had a real end, to make me realize that I don’t like how most roguelikes end. Because most of them don’t. Either you hit some kind of skill cap, where it becomes too much of a grind to make any further progress, or you “finish” the game and it contrives a flimsy-at-best excuse for you to keep playing, and then you do until you don’t anymore.

I get that some better or more dedicated players than I might get some satisfaction out of getting to 32 Heat in Hades, or finishing Ascension 20 in Slay the Spire, or getting all the achievements in basically any game ever released on Steam. But for those of us without the time or skill or both to get to that point, this type of “post-game” content can feel like just more filler that keeps the game from being a complete and bounded experience. I don’t know if I’m explaining this well. I just know that I can’t think of a roguelike that I stopped playing because I felt like it was finished. I always just kind of stopped.

Anyway: I played a few other roguelikes in 2020, none of which were an exception to the above. I bounced off Caves of Qud pretty quickly: it was too opaque and punishing, and had the same problem as ADOM: an overly prescribed early game that has you doing one of a few “starter quests” repeatedly as you get the hang of things. I might have to try it again at some point, but the prospect feels similar to trying to get into Dwarf Fortress.

In some ways, Children of Morta is a less-refined Hades. Like Hades, it’s procgen but with heavy meta-progression and a story-centric approach to the genre. But its pixel art and gameplay are a bit rougher and a lot more generic, its characters and story somewhat less compelling. Still, it was worth playing all the way through. I haven’t dipped into the New Game+ that was released after I “finished” but I’m suspicious that it’s more of the content-itis I mentioned above.

Wizard of Legend and Moonlighter are pretty much your standard story-lite action-roguelikes in the vein of Rogue Legacy and ilk. The latter’s shopkeeping mechanic is cute and equal parts fun and tedious, but the story is nothing and the game as a whole is a fairly “numbers go up” randomized-Zelda-dungeon affair. It has a New Game+, of course, but I couldn’t see the appeal at all. Wizard of Legend leans more to the “action” side of the spectrum, forgoing story pretty much entirely, and is a somewhat “purer” gaming experience for it, but still feels mostly like a time-killer. I found the bosses somewhat overwhelmingly difficult, though I did manage to beat it (again, notwithstanding the post-game whatever), and your choices of equipment seemed to suffer from too much breadth.

Gerty worked surprisingly well for me, considering how slow-paced it seemed initially: the digging-centric navigation was novel in an action-roguelike and it felt a bit different from most of the other top-down games I’ve played recently. Still, the main “story” was over pretty quickly, and by that time I just wasn’t enjoying it enough to try for the better ending that I assume it was possible to get by jumping through certain hoops in a normal playthrough.

Steredenn is a procedurally generated shmup. I liked it a lot but got pretty hung up on the big difficulty spikes on the last two bosses. And since the boss fights are basically the same every time, this took a lot away from what I enjoy about procgen and led to a sort of stressful experience wanting to get the right set of equipment for just those bosses by the time I reached them. In much the same vein, Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story had a surprising amount of story for the type of game it was. Like with Hades, I found myself drawn in by the interactions between the characters, who in this case come from wildly different backgrounds but all have a common enemy. The writing was either clumsy or poorly translated in a lot of cases, but I found it pretty charming nonetheless, and played it quite a bit more than the wildly unbalanced gameplay might have otherwise warranted.

Non-Roguelikes

I finally played Kentucky Route Zero. It’s kind of the opposite of the roguelikes mentioned in the previous section, as far as “gameplay” goes, but pretty engrossing in its own way. There’s a lot to analyze about it, and other people have done so extensively enough that I don’t feel I have anything to contribute. But even without picking it apart, and even though I never really cottoned on to magical realism, it’s affecting, and its atmosphere is probably unmatched among any game I’ve ever played.

Steven Universe: Save the Light was charmingly animated and a surprisingly decent Super Mario RPG-esqueBy which I mean, basically a JRPG but with: some light platforming and treasure hunting during map traversal, encounters visible (and in some cases avoidable) on maps, and timing and other minigame-esque elements during battles.

JRPG. But I don’t have too much patience for JRPG tropes anymore, the small number of vocalizations for the characters quickly became tiresome, and its story failed to capture what made Steven Universe special. I got near the end but didn’t finish it.

SteamWorld: Dig 2 was fine. Like the first, it was plenty engrossing during its playtime, but didn’t improve on its predecessor in any notable ways.

I played far more of Starbound than I think it warranted. It was the first game I think I’ve ever played that really goes hard on the open world / resource collection / crafting thing, and I think I got caught up enough in that loop to overlook how the environments are all kind of samey, the platforming and combat all kind of janky, the crafting and building all kind of tedious and pointless. I think it was worth getting some experience with the genre, but I doubt this particular game is an exemplar of the form, and regardless, I think it’s probably a type of game I should avoid in the future.

Lenna’s Inception is a gem of a game. On Mastodon I described it, somewhat pithily if I do say so myself, as “Undertale – EarthBound + The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.” I stand by that description now, although the last part of the equation would be much more accurate if replaced by the Link to the Past randomizer. It’s a charming little thing, worthy of playing through once and then, if you’re anything like me, immediately a second time to make sure you see all there is to see of the quite surprising story. The procedural generationDespite having procgen I don’t consider Lenna’s Inception a roguelike, as it lacks permadeath.

means that the world and dungeons lack character, but it also makes playthroughs after the first go down easier. This review makes a good, detailed case for the game’s general excellence, and the dev wrote an interesting postmortem about the development and marketing.

Speaking of gems, and charming little things, Butterfly Soup is another game that is both. It’s a straight up visual novel that is, per its developer, “about gay asian girls playing baseball and falling in love.” That’s true, but it doesn’t really do justice to how sharply the game captures the banter of a bunch of precocious high schoolers, or how deftly it balances that banter with the pressure cookers of their home lives. It’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny, a little bit obnoxious in that way that high schoolers are, and just sincere enough to be moving without being maudlin. And it’ll only take you a few hours to play through. And it’s pay-what-you-want. You should just play it.