Cassandra Jenkins released my favorite album of 2021, and I nearly overlooked it.
An advance stream of “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature” first came my way in October 2020, a few months before its February 2021 release date. Someone at Jenkins’ label, Ba Da Bing, recommended I talk to her for a story I was writing about friendship songs. I listened, liked what I heard, had a great chat with Jenkins for my story, and promptly moved on — happens all the time.
“Hard Drive” brought me back. The third track on the album, “Hard Drive” is a free-flowing song that drifts along on a repeating guitar figure in the background, clattering drums and meandering saxophone. Jenkins starts by talking more than singing as she gives an account of loss and healing, but her tone is conversational, as if she were relating the story to a friend. Halfway through, she describes meeting an acquaintance who instantly recognizes the narrator’s fractured spirit and says, “I’ll count to three and tap your shoulder. We’re going to put your heart back together.” And when Jenkins counts to three the first time, it is deeply, unexpectedly profound. As the song unspools to the end, she counts to three again and again. It’s meditative. Her voice is calm and reassuring through a wash of guitars that have risen to the front of the musical arrangement. Even though she’s not singing about the pandemic, it’s as if Jenkins is signaling that it’s OK to release all the stress, fear and anxiety that have characterized life for a great many of us since March 2020. The song gets me choked up literally every time I hear it.
“Hard Drive” is the centerpiece of “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” but it’s first among equals in terms of songwriting. Jenkins has a precise, but subtle approach to musical arrangements that accompany lyrics exploring universal sentiments in unexpected ways. She also has a pristine vocal clarity, and excellent diction. Taken together, the effect is mesmerizing.
If “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature” is my No. 1 album of 2021, here are 10 more LPs that impressed me this year (I know, that makes this a Top 11 list, but so what):
2. Jack Ingram, Miranda Lambert, Jon Russell, “The Marfa Tapes” — Ingram, Lambert and Russell demonstrate their talent as performers and writers with bare-bones arrangements that let their songs stand on their own. As I wrote for Paste, “The songwriting is first-rate, and the minimalist aesthetic suits these tunes in a way that more elaborate arrangements and polished production never would.”
3. Ken Cormier, “Old King Cloud” — On his first album since 2009, Cormier demonstrates keen, and eclectic, pop instincts, with a bounty of indelible hooks. As I wrote here, “‘Old King Cloud’ is so well written, and tightly performed, that it’s probably safe to assume Cormier never stopped revising and refining until he got everything exactly right.”
4. The Weather Station, “Ignorance” — Maybe the only album out there that examines the emotional side of climate change, “Ignorance” is never polemical or strident. Rather, Tamara Lindeman’s latest as the Weather Station is subdued and often melancholy on folk-rock songs built around piano and emphasizing Lindeman’s low voice on rich melodies
5. The Felice Brothers, “From Dreams to Dust” — Grandiose and rustic, smart-mouthed and somber, the Felice Brothers’ eighth album sounds like an elegy for late-capitalism America and the destruction we’ve wrought on ourselves. For some reason, this album evokes (for me) an image of singer Ian Felice in a threadbare tuxedo jacket worn over Carhartt overalls and unlaced work boots, grinning while he rings in the apocalypse. “No drag racing through the bombed out streets,” he sings on the deceptively upbeat opening song “Jazz on the Autobahn.” “No shareholders will be orbiting the earth / It will be hard to recognize each other through our oxygen masks / The successful sons of businessmen will set their desks on fire / While five-star generals of the free world weep in the oil chocked tide.”
6. Amyl and the Sniffers, “Comfort to Me” — Loud, raw punk rock full of attitude with serrated hooks that latch on and don’t let go. “Hertz” and “Security” are particular standouts on the Australian group’s latest album.
7. Squirrel Flower, “Planet (i)” — By turns rugged and beautiful, the third album from Boston-born Ella Williams dissects disasters in their many forms, from the emotional wreckage of failed romance to floods and tornadoes, starkly rendered through Williams’ beguiling voice and sharp indie-rock musical arrangements.
8. Madlib, “Sound Ancestors” — The L.A. DJ and producer’s latest is a collaboration with Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden), who compiled “tracks, loops, ideas and experiments” into a enveloping, cohesive collage of sound that lives inside a deep pocket of soul.
9. Faye Webster, “I Know I’m Funny haha” — Webster takes her time on her third album, an unhurried affair with a lounge-y, late-night feel that belies the “indie-country” tag attached to her (pedal steel = country?). She sings in languid tones as she delivers incisive observations and sharp-eyed descriptions without fanfare, as if anyone could do it. In truth, they can’t: Webster is a rare breed.
10. Low, “HEY WHAT” — Low once had a gig at the long-since shuttered Municipal Cafe in Hartford, where supposedly they played so quietly the music was difficult to hear over the sound of traffic outside on Main Street. That wouldn’t be a problem these days: the Duluth, Minn., band has undergone a wholesale reinvention over the past few years. “HEY WHAT” is a full-throated album packed with musical textures rendered loud: layers of distortion ebb and flow, but always in service of a melodic idea as Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sing rich, tight harmonies. The effect is electrifying and hypnotic.
11. José González, Local Valley — González’s latest marks the first time the Argentine-Swedish musician has written songs in a language other than English, with words here in Spanish and Swedish, which he his “mother tongues” Spanish and Swedish.. “Those two languages were too direct and too close to me, and it was nice to have that distance, the veneer,” González told me in this story for Paste. “I could hide behind this other language, which felt more enigmatic.”Turns out he sounds great in all of them, from the gently wondering first song “El Invento” to the provocation “Tjomme” to the highly rhythmic “Head On.”