Lucrecia Dalt, and my favorite album of 2022

No. 1421: Lucrecia Dalt - ¡Ay!

Well, the headline kind of gives it away, but Lucrecia Dalt’s ¡Ay! is my favorite album of 2022. A couple weeks ago I wrote about High Vis’ Blending, a killer rock record that I played so many times that year, and which would have taken the prize handily… if not for this album.

The two albums have little in common, but the best way I can summarize the difference in terms of why one usurped the other for top 2022 honors is this: One was everything I wanted in an album; one is everything I didn’t even know I wanted in an album. The latter is Lucrecia obviously, and this album caught me off guard in such a spectacular way. It’s a little cliche and maybe a bit precious to describe certain records or works of art in general as magic, but well, here we are.

It’s that way by design. I’m not going to get this entirely right, but the album was conceived as a kind of metaphysical sci-fi narrative in which an extraterrestrial who travels through time gets to experience earthly delights, including love. And in that sense it’s a very romantic album, one that has almost a tactile sensibility about it. But it’s also kind of abstract and conceptual, as well. What ties it all together is the music, which is based around music that Dalt heard growing up in Colombia, primarily boleros, and the kind of noir-Latin sound is something like Tom Waits’ collaborations with Marc Ribot. But a little more ethereal, a little sweeter. Still, she doesn’t shy away from moments with intensity or an edge, like with “Enviada,” my personal favorite song here.

I got into Lucrecia Dalt’s music through a collaboration with Aaron Dilloway, who primarily makes noise, though that album is more accessible, if still pretty weird. And she’s done film scoring and ambient records, so she doesn’t stick to any one particular style. But her last two albums have explored this rhythmic, melodic area, and it’s been immensely rewarding—they’ve both been in my top five of each year. Whatever comes next, I’m on board. Rating: 9.4

Listen: “Enviada”

No. 1422: El-P - I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

In any catalog, there are albums that rise to the top as the consensus canon favorite, and then there are those that are your personal favorites, in spite of that agreed-upon standout. (And there’s also usually, unfortunately, almost always a “worst” album. Nobody escapes it.) El-P only has three solo albums, and they’re all very good, so it’s both simpler and more complicated all at once. He has no bad albums, though, so that’s a good thing.

Fantastic Damage is the canon El-P favorite. It’s also, in my opinion, his best album. So that’s that, right? Except the album that got me into his music, that conclusively made me a fan, is I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, a record that feels a little more sprawling, a little less cohesive in its statement, but no less amazing in its ambition. It was hard not to be won over early by “Flyentology,” a song featuring Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor about a real life experience on a flight that echoes the old saw about how there are no atheists in foxholes. But a lot of what dazzles me on this record is the production, particularly the horn sample that takes over “The League of Extraordinary Nobodies.”

There’s also a lot of rock musicians on this record, interestingly; in addition to Reznor, The Mars Volta and Cat Power both make appearances, though it’s still very much an El-P record, and the production style isn’t too far off from that of Fantastic Damage, but the songs are a little more diffuse. Even kinda… prog? Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t seem like quite as cohesive a statement, but it’s a damn fine album. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Flyentology”

No. 1423: Cloud Rat - Threshold

A Treble reader once told me that they didn’t actually like hearing about how the sausage gets made, i.e. the democratic process of how we make our best-of lists and such took some of the fun out of it. I get that. But that’s what I’m about to do right now, just because I don’t believe in bullshitting anyone. 

Every year I release my list of the best metal albums of the year (according to me). Here’s last year’s if you missed it. And here’s how I put it together: I start with a loose list of metal albums I liked from the past 11 months and start working out the order as I go along. Sometimes I know the number one instinctively and immediately. Sometimes I have to think it over, sometimes I have to weigh two albums against each other (or three). But I figure it out eventually. 

In 2022 this was particularly difficult for a number of reasons, primarily that there were a lot of great metal records! Undeath, Thou/Mizmor, Dream Unending, etc. But I thought, given my history with Thou, choosing that would be too predictable, and I hadn’t spent enough time with Dream Unending to fully commit to that, and Undeath was definitely worthy, but something held me back. So I kind of just went with one of those split-second decisions that just felt right at the time: I gave it to Cloud Rat. 

Cloud Rat is, for my money, the best grindcore band going right now, though it feels like a lot of the best ones have slowed down, like Pig Destroyer and Fuck the Facts. But this isn’t a “by default” thing. Cloud Rat most certainly rips, and this album is the band at their best, balancing furious rippers with moments of melody and complexity that they still manage to fit in under-two-minute songs. I don’t know how they pull it off. But when I revisit this album, it’s clear to me that I made the right choice. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Inner Controller”

No. 1424: Built to Spill - Keep It Like a Secret

It’s hard to fully express how important this album was to me in high school, and college too, for that matter. (I earned the nickname “emo sweater Jeff” from one of my snarkier journalism-school colleagues… even though I didn’t then and don’t now listen to emo, really.) Built to Spill arrived at exactly the right moment in the indie rock continuum as you’d expect, my pattern of discovery going from Pavement to Modest Mouse to, you guessed it, Built to Spill. In fact, how’s this for synchronicity: I went to a Pavement show in 1999 in high school that was being filmed for an HBO live music show called Reverb or something like that? (Anyone remember that show?) Anyway, they’d include two shows on the same program, and the other one, it turned out, was Built to Spill. 

I think I’d only heard one of their songs prior to picking this album up, that being the video edit of “Untrustable” on MTV’s 120 Minutes. But the endorsement of a handful of magazines I read religiously was enough for me to grab the CD at the Wherehouse, having heard zero songs from the album, and I was right to do so.

There are arguments for Perfect from Now On or There’s Nothing Wrong with Love being the band’s best albums, and those arguments are pretty compelling. But this will always be my favorite. It’s the brightest and most immediate of the band’s albums, more concise than Perfect and more polished than TNWL. It has an infectious energy about it that stands on its own, and of course it has maybe the single best Built to Spill song: “Carry the Zero.” (And yes, I will hear arguments for others, “Car” and “Velvet Waltz” in particular. They’ve got some good ones.)

I haven’t kept up with Built to Spill religiously over the years, though every time I hear a new Built to Spill album, I enjoy it. Still, it’s hard to top a high like this. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Carry the Zero”

No. 1425: Kate NV - Room for the Moon

What a weird and wonderful little album! Perhaps I was perusing the RVNG Intl catalog around this time, because I apparently bought it right after that outstanding Lucrecia Dalt record. In any case, Kate NV is an interesting artist whose music zig-zags between more recognizable pop and electronic soundscapes that sound kind of like video game music. Her 2023 album WOW, in particular, seems to exist in this cartoonish virtual world (and there’s a video that essentially fully realizes this idea, so it’s not just me—it’s intentional to some degree). 

The Russian-born artist does write songs with lyrics and hooks, however, and some excellent ones can be found on Room for the Moon, a delightfully strange little album. To be clear, it’s a little bit of both: playful electronic repetition and songs that offer more immediacy. “Sayonara” is the lead single, and even ended up on a Pitchfork year-end list I think, but the one that stands out most to me is “Plans,” which has a stellar bass groove and a fair dose of saxophone, somewhere between Japanese city pop and ‘80s Kate Bush or something along those lines. 

The album came out mid-pandemic, so I’m not necessarily surprised I missed it at the time, though I have to recalibrate my radar every 12 to 18 months or so. But it feels like exactly the kind of thing that would have found an audience during lockdown—melancholy enough to be relatable in the moment, playful and joyful enough to draw you out of it, if only temporarily. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Plans”