Normally around this time, journalists unveil what they think is the year’s best music. These opinions tend to arrive in the form of lists — some with albums that adhere to the pop canon; others with albums you need to hear that aren’t fed to you by an algorithm. Understandably, my colleagues keep it to newer projects released within the calendar year, largely excluding older ones that maybe slipped the radar. But in the deluge of new music, it’s nice to be surprised by something that perhaps you weren’t expecting — maybe an unlikely duo, an archival reissue, or some underground LP that flew under the radar. I’ve done my best this year to get back to listening, to not be so tethered to deadlines and get back to being a fan of music in general.
Though I’ve taken in a lot of new music this year, I’ve also found myself delving into older records that I missed upon their release. Other times, I listened to albums that some would deem obscure compared with heavily marketed acts like Adele, Drake and Taylor Swift. This is a list of my favorite music — old, new, new to me, and obscure — of 2021, presented in unranked order. It excludes albums by L’Rain, Mick Jenkins, Melanie Charles and so on, because, well, my love of their recent music has been well documented elsewhere. Instead, these are a few records that I hope will receive more attention. In the case of a certain ‘70s opus, it’s included as a “my bad” for missing it in the first place.
While I don’t knock those who prefer their jazz a little smoother, I tend to like mine with fire. That’s not to say ambient jazz or more traditional strains can’t be exceptional, but if your music blends funk or free jazz and sounds somewhat chaotic, you got me. I think there’s beauty in chaos; there’s still a pulse beneath the layers of drums, searing wind instruments and escalating bass. That’s how I felt about Cosmic Transitions, the latest album from Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few. While it can sound aggressive in certain spots, those moments are balanced with minutes of calm, like on the beginnings of “Invocation” and throughout “Part II. Humility.” Collier recorded the album at the famed Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, where greats like John Coltrane recorded their masterpieces. Collier, a saxophonist, said he was inspired by the energy of the space and wanted to create his own landmark project. With Cosmic Transitions, he did just that.
I try not to be the “y’all slept on this” person, but given Mndsgn’s resume as a beatmaker and producer, I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about Rare Pleasure, a ‘70s soul-centered album full of lush flourishes and sun-drenched arrangements. First off, look at the album credits: Swarvy on bass; Kiefer on keys; Will Logan on drums; Carlos Niño on percussion; Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on strings; Anna Wise and rising star Fousheé on background vocals. These are elite musicians whose contributions lead to an outstanding LP of spectacular orchestration and positive affirmations. The showstopper is “Medium Rare,” a sleek R&B cut about moving past the doldrums toward some sort of light. “Fear is just a comfy queen-size bed,” Mndsgn sings. “Won’t you get up and start your day?” In a vast discography of beat tapes and this ‘80s-inspired LP, Rare Pleasure just might be Mndsgn’s masterwork.
I’d long seen this album cover in my aunt’s house: Bill Withers, clad in a red turtleneck shirt, writing a long and inscrutable message in chalk on a green board. While enamored with the cover art, I never thought to play the LP, despite my soul being older than most in my peer group. This year, the record club Vinyl Me, Please (where I work full-time as its director of hip-hop) reissued +’Justments and sent me a free copy as an employee. I read the liner notes written by my friend and superb writer Briana Younger. Her prose nudged me to listen. “His songs were paradoxes,” she declared, “deceptively simple in the way they illuminated the interiority of the human experience, how they made the personal universal.” Songs like “Stories,” “Can We Pretend” and “Make a Smile For Me” are brimming with sorrow, the views of a man coming to grips with separation and loneliness. In the end, +’Justments is flawless, an artistic triumph in 1974, 2021 and beyond.
I was in London in November when I woke up to a tweet from the bandleader Telemakus. He was asking me to check out his new album, The New Heritage, which earned a strong cosign from Kenny Fresh, owner of the noted indie label Fresh Selects. I trust Kenny’s ear, so when he stamped the LP as something I needed to hear, I cued it up right away. I liked the album instantly and bought the vinyl quickly. To me, it split the difference between Thundercat’s funk fusion, Flying Lotus’ cosmic electronica, and Herbie Hancock’s dishi era, borrowing from each musician without imitating their sounds. Created virtually during Covid lockdown, The New Heritage is a beat-driven gem of a record — chill yet intriguing, modern with a sense of place and reverence to history.
Here’s another one I can’t take credit for: Before I started working at VMP, I worked off and on at Bandcamp, where I started in 2016 as a senior editor who helped establish its editorial platform, and ended as the company’s contributing editor (aka a part-time writer who penned a certain number of pieces per month). I was reading BC’s weekly Essential Releases column, when I saw that my former colleague Diamond Sharp had shouted out an album by anaiis, calling it sublime. She’s 1,000 percent correct. The album emits a ghostly essence; on songs like “undulations,” “ultraviolet, counts” and “reverie,” the singer demonstrates a mastery of cinematic dreamspaces, perfectly soundtracking the space between fantasy and reality. In a good way, dream feels hallucinatory, a night-themed LP that never stops revealing its many layers. Just one person’s opinion, but I think this one will hang around for quite a while.
