She played all the instruments herself, scaling her sound up to arena size and chiming like U2, even as she refuses herself any excuses or forgiveness. “Beat myself until I’m bloody/And I’ll give you a ringside seat,” Julien Baker sings in one of the brave, ruthlessly self-indicting songs that fill “Little Oblivions,” an album about the toll of one person’s addictions on everyone around her. Six-beat rhythms and skeins of guitar lines carry Moctar’s voice in songs that can be modest and introspective or unstoppably frenetic. But “Afrique Victime” further expands the sonic possibilities for Tuareg rock, from ambient meditation to psychedelic onslaught. Like Tinariwen, his band plugs North African rhythms and modal vamps into rock amplifiers and drums. Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitarist born in Niger. She sings about impending disasters, romantic and environmental, and the widespread disregard for what’s clearly about to happen. The rhythms are brisk and precise winds, keyboards and guitars ricochet respectfully off her breathy vocal lines. Tamara Lindeman, who writes songs and records as the Weather Station, surrounded herself with a jazzy, intuitive backup group for “Ignorance,” clearly aware of Joni Mitchell’s folk-jazz precedent. On “Seis,” she wrote songs that draw deeply on regional Mexican traditions - mariachi, banda, ranchera, corrido, norteño - to sing, in a voice that can be teasing or furiously incendiary, about deep passions and equally deep betrayals. Mon Laferte is from Chile, but she has been living for more than a decade in Mexico and has immersed herself in its music. Sometimes visitors can see what residents take for granted. Drawing on soul, country, folk and deep blues, she connects her own story to myth and metaphor, remembering the trauma yet decisively rising above it. “I’m still rising, stronger for my pain and suffering,” she sings. With Liliana Saumet’s tartly endearing singing and rapping and Simón Mejía’s meticulously kinetic productions, the songs dance through their fears.Īllison Russell, the longtime frontwoman of Birds of Chicago, transforms a horrific childhood - she was abused by her stepfather - into songs of joyful survival. Each new one broadened an album that entwines folklore and electronics, personal yearning and planetary concerns. The Colombian duo Bomba Estéreo released “Deja” as a series of EPs tied to the ancient elements: water, air, fire, earth. The albums that resonated most with me during 2021 were songs of reflection and revelation, often dealing with traumas and crises, transfigured through music. The past year was awash in recorded music - not only the stuck-at-home recordings that musicians occupied themselves with when touring evaporated during the pandemic, but also many albums that had been made before the lockdowns but had been shelved in hopes of some return to normalcy.
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