1. Eleni Mandell - Wake Up Again
L.A.-based singer/songwriter Eleni Mandell has been making great records in relative obscurity for over 20 years, winning enough respect from her peers that Jackson Browne, Van Dyke Parks, and others covered her songs for 2017's compilation Unsung Heroes: The Songs of Eleni Mandell. And her 11th solo album may be her best yet, or at least her most intriguing and ambitious. Teaching songwriting classes led Mandell to teaching songwriting in two women's prisons, and doing that led to her writing an album full of character sketches about the people she'd met there and the things she'd seen. Eleni Mandell has always specialized in songs that feel like small subtle vignettes, times when she seems to just let her mind wander and focus on the emotion of a moment. On Wake Up Again, the emotion is mostly empathy as she puts herself into the shoes of women who were driven to violence or murder, left to spend decades in prison and not raise their own children, with gentle backing from her longtime band (including Geraldine Fibbers drummer Kevin Fitzgerald) that helps foreground these devastating story songs. Here's the 2019 albums playlist that I put all the records I listen to in, an easy place to find most of these albums.

2. Mannequin Pussy - Patience
The Philly band Mannequin Pussy's third album is their first to run more than 20 minutes (but still, only 25 minutes), and their first for Epitaph Records. It's not exactly stadium rock but I tend to like when punk bands get a slightly bigger recording budget and maybe a little more hook-driven. I love the way "Patience" careens right into the midtempo "Drunk II," a great one-two punch to kick off the album.

3. Prince - Originals
I have a lot of mixed emotions about Prince being gone and his estate assembling posthumous releases. On one hand, he left a lot of great stuff bootlegged and/or entirely unheard that would never come out on his watch, and I feel weird about a random assortment of family members and industry people and Jay-Z sorting through his vaults and putting out yearly albums. On the other hand, it's his own damn fault that he refused to make any plans for the inevitability of death, so it's up to the living now. And Originals is a pretty brilliant way to package together unheard Prince versions of the songs he let other artists record, it's such a kick to hear Prince sing "Sex Shooter" (kind of more appropriate for a man to sing anyway, I guess) or "Gigolos Get Lonely Too." I especially love "Wouldn't You Love To Love Me?" which was released by Prince's obscure protege Taja Sevelle after Michael Jackson rejected it for Bad. You could call these 'demos,' but many of these are just the same track with a different vocalist, and only a couple don't sound polished and ready to go on one of his albums before he decided to give it away. That said, I do find it bittersweet to get this album when, as I wrote in my Unstreamables column, the original albums by The Family, Jill Jones, Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Mazarati and other Paisley Park artists are largely out of print and hard to find, and it'd be nice to get all those albums Prince wrote and produced back in circulation too.

4. Beauty Pill - Sorry You're Here
Chad Clark and Beauty Pill were engaged in a number of different projects in the 11 years between their first album and their 2015 masterpiece Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, mostly notably scoring the stage play "suicide.chat.room" in 2010. The band's proper 3rd album is on the way, but in the meantime Clark decided to finally release that play's soundtrack, almost a decade later, as Sorry You're Here. I kind of always assumed the score incorporated some of the works in progress for the 2015 album, but while it's sonically very much in the same space, it's its own distinct set of music, a 38-minute album of mostly instrumentals with a handful of vocal tracks, including covers of the great Paul Simon deep album cut "Some Folks' Lives Roll Easy" and the amazing underrated David Bowie single "Jump They Say." Having not seen the play, I guess tonally I have some idea of the uniting idea or mood of this record, but it's mostly just enjoyable from an aural standpoint. It's really a feast for the ears, so many strange and novel textures but with a certain percussive physicality rather than the kind of inert feeling I associate with a lot of 'headphone music.'

5. GoldLink - Diaspora
I still love "Crew" so much that I kind of stupidly want GoldLink to try to make that happen again and do some more smooth midtempo songs and maybe some Shy Glizzy and Brent Faiyaz features. But I respect that he's perfecting this really omnivorous, danceable sound and has a lot of Nigerian/British/etc. features on here, it's a really smooth and summery album with beautiful production that goes well with GoldLink's calm, cool delivery.

6. The Raconteurs - Help Us Stranger
For a long time, I felt that Brendan Benson was underrated and Jack White was overrated, so I've had to reconcile that with the fact that they work well together in The Raconteurs, and they've become a good vehicle for Benson's songs, particularly since it's been more than 5 years since his last solo album. And hey, obviously White is pretty talented, too, despite whatever ways he's kind of annoying, hearing some cool White guitar solos on Benson songs like "Live A Lie" and "Only Child" is a pretty ideal combination.

7. Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars
Bruce Springsteen has come to represent some kind of rock'n'roll ideal of aging gracefully, still looking good and putting on great shows and respectable late period albums and engrossing, well crafted retrospective projects like Springsteen On Broadway. But I have pretty mixed feelings about his studio albums of the last 25 years, which mostly alternate between putting a modern rock sheen on the E Street Band or updating the acoustic minimalism of Nebraska. So Western Stars is exciting to me just for not settling comfortably into either of those categories, putting Jon Brion keys and sweeping string arrangements and steel guitars and other lush bells and whistles over a contemplative set of songs that's more varied and colorful than the Tom Joad/Devils & Dust side of his catalog. I hope he doesn't try to do this kind of record again, just because it's nice to have something this singular from the later years of his discography.

8. X Ambassadors - Orion
The first X Ambassadors album grew on me a lot over the last 3 years of my wife frequently playing it around the house, Sam Harris has a really impressive voice and they definitely deserve more than to be Imagine Dragons' less famous labelmates. They released a lot of singles in between albums, and my favorite of those, "Ahead of Myself," didn't make it onto Orion, but it's still a strong record that strings together songs written with Malay, Ricky Reed, Emily Warren and others to kind of fill in that currently fertile interzone between mainstream alt-rock and Top 40 pop, so far "Rule" and "Wasteland" are my favorite tracks.

9. Willie Nelson - Ride Me Back Home
Willie Nelson has never been someone who builds up any one album to be a masterpiece event record -- he still cranks out an album or two a year, just as he has since the early '60s. But at the age of 86, it feels like he's been making every album like it could be his last -- songs like "Come On Time" and "One More Song To Write" would make Ride Me Back Home a poignant farewell album, just as last year's Last Man Standing would have been, but I hope he's got plenty more in him. I'm glad Mickey Raphael is still playing on his albums all these decades later, in my mind his harmonica is like Willie's second voice. His son Lukas Nelson, who makes a guest appearance here, also released a pretty good album in June.

10. Lil Nas X - 7 EP
Now that "Old Town Road" has become a pop rap smash enjoyed by young and old alike, and people mostly hang on the idea of it being an unfairly persecuted country song out of fealty to the narrative from April 2019, I kind of look at it as the "Timber" by Pitbull of its time. And I think Lil Nas X taking the Top 40 rapper mantle from Pitbull and Flo Rida is probably the best path for him from here on out, and 7 bears that out. "Kick It" is a solid rap song with a cool sax loop that feels like he could hang with a lot of the Soundcloud dudes if he'd taken a more traditional career path, but for the most part I like that he's leaned into more melodic flows over tracks with big undigested chunks of country and dance and rock music dropped into them, I'd be cool with "Rodeo" or "C7osure (You Like)" or "Panini" doing numbers as a follow-up hit.

The Worst Album of the Month: Hollywood Vampires - Rise
While I do understand that music was Johnny Depp's first love and I believe that he would just be somewhere out there playing guitar if he'd never starred in a blockbuster movie, I doubt that rock legends like Alice Cooper and Joe Perry would be jamming with him if that was the case. The covers of David Bowie and Jim Carroll and Johnny Thunders are uninspired, and the originals are far worse. I always say that Joe Perry is a more interesting guitarist than he gets credit for and often makes even the least distinguished Aerosmith songs worth listening to, but he doesn't even do much to salvage this. And it's pretty damn morbid that Alice Cooper took the name of the band from his '70s drinking club with long gone self-destructive entertainers like Keith Moon and John Belushi. I feel bad for John Waters that he got roped into making a brief cameo on this album.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 01, 2019 at 2:08 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.