acl 2021

11 min read 2021-12-23 07:01:51

ACL 2021 ~ The Top 20 Albums of the Year

If 2020 was the most surreal year in recent memory, 2021 was the runner-up. A rollercoaster of emotion was supplanted by a mountain of malaise.

5 min read 2021-12-22 07:01:27

Sorry, friends, no folk or jazz made our top ten this year ~ 2021 was the year of rock and post-rock! With almost every major post-rock band

4 min read 2021-12-21 07:01:57

This year, we reviewed more modern composition albums than those in any other genre ~ not because more were submitted, but because their overall

3 min read 2021-12-20 07:01:08

The natural world existed long before the creation of instruments: music made by wind and waves, birds and beasts. During the pandemic, many people

4 min read 2021-12-19 07:01:19

Our Experimental section boasts the widest dynamic contrast of all the fields we cover. From near-silence to curdled wails, children’s classes to

5 min read 2021-12-18 07:01:12

Due to lockdowns and quarantines, most of us have not gone clubbing for years. Thankfully, electronic artists have kept making music during the

4 min read 2021-12-17 07:01:57

Drone is the music of suspension: a constant underpinning of sound graced by modulation. The music was perfect for a year in which things seemed to

5 min read 2021-12-16 07:01:07

This year’s picks emphasize the variety of ambient music through poetry, field recordings and home diaries, featuring children and cicadas, time

14 min read 2021-12-14 07:01:48

Album covers were never more important than they are today. In the old days, one might peruse the bins at the local record store, seeing if

3 min read 2021-12-13 07:01:53

Over the past decade, we’ve experienced a shift in the tone of winter music. In more innocent days, winter music was the sound of snow, children

3 min read 2021-12-12 07:01:53

We didn’t publish this list in 2020, because so few movies were released. While Hollywood has been slow to recover, streaming services and film

9 min read 2021-12-11 07:01:34

Lawrence English’s Room40 has landed an amazing five releases on our year-end charts, spread across three genres. The Australian imprint is our

2 min read 2021-12-10 07:01:47

Few would call 2021 a happy year, although it was graced by moments of hope: a (short lived) political shift, a vaccine, a summit on climate change.

5 min read 2021-12-08 07:01:36

Paper shortages, vinyl delays and broken supply chains, added to the pre-existing shift to the digital format, meant a continued decline in physical

3 min read 2021-12-07 07:01:25

When music videos migrated from television to the internet, they found a brand new audience thirsty for innovation. This year’s crop includes