2020: MY FAVORITES
If there’s been something good in this ill-fated 2020, that’s certainly music. I can’t remember another year with so many high quality releases in recent times and that’s great news. I tried to put together a list of my albums of the year, but the draft kept growing. At some point, I just gave up and decided not to narrow it down. If you want to see all the records I considered (about 50), the whole draft list can be found at the end of this post.
All of that said, if I had to pick just one, it would be Matt Elliott’s ‘Farewell To All We Know’. It was conceived way before the pandemic, but the title sounds eerily prophetic. The album is a sort of return to form for Elliot: while on some of the previous works he also experimented with folk music from places he visited or lived in, he sticks to some bare-bones, gloomy acoustic folk on this one. As usual, the poignant and gut-wrenching lyrics seal the deal.
It won’t cheer you up from the 2020 trainwreck, but it’s so hauntingly beautiful.
