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The Best Albums of 2024
While cruelty reigned, the year’s top releases sought stability.
Just as Twin Peaks turns your textbook rural-police procedural into a treatise on reality and personhood, and Dune(1984) makes a pageant of literal and philosophical ugliness out of a story about intergalactic greed, Cellophane Memories, the second album from interdisciplinary giant David Lynch and San Antonio singer-songwriter Chrystabell, recasts the old Hollywood glamor of her voice as spectral building block for droning sound sculptures.It’s a bolder work than its 2011 predecessor This Train, which felt spiritually indebted to Julee Cruise Roadhouse nights. Brat balances private soul-searching and public airing of grievances, offsetting the sonic and thematic coarseness of “Sympathy is a knife,” “” and “Mean girls” with the aching tenderness of “So I” and “I might say something stupid” but making sure to slip in breezy party starters like “360” and “Club classics.” It manages a feat once thought impossible: successfully feeding the crusaders for 2017’s forward-thinking if abrasive Pop 2, 2020’s suitably insular How I’m Feeling Now, and 2022’s more mainstream Crash within the same brisk song cycle. The trio, built around Portishead’s Geoff Barrow on drums and vocals, thunders through snaking, unpredictable compositions without overdubs, drifting through crunchy, sinister prog riffs; hypnotic odes to ’70s German instrumental rock gods; snappy post-punk tunes; and creeping psych-rock odysseys with aplomb.>>>> resembles a fruitful trip to the record store that yielded crisp vinyl copies of Can’s Ege Bamyasi, Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets, and Uriah Heep’s Very ’ Eavy… Very ’ Umble.
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