My favorite music of 2021: Episode 2

It feels like every app and their grandma is pushing some kind of personalized, year-end summary of all the content you’ve used their platform to gorge yourself on this time of year. The endless stream of AI-generated powerpoints showcasing your favorite Spotify artists/most improved Google Docs/most CashApped crack dealer popping up when you’re just trying to use your distraction app of choice for the minute and a half it’ll take to microwave a hot pocket really makes you yearn for the simpler times of the Top Ten list, doesn’t it? The simpler times, being of course the other eleven months of the year when people stop paying attention to AIs that can tell you what awful death metal genre you like the most and it stops being socially acceptable to flood all your social media accounts with screenshots of your Spotify wrapped. (Porta-Potty clowncore, anyone?)

Fear not, curmudgeon, for there's not one, not two, and not three, and also not four, but four and a half best-of-2021-lists coming to this blog for you to enjoy! And the best part is they’re all ranked according to my own questionable tastes, so you don’t have to do any exhausting thinking or self-reflecting while you mindlessly consume two low-effort listicles disguised as a Moonrabbit Haven annual tradition! In these Unprecedented Times™, the holiday season truly is the most wonderful time of year for marinating in comfortingly familiar content within your personal media-bubble. From the bottom of my lil ol’ heart, thank you for making this Moonrabbit Haven article a part of avoiding your family this fourth quarter.

Now that we're at third base (the third paragraph) and you're strapped into this post for the long haul I can finally drop the tried and true (beloved, even?) jaded corporate business guy spiel (that definitely hooked you), bear my soul, and gush a little about some of the music I liked this year! Listicle number two will be the video games I liked (I’ll probably have to get that up after the new year) so that this isn’t a million pages long. Or like, more than five. Welcome to sub-list one! Here’s ten (more or less) of my favorite albums to come out of this year. (Only my top three are ranked by how much I like them– the rest are ordered chronologically.)

Ice Melt – Crumb (May)

I got into Crumb last fall (A.K.A. before everyone else did, thanks), but it wasn't until I rediscovered them and heard their new album in the spring that I really started listening to them a lot. I don't think this would have been my kind of music a little while ago (it barely was last year) but I'm glad it is now. There's some really good psychedelic indie stuff out there (and more on that later), and cuts from this album get stuck in your dome for awhile. Ice Melt is trippy, dark, super solid, and my second favorite Crumb album.

Favorite tracks: BNR, Trophy, Tunnel (all that you had)
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Chicory: A Colorful Tale OST – Lena Raine (June)

Chicory was the game I was the most excited for going into 2021, and it delivered! But also more on that later. Right now let's focus on yet another Classic from Lena Raine, who really refuses to miss. I don't know how well you'll be able to vibe with this soundtrack if you haven't played the game, but if you can make it past the feeling like an ape for bumping to a game soundtrack in the car part of your descent into perpetual virginity, you're gonna find two and a half hours of super pretty melodies and lush instrumentation that'll make you feel like a small genderless draw dog in a large colorful world.

Favorite tracks: Gulp Swamp, Banquet Rainforest, Simmer Springs
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Meanwhile EP – Gorillaz (August)

This EP is a really great morsel of Gorillaz content and the title track is one of my favorite kinds of Gorillaz songs. Damon Albarn feels very in character as 2D, which wasn't really something I knew would connect at all until I heard it. Three songs wasn't really enough music for this EP to have a ton of staying power, plus it had to compete for my attention with Donda a little, but hey it's Gorillaz and Gorillaz is good. And you can quote me on that.

Favorite track: Meanwhile
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Deltarune Chapter 2 OST – Toby Fox & Friends (September)

It's still so wild that there's another Deltarune thing out. It feels like I was just getting waaay too into Undertale maybe a year after it came out and then falling back into a world I thought I was over when Deltarune Chapter 1 released... but here I am living in a post Deltarune Chapter 2 world. And I gotta say, I feel... not that different! I don't think the chapter by chapter release model is how I like to play through a game (even though my favorite game this year was released that way), but it definitely works out a lot better when you get a 𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓷 fifty minutes of Toby Fox music to go along with it. And our hero Lena Raine shows up for a little on this album, too! 🆒 I love the DS Zelda sounds on Faint Glow, the Mother 2/3 on WELCOME TO THE CITY, and that Silly Guy from NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A. Haven't finished playing it yet. Classic.

Favorite tracks: Faint Glow, WELCOME TO THE CITY, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A
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Talk Memory – BADBADNOTGOOD (October)

My dad and I got into BADBADNOTGOOD at the beginning of the Spring 2020 lockdown, so we only had to wait like a year and a half for their next project to drop. If you've been waiting for new BADBADNOTGOOD material since the release of IV, their last album, it's been five years and you might be a liiittle underwhelmed by what they have to show for the hiatus. Not me though! This album is great and it along with Star Stuff (see the second list) completely sold me on the harp. And I don't know who Arthur Verocai is but every track he's on is really great. And so are the tracks he's not on. Signal from the Noise does not feel like it's nearly ten minutes.

Favorite tracks: Signal from the Noise, Love Proceeding, Timid, Intimidating (which is one title with a comma in the middle)
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A Love Supreme Live In Seattle – John Coltrane (October)

I am writing the paragraph for this album last because it's John Coltrane playing what many think is his best album in what (some) think is the best city (in  Washington State) and that is damn intimidating. What do I say about A Love Supreme? Coltrane plays really good saxophone? McCoy Tyner does piano stuff really well? That listening to this album is dizzying? That's all true, I guess. The sax riff that kicks off Psalm and blooms into a great seven minute closer is... great, and McCoy's playing on Pursuance puts anything I could do to shame. For my money, the interludes can drag a little bit, but the heights on this recording are vertigo-inducingly high. Maybe I'll be better at writing about music next year by the time Steve Griggs finds all the mp3s inside the  1TB "NOT_COLTRANE_BOOTLEGS" folder on Joe Brazil's PC. Until then.

PS: I looked Steve Griggs up to make sure he was alive so that joke would work and it turns out the guy soloed on the Halo 3 ODST OST (which is a mouthful). Steve Briggs is officially my hero of 2021.

Favorite tracks: Acknowledgement, Pursuance, Psalm
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Gorillaz 2021 Reissue – Gorillaz (December)

Somehow I've managed to get two Gorillaz releases on my favorite albums of 2021 list in a year that did not see the release of a single Gorillaz album. Which is definitive proof that I need to listen to more new music. This set is listed as the self-titled album (which is currently tied with Demon Days and Song Machine as my favorite Gorillaz album), G-sides (which I am enough of a fan to listen to and appreciate), the Spacemonkeyz remix dub album (which I am enough of a fan to be familiar with but not listen to), Demoz (which I was not enough of a Gorillaz fan to know existed prior to seeing the reissue track list), and a live recording of their self-titled album. Yeah this was really only included because I wanted this list to be ten items long but didn't like the new Kanye album a lot. Now you know how I feel about some very niche supplemental Gorillaz content. G-sides has some gems.

Favorite tracks: Tomorrow Comes Today, Latin Simone, Slow Country
(And Faust is my favorite G-side)
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#3: CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST – Tyler, The Creator (June)

I am as fair-weather a Tyler, The Creator fan as can be. I've only been around for his good albums (sorry, I mean since Flower Boy my bad) and have barely listened to anything before that. No shame! Tyler, The Creator continues a 3-album streak of hits with CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, a title begging to be abbreviated, and I like it more than Flower Boy and a little less than IGOR, which does not seem to be an unpopular opinion. I truly have nothing new to contribute to the CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST discussion other than the note that SWEET and I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE should be different songs because SWEET almost sucks and I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE is a 𝖈𝖑𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖈. Yeah, I know he does that every album for the tenth track. Grow up, Tyler, The Creator fan straw man.

Favorite tracks: CORSO, LEMONHEAD, HOT WIND BLOWS
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#2: The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows – Damon Albarn (November)

There are three projects featuring Damon Albarn now on this list. There will be another. I like this album! It feels a little Now Now-y for my money sometimes but is definitely distinctly Mr.-Albarn-solo-album-sounding and not Gorillaz-y. God that is an awful take™. Writing these little blurbs started off easy but I am rapidly getting tired and I still have like half of them left to write before the end of the year. Okay... some of these songs are really 🅱🆄🅼🅿🅸🅽 (that is the last funny font on this page I promise) but lots of the really good moments on this album come from the slower tracks that might have dragged (drug) if it wasn't for some really good + interesting textures I feel like I haven't heard before. Songs like The Cormorant are super unique and strange. I wonder if Damon Albarn took the photo on the cover. EDIT: It was taken by Marton Perlaki. Nice.

Favorite tracks time: Royal Morning Blue, Darkness To Light, Polaris
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#1: TYRON – Slowthai (February)

My first pick for album of the year, first Slowthai album, and only Slowthai album! The way I worded that makes it sound like there's not more than one Slowthai album. There is, but I have... not listened to the other one. Maybe it'll make my 2022 list! I dunno the way I consume music is weird. Maybe YOU should tell me if it's good. Do SEO bots care if you get comments or is that just on YouTube? Well I like reading them so you should still comment even if they're, like every other action we take, either predetermined or completely random and completely without consequences. So yeah, TYRON is really good. It gave me a new appreciation for downright malicious beats and comes with a lot of nice spring memories attached. Those months were the first time in a long time I was not only hopeful for the near future but also momentarily really deeply chilled out. Even with online school being as lame as it was I had a lot of time to kill with the friend who put me on to this album and I like thinking about all the stuff we did with it on in the background.

Favorite tracks: CANCELLED, MAZZA, terms
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Okay round one is behind us. Now it's time for ten albums I liked in 2021 that didn't come out this year, ordered by when I started listening to them instead of their release dates. My top three are in whatever order I feel like again. 

Quiet Forest – Hiroshi Yoshimura (January)

Right off the bat, this one almost made the top three. Finding Quiet Forest in the beginning of the year was very... quieting... for me and I feel like it justified all the loud things. If that makes sense. No matter how much the world surges around you, you're always welcome to wander through the woods and see this music.
I was bored online one night and clicked on a profile with a name I liked and looked at what their status said they were listening to. I think it was Music For Nine Post Cards, by Hiroshi Yoshimura. I looked up his Wikipedia for some reason and the way Quiet Forest was described struck me so I wrote the name down to come back to it later. What a random way to cross paths with a work that ended up being so magical.

Favorite tracks: Never listened to it out of order, I think, and always from this one YouTube upload, so I don't really know the individual track names... maybe Quiet Forest, Hoh River, and Deep Echoes are my favorites. Tell me if I am wrong.
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Silent Hill 2 OST – Akira Yamaoka (February)

Not a lot to say about this one. It's super cool that these beats/noises came from a PS2 horror game. And it's super cool that they're on Spotify! Not a big fan of the game, though. I tried playing Silent Hill 2 (pirated and with the enhanced edition mod on the Windows partition of my Mac, with an Xbox controller, lol) in October and thought it was alright until I got to the first dungeon-y apartment complex area... which I endured and suffered through. Then it picked back up again until I got to the second set of apartment buildings and decided I was done. I kind of wish I'd stuck it out since it took a really long time to get working on my computer and I'm already like four or five hours in and the music's so good (even if it feels like it doesn't play a lot?) but it's also a pain in the ass to boot into a different OS every time I want to play it and there are many, many, other games to appreciate outside of their soundtracks. So I'll stick to listening to Akira Yamaoka's work on the bus, at arm's length.

Favorite tracks: Heaven's Night, The Reverse Will (man that one's good), True
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Green – Hiroshi Yoshimura (May)

Green took me the longest to connect with out of anything I've listened to from Hiroshi Yoshimura's catalogue. Quiet Forest was immediately really lush and transportive, Nine Post Cards was all cold and zen and contemplative, and the other soundscape albums I heard by him blurred together nicely looking out the window on the light rail. The first few songs off of Green I listened to were measured, staccato, and restricted. It flowed, but wasn't organic in the way I liked. Or Green, really. I thought I'd heard Green on Quiet Forest– trees, grass, nature. Then I took a long walk down a road I didn't know existed on a bright spring day to meet the Slowthai friend at his school and it clicked. This album has a pulse and it sounds like it's shooting out of the ground, growing towards sunlight. If Quiet Forest is a cool pre-spring day in a ...quiet forest, Green is the first day of the year the sun's really out and all the trees are leaved and the water's gotten warm enough to run your hands through. Green is well rested and hopeful.

Favorite tracks: CREEK, GREEN, TEEVEE
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Jinx – Crumb (June)

And with that the ambient noise galaxy brain worship comes to a close. On to real music, which means someone singing about you owing them a Coke or something I dunno. (This is a joke about the album being named Jinx. Laugh.) Right, I technically heard this album last fall but I hadn't listened to it more than once or twice until this spring which was when I decided to become a Crumb fan. This is my favorite album of theirs. It sounds super fall-y, as in the season, not the band or the Gorillaz album or what happens when you walk off of something elevated. "Autumnal" maybe would have been a better word to go with. This album is short, with ten mostly sub- three minute songs spanning 27 and a half minutes. It's a little bit of a bummer Crumb hasn't put out any big projects yet but their sound doesn't vary a Whole Lot from project to project In My Opinion so I guess that makes their catalogue consistent and good for back to back to back listening.

Favorite tracks: Ghostride, The Letter, Part III
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Too Late To Love You – Junebug (August)

This album was recorded by a girl robot and a boy robot and was one of the most unique things I listened to in 2021. Maybe if you have a lot of 80s junk on rotation it'll sound familiar... or you might recognize Junebug's voice if you've played Kentucky Route Zero, where a single from this album is performed in a dive bar off of I-65. That's right, I tricked you! More video game music. And this time it's personal.
This album sounds like its cover: Junebug's electric, modulated vocals pitch through layered production like a neon sign shining through murky navy blue night. It sucks knowing this is probably the only music I'll get from Ben Babbitt that sounds like this, but it's also pretty great to have a full, real album from fictional characters in the first place. If you enjoyed Johnny and Junebug's performance of Too Late To Love You in Act III of Kentucky Route Zero, you'll find a lot to like here, too.

Favorite tracks: Static Between Stations, Poison Dream, Next Time
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BBNG2 – BADBADNOTGOOD (November)

Maybe my favorite jazz album. It's very good. I think I might have to be in a little bit of an intense place to 100% get with some of the tracks on here (especially Flashing Lights and You Made Me Realize) but even when I don't possess the unbridled dark energy required to head bang to all of BBNG2 I can always respect the undeniable chemistry that gushes out of the three and a half members of BADBADNOTGOOD for the length of this album. This is what being in the pocket/the beginning of a Joker arc sounds like. Also, returning from their first album are tons of covers of hip hop greats' material. It Would Be Cool If This Was On Streaming Services Besides Bandcamp.

​Favorite tracks: Limit To Your Love, CHSTR, UWM
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Dear Old Stockholm – John Coltrane (December)

This is an album for a shitty, rainy, pre-break December day. If Dear Old Stockholm (the song) feels like finally getting inside during a nasty storm, After The Rain is getting under a comforter with a book and a warm beverage and falling asleep. I think I just realized why comforters are called that. Woah.
So yeah! Really good Coltrane. Almost my favorite after Village Vanguard. Thank you to Darryl, my piano teacher, for introducing me to yet another ℂ𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕔.

​Favorite tracks: Dear Old Stockholm, After The Rain, Dear Lord
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#3: Merrie Land – The Good, the Bad & the Queen (July)

The Damon Albarn 2021 post tetralogy comes to a close with Merrie Land, my third favorite record on this list. Before this summer/album I never would have guessed I'd be able to self insert myself as Great Britain while listening to a Good/Bad/Queen album and processing something really bad. Well, here we are. The Good, the Bad & the Queen pushed way past their 2009 debut with a somehow deeply mournful 2018 album about... Brexit? [Queue shocked Donkey Kong noise.] Even as Basically A Child who is not at all knowledgeable about foreign affairs, hearing our man Mr. Albarn sobbing about Scotland on Ribbons still hits hard. And with the uplifting conclusion of leaving your home behind being "really sad" on The Poison Tree... yeah this is altogether a pretty rough ride. If you're into this album I super recommend the Hallelujah Monkeyz Merrie Land review where they talk to the guitar player!

Favorite tracks: Merrie Land, Drifters and Trawlers, Ribbons
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#2: Sound & Color – Alabama Shakes (March)

There's a weird amount of sophomore albums on these two lists, I just realized. If you count Silent Hill 2 as a second outing, there's eight. That's like half this list. I'm gonna be real I'm running out of time to finish writing this which is why we're talking about sequels now. Sound & Color is the second LP by the Alabama Shakes and Brittany Howard is still carrying the band. I think everyone might have figured that out in 2015 cause this was the last Alabama Shakes release before she went and did her own thing. I am rarely captured by vocal performances but if Ms. Howard doesn't go ham here, backed by a great band, I don't know who does. This is real good music.

​Favorite tracks: Don't Wanna Fight, Future People, Guess Who
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#1: Star Stuff – Chaz Bundick Meets The Mattson 2 (September)

Because it would be lame to have a tie for first place at the end of this list, Star Stuff just barely edges out Sound & Color as my album of the year. This is the best material I've heard from both Chaz Bundick and The Mattson 2 (although I journeyed into their discographies after hearing this album, biased) and yeah they need to do another record together.
Sir Bundick doesn't properly sing (words) until three tracks in to Star Stuff and when he came in for the first time, I did not know if I was a fan of that style. I have now seen God and He has illuminated the Truth that JBS is the best. Even after listening to this to the point where I hate it, I still hear new stuff going in the background when wearing headphones. The little guy that says "Wait a minute" halfway through the title track is the crown jewel of the song and I hope he finds success in the coming year. Thank you.

​Favorite tracks: JBS, Star Stuff, Don't Blame Yourself
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It's over. The longest blog post of the year is behind me and I can finally go to sleep. Thank you for reading this monster of a post. Editing it will be 2022 Henry's problem. 2022 EDIT: it was
What was your favorite stuff from this year? Should I take this down and start from scratch? Stick around for part 2 coming in a few days ! Also, here's some stuff I liked that didn't make it onto my list(s):
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Bathtub Bumps/Neat Tape 2 – Bad Snacks (March)

Bad Snacks is another artist I found through a Spotify status! Both of these are real nice to perhaps Relax/Study To. Straight up mellow beats are not always the most challenging listens but I Like Them and I don't care who knows it.

Kentucky Route Zero OST – Cardboard Computer (March)

The ambient stuff on this soundtrack is super cool, the folk singing is super cool, and the miscellaneous tracks are super cool too, but there was only room on this list for one Ben Babbitt project.

The Fall – Gorillaz (June)

Surprise Damon Albarn appearance! I am a fiend and should be stopped. I did not find this album good enough to put on a top ten list, but contrary to popular rhetoric it's not bad! I have it on like, fifteen dollar vinyl because I thrive off of pain.

Departure and Farewell – Hem (August)

Putting this in a 2021 list would be deceitful. I've liked it a lot since it came out in 2013 but it took on a weirdly different meaning to me this year cause of personal junk. I dunno if I have this kind of relationship with any other album.

Donda – Kanye West (September)

Don't have a lot to say about this one. I was pretty eagerly anticipating it after all the drama around its rollout but wasn't super blown away by a lot of what I heard. I am not big into Kanye I guess.

BBNG1 – BADBADNOTGOOD (October)

Choosing either this or BBNG2 to include on the final list almost came down to a coin toss. The Zelda medley and Freedom/Billium Evans are particular highlights.

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​Thank you, so much, for reading!! See you soon!

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from henry