Albums That Defined My Year
I have in recent years sometimes added an additional, more personal category to my year-end lists, the albums that defined my year. The idea is to include albums I fell in love with during the year in question, but which were released sometime beforehand. This is meant to act as both a good tool for me to see what I was listening to in 2019 and also as a recommendation for those people who generally share my taste in music. That said, this is just a list and does not and is not intended to include any reviews of the music below. It is also not ranked, obviously, and I have tried to order it chronologically by when in the year I immersed myself in each album/EP.
I do not have to have actually purchased the music in question during 2019; the only exclusive rule for this list’s content is that the music in question was not released in 2019. So for example, I got some of Saosin’s work back in 2014, but I returned to it a lot in January of 2019 as I was craving more heavily stylized Post-Hardcore.
The Appleseed Cast – Sagarmatha
目黒将司 – Persona 5 Original Soundtrack
MONO – Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined
Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
Coheed & Cambria – The Second Stage Turbine Blade
Coheed & Cambria – Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume 1: From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness
Saosin – Translating the Name EP
Saosin – Saosin
Saosin – In Search of Solid Ground
American Football – American Football [LP2]
The Seven Fields of Aphelion – Periphery
The Caretaker – Everywhere at the End of Time
Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s – Buzzard
植松伸夫 – Final Fantasy IX Original Soundtrack
Tori Amos – The Beekeeper
The Album Leaf – In a Safe Place
RADWIMPS – Anti Anti Generation
RADWIMPS – xと○と罪と
Chinese Football – 同名专辑
NUMBER GIRL – SCHOOLGIRL BYE BYE
The Smashing Pumpkins – MACHINA/The Machines of God
Popnoname – 50°
牛尾憲輔 – 聲の形 Original Soundtrack [a shape of light]
The Album Leaf – One Day I’ll Be On Time
Bibio – The Green EP
Death Note Original Soundtrack [Volumes I and II]
The Hotelier – Home, Like Noplace is There
The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Always Foreign
The Hotelier – Goodness
Ital Tek – Nebula Dance
Thanks for reading! I will return with our regularly scheduled Ambient / Drone album reviews next week! And also within the coming months I will begin compiling and writing my best of the decade lists. It will probably be a while though.
By Isak McCune
P.S. The featured image for today’s article was my phone-screen background for most of 2019. It is a picture I took at Nagoya Castle.
