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.

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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

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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.