stubermania
stubermania
The life and tomes of Stuart Berman
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2020: The worst year of the 2020s
Amirite? But hey, even in the darkest of times, there were some bright spots—200 of them to be exact, as evinced by my playlist of the year’s most enjoyable quarantunes/COVID-core/pandemica.
Here are my Top 20 albums of 2020, from A to Yves:
The Avalanches - We Will Always Love You
The Chats - High Risk Behaviour
Death Valley Girls - Under the Spell of Joy
The Dears - Lovers Rock
The Flaming Lips - American Head
Fontaines D.C. - A Hero’s Death
Jade Hairpins - Harmony Avenue
Jessie Ware - What’s Your Pleasure
Mourning [A] BlkSTAR - The Cycle
No Joy - Motherhood
Nyssa - Girls Like Me
The OBGMS - The Ends
Owen Pallett - Island
Porridge Radio - Every Bad
Sault - Untitled (Rise)
Thurston Moore - By the Fire
TV Freaks - People
U.S. Girls - Heavy Light
Wares - Survival
Yves Tumor - Heaven to a Tortured Mind
And these were the 20 best uses of screen time to take your mind off the impending apocalypse:
American Utopia
Better Call Saul (Season 5)
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 10)
Da 5 Bloods
The Dark Divide
The Go-Go’s
The Good Lord Bird
The Haunting of Bly Manor
How To With John Wilson
I Know This Much Is True
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
I May Destroy You
Industry
The Last Dance
Lovecraft Country
The Mandalorian (Season 2)
Promising Young Woman
Run
The Third Day
Zappa
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In a year where all corners of the music industry experienced unfathomable upheaval and hardship, I was grateful to have the opportunity to put my byline on these pieces:
At Stereogum: my 20th-anniversary retrospective on Primal Scream’s still-radical XTRMNR.
At NOW Magazine: To preview of Wavelength’s 20th-anniversary celebrations, I put together a list of 10 largely forgotten albums that defined Toronto in the year 2000.
At Spotify for Artists: I spoke to several musicians about how they’ve adjusted to the new post-COVID normal. Orville Peck and Sarah Harmer shared their pointers for performing livestream shows. By contrast, Tim Burgess of The Charlatans UK, Joe Talbot of IDLES, Murray Lightburn of The Dears, and Linnea Siggelkow, a.k.a. Ellis, discussed their novel strategies for staying connected with fans while isolating—without performing. And Jehnny Beth of Savages talked about diversifying her skill set to include TV talk-show host duties.
At Ticketmaster: A view of the COVID crisis from the promoter’s perspective—I spoke to Shaun Bowring of The Garrison and Baby G in Toronto about becoming a full-time advocate for independent venues in Canada seeking government relief.
At Pitchfork: I reviewed 25 records for the site this year, but I was especially stoked to write about Wares’ Survival, The Flaming Lips’ American Head, The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup reissue, Death Valley Girls’ Under the Spell of Joy, and TV Freaks’ People.
At Q on CBC Radio One: I produced the show’s interviews with Meg Remy of U.S. Girls, David Arquette, Lucy Liu, Machine Gun Kelly, Sam Roberts, and David Cross, among others.
And I had a great time on the Alphabetical Fugazi podcast going deep on the Red Medicine quasi-ballad, “Forensic Scene” (while also doing a practice run of my future TED Talk, “Fugazi are The Beatles of Post-Hardcore”).
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Though it may seem pointless to put together a Best Concerts of 2020 list, I was able to catch a few stellar sets before everything went dark (and at least one after). I can only hope my 2021 list will be a lot longer.
Chastity @ The Casbah (1/15)
Owen Pallett @ Hamilton Winterfest (2/8)
U.S. Girls @ The Paradise Theatre (2/15)
Ellis @ The Casbah (3/5)
The Sadies @ the York Parkade rooftop (9/27)
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Hey ‘19
I realize this Tumblr’s been sprouting tumbleweeds, but here’s a quick recap on my year that was, beginning with my quasi-chronological 150-track/12-hour survey of tunes that soundtracked pivotal moments of my year, made me hit "repeat" the first time I heard 'em, or simply managed to burrow their way from the background to the foreground.
Here’s my Top 20 for 2019, from A to Yves:
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Here are 11 things I worked on this year that I thought turned out pretty good. Let the hyperlinking begin!
First up—my Stereogum deep dive into Mercury Rev's star-studded full-album tribute to Bobbie Gentry.
Also at Stereogum, I wrote an appreciation for the retiring Peter Frampton, a.k.a. the most over-exposed yet underrated rock star of the '70s.
At Pitchfork, I put together a collection of The Best Rolling Stones Songs That Don't Really Sound Like The Rolling Stones.
And despite being firmly ensconced on the Pitchfork geezer beat the past couple of years, this year marked my debut for the Sunday Review. I tried to reconcile my lingering mixed feelings over Pavement's Terror Twilight here...
...and relived the golden age of pre-millennial paranoia (and post-hardcore) with my take on ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead's Madonna.
I wrote my first feature for Bandcamp Daily on Toronto's preeminent avant-gardist-turned-soft-rock-boogie-baron Matthew 'Doc' Dunn and his psych-jazz collective The Cosmic Range.
I got to have some really illuminating conversations with some amazing musicians for Spotify for Artists. I talked to Ladan Hussein (the artist formerly known as Cold Specks) about how she found her way back to music after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.
I spoke with Murray A. Lightburn about what it's like to often be the only person of colour at your own shows.
And I talked to Sharon Van Etten and The National's Aaron Dessner about why taking your kids on the road isn't the ideal way to achieve a work/life balance.
At Spotify for the Record, I put together a beginner's guide for Anglo listeners on delving into the (now streamable) back catalogue of Lucio Battisti, aka the Italian Gainsbourg/Scott Walker/Bowie/Billy Joel.
And over at the CBC Radio One program Q, I produced this interview with Peaches about her 20th anniversary, which also included a handy life-hack for getting around saying the word "jizz" on public radio.
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Lastly, these were my 10 favourite shows of the year:
Orville Peck w/ Persons @ The Casbah, 1/4
Laraaji @ Boxcar Sound, 4/13 (represented here by a pre-performance photo of his glorious gong)
TV Freaks w/ Absolutely Free @ This Ain’t Hollywood, 4/18
Danko Jones @ Club Absinthe, 5/7
The National @ Pier 8, 6/22
Tame Impala @ Budweiser Stage, 7/26
Fontaines DC @ The Phoenix, 9/13
Fly Pan Am @ This Ain’t Hollywood, 9/25
Stereolab @ Danforth Music Hall, 10/2
Lady Gaga @ Park MGM, 11/8
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All your dreams are made
It was a great honour to be invited onto Steven Hyden's Celebration Rock podcast to fulfill my true purpose in life: to convince y'all that "Hey Now" is actually a Top 5 Oasis jam. For this edition of CR’s “Fantasy A&R” feature, we each devised a perfect 14-song album from Oasis’ peak ‘94-’96 period. Listen to the podcast here, and then listen to my version (titled, natch, Definitely Glory) here.
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Blues implosion
On Spencer Sings the Hits!, Spencer isn’t so much playing rock’n’roll as scientifically reanimating it, welding and wiring the debris together into a mechanistic monstrosity that’s perpetually on the verge of short-circuiting.
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Caught by the Fuzz
The six dream-pop reveries on Ellis’ debut EP crackle with just enough distortion to earn their name, The Fuzz. And that feeling is as mental as it is musical, as she works through a mix of confusion, sadness, anxiety, and ambivalence. But these songs are neither about wallowing in that void nor necessarily rising out of it. They’re about learning to acclimate and carve out a space of security in a world that offers only perpetual instability.
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Noise to Men
If the Men were once like a dilapidated house refurbished into an artfully designed living space, then the 10th-anniversary retrospective, Hated: 2008–2011, documents the period where they were still mired in black mold and choking on dust.
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How he wrote Elastic, man
For the generation of Dinosaur Jr. fans who discovered the band by seeing the video for “Get Me” on “120 Minutes” in the early ’90s, Elastic Days will feel like a homecoming. As that song proved, J. Mascis’ perpetually pained moan was always begging for some healing harmonies.
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GOGG show
GØGGS don’t exactly redraft their battle plan on Pre Strike Sweep, but they at least consider new ways to work within it. Like cats trapped in a bag, they poke, prod, and stretch without compromising established parameters.
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Garden care
Over at Vulture, I talk to Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil about life after Chris.
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Still no cure for the dreamer’s disease
I wrote about the 20th anniversary of New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” for Stereogum—an article I’ve been waiting about 19.5 years to write.
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Get happy
youtube
Seeing the DIY video for The Pursuit of Happiness' "I'm an Adult Now" on MuchMusic at age 11 was probably the first time I keyed into the concept of an independent music scene happening in my hometown, so I was stoked to put together this oral history on the song for q on CBC Radio One.
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Warring Peace
Following a handful of wiggy lo-fi releases and classic-album reinterpretations under his own name, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized is Nance’s first release as the David Nance Group—a sophisticating rebrand that not only signals tighter songcraft and more muscular production but also the last-gang-in-town ardor of these performances.
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The AAARTH of noise
With AAARTH, the Joy Formidable have embraced independence not just as a business-survival strategy, but as a creative-liberation philosophy, too. They still sound very much like a rock band striving for the “Top of the Pops”; only now, they want to be the strangest one on there, too.
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Total trash
Mudhoney’s latest album, Digital Garbage, feels less like a collection of songs than a news-saturated social-media feed filled with all the profane polemics of a 2 a.m. drunk-Tweet.
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Arcade firs
Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 is an enchanted forest of a record—deceptively tranquil, but always buzzing with hidden life. Parry’s other band famously told of us of a place where no cars go. This is what it feels like to actually be there.
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Stadium love
At Spotify for Artists, I talk to Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw about their band’s double life moonlighting on the arena-rock circuit.
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How young are you?
I wrote about MBV, Dino Jr., the Replacements, Spacemen 3 and Black Flag for Pitchfork’s stellar collection of burrowed nostalgia for the re-remembered '80s.
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