bandcamp:best of 2022

评语：The Best Metal Albums of 2022 There’s nothing academic about Ashenspire’s Hostile Architecture. The second album by the Scottish avant-garde black metal troupe is a leftist rallying cry aimed at the gut and the heart, performed so viscerally it practically demands action. Beginning with its title, defined by bandleader Alasdair Dunn on “The Law of Asbestos” as “another set of fucking homeless spikes outside another empty shop,” Hostile Architecture is as close as art gets to praxis. Dunn is angry, but he’s also inspired by the power of what he calls “the great many,” whether that’s workers standing in solidarity for a living wage or the enormous team of musical collaborators who helped him bring the album to life. His pummeling drums and frenzied, Devil Doll-inspired vocals propel songs like “Tragic Heroin” and “Beton Brut” forward, but it’s the heaving mass of the collective, all its churning guitars and violins, and saxophones, that make Hostile Architecture the anarchic masterpiece that it is.

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 The illustrated cover art to Grotto depicts a curious but wary-looking red train venturing along railroad tracks that wind through a strangely luminous blue-tinted cavern. The image, which was created by the artist Swampy, seems like something you’d expect to see fronting up a children’s picture book or a lost Miyazaki movie. Fittingly, the latest musical collaboration between London-based multi-instrumentalist Wilma Archer and cosmically-inclined Los Angeles MC VRITRA conveys precisely the sort of wide-eyed wanderlust and amazement at discovering the world that fuels beloved kid’s fables. Venturing through a realm that’s simultaneously fraught with self-doubt and underscored with the hope that there is light at the end of the figurative tunnel, VRITRA’s verses weave together spiritual, religious and mythological thoughts. “I remember when the sky was blue like ice hue/ It’s cold where I stand/ From lands you ain’t ventured,” outlines VRITRA in measured tones over the sweeping pastoral strings and chugging drums of “One Under,” before continuing to construct his philosophy block by block: “Every god know that fame don’t disarm malice/ Magnifying who you are, hope you know self/ Everybody know that joy and pain/ Sunshine and rain, heat waves and storms/ I pray to deity you make it home.” Soundtracking VRITRA’s spiritual world-building, Archer’s production across the album is a lush and bittersweet marvel of infusing cozy melody with a sense of melancholy. The sonics add to the subtle sense of narrative momentum, too: Early moment “Tunnel Vision” pairs lonesome keys with frosty tromping percussion; mid-album ambient break “Stalactites” frees wavering string lines to waft gracefully around hypnotic plucks of acoustic guitar; and concluding song “Safe Passage” is a reassuring musical comfort blanket of an endnote. Mirroring Archer’s motion, VRITRA’s departing words on “Every Evening” settle on the hope of finding solace in small joys and keep faith with the idea that bad times will be followed by better ones. “Every evening is an ending/ Every morning is a birth, reborn/ Take a walk and have a conversation,” advises the MC, before offering a little humble reassurance: “Hold on, the way’ll be shown—I got you.”

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 “I’m so grateful, so grateful to be alive/ But alive ain’t always living,” raps Quelle Chris over fuzz-laden keys and unhurried drums on “Alive Ain’t Always Living,” the first full track on the gifted MC and producer’s reflective DEATHFAME album. Accompanied by a rustling layer of static, Quelle goes on to weave together self-effacing thoughts about family and the importance of staying connected and showing gratitude. “Sometimes low and sometimes high/ I’m so thankful for these people by my side/ Lord, I know what I done wrong trying to be what I done right/ Veinte cuatro siete dias, me oh my/ You can keep the feast and wine, I just want my peace of mind.” A similarly humble sense of purpose emerges as the prevailing tone of DEATHFAME. Parsed by Quelle as something akin to discovering “a lost tape found at a flea market,” the album’s production is an intimate wonder of grungy psychedelic-tinged funk. Moments of distorted percussion and crackled loops serve to bring you closer to Quelle’s words and into his world. The flaws accentuate the resonance of the MC’s words, epitomized by the way he pries into the cathartic element of writing music on “So Tired You Can’t Stop Dreaming.” Blessing the song’s piano-helmed backdrop, Quelle confesses how, “Deep cuts heal the listener quicker than it heals the man bleeding when he wrote it/ Few would choose to sing a silent opus.” Graciously, DEATHFAME proves that there’s bountiful value in the act of Quelle sharing his own metaphorical cuts and contemplative sacrifices.

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 Pulling punches has never been in Psalm One’s personal repertoire. Since debuting back in 2001, the Minneapolis-based MC has stuck to a code of honor that’s presented her as being just as ruthless when it comes to delivering stark self-reflection in verse as eviscerating foes and music industry practices. “I ain’t perfect, but fuck it/ You can’t change me—you stuck with me,” raps Psalm One with an unapologetic shrug on “Shadow Work,” laying down an introductory statement of intent that sets the parameters for the rest of her tenth studio album Bigg Perrm. “But I can change me, it’s fuckin’ deep/ I’ma beast with these energies.” Firing Psalm One’s words across the project, Chicago producer Custom Made puts faith in a sparky collection of beats that mix up razor-edged kicks and snares, sinewy synth riffs, and softer tranquil keys in a fluid manner that mirrors the MC’s sentiments. “Bawl Hard” employs a lilting sunset backdrop to prompt a musing on consumerist desires and contradictory relationships with capitalism, while the emotionally gnarly “Cancer & Virgo” backs commentary about varying conceptions of toxicity with strands of drama-stained keys. Conceptual moments like these abound across Bigg Perrm, but the project is essentially defined by Psalm One’s resolute belief and conviction in her principles. “If you authentic then show me that,” she charges on late-album cut “Pitchfork Score,” aptly expressing the sort of uncompromising stance that has helped her navigate musical and cultural arenas that too often embrace conformity. “How you for the culture? How you for the kids?/ How you gonna help if you ain’t never with the shit?”

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 Nostalgia reigns supreme on Open Mike Eagle‘s follow-up to 2020’s deeply personal Anime, Trauma and Divorce. Where that release pried into the emotional aftermath of a long-term relationship breakup, the fantastically-titled a tape called component system with the auto-reverse takes shape as a broader series of nostalgia-steeped vignettes partly inspired by the MC’s days crafting homemade cassette mixtapes out of footage aired on Chicago’s WHPK college radio station. Archived audio snippets from Eagle’s mixtapes are embedded throughout the album, acting as prompts to showcase the MC’s canny conceptual songwriting chops. “I Retired Then I Changed My Mind” revisits the aftereffects of Eagle having his Comedy Central show The New Negroes canceled; “Peak Lockdown Raps” captures the eerie isolation and disorienting uncertainty of the early COVID-19 months; and “For DOOM” is the most touching tribute to MF DOOM, with Eagle’s own anecdotes of the departed supervillain bolstered by a series of KMD and DOOM references ripe for unpacking. Crucially, the album’s backwards-glancing tendencies are conveyed with a convincing sense that Eagle is very firmly writing from the present. Instead of being content to wallow in the past, the album links memories and experiences to the here and now. Early on, the frosty piano-carried “79th and Stony Island” presents Eagle skipping from recalling youthful days wanting to imitate Turbo from the ’80s movie Breakin‘ to confessing that he’s “in a weird place mentally” and “in a weird place creatively.” With elegant penmanship, Eagle then moves to convey the compassionate soul of the album. “I still got the same worldview/ A brain full of old-school rules/ And memories like flesh wounds,” relays the MC. “The cure isn’t in a test tube/ It’s the sound of my son belly laughing in the next room.”

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 “This life is precious as it’s brief,” declares Singapore-based MC and producer Mary Sue halfway through KISSES OF LIFE, a mature and benevolent album that’s spurred by a series of sludgy and fractured glitch-freckled loops. Being confronted with mortality, grappling with grief, and subsequently seeking refuge in the healing quality of music becomes Sue’s coping mechanism across the release, which was penned in the wake of MF DOOM’s passing back in 2020 and also includes frequent allusions to Sue’s own departed grandfather. “There’s a crevice in my sleep/ But these verses bear relief, man,” confesses Sue on the same song, “Spirits/Name.” There’s undoubtedly a lot of sadness embedded throughout KISSES OF LIFE. “Who the hell is a perfect man?” wonders Sue on “Popo and Gonggong/Plane,” a song that begins as a static-flecked rain storm before morphing into an elegant horn-fueled lament. “Ain’t me, that’s for sure/ Faded in the present tense the man I adore/ Know he made mistakes but he’s good in the core,” continues Sue, flashbacking to being four years old to revisit memories of his grandfather only to find himself realizing that “thinking of the past made my heart sore.” But through earnest contemplation and a willingness to let the nourishing nature of the album’s myriad loops soothe his doubts, Sue gradually finds the burden of grief lifting from his shoulders. “The music avant-garde but the bars hitting/ I’ve been judging in the mirror for a long minute/ Recognize my errors, yeah, reflections could be long-winded/ Innocence that’s lost with it,” raps Sue over the slurry bass and filtered vocal refrain of “Wannabe,” before ultimately realizing that “healing was a cost, but you know that I just grew from it.”

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 “We the post-apocalyptic Run-DMC!” hollers livewire Baltimore MC Brian Ennals on “Coke Jaw,” a hyperactive synth-funk workout concocted by progressive production partner Infinity Knives that jolts the duo’s King Cobra collaboration into action. Spitting with unabashed flamboyance, Ennals proceeds to launch into a blitzkrieg stream of vitriol, swinging from lambasting the Clinton and Kennedy political dynasties to fusing rap-centric commentary with unadulterated braggadocio: “Nail rappers to crucifixes then ask them if they religious/ Since everybody is snakes, I’ma show ’em boa constriction.” The gleefully relentless Enalls continues to stoke a searing melting pot of politics, barbs, and brags across King Cobra. The MC is fired on by a selection of voluminous backdrops crafted by Infinity Knives that meld P-funk’s melodious pomp and panache with the nervy feel and 808 snap of vintage gangsta rap. Smartly, a series of stripped-down instrumental interludes act as pockets of breathing space from Ennals’s whirlwind lyrical tirades while simultaneously enhancing the impact of the MC’s words when his voice returns to the fold. Allusions to societal revolution pepper Ennals’s verses—and at one point he casts himself as being on a Presidential assassination mission—but they’re also tempered by a grounded sense of cynicism and a wariness towards perceived lessons from the past. “You see an eagle and flag—I see a hood in a noose,” reflects Ennals over the marauding bass tones of “Headclean,” before issuing a socio-economic charge: “This was all planned, it’s not luck/ Our parents made more than their parents/ We make less than our parents, it’s all fucked.” As Ennals proceeds to highlight the futility of expecting “the oppressor to act like anything but an oppressor,” the MC illuminates the grand King Cobra lesson: Always question the motivation.

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 Frank is Fly Anakin‘s most autobiographical album to date. That’s not to say it’s full of tortured soul-searching and open confessions of inner doubts and hidden demons. Instead, the Virginia-based Mutant Academy figurehead has conveyed an earnest sense of his personality and emotional tendencies across the album that include a series of skits unearthed from voice memos on the rapper’s phone. The album, whose title refers to Anakin’s birth name, is akin to an honest self-portrait. As Anakin told Bandcamp Daily on the cusp of Frank‘s release: “The album is me standing up to my shit and owning up to who I am instead of hiding behind a rap name.” Key to the persuasive appeal of Frank is the way an ensemble cast of beatmakers have forged the album into one of the most alluring soul-sampling production showcases of recent times. Ohbliv trades hefty drums for fuzz-coated ambiance and strands of acoustic guitar on “WaxPoetic,” Evidence conjures simmering melodic menace for early moment “Sean Price,” and Madlib provides a dose of rambunctious, crusty funk for “No Dough.” Right at the top of the release, Foisey‘s loop work on “Love Song (Come Back)” sets an incredibly high bar for the production, as tear-jerking strings fade in and out of the mix alongside deeply seductive bass and a pained and submerged vocal grab. “I bared my soul for peace and now I got a void as big as Earth/ I find it hard to write a love song to you/ So let me sing a song of affirmations,” flows Anakin on the track, displaying trademark smooth phrasing while deftly conveying the album’s warm tone and soul-centric charm.

评语：The Best Hip-Hop of 2022 Listening to Preaching In Havana is a ghostly phantasmagorical hip-hop experience. Clocking in at 22 immersive minutes, otherworldly-voiced New Jersey MC Fatboi Sharif relays a series of spectral visions peppered with cult pop culture references over New York producer noface’s exquisite exploration into static-burnished sonic minimalism. “Five a.m. Travelodge/ Jacob’s Ladder staggered on/ Return church, master dawn/ Passageway, whisper static tongues/ Pill hollering/ Jagged pill swallowing/ Fire in the hole, kept conscious of congressmen,” sketches Sharif over the thudding, feral drums and blasts of ruptured arcade game lasers that ricochet through “5G Celsius Cell Tower.” The potency of Sharif’s fragmented references and noface’s embrace of irregular loops brings to mind the idea of watching a rickety, analog black-and-white television flicker through broadcast stations of its own ghostly accord. The album wears its lo-fi sonic credentials proudly—but the stripped-down structure doesn’t mean that there isn’t an awful lot going on between Sharif’s words and noface’s soundscapes. On “Sunday School Explosives,” the MC tailors his flow to keep stride with the jazz-propelled swing of the drums and cymbals, while the back-to-back “Sugarcane Plantation” and “Smells Like Autopsy” resurrect the sort of atonal cacophonous syncopation that vibrated through the Jungle Brothers’ 1993 J Beez Wit’ The Remedy experiment. Concluding the album with the sinister “Fentanyl Firing Squad,” Sharif rattles through yet more hellish apparitions and tortured abstractions. “Right wing laughter/ Supplying pressure/ Lightning crashes/ Head-nod funk/ Area broken sweatshop/ Liquor-spilled graveside/ Prayer as the dead watch,” raps the MC, only to vanish and allow a twisted vocal sample to close the affecting experience with a plea that envelopes the album: “Where shall I pray? Where?”

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases To say In Search For Our Father’s Gardens contains multitudes would be an understatement. Tangentially a duo of RA Washington and Jah Nada (veterans of the Ohio noise/free jazz scene), it’s also an ensemble that can suddenly roll some 14 players deep, to where what was once focused and spare now manifests as sprawling as a leviathan. For this double album, the duo both turn inward while creating a wide blast radius of sound. The early half of the album moves at the speed of a deep meditation breath, carefully building to joyous and sustained release. But then you can also play the last two sides of Gardens simultaneously so that they interlock and overlap, creating a mesmerizing whole. —Andy Beta

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases Back in 1981, former schoolmates Mark Stewart and Nick Sheppard launched Recreational Records from their store Revolver Records in Bristol, England. Despite burning out after only a couple of years, Recreational dropped a series of post-punk, funk, dub, and Afrobeat-inspired tunes that sound as fresh and relevant now as they ever did, holding their own against music by current acts like SAULT and Goat. It’s perhaps no wonder that Stewart, a member of The Pop Group, would go on to record for On-U Sound (as a member of the New Age Steppers) and has since collaborated with Trent Reznor, Tricky, Massive Attack, and Primal Scream, to name a few. Sheppard played lead guitar for The Clash from 1983 until their demise three years later. Kudos to Emotional Rescue for compiling this fantastic collection of their short-lived label’s eclectic output, highlights of which include the angular funk of Animal Magic’s “Get It Right” and Scream + Dance’s infectious “In Rhythm.” —Andrew Jervis

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases For Ima ایما, Tehran-based musician and sound artist Shahin Entezami collaborated with fellow musician and violinist Adel Poursamadi to bring forth an ocean of sound—ebbing and flowing, ushering with each soundwave both the depths of human emotion and the layers of circumstance that surrounds them. Harmonious and calming violin intersects with disruptive electronics, adding dimension to the arrangements. The album is a conversation between organic and synthetic sounds and the emotions they evoke—whether through memory, experience, or imagination. —Christina Hazboun

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases One of punk’s best impulses is to capture the uniquely fucked contemporary culture around it—I would rather a thousand bands that attempt this poorly than a thousand competent retro worshippers. Straight out of one of the sharpest working punk collectives around, DM4T Labs, Straw Man Army keep their focus on the ever-unfolding landscape of surveillance capitalism and erosion of social services and collective goods that characterizes the current moment in the U.S. while imagining a better world beyond it. SOS ups the ante from their excellent debut Age of Exile. Their lyrics are ever more incisive and imagistic, their music pulling from anarcho-punk, post-punk, post-rock, and the genuinely visionary (not corny) side of psychedelia to create a distinctive sound that feels both of a piece with our jittery, information-overloaded environs and that seeks to explode the same. —Jes Skolnik

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases It took some amateur detective work for Luaka Bop to track down the Staples Jr. Singers. After recording their only album in 1975, the group’s members went on with their lives until they were contacted by the label to re-release it. It’s been a whirlwind since then, with the Mississippi soul gospel group performing shows across the country and abroad. The album opens with the slow-paced “Get On Board” followed by the uptempo “I Know You’re Gonna Miss Me.” The album’s crown jewel is the title track, with its heartfelt and weary groove. The revival of the group’s lone album has given new life to the bygone era of 1970s soul gospel. —Diamond Sharp

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases Vocalist, pianist, and composer Samora Pinderhughes calls for action and healing through spellbinding, intimate melodies. GRIEF balances lyrics that address the suffering and oppression of living in America with rich instrumentals, addressing topics like the lives lost during the pandemic, incarceration, greed, and upsetting election victories with potency. The cracks in America’s foundation have been present since its beginning, and continue to be exposed as each year goes by. Pinderhughes’s music states the issues plainly, letting his lush music swirl around and bolster his powerful statements. In the process, he offers us a sense of togetherness, a roaring communal catharsis. —Vanessa Ague

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases A Time For Healing is the fourth album that 69-year-old Chicago drummer/composer Kahil El’Zabar has made for budding Swedish label Spiritmuse, each of them wonderfully reflective of El’Zabar’s broad musical history—whether of his time accompanying soul and jazz legends like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and Pharoah Sanders; or within the local community, as one-time chair of the AACM, and mentor to a slew of next-gen players—all while accentuating his input into modern sounds. El’Zabar’s rhythms on Healing, a combination of trap-kit, hand-drums, bells, and kalimba, look to the spiritual continuum for their warm propulsion; supported by a trio of younger Chicagoans (keyboardist Justin Dillard, trumpeter Corey Wilkes, and saxophonist Isaiah Collier), the results are richly engulfing. The great material deepens this feel: Gorgeous takes on Coltrane and “Summertime” will make traditionalists smile, but it’s the voice and percussion street prophecy of “Drum Talk,” and the hard funk of “Eddie Harris,” saluting another Chicago jazz legend with whom El’Zabar performed, that marks this quartet’s well-spent time. —Piotr Orlov

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases This dynamic and adventurous album from Ramallah-based producer Julmud blends traditional Arabic folk musics, hip-hop, and a variety of contemporary experimental approaches to electronic music. It’s at turns celebratory, defiant, soulful, joyous, and sensual, displaying the kind of focused talent that characterizes the current Palestinian underground vanguard, who obviously labor under the omnipresent violence of occupation, but whose creative spirits thrive despite. Richly textured and gorgeously sound designed, with techniques (like the judicious use of noise and the stretching and condensing of individual elements) that could feel easily too harsh or overbearing in less skilled hands, this is a record that rewards listening at both surface and deep, repeated levels—one that feels full of art’s best promises to a brutal, unjust world. —Jes Skolnik

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: Essential Releases D.C. electronic trio Black Rave Culture distills decades of dance music history into their beats. Black Rave Culture Vol. 2 follows 2021’a fantastic Vol. 1, and the music on both is atmospheric and dramatic, while also carrying a few booming megatons worth of bass. Tunes like “Activate,” “Cerebral Atrophy,” and “Long Distance Dilemma (Practice)” traverse the lines between club music, house, techno, and acid house in a way that doesn’t feel haphazardly eclectic or pastiche. Instead, the broadness of BRC’s sound comes from an understanding that all of this music is the product of a shared lineage and cultural DNA. —John Morrison

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z From the moment the opening arpeggio hits on Ariel Zetina‘s Cyclorama, it’s clear that the Chicago producer and DJ is taking us on a theatrical tour of her world. Across the record, Zetina touches on a diverse range of influences—from industrial techno to sub-heavy UK club to tropical breakbeats—to author a manifesto for the queer dance floors she plays to every weekend. Although Zetina has teased her production skills previously, it was always as one-off appearances on compilations. Cyclorama, on the other hand, is a comprehensive panorama of a producer exploring the boldest corners of clubland, full of shapeshifting rhythms, darting synths, and snaking basslines. But don’t let the gargantuan sound fool you; it’s also Zetina at her most personal and political, using club music as the entry point for examining her experiences as a trans woman of color. Trauma and violence loom large on the record, especially as Zetina explores fetishization (“Chasers”) and objectification (“Slab of Meat”), but there’s also a spirit of hope, a vision of a radically different world that comes to life on highlights like “Gemstone,” a euphoric transition anthem. —Henry Ivry

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z Hermit’s Grove is less an album than a technicolored lucid dream. Peaceful bird sounds, wistful guitar, and Isobel Jones’s levitating flute at the start of “Guardians of Eden” soon make space for the quivering, murmured vocals of Brazilian-born band leader Lau Ro, contrasted by Jones’s smooth, floaty voice. The slight dissonance hints at what is to come in the rest of the album, where moments of dark and light, peace and tension coalesce and co-mingle, often within the same song: take the distorted guitars and swirling keys of “Springtime,” or the heavy synths threatening the peaceful seaside soundscapes of “Tears From the Skies.” By expressing these moods through a wide range influences, from Brazilian tropicália to quirky 1960s psychedelia, Wax Machine elevate their kaleidoscopic sound to an enticing new plane that never loses its charm. —Megan Iacobini De Fazio

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z The rebajada (to reduce, or lowered) is a style pioneered in Monterrey and Mexico City in the 1960s by sonideros who discovered that cumbias, when significantly pitched down on a record player, sync almost perfectly with Mexican dance steps. But the rebajada offers more than mere danceability—as the notes dip and stretch, the songs open up to reveal moods and textures once hidden in the mix. Saturno 2000: La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983 is Analog Africa’s new compilation of rebajadas, curated and mixed by the Irish-Peruvian DJ Lengua (Eamon Ore-Giron). DJ Lengua assembles a collection of two decades of cumbias from across the Americas (Ecuador, Mexico, Peru) into a seamless mix of dance tunes that are at once both darker and more transparent than their untouched originals, a rare treat from a vinyl fetishist whose records are often near impossible to find digitally. —Matthew Ruiz

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement is a self-titled compilation that collects the three wildly eclectic albums released from one of the most unique bands to come out of Chicago in the late ’90s. Mixing up funk, rock, and poetry, the songs on Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement are as laugh-out-loud funny as they are insightful in their critiques of gender, class, and racism; consider “Turn Da Fuckin’ Lights Back On,” a funky and manic highlight where Tate folds a broad critique of poverty and policing into a story about a citywide blackout. A tight and flexible ensemble, the band pivot from smoldering rock to trippy dub reggae and beyond at the drop of a dime. The result is a delightfully fun and varied collection from an underrated band who came out swinging at the dawn of the millennium—and hit hard. —John Morrison

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z Perhaps the ultimate lost tapes story of 2022 was the appearance of recordings from the 1970s of cult Chicago producer, songwriter, and arranger Charles Stepney, best known for his grand orchestral work with Rotary Connection and Minnie Riperton. Recorded in Stepney’s basement studio on the South Side of Chicago on analog synths, drum machines, and echo units, these demos and sketches offered a fascinating insight into the recording process of one of the great arrangers and producers. Through the tireless work of his three daughters, who also narrated the album, the project finally saw the light of day, thanks to a beautifully packaged release on Chicago’s International Anthem label. —Andy Thomas

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z To listen to SOYUZ‘s new record is to bathe in the warm and familiar, cozying up to old records over a warm cup of tea. At least that’s how things seem at first, with leisurely overtures of album opener “Song With No Words” before the moment passes, paving the way for a unique and often unpredictable fusion, which is perhaps to be expected from a Belarusian band making Brazilian music. While they’ve cited 1960s and ‘70s Brazilian artists like Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, and Arthur Verocai as influences, SOYUZ don’t settle for merely recreating the sounds of the past. Instead, they infuse the blissed-out, layered atmospheres of música popular brasileira with their own contemporary sensibilities: the band centers around bandleader Alex Chumak, multi-instrumentalist Mikita Arlou, and drummer Anton Nemahai, but here they draw on the diverse influences of collaborators like popular Brazilian musician Sessa; percussionist Cem Mısırlıoğlu; classically trained composer Simon Hanes; Russian vocalist and producer KATE NV; and Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Milliet on flute. Together, this eclectic ensemble constructs a rich, cinematic universe of whirling strings and flutes, rippling jazz-funk rhythms, and cosmic electronic textures; paying homage to Eastern European and Brazilian jazz traditions while masterfully avoiding the pratfalls associated with musical retro-mania. —Megan Iacobini De Fazio

评语：The Best Albums of 2022: R – Z Paris’s Jaymie Silk takes a kaleidoscopic approach to contemporary club sounds. Focused on celebrating music from across the Black diaspora, he’s just as likely to turn out a ballroom or Jersey club record as he is to mix gqom into throwback acid techno in his DJ sets. By his standards, then, The Rise & Fall Of Jaymie Silk & Rave Culture is surprisingly straightforward. Across two discs, he focuses on ’90s dance music, diving deep into the golden years of rave. But even with this more straightforward approach, Silk proves his skills as a producer that can reinvigorate even the most tried-and-true tropes. Opener “Freedom for Everybody,” takes a Malcolm X speech—a classic house motif—but flips it into something that falls somewhere between spiritual reverence and day-drunk tomfoolery, as staggering drums duet with polychromatic synths. Elsewhere he fuses broken beat with rave stabs (“The Heat”), techno ferocity with gospel house (“Stop Singing, Start Swinging”), and delicate piano melodies over 150 BPM insanity (“Waiting For The Day”). It’s a record written as a homage to the Black roots of club culture, informed by equal parts nostalgia and speculative world-building. —Henry Ivry