The Fashionably Late Top 125 of 2019: CHAMPS

Another rough year corresponded to another bumper crop of excellent music. Once again, my list is huge, because I fell in love with each of these 125 records and found it impossible to not include all of them in my fashionably late list.

I'm choosing to post my favorites in alpha order from A-Z again this year. You'll probably find some records that everyone and their fifth cousin raved about, but I hope you'll also find a few records that might be new to you, and that you'll fall in love with them as much as I have.

My thanks, as always, to the artists who created these records.

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Who: CHAMPS

What: The Hard Interchange

When: September 2019

Where: BMG

Why: "Hasn't it been quite the lifetime/it's been sorry/it's been strange." So muse the Champion brothers, Michael and David, professionally known as CHAMPS, on their mercurial and beautifully melancholic third album The Hard Interchange. The influence of the duo's Isle of Wight home turf seeps easily into these elegant, expansive songs, giving them a sense of misty, perpetually overcast skies. Sunlight peeks through here and there, in the guise of the synthiest of songs ("89 (You Stun)," "Too High to Touch," and "Katrina," for example), but it's the twosome's delicate strokes with the gray, misty moments that makes The Hard Interchange so very special. 

[posted 2.14.20]