The Fashionably Late Top 125 of 2019: Ezra Furman

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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who: Ezra Furman

What: Twelve Nudes

When: August 2019

Where: Bella Union

Why: If you recall, Ezra Furman's 2018 record, Transangelic Exodus, was a favorite of mine. Released a year and a half later, Twelve Nudes builds on Furman's restless, rambling cross-country contemplations, leaning a bit more into a gritty, heavy-lidded kind of noise than the more lovelorn, troubadourian tales of Exodus. As in 2018, Furman's gift for lyrical craftsmanship shines through, full of an incredible astuteness of human nature and personal insight. Calling Twelve Nudes a punk record, Furman explains that "“I think we curate our reactions to current news because we’re overwhelmed by how bad it is, and I noticed I was suppressing how bad I truly felt. I wanted music that gave me permission to feel how it felt to live in a broken world, which punk rock does.” The world keeps breaking, but Furman turns those fractures into something great. And to borrow the title of the album's closing track, "What can you do but rock'n'roll?"

[posted 3.16.20]