Year in Review | Music The best overlooked Chicago records of 2020

We’ve all had a lot to pay attention to this year, but there’s always room for more great music.

By LEOR GALIL

End-of-year-list season can feel like a chore, even if you’re not one of the people whose job requires you to make those lists. Just keeping track of what everybody else thinks are the best albums, movies, books, TV shows, and so forth is an exhausting undertaking. And every year I get deja vu as I see the same albums appear arranged in different orders by high-profile critics and major outlets. Chicagoland critic Rob Mitchum is once again collating all the big album lists into a single ranking with a Google Sheet, making it even easier for me to see 2020’s consensus picks emerging.

Music criticism can tell us as much about the way we live as the music it covers, and a great list can do this more easily than a single album review. If you’ve ever made a playlist, received a mixtape from a new partner, or lost track of time during a sprawling late-night DJ set, you understand how assembling pieces of music helps them communicate with one another in ways their creators never considered or intended. Lists do something similar, adding the extra dimension of calendar time—and because this year has felt a lifetime long, I’m grateful to be reminded about an album that seems to belong to a di erent era but actually came out in February.

Jeff Parker’s Suite for Max Brown is just such an album. When International Anthem released it in January, it was met with near universal acclaim, but of the dozen or so major lists I’ve read so far, only a couple have included it. I wonder if critics have forgotten about it because it belongs to the Before Times, even though it came out just 11 months ago. Parker celebrated Suite for Max Brown with four sold-out sets at Dorian’s the first weekend in March, a week before COVID-related cancellations brought live music in the U.S. to an abrupt halt.

Thinking about music in 2020 means thinking about how the ways I usually experience it with other people have almost all been closed o to me or transformed. I’ve watched the occasional livestream, but I find that such a passive way to see a show—it just makes me yearn for the day I’ll be able to return to a venue to see a band I barely know transform the energy of a jam-packed room. That’s not to say virtual music events don’t have their virtues, but I think they work better when they’re not trying to stand in for real-world shows—I got a real kick out of a Minecraft festival that couldn’t have been replicated IRL.

Most record stores have reopened to in- person customers to some degree since March’s shutdowns, but I haven’t gone back to one yet. I don’t own a car or bike, and pandemic anxiety has kept me o public transit and away from taxis and ride-share services (which has also put most protests frustratingly out of reach). With few exceptions, my orbit