2020 was a year of conficting emotions for serious music fans. After the pandemic ramped up in March of last year, the concert touring industry basically shut down. So for most of the year fans were left with livestreams and socially-distanced drive-in or acoustic shows. But as far as newly released music goes, there was a virtual treasure trove of choices. In a social media post this week I rattled off at least twenty releases in 2020 that were in my opinion, all great. It was a bit difficult to narrow them down to a list of ten, let alone establish a running order. In hindsight my number one album was a no-brainer, as upon its release it pretty much offered a preview of the year to come, but we'll get to that in a little while. Here are my picks for the Top 10 albums of “The Year That Should Be Forgotten”...

10. Pearl Jam – Gigaton

The most heartbreaking release for me of last year.…not because of musical or lyrical content, but because I had tickets to see two of the shows on the supporting tour. Plus they were getting set to announce a Fall leg (with a date in Columbus on the itinerary) when the concert industry shut down. The album itself was a consolation prize. The leadoff single - “Dance Of The Clairvoyant” - proved to be a bit polarizing among fans, as it's nearly stylistically unrecognizable as Pearl Jam, instead sounding like mid-80's Talking Heads meets Peter Gabriel. The rest of the album is more in the vein of what you would expect from the Seattle titans. Gigaton is not their best album, but far from their worst. The packaging is stellar...it should be, as it cost about twice what a regular vinyl release does...but it IS Pearl Jam. This was perhaps my most unique purchase of 2020 as well. It dropped when all of the local record stores were closed due to stay-at-home orders, and I had to meet my album “dealer” (Lost Weekend Records owner Kyle Siegrist), clandestinely in his parking lot, both of us masked up, with me paying him by sticking money in a jar, and him giving me the album by stretching his arm to max length while I did the same...not sure if that's a full six feet but we did our best. I felt like I was buying music in a world where it had been banned...scary thought. I am still holding tickets for Phoenix and Denver concerts on the tour, when it is eventually rescheduled. Looking forward to that sometime before 2022, in a perfect world. We shall see.

9. Deep Purple – Whoosh

Classic Rock fans who have been sleeping on the last few releases from Deep Purple are missing out on some really good music. Having struck up a production partnership with the legendary Bob Ezrin, their previous album Infinite, and now their most recent album Whooosh are real throwbacks to Perfect Strangers era Purple. Songs like “Throw My Bones,” “Nothing At All,” and the moody epic, “Man Alive” have become some of my favorite go-to Purple songs. This was a particular favorite for me in the car last year. Don't know how to explain that but I think music fans might get the idea.

8. Blue Öyster Cult – The Symbol Remains

The first studio release from B.Ö.C. in 16 years, this was initially my pick for album of the year when it was released. Strong songwriting and production are delivered in a double-LP gatefold package, and boom, you're right back in the 70's again. Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom are keeping the faith in fine fashion. I was lucky enough to catch B.Ö.C. live again in 2019 when they headlined the River Days festival in my hometown of Portsmouth, Ohio. And they have always been one of my favorite bands, ever since I saw the video for “Burning For You” on MTV, so I was looking forward to this album perhaps more than any other 2020 release, and I wasn't disappointed.

7. Zakk Sabbath – Vertigo

I was tempted to disqualify this release because it's not an album of original material, but for as often as I spun it last year it deserves a spot in my Top 10. Zakk Sabbath is a Black Sabbath tribute band fronted by longtime Ozzy Osbourne guitarist and Black Label Society frontman Zakk Wylde. Zakk plays both the Ozzy and Tony roles in the band, and having seen them perform live, I can tell you that he has a lot of fun with this project. Vertigo is the first studio album from the outfit, and it's simply a re-recording of the debut self-titled album from Black Sabbath. Hearing the first ever Heavy Metal album presented in an updated yet still respectfully retro form was very satisfying. Zakk treated the whole project with a great deal of respect. I don't need to highlight songs, it's the first Sabbath album for Christ sakes!

6. Ozzy Osbourne – Ordinary Man

While his longtime sideman was re-recording the first album we ever heard Ozzy sing on, Ozzy himself was busy with producer Andrew Watt: who was also pullng double duty as guitarist, along with bassist Duff McKagen of Guns 'N' Roses and drummer Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers. They wrote and recorded this album in short order in late 2019 (reportedly four days for the writing and music,with Ozzy recording later, assisted by studio magic). The result is the freshest Ozzy has sounded in decades. Lyrically the songs deal a great deal with Ozzy's mortality and the legacy he wants to leave behind. It would have made for a fine swan song, but reports are that the Ozzman is already recording another album with Watt. The only song really out of place here is the previously released Pop collaboration Ozzy did with Post Malone and Travis Scott, “Take What You Want.” It's really a song by the other two artists with Ozzy appearing as a feature, and it makes no sense here. Fortunately it's tacked on to the end and can be easily skipped (or deleted from digital copies) and thankfully doesn't appear on the vinyl release.

5. Sturgill Simpson – (tie) Cuttin' Grass Vol 1 and Cuttin’ Grass Vol 2

Simpson was perhaps hit harder than most artists by the touring shutdown during the pandemic. He was actually out on the road at the time of most of the early state shutdowns, and he was engaged in his largest tour to date, having gone from clubs, to theaters, to pavilions, and now to arenas in the space of four albums. The tour was becoming controversial, as Simpson was seemingly alienating a large segment of his fanbase, on purpose. The shows were being opened by his protege Tyler Simpson, whose latest release was one of the top albums of 2019, and who was by all accounts delivering a set of rollicking traditional Country Music that had arena audiences stomping & clapping, and hooting & hollering. Then Sturgill would take the stage with his band, all dressed in traditional Nashville nudie suits, and procede to play his entire new at the time album, a decidedly uncountry offering called Sound & Fury, which is a record dipped in the influence of Eliminator era ZZ Top, funneled through a Pink Floyd conceptual story and delivered with a Heavy Metal meets Disco punch. The album is nominated for Best Rock Album at the upcoming 2020 Grammies, and quite frankly should win. I've spent so much time discussing Sturgill's previous album, number one because it ranks as my favorite album by anyone in the last 20 years, and number two, I was two weeks away from seeing the tour when the world shut down. Artistic merits aside, the audiences, many of whom where expecting Sturgill to be playing his material in a more traditional style, did not respond well as a whole to the Sound & Fury live show, and reportedly most arenas were clearing out by half during the course of Sturgill's set. For his part, he said he loved watching all those people head for the doors. An artist in the cut of Neil Young, Simpson has made a career of doing exactly what he wanted, the way he wanted to do it. It certainly paid dividends, eventually leading him to a Grammy for Best Country Album awarded to his Sailor's Guide To Earth album.

So that brings us to the Cuttin' Grass releases. Sidelined shortly after the tour stopped with a bout of COVID-19 (ironic because Simpson was defiant about stopping his tour, going so far as to Tweet that he would play shows “Strapped to an iron lung with the whole audience in hazmat suits before I will stop this tour.”), Simpson went to work raising money for Veteran charities. Himself a Gulf War Vet, it's a cause he has championed his entire career. He came up with an outdoorsman character named “Dick Daddy” and released a line of Dick Daddy Survival School merchandise. He then made a deal with fans that if he could raise $250,000 with this merch, with proceeds goind to a Veterans Mental Health charity, he would release not one but two Bluegrass albums this year. The fans came through, and so did Sturgill. Assembling some of Nashville's most legendary Bluegrass studio players, he released a double LP and later in the year, a single LP which featured Bluegrass renditions of his previous catalog. Stu has always been a musical chameleon (his first four albums are basically in the genres of Hillbilly, Country, Soul, and Rock, respectively), but hearing most of his catalog stripped down to it's Kentucky roots, you realize that he's been a Bluegrass artist all along. He was simply performing these songs in other styles, and not the other way around.

4. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit – Reunions

Another of the albums in this list that was released early in the year, pre-touring shutdown, this was an anticipated album with high hopes that were delivered on. Isbell's career has been on an upward trajectory ever since his sober-debut album Southeastern in 2013, a career path I predicted the first time I ever saw him play live, when he was still a member of The Drive-By Truckers. When he was dismissed from DBT over sobriety concerns in early 2007 (you know you're bad off when a band that drinks a liter of Jack Daniels onstage says you drink too much), his path initially didn't head in that direction. Instead he played to dwindling audiences on the tours for his first two albums, Sirens Of The Ditch and Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit. His third album, Here We Rest (the state motto of his Alabama homestate), began the rebuilding process, drawing moderately more fans to shows based on the strength of songs like “Alabama Pines” and “Codeine”, and word of mouth on the 400 Unit's growing “must see” status as a live band. Once he cleaned up and released Southeastern, the sky was the limit. He could have likely made the jump to arenas in 2020 had the tour for the amazing Reunions album not been shelved. The songwriting, always at the highest level with Isbell, actually climbs to even higher levels on this album. The first single, “Dreamsicle” is a gut-wrenching lament wrapped up in a dare I say, dreamy Pop package. It's about a boy who's mother can't keep a relationship and has to move a lot in childhood. He can only relish the little things like a “Dreamsicle on a summer night in a folding lawn chair” for a short time before being snapped back to reality – “Daddy's howling at the moon better get home soon.” The album opener “What've I Done To Help” asks just that question...“What have I done to help somebody save me? What've I done to help? I'm not myself.” It's set against a nearly constant song-length solo shred from 400 Unit guitarist Sadler Vaden, and stretches to a satisfying but not self-indulgent length. Recently it served as an epic finale during Isbell & The 400 Unit's New Year's Eve streaming show, and makes me both mourn for the shows I missed out on last summer, and long for the ones to come. Isbell in many songs addresses the current political climate (he's an outspoken Democrat), but doesn't come across in the hammer to the skull manner (not a bad thing) that his former band did in 2020. Which brings us to number three.….

3. Drive-By Truckers – (tie) The Unraveling and The New OK

The most politically relevant band in America today, both of DBT's studio releases in 2020 (the plan was for only one, but with touring shut down, they got busy and released The New OK in the autumn, with a vinyl release in December), along with multiple digital live albums, and an official live archive release on vinyl for Record Store Day Black Friday, were like livesaving sips of water in a dry desert of a year that for me, would have been filled with live dates. I actually managed to get 3 DBT shows in during February, returning to their Athens, Georgia HeAthens Homecoming shows in February for the first time in several years, and I am so glad I did. These two studio albums together paint a bleak picture of the America we are now living in. Like a roadmap to what would happen if we don't come together, both albums are stark reminders that the world we live in is far from perfect. The Unraveling was released pre-pandemic (I got to hear all of the songs live save one at the Homecoming shows) and is a stark look at America the way it was in 2019 and early 2020. DBT left no question where they stood on the issues of the day, with songs like “Thoughts And Prayers” (about the rash of school shootings in recent years), “21st Century U.S.A,., and “Babies In Cages” (both self-explanatory). It wasn't all doom and gloom though, they also offered a glimmer of hope with album closer “Awaiting Ressurection.”

Yet even that small hope is painted in strokes of the darkest terms (“There's an evil in this world. Yes there's an evil in this world”). But if you were like DBT songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, and were someone who thought things were bad, then you still hadn't seen anything yet. Because we all know what happened as the year transpired, and the album in hindsight is fucking flat out Biblical Prophecy. The New OK came next at the end of the summer, and serves well as a “Side 3 and 4” for The Unraveling. In the spirit of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, the title track for the former appears here on the latter. The New OK also features the vocal debut of longtime DBT bassist Matt Patton, who croons on the “The Unraveling” as well as the band's awesome cover of the Ramones classic “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Thematically here, there is even more hope, although we are still looking at the world in the most serious of terms. “KKK...” may be the most light-hearted song on the album, because we're still dealing with subjects like the BLM protests in frontman Hood's hometown of Portland, Oregon (“Watching The Orange Clouds”), the state of Lockdown-America (the title track), and the influence of Sarah Palin on the current right-wing zietgeist of Trumpism (Cooley's only contribution, the witty “Sarah's Flame”). Longtime album cover artist Wes Freed, having been noticeably absent for the two previous DBT albums, returns with a vengeance on The New OK, delivering a take on the Richmond, Virginia Robert E. Lee statue controversy in his own inimitable style that may go down as the greatest album cover in the DBT catalog.

2. AC/DC – Power Up

“Best album since (insert year, era, or specific album title here)” sometimes gets thrown around when legacy bands release new albums. Usually such claims are spurred by the excitement of hearing new material, and a revision of opinion may happen down the road, once you've lived with an album for awhile. That said, Power Up, for me, is without a doubt THE BEST album from AC/DC since 1983's Flick Of The Switch. While I have always remained a fan of AC/DC, their material post-FOTS sometimes reached the level of near-parody, and I was usually only taken by one or maybe two songs from each successive release. My high hopes for the Rick Rubin-produced Ballbreaker in 1995 weren't met and I kind of wrote AC/DC off after that. But Power Up really is something else altogether. Billed as a tribute to late band founder and rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young - in the same manner as Back In Black was a tribute to their at-the-time recently deceased original frontman Bon Scott - the songs and production here harken back to that classic mid-80's “we're gonna crank up these amps and kick some ass” sound. The standout here is “The Mists Of Time,” a decidedly un-AC/DC-like song that sings the praises of the good old days and of everything the boys went through to get here, and it's the song that deals in the most direct way with the disease that took Malcolm from us. Anyone who has lost family to dementia can feel the pain in a line such as “See the shadows on the wall / See the pictures; some hang, some fall.” It's dare I say it...beautiful (a word not necessarily associated with the ragin' Aussies). There's also plenty of familiar AC/DC territory here to relish as well. Songs like “Realize,” the leadoff single “Shot In The Dark,” and “Demon Fire” have all the best elements of the 70's and 80's classics

1. American Aquarium – Lamentations

Biblical title very apropro, this album could have easily been called Prophecies. For, as with Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell previously in this list, this album holds a miror up to the present-day United States in a stark way that few artists can accomplish, and yet here we have three of Southern Rock's most powerful voices addressing the subject in simultaneous releases. There's a solidarity of thinking going on here that's on an entirely different level, and is emblematic of a progression in Southern thinking that is being led by great songwriters like Isbell, Hood and Cooley of DBT, and AA frontman BJ Barham. Lamentations professes to be what it says, which is a lamentation for our times. With the traditional themes of Americana at the forefront here lyrically, it initially seems as if Barham is longing for an America of the past.

As you listen, it becomes apparent that he is lamenting where we are heading. And it becomes a foreshadowing of how bad things can get when a nation is divided on itself. A sometimes brutal but often hopeful look at rural life in America, Lamentations not only ranks as the greatest album (in my opinion) of 2020, but also stands as BJ Barham and American Aquarium's crowning achievement so far. It's a real shame that they were unable to tour on this album, because the trajectory was set for them to blow up, and I could have even seen some mainstream crossover potential with songs like “A Better South,” which addressed the “shut up and sing” critique often leveled at politically leaning songwriters: “They say sing your songs, boy, and shut your mouth / But I believe in a better South.” It's a song told from the point of view of a proud Southern American who nonetheless feels simultaneously shameful of the South's reputation and dark past, while still firmly believing in a bright future that is equal for all. Perhaps some listeners can draw hope from the changes in the Southern state electorate during this past election. BJ spent the better part of the year performing songs daily via livestream from his home in North Carolina, maintaining a strong personal connection with his fans. I myself ordered some American Aquarium merch this year and received a handwritten thank-you note from him. I have no doubt that this gratitude will be repaid with loyalty from the fans when the band is finally able to hit the road again.