The best albums of 2017 – final edition

4. Nicole Atkins – Goodnight Rhonda Lee

Incorporating hints of Allan Toussaint and Dusty Springfield, this country artist’s fourth album occasionally courts the kind of nostalgia that gets somnolent – Chris Isaak gets co-writing credit on a couple of tunes. But Nicole Atkins, who can croon and belt on demand, keeps the material tense; I can’t tell if she’s winking at the audience while inhabiting these performances with sincerity. In any case, “Darkness Falls So Quiet,” “A Little Crazy” and “Listen Up” would sound great on a late night station if programmers allowed this sort of thing.

3. Jens Lekman – Life Will See You Now

Abandoning it for a half year, I binged on this Swedish singer-songwriter’s fourth album during the post-Thanksgiving scramble. “A troubadour, a ham, Lekman can sing “the lonely cry of the seagull/”‘Let’s do something illegal'” and not mind courting foolishness,” I wrote in February. “He’ll plunder the Whispers for beats (‘How We Met, the Long Version’) and Romeo Santos for lithesome guitar curlicues (‘Our First Fight’).

2. Saint Etienne – Home Counties

“In a career stretching back to 1991,” I wrote in June, “[Sarah] Cracknell, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and associates like Ian Catt have specialized in a sugarspun dance-inflected pop garnished with flamenco guitars and stringed instruments whose obsession with limning nostalgia doesn’t reduce their distance from it. When listening to Saint Etienne, I think of Cluny Brown, the gentle Ernst Lubitsch comedy released in 1946 but set before the Blitz: Jennifer Jones’ good cheer at first glance unnerves the pedants of rural England when it’s really another kind of village eccentricity. Central to their approach is Cracknell’s breathy soprano, suggesting an acquaintance with insensate joy and a pedagogical remove from the pleasures getting limned.”

1. Kelela – Take Me Apart

Why this album? I don’t know. Superficially, it has elements in common with the strain of Tinashe-indebted luxuriously feng shui’ed vacant-on-first-impression indie R&B, but Kelela, a better melodist, has the ballads on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope in mind. She can write narrative. She can write confessionals. Although Arca and Ariel Rechtshaid the bulk of her first official release, the finish is Kelela’s alone. The unfamiliar should start with “Onanon.” In an excellent year personally and wretched one as a member of a dysfunctional democracy, I have sympathy for music that shares matters of the house by using a structural and vocal reticence. Thanks, Kelela.