Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2018
I started my top ten list articles for movies, video games, and TV shows on a negative note. Each one begins with me explaining that I didn’t feel as strongly for them as a whole as I did in years past and why, then I made sure to end on positive note before launching into the lists themselves. I’m happy to say that I don’t need that formula for the music of 2018.
If you feel so inclined, go back to those intros. Read the parts where I said movies on the whole felt weaker, or how video games burned so brightly in 2017 that they couldn’t have possibly lived up to those standards in 2018, or how it felt like a “less than” year for television because there weren’t enough great new shows.
Now scroll to the parts where I say the positive stuff. Where I talked about the individual movies themselves divorced from the context of the year, or how video games made me experience and appreciate new genres and play styles, and how old favorite TV shows came back and reminded me of why they’re my favorites in the first place.
All of the positive stuff I said about the other three mediums apply to music in 2018, as well as the inverse of all negatives. I tried and loved new things. Old favorites came back strong. New projects and artists came out of nowhere and blew my mind.
As far as music is concerned, I had a hell of a year.
In fact, I had such a blast listening to music in 2018 that not only was this list a nightmare to put together, but the honorable mentions list is, shall we say, a bit long. It was so long, in fact, that I felt the need to trim it down a bit. (So technically, I could’ve made an honorable mention list for the honorable mentions.) But when the list is hard to make, that hopefully means there’s too much great stuff to choose from, and you don’t have to scrape from the bottom of the barrel.
My only complaint this year is that there were so many great albums in 2018 that I didn’t have time to try as much old music as I wanted to. It became exhausting, and I became actively resentful at anyone releasing music in 2018
But complaint wise, that’s all I got. Let’s talk about some music.
Runner-Up: Mount Eerie, Now Only
I said back in the TV article that there’s always a dumb debate that happens for what goes in the number ten slot and what gets runner-up, and when that happens, I try to go with the one I haven’t written about before in the context of these top ten articles. (Assuming there is one I haven’t written about.) And that’s why Now Only, Phil Elverum’s second album about the passing of his wife Geneviève Castrée, is the runner-up.
Granted, I basically cheated my way out of writing about the first album, A Crow Looked at Me. And granted, I’ve written about what’s in the ten spot before, though in a much different context. Still, arbitrary rules are arbitrary rules, and list making is really fucking dumb.
The prospect of listening to Now Only scared me. There’s a reason I felt the need to avoid going in-depth on A Crow Looked at Me. It’s an album that hits harder than most of what I write about, and I didn’t want to spend the time in that headspace it would require in order to get within a ten miles of doing it justice. Especially not in a year like 2017. It had an impact on me, and that was enough.
Still, I knew I had to listen to Now Only. Despite how devastating an album A Crow Looked at Me is, it’s still an album I have a lot of passion for, and I had to give it a shot.
Now Only hit me just as hard, but with a key difference.
A Crow Looked at Me is very much an album in the moment. The recording of the album started mere weeks after his wife passed, and as it unfolds, its scope widens only a little tiny bit. But now some time has passed, and on Now Only, Elverum has more of a bird’s eye view on his grief, his role as a father, and the absurdities of where life finds him now.
He’s able to connect moments from his past to his present, and he reflects on the fundamental differences between who he is now and who he was when he was younger and unencumbered by grief. In “Distortion,” he sings about a time in his life when he was terrified of the notion of fatherhood. We know that he eventually got over those fears, but that knowledge can only be so triumphant because we know the incident that would end up actually shaking him to his core. There’s something fundamentally heartbreaking about overcoming one fear only to be bludgeoned by another he couldn’t have seen coming.
But as worldlier as Now Only can be, he also gets down into the minutia as well. I always had a morbid curiosity about what a performance of the songs from A Crow Looked at Me would be like. What would it be like to want to be in that audience, and how does Elverum feel about performing them? These questions, as well as others, are answered on the titular song.
My own curiosity about aspects of Phil’s life that are none of my business aside, what I hoped to hear from Now Only was that Phil was feeling at least partially better. In some cases, that appears to be the case. For example, on the song “Now Only,” he discusses how the waves of crying don’t crash as much as they used to. But part of the message of Now Only is that it’s not really about “feeling better” or “getting over it.” It’s about accepting that, for better or for worse, things are different.
Favorite Songs: “Distortion,” “Now Only,” “Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup”
10. Phonte, No News is Good News
iTunes was never perfect. No platform is, whether it be poor functionality or lack of popularity or shitty compensation for artists or any number of factors. However, iTunes, specifically the iTunes store, is a service I get weirdly defensive about because back in the day, around late middle school and early high school, it was where I discovered a ton of new artists and songs that I still love to this day.
Most of the functionality that allowed me to do that is gone. But in the era when you could make and share user curated playlists on the store or browse said store’s surprisingly well curated introductory playlists, it was easy to enter these weird rabbit holes of music off the beaten path. Nowadays, Bandcamp and SoundCloud are the places to do that. But iTunes used to be the perfect place to discover incredible new stuff, and you could do so mostly just by dicking around.
Here’s how much this era sticks out to me: I still remember the first “underground” hip hop song I ever bought based purely on the thirty second preview. It was a song called “Not Enough” by Little Brother, a hip hop group consisting of producer 9th Wonder and two MCs: Rapper Big Pooh and Phonte.
There are a lot of “firsts” that this song was for me. Mainly, it was the first time I had heard a narrative of a hip hop career that wasn’t about success. I was in middle school, and I was still only listening to mainstream hip hop at the time. The only stories in rap songs I had ever heard were of success and unsustainable wealth, and if there was any struggle, it was in the past.
It was also the first time I had heard anything negative about the hip hop space in general. I had heard a diss track or two before. But in the era before some kid on SoundCloud could become the biggest act on the planet, hip hop had a more pronounced haves and have-nots mentality between underground artists and big mainstream acts, and “Not Enough” was my first exposure to that conflict.
It’s also just a great song that I was into immediately. It didn’t shatter my notions that the theatrics of the big mainstream rappers were authentic. (That revelation would come later.) But I knew that this song, starting with Phonte’s opening verse, was sincere. The sense of struggle felt genuine, and Phonte, in a very literal sense as he has the opening verse, was the first rapper I had ever heard who was really real.
Almost fifteen years later, Phonte’s still that dude in my life.
You may have noticed that I spent a lot of time not talking about No News is Good News, and it’s because I’ve already written about it before. For laziness’s sake, allow me to copy and paste some of it.
“ (No News is Good News) is an album about getting older and changing with the passage of time. It’s about needing to live healthier so you can be around longer for the people you love. It’s about the looming responsibility of taking care of your parents. It’s about fatherhood. It’s about finding real love, and not the kind of ‘I met X person at the club’ love, but actual lasting soul-soothing love. It is, in short, an album about being a grown man, and though at the time I’m writing this I am 26 years old (NOTE: I’m 27 now) and don’t have nearly as much on my plate, I love this album.
It’s the kind of album that needs to exist, and as much as I love coke raps and gang raps and all types of debauchery in between, sometimes it’s nice to know that there’s an adult in the room writing mature music with something to say. A lot of hip hop thrives off an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, and it makes me weirdly emotional when someone out there is rapping because they actually care.”
All that remains true. I still return to this album all the time. And not just for the wisdom. In rereading what I’ve written, there’s something I forgot to make clear: Phonte can still rap circles around most of your favorite rappers.
Favorite Songs: “So Help Me God,” “Expensive Genes,” “Sweet You”
9. Kamasi Washington, Heaven and Earth
The flight from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. averages out to about five hours, provided the flight goes smoothly or the airline doesn’t fuck up. Many of them say four and half, and some say six. But I take the flight at least three times a year, and it’s always been about five hours, give or take a thirty minutes. Nowadays, I watch movies because they’re free on the airline I take. But they didn’t use to be, so I mainly listened to music, and for the sake of keeping track of time, my go-to plane album was Kamasi Washington’s The Epic.
I first listened to The Epic in one sitting, and it blew my mind out of my ass. It’s an album of tremendous scope that also feels like you’re taking an intimate trip through the mind of Kamasi and his band. Despite its three hours in length, it’s an album that’s ingrained into my skull.
So I had certain expectations for Heaven and Earth.
One thing I knew I didn’t need was another lengthy epic. Not that I was opposed to the idea. After all, Heaven and Earth is a two and a half hours and it’s on this list. What I meant was that I didn’t need this album to try to reach the same scope. The Epic is a massive cosmic undertaking, and if Kamasi Washington wanted to make something a little more intimate, like the Harmony of Difference EP, that was fine by me.
But I’ll be honest, I wanted him to make something as big as The Epic. I mean, c’mon. It’s not everyday that you get what is essentially the jazz equivalent of a blockbuster.
The only thing I demanded of Heaven and Earth was a greater variety of sounds. Say what you will about Harmony of Difference, but I grew to appreciate it because it went out of its way to not sound like The Epic by incorporating more worldly influences and going for a more global sound. In fact, in a weird way, “Truth” is my least favorite song on Harmony of Difference because it sounded the most like The Epic.
So I wanted scope and I wanted new musical directions. Heaven and Earth delivers on both fronts.
One could make the argument that Heaven and Earth has too much scope. At least that’s what the few (relatively speaking) dissenting opinions I read had to say. Whereas The Epic builds to specific crescendos and occasionally takes the time to cool off, Heaven and Earth is all grandiosity all the time. And I get why some people would be put off by that. Variation is more interesting than one type of sound, even if that sound is essentially two and half hours of the the monolith scene from 2001, but jazz.
I don’t have a reasonable response to the criticism. I can’t say it’s entirely wrong. But it either does it for you or it doesn’t, and it does it for me.
As far as diversity of sound, I don’t think Heaven and Earth switches things up in the genre departments as much as The Epic or Harmony of Difference. But it makes up for it by chasing a different kind of aesthetic. Sadly, I’m not equipped enough, musically speaking, to define what I’m talking about. (Said the guy writing an article about music.) But if I had to describe it, I would say that while The Epic sounds more cosmic and grand, Heaven and Earth takes that concept a little more literally. After all, there’s a song called “The Space Traveller’s Lullaby” and the vocals of “Vi Lua Vi Sol” sound like they’re being sung by a robot traveling across the inky void in a space ship.
The Epic evokes something as grand as space. Heaven and Earth tackles space head on, and makes something that sounds like it too. I think my heart still lies with The Epic, but Heaven and Earth is still a hell of an experience.
Favorite Songs: “Fists of Fury,” “The Space Travelers Lullaby,” “Vi Lua Vi Sol”
8. Haru Nemuri, Haru to Shura
Hi. I’ve never listened to a J-pop album before.
It’s a genre I know almost nothing about. I’ve completely missed the kind of Japanese culture that makes it to America where one could be exposed to J-pop, and while the option to search “best J-pop album” has always been available, I’ve never taken it out of laziness.
I know so little about this genre that I don’t even know if this album is, technically, a J-pop album. From what little I do know, J-pop has a reputation for being ultra sugary and accessible. This album does occasionally delve into those kinds of sounds, but I would argue that it’s far from the album’s goal. My lack of knowledge of J-pop also fed into the lyrics (besides the obvious language barrier.) At one point, I looked up the lyrical content of this album. I found some translations, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten most of it. I was going to look them up again, but I didn’t want to. There’s something magical and mysterious about this album, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion.
In other words, there’s a distinct possibility that what Haru raps about on this album is completely lame. I sincerely doubt it, but it’s there. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m spelling her name correctly. As to the album, I’m not as confident. I found this album thanks to an article written in June on theneedledrop.com by site writer Austen in which he named his favorite albums of the year up to that point. That’s how he spelled it there, and despite me seeing multiple variations (“HARUTOSHURA,” for example), that’s the spelling I went with here. I don’t even know if any of the track names I have in my iTunes are actually accurate.
What I do know is that I’ve never heard anything remotely like it before.
Let’s start with Haru’s rapping. Maybe this has more to do with how the Japanese language functions as opposed to English, but Haru’s flow is often frantic, lightning fast, and somewhat offbeat. Some may find fault with that third adjective, but for me, it made it a lot more fun to listen to because she has a particular way of doing it that’s incredibly energetic and engaging. Then, occasionally, she starts to yell and shriek, potentially catching you off guard if you aren’t paying attention to the instrumentation and the compositions. She doesn’t yell as some rock gimmick designed to sound like someone trying to make what they think a rock song sounds like. She does so in a way that sounds like she’s summoning every ounce of energy she can muster so that she can put in her all. I bet her live shows are incredible.
And speaking of instrumentation and composition, the musical elements of this album are just as wild and incredible. It’s one thing to rap off-beat to a standard hip hop beat. That’s been done before to varying effect. It’s another to rap off-beat to a bright hodgepodge of punk, noise pop, synth pop, and many other genres in between, making every song sound like a journey.
Haru to Shura is a strange experimental alien object that crash landed into my life on a wave of euphoria. How this album sounds to a Japanese audience, I don’t know. Maybe this is something they roll their eyes at. But for me, I love every second of it.
Favorite Songs: “Narashite,” “Sekaiwotorikaeshiteokure,” “Rock ’N’ Roll Wa Shinanai With Totsuzenshounen”
7. Kali Uchis, Isolation
Isolation reviewed unbelievably well. Big mainstream publications loved it, indie focused websites and blogs loved it, all the reviewers I follow on Youtube loved it. Seemingly everybody on the planet loved it. Yet I still found some descent in my social media circles and in some conversations with friends in real life, most of which centered around Kali’s voice.
The word “amateurish,” or an appropriate synonym, was tossed around a lot in these conversations. (Or in my feeds, once again reminding me that I need to unfollow a lot of people.) I’m giving their arguments short shrift, but essentially, the gist of their complaints about her voice is that she doesn’t go out of her way to have the biggest voice in the pop world. When we think of pop singers, we tend to think about big arenas and sold out crowds and powerful earth shattering vocal performances, and Kali doesn’t quite deliver on that front.
But she’s not trying to. That’s why I personally adore her voice.
It’s a sentiment I’ve expressed arguably too many times on this blog, but it’s an important one to me: “Most” is not “best.” Sure, you can be a Christina Aguilera style singer who has so much technical ability that you can make anything sound good. However, for someone like me, Christina Aguilera can be a bit too much at times, and though you may have all the skill in the world, what you do with it is ultimately what’s most important.
Kali, in a lot of ways, reminds me of chilled out bossa nova artists and smoky jazz singers from noir movies. It’s not about blowing you away with their vocals. It’s about creating an atmosphere. About channelling cool and creating a vibe.
Aesthetics. That’s what this album has to offer.
As I said, it’s not just about what you have. It’s how you use it. Some might (incorrectly) find her vocals weak, but I can say that “Dead to Me” is one of my favorite synth-pop songs of the year and “In My Dreams” is a better indie pop song than most of the actual indie pop songs I heard in 2018 and despite listening to this album when it came out in April, you can still catch me singing “Your Teeth in My Neck” to myself. (It also makes me nostalgic for The Neptunes.) Part of why these songs work so well for me is how Kali uses her vocals to add a sense of warmth and longing to each song. Every track sounds new and genuinely nostalgic at the same time.
Another reason why these songs work is, of course, the production. If you were to take a quick peek at the production credits, you’d see a lot of potentially familiar names. Romil, of Brockhampton fame. Thundercat. BadBadNotGood. Steve Lacy. Sounwave. The Gorillaz. Wayne Gordon. So many incredibly talented people, all of whom bring their A game to this project.
Clearly, Kali brings something out in her collaborators. It’s not hard to see what.
Also, she’s from Alexandria, VA, which is where I grew up. So I felt duty bound to include her. That and the whole, “I love this album” thing.
Favorite Songs: “Just a Stranger,” “Your Teeth in My Neck,” “Dead to Me”
6. Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer
Back in 2008, there was a reality show on VH1 called I Want to Work for Diddy. It was a pretty standard reality show format where thirteen contestants were competing to be Puff’s new assistant. (Oddly enough, one of the contestants on the first season was Laverne Cox, who would later go on to play Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black. I don’t know why I remember this stuff.) The finale of the first of its two seasons revolved around planning an event for an up-and-coming artist signed to Diddy named Janelle Monáe.
2008 mostly trucked in a more standard pop sound and look. This was the beginning of the rise of Katy Perry, as well as “Disturbia” era Rihanna and the tail end of Fergie fever. So when Janelle Monáe walked on screen with her pompadour and strange outfit (the details of which I wish I could remember other than the fact that I found it strange relative to what everyone else was wearing), I remember immediately thinking “Who is this?” So I rushed to my beloved iTunes to discover that she put out an EP called Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), which consisted of (to my high school ears) strange songs about robots and sci-fi dystopias. This was the era where I was downloading specific songs rather than full albums, but I listened to “Many Moons” from that EP over and over again. I loved her.
A few years later, she put out The ArchAndroid and became music royalty to many around the world. Still, this is me saying that I knew about her before it was cool. Because I happened to be watching a realty show. So there. Neener.
Which brings us to Dirty Computer, which to me is her best album yet.
Of course, we could discuss this album’s impeccable production and Monáe’s well documented talents when it comes to singing (and acting). But what struck me the most here is the thematic territory covered by the lyrics.
Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), The ArchAndroid, and The Electric Lady are all fantastic albums. But at a certain point, particularly on The Electric Lady, I wondered what it would be like if Monáe left Cindi behind. It wasn’t a question of could she make music that stepped away from the science fiction and the metaphors. Obviously, she could. The question was would she. I like my artists to try new things and change, and as quickly as I would and will hop on just about any music Monáe releases, I wanted her to do something different in her lyrics.
And clearly, she was thinking the same thing. Dirty Computer is an album about sexuality, and allowing yourself to let the full beauty of the sexual spectrum overcome you. It’s about women, and the astounding highs and the abysmal lows that come with that experience. It’s about being alive in the Trump era, working dead end jobs, being black in America, embracing what makes you different from everyone around you, and so much else.
All these topics are explored without a single android in sight. (Except for the videos, which are amazing.) There’s no need for allusion, and I hope this is the direction she goes from now on. Or if she wants to bring the sci-fi back, I’ll still be down.
Favorite Songs: “Screwed,” “Pynk,” “I Like That”
5. Death Grips, Year of the Snitch
Every Death Grips album sounds different. That’s part of why I love them. But if one wanted to get insanely reductive and unfair about Death Grips’s output up to this point, one could say that there are two kinds of Death Grips albums.
The first type is what we may call the “standard” Death Grips album, even if the word “standard” should never go anywhere near Death Grips. These are the hyper aggressive hip hop inspired albums with the assaultive production and wrathful worldview. This is The Money Store and Bottomless Pit and what have you.
The second type is the more experimental stuff. The albums where they try different weirder production methods and sounds that still fundamentally come together and do everything you love from their music. These are the kinds of albums like the more instrumental Government Plates and the exclusively Björk sampling first part of The Powers That B.
Again, we should not try to classify or organize Death Grips’s music. That is a foolish thing to do, and you’d look foolish. But if one wanted to do so for the sake of a rhetorical device in a top ten list, I suppose that one could say that Year of the Snitch falls in the latter camp of weirdo shit.
If I had to put my finger on why, I would say that it’s the album that’s the least like a hip hop album. Year of the Snitch is the Death Grips rock album I’m sure someone out there has been waiting for.
Which isn’t to say that Year of the Snitch doesn’t have its rappy moments. Songs like “Streaky” and “Linda’s In Custody” feature some of MC Ride’s most rapping ass rap moments yet. (At least by their standards. “Linda’s In Custody” is also one of the single strangest songs they’ve put out thus far.) But when I think about this album, and the many hours I spent listening to it, what stands out to me are the rock riffs and the guitars. Songs like “Death Grips Is Online” and “Black Paint” and “Disappointed” sound like the kind of songs mosh pits were made for, and the reason why I’ve always been scared to go to one of their shows.
But in a broader sense, what I love about Year of the Snitch is that this is their sixth album (seventh, if you count Exmilitary), and they’re still finding ways of surprising me. I remember at some point, I wondered if Death Grips could ever do their thing with a piano, the foundational instrument to a lot of compositions for a lot of artists. The answer came in “The Fear,” and the answer was, “Of course they could, you moron.” A piano on a Death Grips album. Maybe it’s happened before and I don’t remember. But there’s a fucking piano on a Death Grips album!
At the end of the day, I feel the same way about Death Grips that I do about BoJack Horseman. There will come a day when I run out of nice things to say about them in these top ten lists, and as long as they put out strong stuff, there will always be a place for them here.
Favorite Songs: “Death Grips Is Online,” “Streaky,” “The Fear”
4. Saba, CARE FOR ME
2018 was the year hip hop decided to get serious about mental health.
There was Royce da 5’9”’s Book of Ryan, which not only addressed depression, therapy, and self-doubt, but how all these issues tie in with not only his history of substance abuse and violence, but that of his family as well. (Cutting this album broke my damn heart. Go listen to Book of Ryan.) There was Sylvan LaCue’s Apologies in Advance, and album long dedication to self-care and trying to be a better person while also realizing your limitations and your flaws. There was Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs, a beautiful yet harrowing decent into Earl’s longtime struggles with his mental health issues. (Another album it broke my heart to cut.)
And you could also see traces of it if you looked a little harder at some of the releases from Tierra Whack and cupcakKe and many others.
But the mental health hip hop album of 2018, for me, came from an unexpected source: A rapper I had once blown off named Saba.
Every year, for the last two or so weeks of December, I scramble to listen to as many of the big releases and acclaimed albums of that year as I can to make sure I have as many bases covered as possible. Sometimes, this is where I discover something I love, as was the case with Rosalía last year. But most of the time, because I’m so saturated with albums, I end up unfairly dismissing a lot of music I probably would’ve liked otherwise. One of those albums was Saba’s Bucket List Project.
I had heard Saba on a ton of guest spots before, and I knew he was a talented guy. But I dismissed Bucket List Project as basically just another Chicago album in a year where I already had Noname. When I said “unfairly dismissing,” I meant “unfairly.”
Nevertheless, I decided to give his new album CARE FOR ME a shot, and before the opening track “BUSY / SIRENS” was done, I knew something terrible must’ve happened in his life.
I finished the album, and in an emotional state, I looked up what happened. Not that I needed to. Saba goes into heartbreaking detail on what happened several times throughout CARE FOR ME, most notably on “PROM / KING.” But I did so anyway. In February 2017, Saba’s cousin and fellow rapper John Walt was stabbed to death in Chicago.
So yes, this is a grief album. But it’s not just about direct grief, but the self-reflection such trauma inevitably causes. “BROKEN GIRLS” is a song about not only sleeping with women for the wrong reasons, but “fetishizing your problems” and the realization that you’re using women as objects. “FIGHTER” connects the literal fist fights he used to get into when he was a kid to the struggles he feels nowadays just to get out of bed in the morning. “LOGOUT” explores how your worst insecurities are amplified by your social media habits.
And there are, of course, the songs about Walter. One could argue that every song on this album, in one way or another, are about Walter. But there are some that are more direct than others, and one gets the sense that the two were close. These are the most heartbreaking songs on the album, and some of the most heartbreaking songs of the year.
But it’s also an album that finds joy when it can. Or if not joy, then at least signs that there are ways to cope and feel better. “CALLIGRAPHY” is a song about the catharsis of writing about your troubles. “SMILE” is one of the most heart warming tributes to Chicago and family I’ve heard in hip hop in quite some time. The lyrics to “HEAVEN ALL AROUND ME” are a bit more morbid than the actual sound of it suggests. It’s a song about death, but it’s also about the afterlife, and the joy of seeing all your loved ones again in an unburdened state. And it’s not corny the way a lot of heaven hip hop songs sound.
It’s also a beautifully produced album with incredible rapping and equally incredible writing.
I’m never dismissing Saba again.
Favorite Songs: “BUSY / SIRENS,” “FIGHTER,” “PROM / KING,”
3. Against All Logic, 2012-2017
Truth be told, I don’t have the greatest handle on every sub-genre that falls under the umbrella of “electronic” music. I understand that there are differences between, say, drum and bass and techno. But I’m not educated enough to be able to tell you what those differences are. I can, however, tell you what I like and what appeals to me.
I was going to start this section by saying, “I’ve never really been into house music.” But I don’t know if that’s technically true. So here’s the more anal way of saying it: The music I have listened to that’s been called “house music” has never really resonated with me.
Part of it is aesthetics. To me, some house music sounds like over-polished fashion show music and some of it sounds a little too shat out. But in a larger sense, there are some sounds that work for people and some that don’t, and for whatever non-rational reasons, the house sound just doesn’t work for me.
Another aspect is the environment in which house music is meant to be listened to. When you say “house music fan” to me, my mind doesn’t drift to some party kid holding neon glow sticks and rocking a pacifier in his mouth. But that person is at a party, and I pretty much exclusively listen to music by myself in my apartment. Maybe that works against me for some styles of music, but I’m also not willing to go to a rave or a club just to get that experience.
But finally, there’s the disposability. Of course, there’s plenty of a music I love that’s meant to be enjoyed briefly, and this isn’t an element of house music I hold against it as a negative. However, the music that truly lives in my heart tends to be a bit more timeless, and nine times out of ten, house music simply isn’t chasing that permanence.
2012-2017 is a house album for people like me.
It’s a house album that relies heavily on sampling, making it more reminiscent of DJ Shadow or The Avalanches. (Though not as immediately hip hop-y as the former or joyous as the latter.) It’s a house album with a more compositional philosophy behind it. Or at the very least, it doesn’t assume you’re at a party and you need something to dance to and ignore. It’s an album lighter on repetition and heavy on introducing new exciting elements as you get deeper and deeper into each song.
I know I spent the majority of this write-up not talking about this album. (In fact, you may have noticed that I fall into that trap a lot.) And I know this album doesn’t sound as heartfelt or emotional as CARE FOR ME. However, so much of what I enjoy about this album comes from the context of how I listened to it, and the baggage I brought to the table. I’m not sure this album convinced me to dig deep into house. But it did convince me that there is a context in which I could not only love it, but spend a a huge portion of the year listening to it, and feel tons of joy from it.
House music, y’all.
Favorite Songs: “This Old House Is All I Have,” “I Never Dream,” “You Are Going to Love Me and Scream”
2. JPEGMAFIA, Veteran
In the wake of the election, I saw a shitty take spread through the internet like wildfire. Or at least it spread in the corners of the internet I inhabit. The take was this: At the very very least, the election will spur the creation of a lot of awesome rebellious music.
What’s wrong with the take should be readily apparent. Besides the obvious tone-deafness, we’re reminded of the stakes of the election on a near constant basis, so who the fuck cares if we hear from Green Day? On the other hand, I couldn’t really get mad at those who were saying this because music matters, and it’s in some people’s nature to seek some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll even admit that despite how I rolled my eyes every time I saw that opinion, there was something deeply satisfying about the image of a punk rocker screaming at some tiki torch wielding assholes or a rapper shitting on as many mad alt-right dickheads as possible.
The album most people probably had in mind was IDLES’s Joy as an Act of Resistance, another album in a long line of them that almost made this list. It’s a loud bombastic punk screed that’s equal parts “My blood brother is an immigrant/A beautiful immigrant” and “Putting homophobes in coffins.” It’s an amazing album, made all the better by Joe Talbot’s beautifully sludge-like voice.
Joy as an Act of Resistance is the album a lot of people wanted. But Veteran is the album we all really need.
To give you an idea of what JPEGMAFIA’s about, here’s a clip from an interview he did with Anthony Fantano early in 2018. (If the custom start time I used isn’t working, skip to 14:25. Squarespace fucks up some times.)
A little bit of context: Peggy served in the Air Force for four years, which includes a tour in Iraq. There are multiple interviews where he talks about having a conceal carry permit, and there are also multiple interviews, including the one embedded above, where he tells alt-right members threatening him online to come to his show and start some shit. This is a black man trained to use weapons by the military who’s incredibly public about his gun ownership and inviting confrontation with right-wing trolls. For alt-right scum, what’s not to fear? For the rest of us, what’s not to love?
If any of what I just said appeals to you, then good news: Veteran is a whole album of that. He talks about showing up to alt-right rallies with guns on “Rainbow Six,” harming Trump on both “Germs” and “Baby I’m Bleeding,” gentrification on “Williamsburg,” tearing down white music idols on “I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrissey Dies” (which, even if you don’t agree with the sentiment, is the best track title of the year), and so on and so forth.
So yes, Veteran might not be the most accessible album of 2018. Making that worse (if you’re the kind of person who thinks accessibility in music matters, which clearly I don’t) is the production, which is so off-the-wall and abrasive that I didn’t like this album on first listen because of it.
Granted, it’s not the assaultive nature of the production that put me off so much as it seemed like the ratio of production to rapping was a little more tilted toward the former than I wanted. JPEGMAFIA, by the way, is really good at rapping. But it put even me off at first, and I’m a Death Grips fans. (Don’t compare Peggy and Ride.)
But this album wormed its way into my head and stayed there. I would hear other people praise it, and all of the sudden I’d get really excited. But then I remembered that I supposedly didn’t like it. Then I listened to it again. And again. And again. And I loved it more with each listen.
There’s what you want and what you need, and when it comes to angry assaultive protest music in the Trump era, JPEGMAFIA is both. Veteran is a “fuck you” to not only the right, but the complicit and fake on the left as well. It’s a fuck you to everybody, including you. But if you’re open to a little chaos, you’ll love it.
Favorite Songs: “Real Nega,” “Baby I’m Bleeding,” “Rainbow Six”
1. SOPHIE, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES
I cannot stress enough how stupid some of the arguments you have with yourself are when it comes to list making. The only reason I take it seriously is because I actually have to sit down and write about this stuff, so to a certain extent I have to. Still, the Veteran vs. OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is not only one of the dumbest debates I’ve ever had, but also one of the hardest.
If you think about it, they actually have a lot in common. Of course, Veteran is an experimental hip hop album and OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is… I guess you would have to call it an industrial art-pop album? Both can be intentionally jarring, both can be forceful as hell, and both have the ability to absolutely fuck up the speakers in your car.
They also have a lot in common in some of the granular details as well. For example, both use their opening track to lull you into a sense of calm, then use their second track, as well as the remainder of their running time, to beat you over the head.
All that said, the deciding factor was pretty simple. Sure, sometimes, I still occasionally think, “You know, it’s not too late to move Veteran up one slot.” (Well, it will be by the time you’re reading this.) But Veteran was an album I had to learn to appreciate. OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is an album I loved immediately.
Let’s go back to that one-two punch of the first and second tracks. I went into this album knowing very little about SOPHIE other than the fact that she’s a Scottish trans woman and this album received a high rating on Pitchfork. (Yes, I can be that guy sometimes.) The opening track is lovely little song called “It’s Okay to Cry.” It’s about what you think it’s about, as SOPHIE sings in an unmodulated voice (that I would later learn is rare for her) about how it’s okay to let the world see the parts of yourself that you normally don’t show, even if that means crying. The synths are nice and soft. SOPHIE’s vocals are nice and light. It’s a gorgeous opener.
“Okay. This is nice. I’m into this.” I remember thinking.
“It’s Okay to Cry” ends. Then “Ponyboy” drops on you like an anvil.
“FUCK YEAH!!!!” I remember thinking.
And that feeling never wore off. “Ponyboy” made me understand the appeal of S&M while “Is It Cold in the Water?” made me understand why some people cry on the dance floor and the beat drop on “Immaterial” filled me with the type of energy that most pop and EDM songs try to find.
There are insightful lyrics to unpack, and well as themes and the significance of the weird metallic modulation SOPHIE puts on her voice. And I do think lyrics matter, and I always will.
But that’s not what I think about when it comes to this album. I think about how most of this album hit me like a sledgehammer, and I loved every moment of it.
This is the album I want to shove down everyone’s throat, and every time I think about it, that “FUCK YEAH!!!!” feeling comes right back up. This album came out in June. It’s January now, and I’m still just as excited about it. It’s big. It’s dramatic. It’s over-the-top. It is, to put it mildly, not interested in subtlety.
Even writing this now makes we want to stop so I can go listen to it again. Which is what I’m going to do.
Favorite Songs: “Ponyboy,” “Is It Cold in the Water?,” “Infatuation”
Honorable Mentions
Ariana Grande, Sweetener
Chancha Via Circuito, Bienaventuranza
Benny the Butcher, Tana Talk 3
Blood Orange, Negro Swan
BROCKHAMPTON, iridescence
Christine and the Queens, Chris
Courtney Barnett, Tell Me How You Really Feel
cupcakKe, Ephorize
Current 93, The Light is Leaving Us All
Daughters, You Won’t Get What You Want
Dessa, Chime
Earl Sweatshirt, Some Rap Songs
Elza Soares, Deus É Mulher
Hermit and the Recluse, Orpheus vs. The Sirens
Hop Along, Bark Your Head Off, Dog
IDLES, Joy as an Act of Resistance
Jean Grae & Quelle Chris, Everything’s Fine
Jeff Rosenstock, POST-
Julia Holter, Aviary
Kero Kero Bonito, Time ’n’ Place
KIDS SEE GHOSTS, KIDS SEE GHOSTS
Lupe Fiasco, DROGAS WAVE
Maxo Kream, Punken
Miya Folick, Premonitions
Moodie Black, Lucas Acid
Natalia Lafourcade, Musas Vol. 2
Nipsey Hussle, Victory Lap
Noname, Room 25
Parquet Courts, Wide Awake!
Pusha-T, DAYTONA
Ravyn Lenae, Crush
Robyn, Honey
Rosalía, El Mar Querer
Royce Da 5’9”, Book of Ryan
Ryan Beatty, Boy In Jeans
Rubblebucket, Sun Machine
Screaming Females, All At Once
Sons of Kemet, Your Queen is a Reptile
Tierra Whack, Whack World
Tropical Fuck Storm, A Laughing Death in Meatspace
Vince Staples, FM!
Westside Gunn, Supreme Blientele
Will Listen To Someday
Soccer Mommy, Clean
I’m pretty sure that’s it.
