I’m so sorry about this. Am. Jesus sake. Near 5000 fucking words here. Absolutely fucking full of myself. If any record this year was fit to enchant me half as much as the sound of my own voice enchants me then it was some enchanting fucking boy of a record, alright, fuck knows.
Anyway
This has been the best year for new music in junkyard dung knows even how long. If you want my opinion. Every other week, it seemed, something else was kicking the fucking doors down all over again, upending the whole shebang another time, pulling the yin through the yang to the devil.
The result is that I’ve found it very, very difficult to whittle my list down to anything approaching anything halfways manageable at all.
Here anyway are my Top Picks. The title of each album links to my current favourite track from each, or the one that I think’s maybe most representative, or the one that makes most sense to start with if you’re hearing it for the first time. The exception is the Tierra Whack one. That links to the whole 15 minute long “visual album.” Also, The Number One Of All aside, they’re not in any particular order.
The Number One Of All
Pusha T: DAYTONA /
Kanye West: ye /
Kids See Ghosts: KIDS SEE GHOSTSThis summer was fucking magical for me, the best in many, many years, and a good chunk of that magic had all to do with Kanye West and this ridiculous five albums in five weeks stunt that he decided to pull. Waiting for those records to drop every Friday, waiting for them to be fixed sometimes maybe on the Saturday or Sunday, comparing what you thought about them on Monday to what you thought about them three days prior when they first knocked your knees out from under you in whatever state they were in at that time, Jesus it was a rush and a half, but.
DAYTONA is probably the most consistently great of the lot, but I found
ye the most arresting by far, and the most moving, and the most relatable, and the most surprising. For some reason I had expected a far less adventurous sort of a set from our man this time around. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. Couple minutes into “I Thought About Killing You” and any notions along those lines had been dashed to kingdom come. I remember I listened to it in two-track chunks for the whole of that first day, for I wanted the thing to last forever. By the time I got to “Ghost Town” it was late in the evening and I was walking along the banks of the Bann on my own and my body just fucking went to fucking pot, like. Jesus I was for nothing. Just stood there with my mouth open and my fists clenched, playing it over and over. Geese just pure gawking at me. I was walking on the opposite side of the same river a week later when I first heard “Feel The Love” off
KIDS SEE GHOSTS, then called “4th Dimension” owing to whatever sort of a titling / sequencing cock-up it was that went on, and it was so fucking good that I thought that my head was for cracking open under the weight of it. For cracking open and falling about me in bits. Just a singed tongue hanging out the top of my neck licking limply at nothing every so often.
BRAKK-A-KA-RAKK. Sake, but. Blew me to pieces.
In the end, although I had some issues with the odd track here or there, and although my opinion of some of those records has shifted a bit in the weeks and months since - I rate the Teyana Taylor one a good bit higher now than I did at the time, for example, and the Nas one a wee bit lower – every one of them was fucking phenomenal, really. I can’t decide which of those three up there is my Favourite Of Them All, so I’m putting them all at #1. That’s all there is to it. No telling which one’s better. No separating them. They’re all pouring out of other and over the top of the other all bloody roads and directions.
The Rest In No Particular Order
Low: Double NegativeI haven’t listened to Low very much at all these past few years, I don’t know for how long they’ve been edging towards this fucking colossal, dizzying eruption of distortion and crackling and sweeping and panning, but I know it’s nothing I was expecting to hear from them, or from anyone else really. It bears a surface similarity to Bon Iver’s
22, A Million, I suppose, an observation that I’m sure has already been wrung dry and shook done by absolutely everyone else on Earth that has ever had reason to hear both albums, and like that record it has rendered completely, gloriously “other” an act that I thought I knew pretty solidly inside out, and had grown a bit bored of, to be honest. But it’s not as fractured and skittish as
22, A Million. The melodies for the most part aren’t anywhere near as difficult to grab hold of. Not difficult at all, really, a lot of the time. And yet they still feel alien as glass eyes blinking from the back of a donkey’s throat. Times, like in “Fly,” for example, it feels like I’m trying to listen to a Bronski Beat song that's only ever partially downloaded, played at three quarter speed through a speaker on a fucking soldering iron.
Mount Eerie: (after) The second truly brilliant Mount Eerie album of 2018, far as I’m concerned, presumably completing the trilogy that started with 2017’s utterly harrowing
A Crow Looked At Me (a string of songs about the death of Phil Elverum’s wife written in the days and weeks that followed), continued with this year’s
Now Only (also about the death of Phil Elverum’s wife but then also about the writing and recording and performing of a bunch of obsessively detailed songs about the death of Phil Elverum’s wife), and then concluding with this, in which a selection of those songs about the death of Phil Elverum’s wife and those songs about the songs about the death of Phil Elverum’s wife are performed live in an ancient old church located somewhere in the Netherlands. The performances are quiet and aching and the songs are desperately sad, full of tiny, wounded observations and asides and also some overwritten lyrics and some meandering hardly-melodies (Phil Elverum has called this stuff “barely music”) that just make the whole thing that much more affecting. It’s not some humourless fucking slog through the muck, though. Not at all. Funny, even, sometimes, you would say. “Now Only,” for example, makes me laugh plenty, albeit in a sort of a snorting through my snotters, tears still blinding me kind of way. Self-deprecating. Confused and bemused, half time. Kind of “what the fuck even is this that’s going on” feel to it all. The bits about somehow finding himself sharing a bill with Skrillex “singing these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs.” The nonchalant contextualisation (“the person I love got killed by a bad disease out of nowhere / and for no reason / and me living in the blast zone with our daughter and etc…”). The absolute certainty in the “my devastation is unique” followed by an almost audible shrug and a cheerful singalong affirmation that, actually, really, it’s not. Not at all. “People get cancer and die / And people get hit by trucks and die…” It’s just extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary, haunted, humble, beautiful album and it’s absolutely captivating. If you’re in the mood. If you’re not, well, I dunno, chances are it isn’t.
Georgia Anne Muldrow: OverloadI could pretend like I knew all the fuck there was to know about Georgia Anne Muldrow long before this record ever appeared, that I knew all about how woke she was, that I knew everything knowable about the colossal number of albums she apparently puts out in the course of a year, that I’d heard all of them a hundred and twenty times and was frankly a bit fucking sick of the woman by now, to tell you nothing but the truth. The reality is that I hadn’t a wizened engine’s notion about who the hell she was or why she was it when I first put this album on whenever it was that I did. I still don’t know very much, but I know that this is fucking stunning stuff. To my ignorant ears it sounds a bit like
ArchAndroid-era Janelle Monáe shot through the Björk of a few albums ago. She has some sort of connection to the Sun Ra Arkestra, I think, but it’s almost a decade since I was pretending to listen to far more Sun Ra than I was listening to, so I don’t know. You’ll know more than me. But this is something special. Unless it isn’t. Unless she’s throwing things like this out of her every other fucking week.
Denzel Curry: Ta13ooAnother artist I knew nothing about, and who totally stamped my ribs in by way of introduction. For a while this was my second favourite album of the year. Banger after banger after banger. It’s got some sort of loose concept going on, it’s divided into three separate acts that supposedly take us to ever darker and grimmer places as we proceed. I don’t know how well that works out, but it does get increasingly wilder about the eyes as it rattles by. I’ve since heard a fair bit of his earlier stuff – primarily thanks to our
chveik – and to be honest a fair bit of that sounds a fair bit like a fair bit of this. To me, anyway. To me it seems like he’s been throwing some of these same sorts of shapes for a while. But it does have new-fangled thoughts in its head, it does push things forward, and even if it didn’t, fuck it, like, virtually every track on this thing is immense. The hooks are huge, the pace is relentless… My favourite 2018 record by an artist I hadn’t previously heard tell of that had already put out records.
Soccer Mommy: CleanThis is actually the third album by Swiss-born, Nashville-raised singer-songwriter Sophie Allison but the first “proper” one, by the talk. She’s been described as a sort of grungier, scrungier, more belligerent Taylor Swift, and there’s something in that, I’ve described her that way myself to folk at times, but it’s also pretty reductive. There’s far more going on in her humours. Anyway I really liked this album when I first heard it, then it fell away down the stairs for a while and I largely forgot all about it until I saw her and her band supporting Kacey Musgraves about a month ago, and then here it was again back up on top of my shoulders, this
Clean, pulling away at my hair and flicking fuck out my earlobes all sore. What drew me back in was a cover of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” – one of dozens that seem to be in circulation at the minute, whatever the hell’s the meaning – that she performed that night all on her own having sent her band away out the road and brought the red lights down around her, just her and her guitar and the waves of reverb billowing outwards and, aw man, swear, properly took the breath from me. I found out later that
she’d recorded that song a wee while ago, and when I’d sickened myself listening to that over and over the next few days and nights I went back to
Clean, and it was better than ever, and it’s been throwing the knives and the forks about my kitchen ever since.
Tierra Whack: Whack World15 songs in 15 minutes isn’t maybe all that big of a deal if your favourite bands are all a bunch of screaming, clattering, shouting angry bastards writing songs that would never lower themselves to darken the 61st second of anything, but I think this is a big deal, this album, these 15 wonderful songs in 15 minutes. Every one of them is a small marvel: witty, catchy as fuck, full of ideas and invention. I fell in love with it instantly. It was a while before I saw the accompanying video – it’s a “visual album,” know, is, although thankfully the visual element is far more fun and far less full of its own arse than that appellation often indicates – and I was maybe slightly less impressed by that than others have been, but still, the music’s blinding. It’s undoubtably frustrating too, at times. Stoking frustration is definitely a big part of what it’s up to. Your man Fantano said it was a bit like listening to the 30 second previews of a bunch of really brilliant songs and then not being allowed to hear the rest of them, and it is like that here and there, but it’s still a full and exhilarating experience overall. Radical sort of a thing, really, I suppose, at a time when everyone feels entitled to listen to whatever the fuck they want to listen to for as long as they want to listen to it as soon as they want to listen to it. Frustration in this key isn’t something we’re used to dealing with any more, really. But, you feel it here. You do want tracks like “Hookers” and “Pet Cemetery” to last four times as long as they do. Pleading with them to come in and take their coats off, but they won’t. Other tracks, stuff like “Silly Sam” and “Fuck Off,” the latter among my favourites, they might start casting the shadows of gimmicky novelty songs if there was much more flesh on their bones, they might start to annoy you a bit, maybe, but at 60 seconds they’re around just long enough for that never to have to happen, and the record couldn’t do without them.
Death Grips: Year Of The Snitch This is undoubtedly my favourite Death Grips album since
The Money Store. Just fucking frothing and seething and bouncing from one end to the other. The opening track is one of my favourite tracks of the year, but the whole thing left me delirious. Complicated and intricate and synapse-sozzling as ever but it’s just fun as fuck, like. Fun as fuck. No end of peaks. “Shitshow” speeding face-first into the wall over and over till its teeth are fucked halfway up into its eyeballs and it’s grinning at you out of the side of its skull. “The Fear” tinkling about the lampshades and across the ceilings all spindly and arachnid like. “Streaky” strutting about with its shirt ripped open and its tits all glitching and wonky. Sure for Christ sake. It’s not mayhem, but there’s a lot of fucking mayhem in its bones. I adored it, and I still do.
Colter Wall: Songs Of The PlainsAnother I went backwards and forwards with. On the one hand it’s a stellar collection of stark, atmospheric Dave Cobb-produced railyards and ranches, beans and sawdust, old school country songs after the fashion of a less metaphysically-minded Sturgill Simpson or someone like this, and I’ve listened to it loads since it came out and I really enjoy every track that’s on it. On the other hand there’s something a bit… I dunno, a bit plastic about the whole construction. A bit dress-up. I don’t know if that’s fair or it isn’t. I don’t know if the notions I have in my head about these kinds of songs and this genre in particular are causing me to misread “really fucking young” as “really fucking inauthentic,” to misread “character-led” as “phoney,” and I don’t know if “inauthentic” or “phoney” even mean anything or they don’t any more. Storytelling’s storytelling, innit. He hasn’t written a song called “Saskatchewan in 1881” because he’s trying to hoodwink you into thinking he was there at the time. But with this sort of thing, you need to believe that he could have been, I think. When he insists that you “better fly ‘fore I produce my .44,” you really need to believe that he might. It’s not always the case that I do. Believe him. Regardless of the texture and the timbre and the album cover and the hat and the boots and all of that. Just, I dunno, something. Something a bit
Grindhouse (2007), would you say? But. The quality of the songs and of the performances is undeniable. And his voice is phenomenal. He’s only about three farts old but he sounds like Methuselah. If this album was recorded in 1968 by some absolute waste of gums and marrow, some utterly useless burden of a being that choked to death on his first boak of the morning ten minutes after stepping outside the studio it’d be one of my favourite albums ever made. It’s not really Colter Wall’s fault that he’s a young, good looking, talented, and successful singer-songwriter releasing albums in 2018. But to fuck with it all. It’s good, anyway. And it’s not like he doesn’t know all this. “I know I’m young,” he sings. “I know I’m young / I’ve seen too few / A setting sun.” His debut EP wasn’t called
Imaginary Appalachia for nothing. It was called that because he knows all this.
Mitski: Be The CowboyMore folk being cowboys on the batter, and another number that shot up through the roof and blasted the heavens to bejeesus first time I heard it and then disappeared only to come sneaking back again a while later. Couple nights ago, in fact, is when it reappeared. I’d been talking about it with a dear friend of mine after perusing the Pitchfork Top 50 – within which, if you don’t already know, it ranks pretty fucking highly – and I realised that whilst two of its tracks – “Why Didn’t You Stop Me” and “Old Friend” – have gone on to become two of my very favourite tracks of this or any other year, I’d kind of forgotten about a lot of the rest of it. Last time I listened to it I got a bit exhausted or a bit tired of it or something half way through. Seemed much more front-loaded than it had before. Dazzles and suckerpunches at the outset and it sustains that astonishment for the next few tracks but then settles into a comfortable groove for a pretty long time with nothing particularly outstanding going on. Yesterday I put it on again, except this time I started at track 6, and what I discovered is that actually the second half is brilliant too, just maybe not as immediate as the first. “I gave too much of my heart tonight,” she sings on the first track I clicked on this time round, and I think that was partly the issue. There was just too much of the same really fucking good thing for me to deal with all at once. I got bliss-fatigue or something, shit knows. Never noticed “Nobody” before, really, even though it’s really reminiscent of Music Go Music and I loved Music Go Music like, aw, fuck, man, loved them. Never noticed the next track, really, either. “Pink In The Night.” Never noticed how lovely a thing it was. It is. Lovely. Times it sounds like a cover of something off
Viva Hate. “I could stare at your back all day,” she says.
Troye Sivan: BloomAs good and solid a pop album as any released this year, I reckon. A bunch of huge sounding, vibrant, hook-heavy songs about bottoming-anxiety and nervous exploration and using Grindr before you were old enough to be using it and then, conversely, navigating “The Scene” when you’re staring so far down the barrel of your mid-20s that you might as well be fucking invisible, and all this kind of thing. Inviting Ariana Grande up onto the table one minute, huddling away in the corner quoting “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” the next. It’s fantastic, if not entirely flawless. There’s not a huge amount of variation, really, and as he says himself, “even the sweetest plum has only got so long.” Also, the production sometimes seems to be working against the songs rather than with them. Something a bit stifling about it sometimes. But, whatever, they are mostly tremendous songs – “I want to skip stones on your skin, boy,” for Christ sake – so it matters little in the end.
SOPHIE: Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides If it wasn’t for all the Kanyee this might have been my #1 best of the year. After hearing Kanye’s contributions to that prodigiously rotten 6ix9ine album that came out the other day it actually was #1 for a bit. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the interbelching complexities of the myriad of maddening hisses and thuds and grunts and grinds and screeches among its components, but I know that this
Oil… is as sublime and terrifying and awesome a record as any I’ve heard this year. A lot of the time, this year, for different reasons, I’ve been craving more visceral sorts of things, pulverising sort of stuff, and although this is plenty cerebral, and although there are delicate, fragile moments too, it’s also fit to pound you into fucking puddles, and that’s what I wanted and needed. See also:
Abigor: Höllenzwang (Chronicles of Perdition)Around the start of the autumn I found myself listening to a lot of Emperor again.
Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk in particular. Listened to it most nights for a while. Och. Never done with this bloody
Welkin. Walking through the town in the wee hours with all these various
Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk in my ears, in and out of the churchyards and down along deserted alleyways and up over the fences and the gates, ducking and darting hither and thon. Anyway a day came when there was a storm in the post, terrible brutes of winds were predicted, and I wanted something akin to those Anthems to listen to while I was out and about in them. I didn’t know much about what was going on in black metal in 2018, but I have a good friend who knows all about it, so I asked him to recommend something in that fashion and this
Höllenzwang, these
Chronicles of Perdition, these are what he pointed me towards. I first listened to it whilst walking an unlit country road at one in the morning with the winds thrashing me left and right and with jagged and ancient things all directions. It overwhelmed me and I felt a euphoria hard to credit, besieged and consumed by darknesses beyond number. Listening to it again the following day, sat on the toilet in my parents’ bathroom with my both legs dead and my guts knotted with shits in all different states of becoming, it sounded every bit as impressive as it did the night before. I don’t really know how it ranks among other albums of similar stock released in 2018, I haven’t heard a whole lot, but it’s the only man for me of what I have heard.
Things I Also Really Loved, Just Not As Much As The Others, Or Not As Much Right Now
Ian Isiah: Shugga Sextape (Vol. 1) (The only reason this isn't in the list proper is that I've only had a chance to listen to it a couple times and that's not enough to know for sure that it's truly as brilliant as I think it is right now. But I think that it's fucking brilliant. Packed with shimmering, wild, unhinged and unruly majestic autotuned whirls that I doubt I could ever tire of.)
Christina Aguilera: Liberation (I’m a fan of Xtina, always have been, and I’d say that this is easily her best album since
Stripped. Not as good as
Stripped, like, but it’s not a million miles away either. The tracks that Kanye was involved with are my favourites, but the rest is often excellent too.)
Kacey Musgraves: Golden Hour (I loved the two albums before this, and I loved this one too when I first heard it, but despite all the acclaim it has received, and despite how awesome these songs sounded live, there’s just… I dunno. There’s something missing in the middle. There’s no bite to any of it. Lacks personality a bit, I think, compared to, say,
Pageant Material. Bangers for days, though.)
03 Greedo: God Level (I was shouting about how this was my favourite hip-hop album of the year before ever the first couple of tracks had ever finished, then maybe ten or twenty minutes later it was my favourite album of the year full stop and that was that. Now it’s neither of those things, but, well, I’m prone to it, this sort of hyperbole and huff and puff. It is excellent, though, even if it does go on a bit, and even if it does become a bit repetitive after a while, and even if the ceaseless anxiety does start to wear you down long before the end. Man’s just been sentenced to 20 years for next to nothing, like. You can give him 90 minutes of your time.)
Daphne And Celeste: Daphne And Celeste Save The World (Some days this is in my top 10 and then some days, other days, it isn’t. Today it isn’t, but tomorrow, I dunno. Very little on this that doesn’t make me giddy and light headed. Maybe it is in my top 10. Damnation only knows.)
JPEGMAFIA: Veteran (This too was in my Top 10 for a long time, but, I don’t know. “Real Nega” and one or two other tracks are unbelievably fucking good, amazing, but if they're lifted out of the picture the album as a whole isn’t maybe as impressive as it seems to be with the shock of those tracks reverberating through it. That’s a bit of a useless observation, really. “It’s great, but if you took out some of the stuff that made it great would it still be great?” Shut up.)
Kali Uchis: Isolation (I’m glad this has received so much in the way of the adulation and the plaudits and all the rest, it’s largely fantastic. Both “Your Teeth In My Neck” and “In My Dreams” are high up my Best Tracks Of 2018 list. I was less taken with some of the rest of the songs on here but so what.)
Right.
