Favorite Music of 2018

I listened to a ton of jazz this year, much more so than in previous years. I think I'm becoming one of Those People, which is fine, but given how much my siblings and I made fun of my dad for listening to jazz when we were growing up, it seems just the teensiest bit like some cosmic prank. Maybe free will really is an illusion, and we are all genetically predetermined to eventually fall into the same patterns of musical tastes as our parents. If so, I dread the CCM and Jim Croce phrase that will one day awaken in me from my mother's share of the DNA.

In all seriousness, here are my favorite albums of the year. As I've done the past few years, I've linked to my original reviews of albums, in case you'd like to read my initial thoughts in my weekly reviews posts. And as always, I feel compelled to mention that it is physically impossible to have listened to every music release, and some genres especially (e.g. metal and hip-hop) got short shrift this year from me. So be sure to fill me in on what I missed! Or to tell me how wrong I am! Or to send help to rescue me from my jazz impulses!

Favorite Albums:

1. Let's Eat Grandma: I'm All Ears

Sometimes, it's not until I've lined up all the albums I've listened to in a year that I realize what my favorite is. It's not as if I've ever not loved I'm All Ears. It's great. But it's still something of a surprise to see it land here. But no matter. This is good music for goth indie kids, and great music for all-around nerds like yours truly.

[Read original review]

2. Sleep: The Sciences

I'm really not much of a metal guy, and The Sciences was the only metal release I bought this year. But it owns. The tongue-in-cheek "marijuanaut" mythology, the heavy, heavy riffs—I dig it.

[Read original review]

3. Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet: Landfall

Eerie, spacious, apocalyptic: pretty much everything you'd want from a collaboration between Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet. I've probably spent more time thinking about "Nothing Left But Their Names" than any other one composition all year.

[Read original review]

4. Szun Waves: New Hymn to Freedom

Astral jazz. I'm still not exactly sure how to describe it. I'ms till sure it owns.

[Read original review]

5. Noname: Room 25

I didn't listen to a ton of hip-hop this year, and my impression from people who do follow hip-hop more closely is that this was a bit of an off-year for the genre, Cardi B excepted (and I'm still pretty miffed that Cardi B's album never came out on CD, meaning I didn't really get to dive into it much). But Noname's album is really good! And if you're cheap, you can get it for free on her Bandcamp page!

[Read original review]

6. Father John Misty: God's Favorite Customer

I think this is the only 2018 album I gave an A grade on the blog. Grades are weird. I don't think any less of this album now, but somehow, an A doesn't feel right anymore (nor the #1 slot that would necessitate). But anyway, it's still very good. FJM pulling way back on the smirking and the social commentary and instead making a deeply personal record that sounds like the White Album but is a tight Revolver-esque single LP. Probably my favorite lyrics of the year, and certainly the one most likely to make me cry.

[Read original review]

7. R+R=Now: Collagically Speaking

Probably the best recent example of jazz's ongoing attempt to position itself within contemporary pop music discourse, fusing trap and R&B with a real jazz-head lineup of Robert Glasper, Christian Scott, and Terrace Martin.

[Read original review]

8. Harriet Tubman: The Terror End of Beauty

This jazz trio is back, serving up more of their electric Miles-style fusion. This time around feels particularly indebted to John McLaughlin's work, suffused with squalling electric guitars fed through some rather cosmic pedal effects. Very cool stuff.

9. Helena Hauff: Qualm

I never got a chance to formally review this, but here it is: the rare electronica album to make it onto one of my year-end lists. This Hamburg-born, UK-based DJ still makes her brand of house music on analog machines, which I suppose could be regarded as something of a throwback. And, I mean, we're not in cutting-edge Arca territory or anything. But it's anything but resting on nostalgic laurels. This is exploratory music, setting its horizons wide. And even if it had been done before, just try telling me that "Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg" isn't great.

10. Thom Yorke: Suspiria: Music For The Luca Guadagnino Film

I'll be perfectly honest: this moody, ambient-leaning 81-minute OST is on this list almost entirely on the virtues of 6 songs and about 29 minutes of music: "Suspirium," "Has Ended," "Open Again," "Unmade," "Volk," and "Suspirium Finale." But WHAT VIRTUES. Almost definitely the best music of Thom Yorke's solo career.





Great 2018 Songs Not On These Albums:

Beach House: "Dive"—Beach House didn't exactly re-invent themselves this year, but they did manage to take their music in the most interesting direction (meaning, any direction at all) in years, chopping up their usual sounds into dance beats and odd structures and strange acoustics. "Dive" is the perfect execution of this new inspiration, beginning as what sounds like a spaced-out, Beach-House-y version of Belle & Sebastian's "Electronic Renaissance" before, at its midpoint, exploding like a turning kaleidoscope into an anthemic collision between shoegaze and Arcade Fire indie pomp. It's awesome.

Daughters: "Long Road, No Turns"—A venomously sarcastic explosion of a song reminiscent of the 1980s' No Wave, but lyrically, it's all 2018: "It may please your heart to see some shackled, wrists and throat naked as the day they were born, but no one's going to do that for you." Whether you read that politically or personally, the power of the lines is unshakable.

Ariana Grande: "thank u, next"—Sweetener was a really good pop album, but nothing there comes within spitting distance of this non-album single, a track that stands alongside Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable," Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," and Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" as one of the great breakup songs of the 21st century. In the grand tradition of the best breakup songs, it postures confidence and dismissal (that chorus, y'all) while being laced with crippling sadness. Skip the Mean Girls music video, though, because that's so uninspired baloney.

Jenny Hval: "The Long Sleep"—The centerpiece of Hval's excellent 2018 EP is a 10-minute, hypnotic ambient track. Hval remains one of the best at finding the cavernous unexplored spaced in indie rock, and this is a great exhibition of that.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Party for One"—Quit teasing us, Carly; where's that new LP??

Janelle Monáe: "Pynk (feat. Grimes)"—Unfortunately, not a ton has stuck with me from Dirty Computer (a first for me and a Monáe album). The two exceptions are great exceptions indeed: the slinky Prince-esque banger "Make Me Feel" and this, the tender, soaring PC Music-ish pop gem. They're both good, but if I'm going to be only giving props to one, it's gotta be "Pynk." Maybe it was just the music video.

Preoccupations: "Espionage"—Preoccupations seems to have become one of those bands that everyone kind of agrees puts out good music but to whom nobody really gives the time of day. Maybe it's because they're a post-punk guitar-rock band, and 2018 just isn't the year for that. But it's too bad, because their music pretty much owns, especially "Espionage," which is propulsive and brooding in that specific combination that only post-punk can really evoke.

Pusha T: "What Would Meek Do (ft. Kanye West)"—Outside of the political ramifications (which are bad), one of the most unfortunate things about Kanye West's on-again/off-again MAGA embrace is that it overshadowed some of the actually really good work that came out of the Wyoming sessions. Pusha T's DAYTONA is front-to-back strong, but my favorite is, unsurprisingly, the one with the beat based off a Yes sample, because I am nothing if on-brand. Also, though I might be falling victim to the very same Kanye-based overshadowing that I just complained about, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it's got what's probably Kanye's best, most thoughtful verse of the year, wherein he wonders if his MAGA stunts will protect him from racial profiling. Like... I dunno, y'all. It's good.

Robyn: "Missing U"—For me, Robyn continues to be mostly a singles artist, which is fine, because the singles are great. This one in particular. Crying in the club with the best of them.

Jeff Rosenstock: "USA"—A 7-minute punk-rock epic that ends with everyone shouting "Et tu, USA." It's kind of shameless, but it's also kind of great.

Sons of Kemet: "My Queen Is Harriet Tubman"—Probably the most energetic jazz release I heard this year was Your Queen Is a Reptile, a fusion of jazz, worldbeat, and black nationalism. Presumably with this song, they are talking about the abolitionist hero and not the jazz trio featured on the albums section of this list, but I'd accept either answer.

SOPHIE: "Immaterial"—I was thinking that SOPHIE's demented, bludgeoning pop(?) album, OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-SIDES was going to make my top 10 albums, but then the CD release of the album was pushed back, and I didn't get a chance to dive in as deeply as I would have needed to justify that top-10 spot. But anyway, here's the album's catchiest, sunniest song, which I like a ton.

Spiritualized: "On the Sunshine"—Pretty much classic Spiritualized, if a tad less tortured (so, good for Jason Pierce). You've got Pierce's droning vocals, the swelling guitars, the eclipsing feedback, the wild brass. My thing exactly.

St. Vincent: "Fast Slow Disco"—Annie Clark's lone full-length release this year was a slow, acoustic re-imagining of last year's Masseduction tracks, but her best work this year is in the exact opposite direction: "Fast Slow Disco," a faster, poppier, dancier, better iteration of what was already one of Masseduction's standouts. Bonus points for the excellent music video.

Underworld & Iggy Pop: "Bells & Circles"—"Losing My Edge," but ragging on Baby Boomers. Iggy Pop gives a hilarious vocal performance as a ranting, great-uncle-like character who complains that nowadays "nobody wants you to be able to do the things that make you feel good," like smoking on airplanes and sexually harassing airplane stewardesses. The lyrics turn increasingly crazed and surreal as the driving Underworld beat becomes more and more sinister. Profoundly funny and disquieting at the same time.

U.S. Girls: "Time"—It was a great year for female-fronted indie rock, and if I hadn't been such a loser listening to so much jazz, more of it would have made it onto my album list. You can't do much better than this careening closer to U.S. Girl's In a Poem Unlimited.

Kamasi Washington: "Will You Sing"—Speaking of closing tracks, here's the finale to Kamasi Washington's epic Heaven and Earth. As Washington steps further away from the Coltrane-style hard bop he cut his teeth on and more toward ornate, symphonic jazz, he's sounding more and more like Ennio Morricone, and "Will You Sing" is Washington's very own "Ecstasy of Gold."

Kanye West: "Lift Yourself"—Maybe Kanye just did it for the memes. But I'm serious when I say that this is a legitimately great piece of avant-garde hip-hop. There's a playfulness on display here, and not just with the literal scat lyrics but with how the song plays with its structure and its central soul sample in a way that feels fresh and interesting and fun. Kanye is at the nexus of a lot of what is terrible about 2018, and his position there is almost entirely his own fault, which is both infuriating and dispiriting (and worrying, given his recent statements about his stance toward his medication). But I am at least grateful that he left us this before he completely jumped off the deep end.

Mini-Reviews for July 23 - 29, 2018

So long, summer—I'll miss ya.

Movies

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

The obvious thing to talk about here are the action sequences, which are great. That's not surprising; the last three Mission: Impossible films have established this now over-twenty-year-old series as one that consistently delivers some of the most exciting and refined action setpieces in modern English-language filmmaking, and it's more a pleasant affirmation than an outright shock that Fallout has probably the best ensemble of setpieces in the whole franchise (though I still think that Ghost Protocol's Burj Khalifa scene is the high-water mark for the series). More surprising, though, is how Fallout structures its plot as a procession of increasingly dire trolley-problem situations, which gives a decent weight and thoughtfulness to the characters and their decisions, especially considering that this is a franchise that in the past hasn't exactly thrived on narrative thoughtfulness. I mean, it isn't First Reformed or anything, but especially for the kind of wide-release popcorn flick that it is, Fallout is strikingly concerned with the ethics of violence and the human cost of the usual action movie mayhem, which is something I wasn't at all expecting. It's the best Mission: Impossible movie yet, one of the most exciting theater experiences I've had this year, and likely the best American action movie until the next Mission: Impossible movie comes out. Grade: A

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

The central gimmick—the entire movie on a computer desktop!—isn't as fresh as in the original (and certainly not after having seen The Den just a day prior), and Dark Web isn't really scary at all either. This is definitely a slasher, but instead of dead teenagers in service of horror, the movie becomes something of a very twisty, very dense techno-thriller with more plot than I've seen in a so-called horror movie in years. This is, frankly, the best thing about the movie, the way the plot reveals rule after rule until by the end, it's magnificently complex for the kind of movie this is—it kept me guessing, at least. The movie also fills its cast with some shockingly competent protagonists, which makes Dark Web less of the usual schadenfreude of watching stupid, mean people meet karmic deaths (a feeling which the original Unfriended definitely traffics in) and more of a kind of sad, nihilistic exercise in watching people being crushed by powers far beyond anything they could hope to overcome. Which... I mean, you read the news. Grade: B

The Tribe (Плем'я) (2014)

The letter grade above a D is thanks to the craft and audacity of the conceit—a movie with no audible dialogue (instead featuring Ukrainian Sign Language), told through extremely long takes that emphasize body language and the staging of character action within the shots. It's a fascinating experiment that would be extremely effective if it weren't in service of a hollow and desperately edgy tale about how teens murder and rape each other. Go back to the '90s, dude. Grade: C-

The Den (2013)

A sort of proto-Unfriended, with the action of the movie taking place entirely on computer screens. But instead of Skype, Facebook, and the other familiar environments of Unfriended, The Den goes basically for the jugular of internet terribleness, making its central device a Chatroulette clone. By the end of the movie, the web has lead to a literal cesspool, but even prior to that, the internet media is shown to be a breeding ground of not just the beloved cat videos and silly humor that makes the internet a fun place but also the virulent sexism and violence (both verbal and physical) that has made it such a frightening and effective social force in recent years. It's way bleaker and a lot less fun than the mean-but-cathartic justice of Unfriended, and The Den isn't nearly so meticulous in its only-on-computer-screens storytelling device, cheating at least a few times. But there's an awful lot on this movie's mind, which covers a multitude of sins. Grade: B

Killer of Sheep (1978)

In some respects, this is a very immediate movie—I am watching, with little fussing, a succession of loosely connected scenes depicting the parallel lives of adults and children in 1970s Watts, LA, shot in sumptuous, grainy black and white, and to understand what is really very good about the film, all I have to do is look at the screen and watch the beautiful lyricism of these characters within their scenes within this aesthetic. At the same time, though, it's not all that immediate of a film, presenting little forward pull or conventional narrative lampposts and instead obsessing on small moments and strange (often funny) details. It's tremendous and full of life in a very down-to-earth way, but I'll probably have to watch it again to know exactly how enthusiastic I am about the collective weight of the project. (If you're interested in hearing much smarter people than I talk about this movie, you can listen to Episode 205 of the Cinematary podcast here, which I participated in). Grade: B+

Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951)

This movie ticks a lot of my boxes--religious turmoil, existential dread, nice cinematography—so I thought I'd be more into it than I ended up being. If I'm anachronistically comparing it to this film's most notable children, Winter Light and First Reformed, I guess I have to admit that I just don't find this priest's psychological turmoil nearly as soulful as either of the priests in those subsequent films, and perhaps this movie's grounding in a legitimate terror of mortality, as opposed to the heady philosophical angst of those other movies, just feels a little more terrestrial than I'm interested in for this kind of movie. But I did like it, don't get me wrong! Claude Laydu's performance is stunning, and as I said, the cinematography is super nice. Maybe I just need to watch more Bresson—this is my first of his. Grade: B

Television

Orphan Black, Season 5 (2017)

The fifth and final season of Orphan Black kind of pulls a Lost in the sense that, at a moment when it would make the most sense to be scaling back its narrative ambitions in favor of resolution, it instead spends a large piece of its (limited) time with some main characters stuck in a cult-like encampment that expands the show's mythology in convoluted, unhelpful ways. But also like Lost, Orphan Black comes back around to a truly magnificent run of episodes leading up to a series finale that rightly focuses on characters rather than going out of its way to tie up every loose end. In the end, what this series leaves us with is a compelling portrait of sisterhood and motherhood (grounded by the magnificent Tatiana Maslany) that rejects binaries and patriarchy and everything that is not an empathetic care for fellow human life, which is exactly the final bow it needed to take. I'll miss this weird, wonderful series. Grade: B+

Music

Father John Misty - God's Favorite Customer (2018)

Shrugging off the philosophical grandiosity and instrumental expansiveness of last year's Pure Comedy, Father John Misty returns with something of the photo-negative of 2015's I Love You, Honeybear—God's Favorite Customer, a record not about the intoxicating dance of true love but of the existential terror of watching that love fall to pieces. The album is a bona-fide bummer, and Josh Tillman goes to some bracingly dark places in its ten songs and 39 minutes, culminating in the exquisite, lacerating piano ballad that forms the album's penultimate track, "The Songwriter," which calls into question the very premise of writing about romance when, in fact, romance involves two people and not just the one chronicling the confessional details. "What would it sound like if you were the songwriter, and you did your living around me?" it goes. "Would you undress me repeatedly in public to show how very noble and naked you can be?" This destroys me, y'all. It's a record drenched in self-loathing and regret, and while it isn't quite free of the self-referentiality and sarcastic lyrical barbs that often turn people off the Father John Misty project ("Mr. Tillman," the second and probably weakest track, is awash in sarcasm and inside-baseball musical allusions), those features are channeled to much rawer and more emotionally immediate effect than they've been in the past. Besides, whether or not this is just shtick seems beside the point when the music makes me so weepy. Grade: A

Mini-Reviews for April 17 - 23, 2017

Y'all know what it is.

Movies

Toni Erdmann (2016)
The buzz surrounding this movie was that it's "hilarious," "absolutely nuts," and "wildly inventive" (actual pull quotes from the movie's poster), and while I won't deny that this movie is entertaining—especially for a nearly 3-hour(!) German film—but come on: Toni Erdmann is only "absolutely nuts" in the context of the soundtrackless, handheld-camera'd austerity of contemporary European neo-realism, of which Toni Erdmann totally is one for most of its lengthy runtime. The glaring exception here is a climactic scene that's too wonderful to spoil except to say that it's probably the best use of cinematic nudity in at least a decade. That moment is made all the better by the far more conventional but uncommonly moving scene that immediately follows it and provides the image for the film's poster, a perfect culmination of the father-daughter relationship that animates the best ninety percent of the film. So yes, this is a good movie, and please don't take this review otherwise—I just feel like the buzz needs to be reigned in a bit. Grade: B+

Lion (2016)
At the movie's beginning, Saroo is a five-year-old living in India; he's soon separated from his family, and inadvertently takes a train hundreds of miles from his home, where he dodges various adult predators until finally being taken into government custody and put in an orphanage. This section of the movie is great, and it lasts over 40 minutes. The problem is that this movie still has another 80 minutes to go, and those 80 minutes take place in Saroo's adulthood as he searches for his hometown and his family. It's not an inherently bad idea, and given that it's based on a true story, there probably isn't much the film could have done differently, plot-wise. But Saroo is using Google Earth to locate his village, and this is a very bad thing—not for Saroo, who (spoilers? it's basically the entire reason this was made into a movie) finds his town—but the movie itself, which essentially becomes a very dramatic version of watching a guy click around on a laptop, with just a touch of Rooney Mara thrown in for flair. It's a film impeccably crafted throughout, both visually and aurally (the score is magnificent), which is why I'm rating it as highly as I am, and what the movie is dramatizing is a truly wonderful inspirational story. But as any spouse of a grad student (you're looking at one) can tell you, computer research just isn't interesting to watch if you aren't participating. Thank goodness for the rest of the movie. Grade: B

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
This Persian-American vampire movie is very stylish and cool, as all vampire movies should be. There isn't a lot of substance to it—the characters are sketched so broadly that it's occasionally difficult to tell them apart, and the themes of gender (the vampire is female and kills some greasy dudes, so, you know, feminism) are at least as broad—but that's by design. This isn't a movie that wants to be grand or big; it's a movie content with the little things, like moody b&w cinematography and chilling to cool music. I can respect that. Grade: B

Alien: Resurrection (1997)
In a franchise noted for icky body horror, it's worth noting that Alien: Resurrection is the series' grossest entry by a large margin. The other films have chest-bursting and blood/guts, sure, but do they have a guy's head being bitten in half? A room of demon-spawn fail experiment grotesqueries preserved in transparent vats of urine-like liquid? A creature sucked through a tiny hole in the ship that slowly strips it of flesh and skin as it pulls the poor thing into space all spaghetti-like? I think not. There are quibbles to make with the script and characters (though as always, the reveal of who is and isn't a robot is great), and apparently Joss Whedon was upset at the implementation of his screenplay. But when it's a movie as wall-to-wall disgustingly entertaining as this, who cares? Grade: B+

Books

Surviving Nashville by Stacy Barton (2007)
A brisk short story collection about Southern women: lots of screen doors, Ma's cooking, ice tea, furtive sexual encounters—you know the drill. It's very MFA-feeling, which can be both good and bad, and there are some pretty good stories in here (my favorites are the folk-tale-esque "On Tuesdays" and the religiously tragic "Hail, Mary"). But there are also a lot of stories that either don't have a lot of heft or mine such already thoroughly mined themes (housewifery is oppressive, etc.) that there's really not much left for Barton to carry away. Grade: C+




Music

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy (2017)
A lot of people (myself included) have assumed Josh Tillman's Father John Misty moniker to be a joke persona steeped in irony and affectation, and no doubt that has been true at various times in the past few years. But between 2015's I Love You, Honeybear and this year's sprawling, definitely overlong Pure Comedy, the FJM identity also seems like a device for trenchant self-reflection and self-critique. Take "Ballad of the Dying Man," one of the album's best and sharpest tracks, in which the eponymous dying man spends his last moments in self-important narcissism online—interesting, coming from a singer-songwriter with a habit of dropping in on the comments sections of his own Stereogum reviews (with a username, no less, of "Dying Man," created when he forgot the password for his old "J Tillman" account [yes, I might spend too much time reading the comments on Stereogum]). "Leaving LA," the album's meandering 13-minute centerpiece, is more directly critical, calling Misty/Tillman "another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously." And yes, for all the jokes and quips on the album (and there are quite a few, many of them excellent), he absolutely takes himself seriously. Much as Tillman sneaks in some introspective barbs, this is very much one of those albums: about politics, about the state of the world, about God, etc. "Total Entertainment Forever," another of the album's best and brightest, describes an Infinite-Jest-ish world in which humans consume entertainment so voraciously that they cease to consume anything else and simply die; "When the God of Love Returns There'll Be Hell to Pay" is venom-filled critique of God Himself and the way that He structured the world. Your tolerance for this probably depends on how much you enjoy John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the work of Randy Newman (two obvious thematic and musical influences on the record) and how much you'll allow the frankly gorgeous guitar/piano arrangements to offset the bitterness of Misty's deeply cynical lyrics. There's an undeniable "Josh discovers Christopher Hitchens for the first time" vibe to a lot of the album's discussion of politics and religion, and on the whole, the perspective displayed here is one of trendy nihilism with commentary that's more blunt than insightful. But I dunno—there's something really cathartic in this sort of blunt contempt, and in a political season when I feel myself angrier and more frustrated by the day, I savor that catharsis, even when it comes by way of analysis with which I have strong reservations or even just I flat-out disagree. Plus, there's always the beautiful instrumentation and Tillman's unparalleled ability to turn a phrase, even if I tap out of the actual content. Not bad. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for August 8 - 14, 2016

Read on. Nothing to see up here.

Movies

Miles Ahead (2015)
In true jazz spirit, Miles Ahead takes the component parts of an existing genre—in this case, the biopic—and chops it up in order to spin something new from the pieces. This is, ostensibly, a Miles Davis biopic, and we're certainly treated to a lot of the familiar biopic tropes: copious recreation of Davis records (the film is scored gorgeously by Robert Glasper), through-the-ages snapshots of Davis career highlights, an ill-fated romance. But not only are these moments thread, stream-of-consciousness style, through a 1970s-set framing device that occupies the lion's share of the movie, it's a framing device that very obviously and intentionally is composed of things that never happened. The movie might feint toward providing an origin-story for some of Davis's seminal work, but for about 70% of its runtime, it's mainly concerned with some weird, alternate-universe version of Miles Davis running around with a gun trying to get his session tape for Agharta back from some low-level crooks. It's weird, it's funny, it's a cock-eyed commentary on the myth-making that comes with being a once-in-a-generation musician, and it's full of awesome music. Miles ahead of other biopics, that's for sure. Grade: A-

Cooley High (1975)
As the black answer to American Graffiti, the differences between Cooley High and Lucas's earlier film are stark: it's not just teenaged ennui and go-nowhere small town life on the line here; its the ability of these characters to navigate the balance between their own youthful indiscretions and the hostility of the real world. So when the meandering occasions of the story inevitably pull tight into a plot in the film's final fifteen-ish minutes, the results are dark and Greekly tragic, retribution for things the cast of American Graffiti would have merely gotten fun hi-jinks out of hitting these black, Chicago teens with disproportional force. The film is far from perfect: the comedic first half isn't nearly as effective as the dramedic-to-straight-drama of the film's latter stages, and the female characters are slight enough that it's hard to shake the feeling that the film at least identifies a little with the casual sexism of the male protagonists. But it's an immensely fascinating film nonetheless, and one that hides a magnificent emotional wallop around the corner. Grade: B+

Inside Man (2006)
A meat-and-potatoes thriller given just enough of director Spike Lee's idiosyncratic touch—characters addressing the camera, film stock changes, that part where Denzel Washington appears stationary as the rest of the world moves by—that you don't really care that it's only meat and potatoes you're eating. It's solidly written, convincingly acted, and fun to watch, even if by the end it's never really established itself as anything all that special. Grade: B

Proxy (2013)
This is trash, through and through: Proxy's plot involves obsession, perversion, a fully-explicit C-section of a still birth, a jealous and abusive lesbian lover, and not one but three gory deaths by shotgun. Please note that trash is not necessarily meant to denigrate here: cinema has a rich tradition of trash masterpieces. There's something undeniably transcendent about the sheer depths of old-fashioned, exploitation-style tastelessness that the film plumbs, and you know who you are if this is going to be your jam. For my part, I love a good, twisty, trashy thriller enough to appreciate those aspects here while not quite being gung-ho enough about the exploitation to ignore the painfully stiff acting, showy-for-showiness's sake cinematography, and troubling political subtext. Grade: B-

Television

Superstore, Season 1 (2015-16)
I didn't pick up many new shows during the last TV season, but I'm glad I finally caught up with this one. It's a charming, sharp sitcom, and even though, as a former Kroger employee, I'm maybe uniquely positioned to be captivated by its grocery-store setting (although it's more along the lines of Costco than a true grocery store), I'd also venture to claim that it's got something for everyone, too. The humor is both warm and absurd (the gently funny interactions between the main cast are punctuated by wordless, incongruous footage from around the store, such as a pantsless man in the bathroom) without ever becoming cloying or acidic. The pilot is weak, the only place where the show breaks toward unmitigated and unearned sentiment, but the rest of the season is breezily good, especially a fantastic late-season episode involving the cast spending the night in the store that seems to hint that this show has not just breezy goodness but actual greatness in it. Looking forward to the second season starting this week. Grade: B+

Music

Father John Misty - Fear Fun (2012)
Last year's I Love You, Honeybear is one of the great singer-songwriter albums in recent memory. Fear Fun, the 2012 debut of the Father John Misty persona (Josh Tillman actually has a slew of albums as "himself" before becoming this bearded, social media sage, none of which I have heard), is not. Lacking Honeybear's swooning idealism and romance that conflicted compellingly with Misty's innate irony, Fear Fun is merely ironic, which, especially after "Holy Shit" and "Bored in the USA," just doesn't seem like enough. That's not to say it's bad: Tillman's voice remains like honey, and the psych-country stylings of the music itself are great fun. It's also frequently hilarious, evoking Bob Dylan's sillier absurd moments (one song is even called "Misty's Nightmares 1 & 2," which has to be a direct allusion to the similarly weird and joking "Bob Dylan's Dream" series on Zimmerman's '60s albums); the best of the lot is "Tee Pees 1-12," which begins with the lines, "Well, you took me to the movies; you took me to the dance/You took me to your warehouse tied up in the back of your van." So I guess I can't complain too much, especially considering that this is Honeybear's predecessor. I guess I can forgive an artist some artistic growth. Grade: B

Favorite Music of 2015

Due to my new teaching job (so apparently teaching is time-consuming, guys; who'da thunk?), I haven't posted on this blog in a while, and my post frequency probably won't be much better next spring either. But dang it, it's the end of the year, and far be it from me to shy away from posting my annual thoughts on the music and movies that affected me most over the past twelve months. I'm still working through a lot of films from 2015 (that post will be coming much closer to January), but I think I've listened to all the music I'm going to have time to process until the new year. As always, here are my favorite albums plus a handful of fantastic songs not represented by these records. Feel free to leave your own favorite records/songs in the comments! I always love new music suggestions and/or conversations about new music.

Favorite Albums:

1. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly
good kid, m.A.A.d. city could have happened anytime in the past 20 years, but it's without question that TPaB is a 2015 record in the most vital way possible. At a time when pop culture seems determined to ignore the most turbulent era since the '60s, Kendrick delivers a blistering state of the union address that also, miraculously, becomes the most intimate musical statement of 2015. Here's the thing, though: it's not just the politics or the confessional lyrics or the gorgeous jazz-fusion instrumentation or Tupac or the fact that "Alright" became a black protest anthem; it's that Kendrick did it all and still managed to craft the tightest, most musically innovative album in recent memory.

2. Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear
An album about "true love" as told by the sage alter-ego of indie darling J. Tillman should be insufferable. Admittedly, the Father John Misty persona often feels like an exercise in "I don't even know anymore." Not that it matters; the whip-sharp lyrics are reason enough to adore this album. But even considering the layers of irony strengthens the album's central theme: value defies reason. "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity, but what I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me," Misty sings, and it's the most compelling way to say "follow your heart" I've heard in a while. So too the music: maybe it's all ironic facade, but does it matter if it moves you?

3. Joanna Newsom: Divers
It would be the height of pretension to claim that I understand this album. I do not. It's a concept album, something about the circular nature of time and death and something something. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, or maybe I'm just not the right person to understand Newsom's allusive writing; I've never been very good at James Joyce either. But Joyce isn't set to music. Comprehensible or not, Divers sounds gorgeous. Not the least of the instruments is Newsom's voice, which animates the lyrics with sonic (if not semantic) truth. Any album that manages not to only use the word "Ozymandian" but find its rhyme is going to rank pretty high in my book.

4. Viet Cong: Viet Cong
Make that The Band Formerly Known as Viet Cong, since these folks (understandably) decided to change their name after considering the social implications of VC. Before the name change, though, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the band for a parody: a post-punk group with an inflammatory political name who end an album of dark, brooding music with an 11-minute song called "Death"—it's a veritable pileup of '80s indie clichés. The album is a testament to the power of songcraft over innovation. Just take that finale, "Death," probably my favorite song of the year: there's not an original idea in it, but when you hear how savage, how massive it is, you'll forget every precedent.

5. Wilco: Star Wars
Some critics are calling it Wilco's return to form. That's silly—not because Star Wars isn't Wilco in top form (it definitely is) but because that ignores 2011's even-better The Whole Love. Let's not pit one against the other, though, since they're clearly artistically distinct statements: in contrast to The Whole Love's lush studio detail, Star Wars exudes a playful, tossed-off quality that recalls Wilco's live shows. In fact, their performances of back-half Being There tracks from I saw them live in Memphis a few years ago were a good approximation of what coalesces here: the immediacy of their '90s work filtered through the grizzled maturity of post-millennial Wilco. Great stuff.

6. Kamasi Washington: The Epic
I'm no expert on jazz, but I know enough to recognize that this record isn't innovative—it's merely very, very good. "Merely," as if being very, very good is something to sneeze at. This is jazz maximalism at its finest, and I do mean maximalism: a nearly three-hour record here, filled with furious, spit-flicking sax from Kamasi. The ghost of Coltrane looms large on this album, and that's awesome; I love Coltrane. Therefore I love Kamasi Washington. But it's not just his prodigious, skill that makes this album tick; it's how there's room for a 13-minute riff on The Magnificent Seven; it's how the sax fury is punctuated by unabashedly old-fashioned jazz vocals: all the comforts of home.

7. Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff
More jazz stuff. It's good. Real good. This is my first experience with Vijay Iyer, the prolific (and I do mean prolific—just check out this guy's discography) New York pianist who's been working as band leader since the '90s. I can't comment on how this record compares to that enormous body of work, but I can say this: Break Stuff manages that neat trick of being soft piano music without lapsing into background muzak. With the brooding, minimalist intensity of original tracks like "Hood," this album commands attention, then rewards with surprising reinventions of classics by Monk, Strayhorn, and Kamasi's best bud himself, Coltrane. Nothing broken here.

8. Björk: Vulnicura
It's entirely possible (even likely) that that's a vagina on Björk's outfit. That's just vintage Björk cover art shenanigans. In fact, "vintage Björk" is how most critics have been discussing Vulnicura, comparing it to her mid-career highlight, Homogenic. That comparison is certainly apt, although it also ignores just how fresh this record sounds. This is the melodic clarity of Homogenic filtered through a lens of avant-garde and modern classical, as if Björk's heartbreak—following her separation from longtime partner Matthew Barney—has fractured the songwriting into prismatic shards she doesn't know how to reassemble: the most beautiful sadness you'll hear all year.

9. Carly Rae Jepsen: Emotion
My love for Carly Rae Jepsen is no secret. Make fun all you want; her music is still a minor pop miracle. At its core, Emotion is Jespen doing that same "Call Me Maybe" thing: crafting catchy songs that communicate deceptively simple sentiments from seldom-explored corners of the Top-40 emotional spectrum. As much as the word "adolescent" is thrown at her music, the year's most mature pop lyric comes from her magnificent closer, "When I Needed You," where Carly sings, "Sometimes I wish that I could change, but not for me, for you, so we could be together forever, but I know that I won't change for you 'cause where were you for me when I needed someone?" Wonderful.

10. Rachel Grimes: The Clearing
Of all the albums on this list, The Clearing is the one whose cover art does the best job at evoking the record's music: you look at that ethereal, spare cover, and you've got a great idea of the sounds you're in for. Rachel Grimes delivers an utterly hypnotic cross pollination of post rock and modern classical. "Delicate" is the wrong word for it: these pieces are ghostly, indistinct, occasionally threatening shapes that congeal from that cover-art mist until some sound or a breath melts them back into the air. The music doesn't go anywhere; it's nonlinear and amorphous in a way that I imagine that could be frustrating to some. But whatever. I think it's gorgeous.


Great 2015 Songs Not on These Albums:

Adele: "I Miss You"—My relationships with Adele songs come in waves: I like them, I grow sick of them, I rediscover them a while later and find new things to like, and so on. I'm at varying stages of this cycle for each song on 25, Adele's excellent and already overplayed record from a few weeks ago. I'm still in the like (even love) phase for "I Miss You," though. It's Adele's wager at making a Florence+The Machine song, and it's at least as good as anything from Florence's album earlier this year.

Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment: "Sunday Candy"—Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment's full-length, Surf, is warm but inconsistent. The album's standout, "Sunday Candy," is neo-soul perfection. It's effervescent video is even better. Chance the Rapper may be becoming rap's resident cornball, but who cares when he's helping to craft this sort of nirvana?

Dread: "Can You Hear Me Dying in the Backyard?"—Somewhere out in the wilds of Bandcamp, a little band named Dread created a concept EP about The Sopranos. Like, the TV show. And it's very good! Especially this song, which recounts one of the more existentially harrowing moments in the series's final season (Sopranos aficionados can probably guess what it is based on the title). This project sounds like a joke on paper, but in practice, it's an engaging blast of lo-fi post-punk.

David Bowie: "★"—aka "Blackstar," the 10-minute jazz-rock-acid freakout from Bowie's upcoming 25th studio album of the same name. This is the awesomeness of David Bowie: the dude's about to turn 69, and he's still making music that's stranger and more astral than most musicians a third of his age. Also, he apparently listens to Kendrick Lamar.

Missy Elliot: "WTF (Where They From)"—This song almost made this post on the strength of its video alone, surely the best non-Kendrick-Lamar-affiliated music video of the year. But don't let statements like that distract from the fact that, video aside, this is a really fantastic song. And you don't realize just how fantastic until you get to "Sticking out your tongggggggggue." Who else but Missy Elliot would make one of the catchiest hooks of the year out of a bunch of consonants?

Roman GianArthur: "NO SURPR:SES"—Unsurprisingly, the best song from OK Computer becomes the best song on an EP of R&B Radiohead covers. Bonus points for the Janelle Monáe verse.

Savages: "The Answer"—As if there weren't already enough reasons to be excited about a new Savages album, the first single to drop from next January's Adore Life plays up the metal influences that helped make their debut feel so colossal. It rocks, y'all.

Shamir: "Call It Off"—Lots of sweat, tears, and anguish led to the decision to leave Shamir's infectious debut, Ratchet, out of my top 10 albums this year, so take this song as a consolation prize. Well, a consolation prize to a consolation prize: the album's best song, "On the Regular" was actually released last year, so this is the next best song to qualify for this year's post. Ranking politics aside, "Call It Off" is still a fantastic showcase for what Shamir does best: the slinky funk-fusion instrumentation, the nimble melodies, and of course the heaping helping of personality.

Joan Shelley: "Over and Even"—Evoking the spacier moments from Vashti Bunyan or Joni Mitchell, Joan Shelley delivers a gorgeous four minutes of spare, cosmic folk music.

Sleater-Kinney: "Price Tag"—Never change, Sleater-Kinney. Not that change seems likely. These gals are as fierce as ever, as evidenced by this blistering opening track from their stellar comeback album. That they're going after our culture's fetish for low retail costs (yes, that's an exciting topic!) is just gravy.

Steven Wilson: "Ancestral"—Steven Wilson's Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a spotty album of neo-prog revival, but when it's good, it's good. And it's really, really good in "Ancestral."

Kanye West: "All Day"—Still waiting on that new album, Ye. Hopefully it's as good as this track.

White Stag: "Rhythms of Clockwork"—Local Knoxville pride. The city has a budding prog scene that's inventive and interesting, and this, a 12-minute standalone opus, is the most exciting track to come out of that area. It's a huge step forward for White Stag, and I'm really looking forward to what they do next.


And that's all, folks! Don't forget to leave your own favorite music of the year!

Until next time.