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 April 23 - 29, 2018

Yo, people, there are only TWO DAYS LEFT TO VOTE ON THE SUMMER PROJECT. If you haven't already done that, do so!

Movies

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Wes Anderson's latest is his weakest in quite some time (probably since The Darjeeling Limited, though it's a significant step above his career low, The Life Aquatic), but it has its typical Wes-Andersonian pleasures: its fussy precision, its deadpan dialogue, its cast. It has a few flaws that feel uncharacteristic of Anderson's usual efficiency, most notably the character of Tracy (I'm not sure why we needed a white character in this Japan-set story) and the gender dynamics in general (the female characters are so underwritten that I have to wonder why they're even there in the first place). Even laying aside those critiques, there's no denying that this film is minor—there's nothing of the epic sweep of The Grand Budapest Hotel, for example, or the painfully observed family dynamics of The Royal Tenenbaums or Fantastic Mr. Fox. It's basically just a story about dogs and why people love dogs; while I don't actually love dogs (I know, I know), I can appreciate what this movie is going for, but I can also observe that what it's doing is especially small-scale and somewhat silly. The movie at least has the decency to depict its small-scale silliness in some truly excellent animation, though. Its stop-motion feels less homegrown than that of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the increased sophistication gives this movie a fluidity and an attention to detail that's never not captivating on a visual level. So if nothing else, we at least got what is likely to be the best animation in any American film this year. Grade: B

Zama (2017)
If Barry Lyndon were just a touch more surreal and set in Argentina, you'd have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this movie right up until the third act blows any previous expectations to very small bits. As with The Headless Woman, I suspect this movie will improve on rewatch, when I won't be so concerned with keeping up with character names and worrying which parts are intentionally confusing and which parts are just confusing because I couldn't keep character names right. But even now, with first-watch levels of comprehension, this is a rich movie in both aesthetics and ideas, one that I'll be rolling around in my head for a while. Come for the sumptuous period detail and brutal skewering of European colonialism, stay for the hypnotic sound design and llama photo bomb. Grade: A-

Hostiles (2017)
Remember that song "Savages" in Disney's Pocahontas that's terrible because it's all like, "But Native Americans and European colonizers were both equally bad"? This is basically the feature-length version of that (in that the movie flatters modern viewers with easy platitudes—this time about how the genocide of Native Americans was just an outcropping of the hierarchical structures of violence within the idea of government or whatever ["I'm a good guy, I'm just doing my job"]), only I guess writer/director Scott Cooper couldn't secure the rights from Disney, so they had to tweak the title just a tad. Disney sure is stingy with their intellectual property; makes you wonder who the real hostile is! Grade: D+

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)
There's probably someone out there who'll hang me out to dry for saying this, but the Star Wars prequels' use of green screen and CG as a sort of futurist, deliberately nonrealistic merging of rear projection and matte painting was legitimately visionary and one of the more interesting aesthetic advancements of the past couple decades of blockbuster filmmaking. And here's Sky Captain, nearly a year prior to the release of Revenge of the Sith, beating Lucas at his own game, not just on the technological level but also in its appropriation of decades-old pulp tropes. The movie imagines, rather breathtakingly, a huge (and entirely green-screen-driven) world that's something like the mashing together of Metropolis, Buck Rogers, and the 1927 silent feature Wings, creating, like Lucas did for both of his Star Wars trilogies, a historically grounded but technologically modern pulp sci-fi idiom. Where the movie stumbles is in basically everything else, though none of it is catastrophic. Unlike Star Wars, the action scenes are disappointingly perfunctory, and the movie exhausts its whole bag of visual tricks by the end of the first act. And then there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who, while never exactly a riveting presence, flounders in any attempt to breathe life into the musty female archetype she's given, though I suppose the true fault goes to the screenplay for writing an archetype that musty to begin with. All that said, it's a completely fascinating movie with lots of weird corners and decisions—an alternate history not just for its steampunk postwar plot but also for the way it posits a modern cinema in which everyone else found Lucas's green screen art as engaging as I now do. Grade: B+

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
We're long past the era in which having a female protagonist who swears and talks frankly about sex is anything close to groundbreaking, and even in 2001, Bridget Jones's Diary seems to be hanging on the coattails of Sex and the City. Where the movie still feels fresh (ish) is in its depiction of women navigating the masculine-enabling power dynamics of the workplace and dating scene, which is, after all, more in line with this movie's Jane Austen roots (it's based—loosely—on Pride and Prejudice). It's not exactly #MeToo conscious (there's a moment where a woman's boss jokes about sexually harassing her that's played very much as a haha comedy moment instead of a cringe comedy moment), and when you get right down to it, this movie isn't ultimately saying a ton that a lot of other movies haven't. But it has moments of sharpness, and although the rest of the cast is kind of hit-or-miss (Colin Firth is particularly inert), Zellweger has probably never been better in a role than she is here. Grade: B-

Music

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - Landfall (2018)
Laurie Anderson teams up with Kronos Quartet for—what else?—an album of modern classical infused with mercurial electronics and haunting spoken word. It's a record-length meditation on environmental catastrophe that swings from almost mundane pieces of concrete detail ("CNN Predicts a Monster Storm," "It Twisted the Street Signs") to cosmic and even supernatural grandiosity ("Galaxies," "Gongs and Bells Sing")—all swirling around the album's eerie and elegiac 10-minute centerpiece, "Nothing Left but Their Names," in which a pitch-shifted voice reads out a meditative poem on all the animals that have gone extinct, sounding as much like a ghost as the croons of a humpback whale as it methodically takes apart, brick by brick, the idea that human experience has any centrality in the universe. Not everything on the album works; there are plenty of moments that feel overly literal or a tad too on-the-nose, and those moments usually coincide with the less interesting instrumental portions. But this album is on more than it's off, and at its very best (i.e. "Nothing Left but Their Names"), it's actually stunning. Grade: B+