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 October 22 - 28, 2018

Rev yous.

Movies

Halloween (2018)

It's about as fan-servicey as the trailers promised, which is to say: very. At times, the film tries to say something about the fundamental magnetism of Michael Myers (a nice dovetail with the fan service, admittedly), which would be interesting if the movie didn't keep getting distracted by weird comic cul-de-sacs and some fairly ridiculous gore. David Gordon Green directs handsomely, and the cinematography is generally very good—if a bit ruined by the overzealous editing à la last year's It, and some of the directorial flourishes feel more like obligatory "cool" than anything truly inspired (one long take in particular feels very much like someone saw that episode of True Detective and was like, "Bro, that's sick"). Still, it looks nice, and that niceness is complemented by a solid finale. I'll cop to having seen this in a bad mood, so perhaps I should recuse myself. But I thought this was aggressively mediocre. I guess when you get right down to it, I shouldn't have been expecting anything more than I usually expect from slasher sequels (even ones forty years delayed/retconned), but at least a lot of those had the good sense to be completely loony in their mediocrity. Grade: B-

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018)

Gus Van Sant adapts John Callahan's memoir into something of a Gus Van Sant's greatest hits collage—mostly, a fusion of the counter-culture, drug-addled meandering of Drugstore Cowboy with the therapeutic schmaltz of Good Will Hunting. And it works really well on a moment-by-moment basis (both of Jack Black's appearances are among Black's best cinema in years), even if the whole package doesn't exactly hang together as something special. Which is I guess how it usually goes with greatest hits collections. Grade: B

Southside with You (2016)

"Before Sunrise, but it's Barrack Obama and Michelle Robinson's first date" is a supremely kooky premise that this film plays entirely straight. It's a profoundly weird experience to try to engage sincerely with the emotional arc of this movie knowing that one of them will eventually become the leader of the free world, and the chasm between the very light, very sweet text of the film and the overwhelmingly weight of its historical context creates a cognitive dissonance that's like a significantly more intense version of the way The End of the Tour exploited the collision of the popularly imagined David Foster Wallace with acted simulacra of that image. Here, there's the obviously pandering liberal vision of Obama as the great man who, according to the film, can on a whim rouse community organizers with an impromptu speech or make old white people comfortable with the ending of Do the Right Thing crashing into a youthful, horny, and honestly kind of douchey Young Barrack not that far removed from the pretentious navel-gazer of Ethan Hawke's Jesse in Before Sunrise, just with a bit more political soulfulness thrown in. The movie makes it utterly impossible to set aside your own opinions of Obama the Political Figure while also seeming (somewhat perversely) to tease you with the prospect that this is "just" the story of two young activists falling in love. It's an interesting experiment (one—despite all this rambling—I'm not entirely convinced is intentional, but oh well) that's probably more interesting as the subject of a graduate student essay than as a viewing experience, largely due to the somewhat flatly written and only passably acted central relationship. It's not exactly uncommon knowledge, but perhaps it's taken for granted that the reason the Before movies work so well is the extreme synergy between its screenplay and its actors—it's not that Southside with You is poorly written and acted, exactly, but that crucial chemistry isn't there. Combined with the political semiotics loop-de-loops, it's hard to really get that invested but just as hard to dismiss entirely. Grade: C+

Big Eyes (2014)
I don't know how much I buy that Burton is positioning this film as a metaphor for his career, but if it is, it amusingly positions Amy Adams as '80s/'90s Burton and Christoph Waltz as 2000s-onward Burton, which feels just about right. Anyway, Big Eyes is nothing really to write home about, but it's solidly constructed (which is practically a miracle for modern-day Burton) and it's really, really nicely shot and lit—and not in that normal, post-millennium Burton way, either. Grade: B

Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から) (2002)
The opaque milkiness that water gets as it seeps from a regular drinking-water pipe through the ceiling of your home and back into your living space is particularly off-putting, as if there is something irremovably contaminated about the drywall and insulation and other structures that literally make up your home. Somehow, it is worse than lake or river water, which on a scientific level is (I imagine) significantly filthier. But to see such filth come from your own house—it makes me feel ill. Dark Water makes this essential repulsion its premise, and it's frequently horrifying. It also takes the idea of contaminated water leaking through a home to its metaphorical extreme, using that imagery to explore generational trauma (the true structural contamination of a home) and the knots that form between parent and child, knots that twist and ache and wind until it's hard to trace the linkages that separate one generation from the next. It's scary, sure, but more than anything, it's heartbreaking. Grade: B+

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

A huge step down from Dream Warriors and every Nightmare film before it, The Dream Master is when the inherent silliness of this franchise collapsed in on itself and smothered its inventive spirit. There are a few inventive moments—it's apparently going to be a franchise staple for Freddy to seduce some horny dude in a grotesque way, and there's a scene involving a waterbed here that is a decent iteration on that—but for the most part, the film is pretty tedious and rote, lacking the audacious special effects/gross-out gags or the demented sense of humor of its predecessors. It almost succeeds in becoming a sort of unintentional comedy (the film's idea of literary academic debate is, "Kafka and Goethe have never been irreconcilable to me," which is surely a Mad Libs creation), but ultimately, the funniest thing in the movie is its recycling of Annie Hall's penis envy joke, which probably speaks more to the creative drought here than anything. Grade: C

Television

Party Down, Season 1 (2009)
Though it was the American version of The Office that was at its popular height in 2009 when this short-lived but cultishly beloved comedy about a team of caterers debuted, it's the UK iteration of the show that Party Down draws most from, using that original series's borderline-cruel well of darkly observed human microdrama and the cosmic irony inherent in being stuck in a job that was nobody's first choice—there's a real sense of tragedy to these characters that is so sharply and agonizingly realized that it's impossible not to think of Gervais and Merchant's early-millennium masterpiece. Even if you're only familiar with the American Office, though, you'll recognize the DNA, from the socially clueless boss who overcompensates for his flaws to the point of dysfunction to the sardonic/wistful will-they-won't-they couple to the insufferable and rude coworkers. That isn't to say that Party Down isn't its own thing; the catering conceit allows for some pretty great "job of the week" features (catering a rich kid's yacht birthday! catering a libertarian rally!), and Ken Marino's Ron is a fresh, utterly sad spin on the "awkward/offensive boss" trope. The cast as a whole is excellent, in fact, starring all sorts of late-2000s comedy luminaries such as Lizzy Caplan (of course—can we have her in every TV series from now on? Please and thank you!), Jane Lynch (whom the show loses to Glee near the end of this first season, which... *shakes fist*), and Adam Scott. The whole package probably isn't going to blow your mind—due to the aforementioned similarities with The Office as well as its unfortunate propensity for making homosexuality the butt of its jokes (it's, like, self-aware, but it's still operating on that late-2000s assumption that if something is "gay" it's inherently funnier, which is blegh)—but it's a solid and sometimes hilarious little half-hour tragicomedy. Grade: B+

Books

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The seventh book of the Series of Unfortunate Events series represents something of a turning point in these books in a number of ways—not the least of which is that Count Olaf no longer needs a disguise, and (in the typical cynical fashion of this series) not because of any particularly uplifting victory by the Baudelaire siblings but because a typo in the newspaper leads all the other characters to belief that the villain is "Count Omar." It's also the book in which the Baudelaires begin to have more autonomy, since they get to pick where Mr. Poe sends them (the titular village), as they think the village's name—abbreviated V.F.D. on a map—will help them solve some of the series's ongoing mysteries and find the Quagmires. This is also the book in which the cruel cosmic joke of "V.F.D." comes to the fore, and the sheer accumulation of things that V.F.D. could stand for becomes something of a sick, postmodern joke—V.F.D. on the map, it turns out, stands for "Village of Fowl Devotees." The essential absurdity of the Baudelaires' universe becomes more and more apparent at the same time that their agency increases, and the series begins to modify its thesis from "the world is a cruel and absurd place that is incompatible with ideas of justice or equity" to "the world is a cruel and absurd place made even more so by the individual actions of autonomous individuals," an idea reflected not just by the Baudelaires' frustrated attempts to own their own destiny but also by the byzantine proliferation of rules that the Village of Fowl Devotees has put into place—laws and rules being perhaps the most acute way that a free people make the world a maze of absurdity. It's all very darkly funny, but it's also, more so than any other of the Series of Unfortunate Events thus far, crushingly sad—not just in the formulaic "foiled attempt at victory" that all the books have leaned into but also in the minutiae recorded of these frustrations. In what is without a doubt the saddest moment of the series so far, Klaus realizes, when he and his siblings are at their most despairing, that it is his birthday, and the book takes a few pages to mull over the chasm between what Klaus's previous expectations for this birthday and the reality of it. It's uncharacteristic for the series to languish over little character moments like this, and when it does, it's a punch to the stomach. Grade: A-

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket (2001)
The Hostile Hospital continues the series's subversion of its own tropes that The Vile Village began—this time, forcing the Baudelaires to disguise themselves instead of Count Olaf (although Olaf also disguises himself, too). It also extends the previous book's exploration of individual autonomy to pose ethical questions about what it is that truly makes a person's decisions "evil"—do the ends justify the means? should a pure motivation be a factor? does the way that the universe's absurdity limits one's viable options change the way actions must be evaluated on a moral level? This is only accentuated by the increased visibility of Lemony Snicket as not just the book's author but also a character (a character who has perhaps committed questionable actions himself). It's always been clear that these books were postmodern metafiction, but as the series gears up for its back half, the precise nature of its postmodernism and its metafiction is snapping into focus. The Hostile Hospital is not nearly as biting or clever as The Ersatz Elevator, nor is it as sad as its immediate predecessor, but it's still no slouch. I can't believe I never read these books when I was in middle school. I would have dug them so much. Grade: B+

The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket (2002)
Like The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival is more of an extension of the ideas and plots of the previous few books than it is anything new of its own. Back again are the plot subversions of having the Baudelaires, not Olaf, in disguise; returning is the ouroboros of "V.F.D."; here are the same questions of freedom and one's own responsibility for one's actions (there's a particularly violent and horrifying iteration of this question at the book's finale, rivaling the infamous Aunt Josephine death by leeches in The Wide Window as the series's most grisly moment). But, as formulaic as this series can get, these ideas still feel fresh, if not quite as exciting as when they showed up in The Ersatz Elevator and The Vile Village. Plus, the book ends on an especially nasty and unfortunate riff on the "suddenly tragic ending" thing that this series loves, which is, even in a book (and series) full of mean shocks, still pretty shocking. Grade: B+

Music

Let's Eat Grandma - I'm All Ears (2018)
Let's Eat Grandma are, in most respects, yet another piece of the current wave of female-led, emotionally forthright, retro-curious, future-focused indie rock that's been dominating the game for a few years now. What sets this band apart from Snail Mail and Mitski and their other peers in this wave, though, is a deeply atmospheric and even goth spaciousness to their music; listening to I'm All Ears feels a lot like listening to classic The Cure or Echo & the Bunnymen filtered through a distinctly millennial sensibility, and that's probably intentional—surely it's no accident that the excellent 11-minute closing track is called "Donnie Darko," name-dropping that ur-text in post-millennium appropriation of '80s goth rock. These folks aren't copycats, though, and as much as the album evokes its 30-years-prior ancestors, the music itself is as fresh and inventive as you would want a 2018 indie rock release to be, not just in the spaced-out, epic closer but throughout the album with the likes of the high melodrama of "Snakes & Ladders" and the strutting synth-pop of "Hot Pink." I've not listened to the band's 2016 debut, but that one would have to be quite an album for I'm All Ears to come anywhere near to being a sophomore slump. It's one of the strongest releases of the year. Grade: A-