25 Best Albums of 2018 (#10–1)
The king of anxiety, this generation’s MF DOOM and utopia through sonic destruction. The best music of 2018.
10. POST- Jeff Rosenstock
“Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/ Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted”
Jeff Rosenstock turned 36 back in September, either making him the eldest of elder statesmen for Millennial punks or a baby Gen Xer. I prefer to see him as the former as he’s perfected a form of pop-punk that speaks to the teeth grinding mindset of the Y-generation in the United States. In other words, he sounds damn good when screaming “we’re tired, we’re bored” ad nauseum.
And yet, for all the worry, all the dread, all the nihilism, Rosenstock closes the album by screaming “we won’t let them win/ FUCK NO.” There’s no way his hair follicles were intact after recording POST-, but Rosenstock has created something welcoming and accepting in between the waves of angst. All hail the king of anxiety.
9. Some Rap Songs- Earl Sweatshirt
“Fingers on my soul, this is 23 / Blood in the water, I was walking in my sleep / Blood on my father, I forgot another dream”
A sampled voice calls out, “Imprecise words” and we’re off into Some Rap Songs. But there are a few caveats that need to be attached, even this early. It’s not words that are imprecise, Earl’s never been one to be diffusive with his rhymes, it’s the music that’s hazy as hell. And Some Rap Songs is a misleading title. Over the course of 25 minutes, the music flows and ebbs in such a disorienting, yet natural, fashion that it feels like A Rap Song.
I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside might have had the song “Grief,” but that album was the thrashing of a young man rubbed raw with rage. Some Rap Songs, with its subdued, amorphous textures, seems like the truer document of grief. Ghosts float through the album at will, disturbing Earl’s dreams and shuddering through the beats. He was supposed to have a long-awaited visit with his absent father, South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, but the senior Kgositsile passed away before the album dropped. And the only joyous moment on Some Rap Songs comes from the summery trumpet playing of Hugh Masekela, Earl’s uncle who also passed this year.
He balances the abstract and the concrete with ease, the hearses rolling by, carrying family members as he attempts to find answers in vinyl pops and thumping beats. I Don’t Like Shit was staring at the void, Some Rap Songs hovers in the nothing, thrilling in limbo.
8. A Laughing Death in Meatspace- Tropical Fuck Storm
“And all this scot-free moralising’s got me quite demoralized”
I had the chance to interview Tropical Fuck Storm’s frontman Gareth Liddiard (coming out post-New Years). He was brilliant, caustic, friendly and had wonky thoughts on everything from Dylan to Drones to Trump. But when talking about A.I., a huge theme on A Laughing Death in Meatspace, he didn’t see the traditional Terminator apocalypse in our future. “We’ll just be redundant — we’ll be ignored to death.”
So goes the moral center of A Laughing Death in Meatspace, trying to parce together a future that no one can see and everyone claims to own. Liddiard speaks through a menagerie of cracked characters, from tech nerds escaping into the net to avoid nuclear war, the Deep Blue computer that defeated Chess Master Kasparov and a family of Australian rednecks awaiting a trial for the “wounding of a rent-a-cop.” It’s as madcapped as it sounds, rollicking with glee from set piece to set piece, making bigger and bigger explosions with each new toy. The guitars sound acid-washed, the drums crack under throbbing grooves and Liddiard seems on the edge of completely losing his mind. But in the chaos, the Aussie quartet finds a center, zen from madness. And, next to Algiers and Everything Everything, no rock has made a political statement as thoughtful and furious as A Laughing Death in Meatspace. We might be made redundant, but not Tropical Fuck Storm.
7. Dream Songs- Devon Welsh
“I am a body, stuck in a story.”
Devon Welsh has this wide-eyed, awkward intensity that screams “oh god, this guy really means everything he says.” When he coo “I will surrender, follow me now” it’s hard not to be carried along with him. The former Majical Cloudz frontman proudly carries on the emotional flood he created on those two albums, trading synths for analog instruments, and a flurry of chamber like orchestration.
Dream Songs is a remarkably vulnerable album, perhaps agressively so. When he mewls “I hope you’ll take it easy on me” to close the record, he’s on his knees, begging for a gentle touch to lead him onward. This isn’t the trap of fake-emo or pop-rap that celebrates self-destuction. Instead, it’s emotionally naked, uncomfortably, wonderfully so. Any amount of bullshit or bravado would poison Dream Songs, but there’s not a false note in the entire album.
6. Beyondless- Iceage
“Jump off the diving board and cannonball/ Into the bottom of the genetic pool”
A few years ago, I claimed that Queens of the Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork was the platonic ideal of a rock album. Well, these Danish destroyers might have a word or two in response. Beyondless is a remarkable document, the fourth excellent album in a row from Iceage and after dabbling in hardcore punk, Nick Cave dowerness and steely post-punk, they decided “hey why don’t we just do all of it?”
Each song feels like a showcase of the best bits of different rock motifs. Opener “Hurrah” is a barnburner of the finest hour, “The Day the Music Died” thrashes like a lost Stones classic, “Take it All” is U2 grandeur minus the pretension, “Pain Killer” rolls on like the Danes were playing in a New Orleans jazz hall as they set the institution ablaze — it just goes on and on. When the aliens come down and ask about this “rock ’n’ roll” thing, hand them Beyondless.
5. Hell-On- Neko Case
“The undiscovered continent/ For you to undress/ But you’ll not be my master/ You’re barely my guest”
There’s a question to be asked in the wake of Hell-On; is Neko Case channeling the natural world, or has she become its avatar? For her entire career, she’s been happiest making metaphors of tornados that spin through like a mid-life crisis. And here she’s fully embraced the scope of her voice, inhabiting the spirits of the first humans rising from African plains to animals fleeing fates of extinction.
For all that, Hell-On is Case’s most autobiographical effort, searching through lost loves, losing her house to a fire and a stalker lurking in the shadows. But the tiny details of humanity; fake IDs, lost engagement rings and forgetting to put on underwear, make the awe-inspiring moments all the more sublime. The previously mentioned undergarment mistake comes at the half way point of “Oracle of the Maritimes,” with Case swimming through a nautical dream, whose currents drag her to an old flame. “Sometimes I feel so beautiful/ So strange for a tomboy” she coos. And it’s good to be reminded that even a demigod like Case has insecurities. But, she is stronger for them. Her impossible eye for the small details, while embracing her faults and insignificance doesn’t weaken her, it empowers her.
4. Tru- Ovlov
“You lie, you cry/ And I will try to find a different way home”
For a certain subsect of rockers, the warm fuzz coming through an amp that’s dusty and broken is like being covered in Linus’ blanket. Comforting, cozy and a perfect safe place. Much of that might be cultural, punk rockers are generally in desperate need of hugs, but there’s an argument that Ovlov’s quilty tones are comforting regardless of mosh-pit resume.
And Tru is their greatest work of rock’n’roll as a bear hug and a good cry. How can a band this adorable be so massive? Cuteness is supposed to come in little boxes, with bowties and confetti, not with a wash of whirring noise that wonderfully destroys the eardrums. Yet that’s been Ovlov’s mission statement from day one: Make music that will decimate an arena while the crowd goes “aww.”
3. Paraffin- Armand Hammer
“Every victory Pyrrhic/ Every live show forget the lyric”
“You don’t work, you don’t eat” is about as stark as it comes. The twin Virgils that make of Armand Hammaer, Elucid and billy woods, are comfortable with highfalutin language, triple time rhymes and internal syllabic play that twists letters like pretzel dough, but that’s not what they’re interested in on Paraffin. This is direct, bullshitless work that paints a world of economic hurt in the plainest terms.
Over hallucinatory beats, the duo leads you down the dark alleys and trashed apartments that serve as the different circles of hell, just across the block from supposed heavens, all gated communities of course. When woods spits “Just to get to the point of the script/ Where a cop pull you over coming from your nine to five/ Inexplicably empty the clip” it’s a formality, not a horror story. “Your god is distant, your father never listened,” they later intone over a swirling mass of broken drums and cracked vocal samples here. No gods here, just guides to the underworld.
2. Knock Knock- DJ Koze
“I need a bit of light here.”
I love how Knock Knock starts like it’s going to be this big, pretentious, stately dance record. All vinyl-crackling violins, waltzing drums and well placed bass processing forth with a sense of inevitability, then a silly as hell synth swoops down and a chorus of nonsense flows forth, Walt Disney orchestrations and a sense of giddy relaxation.
That’s what Koze does, mixes the melancholy with the goofy, mars anger with splatter-paint dumbassery. Knock Knock is filled with stunningly beautiful moments, undeniable grooves, but he undercuts himself constantly, just to see if you’re paying attention. But it makes each peak all the more thrilling. The beat switch in “Illumination,” following a grief-filled meditation on a decaying relationship is my single favorite snippet of music all year. Would it have stuck out in my mind as much without the late fall blues of “My Rock” drunkenly stumbling in just a song before? I doubt it. When Knock Knock closes with “Drone Me Up, Flashy,” it’s reached a climax of nearly reverent gorgeousness. It’s a church like sanctuary, punctuated, or deflated, by singer Sophia Kennedy burbling in German like she’s about to crack a dirty joke. Koze says, live in the ambivalence, in the unknown, they have the best clubs there.
1. Konoyo- Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker’s dissertation was titled “The era of megaphonics: on the productivity of loud sound, 1880–1930.” A bit of an unassuming title for something that informed, and was molded by, one of the greatest streaks of musical accomplishment of this still fresh century. But the meat of the text is more informative, researching: “Sonic power and its ability to paralyze the body, empty the mind and even threaten life is to suggest ways in which idealist or utopian hopes were interlaced with an idea of sonic agency.” And damn if he hasn’t made album after album that has reached that utopian plain.
Usually a fairly solitary figure, Hecker teamed up with the Tokyo Gakuso, an ensemble that plays gagaku, a classical form of Japanese music that translates roughly to “elegant music.” Notice it’s not “pretty” or “beautiful” music. There are so many other implications to elegant that Gakuso and Hecker explore. Hecker creates sheer, overwhelming passages of noise that cohallese into something transcendent. There is a mournfulness in every note, the live instrumentation and Hecker’s fitzing electronics attempting to understand, then dance with each other.
There is a moment, late in the album, where the swirl of flutes, chimes and synthesizers all spin together. In a breathtaking, incomprehensible show of production mastery, they form a sonic tunnel. In the space of headphones, it sounds like its ushering us on, or opening into another world, as comforting as it is mournful. It is unlike anything I’ve heard this year, perhaps this decade. This is an album about passing to another place. Whether it’s an ascension or descent, we’re not supposed to know.
