Join me in exploring all the whack worlds, golden hours, and dirty computers from the latest crazy year in music. If you know, you know.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #21 in the series. My random number generator tells me that 1980 will be the next year to tackle!
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 2018
Last year was such a fertile yet confounding year of music that I surprised myself with my own top 10. There are some unwritten rules I didn’t even realize I had with this blog, and this post forced me to consider and ultimately abandon many of them. My list contains an album that is a straight cover version of another album that is going to show up on my next post. One entry is a straight cover version of another album by the same band. There is a 150-minute album on my list. There is a 15-minute album on my list. One of my top five albums contains one of my least favorite singles of the year. 2018 was a bit of a pill.
There are a lot of new names on this top ten. Only two artists are repeats from prior lists (with the top spot going to the first repeat #1) and many of them are entirely new to me personally. It’s always gratifying to re-confirm that great music is not a finite resource that will eventually dry up. From a genre perspective, I wrote in my 2017 article that rock and roll was on a downswing, but there was some pretty good stuff that came out last year. It is far from the dominate force it once was, but at least musicians are still interested in the form. This was, however, a down year for hip hop, headlined primarily by the universal shrug that met Kanye’s crazily ambitious five albums in five weeks gambit. One of those did make my top ten, but the whole project was generally met with apathy or disappointment (something that his continually puzzling and erratic behavior didn’t help). I feel like I should touch on Jay Z and Beyonce’s Everything is Love, since the first two chapters made my prior two year-end lists. It got a lot of praise from critics, and I get that it’s sort of this triumphant third act, but it fell flat for me. Cynically, it comes off as a bit of a manufactured happy ending to something that had previously been presented as so thorny and painful. Such a neat end cap to the story of their marital strife beggars belief a bit. Best case scenario, strife just makes more compelling artistic fodder than contentment. At least Beyonce had that pair of monumental Coachella performances, but that’s a subject for the 2019 post. I should also mention that everybody’s favorite hip hop artist in 2018 was Cardi B, but I don’t really get the hype. She’s a competent enough emcee, which I guess is impressive for a reality TV star, but definitely not my bag.
One last genre note worth bringing up: Jazz is back, baby! I mean, it never really went anywhere, but there are two jazz records in my top ten, a feat that hasn’t been replicated in any year I’ve covered past 1967. Add in the two honorable mentions, and I’m very encouraged about the resurgence of that art form. Okay, four albums in a year isn’t exactly a movement, but I’ll take what I can get. It does highlight the most rewarding quality of the music of 2018, however. Its far too soon to declare with any conviction whether or not last year was the best year of recent vintage, but it is definitely the one that has me most excited for what’s to come. So, with that bit of prelude out of the way, on to the list.
Dirty Computer – Janelle Monae
Dirty Computer is an album about sex. I mean, its about politics and self-image and honesty and a lot of other things, but the rosetta stone by which these concepts are deciphered pretty much starts and ends with sex. Monae uses sex as activism, like when she sings “If you fuck the world up now, we’ll fuck it all back down”, or more specifically, in the comedic highlight of the album, when she warns what will happen if someone attempts on her what our president was caught on tape bragging about prior to the election. She uses sex as empowerment on songs like “Pynk” and “The Juice”, whose anatomical metaphors are so thinly veiled they are bound to make some people squirm. Sometimes, she even uses sex as sex, singing about trysts in limousines, swimming pools and anywhere else that strikes her fancy. That’s why, despite contributions by other legendary geniuses such as Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson, Prince is the artist that most clearly influenced the direction of the album. It’s unclear precisely what his direct involvement was before he passed away, but he’s clearly in the DNA of every track. You hear it in the guitar jangle that opens “Screwed”, in the way that the music is persistently funky in the most unexpected manner, in how the complexity of each song is masked by an almost insidious catchiness. “Make Me Feel” could easily be a song he wrote circa 1986 for one of his protégés. It makes you wonder, is that who Monae would have been thirty years ago, Sheena Easton or Sheila E? She certainly couldn’t have put out this album, despite the fact that it is no more audacious than its obvious spiritual predecessor, Prince’s Dirty Mind. The big headline I kept reading in regards to the music of 2018 was what a great year it was for women. That theme certainly plays out in my top ten, but I wish we had come far enough that such a thing was hardly worth commenting on. On Dirty Computer, Monae addresses that imbalance head on, explicitly encouraging women to take ownership of their sexuality, their bodies and their feelings. Still, it doesn’t feel exclusionary, unless you are the type that automatically assumes respect and independence are finite resources and any attempt to embolden a specific segment of society is a zero-sum game.
We’re still a long way from a deeply confessional album by Monae, and I’m not sure she’ll ever be particularly interested in that. When she sings “So dress me up, I’ll like it better if we both pretend”, it feels like a very telling sentiment that extends far past the encounter she’s describing in the song. Still, despite the continued sci-fi trappings that include an accompanying short film where she reprises her Jane Mayweather alter-ego, this feels like the most personal taste of the artist we’ve yet been granted. It’s certainly the most self-assured she has ever been. “Django Jane” finds her spitting legitimate bars about how dope she is, eviscerating her critics and celebrating her considerable successes in equal measure. My favorite track is “I Like That”, in which the “that” seems to be kind of her whole deal, and the chorus repeats “I don’t give a fuck if I’m the only one, I like that.” Yet Janelle is not afraid to expose her vulnerabilities, as well, particularly on the slower, late album songs “Don’t Judge Me” and “So Afraid”. She’s being bold and fierce and challenging bigotry and misogyny because she wants to and needs to, but that doesn’t shield her from being worried or scared or exhausted by it all, just like the rest of us. For all of the personas she wears – android, hedonist, superhero – its her humanity that makes this more than just a fun album to dance to, but an album, and an artist, we should all be paying attention to.
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By the Way, I Forgive You – Brandi Carlile
Unlike Janelle Monae, Brandi Carlile has no reservations about mining the particulars of her personal life for material. The album’s title comes from the chorus of the opening track, which sounds like your standard break-up tune at first blush, but becomes much more poignant when you understand the teenage trauma that is the actual inspiration. “The Mother” investigates the way her life changed after becoming a parent, capturing both the unparalleled joy it brings but also the palpable sense of loss for a life of independence abandoned. Later, on “Most of All”, she examines her relationship with her own mother. All of this confessional material lends the songs a tremendous immediacy and sense of investment from Carlile, but similar efforts from other artists have been known to devolve into painfully self-absorbed navel-gazing. Luckily, she is such a tremendous song-writer and performer that the album remains captivating throughout. It’s largely a lively set of songs, less interested in wallowing in the past but rather using it to examine why she is the woman she is today. I could ramble on about the influences I hear in her music from many of my favorite songwriters, but I feel like that’s largely me projecting. The best way to describe Carlile on By the Way I Forgive You is that she makes me feel the way I imagine Joni Mitchell makes people who love Joni Mitchell feel. Beyond her lyrical chops, Brandi also nails the singer side of the singer-songwriter equation. Her voice is amazingly versatile, and she makes inspired choices on pretty much every verse she sings. That’s another reason that the album is so dynamic, because you never quite know what to expect from her performance. One time she’ll belt out the chorus of a song with crystal clarity, and the next time she sings it she will cut the intensity in half and have a little Phoebe Snow hitch in her voice. She does such a great job of conveying a full array of emotions that I feel like this is an album I can listen to at any time, and to fit any mood. That’s probably why I keep returning to it more than any other music released in 2018.
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Remain in Light – Angelique Kidjo
When the Talking Heads and Brian Eno crafted what is probably the pinnacle of their collaboration together, Remain in Light, in 1980, they clearly had the afrobeat music of the 70’s as their primary touchpoint. It isn’t an afrobeat album, per say, because that influence is refracted through the unique sensibilities of the band. Nearly thirty years later, Angelique Kidjo has decided to ask what that record would have sounded like if it had fully embraced the art form that inspired it. The answer is kind of magical. I’m not surprised that the project sounds good – I count the source material among my favorite albums of all time, after all – but I’m amazed at the extent that it actually justifies its own existence. Weezer can pat themselves on the back all they want for how note-perfect their cover of “Africa” is, but there will never be a real reason to listen to it a second time after you’ve confirmed that, yep, they sure copied Toto real good. Covering an entire album is an exponentially trickier proposition, yet I expect I’ll be playing both versions in equal measure for the rest of my life.
It’s remarkable how faithful an adaptation this really is, yet what a different tone it has from the original. The most striking difference lies with the vocals. Where David Byrne came across as an addled street prophet chanting non-sequiturs to passersby, Kidjo’s voice has a distinct air of gravitas. “I’m a tumbler, born under punches” still means nothing to me, but it coming from Kidjo, it could mean something. When she sings that “the world moves on a woman’s hips” in “The Great Curve”, the phrase is transformed from droll observation into something like a universal truth. The instrumentation paints within the lines originally drawn by the Talking Heads, but shades in the thicker bass and more militaristic syncopation of traditional afrobeat. It’s fascinating to hear how the musicians tackle the freak out of video game noises at the end of “Born Under Punches” or the nearly formless miasma of “The Overload”. The most transformative moment is the point at which Kidjo and company tackle one of the Heads’ most beloved songs. “Once in a Lifetime” is maybe the most recognizable tune the band ever recorded, having become over the years a sort of stand-in for the suburban ennui that leads people to sleepwalk through life. That feeling is lost in the new version, replaced with a sense of urgency and optimism. Foregoing the pulsing synthesizer lead-in, this version starts on Kidjo singing, almost a capella, the iconic opening lines, before launching into a bubbly, effervescent take on the song. It functions almost as a counterpoint to the original, a splash of water in the face to wake us up out of the existential torpor described by Byrne.
As with the original album, Kidjo’s version of Remain in Light loses a little steam towards the end, and the more restrictive structure of afrobeat makes it harder for the band to deal with the audible dissolution that Eno designed. Nevertheless, if you are a fan of the Talking Heads, you absolutely have to listen to this album. It is an unbelievably rare opportunity to experience a favorite work of art for the first time again, so don’t let it pass you by like so much water flowing under the rocks and stones.
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Golden Hour – Kacey Musgraves
I kind of consider Kacey Musgraves to be the Alicia Keys of country. When Keys first started making noise in the early-00’s, she was as radio-friendly and polished as Brandi or Destiny’s Child. Yet, she carried an element of authenticity that I found lacking in her peers. If she was making sweetly catchy R&B, it seemed that was what was in her heart, not the result of some corporate edict to produce hit singles. On the unfortunate instances that I’m exposed to mainstream country music, I have an extremely negative gut reaction due to the manufactured aesthetic and cookie cutter lyrics. There are exceptions, of course, and it would hardly be accurate to consider Musgraves as anything but a mainstream artist – she’s won six Grammys after all. Yet, similar to Keys, she seems to be her own performer, and despite some pop leanings, she writes soulful, emotionally complex songs. On “Happy Sad”, she makes explicit a theme that she has explored throughout her career about how those two feelings are not polar opposites but can actually occupy the same emotional space in our mind at the same time. It is a sharply observed truth that is rarely acknowledged in these terms. Dreamy album-closer, “Rainbow” is as simple as it gets, but the gentle call to look on the bright side would only be muddied by more a complex metaphor. One of Musgraves great strengths is that she has the balls to say what she means without obfuscation or too-clever wordplay. Not too-clever doesn’t mean not clever at all, however, as she honors country music’s tradition of wry lyricism. She kicks the album off, for example, with this couplet: “Born in a hurry, always late, last time I was early was ‘88”, (1988 being the year of her birth, natch). “Space Cowboy” is not a Steve Miller tribute, but instead takes its title from the phrase “You can have your space, cowboy” in a melancholy yet beautiful break-up tune. Still, not everything works for me on Golden Hour. “Velvet Elvis” feels like filler, and I actually kind of despise her third single, “High Horse”. It has the queasy combination of sexless disco and auto-tune pop that landed Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” on my all-time worst songs list. The difference is, I don’t care about Maroon 5, and I really like Musgraves. I guess I’m trying to say I’m not mad, Kacey, just disappointed. Of course, even that reaction is a foolish one. Musgraves isn’t obligated to record songs that appeal to my specific sensibilities, and I don’t take this as a Metallica-wearing-eyeliner betrayal of her core ethos (which is also probably a dumb thing to get mad about, but that’s a topic for another day). Likely, it was harmless experimentation that led to something that doesn’t land with me, but seemingly makes a lot of people happy. It would be unfair to assign her demerits for the very attributes that drew me to her to begin with. If Musgraves ever stops following her muse, no matter where it takes her, that will be the real reason for disappointment.
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Your Queen is a Reptile – Sons of Kemet
One topic that really interests me as I navigate my way through the last sixty years of music is the evolution of jazz, and its relegation to the sidelines of popular music for the past five decades. It’s clear that rock and roll really started to crowd it out in the latter half of the sixties, and probably fair to conclude that funk music finished the job early into the seventies. Jazz musicians at the time, acting either out of inspiration or self-preservation, quickly adopted elements from rock and funk. While that move undoubtedly led to a few fusion masterpieces, it also accelerated the demise of some of the fundamental components that made the art form great in the prior half of a century. By the time Wynton Marsalis and his ilk revived the sound that their predecessors had abandoned, it was largely received as passé, not reinvigorating. I personally have some artists that I enjoy from this fallow period, but I tend to keep their work at arm’s length. There is jazz from the forties, fifties and sixties that was absolutely transformational to the way I approach music, and I cherish it to this day. Yet nothing has remotely engendered that level of emotional engagement in the subsequent years.
The reason for that prelude, you may have already guessed, is that the stagnation is starting to lift. Kamasi Washington’s back-to-back epics (see my 2015 post and further down the list for more on those) were the first jazz records of a modern vintage to capture my imagination and truly excite me. With Your Queen is a Reptile, I may have encountered an album that speaks to me even more. As with Washington’s work, this is far from a retread of be-bop or swing. It is a re-contextualization of jazz through a vibrant new lens. The songs are each named for an influential black woman with varying degrees of notoriety (from Harriet Tubman to the lead singer’s grandmother), yet the album offers so much more than inspiration for some high-minded Googling. The easiest way to describe it is improvisational jazz ring-fenced by the more rigid strictures of African music. Instead of a single instrument coming to the fore while the rest of the band keeps the rhythm simmering along (the composition of nearly all my favorite jazz recordings) the percussion shares equal focus with the solos. That gives the music a great intensity and forward motion, even on the tracks that have a more relaxed tempo. It feels very afrobeat adjacent, which probably explains why I find it so riveting. The two songs with vocals that open and close the album are overtly political, closely mimicking the Fela Kuti template, but the band chooses to display their radicalism through dynamic and unconventional song-craft throughout the rest of the album. It’s a recording that happened to show up on more than a couple of the year-end lists that I frequent, which gives me hope that its influence will help pull the genre out of the doldrums it has inhabited for so long.
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Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) – Car Seat Headrest
I faced a potential dilemma in the eleventh hour of preparing this post, when I discovered that Car Seat Headrest had already recorded this album in 2011. I don’t mean that I had the release date mixed up, but rather that they put out an album called Twin Fantasy seven years ago and re-recorded it last year. What to do in that situation? What if the 2011 album is strong enough to make my top ten of that year? Can I really give them credit for the same set of songs twice? Why does this scenario even exist? Who in the hell do Car Seat Headrest think they are, anyway?
Ever one to perform my due diligence (because heaven knows, this blog post is so important), I listened to the 2011 album, and a couple of things became immediately clear. First, it is unlikely that the original formula will crack my honorable mentions section, much less the list proper for that year. Second, Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) is legitimately one of the best ten albums of 2018. Third, as a function of the first two insights, I suppose I understand to some extent why the band went back and re-did the album. They are clearly better performers, and while this is hardly an overly polished recording, it is a far more accomplished work than the previous iteration. Also, while I didn’t document all of the differences, it appears that this is a chance for singer and chief lyricist, Will Toledo, to re-examine the songs that he once wrote through the eyes of the man he is today. Included in the lyrics are also all of these asides and meta-commentaries on the music that may or may not be new additions, but are fascinating nonetheless. On “Bodys”, you hear this helpful conversation:
Is it the chorus yet? No, it’s just the building of the verse, so when the chorus does come, it’ll be more rewarding.
Later, in a potentially more interesting example, you have this spoken transition on “Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)”:
This is the end of the song, and it is just a song. This is a version of me and you that can exist outside of everything else, and if it is just a fantasy, then anything can happen from here. The contract is up. The names have been changed. So pour one out, whoever you are. These are only lyrics now…
That section is simply followed by Toledo singing “When I come back you’ll still be here“ over and over again, and the affect is gut-wrenching. If I’m making this all sound a little too slick or overly clever, I’m doing the material a disservice. The lyricism is top notch, even though I’ve barely begun to parse it all out. Not to get too heavy here, but I lost my father last year to essentially poor lifestyle choices, not the least of which was fifty years of smoking. The naked simplicity of the lyrics in “Stop Smoking” hits me like a glass of water to the face every time. Musically, I am reminded of confessional indie rock like Spiritualized and particularly Neutral Milk Hotel. The way the whole album is constructed is pretty brilliant, and I’m still picking apart the intricacies. There are a handful of smart and solid rockers in the middle of the album bracketed by two ambitious, emotionally challenging tracks with lots of changes over ten-minute-plus run times (“Beach Life-in-Death” and “Famous Prophets (Stars)”). Those in turn are bracketed by the musically and thematically similar “My Boy (Twin Fantasy)” and “Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)”. The whole mirror-image structure is echoed in several places on the record, not least of which is the title. It’s the first truly great rock record I’ve heard in a few years, which is enough for me to set aside questions about its origin. I’m just happy it exists.
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Ordinary Corrupt Human Love – Deafheaven
I relish being surprised by music. I was working on a home project the first time I heard Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, and I didn’t even know what I was listening to. The prior album in my playlist ended and rolled over to this one, and I hadn’t bothered to look at my phone to figure out what it was yet. I’m glad I didn’t, because while I was not previously a fan, I knew enough about the band to realize that Deafheaven is ostensibly a heavy metal act. What was playing through my speaker, however, was most certainly not metal. “You Without End” could best be described as a lush, piano-driven soundscape with a woman soothingly speaking in the background, very much like something out of a Pink Floyd album. Then, halfway through the nearly eight-minute song, another voice is introduced. This one is unmistakably aggressive, practically demonic, yet it’s buried so far in the mix and replaced so quickly by that pleasant woman, I don’t think it really registered the first time I heard it. It pops back up at the end of the song, and I remember getting a little uneasy, and not really knowing why until I stopped to pay attention. By that point, the album was just about to transition to the second track, “Honeycomb”, which wastes little time before unleashing its full metal onslaught of concussive drums and devastating riffs. The whole sequence played out like a horror movie, where the director puts clues that something bad is about to happen in the background of an otherwise innocuous scene, thereby sewing dread in the audience. It was awesome, the kind of thrill you just don’t get very often when listening to music.
Bands like Fear Factory and Opeth have made their living off exploiting the heavy/soft dynamic (hell, Metallica had figured it out by their second album, some thirty-five years ago), but that isn’t what this is precisely. Those acts juxtapose softer, melodic sections with fast, heavy sections. Deafheaven has the unique ability to combine beautiful melody and absolute brutality at the exact same moment, something that they deploy to great affect all over this album. On “Canary Yellow”, you can hear George Clarke’s menacing snarl over a bed of tommy gun drumming, but it’s accompanied by clean, lyrical guitar playing that could almost be Neal Schon or David Gilmour. Once you engage with the music, it’s very difficult to relegate it to the background because your brain is busy making sense of these seemingly disparate sounds. Yet it never feels discordant or clunky, which is a credit to the thoughtfulness of how these elements are combined. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is a triumph of both song-craft and production, and further proof that there are always new paths to take when it comes to making music.
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Whack World – Tierra Whack
The idea of an album made up of one-minute songs is not new. The Residents did it way back in 1980 with Commercial Album, although even those arthouse nutjobs didn’t have the gall to only make it a quarter of an hour long. They also didn’t put nearly as much care and craft into the incredibly fully realized bites of music that populate Whack World. Each of the fifteen tracks is its own thoughtful composition, largely in the R&B and hip hop vein, but ultimately they end up meandering across any genre that Tierra sees fit. It’s not really clear which of these snippets would be well-served by a more traditional run time, but each and every one leaves you wanting more. I could absolutely listen to her sing about the Super Mario brothers on “Silly Sam” for at least five minutes, so that one in particular feels like a tease. What makes the album such a success is that none of the choices at her disposal could really harm the overall effort, since its sixty seconds and out. That freedom affords her the opportunity to make the chorus of one tune a hot wing recipe (fried hard cause she don’t like soft – I’m with you there, sister), or randomly adopt a mock country twang for a verse on a bitter break up song, and its often these more surprising choices that work the best. Also impressive is the breadth of styles Whack squeezes into the brief album. Some tracks play like the down-tempo funk of The Internet, while others recall the breezy soul-hop of Anderson.Paak. Even her rhymes sound like they come from different emcees, as she uses odd inflections and meters to vary her approach. It’s unclear how this kaleidoscope of sounds and personas would translate into a traditional album, but I’ll be first in line to find out once she converts her much-earned buzz into an inevitable full-length follow up.
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Heaven & Earth – Kamasi Washington
I had a much harder time reconciling the previous album’s unusual length than this one’s (at just under two and a half hours, Heaven & Earth is a massive recording). Yet I’m not entirely sure why that is. The fact of the matter is that their relative run times mean I will listen to the whole of Whack World ten or twenty times more frequently than Kamasi Washington’s latest epic. Two and a half hours is quite an investment to ask of people in this day and age. To put it into perspective, Marvel’s Infinity War has the advantage of a $200 MM budget and a lifetime of nostalgia behind it, and I’ve still only seen that three times. I’m not fully convinced that the length is necessary, but on the other hand, there isn’t a minute that feels extraneous. Of the two jazz records on my list, Heaven & Earth is technically the more traditional, but it doesn’t feel dated at all. That’s quite a feat, considering that the first track, “Fists of Fury”, is an interpretation of the theme song from a 1972 Bruce Lee flick. The track certainly leverages a funky blaxploitation vibe, with thrilling keyboard and saxophone solos in between vocals that range from choral singing, to a duo tearing through the song’s original lyrics, to a righteous speech railing against inequality. While many of those elements wouldn’t sound out of place in a seventies-era recording, the immediacy and vibrancy of the performance ties it specifically to the moment that you are listening to it. It is a song that absolutely soars. I’m focusing so much on the opening track not because it is uniquely excellent, but rather the opposite, because it is a great encapsulation of what makes the entire album so impressive. If I have any powers of persuasion at all in my writing, I’m sure they fall well short of convincing you to invest a whole afternoon listening to a modern jazz album. Instead, just cue up “Fists of Fury” and let that determine if you feel led to sample the rest. If you are anything like me, you’ll immediately feel the immense swell that the 50+ musicians provide while also marveling at all the individual contributions that stand out so clearly despite the massive scope.
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Daytona – Pusha T
I’ve been taught on several occasions that multi-tasking is a myth. Of course, the companies that pay consultants and trainers to teach that to their employees still expect them to focus on ten things at once, but that’s a topic for another day. Basically, as the adage goes, if you chase two chickens at the same time, you won’t catch either one. It should come as no surprise then, that Kanye’s endeavor to collaborate on five, seven-track albums released in consecutive weeks last year was a mixed bag at best. Three of the albums topped out at mediocre, one was solid, and only one turned out to be great. Daytona represents the best of what was a pretty weak crop of hip hop albums in 2018, and it does so by sticking to the basics.
Kanye and Pusha T deliver well-crafted bars over dope beats, bells and whistles be damned. Push doesn’t seem overly concerned with constructing intricate rhyme schemes or expanding the palette of accepted topics in hip hop. He pretty much just presents some straight forward verses about being awesome at both drug dealing and rapping, like he always does. His peers such as Noname and Open Mike Eagle are releasing albums that rail against the boundaries of their art form, yet they didn’t make my list. Perhaps it’s because nothing from those artists bangs like “If You Know You Know”, the opening track off Daytona, and probably my favorite song of the year. If Pusha is content to stay in his wheelhouse, at least he has the confidence to give us the best version of Pusha T that he can. That includes an ice cold collaboration with Rick Ross and a diss track aimed at Drake and Lil’ Wayne (Side note – my awareness of modern-day hip hop beef is basically nil, but everything is a mere Google away these days. Back in the day when LL Cool J was feuding with Canibus, you had to pick up an issue of XXL or The Source to glean any insight.) Sometimes less is more, and that seems to be the case here. Maybe if Kanye had harnessed his full energy producing Daytona, he would have over-complicated it after all.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Pop: Hell-On – Neko Case; Lush – Snail Mail; All at Once – Screaming Females; Big Red Machine – Big Red Machine; Glorietta – Glorietta; Lifted – Israel Nash; The Hex – Richard Swift; Lost Cause – Druhv Visvanath; Tearing at the Seams – Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats; Con Todo El Mundo – Khruangbin; To the Sunset – Amanda Shires
Soul/Funk: Isolation – Kali Uchis; Hive Mind – The Internet; Overload – Georgia Ann Muldrow; Young Sick Camilla – St. Paul & the Broken Bones; Black Times – Seun Kuti & Egypt 80; Conexao – Amber Mark; Good Thing – Leon Bridges; Semicircle – The Go! Team
Country/Bluegrass: Songs of the Plains – Colter Wall; Desperate Man – Eric Church; Hell on an Angel – Dillon Carmichael; Life Is Good on the Open Road – Trampled by Turtles; See You Around – I’m With Her; Interstate Gospel – Pistol Annies; Carolina Confessions – Marcus King Band
Metal: Devouring Radiant Light – Skeletonwitch
Hip Hop: Some Rap Songs – Earl Sweatshirt; Room 25 – Noname; Black Panther Soundtrack – Various Artists; Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts; Streams of Thought, Vol 1 – Black Thought; KAOS – Roc Marciano & DJ Muggs; What Happens When I Try to Relax – Open Mike Eagle
Jazz: Universal Beings – Makaya McCraven; The Choice – Kamasi Washington
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