2018 Music: Albums of the Year

This year's a bit better than last year, because last year's top albums was kind of a rehash of my top 20 songs. There's obviously some crossover still but it won't feel as redundant as "of course, here's the War on Drugs and Will Joseph Cook right at the top, both of whom had two songs in my top twenty". Yes, Phosphorescent is in here, but maybe not where you think. Anyway, you're probably not even reading this CONGRATULATIONS READER YOU HAVE WON AN IPAD so let's get to this...

25) Flow State - Tash Sultana (Australio Reggae Rock)

Kicking off my albums of the year with an album that shouldn’t need any introduction to any other Aussies. I was really blown away by the talents of young Ms Sultana from her 2016 EP, and this full-length debut really solidifies what I already knew about her musical intuition and unique sensibility. It's a little long, possibly a bit samey, but it's interesting and curious music from a very talented musician.

24) Dirt - Yamantaka // Sonic Titan (Experimental Rock)

This is the first of a few really quite weird picks on this top 25, but possibly also the weirdest. Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, an ‘experimental music and performance art collective’ from Canada, dabbles in fairly schizoid sounds that swing erratically from heavy driving industrial rock to twee J-pop vocals and pretty much everything in between. It’s one of those albums where individual songs made me question my original esteem for this, but revisiting the full thing is an impressive experience and I highly recommend doing so.

23) Evo - Skerryvore (Celtic Rock)

This is not a weird pick at all. If anything it’s a dull predictable pick. Ever since Jamie Smith’s Mabon wowed both me and Jez with their 2016 album “The Space Between”, we’ve been loving every bit of folk-infused rock music released. This, while not being quite as idiosyncratic and exploratory as JSM, delivers all the right elements of traditional Celtic instrumentation, driving and entertaining rock songs with catchy hooks, and just a good fusion party vibe.

22) Nearer My God - Foxing (Art Rock)

Another album, like Yamantaka // Sonic Titan that I liked a lot initially then steadily cooled towards as the songs in isolation didn’t quite stack up. This album is a unique experience, delivering strange and unsettling sounds that cut their way through an overall gloomy, murky undercurrent to create a baroque and almost cabaret-esque set of noir rock music. I feel like it demands quite a lot of attention while listening, but it rewards close attention and rewards revisitation. I can imagine this one growing even more on me as time goes on.

21) Night Time People - The Bamboos (Australio Soul Funk)

Yes I’m continuing the ping-pong style flitting between a weird pick and an obvious pick. This album from Melbourne-based funk band the Bamboos is not obviously in my wheelhouse given what I openly profess to liking, but it is very apparent why someone would like it. Kylie Auldist’s vocals bring a striking soulful gravitas to all the music on here, and beyond that it’s just big-band fun with loads of dynamic party rhythms to enjoy.

20) The Radio Winners - Madisen Ward & the Mama Bear (Indie Folk Rock)

This one should have been obvious, and maybe it’s a little bit low on the rankings given it yielded my song of the year, as well as a second top 100 track. But it’s obvious why it’s down this low, which is that, at six songs, it’s just too damn short to really drive home the potential it built up. Sure, one third of this album consists of masterpieces, another sixth (“Everybody’s Got Problems”) is another great track that made my 250-odd song of the year longlist, and the other three are well-written and –performed folk rock, but the main thing it left me with was a desire for more. I really hope there’s more in the works from this mother-and-son duo.

19) re:member - Ólafur Arnalds (Neoclassical)

This definitely falls more into my wheelhouse than most other people’s so I don’t expect it to light any other fires among my readership (even though my readership – Hi, Mother! – does enjoy classical music). This album ticks all the requisite boxes of being based around nice, mellow, dreamy piano music but also having a good structure to it, including some judicious swells of strings and some electronica elements including beats thrown in for good measure. This stops it from being dreary or monotonous but is instead an engaging and enlivening instrumental sojourn.

18) Prequelle - Ghost (Heavy Metal)

I know from the number of tracks from this album – most often my highest-ranked, “Rats” – that have been shared on Reddit this year that I’m not alone in enjoying it. The strange fact is it’s the only metal of any description on my top albums of the year, and that’s not to say it’s been a bad year for metal (though 2017 was definitely better). This album of fairly traditional metal interspersed with little flourishes of their supernatural personas, and occasional synth ornamentation, is very charismatic music within an otherwise conventional framework that doesn’t necessarily hide any sonic idiosyncracies. Mostly it delivers a large number of dark-yet-glossy bangers that hit the right balance between the metal drive and a populist accessibility.

17) Semicircle - The Go! Team (Eclectic Electrofunk Pop)

While an album from the Go! Team being on my top albums of the year is the least surprising thing ever to happen, this is actually a big surprise even to me. When this album came out very early in 2018 I couldn’t have been more excited for it, having discovered and fallen in love with this group at the very start of 2015 when their previous album “The Scene Between” came out. I went back and devoured their entire back-catalogue (I remember listening to a lot of it on the train between Grenada and Seville in 2015), so for a new album to get proper music project scrutiny, expectations were sky-high. Too high, as it happened, and I was really rather underwhelmed by this. I still gave it a tokenistic, Steven Bradbury-esque album of the week win because it’s generally stuff I like, but I basically put it on the shelf for the rest of the year. And that was the best thing I could have done for it, because when I put it on again for reconsideration at the end of the year, with lower expectations of course, what I got was all the fun, quirky idiosyncracies that I’d come to love from these folks – weird sonic experimentation in chirpy pop fashion, some in-your-face funk attitude and some cool, interesting songwriting lampooning modern life in the way they always have. I’m really glad that I let my excitement simmer down and then gave this a second chance, and I’m really happy The Go! Team is back where they belong, on the winners’ podium (albeit only 17th – “The Scene Between” and “Rolling Blackouts” are still better albums)

16) Full Circle Nightmare - Kyle Craft (Glam Rock)

This feels like another one that’s no surprise at all being on here, but the surprise may be that it’s so low. I feel like Jez potentially likes this album a lot more than me so he may be the one surprised at seeing it only at #16. After discovering Señor Craft as part of the 2016 music project, this sophomore effort was highly anticipated by both of us (his 2016 track “Jane Beat the Reaper” earned the honour of my-and-Jez’s combined song of the year, as his #1 and my #11 track of the year respectively) and lived up to expectations, taking out both of our album of the week awards. While it continued to live high in my estimation on the strength of my favourite tracks from it, when I revisited at the end of the year, it dropped a bit mainly due to the fact that it does have a sameyness to his schtick – which isn’t apparent when he’s delivering bangers like “Heartbreak Junky” and “Bridge City Rose” but some of the less successful tracks like the ballad “The Rager” here just don’t keep the hits ticking along. As such I feel the album ends really strongly but actually takes a while to get going. And for that reason I’d rank it below his 2016 effort “Dolls of Highland” and also below 15 other albums released this year.

15) Kazuashita - Gang Gang Dance (Experimental Dreampop)

This is definitely another weird album but it's absolutely my kind of weird. It’s got a very distinctive mix of Oriental-style mysticism on top of ambient dreamy electronica that’s a really compelling combination. The vocal work delivers the very necessary ethereal quality on top of the well-structured, driving dreampop music that makes this sound unique. I think some of the filler tracks that are just pure experimentation do drag this down, but when it's in its stride this is really fantastic - as evidenced mainly by my #12 song of the year "Lotus", but the title track and "Young Boy (Marika in America)" are also great. Basically without the noodling experimental wank (which is still certainly part of Gang Gang Dance’s musical brand) this could have been a top 10 album, but as it is it falls a bit short.

14) No Tourists - The Prodigy (Soiltronica)

Interestingly you wouldn’t have known that the Prodigy released a new album in 2018 from reading any of my posts so far, because no individual song from this album cracked my top 100. The fact is I don’t think any of these songs or even mixes is intrinsically amazing – there’s no “Break & Enter”, “Diesel Power” or “No Good (Start the Dance)” on here – but by the same token, not one of these misses the mark, either. Liam Howlett is the pioneer and remains the master of this type of down and dirty breakbeat electronica (that Jez calls ‘soiltronica’ in some kind of joke that I’ve never understood and never asked him to explain)  and every beat, every sample here is perfectly kickass in its own way. Because of the lack of hooks, this ends up being another really good working album rather than any eclectic mix of musical statements, but it’s as good as it gets for damn fun, big-sounding dance energy.

13) Vide Noir - Lord Huron (Prog Rock)

This album is definitely  driven on the strength of a handful of completely kickass rock songs, the most noteworthy of which have already been spoken about as my #5 song of the year (parts I and II). Beyond those highlight tracks though, this is a very strong concept album of sorts featuring a consistent through-line of a certain set of chord progressions that rise and swell progressively as needed. Ben Schneider’s vocals drive a lot of the intrigue and movement of the story through the album with an almost ethereal folksy quality that evokes a particular mood and time and place for the songs. It doesn’t hit the bullseye every time, but it’s a very solid rock album with some innovative songwriting flourishes that make it more interesting than the kicking rock music it would be anyway.

12) Living in Extraordinary Times - James (Indie Rock)

When I first listened to this album, and it danced its way into my album of the week award pretty easily, there were two things I felt a bit reserved about. The first was that, despite my fondness for a lot of the songs, it did just sound like pretty generic Indie Rock music. The other reservation was that I felt I couldn’t call myself a fan of a band called “James”. No, I’d never heard of them during their apparently illustrious career through the 80s and 90s, although it’s quite possible someone has played me a great song by James and I’ve just dismissed it because it’s such an incredibly stupid name for a band. Anyway. This is generic Indie Rock, for sure. But despite it feeling a little boxy at times, it’s consistently very well produced and interesting music, and some of the experimental variegation across the album like the driving clashes of the track “Heads” and the slower introspective vibes of “How Hard the Day” make it a really rich and rewarding experience. I’m certainly intrigued enough to seek out more of their earlier more formative stuff on the strength of this very enjoyable album. While I’m not sure if I’d profess myself a fan of James, that’s only because, if I haven’t mentioned already, James is an incredibly stupid name for a band. It’s not because I don’t very much enjoy their music.

11) What Never Was Will Always Be - Kristoffer Bolander (Indie Singer-Songwriter)

This one was a huge surprise for me. Not upon first listen; my enjoyment was based around Bolander’s gentle, unassuming style and some of his beautiful melodies and guitar-and-string arrangements. But I put this into consideration for album of the year purely because it just had a lot of songs that I liked and I really didn’t expect it to soar this high. But this is actually a really great album. Some of the songs I liked on initial listen have seriously grown on me, most notably “To Come Back” and “Animals” but the fact is, upon relistening, I couldn’t find a bad song in here. Bolander has a great voice that can carry the soft ballad songs that populate much of this album but can deliver more upbeat and still thoughtful rock tracks as well. Some of the folksy guitar work on this album is terrific as well, and as such it comes out as the highest-ranked outside pick and just outside my top ten albums of the year.

10) Take Me to the Disco - Meg Myers (Noir Pop)

Definitely shouldn’t be a surprise to see Meg Myers in the mix and even this high up. For one thing, she holds the mantle of the second-most songs on my now-public ‘song of the year’ playlist, with five from this album making the cut. Two of those also took out my #8 and #28 spots on my song of the year countdown, so of course it’s up here. More than just being a collection of excellent songs, this is a great collection of song themes and sounds, varying between driving rock and dark-toned synthpop. It suffers a little bit from inconsistency with some songs just having less impact for me, and because of the variegation this isn’t necessarily a coherent whole, but the tracks that do work are fantastic, and are many.

9) Know. - Jason Mraz (Pop)

Yes, despite my weary exasperation at having to defend my love of this album to Jez ever since its release, my love hasn’t deteriorated that much. Although I think this album is front-loaded a bit with the three biggest bangers, “Let’s See What the Night Can Do” (my #19 song of the year), “Have It All” (my #69 song of the year) and “Unlonely” coming one after the other to kick it off, the whole album is full of sweet, unassuming and uplifting pop music that just gives me a good feeling about the world. I think I mostly just love Jason Mraz as a wholesome guy (through his music; I did have to look up whether he’s secretly a wife-beating puppy-kicking Nazi sympathiser, and no he seems genuinely sweet) but the music here fills me with nothing but positive vibes.

8) In Your Own Sweet Time - The Fratellis (Indie Pop Rock)

This one didn’t quite come out as high as I’d thought, because it’s quite densely packed with banging pop rock tunes (see my #100, #55 and #10 songs of the year), each one with their own great hook and own musical identity. There’s no song here that seems to be repeating the same idea, musically or lyrically with another, so it’s a real grand tour of the catchy rock music universe. I’d say the only reason this isn’t higher (it has many of the same things going for it that Mrs Yéyé’s Cabaret Noir, my #1 album of 2016, did for instance) is that the ultimate sound of The Fratellis, on relistening, comes across as quite familiar without that much that’s really distinctive beyond being pretty bloody good.

7) How to Solve Our Human Problems - Belle and Sebastian (Indie Pop)

As much as I complained about Lord Huron splitting my #5 song of the year, Ancient Names, into two parts, I don’t have the same qualms about Belle and Sebastian releasing this 15-track album as three separate 5-track EPs. I think they did harm themselves somewhat because Part 1 was by far and away the best of them if only by virtue of having my #3 song of the year, “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” on it (although the other top 100 entry, “We Were Beautiful” at #59, also came from Part 1). When I finally listened to all three together when sorting my final rankings, I reached the conclusion that the whole really holds up well. There’s a lot of character and talent involved with these Scottish popsters (note: two Scottish artists in a row, with the Fratellis also hailing from the land of Groundskeeper Willie) with another array of different pop sounds being presented here along with at times savagely witty and at others, sweet and profound, lyrics. It has a lot of moods and it sends me through a lot of moods.

6) C'est La Vie - Phosphorescent (Indie Folk)

Well, I can hear you say, this is unexpectedly low. After landing four songs in my top 50, and the only artist to feature twice in my top 20, why is Phosphorescent missing out on my top 5 albums? Last year the same feat was achieved by my #1 album of the year from the War on Drugs, but the sad truth is this. I love, very very dearly, those four songs - but ONLY those four songs on this album. There’s nothing wrong with the other half of this album, hence why it’s still #6, but the other tracks here feel quite like box-ticking exercises to me. They’ve got Matthew Houck’s voice, the same kind of songwriting and instrumentation but they somehow feel a bit samey, and a bit tired, within that same aesthetic. The four songs that I love (My #48, #25, #11 and #9 songs of the year) take that aesthetic into beautiful new dimensions and really excite my brain - and my soul, for that matter. Relistening to this really developed a clear chasm of difference between the brilliant (or could we even say, phosphorescent? No, no we couldn’t) songs on here and the just-fine (or could we even say, not-phosphorescent?) songs on here. But it’s definitely worth a listen for all the music he has to create.

5) Pareidolia - PreCog (Dark Wave)

From something that seems unexpectedly low to something that I feel I’ll need to defend, for some reason, if only to Jez who I know doesn’t care that much for this. From very early in the year, this ‘dark wave’ (it’s not really a great genre classification but it’s fine as a descriptor of the music) album really blew my socks off. It’s an hour long, the tracks all follow a similar kind of aesthetic path, but it never really loses steam and never lost my interest. PreCog is two guys from the home of the shittiest music on earth, Nashville TN, and they deliver this dark, brooding electronica that’s dynamic as well as smooth and mellow: the influences of Massive Attack and Depeche Mode are obvious. What really elevates this to a level beyond being enjoyable electronic music is Jason Thomas’ gorgeous voice, as he uses it to let the music and its emotional heft soar, and delivers some really interesting suspensions and even discordances with the synth tones underneath at times that reminds me at times of Bowie. Beyond delivering my #42 and #7 songs of the year, there are loads of killer bits of music on here, with “EMMR” the only real misstep that costs this album being even higher, than, say…

4) Denizen - Funke & the Two Tone Baby (Electro Blues Pop)

Number 4 song of the year, and now number 4 album of the year as well. There’s not a great deal to say about the full album from Funke and the Two Tone Baby than I already said in my commentary on “The Signal is Cut”. His whole musical persona is at once wildly bizarre and erratic, charismatic and infectious, yet weirdly tenuous like it’s hard to believe he holds all the songs together. Yet that’s exactly what he does: he delivers a full album of catchy, interesting bluesy funk on an absolute shoestring: beatboxing, looped samples, frantically strummed guitars and then he just yells and rails over the top of it. It’s unique, it’s entertaining, and it’s very very cool.

3) Yolk in the Fur - Wild Pink (Indie Folk)

It’s probably time for one spoiler, this late in the game and since Phosphorescent’s out of the bag: my top three albums of the year were not represented at all in my top twenty songs of the year, starting with this one. This though did, of course, yield three top fifty tracks and I love those three songs very dearly. But this album is far more than a collection of gorgeous folk tracks: it’s a genuinely beautiful progressive concept album, like the gentle folk rock answer to Dark Side of the Moon. It takes you through different flavours and variations on the same theme of epic Americana folk, probing deeply into expansive themes of love of people, of community and landscape. It’s sentimental but also artistic and interesting, and it builds and grows and swells at all the right time, and feels like you’re completing a very long train journey or something in really pleasant company with this album. It’s easy to lose sight of how good this is when you listen to individual songs in isolation because they’re all very good but this album and the way it’s put together is on another level.

2) A Humdrum Star - GoGo Penguin (Jazz)

I mentioned in the write-up of my #21 song of the year, “Bardo” from this album, that you’d see more of this trio in my albums write-up, so here it is, my runner-up album of the year. The fact is that it’s kind of hard to isolate highlight songs from this album (although two, the afore-mentioned and “Window” did crack my top 100) because it’s all of one glorious piece. This is a superb album. At the end of the day, it is mostly background working music, but I respond very well to background working music, especially when it offers something complex and interesting rather than just building on the same repeated motif (which, at its core, is what this and jazz generally does anyway). But when you really pay attention to this it becomes far more than just repeated motifs or background droney jazz: it is fantastically complex, dynamic, fascinating jazz music. The foundations of the songs are great and the layering on top of that just keeps building levels of musical meaning. Rob Turner’s drumwork is other-worldly good, when some of the syncopation from Chris Illingworth’s piano moves his beats erratically from one phrase to the next, while the movements of those two with Nick Blacka’s thrumming bass are so intricately dynamic, it creates this miasma of controlled chaos that astounds me how well the music comes out sounding on the other side. Like some others on this list it’s not got profound, affecting messages in here, it’s just pure entertainment but it's so rich and dense and chewy and chocolatey.

And that leaves us with...

1) Please Don't Be Dead - Fantastic Negrito (Contemporary Blues)

There was rarely any question about the album that would take the top spot for me this year, but it’s sort of a funny winner too just because of the circuitous route it took to get there. We listened to Fantastic Negrito’s 2016 album during that year’s music project, and it made so little impact on me that I didn’t even remember his name coming up. But I picked this one due to the fact that it was a new release from a former NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner (again not linking it with his 2016 album), and I went into my initial listen fairly sceptical of it all. One of the reasons is that, individually the songs don't immediately jump out at me (hence, perhaps, why none made it into my top 20), but the fact is that this album really demands but richly rewards closer attention. And on that first listen, the run of songs in the middle of the album starting with “A Boy Named Andrew” followed by “Transgender Biscuits” and finishing with "The Duffler" just gripped me from left field and literally had me edging to the front of my seat as it dawned on me what an exciting album this was. Revisiting it, it was clear that this was still the album to beat. While the songs don’t always have that immediate wow factor, there isn't a duff song in the lot, and all of them below the superficial layers are interesting, creative and thoughtful blues music. The themes vacillate between righteous anger, lamentation and personal confession and is full of poetic observations on societal pressures and cultural cringe. It's really a masterpiece. But more than just being masterfully done, the way it plays in a familiar blues milieu but innovates and twists the limits of those familiar conventions really excites me about the possibilities of modern music. In the end there was no other choice for me.

Other highly recommended albums from this year (in order of length of text when written out including genre description):
Ivory - Gin Wigmore (Soul Pop)
Next Time - Greg Laswell (Indie Folk)
Art of Doubt - Metric (Indie Pop Rock)
Even Though - Ben Browning (Synthpop)
We Sleep Again - Dream System 8 (Dreampop)
Eat the Elephant - A Perfect Circle (Heavy Metal)
Off to the Races - Jukebox the Ghost (Power Pop)
A Partner to Lean On - Trace Mountains (Dreamrock)
The Deep & the Dark - Visions of Atlantis (Symphonic Metal)

And that's it, I'm wrapping up the music project for another year. 1000+ albums, many more songs. Next year, we're of course doing it all again.

Also for my regular readers (Hi, Mother!) look out for my write-up of the books I read in 2018, probably coming in the new year.