2018 Music

During the past twelve months of working at a music store that actively stocks new releases, I kept track of what I heard that was released this year that was remotely of interest. I also kept track of all the things I heard and investigated via the internet. I am actually in a pretty good position to do a year-end "the year in music" post. The main thing working against me is just the feeling that records can't really be ranked, when you consider how disparate everyone's goals are. So, rather than come up with some kind of "master list" I wrote a bunch of short lists that are essentially determined by genre. But genres are about as fake as ranked lists! These lists should maybe be thought of more like an attempt at coming up with a bunch of theoretical tastes a person could have, perhaps to more efficiently "catfish" nerds. To that end, I'm doing a weird thing where I'm putting reissues of stuff alongside new releases. Without counting, I imagine this might end up being like fifty records, which is honestly way too many for a "year-end" list to have and retain some sense of purpose for anyone who wasn't paying attention to music all year, which I always think is the "point" with such lists at major publications. This just being my blog, it's fine, we do it "strictly for the heads" here at briannicholson.blogspot.com. Anyway, I'm including Bandcamp links when possible, which is not always.

Let's begin with the weirdest genre of all... The total outliers. Or what I could call "jazz-adjacent freak prog." I wrote it down. Number one on this list is the five Haruomi Hosono reissues Light In The Attic put out. I bought all of them, which is insane. My rationale was: Two of them, Philharmony and Cochin Moon, I already know and love. The other three were basically unknown quantities. While plenty of people only buy records they know they love after extensive online sampling, those people are basically assholes, unadventurous and intellectually uncurious. These Hosono records are rewarding, but they're also sort of challenging: Not because they're abrasive, but because they're insanely goofy, and maybe most easily explained in terms of references to things I don't regularly listen to, or sometimes even actively avoid. They're all good. Next up on this list is Creative Healing's record Low Effort Social Events, which is like an art-rock thing, post-Captain Beefheart, with violin and saxophone. It's got members of some bands I knew from releases on OSR Tapes, Salt People and Listening Woman. Recommended if you like getting the coffee jitters and listening to Prime Time. I really did make lists, but am not just copy-pasting them because the spacebar key on my keyboard is broken and I'm using copy-paste to make spaces between words and I don't really think a list of bandnames followed by a paragraph explaining what's good about each would be particularly readable anyway. You have to just trust me I have a series of lists I'm going to work my way through. Next up is Kemialliset Ystavat's new tape SIIPI EMPII. Damn they make beautiful music, fascinatingly alive and finding harmonies between stuff that feels futuristic robot and organically grown, in a way that's really only analogous to drug experiences, but so filled with motion and allergic to stasis that it's totally unlike everything else that gets called "psychedelic." This description could be used to discuss virtually all of the music they've made, they're basically never bad. Way poppier than this is Daphne And Celeste "Save The World," produced by Max Tundra, which is bright and sunshiney and totally funny and goofy in a way that definitely places it in the same universe as Hosono. Then there's Jake Tobin who also I know from OSR Tapes releases. I think he is someone who likes Steely Dan, who are terrible, but are a good reference point for Hosono's Paraiso. His tape Fifth Thought is, I think, a mixture of Chopin etudes and improvisations. He also just released another tape a month ago I only discovered yesterday but haven't spent much time with yet. He's an interesting cat for sure. Next up is Mouse On Mars' Dimensional People, a record I think people didn't really like, maybe because it has a lot of features but they're not very good? I still think Mouse On Mars are generally interesting and this one doesn't really feel like an attempt to make a party record, it's more like everyone's been invited to something very weird and are trying to make the best of it and have a good time. Damn I'm just realizing this list is going to be defined more than the other lists by people whose work I've followed for over a decade but are really unfashionable, like this is my "bad list," like an uncle whose top albums of the year include Paul McCartney and Van Morrison, only I'm riding for IDM dudes who have lost "relevance" as music-writing embraces more straight-forward pleasures. To that end, the fucking Dirty Projectors released a record Lamp Lit Prose that I only heard once but thought "This is pretty interesting... It's weird this guy isn't just the poster child for cocaine though, because this record is manic and all over the place." Again, I think people turned against this dude for making a break-up record and breaking up his band but those early Dirty Projectors records were done solo and are totally insane, this one is like that but with guest singers who are successful r&b vocalists. Anyway when I ordered the Jake Tobin tape I got two more tapes thrown in that I really liked and would be remiss to not mention, by Magic From Space and Dok-S Project. Some people might know the latter name from having put out a tape with Orange Milk, it's in this "insanely sequenced electronic music" realm which is kind of a theme here. Also only heard the Paul De Jong record You Fucken Sucker once but thought it was real interesting, and intense in its use of sampled screaming, really the sort of thing you can only listen to the privacy of your own home and only when you're in a weird mood of self-loathing. This list ends with Marcia Custer's Stacey's Spacey, which is a noise performance art comedy thing. I saw her perform live and would highly recommend it.

 But I called that "jazz adjacent" which is sort of insane but I guess a lot of music is jazz adjacent, especially if you're just moving in a direction away from the blues, but what about actual jazz? Well, shit, I really loved the Charles Lloyd and The Marvels record featuring Lucinda Williams, "Vanished Gardens." And I don't really listen to Charles Lloyd ever or Lucinda Williams. Having Lucinda on every other track and a bunch of long jams just fucking rules. Bill Frisell is a member of the Marvels and also plays on some Lucinda Williams records. This record is long and the fact that you sort of get used to a vocalist but she's not always there means you can sort of lose track, like "what am I listening to" but the very fact that you ask that question means you're engaged. Loved it. Blue Note also put the Nels Cline 4 record "Currents Constellations" which is similarly defined by two guitars, it's great. I actually bought the Alice Coltrane "Spiritual Eternal" reissue though, of three LPs on two CDs. Another actually astounding reissue is of Sun Ra's God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be, which is a piano trio record circa the time of him putting out funkier records, i.e. what most people I know would maybe consider their favorite era. It's so good, a piano trio can really rewire your head when someone like Ra is doing what he does with harmony and rhythm. The Sylvie Courvoisier Trio also did a great record this year, D'Agala. She also performed a track on this Tzadik comp "Winged Serpents - Six Encomiums For Cecil Taylor" where six different pianists did solo tracks. I feel very differently about piano trios (with bass and drums) than I do about solo piano but am trying to suggest something about her skill level by bringing that comp up. Also Sarathy Korwar's "My East Is Your West" is a double-CD merging of Indian music and jazz, covering Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Don Cherry, etc. It's almost obvious, in that it's obvious you will like it. Sons Of Kemet's Your Queen Is A Reptile is a pretty great upbeat record. Bandleader Shabaka Hutchings seems like a dude who loves both jazz and "jazz-inspired" no wave but wields it into effective dance music; this record has some rapping on it for the sake of pushing the energy level higher. I also liked the Fire! album from this year, which I guess is aiming for like a jazz-meets-krautrock thing, I found it real listenable. Damn this preference for listenability is leading me to mention stuff that's not necessarily the most radical- I both acknowledge that jazz isn't just music to put on at a cafe or something but also like it should be played in such contexts more! This is the paradox of modern jazz basically. I also liked the Brian Marsella Trio album released on Tzadik, it's all covers of this pianist "the legendary Hasaan" who really only cut one record with Max Roach that he wrote all the tunes on. I also have the "J-Jazz" compilation of jazz from Japan at the bottom of the list but I remember it less than any of these other things and obviously my memory with instrumental music isn't as good as my memory of stuff with vocals.

I also made a list marked "droney stuff" topped by Park Jiha's Communion, which is a record calling it drone oversimplifies, as it clearly relates to jazz, minimalism, and traditional music of Vietnam. It's a really beautiful record, but I should clarify, not just beautiful, clearly comfortable with creating moments of tension, it's not trying to relax or be ambient. Similarly tense is Louise Bock's Repetitives In Illocality. The artist's name is a pseudonym for Taralie Peterson of Spires That In The Sunset Rise. Way more relaxing is the Matchess Trilogy, three cassettes, only the most recent of which came out this year, the others were released on vinyl in recent years. My friend Sara did the album art for the cassette box and that's only part of why I endorse the more affordable option. Another amazing reissue was Laraaji's Vision Songs, handled by Numero Group, that differs from his other stuff by the presence of vocals, singing songs which are sort of like new age gospel numbers but very very funny and kinda dumb. I like this WAY more than Day Of Radiance. I think this is a CD and LP reissue of what was originally a self-released tape. Contemporary music released on tape was the Gemini Sisters, which is a duo of the people from High Aura'd and Mind Over Mirrors which I like more than their individual efforts. But the new Mind Over Mirrors record Bellowing Sun is way ambitious and it gets a slot on the list as well.  I should also mention the Joe Talia record, Tint, and Alison Cotton's All Is Quiet At The Ancient Theatre. The Talia record is very nuanced, he contributes to another record I'll talk up, and there's a sort of scope or attention to detail that's interesting- There's a huge difference between people doing stuff I'm calling "droney" on a record vs. a tape but it's not a qualitative one, it's more like a type of nuance that's almost besides the point in terms of how you feel the music but it's like a different approach to the horizons of the perceptual field or something. On a tape those effects are still there but maybe you're hallucinating them, whereas Talia is doing like an electro-acoustic thing where that stuff is deliberately being worked on. Alison Cotton is more of a Tony Conrad type thing, at a high enough volume you don't notice the difference: But with the stuff that's on CD or LP you do hear the difference. Is this very clear? Also, rounding out the list is the new Yo La Tengo record, There's A Riot Going On, which is basically ambient, with many of its songs being like peaceful pools you dip your toe into, but with a few tunes as well. They don't really disturb the calm. It's not the best Yo La Tengo record but I truly appreciate it.

I also made a list of stuff I'm calling "electronic-y stuff" but that's probably not the best way to define it. It has nothing to do with computers or the stuff I was talking about on the "outlier" list I opened with. I'll explain the vibe as I go. Maybe the best of the year was Profligate's Somewhere Else which was released in the first few months of January. I vaguely consider Profligate in the vein of like "a noise dude making techno," but also feel like, in a live setting, it doesn't really move the crowd as effectively as some other people in that realm. But on record it's a different thing, especially here, it feels like a sort of mournful downcast bedroom thing, unconventional songs but with a good amount of lyrics and live guitar. Numero Group put out a compilation called Switched-On Eugene which collects tracks made by the Eugene Electronic Music Collective, people in Oregon in the eighties who would share equipment and be played on college radio shows hosted by members. Most of the people do instrumentals, there are some tracks with vocals but they're towards the end, which really does help conjure up this late-night radio vibe. Similarly sourced from self-released cassette tapes is Michele Mercure's Besides Herself. But the thing about late night is that it's not just about feeling sorry for yourself, it's also about feeling like your brain is leaving your body. Surgeon's "Luminosity Device" is supposedly inspired by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, but let's be real, that's press release talk to benefit hacks, it's psychedelia via beats is not that far off from the rest of people here. High-minded in a different way is Lucrecia Dalt's Anticlines, which is an interesting development away from her earlier Badalamenti-ish work to something more abstract. It's comparable to Laurie Anderson, whose record Landfall with Kronos Quartet I thought was stunning. Exploded View are more of a "band" than the the rest of what I'm talking about, but their Obey is nicely propulsive and grimey. There was also a 2CD reissue of the Nightcrawlers, The Biophonic Boombox Recordings. The Nightcrawlers were a Philly-based eighties-cassette concern, in a similar universe to the Mercure but a little more dedicated to the drawn-out atmospheres of the German electronic stuff I don't really deal with. Glasser's Sextape seems like a serious leveling up, despite the potentially-alienating use of heavily featuring spoken word interviews with queer people talking about their earliest sexual experiences. (I think a dude I know is sampled extensively on this record, actually.) Rounding out this list would be Lolina's The Smoke, which in some ways didn't click for me but I returned to a few times to see if it did, and I always basically enjoyed it enough to let it play out its runtime.

Also, let me talk about film scores real briefly, as that's a designation that's actually important, with intentions distinct from albums. Jonny Greenwood's score to You Were Never Really Here is great, I heard it months before the film and always felt like "wow, this must play over a really intense scene!" even as I enjoyed it as music. The Lynne Ramsay film is similarly good, in that, as you watch it, it feels very intense and compelling, though as a narrative, it doesn't really leave you with a ton to think about afterwards. As a film, it works as this cavalcade of sensations, which is kind of what you want from a film score. Matthew Herbert's score for A Fantastic Woman is very understated, almost minimal, and while I haven't seen the film, the score is stately and romantic. Liars have long been one of my favorite bands, literally, for the entire time I've maintained this blog, but I kinda didn't think they could pull off a film score, but the music they did for 1/1, what I think is a horror movie, that I also don't know if anyone's seen, was great and really engaging. I also thought Alexandre Desplat's music for Isle Of Dogs was a lot of fun, I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson doing these sort of "boy's adventure" movies and the galivanting miniatures of his recent scores do a lot to animate them.

I've got a list here I labeled "indie rock," which I view as a pretty wide category, but let's say that means there's a rhythm section and there's a vocalist and the bulk of what you're hearing is being made by a solid "band" type structure of people in a room, and the general mood of the music is not one of aggression, but something more conversational and empathetic and built around the relationships of the performers. (When I have "metal" list, aggression will be the determining factor, say.) Let's begin with Palberta's Roach Going Down, let's say that's the best of the year. Palberta's three women, switching off on instruments, playing short songs, sort of RIYL The Raincoats, The Minutemen, and Deerhoof. You might have noticed those are some of the best bands ever! Palberta are truly compelling, giving off the feeling of being fun goofballs you could be friends with if they weren't already such good friends with the people in the band who are really good at making music. They're a great live band, but not the best I've seen this year. (I think I last saw them last year.) That honor belongs to Ohmme from Chicago, who made a record called Parts. Live, the group (two women are the "core" of the thing, the songwriters, though the drummer seemed very skilled and sharp, relied upon to be a background element) shredded way more than I anticipated having heard the record, doing weird songs in a natural way that made me think about a version of The Roches that had more in common with King Crimson than just being produced by Robert Fripp. Their vocal harmonies are less complex than The Roches, it's just the two of them singing the same lines, but it arrives at a nice place between classic songcraft and complexity. I'll link you to this live video, where they do one of their own songs and then cover Jim O'Rourke's "Memory Lame." (From the record Insignificance, which makes this as good a time as any to say RIP Nicolas Roeg.) The record is also embellished by appearances by jazzers Ken Vandermark and Tomeka Reid, which is waht got me to check it out initially, despite the fact that they're barely on it, that's a promising pedigree. The Breeders' All Nerve is a really good record, stacked with good songs, marginally better than the other post-Last Splash Breeders records, which are also totally good. I have no idea how overjoyed I would be to see this band perform live but damn I'm pretty happy that they still make good records. On the same record label as Ohmme is this band The Ophelias, who released a record called Almost I listened to a ton. Produced by Yoni Wolf of Why?, who I guess is also playing the vibraphone, and with prominent violin, we get something very poppy and gentle, but never really reassuring, always sort of comfortable with its provocations and potential to unsettle, more melancholy than anything. This is the record I played the most this year, with the melodies that got stuck in my head the most often. Possessing a totally different kind of tension is the Oneida record Romance, which actually is on the same label as well, a double-LP set of long, tense, dissonant songs where you rarely get catharsis, but feel relief when a song ends. The songs are long, but not ridiculously so, this is a real nervous-feeling record, a psychedelia like you get from eating spicy food or something, where you feel just barely out of your mind. It rules. Big Blood have been a favorite band of mine forever, their new one Operate Spaceship Earth Properly reminds me that while I think of them as being a folk duo, who clearly listen to a lot of great records due to their choices of what they cover, probably they listen to a lot of Black Sabbath. A band built around being a couple, this one has their child, probably quite young, playing drums with a steady beat. Rose Mercie and En Attendant Ana are basically the same band, two gangs of french women playing songs reminiscent of Electrelane, Rose Mercie are the better of the two and don't have an American record label helping them out. Locate S,1 is the newest name for Christina Schneider's songwriting outlet, previously associated with C.E. Schneider Topical, this is a little lusher and very inviting. Their record is called Healing Contest and it's both initially charming and a grower. It's a total bummer to me they're on tour opening for a band as mediocre as Of Montreal but maybe they're making a lot of fans that way, their softly "jazzy" songwriting probably wouldn't win them many fans on a more DIY circuit, I definitely had a difficult time trying to get them on a bill a few years ago. I checked out the band State Champion after the press release for their record Send Flowers had a blurb from David Berman calling the frontman "the best non-rap lyricist working," after wondering if David Berman listened to Starlito I realized this dude also fronts the Load Records band Tropical Trash, and his earlier records had press releases by such If-you're-going-to-sing-you've-gotta-have-the-lyrics-matter sticklers as Wooden Wand. So, despite the southern twang which will assuredly turn some people off, I was totally on-board, the songs are in a sort of plugged-in-and-jammed-out style as to feel pretty loose, but closer to "free" than tossed off. Probably the next closest thing to a "good lyricist" would be the Haley Heynderickx record I Need To Start A Garden, whose songs were much shorter, and called more attention to the fact that this is a woman who cares as much about meter and syllable count as she did making sure there was evocative imagery. This list seems as good a place as any to mention that Numero's Basement Beehive two-CD set of obscure girl group stuff ruled, and I appreciated its willingness to include both a and b sides of singles, and present individual artists with a degree of agency rather than just presenting them as just a cultural phenomenon. I liked this year's U.S. Girls record, In A Poem Unlimited less than the previous Half Free but I guess the presence of a live backing band makes for a more satisfying live experience, I think everyone left the show I saw her do a few years back pretty disappointed. Also in the "probably a great live band" category is Lithics, beloved by my friends in Portland who get the chance to see them perform regularly. Their record Mating Surfaces certainly indicates a fun time. The new Low, Double Negative, is an unexpected turn by a band who it is easy to take for granted to the point of ignoring. The new Stephen Malkmus record, Sparkle Hard, is maybe the best of his post-Pavement records, with a couple unexpected moments and maybe only one embarrassing misstep.

I also made a list more explicitly marked "singer-songwriter," and that list is topped by Ned Collette's Old Chestnut, a sprawling double-LP that Joe Talia contributes to, I think playing drums on. A dude from The Necks plays piano on it; it is a great-sounding record, sort of like if one of Jim O'Rourke's "pop" records were stretched out to a double-LP using embellishments from his more "experimental" work. This was released in the U.S. by Feeding Tube Records, who released a ton of the stuff I'm advocating for now, even more that doesn't quite make the list (like the A Faun And A Pan Flute 2-LP, which I bought a cassette of but probably deserves to be heard in the best possible quality), a good bit I'm ambivalent on, and way more that I haven't heard. I also heard the Mount Eerie record Now Only exactly once, streamed via NPR's website. I thought it was great but devastating and haven't heard it since. I want to track down a copy but I have to do so via mail-order from Phil and if I were to do that, I'd get a bunch of his records at once and it would be a big expenditure. I was really surprised by how good the Anna St. Louis record If Only There Was A River was, sort of close to the Angel Olsen close-to-country style of Half Way Home, or stuff on Numero's Cosmic American Music compilation. It's produced by King Tuff, who is a garage rock guy whose stuff I don't really engage with, though I was recently reminded he rips a guitar solo on Blanche Blanche Blanche's "Wink With Both Eyes" and has been in bands with Ruth Garbus and Kurt Weisman, he's not unfamiliar with nuance, this record sounds gorgeous in a way where I very quickly felt like "wait.. this record is really good," even though, yeah, some lyrics I found a lil' silly. Speaking of Jim O'Rourke, I gotta cite Eiko Ishibashi's The Dream My Bones Dream, which he produces and plays on a little, though it is Ishibashi's earlier records with O'Rourke I freaked out about and texted friends about, I'm a little unsure if I "get" the new one yet I'm confident it's good. Like Lucrecia Dalt, hers is a discography worth digging into, I actually think there might be a lot of parallels between the two of them actually. One artist whose work actually seems to just be getting better and more interesting is Sarah Louise, whose album Deeper Woods feels like it's heading nicely to places further and further out, but also burrowing inwards into not just the self but also the past and musical traditions there. Anna & Elizabeth's The Invisible Comes To Us has a different relationship to the past of songwriting traditions and how to move further out from there, I shouldn't consider it "singer-songwriter" record so much as just a "folk" one utilizing traditional song.

As for metal, as usual, I barely paid attention to it, but The Body's new album I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer is phenomenal, they just get stronger and stronger. Also I'd never really listened to this band Daughters, who I guess used to be a grindcore band, but now aren't. I don't know if you'd really consider them a metal band either. Still, You Won't Get What You Want rips, put it on if you want to get yelled at. The Body's collaboration with Uniform, Mental Wounds Not Healing was good too. Also, not really metal but definitely notable and important is that this year the High Rise album II was reissued and I heard that for the first time, more of psych thing played at high speed but really distilling the whole "oh shit rock music" in such a powerful way that I'm classifying it with metal out of respect for its force. Also not really metal but described at their show by an audience member as "kind of a merger between nu-metal and indie rock, but in a good way" was The Dreebs who I've seen live many times over the past few years, and they're frequently good but Forest Of A Crew is the first time I've felt like one of their records worked, though maybe it's the first I've actually heard. Again, I don't pay a ton of attention to metal, but I occasionally buy metal stuff via Bandcamp, because I love having a weird diverse collection there.

Let's stay in the realm of "genres I barely pay attention to," because just because I don't know what I'm talking about doesn't mean I don't have opinions! Tirzah's "Devotion," produced by Micachu, is the r&b record of the year, built on minimal loops, winning the approval of Earl Sweatshirt and the "album of the year" slot on two lists I've seen thus far, reminding me that people love r&b. I like the narrow range it falls into, the lack of vocal dramatics complementing the music really well. I also liked the Kadhja Bonet album Childqueen a good deal. It's lusher and more colorful but still muted. I realize I am mentioning things Numero did a good deal, and generally I feel like they do a better job branding themselves than they do in putting out things that are truly extraordinary, but their Eccentric Soul comp of the work of the Saru label contained a ton of great songs. Hearing the sample Kanye West built "Bound 2" around is a stop-in-your-tracks moment but the whole thing's that good. Meshell Ndegecello's Ventriloquism album of covers of sort of classic hits rendered in mildly artsier ways I found really winning. Also, while previous records by The Internet I've been pretty ambivalent to, their newest Hive Mind is pretty good, good enough for a local jazz player to ask about it while it was playing in the store.

I don't feel like I ignore or don't really fuck with rap but I feel like I am too old for new rap, all of the Soundcloud stuff I'm avoiding on like general principle, and a lot of older rappers are clearly corny now, and now it's actually really hard for me to keep up because I think a lot of stuff is exclusively on streaming services I don't fuck with, whereas for awhile there was a lot of stuff you could get a download of via Datpiff or there'd be CDs pressed. Anyway, I do think the new Earl Sweatshirt rules, such a weird raw fucked-up record, following in a tradition of Wu-Tang Clan's The W or Lil Ugly Mane's Oblivion Access. That it's called Some Rap Songs when that seems barely true owing to how the raps are buried, it feels more like a blown-out beat tape with some rapping quietly in the mix making it more captivating and compelling than any beat tape since Donuts. But also, for whatever it's worth, I also thought the new Dr. Octagon album, Moosebumps, was better than I would have expected. It seems like Kool Keith is maybe the only aging rapper to not become corny. I also really enjoyed Roc Marciano's Behold A Pale Horse, which is filled with jokes I thought worked. All of these records work basically outside of the expectations that I have for rap besides that the language will be interesting, but I'm continually reminded that for a lot of people that isn't even an expectation.