Favorite Albums of 2018
It’s 2019, people! We are living in the future. Exciting, right? Doesn’t it feel like just last year it was 2011? No? Just me? And I suppose I’m the only one making “1999 was only ten years ago” mistakes, too, huh?
2019 is a year that seemed impossible to me when I was a child growing up in the ’80s. The 2000s I could kinda picture. It’s hard not to think ahead a few years when Prince is singing about 1999 from every stereo around you. Beyond that seemed like a no-man’s land, though. Are you familiar the oldie “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans? Probably not. Here, check this out
Strangely dark for a summer Billboard chart topper, right? In 1969, no less. I listened almost exclusively to oldies radio as a kid, and that song was heavy in my local station’s rotation, so I heard it often. Whenever I thought about a time past the year 2000, that’s exactly what it felt like — some far-off date in the future when humanity and the world we’ve created are barely recognizable. And now here we are. Things pretty much the same, only we zip around on e-scooters. What a time to be alive.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve waded through dozens of Best Of, Top This, and Best That lists over the past few months. Pile those on top of the Most Anticipated This, That, and the Other lists and it can be exhausting just trying to comprehend what the hell happened in 2018. Like most years, I’m not sure if I managed to have my finger on the pulse of every great piece of pop culture, or if I missed everything that really mattered and should take some time to re-evaluate my life.
Typically, I would have been right there in the middle of those glossy lists, trotting out my own humble favorites on my scrap of the internet before the calendar turns over. I’ve been doing it in one form or another since 2002. It all started when some friends and I sat down in the control room of our college radio station to discuss our top albums of the year, which of course sprawled into a multi-hour argument about music and pop culture that, surprisingly, still makes me laugh when I listen back to it today. I even flew back from Portland the next year to do it again. The year after that, I called in on a very dodgy early version of Skype the year after that. From then on, it’s been strictly a blog thing.
Like the other list-makers, the schedule had become second-nature. I start thinking about what albums are first half of the year contenders over Memorial Day weekend, and then start contemplating my full list over Thanksgiving weekend.
This year, though, I decided to wait.
It never occurred to me to wait until someone I follow on Twitter wrote that all of the year-end lists should come out not in November and December, but in January, after the year is actually over. That way you have more time to digest the year as a whole. It made such sense that I wondered why it had never occurred to me before.
Over and over, I’ve been burned by some album that I overlooked late in the year, only to have it crash into my orbit after I’ve posted my picks for the year. It’s happened almost every single year I’ve been at this.
The earliest one I remember well is an album by Tim Fite. He self-released Over the Counterculture on the internet way back in the halcyon days of 2006, when releasing albums online was still an oddity worth noting. I didn’t stumble upon it until after I’d published my list for that year and was so mad I ended up posting an addendum almost immediately. It’s a psych-folk hip-hop amalgamation that works better than that description would lead you to believe. You still can, and should, download it here. It’s a real time capsule of the aughts.
More recently, in 2017, I missed The Cribs’ excellently loud and grimy 24/7 Rockstar Shit and Autonomics’ power-pop gem Debt Sounds, and spent all of January and most of last February kicking myself over it. (and the rest of the year listening to them both over and over)
So this year, instead of cramming month’s worth of analysis and hand-wringing into a few frantic hours at the end of December, I waited.
I also listened more than I have in awhile. Casually, not critically. I got up and did stuff — cleaned the house, puttered around the yard, worked out, walked the dogs — it gave me another chance to live with that particular album in my head. I let my mind wander, remembering where I was when I first listened to it, how I felt, who I was with, what I was doing.
And that’s really how we enjoy music, isn’t it? Not for all of the rank and file aspects of who wrote what song or where the drum parts were recorded, or what label put it out. Sure, those tidbits help inform what it is and who created it. It fills out the narrative. But what really matters is how that particular album or song makes you feel. How you the fun little breakdown before the second chorus in song five makes your knees go weak every time. Or the way that the guitar shimmers on track seven puts an extra spring in your step. That amazing little bass line hiding just behind the guitars and organ on track nine is waiting to make you smile every time. And then there’s that contented feeling you get after the last song goes out on the perfect note. That’s what matters, how music can capture and cauterize a singular moment in your brain.
I’ve always loved the way that a single song, or album, or artist can transport me back to a moment so completely that I can almost taste and smell and feel it materialize around me. I even love it when it’s some ear worm-y song I never liked is forever stuck in my head, regardless. Like how Amy Grant songs takes me back to the early ’90s, laying around on Sunday mornings, reading my dad’s Time-Life The Old West books while listening to Casey Casem’s Top 40 Countdown. Y’know, normal kid stuff.
So what got stuck in my head, in a good way, from the past year? Let’s do a nice, sloppy, narrative list that follows no particular order and has no set amount of entries.
One album from this past year that really felt like an old staple right from the jump was Middle Kids’ debut LP, Lost Friends. I really enjoyed their eponymous 2017 EP and while Lost Friends isn’t perfect, it has a real electricity to it. Sara and I caught them at Mississippi Studios this past summer and left feeling like it had been our one chance to catch the band at an intimate venue before they come back to town headlining the Crystal Ballroom or opening for someone big at the Moda Center.
Jeff Rosenstock more or less opened 2018 with POST- (it came out on January 1st, 2018), his rollicking, cathartic follow-up to 2016’s over-stimulated /WORRY/. POST- is filled with sing-along choruses and enough energy to buoy even the weakest tracks, it’s as sloppy and fun as his live shows, and sometimes you just need that kind of album in your life.
Speaking of catharsis, IDLES’ Joy as an Act of Resistance takes a fistful of seething rage, beats it into a shiv, grabs another fistful of broken glass, and starts swinging wildly. There’s an almost gleeful anger to lead singer Joe Talbot’s lyricism that really strikes a chord with the general sense of unease that many are feeling nowadays. (hence the album title, I guess) /Joy as an Act of Resistance/ is barely-contained and righteous as fuck and its glorious.
I’ve always been a fan of confident women, and 2018 featured no shortage of great albums by talented women artists.
Dessa’s first new album in five years, Chime, only gets better upon repeat listens. I’ve never been a huge fan of melodic hip hop. Her thing isn’t usually my thing. But there’s a certain strut to this album that makes it so magnetic. Plus, she can really write (her first book came out last fall) and the production by the Doomtree crew is top notch.
The always amazing Neko Case dropped the captivating Hell-on, her first solo album in five years. What can I say about Neko? Ever since she stepped out from the shadow of the New Pornographers with her solo work — not an easy task, especially when she’s also a New Pornographer! — each album has been more entrancing, more fully realized, more impressive than the last. I don’t even know if I could pick my favorite song off of Hell-on. Each time I hear one, I have to listen to the rest.
Actually, I take that back, it’s Curse of the I-5 Corridor. Easily. But the rest are great, too.
Courtney Barnett’s second full-length, Tell me How You Really Feel, combines the best of power pop and grunge with prime Neil Young-ish song craft.
Mitski’s Be The Cowboy stole my heart. Kinda like this a cappella performance of Nobody steals your breath away -
Black Belt Eagle Scout’s Mother of My Children rocks me as much as it haunts me. I must have listened to the single, Soft Stud, a couple dozen times before the rest of the album was released.
Speaking of northwest locals, Laura Gibson, Laura Veirs, and Haley Heynderickx all released wonderful albums this year, too. Plus, there was also some really solid new music from Natalie Prass, Amanda Shires, Tune-Yards, Cat Power, Dream Wife, and Sudan Archives — and I KNOW that’s only a fraction of what I should be mentioning.
Basically, 2018 was awash in some great music made by really talented women.
Every year, I get caught up in a a little bit of jazz. My understanding of the intricacies of the genre isn’t as deep as my appreciation. I’ll never be able to tell you who was in Miles Davis’ second great quintet off of the top of my head, or be able to rattle off what genre of jazz an artist inhabits, but I know what I like when I hear it. Especially since whatever that “it” is tends to result in me listening to the album from front to back repeatedly.
Last spring, I stumbled upon Kamaal Williams’ debut, The Return. It’s a swirl of mellow and funky grooves, the kind of album I can just get lost in over and over.
Speaking of great grooves, Portland’s own 1939 Ensemble’s latest, New Cinema is percussive tour de force that stays int he pocket from start to finish. David, Jose, and the gang have always made compelling music, but /New Cinema/ feels like a big step forward.
I also really enjoyed R+R=Now’s Collagically Speaking and Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth. They’re both as forward-thinking as anything out there right now.
So, did I use this lag in putting out my list to listen to some albums that I had missed during 2018? As a matter of fact, I did. Portland husband and wife duo bed. released their long-awaited debut, Replay, in December, and it does not disappoint. After roughly a dozen listens over the past month and a half, I’m pretty much in agreement with my buddy Jerad Walker over at opbmusic, who calls it a “shoegaze masterpiece.”
That extra time also gave me a chance to go back and give /Be the Cowboy/ another listen. I’m so glad I did. I don’t know if it got lost in the shuffle or what, but on second listen, it shined. That whole thing is its own mood.
I was blown away by *Dream Wife’s* self-titled debut. Alice Go’s guitar especially stands out. It’s edgy and staccato and brilliant. I’ll definitely be keeping an ear out for more from them.
Post Animal’s Shame has dipped in and out of my radar since it came out. So I took some time to dip back in. Psych rock has always been a fickle thing for me. Some days, I’m all about it. But on others, it’s the worst. Post Animal caught me on a good day, and not just because of their crazy-ass video for Gelatin Mode -
I took some more time to digest Ordinary Corrupt Human Love by shoegaze/metal band Deafheaven. It came out this past summer and scratched an itch I never know I had.
And I finally found time to sit down with the late Richard Swift’s posthumous The Hex, a jaunty, sweeping nugget of pop genius. It sounds far too alive for his passing to be true.
So that’s my year in music for 2018. Other stuff happened that I forgot to mention, like a bunch of sessions with opbmusic that you can check out over here, and some really good shows that showed up for from time to time.
2019 has already had a handful of solid albums come out. Sharon Van Etten, The Delines, and Aesop Rock have already graced us with some good music. I’m sure there’s much more to come as we continue on into the futuristic year 2019…