Apr. 29th, 2019 11:37 pm

2018 in music

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[personal profile] joshua0

Hooo boy, I am late on this one this year. At the beginning of 2018, I was worried that there wasn't a lot of music that I was excited for; I was pleasantly surprised, over the course of the year, to have a lot of stuff that I really really liked! I bought a lot of music and spent a while reviewing it — but also, this year, I even did some mixes and mashups of my own, so stick around for those.

As usual, here's how this works: the rating system is relative and subjective rating system, from one to five stars. A one star album is not, necessarily, bad (unless I say it is...) — think of it, really, as how much I am excited about listening to something, so one star just might mean that I haven't really found a place for it in my regular listening habits. The more stars, the more I think other people will want to listen to it too — or, at least, the more I think other people ought to listen to it, anyway...!

Got it? Okay, well, let's get started — this year, I bought 22 albums, made 4 mashups of my own, saw 4 live shows, and recommended another additional 26 pieces of "extra credit", and here they all are:

Table of contents.

New this year, an end-of-year mix: Don't have time to read through all of this, but want a taste of what I listened to this year? I have assembled for you a CD-length (72-minute) continuous mix with some of my favorite tracks that I listened to this year, spanning a wide variety of genres, feelings, and tones. I had an enormous amount of fun putting this together; I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed assembling it for you!

New albums for 2018.

  • January 12th: Gabriel & Dresden - The Only Road (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released December, 2017).

    Electronica; nominally trance, but not definitively. Recommended for everyone. Drop what you're doing and buy this album right now.

    I heard that this was happening because I just happened to tune into Above & Beyond's radio show, where G&D were doing a guest mix to promote their new album. I'm sorry, wait, a G&D new album??? I picked it up at the beginning of the year, and as I alluded to in last year's review, I absolutely loved it. I'm glad I didn't discover this in 2017, really: I would have hated to have to decide between this and Escape as my favorite album from 2017!

    This album reads as a continuous mix, and I love it as a coherent unit. Like albums that I've fallen in love with in the past, it explores a wide range of content and a wide range of feelings in the soundscapes that it puts together. It starts as what feels like is going to be a trance DJ set with Only Road, and that's okay, but the style shifts all over the place, with Gabriel & Dresden's trademark detuned synths showing up in This Love Kills Me, and an almost New Order-like sound in the verse (such as it is) in You. It's difficult to describe the true expanse that this album covers without going into almost every song on it; it's almost a disservice to the album to have to pick only a few tracks to get a feel of what it is, but the linked ones represent at least a few corners of it.

    Two tracks from this album ended up on my end of year compilation: “Jupiter” and “I'm Not Like Everybody Else”.

  • January 14th: Ari Mason - Musica Lunae (bandcamp) (⭑⭑; released December, 2017).

    Classical.

    Ari Mason, who you may remember from 2016's collection of almost EBM-style tunes, is evolving as an artist, and she spent much of 2018 changing around her sound. A lot of the rest of what she did in 2018 had an R&B feel. But this, on the other hand, is something else: she decided to cover a bunch of 16th century motets. Reportedly, despite the sound, none of the recording uses a vocoder, which is quite surprising indeed!

    In the "extra credit" notes from last year, I wrote: "But I'm really excited to see an artist finding her sound, and making such a strong statement: "this is what I believe that this genre should draw from", and "it's okay to have crosspollination in our influences". This is a gutsy album to release, and I'm so glad that she did it." I stand by that: I'm not convinced that this is something that everyone has to buy, but if you liked Ari Mason's previous work, this is an interesting and very different view on what is clearly quite a lot of musical talent.

  • January 26th: Above & Beyond - Common Ground (⭑⭑; released January 26th).

    Trance, or, uh, as trancey as 125bpm gets. Buy if you liked We Are All We Need; everyone else can skip.

    Yep, it's a modern Above & Beyond album, I guess. To be honest, I am not super enamored with Above & Beyond's productions these days: they all seem to have the same flavor, and that flavor is not really what I want. It's either commercialized trouse that all sounds the same, or messy big room disasters that all have the same drop. I keep buying it, because I loved Tri-State, and I know there will be a few tracks that I will love, but it kind of gives me the same feeling that I got from Gareth Emery's 100 Reasons To Live: it feels like they turned the crank and just churned out another one.

    Anyway, there are some good tracks on there. Sahara Love tickles some specially joyful bits of beats in my head, and I really do occasionally keep hearing Zoë Johnston's voice echoing in Always in my head, so those are maybe highlights to listen to if you'd like.

    “Sahara Love”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • May 2nd: Lamb - Backspace Unwind (⭑⭑⭑; released October 2014).

    Chill-verging-on-ambient that wraps its tendrils around you. Recommend if that intrigues you instead of scaring you.

    This album is a great way to get completely and totally lost in soundscapes that collide directly with lyrics that verge somewhere between "abstract" and "sharp and pointed". I knew of Lamb originally from a remix of one of their songs — Trans Fatty Acid (K&D Session) — but I think something from this album got suggested to me by YouTube, of all places. (Maybe it got bored of recommending Nazis and decided to try doing some actual good in the world for once.) This album stays largely in its own little corner of truly intense sounds, but it varies some within, ranging from Nobody Else — a 6/8 ballad — to What Makes Us Human, which seems resistant to any particular analysis of rhythm at all. The sweeping synths seem to want to grip you and pull you every which way; I found it to be quite rewarding to let them.

    “What Makes Us Human”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • May 23rd: Gothic Buddha Masters - Gothic Buddha Lounge (⭑; released April 2007).

    Dark ambient.

    I think I was looking for music for my yoga class for World Goth Day, and, well, I got it. I was searching, and I think, I must've found the track Gothic Yoga, which I think is definitely a representative track of what you'll get on this album. It is 100% as weird as advertised.

    Ambient ain't usually my thing, but if it's yours, I think this might be pretty decent ... you'll have to let me know. It might be good background noise while you're working; I'll have to try it for that.

  • July 17th: (Compilation) - In Search of Sunrise 14 (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released June 29th).

    Mix CD: trance, etc. Recommend for people interested in that kind of thing.

    I don't usually get mix CDs, but I definitely don't regret getting this. This is a 3CD with mixes each from Markus Schulz, Gabriel & Dresden, and Andy Moor — each of which, in their own right, is a huge and historic name in trance. All of that is amplified by the fact that ISOS is also a compilation with a real history behind it; Tiësto did the first seven, for instance, and had a history of putting remixes that are now considered "the standard" on a bunch of them.

    Anyway, this mix seems to have offered each of those three artists an opportunity to compose an answer to the question, “what do you think trance ought to sound like in 2018?” — and each of the three has their own subtly different answer. I think this compilation is a great, and fairly definitive, set of perspectives, and if you find yourself interested in that question, you probably owe it to yourself to listen to the answers from these three artists.

  • July 17th: Solarstone - .---- (1) (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released April 2017).

    Trance. Even a little dark! Recommend if you liked Pure, or for trance fans.

    Ever since Solarstone released Pure in 2012, I've kind of hoped he would do another artist album. I'm not sure how I ended up finding that he did — but I'm glad he did, because this feels like a worthy follow-up. It feels like it trends a little more melancholy than Pure, but on the other hand, maybe I do too — and it certainly retains that uplifting Solarstone base, if you know where to look for it, after all. .---- (morse code for "1") is only eight tracks long, but I think that goes a long way to help the album avoid overstaying its welcome; Solarstone had about eight tracks of good ideas, and so he released only that much music.

    If you like, for instance, I Found You (featuring Meredith Call) or Choosing His Angels (featuring Alex Karweit), you'll probably like the rest of .----. I sure do, anyway.

    “Leap of Faith”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • July 17th: Solarstone - ..--- (2) (⭑⭑; released May 4th).

    Trance.

    This is, in theory, the successor album to .----. It has some solid tracks on it, but it doesn't feel as coherent as its predecessor. It has a little of the "turning the crank" feel, but mostly my claim is that it has a bunch of okay tracks, but no really great ones. It's not an active disappointment, but it kind of feels like a no-op. If you want some more Solarstone, Midsummer Nights is probably this album's biggest contribution to that aesthetic.

  • July 17th: De/Vision - Citybeats (⭑; released June 22nd).

    Futurepop.

    De/Vision seems like they have an even/odd cadence of "good album", "bad album". Unfortunately for me, this album seems like it falls into the "odd" cadence. I am used to driving, compelling rhythms, with big synths to back them up; I found this album to be, rhythmically, uninteresting, and I generally felt myself uncompelled to move my body in response. I think I only listened to it once or twice, and I don't remember much of it; representative, maybe, is They Won't Silence Us.

  • July 17th: ohGr - TrickS (⭑; released June 20th).

    Industrial.

    I was kind of upset with the De/Vision album mentioned above, because I knew it could be better be than what it was. I rated this the same because I listen to it about the same amount, but I like it better as an artistic statement: I think what I learned from this album is not that "ohGr's composition is bad", but that "I don't really categorically love ohGr". ohGr has had his moments in the past for me (wateR is a track that has stuck in my mind for a good long while), but none of this really made me stick around such that I want to replay it. But all that said, I at least can name a track that I like from this album, and it is the title track, TrickS.

  • August 24th: Ashbury Heights - The Victorian Wallflowers (⭑⭑⭑; released August 24th).

    Synth......something. Recommend for Ashbury Heights fans or people who want something just plain weird.

    I have absolutely no idea what is going on in this album and I'm kind of here for it. Ashbury Heights have a very synthpop-ish legacy, but this album solidly went in the direction of "whatever the hell Anders Hagström wants, because he has been around too long to put up with whatever your thoughts are on what he should write". So the result is something completely off the wall; it starts with Headlights at 155+bpm, moving into an almost Gareth Emery-feeling track, through an almost French House-style gated compressor, all the way through Waiting For The Fall with a Groove Coverage kind of feeling... it's all so weird, but the secret is that I actually love all of those sounds. I vacillate between feeling that the whole thing is way over the top, and feeling that it's exactly what I want; maybe the two feelings actually coexist better than I had thought!

    I have no idea what to recommend as "representative" tracks. Maybe Journey is one extreme, and Headlights is on the other side, but there's a lot of weird stuff everywhere in the middle.

  • August 24th: Helix - Twin (bandcamp) (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released August 24th).

    Synthpop. Trip-hop. Recommend for synthpop and dark electronic fans.

    Helix is one of Tom Shear (Assemblage 23)'s many side projects, this time formed alongside vocalist Mari Kattman. I've been ambivalent on some of Tom's other side projects, but I really like the combination that resulted. It feels like a fresh view on a lot of the themes of his work, and more than that, it's an opportunity to let someone else bring the strengths of their vocals on top of what I think Tom really does best — putting down communicative and engrossing drum sequences and synths. As a change, not everything on the album is something that necessarily makes you gyrate and dance (though it does have its moments!), but instead there are some more pensive opportunities, and unusually for A23-associated work, they don't seem to drag along.

    If you like A23's stuff, this is a logical place to go. But the interesting thing, I think, is even for people who don't necessarily like Tom Shear's previous work, there might well be something for you. There's something to this album that seems familiar, but at the same time, there's a whole new range of sounds that just don't fit the Assemblage 23 name — and I'm glad that Tom Shear is exploring them here anyway. Representative, maybe, is the dancy-feeling Bird of Prey, and the slower, chilled trip-hop feeling of I Might Be Wrong.

    “Bird of Prey”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • August 24th: Solitary Experiments - Crash & Burn (⭑⭑⭑; released August 10th).

    Industrial. Aggressive futurepop. EBM. CD single.

    I had kind of forgotten about Solitary Experiments, but I know them as "the group that does higher-BPM stuff that I really like". I saw this float by on YouTube, and I had planned to include it on my yearmix, so I bought it, and actually, the rest of the single is basically worth it, too! My big complaint about this is that it's just mastered way too hot, but musically, Crash & Burn just seems to tickle all of the bits that really get make me get way into synthpop. The remixes on the album, also, are a total riot — if you couldn't get enough of the Ashbury Heights weirdness from earlier this year, you bet that Crash & Burn (Ashbury Heights Remix) is appropriately wacky.

    “Crash & Burn”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • August 24th: Infected Mushroom - IM21, Pt. 1 (⭑⭑⭑; released March 9th).

    Uh... Infected Mushroom. Remixes. Buy for Infected Mushroom completionists.

    Have you ever wanted an acoustic live version of I Wish? That is one of five "unusual remixes" that is on this album, which I purchased for $5. It was a good use of $5. There is nothing new on this album — just remixes — but let's be honest: old Infected Mushroom is good Infected Mushroom.

  • September 5th: Seven Lions ft. Fiora - Start Again EP (⭑⭑⭑⭑; released August 24th).

    EDM, verging on dubstep. Recommended, even if you normally look at the word "dubstep" and run the other direction.

    To be honest, the only reason this isn't getting a 5 from me for this year is that there are already three! other albums that get 5s. But this is a really great four-track EP. It's crafted as something of a concept album, and at least flows intentionally from track to track; it feels like a shaped narrative of feelings, which always resonates with me. Even the track in the middle that I stylistically like least — After Dark — I understand why it "needs to be there" for the purpose of the album, and I respect it.

    Maybe part of why I like this album is that it came at the right time. It kept popping up in my playlist during a few months of a horribly rough phase of a relationship, and felt like it was asking some of the same questions I was asking myself. Start Again felt like it prodded at the same edge of giving up versus trying again that I kept finding myself on the corner of ... and the enormous chords of Dreamin' were a beacon in the darkness, as this counterpoint and resolution to the tension that the rest of the album builds up. I found this to be one of the most refreshing and honest takes on "modern EDM" that I'd heard in a while; at just 22 minutes, I think it's worth a listen through for most people.

    “Start Again”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • September 21st: Metric - Art of Doubt (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released September 21st).

    Rock. Buy this album.

    I have liked Metric's work for a while. Fantasies and Synthetica have their catchy moments; Pagans in Vegas was okay, too, I suppose. One of the things that I really enjoy, though, is Emily Haines's style of songwriting — what feels like almost an unfiltered reflection of her psyche, in a way that seems pretty rare. Art of Doubt doubles down on this, lyrically getting even deeper than I remember from any previous Metric albums, and as the album title suggest, touching on themes of uncertainty that feel like they've been glossed over in her past work.

    Art of Doubt starts off with a proper "stadium rock" feeling to it, and that's the tone of the first half of the album. Risk feels like a pivot point in the album's energy into a more reflective phase, from feelings and tones into a more explicitly experiential view. The first half sticks in my head more, to be sure, but I'm not sure this is a knock on the second half — the second half feels almost like a necessary come-down, just as a way of reminding the listener that it's all true to what feels like reality for Emily Haines.

    Anyway, I think everyone should just listen to this album cover to cover, probably on a road trip or something. But if you can't do that, have a listen to Underline the Black and Now or Never Now. Then go listen to the rest of the album anyway.

    Two tracks from this album ended up on my end of year compilation: “Dressed to Suppress” and “Now or Never Now”.

  • October 3rd: Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑; released June 22nd).

    Free jazz. Afro-futurism. Buy this album.

    I do not get to listen to enough modern jazz, really, and this album feels like what I needed as an antidote to that. The general thesis of this double (!) album is simple, and it goes like this: the first CD is "Earth", a gritty view onto this world we live in, as separate from Washington's view of the Divine — and the second CD is "Heaven", an almost Messianic view of a perfect world, and the calling that takes us there. In some ways, these two themes are overt in presentation; the first track on the first CD, Fists of Fury, explicitly presents a message of Black empowerment in its lyrics, while Vi Lua, Vi Sol off of the second album is a ballad of love from a creator to all of creation. But in other was, the themes hide in sounds and tones: the almost frenzied feel to Connections (off the first disc) contrasts directly with the feeling of transcendence associated with The Space Travelers Lullaby, which opens up the second disc — even though both have no lyrics to speak of.

    One comparison I find myself making is with John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, a four part investigation also into Coltrane's connection with divinity. Coltrane tries a bunch of ways to get his message across — lyrics, an almost mantra-like repetition of a phrase, and sounds — and they all play off each other in the hope that one will stick. Washington takes a similar tack, both in the general sorts of questions that he asks with his inquiry, and also with how he goes about it. In some ways, Washington's work is more accessible than Coltrane's: it has lyrics and rhythms that are aligned more closely with what our modern ears seem to understand and expect, and so it's often more familiar. In other ways, it's less accessible: while Coltrane makes his point in four tracks lasting just over half an hour, Washington explores the subject matter for almost two and a half hours. But the familiarity that the modern sounds bring to it, I think, compensate for that: more often than not, I found myself thinking "aha! I understand what he's doing here", and suddenly excited about a new twist or turn that he had taken. I found myself basically captivated for the entire duration of my first listen-through — no mean feat for such a long work!

    Anyway, I think everyone should listen to this. This album feels like a definitional moment for "what jazz should be in 2018". If you can't listen to all of it, Fists of Fury (not on YouTube, but Spotify, and Google Play Music) and Vi Lua, Vi Sol (not on YouTube, but Spotify, and Google Play Music) are great tastes of what this album is all about.

    “Will You Sing”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • October 12th: VNV Nation - Noire (⭑⭑; released October 12th).

    EBM, or futurepop, or whatever VNV Nation is. Buy for VNV completionists; everyone else can probably skip.

    Noire is VNV's first album that's just Ronan Harris, after Mark Jackson left the band. It's like an hour and 13 minutes, and there's just no need for it to be that long. Each song goes on at least a minute longer than Ronan had ideas, so my conclusion is that Mark Jackson was the one who held the trimming tool in his hand. Since the album is so damned long, I'll try to be brief.

    There are a few good tracks on it with good ideas, and a few that even stick out in my mind. All of them just feel too damn long, though. Anyway, the track you're looking for is When is the Future?.

    “Immersed” — yes, all six and a half minutes of it — from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • October 26th: Solitary Experiments - Future Tense (⭑⭑⭑; released October 26th).

    Futurepop. EBM. Recommend for fans of the genre.

    I think that the best description of this 2CD for me is that Future Tense is the album that I really wanted Noire to be. Although it mostly settles on a theme that feels a lot like the lead single, Crash & Burn, it's, anyway, not exactly 12 tracks of the same song over and over again; it has its share of ballads, and different rhythms to shake things up a little, even if the instrumentation is fairly similar from track to track. As a whole, though, the album comes at you like a train, with I Am totally unstoppable in its unlifting synths. (As a bonus, you get a second side full of remixes, which are often interesting views on the original tracks.) My biggest pet peeve is that the album is mastered hot as hell, to the point that some of the tracks sound clipped, which seems like a frustratingly unnecessary strike against an otherwise very solid album.

    Every Time is a good introduction to the harmonies and soaring synths that you'll find on the album, and Shelter is a counterpoint of something more ballad-like; if you like these, you'll like the rest of the album.

    “Crash & Burn”, from this album, ended up on my end of year compilation.

  • November 9th: Muse - Simulation Theory (⭑⭑; released November 9th).

    Rock (paranoid). Recommend for Muse completionists.

    There's a new Muse album. It seems to happen every year or two. And, really, there's basically one big problem with that — well, actually, there are three big problems, and they are Origin of Symmetry, Absolution, and Black Holes & Revelations. The basic issue is that Muse, more or less, keep making the same album, but every time they do, it's not as good as the last time they made the same album. Occasionally they have shaken it up — Resistance was something that was totally different than Old Muse, and 2nd Law was something that was just straight up bad even if you don't compare it to their other albums, but the biggest problem with Simulation Theory is that Matt Bellamy doesn't really say anything in it that he didn't say better in the past.

    So I guess what I'm saying is that Simulation Theory isn't really a bad album, per se [1] ... but I just don't see a whole lot of reason for it to exist. It has a handful of good tracks, and I'd even say that there are more good tracks than there are bad ones. But even the best of them are good mostly for gag value, rather than for anything else about them (and Muse seem to implicitly acknowledge this, for instance, by commissioning the UCLA Bruin Marching Band to do an official cover of Pressure!). Not a whole lot of it sticks out in my head; maybe that's because I've been trending away from rock, or maybe it's because I've been trending away from Muse's sound, or maybe it's just because it feels unremarkable, but either way, it's hard to know which.

    Anwyay, probably one of my favorite tracks on the album is Something Human ... and if you want to have a good laugh, click through to Dick Town, all the while with the knowledge that I have primed your brain with that phrase.

    [1] Just as I finished writing this, I did realize that I wanted to call out one thing I heard on the album that kind of explicitly bothered me. Muse, and Bellamy, have always enjoyed speaking of conspiracy theories and generally topics of paranoia and otherworldly control. Thought Contagion echoes some of these themes of social control, but one lyric in the chorus, "...brace for the final solution..." feels particularly ill-conceived. The song is unclear in its intent, and can be read either as a warning of the rise of fascism (and, therefore, an anti-fascist call to action, with a claim of the consequence) — or it can be read as a claim that the "thought contagion" is something that can be cleansed with a "final solution" (and, therefore, an anti-semitic call to action!). I generally read the message as the former, and so that doesn't stop me from recommending the album ... but all that said, Matt Bellamy is no fool, and really ought to have known better than that.

  • December 11th: Kyau & Albert - Neverlost (⭑; released December 7th).

    Trance.

    Kyau & Albert is one of those old-school trance names from when I started listening to trance, so when I saw that they had released an artist album, I was excited. Unfortunately, not a whole lot on it really stuck out in my head. I guess it was good background music when I was working when I listened through it, but only one track was really remarkable, and that was Don't Need a Lesson. I guess the track that followed it, Airy, is a cool instrumental too that I could see being the soundtrack to something. The rest you can safely skip.

  • December 25th: Armin van Buuren - A State of Trance, Year Mix 2018 (⭑; released December 14th).

    Yep, another ASOT yearmix.

    I liked last year's better than this year's. I also liked mine better than Armin's. Regardless, this one felt like a clean miss.

This year, I spent a bunch of time in Ableton, and mostly made a whole lot of total crap, but some things actually came out pretty decently. I'd been trying my hand at doing some mashups. Here are four things that I did in 2018:

I also listened to a bunch of music that I didn't end up buying -- for some of these, because I didn't really want a whole album, and for some of them, because there wasn't a whole album to be had. For extra credit, here's a smattering of these things that I wrote down, anyway, sorted roughly by category ... but fair warning, they get weird in a hurry:

Finally, I got to see some live shows last year. Here's my rundown of what I saw:

So that was 2018. What did I miss?

(Previously, 2017; previously, 2016; previously, 2015.)

(Also, this post was automatically formatted by a script that I wrote, and if you want it for yourself, you can get it here.)

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Date: 2019-05-02 05:57 pm (UTC)

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