Top Tracks 2018 Part X 10 – 01
10. Sumac – The Task (Love In Shadow)
After becoming a holistic entity on their previous album and laying the groundwork of a threshold to be passed in Love In Shadow, Sumac learned to evolve into a breathing body, a dynamic entity that not only allows for each part of the trio to work meticulously in unison with each other and play more complex forms of hide and seek, but to push even further, allow space and substance beyond rational musicianship. Surely, The Deal was far from being a melodious or even easy to digest album, but the sense of a band finding grooves to carry was still audible enough, the abstraction and deconstruction the cream between the cake of song structure. In accordance with Sumac linking up with experimental overlord Keiji Haino, “The Task” is the continuation of the collaboration, even if it may have preceded the recording of American Dollar Bill by a few months. Turner and his mates go from a razor-sharp onslaught in the first six minutes to silence and a few chords that turn to a heavy jam that allows for a few breaks in structure. It is Turner's voice that shatters, twists and turns over the course of these 20+ minutes, going from growling hardcore to high and low screams, even high-pitched shrieks in the sluggish post-mid section that relies on jazzy guitar plucking over the vast drumming and robotic bass. What makes “The Task” shine the brightest out of the Love In Shadow is the organ section that rises in the last 2 minutes: Everything dies down, Turner shouts become almost “a chapela” when contrasted with the high tones of the organ, a lonely philosophy speaking on human connection and relation.
09. Mourn – Fun At The Geysers (Sorpresa Familia)
“Fun At The Geysers” feels as advertised in the song: A short burst of action, spiteful energy condensed and released with anger and frustration. It is easy to forget the personal and political references Mourn make on this song, being pushed aside by their label with the excuses of being too young or not being their time yet. “Never mind go have fun” becomes the ill-willed executive trying to get annoyances out of his/her hair and condescending towards to artists to forget about the business and go have fun. Mourn turn these small details into telling devices of coming clean and getting off, a sweet fuck you to the past and a song that feels as if it is was written on stage after being told off.
08. MØL – Bruma (Jord)
While bands like Deafheaven have decided to push their sound in various directions and not just be a pretty black metal band, other bands take up the mantle of black gaze and do the formula justice. “Bruma” is an attack of beauty that makes no concessions on being hard-hitting in its raw metal vibe. The shrieks are on point, the ambient moments breathe new life into old post-rock tropes and the song explores a variety of feelings and states in just under 6 minutes, not allowing for any lengths or sluggish mid-sections to occur. Being a bread and butter band would not do MOL any justice, they put a spin on the formula and execute it in perfection.
07. Kacey Musgraves – Space Cowboy / High Horse (Golden Hour)
Kacey Musgraves is the prime example of making pop music while remaining true to your original formula and both “Space Cowboy” and “High Horse” embody progression and versatility with artistic integrity. While others go off into the same tropes and sonics that fill the radio with songs that only hold high production value but no real songwriting capability, “Space Cowboy” is Musgraves in an understated country mode that still has elements like the slide-guitar and common themes – that is, with a trippy twist telling of Musgraves expanding her mind and coming closer to herself musically and personally. “High Horse” on the other hand has her going disco, with a winking eye but complete focus and energy. This is the stuff I´d co-sign on the radio, even if it came on 10 times a day. There is love in the italo-western strings, the 80´s beats, and feeling. The bits that would be Abba never overshadow Musgraves, don´t go throwback and when the jangly banjo comes in, you know that Musgraves and her producers never let go of what makes her music local and international at the same time. Apart from all that, the emotional value of “Space Cowboy” is heartbreaking and relatable everywhere, having to let go after the realization of love fleeting and it being the right thing to do. The maturity and hurt are apparent in Musgraves' voice, the guitar and openess of the instruments feeling like a gust of wind that enshrouds you in the saddest moments but feels refreshing and ultimately points forward.
06. Demdike Stare – At It Again (Passion)
On Passion, Demdike Stare are just simply showing off. They can go experimental, work with orchestras and play around with archive materials or just unleash their own archive to the world, but at the end of the day, they will never lose their tight grip on being at the forefront of churning out dance-floor bangers; even when they do it in their own broken and challenging mindset. “At It Again” is the seamless continuation of “New Fakes”, the underground ambient intro to Passion. Before even starting off and giving a glimpse of where the duo will move, the track turns up the volume for a short while until falling into a warped slew of noises, as if the opening salvo of “New Fakes” wasn´t quite finished yet, any gratification that would release the pressure has to wait until DS finishes speaking in their language only they understand fully. Immediately after this, they release the assault of putting a jungle / UK Garage track through the meat-grinder and having a laugh about it. The warped noise peaks up, clips and overtakes the whole dnb setup in an unholy pace. It's like playing everything at once and still finding a plotline and traces of substance and melody within. While “At It Again” might earn you some bottles to the face in a normal club setting of people lusting to dance at let loose in a four to the floor fashion, in a different context this might blow the crowds mind with even a small portion, a minute of the track filling up the space of the dancefloor and pushing the capabilities of sound and movement into stranger and wider territories.
05. Tim Hecker – This Life (Konoyo)
“This Life” did what I never expected to recreate ever again after getting deeper into music: The sensation of listening to a track and feeling like experiencing sound all over again. “Piano Drop” from Hecker´s Ravedeath 1972 did this in 2012, pushed my hearing and understanding of sound and listening to a different standpoint altogether. I was pursuing music deeply at that time but didn´t think it as detrimental in my experience of my life-world, my being in this world and my body at that point then after Ravedeath 1972. Over the course of these five years I started my blog and began to change my approach to music every year since. While post-rock and instrumental music were close to my heart, with artists like Hecker or Oneohtrix Point Never, my thinking about sound was actually opened up, artists that were not only making music without words and playing songs without them, but trying to get closer to the essence of what it means to be in a sonic world altogether, and at that explore our cultures and way of being. Within “This Life”, Tim Hecker takes a similar standpoint as he did in 2011 and with Ravedeath, but this time his expression sounds truly organic and not fighting with each other. When introduced to the world of Ravedeath by “The Piano Drop”, you felt Heckers Faustian quest of wanting to mold sound, changing it, diminish it and be the sculptor of a world in his image. Now there is a sense of tranquility, maybe in accordance with working with Japanese musicians and channeling gakuso. The crystal clear drones, the churns of glass resounding and shattering work perfectly with the sparse wooden percussive instruments and flutes of the traditional Japanese setup. There is still a sense of searching, wanting to make sense and a world that sounds empty and jarring at times, but the viewpoint has become vast, like climbing a mountain to get a better view and understanding the diminutive moments of wrapping one's mind around thing without letting them in and change you as you do them. Never did I feel as firmly grounding in my world as I did with “This Life” and Konoyo. Even when the sounds stop, the small silences of my actual surrounding take over, the feeling of “This Life” remains, the outlook unchanged, a lesson learned, a mountain climbed.
04. Tirzah – Devotion (feat. Coby Sey) (Devotion)
03. Deafheaven – Canary Yellow (Ordinary Corrupt Human Love)
Deafheaven had to delve into darker territory on New Bermuda to truly rise above and make their music completely their own. By way of speaking in the terms of identity and genre, while they never seemed to care too much about their place black metal, their reputation as a metal band and a band making hard music must have been the point of their contest, the itching spot that got them to write New Bermuda as a kind of fuck you to their peers and critics hearing in Deafheaven the gentrification of metal music. OCHL as an album and "Canary Yellow" as the second single resound as a band that has gone down that lane, has shown their own lineage to be true and meaningful to finally shed their last shackles and go and make their own style of music. “Canary Yellow” as such is a grandiose metal track that easily warps from serenity to moments of despair and forfeit to a sense of beauty that arises from the fact of mortality. The album shows the maturity of a band and a person that has understood “that we all die someday”, able to look beyond the mundanity of biology and to dive into the aesthetics of perceiving a world that is brimming with life. Going with the bands or Clarks description, the memory that remains in others after you have passed on is a theme that plays into the identity of the song and the band. As tracks on Sunbather and New Bermuda were like shouting against the winds of change, were blips on the radar of existence, Deafheaven have learned and perfected the craft of building a whole world, seeing trouble, pain, and life with lucidity in one song and closing the chapter in accordance with the lived experience. With the band closing the track on group vocals declaring “on and on we choke on an everlasting night / my lover´s blood rushed right through me” the poetry, while inherently torn and in tension is a different kind of swelling guitar that explodes in reverb and gain, an ephemeral touch that can only retain for a few seconds but carries a fragile core within itself, radiance in death, Deafheaven.
02. Low – Always Trying To Work It Out (Double Negative)
This and my number one tracks of 2018 are almost interchangeable and feed off each other's feelings. On a political and personal sphere, Low undoubtedly released the album this year, that is able to identify and express the feelings of political disarray and uncertainty becoming pungent in almost every western country today. Every day feels like a major step backward from the vision of peace of the new millenium and beyond (although it definitely qualifies as a grand narrative that served as the singular vision for the west and wealthy countries). Living in Germany and being an immigrant of the second generation, for the first time in my life there is a clear feeling of not being welcomed by a huge portion of fellow citizens and the dispute or religion, liberalism and overall political orientation becoming heated and menacingly irrational. The affective tension of being looked at the wrong way, disinformed people taking up political agency, xenophobia, conspiracy and the overarching feeling of violence creeping back into speech and patterns of behavior in the most subtle way. “Always Trying To Work It Out” expresses this feeling, observations made about the vulgarities of life, bathed in noise, with a blunt drum hanging in the back, conversations caught in your ear, blatant statements like “the war is over”, mulling over a sense of dread while things seem unchanged on the surface. Low build the perfect broken sound collage to exemplify and amplify this feeling at once, a mean world syndrome creeping up on you and the consequences of denial inverting into suffering.
01. Kanye West – Yikes (ye)
As “Always Trying To Work It Out” is the mournful reflection of the world going downhill and feelings of discomfort creeping in, “Yikes” is the manic antithesis. Kanye West is always doing something that rubs people the wrong way, but in 2018, he topped his own antics and megalomania as far as too become a depressing semblance of Yeezus, the vengeful god unable to reclaim his full power due to hubris and misinformation. On “Yikes” Kanye is non-repentant as can be while bearing full knowledge of his actions and public persona. His condition and medication play a huge part on ye, but more in the sense of taking power and agency from his alleged sickness and taking mania and branding it as ye as possible. West knows, and all apologist must somehow acknowledge this, he knows that his words are hurtful and support the wrong people that stand against his interest, but he his fully caught up in the whirl. When he intonates the hook of “shit could get menacing, frighting / find help / sometimes I scare myself” there are not only the words of a man that is passive in his fright but observant and maybe even a little joyous in these states. “Yikes” is as much an anthem on the terrors of mania and bipolar disorder, as it is riding the wave and shedding light on every corner of the pit. And what makes this the ultimate track and expression of 2018 is the simple and striking fact that West has lost none of his musical genius at that. Ye, Daytona, Nasir everything he touched (even with the help of Drake and others) was the undeniable proof of West prowess as a producer and rapper, every verse he hopped on brimmed with overconfidence and mislead swagger. In this, “Yikes” is one of the core tracks, our entry point into the menacing and frighting Kanye West show, his life under the scrutiny of the public, focusing in on the political shit-show that crushed the borders of a man supporting the wrong side for so long, out of a misguided sense of self, his superiority and a distrust of anyone who isn't Ye. This is 2018 in a nutshell, not just from an American standpoint but working in the west and most democratic countries. Beyond this, this is the other side of 2018, giving insight to the side that is always talked about, disagreed with, contested and lastly robbed of a sense of rationality. The bad thing this year and next year will be the fact that this voice is loud, crazy confident and rich as hell.
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