Top Albums 2018 Part V 10 – 01

10. Trouble & Mike Will Made It – Edgewood

The best rap album came in the form of Edgewood and newcomer Trouble. If there is something like a ghetto symphony or a Bildungsroman in rap, Edgewood would be both. The immersion Mike Will Made It creates through his nocturnal beats is impeccable. After the introduction “Real Is Rare / Edgewood” we are thrown into the action with “The Woods” interlude, helicopter swirling, a man running and cursing. Following, the collage “It's In Your Hands” might be the best Raime track without the UK duo laying down a bass that bursts your skull. The prayer, calling upon God to reaffirm your standing as a gangster and wishing for the safe journey of a young one open up a world without even giving slight narrative pointers. It is just in the sound and feeling that the scene is set and the following tracks are to unfold. Mike Will and Trouble did not weigh down their tracks with skits or interludes, the changes happen by Mike Will´s beats and Trouble´s voice in a meaningful conversation. While Edgewood doesn't try to present itself as a conscious rap album in any way, the darker sides of slighing drugs and living that life breathe through Mike Will´s stark beats that seldom remain as uplifting as in the commercial singles featuring artists like The Weeknd on “Come Thru” or “Rider” with Quavo and Fetty Wap. Even here, the musical ideas remain focused on the holistic experience of Edgewood and Troubles´ grim presence. Both artists use their craft to narrate through affects, they never turn to simple swagger or euphemize the gangster persona. In a way, it is fitting for Edgewood to be accompanied by stark black and white imagery and a short film. The sharp edges of HD black and white, the perspective surrounding riches and designers on “Selfish” or commentary on a phone centered culture blend into the world of Edgewood. Trouble might not be the best spitter yet, his wordplay not striking enough, but like Schoolboy, his voice demands attention and multiple layers that shine when not only being a hard gangster but in the ability to growl when singing the lines of “hurt real bad” and then turning angry and frustrated in the same instance. Edgewood is theater, a play that doesn't lead to grand conclusions or commentaries on a culture, but stands as the best performance of a peculiar world, leading you by the hand from start to finish, in disgust, awe, and marvel at the creative power of Mike Will and Trouble. 

09. The Field – Infinite Moment 

You could set Infinite Moment to a slow-motion version of a flower blossoming, as you might have seen it fast-forwarded in a nature documentary. This album should invoke this opposite feeling; coming out the shell by way of searching for light and warmth. Transferring this notion to your listening and the effect on the dance floor, Infinite Moment lives for the slow build up, you becoming aware of the minute changes. Willner transposes, a slight hum and drum pattern setting in and expanding without reaching higher or lower, moving horizontally and affecting your understanding more than changing themselves. This is a form of introspection and creativity that made Willner express hope in these tracks, the dark shifts of Cupid's Head or The Follower become slow food and lead not to desertion of mind but to an enveloping fullness. Rarely do these tracks get high tempered, “Divide Now” might be the one instance of tension building up and releasing into hard-hitting beats. Other than this welcome change, tracks like “Hear Your Voice” feel like slow-burning mindfulness exercises, they build, but build to dissolve and become ephemeral in their own right. The beats that catch your ear, carry you through melodies and techno like trance and ecstasies serve this purpose exactly, a hand extended, luminosity increased. The best example of this type of movement can be found in the closer and title track “Infinite Moment”. In a marriage of his previous styles, an eerie modular synth tone is extended and enhanced by a flowing drum pattern. The sounds swell and diminish in various ways, never actually ceasing to exist until the very end, when it becomes incessant, glaring and superimposed over every other element. Until, in the blink of an eye, it dissipates to create the sweetest embrace of negative space there is. In going with the theme of hope, the meditation of pushing and pulling element on Infinite Moments leads to a kind of peace of mind,a tranquility that appears as the newest element in Willner´s arsenal. Tranquility with glaring eyes, hopeful towards a future that might move in a slow fashion, but is still going somewhere. 

08. Rosalia – El Mal Querer

One of the recent appearances of electronic music sage Oneohtrix Point Never was beside the flamenco singer and now boundary-pushing creative Rosalia – the promise of these two artists working together marks the same excitement her possible collaboration with Arca behind the boards brought. But still, this all happens after the fact of El Mal Querer showing Rosalia´s ability to make experimentally leaning, all-encompassing music without the help of well-known weirdos helping other artists achieve the same feat. Rosalia partnered up with producer El Guincho to build a staggering body of work that is at once thematically complex and otherworldly in sounding recent while being traditionally inclined. The musical ideas on El Mal Querer blend together perfectly while being miles apart at times. “Que No Salga La Luna” is the most flamenco setup on the album, Rosalia building a throwback to her debut album Los Angeles, but is framed by the hit singles “Malamente” and “Pienso En Tu Mira” that cut their teeth in RnB styles carrying the aerial vibe of flamenco and dance. From there “DE AQUÍ NO SALES” goes from Rosalia harmonizing with herself to a Gesaffelstein-light way of using motorcycle sounds and sirens to build embellishments that carry the sparse set up of Rosalia's voice, effects, and her ad-libs. Then there is the operatic “Reniego” the interlude “Preso” switching from another curtain opening in a traditional play to chill-inducing “Bagdad” in its use of Cry Me River hitting a choir hitting Rosalia's deft voice. You get the dance number “Di Mi Nombre”, ethereal thinkpiece “Nana”, and the last tracks “Maladicion” and “A Ningun Hombre” following in highlighting the ghostly translucence of Rosalia's voice. On all this El Mal Querer does not simply live by its flamenco roots, Rosalia's vocal style or the distinct hand claps that run through most songs, it is the mindset of contrasting and enhancing a capable voice with the emotional dioramas of El Guinicho that take both flamenco and other genres to another level. Rosalia made no compromises on this album, the concept is set to a 13th-century novel, her singing remains strictly in Spanish and even though she bends and alters her voice through effects and sampling, her footing remains in the local style of singing that is mostly associated with tradition and niche in the west. For a young artist to go all out after a safe debut, to go international without pandering to English speaking audiences in the usual compromise of English words, songs or features is still pretty much unheard of. Maybe this is one of the better consequences of songs like “Despacito”, widening the possibility to make different languages pop, part of the mainstream. Even without the widespread acceptance, El Mar Querer has garnered, she proves her vision to be holy, her musical circumference to be ever expanding and that flamenco as a music and culture can transcend and become the better pop music of years to come. 

07. Helena Hauff – Qualm 

Qualm feels like watching Helena Hauff create music on the spot. Seeing her finding a pocket, a distorted drum pattern that works or pushing for the breaking point of a modular synth before it teethers into complete noise and crushing feedback. In this straight-to-tape manner, Qualm is still completely club-ready in its fast-paced cuts and delivers the confidence to go beyond banging your brains out through distortion and bass in its smarter moments of spacious synths and arrangements that never sound like interludes. Tracks like “Entropy Created You And Me” or “Primordial Sludge” help Qualm to become a full experience, being build ups for the explosions of Hauffs drum machine as well as mood pieces that show direction and focus in fucking with synths and gothic ambiance. And when the hollow drums hit, vibrate your skull to comforting hypnosis, everything clicks, the offense of distortion become the nurturing earth for experiences of uplift in darkness. You just need to listen to “Qualm” and “No Qualms” back to back as intended, the gracious synth line that dances and respirate on “Qualm”, grows and transforms to incite unrest married with the drumbeat on “No Qualms”. Going with the theme, the smoke does not clear but humours into the body, to become a force creating tension and release, showing the power of drum patterns in their most synthetic and idiosyncratic. 

06. Tirzah – Devotion

The most honest and stripped back album of this year come from the minds of Mica Levi and Tirzah. Devotion resembles listening on a private conversation or even better, the scribbles of love in a diary or notebook coming to life through the help of a friend telling you to make songs out of your thoughts. And if that friend is producer Mica Levi, you get an album full of subtle shifts, delicate instruments looping and evoking the feeling of little glimpses turning to sound. Every track on Devotion is centering on love and relationship, but Tirzah´s way of speaking directly under the few instrumental elements Levi allows make her words philosophical and poetic. It is as if both artists made the effort to let the emotional hues of love become their own worlds, soundtracking affection, begging your loved one to leave or holding on to someone despite good reason to do so. “Affection” becomes the looping instance of replaying the same games and conversations instantly, one part pressing the knowledge of failed attempts and missed opportunities to his counterpart that has ceased listening on basis of past affection and over-confidence of his lover feeling the same way. Lastly, Devotion is the most unscripted and unintermediate way of expressing the way people in a relationship behave, understandable for everyone in a way to make sound and music that is inviting and glowing with warmth and relatability. We found a private piece of Tirzah, flipped through the pages, got caught in short phrases and shed tears in feeling heard and understood. 

05. Tim Hecker – Konoyo

What was still blossoming in Love Streams came into full effect on Konoyo: Tim Hecker graduating from being a board master that is keen to use his fellow musicians creations in a quest to alter sound as a part of time to becoming interaction with space, to Hecker becoming a composer, working in unison with others and arranging the parts for the haunting effect of his electronics meeting the organic world. Somehow Konoyo carries a debt to Instrumental Tourists, too. The collaboration between him and Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never seems to carry similarities in the fashion of using different frequencies and sounds in correspondence with own ideas of modulating and evaporating. Only that on Konoyo Hecker is working with a real ensemble of gagaku, traditional Japanese music. The eerie synth lines, piercing drones and menacing thumps of his previous work have now become the sounds of traditional reeds, flutes, and drums, played in his mindset and to complement his usage of synthetics. When he ventured into the sound of choirs and the voice particularly, Johann Johannsson lead his hand, made him explore and extrapolate the texture of his elements to make them shine, cry, stack and die out in the same way he would have made his drone sound on his previous music. Here Hecker shows the confidence he earned in this approach, making Konoyo a whirlwind of drone in the most organic way possible. At times his electronics seem almost as if he himself is taking up a flute or reed instrument, their vibe of clashing and cluttering entrenched with the actual elements played. Above all, Konoyo is a prime example of working and reworking sound to create a unique listening experience. Not just in the dynamic of organic and synthetic, loud/soft, but in the way space is built, your listening is able to construe a state of being from these sounds, engage with a sense of being in the world that is different from the ways of sensing sound in the everyday life. Tim Hecker is my favorite artists because of that, a man doing sensory studies on every release, each enterprise he tackles.

04. Demdike Stare – Passion

Passion is plain and simply Demdike Stare having fun and letting loose. In their multiple approaches to electronic music and expanding their brand from the dancefloor, their core potential lies in making excelling dnb tracks that still carry experimental prowess and those nuggets of creativity that few other contemporaries reach. You can get this in the duo delaying the release of their intro “New Fakes” in “At It Again” for an additional 90 seconds before jumping in with their heavy drum beat. As you might think that things lift into one direction, the distortion reemerges as if someone is playing with pulling the plug. While this might hold off some tracks becoming fully immersive for the dancefloor and people wanting to get a move on, they melt the listener's mind in the capabilities of fucking with genres and expectations big time. Things normalize for “Spitting Brass”, just as a way of sobering up and doing what most people expect them to, but in their abstractionist OCD, “Caps Have Gone” cannot remain in one place, the glacial synth middle part interrupts the forward-thinking track without much love and warps the experience for a slowed down comeback. The following tracks on Passion play in the same field, DS purposely throwing a wrench into a functioning and danceable tracks to abstract, divulge different states of movement and getting affected by menacing dubs or stellar synths lasers. Nothing here seems a product of change, much rather the need to push forward and evolve basic structures that have worked for the last years. In my understanding, Passion makes all genres Demdike put through the blender more lively and performative. With a fitting comparison, DS look at the Matrix of music and think to themselves, “yeah, but how about that…” and executed their ideas while still keeping the building, roads, and lifeforms alive, just a little different from how you´d think they are.

03. Deafheaven – Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

“I’m reluctant to stay sad

Life beyond is a field a flowers

My love is a nervous child

Lapping from the glowing lagoon

Of their presence

My love is a bulging, blue-faced fool

Hung from the throat

By sunflower stems”

Rarely do lyrics induce such chills in me then they did on "Honeycomb". Much like the visuals for this song and the photographs that inspired George Clark, Deafheaven emerge from the dark and muddled state of being of New Bermuda to become a band that is singing praise, seeing a world full of contradictions, experience such in themselves and chose the go the path of grace. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is looking out at buzzing streets, nature in flux, human culture imposing on this nature and understanding that one's own perception is but a hand reaching out and making meaning with the contents of your senses. As a band, Deafheaven do not need to stick to any tropes anymore, they have settled in their existence as a band on the fringes of a metal culture that is scared to tackle vulnerability the way their guitars soar and their instrumentals know the difference of abrasion and a tender caress. On this album, Deafheaven find a voice they have been wrestling with for their past albums, the fame, and infamy mix to create an expression that they can call their own, no walls or boundaries remaining. Thematically George Clark is a shirking poet that finds hold and understanding in Kerry McCoy´s aurality and the band overall pitching in and delivering ideas to make the pure affect of Clarks´ voice stick. For the first time in their discography, Clark allows his singing voice to emerge, not just a counterpoint, but carrying the subtle highlight of “Near” and the Chelsea Wolfe featuring ballad “Night People”. Both songs become a new veil for Deafheaven´s grandeur to speak and come alive. While New Bermuda carried their ambiance in the short bursts at the start or the end of their songs and Sunbather gave them single tracks that felt like interludes, OCHL carries them with pride and contention into the ring of meaning-making as a band that also works with metal elements. The band is not looking to let people ask “is that Deafheaven?” but confidently saying “yeah, that's us”. The longer songs show a different drive to perfection at that. The doom of “Glint” or “Worthless Animal”  burst your chest, Clark's voice full of disgust and turmoil, when the assault cools down for seeming moments of respite we have come to known, you feel exhaustion colliding with the need to uplift and deliver gravitas. This motion let´s both “Honeycomb” and “Canary Yellow” become perfect entry points to Deafheaven and transform a band that might have been blackgaze in the past into an entity that disperses light in a prism, enables all hues to shine through and for the absence of light to become an essential part of life. 

02. Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour 

For all the dark shit that is alive and well in the world, there are the eyes of a child, the naive, but ultimately not the wrong outlook on life that wonders at the beauty of wandering skies, feels both loneliness and happiness to a full extent that adolescence is set to dilute and rationalize away as just temporary states. It may be that Kacey Musgraves experienced these things through LSD and expanding her mind by these means, but no matter the process, Golden Hour is the magnificent outcome of a searching soul that learned to breach the duality of introspection and external world to understand that everything is connected. As a country artist, Musgraves elevates the whole genre, in the same way, she sings about a magnificent and magical world, her country roots never cease to exist but flow into moments of disco beats or modest pop that makes the onset of a gently sparkling slide guitar the new dubstep breakdown. Going with the theme of the “Golden Hour”, the periods of light before sunrise or sunset, Musgraves, much like Terrence Malick and his infatuation in filming in these moments, becomes the voice to capture the purest iterations of emotions, missing someone and setting off a chain of thought that understands the loneliness running through human relationships or being astonished at the world and the love in it. Even the more cheeky songs like “Velvet Elvis” or “High Horse” feel perfectly in tune with the grander scope of Golden Hour, at the end they deserve their place as exalted highs that allow for a laughing Musgraves to entertain and be a country girl to her heart's content. Lastly, there must be room for Golden Hour, tears and laughter at the bittersweet waves life throws at you and the spirit of wonder that should accompany every soul. 

01. Low – Double Negative 

Double Negative made me break my own cycle of not writing, putting it off for stupid reasons and you can read the full review here. 

Every time I feel a bad case of mean world syndrome coming my way, I check myself with this short segment of Bill Hicks speaking on the news cycle and the disparity of seeing war, famine, death, disease in the news and never truly experiencing it in your own surrounding (here). Whilst Hicks words still ring true and make me laugh, for the most part, a certain bleakness in the outlook, socially or politically cannot be denied anymore. In Western and democratic countries, we still live a life free of harm and enjoy the comfort of education and wealth to some extents. The countries the news speaks of, riddled with war, famine, death disease still are pretty far away. And yet, the experiences of those people living through these horrors have become more apparent with technologies and reporting, the causes of war and dispute find their root in the wealthy countries more often than not and these same people have the right to seek out better places in the world and demand a fair share. At this point, the experience in the West shifts for the worse. Those people coming into “their” countries, claiming the right to safety and wealth become thorns in their sides. Other restrictions follow suit, the feeling of politics moving away from the people, wealth becoming unattainable and social care only working for those that have nothing and do nothing. Through these base feeling a new disgust arises, spite at the world moving not in the ways one wanted it to go, having to “fight” with groups that are visible and vocal for the first time, be it immigrants, women or queers. The new Spitefuls cling to nationalism and various forms of hatred in their move towards closed borders, a harsher justice system working for their xenophobic tendencies. As these powerless people still hold political and cultural power, they shift the discourse, lead and are led to work in the name of right-wing politics and demagogues that have been hacking away at the subaltern since the dawn of time. In this shift, the feeling of dread and hopelessness arises. The question of “where is all that shit happening?”, turns to a mournful “how is all that shit happening?”. Here, in countries that build democracies and have fared well in upholding these system for generations to strive and prosper.

The mourning question, the static noise that has been creeping up to unbearable volume over the last decade finds its expression and cathartic release in Double Negative. Music that could be harmonious and sublime becoming fenced in by noise and a menacing thump, stomping resentment as well as the forlorn heartbeat of your fellow citizens. Low have soundtrack this feeling and their need to make sense of these events in their own way. As a listener, I come to Double Negative not just as an expression of dire times of disarray, but especially as the aural performance of the hardship of understanding and the feeling of being misunderstood. List making as an act of reflection and not only critically ordering albums for their musicality but finding the best manifestation of the year in review. Double Negative checks all the boxes and much like Hicks section in actually seeing the world in an hopeless perspective, I will return to Low to check my feeling of discontent with the world. Not in the mode of the Spitefuls and as an affirmation of my own views, but as an sonic experience to fall and rise in the noise of a world ridden in turmoil. For at the end of Double Negative, “Disarray” leave room for betterment, changing your ways and actively engaging to correct course. Never the end, just the end of hope.