The order of this list was the most I've ever struggled over one of these, so enjoy...
Albums of the Year
Monáe
Dirty Computer
Pop/R&B : Listen
Janelle Monáe is the most talented, the most interesting, and the most extraordinary person in the universe. But apart from being The Special, she's also really great at writing catchy pop and R&B songs that impart social consciousness, personal empowerment, and self-aggrandizing that comes off as purely earned confidence. She is the only person who could right a song about partying in limousines and make it something you're supposed to learn from. She is a national treasure, and a limitless well of ability that seemingly has no end to its breadth.
Dirty Computer is the first album Monáe has created without putting on a persona, outside of her ever-expanding Metropolis musical universe. And while I was a bit disappointed that we wouldn't see more of the creative pool that spawned "Tightrope," "Cold War," "Primetime," and "Dance Apocalyptic," we did get "Take a Byte," the juiciest beat in the history of beats or juice. We also get an absolutely brilliant collaboration with Grimes on the shade-throwing/girl power anthem "Pynk" --(as an aside, I loved this duo when they teamed up on Grimes' Art Angels single "Venus Fly," and hope they keep it up well into the future)-- and the monster rap of "Django Jane." This is a gift we don't deserve.
Not enough can be said about Monáe's lyricism here, or anywhere really. She deftly and expertly crafts rhymes, raps, and gorgeous ballads with equal relish and every singer everywhere is better for it. "I Like That" is one of the most striking and enlightening looks into Monáe's own backstory--from growing up poor in Atlanta, to her troubles at school--and how she became a badass super queen because of it. And on the previously mentioned "Django Jane" she comes so correct that, somewhere, Big Boi is fainting. She hits her beats so hardcore that you'd think her life actually depended on getting all those thoughts out.
The artistry in songwriting is also incomparable to anyone else in R&B right now. The funk put into "Jane's Dream," a song that only exists as a transition blurb, is unnecessary, but showcases how important consistency and storytelling is to the artist. The way the chorus of "Screwed" blends into "Django Jane" is so perfect you could listen to just those 10 seconds and get enough of the song to be satisfied. The way "Pynk" fades so that just Monáe's beautifully delicate vocals remain to highlight the equally delicate subject matter (I'll let you figure it out). The backing vocal loop on "I Like That" mimicking the best of 60s Motown. These are just examples pulled from dozens of moments on Dirty Computer that show Monáe is a bonafide star, a talent with no equal.
Joy as an Act of Resistance
Punk rock : Listen
From the opening moments of Idles' second album, you understand that the world is headed in the wrong direction. The industrial bass drones aren't here to welcome you to the promised land, but rather to warn you that the next 42 minutes are penance, a flagellation for all of humanity's sins. As "Colossus" morphs from its Jesus Lizard opener to its Black Flag conclusion, however, you understand that the gauntlet you will run is not like any other. This is going to be punishing and exciting at the same time.
"Brylcreem, creatine, and a bag of Charlie Sheen" begins the album's most successful entry into modern culture, "Never Fight a Man with a Perm," which apart from having one of the most amazing titles of any song ever, is as concise a treatise on Idles' influences as possible: there's post-punk guitars, punk lyrics, noise rock drums; and then the transition to a 3/4 chorus is straight out of a shoegaze manual. The song also is one of the best examples of Joe Talbot's poetry--"you look like a walking thyroid / you're not a man, you're a gland," he yells at his target, alt-right gym bros (if that wasn't incredibly obvious)--there's no obfuscation here.
And the examples of his wordsmithery can be found on every song: "this 'snowflake' is an avalanche" from "I'm Scum," "look at this card I bought because I love you" on "Love Song" (which, P.S. is a terrible love song, not to be played at weddings), "the mask of masculinity is a mask that's wearing me" on "Samaraitans" (which also has the play "I kissed a boy and I liked it" screamed at fever pitch, maybe the best vocal performance on the whole album), and "I go outside and I feel free / 'cause I smash mirrors and fuck TV" on "Television."
Idles created one of the best and harshest albums of 2017 with their first full-length Brutalism. Never before has an album so lived up to its name as that one. And it too was exactly what we needed to hear. But if Brutalism was the best at describing 2017, Joy as an Act of Resistance is the best at RESPONDING to 2018. Here we find Idles at their loudest, their most discordant, their fastest and their most furious. Every sound is dripping with glorious reverb and harsh, angular production. One of the few to wear their influences so obviously on their sleeve and yet still sound original, Idles fills the space with nasty, greasy textures culled straight from Swans and late-career Neu. Everything has only improved with their increasing anger.
"Rottweiler" is perhaps, and I don't say this lightly, the greatest closing track in the history of rock music. It is beyond normal musical consumption. Loud and angry certainly, but what punk music isn't? But the end, how the suite speeds up, changes key, becomes more degraded in texture. It changes from angry to apocalyptic, from loud to brutal, from fast to warped. This song will break your mind. But... it keeps going...
Keep going...
Smash it...
Ruin it...
Destroy the world...
Be the Cowboy
Art pop : Listen
Two years ago, in the process of trying to distill all of 2016's great albums down to 25, or whatever arbitrary number I was aiming for then, I remember listening to this album, Puberty 2, by a Japanese-American woman that sounded, just strange. Somehow I liked it, I still can't explain the experience of it the first time, but it was like hearing all your favorite bands play over top of each other that, by pure coincidence, made an entirely new, coherent sound that was greater than the sum of its parts.
It's 2018, and Mitski has returned, and in that intervening time she honed, crafted, narrowed, specialized, and perfected every aspect of her uniquely unwieldy, undefinable sound. Be the Cowboy isn't just an opus, it defies explanation, it defies awe. Pop music shouldn't be this complicated. Art shouldn't be this listenable. What is this? There's a love ballad that has random industrial noise, a synthpop anthem that doesn't have a rhyme scheme, a country song that becomes an ambient drone, and a Billboard-charting single where she sings the word "nobody" over and over for a minute straight. What is this? The most depressing themes are given the most upbeat music while the most beautiful testaments to love and its eternity are played as dirges. What is this?
The major points of the album are "Old Friend," "A Pearl," "Nobody," "Washing Machine Heart," and "Two Slow Dancers," and we shall go through all of them. "Old Friend" is a folk ballad describing two exes who want to stay friends (or perhaps never got over each other) meeting in secret to...talk--just talk; "Meet me at Blue Diner / I'll have coffee and talk about nothing" Mitski sings, her feelings so delicate that a whisper would destroy them.
"A Pearl" has maybe the best poetic imagery of this or many years. "I fell in love with a war" Mitski croons, describing that temptation to return to an unhealthy relationship just so she can try to save him, "and nobody told me that it ended." Now in a new relationship, her need to be in the toxins is a beautiful mess, "it left a pearl in my head, and I roll it around every night, just to watch it glow." This is all played over a bombastic guitar and horn combination like arena rock, pointing to the necessity of the argument.
"Nobody," written while Mitski was traveling abroad alone, is probably the most descriptive image of loneliness and isolation in popular music in the modern era. "My god, I'm so lonely, so I open the window, to hear sounds of people;" she only wants to hear people, because maybe that is enough to satisfy the need for human connection. When she finally realizes nothing will end her solitude, all she can do is weep "nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody" over and over and over, because, well, there's nobody.
"Washing Machine Heart" is played for straight synthpop, even Italo-disco, with a Vangelis-esque repetition, 808 clap track and everything. But the fact that Mitski doesn't even attempt to create a verse structure of any kind is as maddening as it is inspiring, her run-on sentences giving Faulkner a run for his money. How is this even musically possible? She doesn't fall into anything resembling a normal pattern until the chorus, half of which is just solfege. This woman is impossible.
And then we end our journey with "Two Slow Dancers," the dictionary of human feeling condensed into a song. Is it literal? Are the dancers Mitski and her interest at a high school reunion? If it is, it's even sadder than the metaphor. Two people who missed their chance at true love with each other in their youth, now aged past the point where they can reconcile that fact, forever trapped in lives apart from each other, except this...one perfect moment, where they can dance with each other in the empty gym, the smell of wood and dust transporting them back to when "it would be 100 times easier". But that time is gone.
Mitski dabbles in everyday love, picks at loneliness, but her main concern is time, and how it ruins everything. Those dancers were meant to be together, but they never will be. That washing machine heart will never be used. That pearl will never go away, the oyster only adds to it. The Blue Diner with the old friend is only a temporary escape. Her thesis is most clearly explained on the elegy "A Horse Named Cold Air," which is at once her starkest instrumentation and Mitski at her most experimental: "I thought I'd traveled a long way, but I had circled the same old sin." Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses. Now is now, it can never be a long time ago.
And that's it everyone! The Second Baltimore Music Festival has come to a close, but here's to a better 2019, and the great music of 2018!
If our Albums of the Year aren't enough to hold you over, check out our Honorable Mentions or this year's amazing Runners Up.
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