Culturedarm's Albums of the Year 2018

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20. serpentwithfeet – soil

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19. Gazelle Twin – Pastoral

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18. Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs

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17. Dizzy Fae – Free Form

Any preconceptions one might have going in to Dizzy Fae’s debut mixtape – whether owing to her name, the ordinary nature of mixtapes, or the alternative R&B catchall she falls under – are utterly dispelled within the first few phrases of the opening song ‘Her’, which begins as a lush and airy piece of musical theatre. ‘She taught me everything I know’, Fae confides, her voice knowing and mellifluous, over glistening and swelling and seafaring synths which she swoops and swoons to meet and meld with, the crunch and drag of footsteps providing the percussion and her voice the contours as the song edges towards its crescendo and Fae repeats ‘Can you feel the isle of snow carved beneath?’.

A classically trained musician who studied opera and dance at two Twin Cities institutions, the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Arts and TU Dance, a fledgeling solo star who performed with The Internet, Kehlani, Empress Of, and supported Lizzo and Toro y Moi before this first mixtape release, what really distinguishes Free Form beyond its freewheeling attitude to genre is the composed, performative approach through which Dizzy Fae roots the project. ‘Johnny Bravo’ is a sleek and urbane take on 80s synth-pop, replete with breezy insights and evocative imagery, like ‘Lighthouse boy, you see that girl light up? / She always glows pink, so you can disguise the fact that she’s always feeling blue’. ‘Canyon’ oscillates inside a plasma globe, its wiry filaments, electric glow, and the steady snap of percussion sustaining a soaring soul vocal.

Most of the tracks are lushly produced or co-produced by Minnesotan contemporaries Alec Ness, Su Na, Sen 09, and Psyum. There are wobbly basslines, funk and jazz and new wave cues on ‘Booty 3000’ and ‘Baby Pillz’, a zither-like, eastern-infused melodic line on ‘Kosmic Love’, and pensive late-night R&B on ‘Temporary’. ‘Indica’ – a song about falling in love for the first time with a woman, transposed as the second half of ‘Her’ for Dizzy Fae’s music video bow – makes use of pitch-shifted vocals to figure vulnerability, pitting Dizzy Fae right where she belongs, amid the alarums of synths and slow-throbbing bass, in the middle of contemporary trends with an unusual mastery of form and emotional register.

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16. Mount Eerie – Now Only

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15. Laurel Halo – Raw Silk Uncut Wood

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14. Noname – Room 25

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13. Tirzah – Devotion

Trained in the harp, working a day job as a designer for a print agency, with production by Micachu which teeters and disorients and lilts, on Devotion, her debut album, Tirzah provides a model of intimate, understated, singer-songwriter R&B. The record works by a process of repetition: most of its songs are built around loping and stuttering, looping, low frequency keys, punctuated by hi-hats and the fuzz and rumble and occasional glimmer of synthesizer, music which serves to buttress Tirzah’s lovesick and lovelorn themes. Innocent, clear-sighted, yet still with a touch of menace, again and again Tirzah ostensibly addresses a lover, although some of these songs double as messages to herself. Occasionally she seems to occupy both sides of a dialogue, or in the tumult and uncertainty of separation inhabits both spaces, one and the same: the gesture remains familiar, whether to hold on to something worth saving, or to finally let go, to say when or say forever, each in an attempt to make whole.

It is difficult to say who conjures the better trick: Micachu whose production so thoroughly unsettles the plainspokenness of Tirzah’s lyrics, or Tirzah who manages to straddle these loops with her frank and thin but still dexterous, modulating voice. ‘Do You Know’ circles the plughole, unsure whether to drain or let sink. On ‘Gladly’ a four-note synth loop and steady percussion sustain a song full of clarity and hope, Tirzah’s voice hovering above the mix, the odd twinkling key reaching out before the lushly drenched bridge. Muted trumpets provide an air of cautious triumph on ‘Holding On’, with an instrumental interlude offering momentary resolution. The brashly gleaming opening to ‘Basic Need’ gives way to breathy percussion and a shape-shifting vocal which inhabits all of the spaces between R&B, gospel, and soul. Power chords and pitch-shifted vocals distort ‘Guilty’ almost to the point of incomprehensibility until the song is finally subsumed by guitar, pacing keys and a simple entreaty from Coby Sey provide the building blocks to the title track, ‘Go Now’ mines ‘Are You That Somebody?’ by Aaliyah and ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’-era Destiny’s Child for a slightly grimy, funky, late-90’s R&B sound but without the uplift, and the lurching, buzzing synths which give way to wet lubricated keys make album closer ‘Reach’ a dense and misty final plea for communication.

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12. Vince Staples – FM!

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11. Devon Welsh – Dream Songs

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10. Kali Uchis – Isolation

From Motown soul to Brazilian bossa nova, from West Coast psychedelia to swinging sixties London with a tropical twist, on Isolation, her debut album, Kali Uchis glides and bounds through a palette of sounds rooted in and richly evocative of the past, globetrotting with one eye on home, lingering in the sun of the late afternoon. There are traces of Marvin Gaye (‘Body Language’) and even Roy Orbison (‘In My Dreams’), Amy Winehouse-inspired, schematized takes on vintage soul and R&B (‘Feel Like a Fool’, ‘Killer’), Robyn-esque electropop (‘Dead To Me’), while features bring their own flourishes to the mix: rapper BIA brings the flash to the sleek and bubbly ‘Miami’, ‘Just a Stranger’ with Steve Lacy moves with a warped and chopped funk, ‘Tyrant’ with Jorja Smith is kaleidoscopically transient, on ‘Nuestro Planeta’ amid dashes of disco Reykon offers his characteristic blend of reggaeton, and Bootsy Collins and Tyler, the Creator provide the star turns on ‘After the Storm’. There are instrumental plumes too, for instance in the flute on ‘Body Language’ or the brass ends which punctuate ‘Killer’.

But though they play their part these features flicker in and then out, wafting on the breeze: it’s in Kali’s hands that the whole coheres. Aside from her impeccable taste and an ability to seamlessly blend genres, vocally she’s always up to the task, mingling and melding with and sustaining her songs. ‘Gotta Get Up’, styled as an interlude, is a standout for its whoozy atmospherics and tangible daydreams. Isolation is on the one hand about the push and pull of family, home and the familiar, on the other about escapism, and reconstituting as a means of preserving the self. There are pensive moments, like on ‘Tomorrow’ where the sun strains to keep the clouds at bay; ‘Flight 22’ is a love song which forebodes disaster; on ‘Dead To Me’ she’s a touch sarcastic, for she might be the one who’s still obsessed; while ‘In My Dreams’ featuring Gorillaz is so hyper it’s dizzying. In the end Kali Uchis comes through, showing that with sharpness, deft, and an easy disposition, she’s more than capable of seizing opportunity on her own terms.

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9. Skee Mask – Compro

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8. Marie Davidson – Working Class Woman

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7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of

After collaborating with ANOHNI, FKA Twigs, David Byrne, and Iggy Pop, and composing his first soundtrack, to the Safdie brothers’ neon-clad crime caper Good Time, the first Oneohtrix Point Never album for three years has been described as folk horror, suitably cinematic while capturing its manner of composition and prevailing mood. Between work on his other projects, Daniel Lopatin retreated to suburban Massachusetts, to a glass-clad Airbnb out in the woods. He made much of his album there, alone and feeling under observation, the windowpanes at night alit with kamikaze moths. But you could just as well throw ‘space’ in front of the genre descriptor, because if there’s something down-home and makeshift about Age Of, that doesn’t halt or hamper its interstellar reach.

Age Of attains folk horror histrionics and palpable moments of dread, but as usual Lopatin draws from a broad palette of musical styles and cultural ephemera. In his hands ephemera become stranded in space, carved out or crystallised, detritus is redesigned or rediscovered as high culture, and prevailing trends, the spirit of the age, are spread out and made to go swimming. Age Of for the first time foregrounds Lopatin’s vocals, usually autotuned so that they attain a robotic intimacy, with support from ANOHNI and Prurient. James Blake provides additional production and mixing, Kelsey Lu features on keyboards, and especially on the second half of the album, Eli Keszler takes over on drums. Age Of has another life as part of Lopatin’s MYRIAD project, a multimedia stage production which played at Park Avenue Armory as part of the Red Bull Music Festival, an ‘epochal song cycle’ in four parts which figures a group of artificial intelligences who in the distant future lounge about parsing the history of human recording, seeking the banality in the beauty of our ongoing decay.

Album opener and title track ‘Age Of’ springs to life with a synthesized cross between a koto and a lyre, before rapid arpeggiated harpsichords transport us and we wind up in a baroque, austere and stringent. Somewhere amid the boing-boing of the synths the baroque gets smoothed out, like a string quartet performing inside of a mall elevator, until the gloop and gunk and then a final barrage of sound overcomes the edifice. The track is typical of the album in being so forthright, while mining traditional forms for a queasy resonance. ‘Babylon’ is a pitch-shifted country ballad, both ode and elegy to the modern city, the looped guitar riff which shackles ‘The Station’ gives out and rolls off into the nether, and on ‘Black Snow’ descending bass and percussive clicks give way to an R&B vocal on televisual static, societal demise, and impending apocalypse.

‘Toys 2’ swirls and swells inside its temple block beakers, a slow-moving, pensive instrumental composed as the score to an imaginary film, the sequel to the early-90s clunker Toys starring a CGI Robin Williams. As the sheen wanes in the second half, its sound is too inert to be described as ennui, too glazily abstract to be portrayed as melancholy. ‘Warning’ is all faltering breath under shimmering sitar, ‘We’ll Take It’ wades through the radioactive wreckage, fiery sparks, industrial hammering and welding, squelching percussion and trammelling waves of synth interrupted by fragments of a MADtv sketch, where a minister-cum-car salesman exuberantly hawks his wares to a compliant young couple, and ‘Same’ stars ANOHNI, despairing and crashing, whose lyrics on the themes ‘As above, so below’ and ‘Dust to dust’ offer the most overt instance of the spiritual undertone to Oneohtrix Point Never’s music. The slinky and radiant ‘RayCats’ refers to a scientific proposal around genetically modified cats, bred to change colour in proximity to nuclear radiation. ‘Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen’ is a quiet celebration of the household. And ‘Last Known Image of a Song’ is dark and stellar, but it abides rather than forebodes, for Age Of might be grim and sometimes isolated, but it’s never desolate, always suffused with human inclinations.

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6. Pusha T – DAYTONA

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5. Grouper – Grid of Points

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4. Blood Orange – Negro Swan

‘First kiss was the floor’, Dev Hynes sings on Negro Swan opener ‘Orlando’, and as he got up he seems to have carried some of the world with him. There’s a weight to this music, feelings of anxiety and alienation and exhaustion, themes of black identity expressed through music, hair, and skin, of performative masculinity, of political and societal and psychic distress. Hynes discusses childhood beatings based on race and gender or sexual nonconformity, there are brief references to police brutality and mass shootings, and Hynes delves into personal locales from the run-down East London borough of Barking and Dagenham where he grew up to the covered-but-still-porous legacy of Manhattan’s Minetta Creek. Yet none of this specificity and none of this darkness provides the right contour for the sheer pleasure of listening to Negro Swan. Dev Hynes seems able to reflect at the same time as he absorbs, to float on the breeze as a model for sturdy self-realisation: Negro Swan is yielding and unhurried even as it bristles with life, gently buoying its listener.

The sonic palette is broad and encompassing: Hynes casually finds the connecting threads between the easy funk and celestial R&B of Sign o’ the Times-era Prince and the shoegazing psychedelia of early Smashing Pumpkins, between the freewheeling soul of Marvin Gaye and the dreamy soundscapes of Air and the Cocteau Twins. There are robust rap features and one major coup in the appearances of A$AP Rocky, Project Pat, and Puff Daddy, with the train-track percussion and pitch-shifted samples of ‘Chewing Gum’ – a song about tiredness and ennui set upon images of oral sex, which loops the refrain from the mid-90s Memphis underground classic ‘Lookin’ for Da Chewin” by Kingpin Skinny Pimp – providing that tune with its hard edge. But moments like these sit happily alongside the Robert Wyatt-inspired, woodwind infused ‘Take Your Time’, and the smooth opening to ‘Jewelry’, reminiscent of nothing so much as the Beach Boys’ ‘Cabin Essence’.

‘Hope’ – on which Puffy positions himself as hip hop’s first purveyor of faltering intimacy – and ‘Runnin”, highlighted by the soaring vocals of Tei Shi and Georgia Anne Muldrow, make explicit some of the lingering tensions on the album, anxiousness dispersed by messages of optimism and encouragement and self-belief. There are jazz flourishes notably on ‘Saint’ and ‘Jewelry’, and on ‘Holy Will’, a partial cover of the Clark Sisters’ ‘Center of Thy Will’ featuring Ian Isiah and Eva Tolkin, high-definition gospel with on outro of glimmering synth. There’s a choral quality to ‘Dagenham Dream’ which turns the tables on violence and coercion, while ‘Minetta Creek’ and ‘Smoke’ possess a sleek, urbane and chattering New York City feel. Finally acoustic guitar breaks through the din and Hynes repeats, ‘The Sun comes in, my heart fulfills within’, but whatever he’s found, Negro Swan shows he’s more than capable of giving.

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3. Robyn – Honey

Robyn is one of the all-time great artists at conveying and embodying what’s always seemed like a decidedly youthful form of romance. Let’s put it between her and Ronnie Spector, separated by very different career arcs, Robyn starting especially young but finding her voice by seizing the sort of control over her music Spector could scarcely dream about, and by the fact that while Spector sung rhapsodically barely in the first flush of love, Robyn has borne instead love unrequited and on the way out. That’s from coquettish yet caustic takes like ‘Bum Like You’ and ‘Love Kills’, to the forlorn anguish of ‘Be Mine’, to ‘Every Heartbeat’ which rapt in the throes of heartbreak stumbles and tumbles and barely holds on, and even to ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ which finds Robyn adopting dual roles, ostensibly the other woman but relating intimately through experience to the woman scorned, and ‘Hang With Me’, tender but ever wary.

She hasn’t been gone for so long: in the meantime she’s released EPs with Röyksopp and as La Bagatelle Magique, featured on records by Neneh Cherry, Kindness, and Mr. Tophat, and her label Konichiwa Records has signed and released music by its sole other artist, Zhala. But though age is but a number and concepts of age changing fast, still Robyn’s first solo album in eight years has been anticipated with eagerness as well as a sense of wonder, over the sort of Robyn we’re going to find as she nears forty and grapples with the death of her longtime friend and collaborator Christian Falk. Does the popular love song have an expiry date, can a different sort of heartache still sustain moments of bliss?

While Robyn’s crystallised songs of young love and youthful ardour are universally relatable and intimately wrought, even as an artist Robyn has always held her reserve. In songs of longing it was never you she was looking at, and as you took surreptitious glances across the club floor she was alone wrapped up in thoughts about someone else, even if there was always the implicit invitation to dance. By contrast on Honey Robyn enters into more of a negotiation with her audience: its songs are unhurried, at times they bear traces of weariness and worry, but they are each suffused with an inviting warmth. Unafraid to mine a long history of dance trends and subcultures, Robyn intuitively melds their disparate pieces into a sturdy yet flexible, seductive and enveloping whole.

‘Missing U’ eases its listeners in through shimmering electropop, vintage Robyn with a psychedelic twist, on a song whose meditation on loss doubles as a message to Robyn’s fervent fanbase. ‘There’s this empty space you left behind / Now you’re not here with me’, Robyn sings breathlessly, but ‘All the love you gave it still defines me’, a message of courage and resolve, cuts quietly through the murk. Featuring Zhala, ‘Human Being’ inhabits a future of artificial intelligence, over fraying, distending synths and dull thudding drums Robyn still managing to find her sense of rhythm. ‘Because It’s in the Music’ is pure disco, steady bass and Robyn’s sinewy vocal preventing the confection from becoming sickly sweet.

‘Because It’s in the Music’ forms a sort of trio with ‘Baby Forgive Me’ and ‘Send to Robin Immediately’, the songs seguing into one another and affording different visions of the disco-led late night: ‘Baby Forgive Me’, whose backing vocal follows on from ‘Because It’s in the Music”s song-within-a-song, sounds like a road song or saloon song in the manner of ‘One for My Baby’, detached but seeking intimacy, a mellow mood with a modern R&B sensibility on which wind chime synths are buttressed between back-and-forth cowbell; while on ‘Send to Robin Immediately’ the entreaty ‘Baby forgive me’ becomes less persuasive and more direct. Produced by Kindness, ‘Send to Robin Immediately’ interpolates Lil Louis’ house classic ‘French Kiss’, amid the thick buzzing atmosphere offering tail-end twinklings of hope.

‘Honey’ is a towering achievement that suffuses the rest of Robyn’s work, trickling over and through the extent of the album, offering tactile and tensile support. Its synths come in waves, silky and fragrant, Robyn’s brisk vocal surfing effortlessly over the top. ‘Honey’ really encapsulates a newfound softness and generosity to Robyn’s music, as well as necessitating a new word, a new concept, a new process: something that figures a song which sounds like its foodstuff. ‘Between the Lines’ draws overtly from early 90s house music, ‘Beach 2k20’ offers a taste of the tropics through discrete parts, and the slick 80s synth-pop of album closer ‘Ever Again’ opens out with an upbeat lyric full of optimism and liberty hard-won. ‘Never gonna be brokenhearted / Ever again / I’m only gonna sing about love / Ever again’, Robyn sings with a pulse, knowing full well that the two are inseparable, and that the pitfalls and passions of love have always been her theme. Love can be fickle, but in the moment of love its unsullied, pristine: love lasts, and art endures, and when Robyn moves the world gasps and ogles at her agility then strains to keep up.

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2. KIDS SEE GHOSTS – KIDS SEE GHOSTS

Kanye West’s project over the early part of the summer seemed to be to take the zeitgeist for throwaways, for short attention spans and a sort of fickleness and contrariness to which he contributed more than most, and to capture its liberating qualities in forms resembling works of art. So – subsuming the world of EPs and mixtapes – we had five short albums in the space of a month, which aside from Kanye’s own releases saw him produce for Pusha T, Nas, and Teyana Taylor. If Pusha T’s Daytona was the stripped-back statement of intent, KIDS SEE GHOSTS – Kanye’s collaborative album with Kid Cudi, a waif-like arthouse kindred spirit – sought to show that even a brisk twenty-four minutes could be mind-bending and inquisitive, an evolution in style at the same time as it’s gloriously freeform.

It’s bold and brash in its production, full of buzzing strings, clattering drums, straining keys, and strummed guitar, its movements and interpolations strike at the gut rather than seeking to alter the mood, and its lyrics are for the most part playful and introspective. ‘Feel the Love’, with an extemporaneous verse from Pusha T and Cudi’s self-assuring pronouncements, sees Kanye play the mad scatter, spluttering gunfire. ‘Fire’ features stunted brass and chain gang percussion, ‘4th Dimension’ samples Louis Prima’s ‘What Will Santa Claus Say’ to delirious effect, and ‘Freeee (Ghost Town, Pt. 2)’ abounds in staggered rock dynamics. ‘Reborn’ with its minor keys, melancholy but still sustaining, and chug-along percussion gives way to a couple of stark confessionals, Kanye forthright while Cudi blurs hauntingly into the music.

The title track ‘Kids See Ghosts’ is all quivering spectres: amid the bubble and drip of the beat, and the oscillation of what sounds like synthesized castanets, the shiver and subtle change of rhythm midway through Kanye’s sinuous verse marks one of the most thrilling moments of his career. ‘Cudi Montage’, with firebrand guitar courtesy of Kurt Cobain’s ‘Burn the Rain’, wraps up the record on the note of a modern-day spiritual. All of these songs deal in some way with loss, with feelings of public condemnation and abandonment, with depleted and deteriorating mental health, and with the attempt to overcome and navigate some way out, an intermittent struggle but an effort always worth celebrating.

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1. Julia Holter – Aviary

Amid glittering and straining strings, crashing rolls of percussion, plucked bass and buzzing brass, a cacophony of sound, on ‘Turn the Light On’, the opening song from Aviary, Julia Holter is stranded again: beaming brightly from the lighthouse, transfixed by memory, enveloped in a love which may be more imagined than real. ‘In a high, vast, and empty distance’, Holter’s love light is a searing, ululating, reverberating supernova of the stars she would have her suitor eat. ‘Turn the Light On’ sets the tone for Aviary, an expandable enclosure with the lure of nature which for all its grandiosity and intimacy finds Holter at her most isolated. Its meditations are full of wariness as well as wonder, and its swirling rhapsodies speak of alarm, for even a love call is a call of alarm when it rises and falls suddenly and is keenly felt.

At eighty-nine minutes, the length of a double album, Aviary might seem daunting, but its songs seem to gallop by even when they unfold with a stately march. Pop hooks and full-frontal auditory assaults subsist alongside elegant baroques, still characterised by the hocketing technique where a single melody bounces between two instruments or voices compete and cohere in rapid call-and-response. Each track is full of interest, and joyous in the ways that they play with sound despite the sometimes remote and lovelorn themes. These days people feel easily oppressed by the attention implied by duration, or by acquaintance to cultural forms outside their usual milieus. In this sense the fact that Aviary draws its title from a line from an Etel Adnan short story, ‘I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds’, already serves as a barrier to entry: at best it’s something else to add to the reading list. But references no matter how erudite they might seem have always served as portals rather than hurdles on Julia Holter’s records, and likewise on Aviary. It takes no effort whatsoever to immerse yourself in this.

On ‘Chaitius’, whose soaring choral vocals mimic birdsong before progressing into something approaching new age, medieval strings and naif-like phonetics give way to synthetics and a spoken-word passage delivered in the manner of a self-help manual, with lyrics drawn from the Old Occitan troubadour poet Bernart de Ventadorn. ‘Voce Simul’ continues in the same vein, its automaton utterances over cool and sombre jazz eventually becoming tribalistic. Bagpipes sound like foghorns on ‘Everyday Is an Emergency’, before ominous keys and lyrics which once again function like sound poems figure the dim and circling pseudo-continuous. Some of these songs have long gestations, and ‘Another Dream’ with its jagged synths, spaciousness, and refrain ‘In the sweet melody I can see your face’, harks back to Holter’s earlier works Tragedy and Ekstasis.

‘I Shall Love 2’ is a piece of blistering, beautifully distilled pop, with propulsive percussion and vocal trills reminiscent of 60s girl groups, a Dantean interlude in the lines ‘Why do you squander? / Why do you hoard?’, and whooping and hollering as the song reaches its impassioned climax. ‘Underneath the Moon’ offers a slight change of pace with its ramshackle drumming, ‘Colligere’ is an ornate evocation of memory, as it slips its bonds or disintegrates, and ‘In Gardens’ Muteness’ is an aching, almost tearfully sad song about separation and incommunicability. ‘I Would Rather See’ is based on a fragment of Sappho’s poetry as translated by Anne Carson:

‘I would rather see her lovely step / and the motion of light on her face / than chariots of Lydians or ranks / of footsoldiers in arms’

fitting for an artist so concerned with faces in turn or in silhouette, seen only in the brisk blurred moment.

‘Les Jeux to You’ draws its inspiration from medieval memory games, slinkingly exquisite, its abundance of simple present forms forging an impression of intent which becomes wilfulness, swirling and heady. Quivering strings provide the panorama on ‘Words I Heard’, a sweeping song set in war time, present, ancient, or mythic. Droning bagpipes and strings, chomping bass and constant shakers sustain ‘I Shall Love 1’, a reprise figured as the first part, muttering, pleading, coupling, and dependent. And on the muted ceremonial close to Aviary, ‘Why Sad Song’ – based on a phonetic transcription of ‘Kyema Mimin’ by the Nepalese Buddhist nun Ani Choying Drolma and the jazz guitarist Steve Tibbetts – Holter inhabits a pensive mournfulness before shimmering out on the cymbal. Aviary is lush and exploratory, its sounds exulting in small triumphs, its moods and states lingering.