Our Year in Sound: 2018

This is my last week at TakeAction Minnesota.

I have loved writing to you.  About our state.  For TakeAction Minnesota.  Working with Kenza and Elianne and the whole team here has been transformational for me.

But after ten years, I’m ready for something new. 

I’m launching the 100% Campaign, a new state-based effort to create an equitable & clean energy future for everyone in Minnesota.  (You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.) 

But before I go, I’m leaving you with Our Year in Sound: 2018.

You see, my political life didn’t start in, well, politics.  My politics erupted out of my headphones.   I got political via punk.  The Dead Kennedys.  Fugazi.  The Nation of Ulysses.  The Minutemen.  The Misfits.  The Meat Puppets.  Wire.  The Stooges.  The Damned.  It was messy.  And liberated.  And created out of thin air.

Who made the songs that mattered this year? Listen and read about my top 35, alphabetically arranged…

• “Zelda Shyt” is Portuguese dance music, formed in Lisbon, made in Manchester, created by P. Adrix.  You’ve never heard this before.

• Big Joanie on Big Joanie: “We’re like The Ronettes filtered through 80s DIY and riot grrrl with a sprinkling of dashikis.” From London.  “Fall Asleep” is the lead single from their debut album.

• Anna Calvi’s Hunter is one of the best albums of the year.  Mature, ferocious, risky.  “Don’t Beat the Girl out of My Boy” holds all the album’s tensions perfectly.

• Brandi Carlile’s “The Joke” is what you need: the push to be you, when you don’t fit. 

• “APESHIT”.  Yeah, only the Carters can do this.  And they did it.  Real.  Right now.  Real expensive.

• Container’s “Drain” is dance music tearing itself apart while it’s being formed.  It’s unstable, formational, relentless, uptempo, and endearing.  I loved it this year.

• Canadian techno provocateur, Marie Davidson’s “Work It” features the best lyric of 2018: ‘You want to know how I get away with everything?  I work.  All the f*!%ing time.’

• Technically a 2017 release in Australia, Stella Donnelly’s Thrush Metal EP hit North America in 2018.  “Mean to Me” is my favorite.  She never throws a moment away.  Every second she sings, she’s reaching for some nuance, or shade, or twist of sound.

• “Nonstop”.  Feel how you feel about Drake.  This track was on repeat in 2018.

• Best of single of the year?  Easy.  “This is America” by Childish Gambino. 

• Ezra Furman’s “Driving Down to L.A.” is teenage complicated.  Like if Lou Reed, David Byrne, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen had a gender-non-conforming kid who was angry free.

• Sidney Gish’s 2nd album No Dogs Allowed is irresistible.  “Sin Triangle” is casual, disarming, catchy.  It’s like you’re in college and she’s in college and she’s playing in your dorm.  On a Thursday.

• Just an organ.  Deliberate.  The sounds of sounds joining, then hanging together.  It’s just an organ.  “Silent Scrapbook” is a beguiling song from Eiko Ishibashi.

• Jim James sounds like Jim James.  That’s a good thing.  “Just a Fool” delivers exactly what you want in exactly the way you want it.  (That is, if you want southern rock.)

• Adrianne Lenker’s “symbol” is surprising, proliferating, cascading past you; it’s hard to put your finger on.  It’s one of the year’s most beautiful songs.

• Lizzo is a Minneapolis treasure.  “Boys” is too good to be true.  Have you heard it yet?

• Okay, it’s melodrama.  It’s pop.  It’s irrepressibly optimistic.  Say what you want: Logic delivers on “One Day”.

• Low makes a certain 2018 anxiety manifest on their show stopping, mid-career masterpiece, Double Negative.  “Disarray” closes the album.

• Gia Margaret sounds so mid-twenties and Chicago.  “Groceries” is instantly sentimental.  And pleasurable.  Yes to this.

• H.C. McEntire’s love songs just put you there.  In North Carolina.  In early summer.  Blushing & vulnerable.  Check out “A Lamb, A Dove”.

• “Soft Stud” is the lead off song on Mother of My Children by Black Belt Eagle Scout.  It’s the debut album from Katherine Paul, a self-described radical indigenous queer feminist.  Did I mention that it rocks?

• Dude, it’s too good to not include: “High Horse” by Kacey Musgraves.  Just enjoy it. 

• You’ve got to listen to Noname.  It’s like you figured out one of your high school friends could rap.  And she’s waaay better than everyone else.  “Blaxploitation” is pure skill. 

• “Wide Awake”.  Parquet Courts.  You can dance to it.  Dancing is super-political.  Don’t let the bastards take away your joy.

• Petite Noir (AKA Yannick Iluna) creates global pop grounded in his experiences as an international refugee.  Though you don’t need the bio to get it: “Blame Fire” is ambitious, relate-able, generous, dance-able music.

• Joey Purp’s “Godbody”: it’s the perfect beginning.  He raps.  You listen.

• Put the drama aside.  Pusha T’s DAYTONA was the best of Kanye’s summer album series.  “If You Know You Know” was worth the wait.

• Superorganism’s “Sprorgnsm” is so 2018 it hurts.  Recorded collaboratively across the globe by musicians who recorded, emailed, added, edited, and emailed it back.  It came together brilliantly.

• Moses Sumney is almost impossibly good.  “Rank & File” is the single from his between-two-LPs-EP, Black in Deep Red, 2014, a political turn in a political year.

• Yves Tumor’s “Noid” sounds epic like What’s Going On-era Marvin Gaye, political like… well, also Marvin Gaye, but also like an alien outtake from a Spiritualized album circa 1996.

• Colter Wall is homesick.  “Plain to See Plainsman” should have a place in your midwestern heart. 

• London’s Nilufer Yanya is coming.  You will hear about her again.  This single, “Heavyweight Champion of the Year”, is just too good to be ignored.

• “In My View” is a stand out on my favorite album of the year, Cocoa Sugar, by The Young Fathers, an international trio of musicians based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

• Thom Yorke + Piano = “Suspirium”.  It’s off-kilter and aching.  It delivers you to some second-floor room where the sun is setting, the curtains are drifting, and something is, not, quite, right.

• 1010 Benja SL is an internet-age mystery, a Kansas City based musician who’s dropped exactly two singles before his EP this year.  “Ultimaybe” is the standout from Two Houses.

Listen to all the tracks and add your own to the playlist.

Until our paths cross again,

Chris