1. Future - Beast Mode 2
At any given time, Future has several rumored or promised projects in the pipeline; for a long time, the top of my wishlist was an R&B-leaning album, which I finally got last year in HNDRXX. Since then, I'd been hoping for a sequel to my favorite mixtape from his 2014/2015 run, Beast Mode, mainly because Zaytoven's sound is such a bright and melodic contrast to most of Future's go-to producers. In February I made a Future/Zaytoven best-of playlist for The Dowsers, but since then they've been pretty busy together with great tracks on the Super Fly soundtrack and Zaytoven's Trapholizay mixtape, but I was still pretty happily surprised that Beast Mode 2 materialized a few weeks ago. I seem to have different favorites every time I put this on but right now it's "Racks Blue" and "When I Think About It." Here's the 2018 albums playlist I add all the stuff I've been listening to this year.

2. Lori McKenna - The Tree
Lori McKenna has had an odd winding career path, releasing many albums, mostly independently, getting briefly signed to a major label and then dropped a decade ago, and then surging back to prominence recently as the Nashville songwriter behind huge hits by Little Big Town and Tim McGraw. The Tree is a really beautiful and spare folk record, a lot of understated emotion and storytelling in songs like "Young And Angry Again" and "The Lot Behind St. Mary's," I don't gravitate towards albums like this very often but this is a good one.

3. Wilder Maker - Zion
This New York band and I follow each other on Twitter so I'm a little friendly with them and enjoy their music, and they recently had a pretty up-and-down run of releasing their debut full-length and then a few days later had a bunch of gear stolen in Cleveland while they were on tour. The album is good, though, 7 songs that stretch their legs with a relaxed confidence. I think my favorite is "Drunk Driver" sung by Katie Von Schleicher, but Gabriel Birnbaum's Randy Newmanesque vocal presence is growing on me as well.

4. Cowboy Junkies - All That Reckoning
Cowboy Junkies made their most well known music 30 years ago and have kept at it ever since without ever breaking up or changing lineups. And I haven't kept up with their career closely, outside of listening to singles or The Caution Horses here or there, but I just love their sound and was happy to check out a new album and see that they've still got that beautifully simple, spare sound.

5. Meek Mill - Legends of the Summer EP
The night that this and Beast Mode 2 dropped was so great, just getting some unexpected music from two of my favorite rappers of this decade. It's funny how the number of songs on albums is such a hot topic in hip hop, running the gamut from the 7-song G.O.O.D. Music releases to 25 Drake songs, but I think I'm looking more closely at the EPs and little clusters of songs that rappers have taken to releasing instead of singles. Aside from Drake's 2-song Scary Hours, I think 4 songs has been emerging as the most popular format, but there's a lot of semantics and technicalities involved -- if Chance The Rapper had packaged his 4 new songs as an EP and not as 4 singles, I might include it in this post along with Meek's 4-song EP. This was a good way for Meek to dip his toe back in after all the post-jail publicity, "Millidelphia" is insane and the R&B tracks are really some of his best stuff in that vein to date, it's still surreal to me that that's become a good niche for Meek.

6. Jumbled - You Don't Know!? EP
John a.k.a. Jumbled is one guy in Baltimore who I feel a kinship with as one of the other people who has a foot in the hip hop scene but also plays drums in bands like Soft Peaks, who I've played a couple shows with. His latest album is a tribute to Baltimore club music that puts his own spin on the club sound of the '90s with his a lot of breakbeats and samples of Miss Tony and old soul records, much in the same way his lo-fi hip hop records tend to evoke golden age rap. You Don't Know!? sprints through 13 tracks in 15 minutes and has a couple great cameos from Berko Lover of So Nice Yesterday, it's a fun and impressive little record.

7. Mila J - July 2018 EP
Mila J has had a pretty low profile since she released a couple minor R&B radio hits a few years ago, but she's become increasingly prolific lately, releasing in every month of 2018. Just since the beginning of the year she's put out 38 songs, and it's a pretty impressive output, ranging from spare guitar-driven ballads to clubbier tracks. July 2018, like most of the other EPs, has an appearance from a Trey Songz soundalike named Migh-X who sings a weird song about Desiigner, but otherwise this is one of the best EPs in the series, I love "We Don't Mix."

8. Daron Malakian and Scars On Broadway - Dictator
A recent Rolling Stone story about how and why System Of A Down haven't put out an album in 13 years, even as the band members remain friends and continue to occasionally tour, really kinda bummed me out. SOAD were such an exciting and strange group to be one of the biggest bands in the world, and I'd really love to get a new record, particularly because the solo records and side projects never quite had the spark of the full band for me. But guitarist and principal songwriter Daron Malakian decided to finally release the songs he'd recorded in 2012 and was hoping to use for the next System album. And while this probably wouldn't be up to the standard of their previous albums even if these songs had System's powerful rhythm section and Serj Tankian's incredible voice on them, it's still pretty enjoyable to scratch the itch of hearing Malakian's unique sensibility.

9. Body/Head - The Switch
Sonic Youth, however, is a band whose side projects I've always devoured and I really just enjoy hearing everyone explore their own particular paths outside the band. It's a lot more bittersweet, of course, to not also have any new full band Sonic Youth records to look forward to. But in a way I've come to appreciate how Body/Head has allowed Kim Godon to take her odd sprechstimme vocal style over the Sonic Youth's spacier noise passages and isolate that aesthetic as a project's entire output, it's dark and abrasive but I can kind of sit and zone out to it without thinking about how I want the drums to kick in for the next uptempo song.

10. Halestorm - Vicious
I loved Halestorm's last album, 2015's Into The Wild Life, where they got a more relaxed, varied sound with country hitmaker Jay Joyce. But I'm not surprised or disappointed that they went back to more traditional hard rock production with the new one, they have a signature sound and it works for them.

The Worst Album of the Month: Wiz Khalifa - Rolling Papers 2
Every form of physical music media came with time limits that put some productive restraints on artists -- in the vinyl era, an artist who wanted to release more than 40 minutes of music usually had to come up with some manner of artistic or commercial justification for the extravagance of a 'double album.' And even when CDs doubled that limit, you got some pretty gutsy double albums that tried to make it worth your while to take up more than 80 minutes of your time. But now, you can just put an album of any duration on streaming services and not have to even pretend it's anything but a data dump. Drake's recent 89-minute Scorpion at least made a little sense in terms of a huge star at his peak of popularity making a long album with two musically distinct 'sides.' Wiz Khalifa, on the other hand, made an 89-minute album half a decade past his commercial peak, just because he can, and even labeling the album as a sequel to his biggest LP doesn't really do much to bring a sense of importance to the proceedings. Wiz Khalifa has always shitted out bland, emotionless music, constantly laughing at himself but never saying anything funny, and very little breaks up the monotony of these 25 songs other than a welcome Bone Thugs-n-Harmony guest spot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2018 at 10:43 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.