1. The Lemon Twigs - Go To School
The Lemon Twigs are two 20ish brothers from Long Island who make doggedly old-fashioned pop/rock that often recalls Todd Rundgren and Big Star on a 4-track in their basement. But Go To School is their second album for 4AD and features cameos from Rundgren and Jody Stephens. I got hooked on the band earlier this year when I heard "Tailor Made," the B-side of a single they released in March. Neither of the songs from that single is on Go To School, a concept album (actually, 'a musical' per the album cover) about...a monkey going to school. So while I shake my head a little bit at them leaving my favorite song off the album to pursue a deliberately ridiculous storyline, I appreciate the chutzpah of the gesture, and the album is full of memorable tunes. After all, some of the best concept albums are parodies of concept albums, dating back to Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick. I put this and the other albums I've been listening to this year into a 2018 albums Spotify playlist. 

2. YG - Stay Dangerous
YG's third major label album seems to suffer from comparison to his first two, which were among the best of the decade. I have to wonder if it's more about narrative than music, though. My Krazy Life was this great underdog moment where a regional star who'd been kicking around the charts for half a decade and his producer lined up with the zeitgeist perfectly. And then Still Brazy proved that YG could still thrive without DJ Mustard in his corner. Now, YG and Mustard are back together on Stay Dangerous and there's little of the excitement that was generated when they first fell out at the peak of their respective careers. But they're both a little more versatile than they were 4 years ago, it's hard to imagine them pulling off something like "Bomptown Finest" as well in 2014. "Suu Whoop" is my personal favorite but "Slay" is the one that deserves to be a hit, and you know I don't just ask to hear more Quavo on the radio like it's nothing. 

3. Lloyd - Tru
I loved Lloyd Polite, Jr.'s last album King of Hearts that was released over 7 years ago, and after his excellent 2016 single "Tru" and EP of the same name weren't immediate followed by an album, I started to think we'd never get another full-length from him. So I'm happy that he finally added 7 songs to the 4 he released in 2016 and completed the album, which maintains the kind of humble, wizened vibe of "Tru" but also gets some nice sleazy R&B slow jams in there. It's not often that singers who were stars as teenagers get to 30 seeming to have a pretty good head on their shoulders but this feels like an unusually relaxed and centered album from an aging R&B star. 

4. Troye Sivan - Bloom
It really seemed like Troye Sivan was being anointed as the next big pop superstar for a minute there but then they released half of this album as singles and none of them really took off. This album is really solid, though, I think the only time I'm not totally on board is when he briefly abandons the brooding synth pop thing for the folky "The Good Side" and it falls a little flat. "Plum" is great, though. 

5. Ariana Grande - Sweetener
Four albums in, Ariana Grande doesn't have any bad albums, but it increasingly feels like she'll never make a better one than her debut, 2013's Yours Truly. I have a real love/hate relationship with Pharrell Williams, who produced half of Sweetener with his typical one-size-fits-all style of making Ariana Grande sing over beats that sound like an outtake from G I R L or the last N.E.R.D. album half the time instead of crafting something that suits her voice. "Blazed" and "R.E.M" and "Get Well Soon" are decent, but really all the Pharrell stuff pales in comparison to the tried and true Max Martin/Ilya stuff that resembles the last couple albums more. "Breathin'" is almost too much like other Ariana tracks but I still love it, wish it was a single. 

6. Peter More - Beautiful Disrepair
Peter More is a young Austin singer/songwriter who fronted an obscure indie band called Oh Whitney who, it seems, by some twist of fate wound up befriending Steely Dan legend Donald Fagen on vacation in Mexico. So Fagen produced More's debut solo album, which is a bit more of an Americana thing than you might expect from the Fagen association, but has an appropriately pristine polish of old-fashioned session player magic and relaxed bluesy grooves. "Cuando" is probably the most Steely Dan-ish track. 

7. Moneybagg Yo - Bet On Me
Memphis is one of the great hip-hop cities and they've had a real moment lately. But it's kind of felt to me like the new stars (Blac Youngsta, Moneybagg Yo, and BlocBoy JB) all feel like they're following in the footsteps of the more established Yo Gotti and Young Dolph, when I'd love to hear some more unique voices and flows from the city that gave us MJG and Project Pat. But Moneybagg Yo has started to stand out to me more, in part because of Lil Baby's "All Of A Sudden," which I was just raving about on here recently. And Bet On Me is a really solid little 9-song project, with majority of the beats produced by Tay Keith, who I understand the hype around a little more after songs like "Wat U On" and "Exactly." 

8. T. Ali & Doowy Lloh - New Age Renegades EP
I haven't heard a lot previously by Baltimore rapper T. Ali and Baltimore producer Doowy Lloh but this 5-song collaboration is really good, there's kind of this subtle neon futuristic vibe to the production that sort of feels like it justifies the title. Haz2Real's 1993 is another Baltimore rap release from August that was really good. 

9. Fall Out Boy - Lake Effect Kid EP
On the eve of Fall Out Boy's first stadium show in Chicago, they released an EP of three songs dedicated to their hometown, and it's a pretty nice little chaser to Mania that, "Super Fade" aside, might go over better with longtime fans than the album did. "Lake Effect Kid" was first released as a demo 10 years just before Folie a Deux, an era that I basically consider the band's creative peak, so it's great to get a polished version of that, and "City In A Garden" is gorgeous too.

10. Travis Scott - Astroworld
Rap sales wars have long functioned as a symbolic changing of the guard, when one act that has always outsold another suddenly finds themselves on the losing side (most famously 50 Cent/Kanye). And that wasn't supposed to happen with Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj, since their albums didn't come out the same week, but when his 2nd week outsold her first week, it made for an unexpected contrast between two artists so different that nobody would've otherwise thought to compare them. It's interesting to think of their opposite sets of strengths and weaknesses, though: Nicki Minaj, for all her talent and all her hits, has never really known how to put together an album that didn't feel like a haphazard collection of hits and filler with no baseline aesthetic. Travis Scott, by comparison, can literally barely put together more than a couple coherent rhyming lines at a time, but he's the Best Aesthete Alive, and he's in total command of his audience and what they expect from him. You can feel him leaning into the unapologetic self-parody on the first 60 seconds of the album, when he lets loose an "it's lit!" and a "straight up!" But the less-is-more songwriting works for him, I'll admit -- the Kanye-penned verse on "Skeletons" sounds so awkward that the last thing I want is Travis Scott delivering lyrics by rappers who have more personality. Since he started his career as a producer, people tend to credit him with the sound of his records more than other rappers, and I think Astroworld gives lie to that -- he only has co-production credits on 2 tracks, and if he's trying to put his stamp on the tracks by combining beats from different producers, the beat switches on "Stargazing" and "Sicko Mode" sound awkward and pointless (in the latter case it sounds like 2 unfinished Drake collaborations got stapled together when it was album time, but of course people fucking love it). Still, Travis Scott remains a great curator of reference points, and the Goodie Mob interpolation on "5% Tint" is a refreshing addition to the more expected DJ Screw and Three 6 homages. So while Astroworld strikes me as mostly empty spectacle, it at least succeeds at being a spectacle far more often than Queen, so I understand why one album triumphed over the other.

The Worst Album of the Month: Trippie Redd - Life's A Trip
Travis Scott is kind of an unofficial forefather or elder statesman of the Soundcloud rap scene that Trippie Redd is one of the 2nd-tier stars of, and Travis appeared the lead single for Life's A Trip (also, on Twitter I joked that both of their albums have Insane Clown Posse cover art). But where Astroworld is kind of a successful argument for brooding melodic rock-influenced goth rap to rage to, Life's A Trip is a 'debut album' that sounds like a messy scattershot playlist. Some of the guitar-driven stuff actually sounds decent but is undercut by the fact that Trippie Redd's bleating 'rock' voice resembles Fat Mike of NOFX more than anyone else, and at one point on "Bird Shit" he stumbles upon a perfect imitation of the Howard Dean scream. Out of a crop of rappers that isn't necessarily prized for its musical talent, Trippie Redd might genuinely make the worst music out of the whole wave of Soundcloud stars, save for maybe 6ix9ine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 04, 2018 at 9:16 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.