1. Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Look Now
Elvis Costello and his Imposters/former Attractions, Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas, have been making albums together for over 40 years now. And considering that Costello's last album was 5 years ago and his last Imposters record was 10 years ago, and he had a health scare earlier this year, I'm really cognizant that I can't expect these guys to be doing this and expanding on their unique musical chemistry forever, so I'm really happy that this album exists. Most of Costello's albums doggedly pursue one particular idea or aesthetic, but his albums after longer hiatuses tend to be wide ranging hodgepodges of different styles like Spike and When I Was Cruel. So I'm pleased that Look Now manages to work several Burt Bacharach and Carole King co-writes and a large number of brass and string musicians into a fairly cohesive album that has all the rock'n'roll oomph of his other Imposters/Attractions albums (even some of the non-Bacharach cuts give me Painted From Memory vibes). Costello's ungainly gulp of a voice may be an acquired taste, but it's aged well, gaining more in character than it's lost in range in recent years. Most of these albums are in my 2018 albums Spotify playlist. 

2. Madeline Kenney - Perfect Shapes
Jenn Wasner has been so consistently brilliant in her own work with Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes, and others, that I was excited to hear that she was producing another artist for the first time, North Carolina singer/songwriter Madeline Kenney. And Perfect Shapes is beautifully and uniquely textured in ways that are similar to Wye Oak's last couple albums, I haven't heard Madeline Kenney's previous album but I should check it out, I like her voice and her writing here. A lot of songs take interesting left turns in the second half, particularly "Bad Ideas," and I really dig Camille Lewis's drumming throughout the record. 

3. Ella Mai - Ella Mai
After months of Ella Mai ruling R&B radio with 2 very similar songs, I think I expected a really homogeneous album of midtempo DJ Mustard beats with piano sprinkled over them. And I have to say, this is a really lovely, varied album with a welcome amount of top shelf work from more traditional R&B producers like Harmony Samuels on "Cheapshot" and Bryan-Michael Cox on "Dangerous" in addition to Mustard trying some different sounds. The bits in between songs where Ella Mai does spoken word about words that start with the letters of her name are kind of silly and make it sound like a knockoff Floetry album, but the whole thing still holds together really well. 

4. Jeremih & Ty Dolla Sign - MihTy
This album was a little underwhelming at first because the best 2 tracks are the first 2 ones that were previewed ahead of the album, "The Light" and "New Level" (and their first collaboration, 2015's "Impatient," may still be their best). But MihTy is solid, I'm a much bigger fan of Jeremih than Ty but they're a good combination just in terms of their voices complementing each other and filling different spaces in the sound and personality of the record, "These Days" and "Imitate" are really lovely.

5. Mick Jenkins - Pieces Of A Man
Cinematic Music Group feels like it's kind of built on a TDE-esque model of 'album rap' that has Sony distribution but is more about cultivating a fanbase with immersive, ambitious records than chasing the radio/mixtape zeitgeist. And Mick Jenkins is by far my favorite artist out of that roster, he really has a great ear for production and a unique voice. I don't think I like Pieces Of A Man as much as 2016's The Healing Component, I just don't know if the Gil Scott-Heron thing he's going for suits him perfectly, but it's still pretty good.

6. T.I. - Dime Trap 
T.I. is one of the most influential but least imitated rappers in Atlanta, which is maybe a nice way of saying that young guys probably couldn't rap like him and haven't tried. Still, T.I.'s lowest charting album since 2001 is solidly better than Tha Carter V, which had a winning mix of narrative and marketing and a constant crop of Wayne wannabes to keep him seeming current. Tip is as singular as he ever was, which increasingly makes him feel like a man who stands apart from the trap rap scene he helped birth. Dime Trap is good, though, it feels like T.I. kind of took a Black Album approach of getting one track apiece from many of the producers he's worked well with in the past (David Banner, Just Blaze, London, Swizz, Scott Storch) along with a mix of lesser known producers. The way "More & More" flows into "Pray For Me" is so killer. The Dave Chappelle narration thing doesn't really work though. 

7. Eric Church - Desperate Man
Eric Church and the producer who he helped make into a hitmaker in his own right, Jay Joyce, have long cultivated a more dry, skeletal sound than their Nashville contemporaries (I was amused by the passage in Rolling Stone's recent Church cover story where he and Joyce talked about realizing early on that they hated steel guitar -- I love steel guitar, personally, but I appreciate that they figured out what to exclude to create their sound). Desperate Man is Church's sparest, shortest album to date, and sometimes it's so dry it almost chafes, and it takes a couple songs for me to really get the feeling I get from Church's best music, but "Some Of It" and "Hippie Radio" are great. 

8. Jonathan Richman - SA
It's been over 40 years since the original Modern Lovers broke up and Jonathan Richman more or less left behind that band and its sound in favor of the acoustic direction of his solo career. So I was a little surprised to see that his most famous Modern Lovers bandmate, Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads, co-produced Richman's latest album (the liner notes for SA also point out that the album was sequenced by someone who recorded some of the early Modern Lovers demos, Allan Mason). SA is very much of a piece with Richman's last dozen or so albums, it's mostly the skeletal sound of him playing acoustic with Tommy Larkins on drums, but on most tracks Harrison's keyboards and/or Nicole Montalbano's tambura add some welcome added texture. 

9. Usher & Zaytoven - A
The announcement of this project was met with a fair amount of skepticism and derision from people who I think just wanted to jump on 40-year-old Usher continuing to work with rap producers as a bad or 'desperate' thing and not him just continuing to make the kind of music he's made his whole career. It's especially clueless because Zaytoven is almost 40 himself, produced a hit Usher ballad, "Papers," nearly a decade ago, and has a lot of melody and gospel piano in his productions. That said, it's a 27-minute mini-abum thrown together very quickly so it's not any kind of masterpiece, it's just a breezy little experiment that occasionally results in some really good songs like "Say What U Want." 

10. Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper - A Star Is Born Soundtrack 
I've long resented Bradley Cooper's success and cast a skeptical eye at Lady Gaga's gestures towards artistic legitimacy since she stopped cranking out radio hits, so for years I rolled my eyes at the very idea of this movie being made. But hey, people say the movie is good, and Coop has come across well in interviews, like he's really a music head who thought about how he wanted to approach this project and make himself into a believable performer. But ultimately, his singing voice sounds like Eddie Vedder meets Neil Diamond and his solo songs on the soundtrack land somewhere between "better than I expected" and "still not good at all," so this is Gaga's show maybe more than I expected. "Look What I Found" and "Heal Me" are easily some of the best things she's done in ages, the rest is hit or miss but I have no idea whether certain songs are not great on purpose as part of the narrative or what.

Worst Album of the Month: William Shatner - Shatner Claus
I think I may fill this space with Christmas albums for the rest of the year, since so many bad ones come out every 4th quarter and I kind of get tired of bitching about Soundcloud rap albums. William Shatner's 50 year recording career began with a genuine camp classic accident, but he's since kind of turned it into just another way to whore himself out for attention and stay somewhere near pop culture. Some of the stuff where he covered Pulp or had Ben Folds writing songs was kind of fun, but at this point the joke just isn't funny more and hearing Shatner shat out Christmas songs with Henry Rollins and Iggy Pop is just kind of sad, like how much time do these guys have left on the planet and this is how they're spending it? ]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 01, 2018 at 12:01 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.