1. The 1975 - A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships
I was curious how the best British band since Pulp (YEAH I SAID IT) would navigate their big ambitious post-fame-and-addiction album, and for a while I feared that it would be more of a Be Here Now mess than a difficult but rewarding masterwork like This Is Hardcore. But by the time the album arrived, all 5 of the advance singles had had time to grow on me, and I was relieved to find that not every song followed the "Give Yourself A Try"/"Love It If We Made It" template of wordy stream of consciousness verses and simple one line choruses. And while the other tracks feel largely like connective tissue between those 5 songs, I appreciate that the band's penchant for ballads and chill soundscapes has resulted in an album that still has the same kind of topography of peaks and valleys as I Like It When You Sleep even though it's a substantially shorter record. 

2. Meek Mill - Championships
There's something really funny but also gratifying about Meek Mill opening Championships with an other intro that builds up patiently to a big cathartic climax in the mold of his signature song "Dreams & Nightmares" by sampling another classic slow burner, "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins. The back-to-back samples from Life After Death and Reasonable Doubt maybe are a little too on-the-nose as far as Meek borrowing the grandeur of '90s rap to make his own album sound like a classic, but it's alright, he's one of my favorite rappers of the decade and I'm happy anyone that was fronting on his previous great records has come around for this one, "Championships" and "Oodles O' Noodles Babies" and "Cold Hearted II" are some of his best work that really put across his message he's always had at a time when people are actually listening to it for once.

3. Black Thought & Salaam Remi - Streams Of Thought Vol. 2 EP 
Another hero of Philly rap from a different generation, Black Thought, has had his own kind of cool renaissance this year after a viral radio freestyle and some solo music kind of brought him out of the shadow of The Roots and "The Tonight Show" for some well-deserved attention. I wasn't crazy about 9th Wonder as the producer of the first EP, so I'm kind of thrilled about the choice of Salaam Remi for the new one -- Remi has long been underrated because of the narrative that mid-period Nas albums had terrible production, and 9th Wonder's inflated reputation started with him doing inferior versions of Salaam Remi-produced Nas tracks for God's Stepson, so I feel like it all came full circle here. "Get Outlined" in particular is just killer.

4. Styles P - Dime Bag
Styles P is another veteran rapper who I always really root for, his solo catalog has always been solid and I feel like he's kind of found an interesting lane as this peaceful vegan dude who still makes really hard edged music. And this album is even better than the G-Host project earlier this year and the enjoyable duo project with Dave East a couple months ago. 

5. Takeoff - The Last Rocket
I've been defending Takeoff as an essential part of Migos for years. And while I'm annoyed that his solo debut was squeezed in between the group's other solo albums at the height of their overexposure, I'm at least glad that people got a chance to compare this favorably to Quavo's album. The Last Rocket isn't a really high energy album, but I feel like he did a good job of picking beats that foreground his gravelly voice and it's fun to hear him really stretch his legs and finally do multiple verses on the same song and switch flows. "Soul Plane" is a standout, I feel like he kinda buried that one toward the end. 

6. Vince Staples - FM! 
The last 20-minute stopgap project Vince Staples released between proper albums, 2016's Prima Donna, didn't really stick with me at all and kinda left me feeling like I only wanna hear bigger album-length projects from Vince. But FM! has a nice refreshing energy to it, has a whole thematic thread but still kind of brisk and light on its feet, makes me wonder what he has up his sleeve for 2019. 

7. War On Women - Live From Magpie Cage (Acoustic) EP 
Shawna Potter and Brooks Harlan did acoustic duo versions of songs by their great underrated old band Avec a decade ago, so I wasn't surprised to hear they'd done the same with their current band, even if it may seem like a less obvious idea for a band that makes fast heavy feminist anthems. And one of the reasons War On Women is great is there's a lot of melody and songcraft underneath the confrontational sound and message, so these songs translate to simple voice-and-guitar arrangements really well. I was thrilled that one of my bands got to play a show in October on the same bill as Shawna and Brooks doing an acoustic set, and there was a great moment when they opened with "Predator In Chief" and the whole audience cheered at the line "every time a Nazi cries/ I just wanna punch him one more fuckin' time." Shawna laughed so hard at the reaction, which I guess they don't get at full band shows where people don't hear the lyrics as clearly, that she had to take a couple bars to stop and gather herself and sing the next line.  

8. Boosie Badazz - Boosie Blues Cafe
An actual blues album is the kind of odd little detour that I wouldn't have been as surprised by if it had come out during the stretch of 2016 that Boosie was releasing an album every month. As his first project in almost a year, though, it's a weird one. Southern rappers with dark, personal lyrics like Boosie get compared to blues singers sometimes, but to take it too literally is a little bit of a stretch. But I will say that the album's strength is in its scattershot approach -- over 17 songs he tries a a whole lot of different approaches to what a Boosie 'blues' song could sound like, and a few of the early tracks come off pretty cheesy and slapdash, but as the album goes on it kind of finds its groove and you get all these different experiments like the zydeco sound of "I Know How To Have A Good Time." 

9. H.E.R. - I Used To Know H.E.R. - Part 2 EP
The first I Used To Know H.E.R. EP earlier this year didn't leave much of an impression on me and made me feel like once you've heard one of her songs, you've heard them all. But I like this one a lot more, partly because the presence of acoustic guitar on about half the tracks, maybe she took the success of her Daniel Caesar duet "Best Part" as a cue to head in that direction a little but there's a nice variety of different sounds here, "Carried Away" and "Hard Place" are really lovely. 

10. Richard Lloyd - Countdown
In 2007, Richard Lloyd left Television, stating that he "took a vow in '73 to be invisible so that Tom could be the leader so there'd be no challenge in public" but was ready to focus on his solo career. And I kinda respect that, because Lloyd played nearly half the guitar solos on Television's albums, and he and Tom Verlaine are absolutely equals as guitarists, plus Lloyd did amazing work on Matthew Sweet's '90s albums, but he never really got the credit he deserved. And Countdown is Lloyd's 4th solo album since he left the band, while Television has still yet to release the new songs they've been playing live since the '90s, so maybe he was right to move on and actually make some records. Lloyd is about as good a singer as Verlaine but perhaps a bit less distinctive or charismatic, so the appeal here is more the guitar playing, there's some awesome solos on here. 

The Worst Album of the Month: The Smashing Pumpkins - Shiny And Oh So Bright Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. 
I wasn't naive enough to expect that James Iha returning to the band would reverse Smashing Pumpkins' steady decline since he left, but I at least thought that Billy Corgan's incredible thirst to fulfill a reunion/redemption/comeback narrative would lead him to try and focus on his strengths and make something more accessible. So when I listened to the new album's opener "Knights of Malta," perhaps the most annoying the band has ever released, I was more amused than disappointed. Funny to think that the best Smashing Pumpkins album since the '90s is probably that one that Tommy Lee from Motley Crue played drums on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 04, 2018 at 11:29 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.