1. Young Thug - So Much Fun
It's been almost a year since I wrote a Vulture piece about all the ways Young Thug had spent a half decade getting in his own way and short-changing his career potential. And it seemed really simple to me that all he really had to do was one normal album cycle with an advance radio single and announced release date to get back on track and finally do solid first week numbers. But I'd kinda given up on him actually doing that, until it all fell together for So Much Fun. I'd started to worry that he'd kind of gotten too musically stuck in a holding pattern to make a great album, especially since I don't really care for the big single, "The London." But this is killer, "Light It Up" and "Big Tipper" are my personal highlights but there are really no skips since "The London" just pops up at the end harmlessly. Here's the 2019 albums playlist I fill with every new release I listen to.

2. Rapsody - Eve
I'm still stuck on Laila's Wisdom as Rapsody's masterpiece, but Eve is another great record from one of the best MCs out there. Like LEGACY! LEGACY! by Jamila Woods earlier this year (or Jeffery by Young Thug a few years ago), every song on Eve is named after the artist's heroes and influences, all black women in this case. But I wasn't even looking at the tracklist on my first listen so I was just enjoying the songs as is, now the thematic undercurrent is sinking in a little more, and "Whoopi," "Serena," "Iman" and "Hatshepsut" are my favorites.

3. Raphael Saadiq - Jimmy Lee
This is at best Raphael Saadiq's third best solo album, but it's really something new and essential from him, darker and more autobiographical than his other records, named after his brother who overdosed on heroin 20 years ago. I really like the abrupt transitions from track to track on here, particularly from "Sinners Prayer" to "So Ready," it really gives the album an interesting texture that contributes to the anxious, agitated air of the songs.

4. SiR - Chasing Summer
Top Dawg Entertainment has a tendency to let their artists go years between projects, sometimes even when they don't want to but aren't bankable stars yet. So I'm glad that SiR has been able to put out a project every year with TDE, first two EPs and now two albums, and really grow his fanbase gradually with his subtle slow burner songs. The mid album run of "Fire" and "New Sky" and "Lucy's Love" is my favorite part of Chasing Summer, but there are some potential singles here, particularly "Touch Down."

5. Red Hearse - Red Hearse
Jack Antonoff produced the majority of two August releases that are the highest selling (Taylor Swift) and perhaps most acclaimed (Lana Del Rey) albums of 2019. But people kind of have a weird thing about loving the records Antonoff makes and resenting that he's involved, whether it's residual resentment for Bleachers or Lena Dunham, or just that he's the dorky male feminist type dude who seems to work with every other admired woman in music. In any event, the Antonoff release from last month that I found myself getting into the most was the debut from Red Hearse, his new trio with singer Sam Dew (best known for the hook on a minor Wale single) and producer Sounwave (best known for many of Kendrick Lamar's best songs). It's an odd and whimsical little record, and the title of the song "Red Hearse" is an uhhhh anatomical metaphor, but it sounds great and fuses a lot of different styles together interestingly.

6. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
As someone who's rolled their eyes at the title Norman Fucking Rockwell for months, I'm impressed at how much I like the title track that opens the album. As far as aggressively branded sad girls who spike their vulnerability and platitudes with curse words for effect, I still prefer Tove Lo's last album, but this is a good record, I kinda get why it's become her first album to get really huge consensus acclaim even if it's just an incremental step up from her previous work. I never thought a mastery of spare piano ballads would reveal her strengths as a vocalist, but here we are. I have to wonder if "Doin' Time" was going to be on the album before it became her biggest alternative radio hit, even for an artist with a very evolved sense of camp, Lana singing "Bradley's on the microphone with Ras MG" is a bridge too far for me, I kind of grit my teeth to get past that track and back to the good songs. That little stutter on "Bartender" is the only time I really remember how bad Lana sounded when she started out.

7. Chants - Seven Spheres
I have been friendly with Jordan Cohen for a number of years and I've been really proud to see his career take off producing tracks under the name chants. He's a talented drummer who's played in New Orleans brass bands, so I can't help but hear how that informs his work programming beats, particularly on Seven Spheres, which features some live djembe and marimba, and even the synths often have the texture of mallet percussion.

8. The Bird And The Bee - Interpreting The Masters, Volume 2: A Tribute to Van Halen
When The Bird And The Bee released their first Interpreting The Masters album covering Hall & Oates 9 years ago, I jokingly but accurately predicted that a future volume of the series would feature the songs of Van Halen, based largely on the band's earlier DLR tribute "Diamond Dave" and also some familial connections (Ted Templeman produced some of the best albums by both Van Halen and The Bird And The Bee singer Inara George's father, Lowell George of Little Feat). The idea of covering early Van Halen songs with piano and synths in place of guitar is a little funny -- I think about the Billy Joel VH1 special where he self-deprecatingly played the "Sunshine of Your Love" riff on piano to illustrate that it's hard to pull off hard rock without guitars. But Greg Kurstin totally rises to the occasion and finds creative ways to play "Eruption" or the "Hot For Teacher" solo on a grand piano without losing the electric showboating spirit Eddie Van Halen's performances. Even when they do Van Halen's biggest keyboard-driven hit, "Jump," they switch it up, having George stack vocal harmonies to perform the synth riff.

9. Midland - Let It Roll
Let It Roll hasn't struck me as immediately as Midland's 2017 debut On The Rocks but it sounds like a solid continuation of their sound. Country music is great at mythologizing its past, and nobody has plumbed nudie suit retro as well as Midland lately, but their songs themselves are often self-referential about country lyrical tropes, from "Cheatin' Songs" to "Every Song's A Drinkin' Song."

10. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Infest The Rats' Nest
I was excited to hear that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard would release their second album of 2019, given how great their several 2017 albums were, but I was a little skeptical about this one being a one-off excursion into heavy metal. But I generally like '70s hard rock and proto metal a lot more than what the genre later became, and I supposed I should have expected that King Gizzard's '70s-heavy sensibility would lead them toward an album that mostly reminds me of Motorhead and Sabbath. They really got into the apocalyptic metal vibe in an entertaining way with the lyrics, too, with timely songs like "Mars For The Rich" and "Superbug" in particular ("H1N1 was a flop/ Anti-microbial resistance is futile/ Superbug is like a truck/ Penicillin is a duck that's sitting on the road").

The Worst Album of the Month: 93PUNX - 93PUNX
In August, former Roc Nation singers Justine Skye and Bridget Kelly quietly released pretty good independent EPs. Meanwhile, Roc Nation released a terrible side project from perennial problem child Vic Mensa, who's probably pretty horrified to realize that even at the crest of a Chance The Rapper backlash, people will never like him as much as his old frenemy. Vic Mensa isn't untalented, but he's gone through so many ill-fitting musical costumes in the last few years, and screaming over power chords suits him even less than some of the others. He samples Bad Brains at one point to nod to the great and often unheralded history of black punk rockers, but his songs with Good Charlotte and Travis Barker don't add much to that legacy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 07, 2019 at 2:55 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.