1. Tove Lo - Sunshine Kitty
Tove Lo's last record, Blue Lips, was my #1 album of 2017, so I've been really looking forward to this one, and it's not as great front to back, but still really enjoyable. I'm not going to fall into a Charli XCX spiral of insisting that she should be a gigantic pop star just because I personally really like her kind of niche adult-skewing take on dance pop, but if I could I would totally put "Stay Over" all over US radio. And the Kylie Minogue duet "Really Don't Like U" is fantastic and everything I hoped it would be. You can hear all this and all the other albums I've been listening to this year in my 2019 albums Spotify playlist.

2. DaBaby - Kirk
DaBaby's big breakthrough album Baby On Baby was barely 6 months old with its singles still all over radio when he announced a follow-up album, and as with many other prolific rappers I think Kirk has encountered maybe more skepticism than it deserves simply because he didn't take a one year grace period. It's true that Jetsonmade and the rest of DaBaby's stable of producers have mostly stuck to the sound that made him a star and not everybody needs 2 albums' worth of this stuff in one year (although I will maintain that two 35-minute albums is always preferable to one 70-minute album). I've been comparing both albums trying to figure out which one will be higher on my year-end list -- that's right, I'm going A/B on Baby -- and I can't quite call it, although the earlier album is definitely the one to beat. "Bop" and "Vibez" add enough new textures to that Jetsonmade sound to still be a lot of fun, and "Intro" is an incredible song that changes up his sound and shows him in a different, more thoughtful light that's genuinely exciting to hear, and even the middle section of the album full of big name guest stars works really well. I don't think this run he's on is over anytime soon.

3. Height Keech - Raw Routes
Dan Keech has been making rap records out of Baltimore for almost 20 years as Height, Height With Friends, or more recently Height Keech. I've interviewed him several times and he always sends me everything he puts out, and I don't write about all of it, because there's just so much and some connects with me more than others, but I'm always just in awe of his work ethic and how much he performs and records -- about a year ago he played his 1000th show, and put out a best-of compilation of songs from 20 different records (I also ended up on the same song as Height last year, kind of by accident). And I'm happy to say that after all this time he's still hitting new peaks, I'd put Raw Routes up there with Winterize The Game, Bed of Seeds and Versus Dynamic Sounds as one of his best albums. Songs like "That's a Wrap for Radio Shack" really just sum up his joy of making beats and rhymes well, he's got this very '80s-indebted approach to hip hop that feels very organic and unforced, which I think is rare. And "I Can't Believe There's a Meme Shooter" is this earnest, stunned reaction to mass shootings committed by internet trolls that only Height could write.

4. JPEGMAFIA - All My Heroes Are Cornballs
Even thought JPEGMAFIA is from a different generation and different part of the Baltimore scene, I see him and Height as part of a whole continuum of uncommercial and idiosyncratic Baltimore hip hop, something that's flourished here long before 'lo-fi hip hop' was a buzzword, a whole lineage of smart strange rap that ranges from Labtekwon to The Unstoppable Nuklehidz to Rapdragons. The thing that's different about JPEGMAFIA is that he touched a nerve and is now, like, nationally famous, getting written about it in every publication and playing festivals and has kind of entered the larger conversation of avant rap. There are some tracks like "PRONE!" where he really shows how well he can rap in a traditional sense, but obviously the fractured production and arch sense of humor and the surprisingly pretty little bursts of melody in his delivery are what really tie the record together.

5. Jon Pardi - Heartache Medication
In a brief career of only 3 albums to date, Jon Pardi has released 2 singles with "boots" in the title, 2 singles with "night" in the title, and 2 singles with "heartache" in the title. That's emblematic of how faithfully he sticks to the reliable old ingredients of a good country song, but I don't mind, especially since he's practically the only guy left on country radio these days who makes room for prominent fiddle parts in the mix. There's some really nice guitar work on this album too, particularly on the opening track "Old Hat," and "Me And Jack" and "Tied One On" have really loose, playful tempo shifts that feel a lot more spontaneous and lively than what you usually get on a Nashville record these days. I also enjoy that "Me and Jack," a song where he blames all his problems on whiskey, is directly followed by the song "Don't Blame It On Whiskey" (I can't even be sure if it's deliberate, since I haven't heard a new country album in years that didn't have at least two songs about whiskey). Miranda Lambert and Eric Church co-wrote "Don't Blame It On Whiskey" and Pardi wanted her to sing on it but instead they had to get Lauren Alaina, kind of a shame, Lambert should've done it. There's actually 6 songs in a row about alcohol in the middle of Heartache Medication, plus the title track earlier in the record, a streak that rivals the recent Justin Moore album.

6. Iggy Pop - Free
I like some of the Stooges and Iggy Pop songs that everybody likes, but he's never been really important to me personally, so I don't check out every new record, although sometimes I do depending on how much time I have when they come out. So I never heard Iggy's last album, 2016's Post Pop Depression, but apparently he came home from touring for that album feeling exhausted, and kind of unwound by making Free, a very relaxed and downtempo record largely written by trumpeter Leron Thomas. And it's really a lovely and unexpected album, not what I expected from Iggy Pop and a cool late period experiment.

7. Kevin Gates - I'm Him
Islah was one of those great breakout albums where everything lined up to turn a regional star into a big mainstream platinum rapper. But it kinda felt like he lost a lot of momentum in the 3 and a half years since then, between the year in jail over some dumb shit and a couple of stopgap projects that felt like they were just filling space between proper albums. So I'm pleasantly surprised that I'm Him is really strong, and feels really focused and streamlined -- the average song length is about a minute shorter than Islah, so it feels like he just trimmed the fat and kind of keep up with the brevity trend of Soundcloud rap to great effect.

8. Hobo Johnson - The Fall of Hobo Johnson
I never thought I'd find myself as something of a Hobo Johnson apologist after I recoiled at the performance clips of his songs "Peach Scone" and "Creve Coeur 1" that went viral last year. But there's something genuinely exhilarating to me about hearing him reach for this major label brass ring with a big fast catchy single like "Typical Story" that squeezes all his spoken word tics into as concise a package as he can manage. And while nothing else on this album quite rises to that level, I found myself enjoying it more than cringing. The only thing I really dislike is that there's one song produced by Ryan Lewis and "Subaru Crosstrek XV" is the same kind of smirky broke guy parody of a materialistic rap song as "Thrift Shop" and you'd think he'd be embarrassed to so openly court following in Macklemore's footsteps.

9. The Highwomen - The Highwomen
I don't think of Maren Morris or Brandi Carlile as especially formalist or beholden to tracing the footsteps of old country music legends, even if they're definitely knowledgeable of that stuff. But The Highwomen aren't just playfully doing a gender-reversed answer to the classic country supergroup, it kinda sounds like they're trying to turn the clock back to 1985 and make a perfect answer record to the first album by The Highwaymen. And that's fine but it kinda feels like one big stylistic exercise to me, not necessarily as interesting as the participants' solo records, and not as ambitious as another quartet of female folk musicians who released an album as Our Native Daughters earlier this year. Some pretty nice tunes, though, "Old Soul" is great.

10. Boosie Badazz & Zaytoven - Bad Azz Zay
Zaytoven is really one of the greatest producers of the past decade, definitely one of the most talented guys to ever come out of the whole trap scene, and one of the reasons I think that is that he's done whole projects for a few rappers and always has enough variations on his sound for it to really work (obviously Future first and foremost, but also really excellent projects with Shy Glizzy, Gucci Mane and Young Dro -- I never heard the Lecrae project but that was probably good too). Boosie has been quietly cranking out quality albums with virtually no big name producers for the last few years, so I didn't see this one coming, but they have more chemistry than I expected, Zaytoven definitely delved into the darker end of his sound for it.

The Worst Album of the Month: Zac Brown Band - The Owl
Zac Brown Band have gotten to have their cake and eat it too for the last decade, being a Grammy-friendly traditionalist country band that also makes lots of slick radio-friendly singles. Their 2015 double album Jekyll + Hyde that hopped all over into different genres was much more successful than 2017's back-to-basics album Welcome Home, so I can see why they probably thought it was a fine idea to make an album collaborating with Skrillex, Max Martin, and Ryan Tedder, among others. But The Owl has been really terribly received, and "God Given" in particular sounds like something that Florida Georgia Line might have been embarrassed to put out. Zac Brown released a surprise solo album called The Controversy a week after The Owl that goes even further in that direction without with his band at least kind of rooting the songs in some live instrumentation, and even in the era of "Old Town Road" and constant crossovers between country and other genres, it seems like this album is turning into a real career-derailing fiasco.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 07, 2019 at 4:34 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.