1. Kim Gordon - No Home Record
I obsessively collected Sonic Youth side projects and solo records for years, but it was more fun when the band was still going and I wasn't in any way trying to fill the void left by the breakup of my favorite band. Thurston Moore and especially Lee Ranaldo have made some pretty enjoyable records of songs that could have easily been Sonic Youth songs, while Kim Gordon had primarily explored something a little darker and more minimal in the percussion-free albums by Body/Head. So I went into Gordon's first full-on solo album with no expectations of what I would hear, and was pretty thrilled with what I heard. There's a lot of programmed beats and some full-on rock songs, but no set sound for the full record, it's a really interesting patchwork of different styles united by her inimitable vocal style. If it recalls anything she's done, it's Free Kitten's anything-goes 1997 album Sentimental Education, or even Ciccone Youth's The Whitey Album a little bit. Here's the 2019 albums playlist I fill with all the new records I listen to.

2. King Princess - Cheap Queen
I wish King Princess's debut album was arriving with the same kind of sad teen zeitgeist as Lorde's debut or Billie Eilish's debut, but I'm glad that it's arrived all the same. Mikaela Straus is really an interesting writer, both melodically and in the mix of vulnerability and humor on songs like "Homegirl" and 'Watching My Phone," and the production is just gorgeous and weird and surprising.

3. Fantasia - Sketchbook
Fantasia's last 2 proper album The Definition Of... and The Side Effects Of You were really impressive to me and marked the point where a great singer who had great singles began truly making great albums. And she goes first in the 'rock soul' direction with even more live instrumentation on The Definition of... and really covers a lot of stylistic ground. I actually did a phone interview with Fantasia a couple days ago so watch this space for that piece when it's published. One thing I will note that didn't make the piece is that my favorite song on here is "Believer," and when I told Fantasia that she said that it was the most Aretha-influenced song on the album, which really makes listening back to it.

4. Gallant - Sweet Insomnia
Gallant's acclaimed and Grammy-nominated 2016 debut Ology was a really good record that kind of stood on the line between R&B and dance and pop. But he moved further towards mainstream R&B's center last year with his radio breakthrough "Doesn't Matter," and even though that song isn't on his 2nd album, Sweet Insomnia follows in that vein really well, I particularly like "Crimes." It's funny, I keep forgetting that Gallant is from Maryland, but then the intro track on this album titled "410" reminded me (people in Columbia, Maryland definitely have 410 phone numbers, but saying '410' is generally considered a signifier of Baltimore -- but who cares, I live even further out from the city now and people still associate me with Baltimore).

5. The Muffs - No Holiday
Kim Shattuck died 16 days before The Muffs released their 7th album, and naturally it's impossible to listen to No Holiday without thinking about how Shattuck, who had ALS, made it knowing it was probably her last record. But she kept making the kind of dryly funny punk songs she'd always made right up to the end, and if the album is poignant, it's because of the casual way Shattuck continues to pick apart the minutiae of daily life and set them to catchy little riffs -- is "Late And Sorry" just a self-deprecating song about being chronically late, or is it about how a chronic illness makes it difficult to keep appointments? At a certain point it doesn't matter, it's a great song either way.

6. Summer Walker - Over It
I feel like every time an album by a woman does as well as Over It is doing, it tips the gender balance in R&B back a little toward the middle, but I think it still speaks volumes that the 4 most popular songs on the album are the one with Drake, the one with Bryson Tiller, the one with Usher, and the one with A Boogie (hey, at least there's no Chris Brown for once). I like this album a lot, though, people complain about the Soundcloud rap-style brevity of her songs but I think it works for her. And it's a good bit for her to take a song that was 2:24 and do an 'extended version' that's 2:23.

7. Jumpstarted Plowhards - Round One
Mike Watt has made a lot of music over the years where he's composed the meat of the song on bass and then kind of gives the guitarist free reign to fill in the blanks on top of it. And Jumpstarted Plowhards kind of takes that approach to its logical extreme, with Watt simply recording a bunch of basslines to a click track and then letting guitarist/singer Todd Congelliere and a rotating cast of drummers (including George Hurley of the Minutement) build songs around it. I'm always interested in all the different ways you can build a song so it's fun to hear this particular experiment, and know that Watt is still trying new things like this after making music for so many decades. And I dig how Congelliere borrows one of Watt's favorite phrases ("write your own song!") for the last track, "Babylon Gone."

8. Bandhunta Izzy - That's Pretty Gangsta
For the last couple years, I've thought that Bandhunta Izzy has been one of the Baltimore rappers getting the closest to a real mainstream breakthrough, and in the last few weeks he's appeared on the BET Hip-Hop Awards and then trended on Twitter for the release of his modern update of 50 Cent's "How To Rob" that even features a cameo from The Madd Rapper. That's Pretty Gangsta is a quick 21-minute record that ends with "How To Rob" (although the version here doesn't have D-Dot's Madd Rapper ad libs on it for some reason), but it's really strong, could definitely see one of these songs becoming a major hit.

9. Hemlock Ernst & Kenny Segal - Back At The House
When I interviewed Future Islands a few years ago, I was a little surprised to hear Sam Herring say that he's been rapping for longer than he's been singing. But over the years he's done more and more features with Baltimore artists and has held his own on some posse cuts, and I'm really impressed by this full-length from his rap alter ego Hemlock Ernst. He sings a few hooks, sometimes kind of filtering it as if it's a sample of an old record, which is kind of cool, but I almost don't like when that comes in and reminds me of Future Islands, it's fun to hear him rapping with this completely different voice and perspective and writing style and pull it off.

10. Ne-Yo - Another Kind Of Christmas
Every year a few more pop stars pad out their discographies with the obligatory Christmas album, and most of them are pretty inessential. But I still like to check them out and see which ones are pulled off well, and Ne-Yo's is really excellent, probably the best I've heard since Kelly Clarkson's Wrapped In Red. Ne-Yo kicks off the album with the requisite Donny Hathaway cover of every R&B Christmas album, and then shifts gears into "Talk About It," a funny slice of life Christmas song that actually has an explicit lyrics tag, which seems like a potentially disastrous idea but it totally works (my favorite lyric: "mama said don't be givin' no fat white dude credit for my shit").

The Worst Album of the Month: Kanye West - Jesus Is King
I haven't felt optimistic about the direction Kanye West was headed in, musically or otherwise, in a long time. But last year's Ye at least felt like a creative rock bottom that it wouldn't be hard for him to improve upon, and this genuinely might be worse. If nothing else, Snoop Dogg's gospel album was way better. The show "Hip Hop: Songs That Shook America" recently dedicated an episode to "Jesus Walks," and Rhymefest talked about how he suggested a bunch of over Biblical references for the verses but Kanye pointed out that Jesus was already in the hook so they didn't have to make the verses all about that too to get the message across, and that feels like the major difference between that song and this album, besides the fact that it sounds muddy and lazy and unfinished.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 01, 2019 at 11:21 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.