The time has come.
Almost.
Before I count down the top ten albums I wrote about this year, let us take a stroll down memory lane, skirt past the boulevard of broken dreams and merge onto the superhighway of content
Since I churned half as many articles this year, the superlatives are looking a little less congested. Think of them as creativity-dense. The same amount of me squished into half as much space.
Go big or go home, folks.
Since I churned half as many articles this year, the superlatives are looking a little less congested. Think of them as creativity-dense. The same amount of me squished into half as much space.
On with the newly compact show!
For my very first article of this year, I sank my teeth into the pop industry's latest monumental milestone.
Tay Tay splits her spectacular sixth album between crackling with wrath and shrinking from the light, crafting a touching portrait of a woman forced to live and laugh and love through camera flashes and microscope slides.
"This new Taylor is wrought in the image sculpted for her, all swagger and braggadocio, stomping her way through anthems of vengeance and paeans to her own freakish Promethian immortality. She has called down a thunderstorm and embarked on a crusade against every man, woman and magazine that has ever slighted her, even as the bloodsoaked tatters of her reputation flutter away, forgotten.
She is a caricature of her former self. She is in fine form, and she is a decoy.
Because the old Taylor is more alive than ever.
Because the old Taylor is in love."
Click here to read the full article
This soundtrack holds the fairly dubious of being the only instrumental album I wrote about this year, a sharp comedown compared to 2017's seven and a half.
She is a caricature of her former self. She is in fine form, and she is a decoy.
Because the old Taylor is more alive than ever.
Because the old Taylor is in love."
Click here to read the full article
The second-best animated flick of the year (after Into the Spider-Verse, which, holy dang, go see that immediately please) splashes to life in joyful gushes of sweet cherry and bitter bursts of burgundy, ribbons of crimson excitement inexorably tangling with scarlet terror.
Each track catches the light differently, each a facet of a single shining ruby, struck by the same sanguine composer who brought to life the first act minutes of Up and the finale of Rogue One.
"Dropping the needle on Giacchino’s most recent oeuvre, the first thing that springs to mind is how extraordinarily very good it sounds. A thin film of patina has settled on the original soundtrack since its release lifetimes ago in 2004, and for lack of a better word this new one really pops: clear, sharp and warmly defined. The composer’s boisterous approach to jazz manifests itself in technicolour columns, in pleasing parallels and perpendiculars."
Click here to read the full article
"Happily, Vows is more than up to the task, presenting a sleekly layered set of attractive pop songs that nimbly threads the needle between variety and homogeneity. Kimbra displays an uncommon knack for crafting catchy, hook-laden melodies in a variety of scales and modes, delivered with gleeful vibrato and piercing high notes, decorated handsomely with arrays of handclaps and tambourines."
Click here to read the full article
Click here to read the full article
Imagine a world of pastel-noir.
A world where soft blues and delicate pinks not only decorate nurseries, but also tinge sour whiskeys and the smoke rising from cigars.
A place where everything is slightly weird but never too much so; intriguingly kooky, but never crossing into off-puttingly buckwild.
Take a vow, and take the plunge.
Click here to read the full article
Remember a few years ago when country-EDM was all the rage? You couldn't set foot in club nor gym nor café without hearing some frantic guitar strumming or yowling fiddle fiddling nailed by its grubby toes to a pounding drumbeat? Oh, how that needle swung after the musical meteorite that was dubstep.
Well Kylie's giving it a crack!
"[...] now the princess of pop has thrown her rhinestoned Stetson into the ring.
Kylie’s just here to have a good time, and boy can you hear it. She has scooped a sample of every conceivable country cliché into a honeypot of pop trimmings and simmered it down sweet and smooth. The quaint fiddle decorations of ‘A Lifetime to Repair’, the understated balladry of ‘Radio On’, the flirtations with Mexicana on the title track’s plaintive wail, and the standout disco barnstormer of ‘Raining Glitter’. Heck, there’s even a song about a car."
Kylie’s just here to have a good time, and boy can you hear it. She has scooped a sample of every conceivable country cliché into a honeypot of pop trimmings and simmered it down sweet and smooth. The quaint fiddle decorations of ‘A Lifetime to Repair’, the understated balladry of ‘Radio On’, the flirtations with Mexicana on the title track’s plaintive wail, and the standout disco barnstormer of ‘Raining Glitter’. Heck, there’s even a song about a car."
Buttery and dry as homemade shortbread, Mitski Miyawaki's latest is not for everyone. Maybe you'll find it too subdued, too gracious, too beige for your liking.
Or maybe you'll fall head over heels for by far the chicest subject from this year's ramblings. Pitchfork has already declared it album of the year, consider that an official leafy stamp of approval.
"[...] the grand expanse of the American landscape is sanitised into a postcard; grand mesas and glorious canyons glowing red under the rising sun stuffed inside a snowglobe. Just behind the placid whitewash is a radical reclamation, a Japanese-American woman seizing from the patriarchy what is rightfully hers: the opportunity to be an individual, on her own terms.
Which is to say the opportunity to fail."
Which is to say the opportunity to fail."
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Merry Christmas Eve to you and yours. Tune in over the next week for this year's top ten!