Can you believe so much good stuff has happened since the last time I made one of these lists? Deltarune! Ariana Grande's Twitter account! That meme of Pikachu looking fake-surprised!
So without further ado, please enjoy these ten albums that brought me joy this year. I hope they spark something for you too.
(As per usual, everything is made up and the numbers don't matter. As you were.)
"[...] the band graduated directly from banging pots and pans on grubby linoleum to treating grown-up instruments (including a shrieking string ensemble, and a brass section with all the gravitas of a plastic kazoo) with the same inquisitive kitchen-floor care. They take an appealingly slapdash approach to composition, tottering orchestrations piled on top of cramped, jagged punk-rock rebellion.
[...]
Romance Is Boring tastes of chewed fingernails and secondhand chips, shards of broken glass and shattered glockenspiel ground into gravel, where the most stable through-line is baffling references to soccer."
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It's not often that the fifteenth entry in one's discography can claim the honour of essential listening. Mariah brings the smoulder on Caution, delivering simmering hits with cool dexterity while refreshing her status one of pop's greatest luminaries.
"Gone are the glamorous windswept gowns of The Emancipation of Mimi. The Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel have rekerned their flouncing cursive into chic serifs. The oversaturated horizons of Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse have been drained and dumped. Now the definitive diva gazes out through cool contours of blue, sparkling teeth bared beneath an effortless smize. This is a sleek and stylish statement of defiance: that behind the solipsism and sophistry, she is on top of her game."
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"I, a white man, am entitled to everything. That includes opinions on seminal oeuvres in the history of humanity in which I have no emotional investment."
We like to defy expectations here at the Ramble. Here I've taken an album frequently lauded as the crowning jewel of All Music Ever — zig! — given it a lukewarm appraisal — zag! — and still entered it into my top ten — zoom!
Pink Floyd is good stuff. It's not cataclysmically brilliant if you ask me, but it's certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Sniff away.
"I’m reminded of the Ford Model T, the forebear of the modern car: once a landmark achievement and cornerstone of its industry, now a faintly ridiculous curiosity that gets about two feet to the gallon. It has been so far superseded, so utterly eclipsed by a century of progress that it is barely recognisable as the horseless progenitor of personal everyday transportation.
[...]
So naturally, Dark Side is best at its most ambiguous. The extraordinary wordless vocalise of ‘The Great Gig In the Sky’ still sends chills down the spine. Is this anonymous presence a witch shrieking as she is burned at the stake, screaming as her skin bubbles and splits, wailing as the flames cook her living sizzling flesh? Perhaps a spirit is performing at the titular gig, and what we mere mortals hear is but a pale echo of a true seraphic version yet to come.
Perhaps it’s the rapture of a littler death."
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I've instated a new rule this year: no double-dipping. No musician, no matter how earth-shatteringly talented they may be, is eligible to enter the top ten more than once. Bad news for Vienna Teng and Jon Hopkins, not to mention Beyoncé: potential gold medallists, triggers I pulled far too early, missteps attributable to growing pains from my first year of writing.
Of course, through the middle of my no doubles policy yawns a honking great loophole.
After Kacey's Pageant Material earned a spot on last year's superlatives list with its clear-eyed charm and whiskey-smooth production, it was only a matter of time before the chillest country singer in the game hopped up here too.
"Golden Hour is about finding the magic in the mundane. When the angle is just so and the light hits just right, the world somehow resolves itself into understanding. Kacey doesn’t have the power to solve our problems. But she has a way of articulating small shifts in perspective, little everyday choices to take life as it comes, that forms the core of this gorgeous and criminally underrated album."
(This was obviously written before the fine folks at Grammy HQ settled on Golden Hour for album of the year. Will wonders never cease.)
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I've written before about my first and favourite video game of all time, the historic Pokémon Sapphire. I've written before about the terrorist cell that awakens an ancient behemoth of legend and harnesses its ungodly powers to call down torrential rainstorms and drown the world.
I don't believe I've touched on what happens next.
You beat the baddies, and with a bit of luck and a lick of elbow grease, the leviathan will join your team. Just in time to sweep the final gym in the Hoenn League.
It turns out commanding a massive beast that can call down thunderbolts and lightning strikes lends you an advantage against the Sootopolis gym leader's superconducting water-types.
Anyway, do you find yourself drawn to fantastical worlds like those of Tolkien and Martin? Do stories about cute boys in love make you blush and tingle like you've just popped too many fizzy lollies? Are you fascinated by avant-garde drum machine programming and synthesiser sequencing?
Cause I know a guy.
He had E. coli for a bit and made a really depressing album. Then he made Romaplasm.
"Will likes to reconstruct rather than build. He dumps the contents of his digital toolbox over the workshop floor and crouches there among the shattered splinters, in shorts and scuffed boots and a rubber apron, sifting through the debris for exactly the right piece, lost in his own boundless imagination. He’s a kid playing with his Lego, but bigger, and also wielding an acetylene torch and some sweet goggles. He solders together individual needles and shards into sparking, stimulating spikes of glitchy electronica (heavily indebted to such acupuncturists as Matmos and Aphex Twin) and then runs off to find you, to share them with you, seeking your approval, holding them out with sooty-faced toothy-grinned delight."
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On his debut album, Troye was but a sad pouty boy in an oversized jumper.
Three years later, he has fashioned a silver staff, donned the ermine mantle, and claimed his place among the queens of pop.
Proficient and sophisticated, Bloom sees Sivan slouching his incredibly long legs over the studded leather of his tastefully-backlit throne.
"His second studio album gleams in contours of black and chrome. Each composition is wrought with utmost care, each like an unsung anthem of the eighties remastered in crisp 4K. What technical limitations once constrained to skeletally efficient arrangements Sivan brings to breathing, beating life: mighty drums drenched in thunderous reverb, dense basslines darkening the horizon where towering guitar lines loom into skies once blurry matte, newly strung with glittering constellations. Sivan crafts wondrous new architectures, impossible intricate, and yet perfectly legible."
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"I am not America's nightmare /
I am the American dream"
This is the radical thesis statement of Dirty Computer, and that's all I've got to add here.
"This is not shallow listicle-baiting. These are surface ripples and waves and crashing tsunamis defined by the dark currents of deep waters yawning far beneath. This is a lucid articulation of complex politics, of what it means to be queer, to be black and to be a woman all at once in a world out to crush all three.
And folks, it is wall-to-wall slappers.
Neither hide nor hair of orchestral bombast may be found on Dirty Computer. The occasional cameo from an elegant string quartet meshes into an album of taut and sinewy pop music; funky, slinky and dangerously sexy. Monáe spryly stretches elasticated basslines between bright bars of technicolour bliss, themselves strung with webs of stylish, skittering, high-hats, coiling it all together snugly with her smooth, velvety vocals."
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Taking out the bronze is this tasty slab of definition-defying earbeef. It is so monumentally dense that meaning bends around it, like a black hole hungrily swallowing all comprehension.
Get amongst it.
"Great hulking meaty chunks swell where once lay only narrow fillets of guitar, tinny drum applets and patches mashed and poured and smelted into robust new progeny, Will’s cold, dusty strips of vocal re-recorded in drawls and yelps and screams and ruptures in surround-sound high-fidelity so that he may finally raze and salt and scorch as his brutal music deserves, nay, requires. All these sinewy separates wind and lock and support and reinforce, muscle on bone, to form a homunculus of warm flesh and hot blood and thrashing sincerity, and man does it need a drink."
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Silver isn't the first element that comes to mind when one attempts to translate the mystique of Sophie into words. Mercury, perhaps, to honour the way she liquifies emotions into reflections of reflections. Maybe silicon, to reflect that her endlessly stretchy and tactile and customisable nature.
Or better yet, the element of surprise.
"Sophie deals in absolutes. Her palette is not contrived of squirted paint or dabbed watercolour, but asserted in fistfuls of plastics and acrylics, metal and rubber threads spun like alloyed silk from her fingertips, either pliable as putty or rigid electric white. There is nothing in between. She constructs each artwork in imitation of the pop song, a gleaming airtight artifice, but with nothing in its core. Her music is hollow, devoid of message or manifesto. She declares that the artifice is all there is, and all that is needed, drawing forth identical emotional responses with maximum efficiency.
A Sophie song is a keystone without an arch.
A Sophie song is style devoid of substance."
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A precocious child plays in the dirt, tracing the complex paths of scuttling insects, marking the delicate greens of leaves and stems, drawing new constellations below and above — elevated to high art, and bound in an illuminated manuscript.
Joanna Newsom's music intertwines in intricate golden curls, spiralling into fractals of texts within texts. This album is a gift. A gift for musicians and poets, for botanists and geometricians.
"Newsom is no architect. She is a horticulturalist. And she is an enchantress.
She kneels in the garden. The shade provides shelter from the sweltering sun. Thick braids of flaxen hair wreathe her head, unruly flyaways drifting in the midsummer breeze. Shifts of silk and bone gird her waist, hemmed with mud and spattered with filth. Her fingers reach into the dark earth, tickling roots and caressing stems, learning the colours of all their moods, nurturing every curlicue, cultivating each eccentricity. She coaxes them apart and together again, earning precious knowledge of the bashful keys of the clarinet, the shrewd strings of the viola.
So when Joanna Newsom takes up her own harp and begins to sing, music sprouts and spreads beyond her, unbidden. Music embraces her flourishes and serifs, interlacing her thoughts into splendorous sylvan calligraphy.
Ys is an incantation. Ys commands harmony and melody to creep like ivy across the water."
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· · ·
Well that about wraps in up for 2018. We've explored critical darlings like Mitski's humble Be the Cowboy, huge pop releases like Taylor Swift's spotlight-seizing Reputation and everything in between — three consecutive articles saw me swing between Kylie Minogue's country-disco club bangers, Hop Along's sad spindling and this year's almighty Eurovision with my indie cred firmly intact (have you seen my hair?). Here's hoping for more terrific, blissful, agonising, gut-wrenching, life-changing music next year. And if you've got a suggestion for an album you'd like to see me write about, feel free to send that my way.
Love you.