My top albums of 2018 deliver beauty, thought, and a fair bit of rawness – a reflection, I’m afraid, of how we’ve chosen to live. Here they are (unranked), with a playlist below:
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Mary Gauthier – Rifles and Rosary Beads
A masterful work that leaves you nowhere to hide, this is the culmination of a personal journey the grew out of her work with SongwritingWith:Soldiers.
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Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed
Cohen and Dylan have said they don’t understand every line they write or where some of the words come from. Damien seems to have a similar trust in his pen.
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John McCutcheon – Ghost Light
You’d think a folkie modelled on Guthrie and Seeger would be dated, but we still have a lot of the same things to work on. Sigh.
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Tom Morello – The Atlas Underground
Known for hard-edge guitar and take-no-prisoners social activism, Tom adds EDM (Electronic Dance Music) to the party. Artists take risks.
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Robyn – Honey
Swedish artists tend to sound like they’re imitating Brits or Americans. This pastiche of rich, sparkling melancholy will have many pop artists wanting to be more like her.
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Eliza Gilkyson – Secularia
Every one of us will be confronted with our own mortality at some point. This helps.
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Loreena McKennitt – Lost Souls
Classical meets Celtic. Beautiful storytelling in lush, expansive settings.
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Ian Siegal – All The Rage
I’ll say one thing for Trump – he’s inspiring some great music. The tinge of voodoo menace in Ian’s blues suits the corrupt American political machine. Stick it to them!
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Ashley McBryde – Girl Going Nowhere
If you romantasize rednecks they’ll buy your records, so most country artists do. Not Ashley; most of the folks she sings about either can’t afford them or can’t be bothered.
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Cedric Burnside – Benton County Relic
Blues has been pretty much bereft of imagination for a few decades. We need Cedric.
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Marissa Nadler – For My Crimes
There’s hundreds or thousands of breakup albums, and after awhile they all start sounding the same. This one is different, and it’s done very well.
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Leon Bridges – Good Thing
At times a Bruno Mars Jr, his musical wings are beginning to sprout. Nothing wrong with either.
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Western Centuries – Songs From The Deluge
Supergroup is overused, so I’ll call them a super group of roots music veterans. They live yonder, on the border of country and rockabilly.
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Nik Bartsch’s Ronin – Awase
Listed last because the piece I chose for the playlist, Modul 58, it is 18 minutes long, the Swiss pianist’s Inventive groovy trance jazz makes time stop.
Honorable mentions (unranked): Colter Wall – Songs of the Plains; Donovan Woods – Both Ways; Gretchen Peters – Dancing With The Beast; Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore – Downey To Lubbock; Lucy Dacus – Historian; Me’Shell NdegeOcello – Ventriloquism; Idles – Joy as an Act of Resistance; Mary Chapin Carpenter – Sometimes Just the Sky; Lily Allen – No Shame; Amanda Shires – To The Sunset; Mark Kozelek – Mark Kozelek; Lori McKenna – The Tree; Camila Cabello – Camila; Everlast – Whitey Ford’s House Of Pain; Charles Bradley – Black Velvet; Courtney Marie Andrews – May Your Kindness Remain; Jimmy LaFave – Peace Town.