What I Heard in 2018

It’s about that time of year again. Today I’m going to list my favorite five albums I heard this year. In terms of music, I wasn’t blown-away by much released this year. Most of what I bought were albums released ten or even twenty years ago. I wouldn’t classify this as nostalgia because what I was listening to wasn’t really what I was listening to at that time. Nevertheless it was a shift from last year which I thought was an excellent year for new music. That said my favorite release this year is one of my favorite albums in quite some time.

#5) Be the Cowboy by Mitski: Propulsive, poignant electro-pop with a lead singer who seems to narrating, moment by moment the day she realized she had the ability to survive everything weighing her down. Survive, that is, if she did everything exactly the way she needed to. This is album composed of highly danceable anthems to self-possession and there’s not a single track that doesn’t contain some moment of cataclysmic heart-break set to a memorable electrified and so familiar soundtrack. Highlights: Geyser, Old Friend, and A Pearl.

#4) Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe: I bought it. I loved it. Janelle Monáe stepped back from her synthetic alt-personality on this album to inhabit more fully...herself, a kind of hyper-aware, determinedly funky, singer/songwriter. Instead of a concept album, Dirty Computer sounds like social media posts set to music, which considering Monáe has a wicked sense of humor and a engagingly down-to-earth weirdness, works very, very well. A summer album so perfect it makes every day about 10% brighter. Highlights: Dirty Computer, Crazy, Classic, Life, and Screwed.

#3) Ordinary Corrupt Human Love - Deafheaven: At some point this year I got into metal. Not just any metal but the grinding, singer shredding his voice, obliterate all resistance strain of metal I have NEVER liked before. What can I say? I started going to gym this year and I needed some appropriate soundtracks. Okay, that’s a little flippant. In actuality, I finally got around to picking up Slayer’s Reign in Blood and found I really loved guitar thrash for guitar thrash’s sake. So, after a few twists and turns, I eventually wound up here. Deafheaven is basically My Bloody Valentine only screamed instead of cooed softly. The same emotional heft and obvious compositional talent are there, but Deafheaven, as befitting its post-metal background hits with more immediate visceral intensity. Highlights: Honeycomb, Canary, and Glint.

#2) Joy is an act of Resistance - IDLES: Earlier this year I wrote my admiration and enjoyment of this post-punk slab of pure energy. IDLES are not really what you might think, as a band, and a creative force. What they appear to be is an unstable mix of angular Wire-style rave-ups mixed with a Mekons or Chumbawumba populist singer. In actuality they are an excellent example of how when you choose a particular voice and stick with it, there is no topic that cannot be made into killer song. Highlights: Colussus, Never Fight a Man With a Perm, Danny Nedelko, and Love Song.

#1) Rifles and Rosary Beads - Mary Gauthier: This one is a weird one for me in the sense the songs concern experiences I don’t have. Each of these tracks details the struggles and pain of veterans of foreign wars, often filtered through the singer-songwriter’s incisive and plain-spoken voice. Tracks like “Soldering On,” however struck me on a profound level. The observation that one set of skills that kept you alive cannow slowly kill you is one that I am very familiar with. Even though it feels slightly uncomfortable to identify with songs of veterans rather than simply appreciate them, I have to be honest about why I’ve enjoyed this album so much. Although I probably no right to claim this, I nevertheless feel as though these songs spoke to and comforted me in a time when I really needed that message.

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

Ancient Logic

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