#meatspace adventures with my best little guy

[doks-aux]

"Rambley's actually evil!!"

Okay? And?? He's my special little buddy, he can do whatever he wants, including atrocities.

[some-triangles]

MUSIC OF 2018

Ophelias – Almost

All-woman band with disreputable male producer creates songs about codependency, power exchange and the prison of needing others.  This is my favorite album of the year because it has the projecting power from a position of weakness thing down to a science, plus the production is crisp as anything and the melodies stay in your head.   It’s all very simple and very careful and very thoughtful and very skillful and very angry, and the singer does not display a trace of emotion at any point.  Perfect for all moods.

Tropical Fuck Storm – A Laughing Death In Meatspace  

This is more of a specific mood.  A thing I value in music is the sound of a vocalist who is experiencing Peak Distress, but as an artist, intentionally; not goopy or dramatic but using an emotion, albeit a very unpleasant one, to draw a color on a canvas.  The greasy australian who made this band after he got sick of his more famous one does that with the words “at any time” on the opening track, “You Let My Tyres Down”, which is my favorite song of the year. The rest of the album isn’t as good but it’s a high bar.  The album also features people doing exciting things with guitar tones and actively unpleasant distortion while remaining in a rock idiom, which people don’t do anymore and is one of my favorite things.

Noname – Room 25

The best indie rap album of the year, objectively.  Noname used to be called Noname Gypsy but some roma people had a talk with her and now she’s Noname.  No muss, no fuss.  Imagine if everyone was that graceful, huh?  That transformation must have kicked something else into high gear, because this record is miles better than her last one.  Confident, chopsy, warm, wise; soulful, adventurous, real.   Too virtuous for me to embrace fully but undeniable even at a distance.

Kendall 😊 – hey

Unforgivably slept-on new artist making swoony electropop with big stacked chords and big stacked distortions, up against “I can barely play piano but I know what’s beautiful” interludes, drenched in reverb and dripping with honesty. One could pray for this kind of candor.   The chorus of “knife” reminds me of Hindemith, unjustifiably – it’s that maximal approach to building clusters of tones.  On the one hand, it’s another transwoman artist who seems to construe feminity as suffering.  On the other hand, this is the world we live in, and there are worse takes.

Rosalia – El Mal Querer

I’m not going to pretend that I have enough context or the right background to describe this properly but it’s a monumental accomplishment and that comes through even if you got clod ears.  Maximal, sensual, ancient, enormous, combining trad and modern sounds, blah blah. An album about love, religion and suffering coming at you from the weird sex/blood/magic underside of catholicism that white people generally don’t get access to.  Also has that same knack for pinning down and utilizing anguish that the Tropical Fuck Storm guy has.  Like.. not the same, as that. Obviously.  But similar.

Tierra Whack – Whack World

A small clockwork collection of readymades about the quotidian.  I get David Byrne vibes off Tierra – she’s a polymath, an alien, and a designer at heart. But also an extrovert, significantly.  This album is made to be popped into your mouth, digested and forgotten, leaving little traces of doubt in your bloodstream.  It’s an instagram filter for your insides.  

The Cradle – Bag of Holding

The local acoustic dirtbag has come to read your tarot, but he’s also communicating wirelessly with your smart fridge.   This album has a bit of a Jesse Moynihan vibe, and is also nostalgic for those of us who liked our Devendras and our Animals Collective and also enjoy production where someone’s elbow hit the dial and they just kind of kept it in.   There’s a good song on here where a very groovy and centered man is trying to get a lady to break up with her boyfriend because he is too cyberpunk.  Why not?

Lolina – The Smoke

This is an album about Urban Narstiness that is meant to be played in headphones while walking at night, to lend yourself a dangerous sountrack vibe.  It’s too jagged and self-consciously experimental to be heavy, which is good, because there are enough sad boys yelping over cold metal about how the moon is turning them to knife crime.  This is mostly about how being a woman is fun when you feel no emotions, which sort of brings us back to the unifying theme of my year in music. Feeling felt a lot, in bursts; feeling felt not, at length.  

Amaryllis – Away We Go

I wrote a big long poem about how much I liked this album when I first heard it. Once you’ve done that it’s difficult to pretend you were never into the problematic artist in the first place, so on the list it goes.

Hushy’s still young – not as young as she’d like to be, admittedly, but young – and has a lot of work to do.  Wallowing in baby land may not be fulfilling forever, and she might turn her attention elsewhere.  She might become a huge, genuine monster.  She might figure herself out.

In the meantime, please heed the very objective and not feelings-based ADULTS ONLY sign that now adorns all of her work.

In a way I think the Hushy debacle had a part in my journey to wizard town.  I mean, I am grown, so I’m more judicious about dragging you through my personal swamp than she is.  But the particular cocktail of personal tragedy, hypomania, magical thinking and guilt that I see in there - that’s The Stuff.