I’m pleased to report that I found quite a few enjoyable new releases this year.

It’s hard to have a ‘definitive’ outlook as there remains so much for me to catch up with, but here are the highlights from what I’ve heard so far.

(To keep things from getting redundant here, my 2018 halfway list’s honorable mentions won’t be featured here. Read that list here if you’re curious about them.)

Top 8 Albums

8. Steve Hauschildt – Dissolvi

ambient techno / progressive electronic / ambient

Hauschildt is known for his role in the defunct drone/ambient group Emeralds. I’m yet to ‘get’ the appeal of Emeralds, but I’ve enjoyed a great deal of songs from Steve’s solo career, which veered away from his droney roots into more melodic territory. Dissolvi is more transparent/airy in texture than his last few albums, and often less inconsistent. This is great knowing how one of my main issues with his other albums was the lack of consistency. There’s a mild techno element here through the subtle use of rhythms, which gives the songs an interesting aquatic pulse.

Dissolvi may be my favorite album of his besides the popular Tragedy And Geometry from 2011. While some songs loop or repeat too much, most of them have plenty of evolving layers to keep this a fluid and hypnotizing listen. This is most apparent on the 7-minute “Alienself”, which goes on about 1-1.5 minutes too long but also contains some of Dissolvi’s most impressive textures and atmosphere. Also notable is the title song, by far the most rhythmic and tense but retaining some needed subtlety through soft synth hums. A promising step up.

Listen to “Lyngr”

7. Tess Roby – Beacon

art pop / gothic / synth pop / dream pop

Balancing folksy vocals, synths and Durutti-like guitar, Tess Roby is like a lost 4AD/This Mortal Coil collaborator. It’s not the most surprising she’s on Italians Do It Better, but at the same time it’s a bit different from what I expect from the label. These songs are moody and elusive, with a semi-gothic tone save for one or two more tender moments like “Ballad 5”. They drift along subtly, but not without shifts in tone or instrumentation. At eight songs long it ends pretty quick but at the same time this keeps it digestible and interesting. My favorite has to be the sinister folk/synth combination of “Borders”.

Listen to “Borders”

6. Noname – Room 25

jazz rap / hip hop / neo-soul

Noname is someone I’ve been meaning to listen to for some time now. And my first thought, of course, is ‘why didn’t I listen to this sooner?’ Room 25 is full of blissful jazz groove, even subtler in execution than the likes of Nujabes and Digable Planets (check this out if you like either one). The excellent live band she assembled for the album enhances this effect with it’s free-flowing style, one that tends to disobey common verse-chorus structure. The smooth keyboards (piano, e-piano) and Noname’s own unique delivery are sure to lull you into a peaceful daze.

I do think Noname tends to mutter a little too much, which can obscure the lyrics, but she has a great flow that blends in very well with the music. She includes plenty of guests and sung sections for these songs, but they don’t disrupt the album’s flow. They’re fitting and natural rather than thrown-in. One great example of this is the way “no name” begins with one brief rap verse before 2.5 whole minutes of singing. If someone else tried that, it could’ve wound up boring, but this may be the loveliest moment on an already rich album. ‘Your life is your life / Don’t let it pass you by’, the voices repeat over strings and piano until it (and thus the album) ends. I’ll be very interested in Noname’s next move.

Listen to “no name”

5. Music House/Various – Scandi Disco

electro-disco / synth pop / electropop / synthwave

‘If you’re bored of the sheer quantity of 80s retro music out there, maybe don’t listen to this. But if you’re like me and love this music enough to still give the continuous new releases a chance, I recommend this recent library album. I enjoyed almost every song on this one, a bit surprising seeing how there’s no hype at all surrounding it. I found it only because I was looking through other, older releases by this label, Music House, and this happened to be their most recent album. Everything about this album is shiny, stylish and fun with plenty of energy and melody. The production is impressive as expected from a stock music label, and while it has a prominent modern polish they tap into the huge potential and legacy of electro-disco very well.’

Listen to “I Can Feel The Fire”

4. Reni Jusis – Ćma

dance-pop / electropop

If you’ve followed me for long enough you may know I’ve become a big fan of this semi-obscure Polish singer/producer. However, her ’16 album BANG! was a let-down. It hopped on all of the worst mid-10’s mechanical bass-drop trends I hoped she would evade. I sighed and moved on. But that’s when a single (“Tyyyle Milosci”) popped up in May. A GOOD one, too, a reflective ballad-like song lacking BANG!’s pitfalls. A great surprise, but I didn’t know what to expect from an album. The following press release claims the album is Reni’s return to dance music after the ‘experiment’ of BANG!…

And like I hoped, the album is much more uptempo than BANG!. Shimmering pop anthems, hypnotic melodies, and of course, the abundant synths are all here. All kinds of pleasant textures pop up, forming some great transitions and grooves. Even in more ‘experimental’ moments (e.g. “Ćma”’s dizzy end cool-down; tracks #6 and #9) there’s the kind of spacey atmospheric touches that popped up in her 2000’s heyday. It would’ve been fine if she didn’t bring that part back. I thought it was too much to ask for – but there it is!

Ćma has plenty of flaws. A few songs are inconsistent, the huge repetition lowers replay value, and her delivery gets bombastic at times. Many areas would benefit from some tweaking. But I finished Ćma feeling relieved. She did come through with some jams, and she revived the sound she does best. It’s a big step up from BANG!, and for that I’m grateful. I recommend this to anyone looking for good modern electro-pop this year.

Listen to “To Tylko Podróż”

3. U.S. Girls – In A Poem Unlimited

art pop / psychedelic pop

As I wrote in the 2018 halfway list:

’While I did find the previous U.S. Girls album Half Free a bit inconsistent, In A Poem Unlimited feels like a step up. There were only about 2 or 3 tracks that I didn’t enjoy here. The album has a warm semi-70s feel thanks to the band put together for it. There’s also a sense of eclecticism that’s executed better than on a lot of other albums with similar ambitions. The voice of Meg Remy, the one true ‘member’ of U.S. Girls, can be quite twangy and takes a bit of getting used to at first, but it’s somewhat grown on me since then, and it got some time to shine here. This is most often when she does a kind of nervous falsetto like in two of my favorites, “Rosebud” and “L-Over”. While the many styles that Remy explores here aren’t much new (70s funk, jazzy rock, general quivering psych weirdness, a bit of synth pop), the variation of it all and the will to experiment helps keep things interesting, and most of them evade the boring cliches that tend to pop up in so much music lately.’

Listen to “Rosebud”

½. Suiyoubi No Campanella – Galapagos

j-pop / electronic / art pop / downtempo

Cult J-pop group Suiyobi no Campanella released this ‘EP’ in June, though I don’t get why it’s considered an EP, since it’s the length of an album. It did receive some deserved acclaim upon release but since then, I’ve heard little about it – seems it didn’t stick. I’m wondering if the promotion as a mere ‘EP’ is part of it – were they wanting to keep a lower profile for this? If so, why, when it’s this elaborate?

The first thing I noticed was how much these songs morph and change, often in unexpected ways. “Bamboo Princess” sets the scene. It begins wistful and hushed but soon evolves into a thrilling chorus of strings and horns. The song also seems to reference an ancient Japanese folk tale. “Matryoshka” relaxed mallet groove mutates and evolves many times through it’s duration. Despite all this, the last two songs calm things down. “A Cat Called Yellow” is a gorgeous end to the album that sounds like both a farewell and a lullaby, covered in this blanket of thoughtful ambience.

Matching the creative song structures is a wide-ranging palette of sounds. There’s percussion, sampling, aquatic keyboards, mallets, clean guitar, synth bells, some kind of keening violin (“Bamboo Princess”) and even hang (a recent creation similar to the steel drum). It’s cold and tropical all at once. Listening is like dipping into the water at a beach resort, watching all these colors blur into the water.

Galapagos has some of the most impressive production I’ve heard all year. These are more tapestries than songs, and I mean that in the best way possible. This album is an ideal summer-evening mood piece. It may be winter now, but you should listen to it ASAP anyway.

Listen to “Matryoshka”

½. Fishdoll – Noonsense

wonky / dream pop / electronic / downtempo

‘Fishdoll, an exciting new artist from China, manages to recall everything I miss about electronic music of the earlier 10′s. First I thought of ‘wonky’ producers like FlyLo and Teebs who had such interesting and creative taste in electronic production and samples. Take a gander at the amazing operatic vocal/harp sample that ends “Beijing Well” or the spacey fluttering chords on most of the songs, for example. Secondly, Fishdoll adds subtle effects to her own voice that say, Grimes or Washed Out became popular for, creating a similar kind of airy surrealism.

It doesn’t do enough justice to Fishdoll to make so many comparisons, though, since this album really does feel unique. Which is exactly why it’s one of my favorites of the year – it’s an electronic artist doing something unique and doing it well.

I’m looking forward to Fishdoll’s next musical move, and I’m convinced Noonsense deserves more than a bit of Bandcamp popularity, which seems to be all it got upon release.’

Since writing this in the first halfway list, I was also asked to write a brief review of Noonsense for the Rateyourmusic front page in October, which you can find here.

Listen to “Bubbling Bop”

Continue reading “My Top Albums/EPs of 2018” →