Poorboyoftroy's favorite albums of the very good year 2018
The album, as a discrete entity of artistic output created with the intention of having its suite of recordings enjoyed serially, is dead. Musicians continue to produce albums, sure, and will for the foreseeable future, but their importance has been downgraded to that of publishing middleware, mere frontispieces that are immediately cannibalized upon birth for their individual songs by influencers and fucking AI’s who add them to playlists to build their brands.
This is driven, of course, by technology-enabled changes to consumer behavior - why listen to an entire new album when a playlist can contain songs from multiple new albums that align with your interests? Moreover, what if that playlist could organically evolve over time as its governing algorithm more fully defined a profile of your preferences? The answer is that the album as a format is intended to be a unified listening experience, its construction as a suite of individual songs/pieces not some mere caprice but a foundational element of its creators' vision. If you grew up with vinyl, or cassettes, or to some extent CD’s, you acknowledged the sheer suasion of a medium that obliged you to listen to a track you didn’t care for in order to hear a track that you did, and you listened because you knew that the musicians wanted you to experience their output in this manner. Great albums are great because of their sequencing and structure as much as the artistic merit of the music - e.g., “Subterraneans,” heard out of the context of the bracing, cocaine-fueled suite that precedes it on David Bowie’s Low, just doesn’t land the same rewarding junkie sublimity it does when heard as the album closer.
As is quite obvious, I’m totally OK with all of this (i.e., people doing what they want with music they acquired legally). Poorboyoftroy has always been “future forward” in his outlook. And besides, I can always maintain an atavistic list of albums in my streaming service of choice for ease of reference/listening.
Or can I?
I started using YouTube Music this year. I like the service because it pulls in both Google Play Music’s Spotify-equivalent streaming library as well as all the shit people post on YouTube that is not available on streaming (like everything by The KLF). However, when I navigated over to my “Library” and to my favorited “Albums,” I was given a list organized, incredibly, by when I favorited them:
This is useless nonsense. I can’t imagine the human use case for sorting in this fashion (maybe Google wants to know how old I was when I truly appreciated Sonic Youth’s Dirty), and I want it to die a bad death.
So, considering the foregoing, I deliver this list of my favorite albums of the year with the anxiety of a lone holdout the very performance of whose list-making is the only thing standing between the album and total cultural irrelevance:
This is driven, of course, by technology-enabled changes to consumer behavior - why listen to an entire new album when a playlist can contain songs from multiple new albums that align with your interests? Moreover, what if that playlist could organically evolve over time as its governing algorithm more fully defined a profile of your preferences? The answer is that the album as a format is intended to be a unified listening experience, its construction as a suite of individual songs/pieces not some mere caprice but a foundational element of its creators' vision. If you grew up with vinyl, or cassettes, or to some extent CD’s, you acknowledged the sheer suasion of a medium that obliged you to listen to a track you didn’t care for in order to hear a track that you did, and you listened because you knew that the musicians wanted you to experience their output in this manner. Great albums are great because of their sequencing and structure as much as the artistic merit of the music - e.g., “Subterraneans,” heard out of the context of the bracing, cocaine-fueled suite that precedes it on David Bowie’s Low, just doesn’t land the same rewarding junkie sublimity it does when heard as the album closer.
As is quite obvious, I’m totally OK with all of this (i.e., people doing what they want with music they acquired legally). Poorboyoftroy has always been “future forward” in his outlook. And besides, I can always maintain an atavistic list of albums in my streaming service of choice for ease of reference/listening.
Or can I?
I started using YouTube Music this year. I like the service because it pulls in both Google Play Music’s Spotify-equivalent streaming library as well as all the shit people post on YouTube that is not available on streaming (like everything by The KLF). However, when I navigated over to my “Library” and to my favorited “Albums,” I was given a list organized, incredibly, by when I favorited them:
This is useless nonsense. I can’t imagine the human use case for sorting in this fashion (maybe Google wants to know how old I was when I truly appreciated Sonic Youth’s Dirty), and I want it to die a bad death.
So, considering the foregoing, I deliver this list of my favorite albums of the year with the anxiety of a lone holdout the very performance of whose list-making is the only thing standing between the album and total cultural irrelevance:
- Orbital - Monsters Exist
- M. Geddes Gengras - Light Pipe
- Kelly Moran - Ultraviolet (technically an EP, but I don't care)
- Iceage - Beyondless
- Dead Can Dance - Dionysus
- The Necks - Body
- Makaya McCraven - Universal Beings
- Forma - Semblance
- Underworld & Iggy Pop - Teatime Dub Encounters
- Demdike Stare - Passion
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