2018

50 Best Albums of 2018

/ David James / 12 Comments

I say it every year because it’s always true: this year has been great for music. All it takes to find the greatness is an open mind and a set of ears. And a little help from your friends. So to begin, I want to thank all my friends around the world for the tips and the tunes.

More than any recent year, in fact, I had a tough time sorting out all my favorites and cutting them down to only fifty for this list. It’s tough, but it’s also fun. Weighing these pieces of music against each other feels so unfair, but so personal. Deeply personal, in fact. There’s no one here but me, so keep in mind that everything is here because of one man’s opinions. Naturally, I’ll miss some things – so as always I welcome suggestions. Soon I’ll have a secondary list of all the other great albums I heard this year. In the meantime, I hope you read and enjoy and find some new stuff to enjoy here. This is a labor of love, and I just want to share the joy.

Speaking of joy, the header image is a photo I took of my son on one of the last warm-enough days before winter. I love being a dad, and I can’t wait to share music with my kid. For now he mostly just spazzes out to anything I play. Kids are great because they don’t have any prejudices about music. If it moves them, it moves them.

In the past I’ve gotten too verbose with these intros, so I’m keeping it short and sweet. Thank you for reading. These are the best albums of 2018.

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Aphex Twin – Collapse EP

/ David James / Leave a comment

Collapse EP is the release that adventurous Aphex Twin fans have been waiting for, whether they knew it or not. This is where the formerly reclusive artist finally moves well beyond his own monumental shadow.

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Astral Blues [mixtape]

/ David James / 3 Comments

Zero gravity dance music for lonely cosmonauts. Or utopian jazz for the spiritually dazed. Interstellar beach techno? I don’t know. I’m calling it Astral Blues.

I like to think of it as a fever dream night out on the town, in love and half-crazed, blurred under neon lights and bursting with energy, connected to the earth and the heavens and all that hormonal stuff that makes us feel larger than life, self-mythologizing the way forward.

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Kyle Bobby Dunn & Wayne Robert Thomas – The Searchers / Voyevoda Split LP

/ David James / 2 Comments

Before this year, Kyle Bobby Dunn’s singular shade of ecstatic ambient drone music managed to flit by in the periphery of my tastes. His album releases seemed like big occasions to many friends, but I only listened, it seemed, in the midst of ambient playlists and random spins through Spotify or Youtube. I always enjoyed what I heard, but my attention was swamped by the constant snowblind bliss of the experience – the entire point of listening to hours of ambient music at a time, lost in headphones.

For someone who wrote a list called the 32 best ambient albums ever made, I was hilariously surprised by how quickly I fell in love with his sound. The two tracks on this split LP, by Dunn and Wayne Robert Thomas, make a convincing case for the power of sustained ambient drone in the year 2018.

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Hampshire & Foat – The Honeybear

/ David James / 4 Comments

This is what I thought the first time I heard Hampshire & Foat: oh my god these guys, oh my god I need more.

That was just a couple weeks ago. I’d stumbled upon their 2017 debut Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by chance, hearing the opening track and instantly feeling the need to hear everything they’d made. Lucky for me, they were just about to release their followup, The Honeybear.

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Dedekind Cut – Tahoe

/ David James / 2 Comments

Dedekind Cut, one of the most exciting experimental composers working today, has released his most accomplished set yet, an industrial ambient juggernaut that folds all his prior rough edges into an interstellar discovery vehicle. Tahoe is music for travelling beyond, informed by a deeply honest sense of what it’s like to be alive right now in this weird world.

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Until the End of the World [mixtape]

/ David James / 5 Comments

Every day, I’m becoming more and more the person I decided I would be. There is no immutable, core me – at least, not on a long enough timeline. It’s freeing to realize this and to reflect upon it every once in a while.

They say that no matter what you’re writing about, you’re always revealing yourself. A moment on this blog tells you I keep my mind on the future, and I keep its aim true with a steady diet of sci-fi, art, music, and stories all filling in the aesthetics of the great beyond. It’s impossible to create anything without these influences pouring out. So it goes, with another mixtape: Until the End of the World.

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