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Top 70 Albums of 2018

Every year here at SILY, we’ve increased the number of records in our year-end list by 10. Over the last few years, that move has been mostly arbitrary, aside from the fact that we increasingly listened to more and more great albums. This year, it seemed like a necessity--there was no consensus #1 album among any of us like there was in previous years. Plus, contributors Lauren Lederman and Daniel Palella didn’t share a single common album in their individual list!

While we know there were more great records in 2018 than just the ones listed below, these were our favorites.

70. Tal National - Tantabara (FatCat)

Tantabara features the best singing on any Tal National album so far. From the long screaming notes of “Belles Reines” to the soft, lovely harmonies of “Duniya” and “Trankil”, each member of the band is given the opportunity to showcase his or her unique style and tone. Tal National is a collective, but let’s not forget the individuals that make up the great band who are now 3-for-3 over their past few records. The difference with this one is it makes them essential listening.

Read the rest of our review here.

69. Robbie Fulks & Linda Gail Lewis - Wild! Wild! Wild! (Bloodshot)

We should be thankful that we have a document of a collaboration between Chicago folk hero Robbie Fulks and the legendary piano player and singer Linda Gail Lewis. Wild! Wild! Wild! is a collection of Fulks originals and covers. On each song, he leads the band and produces. The credits list is, as expected, insane, The Flat Five part of their backing band in addition to a ton of collaborators on individual tracks.

Read the rest of our review here.

68. Brigid Mae Power - The Two Worlds (Tompkins Square)

The Two Worlds–whether referring to pastoral beauty vs. raw anger, the present vs. the past, or something else–is an album for the #MeToo era in 2018. And not just because it’s a protest against toxic masculinity, but because it allows Power to embrace and celebrate her own artistry.

Read the rest of our review here.

67. Shannen Moser - I’ll Sing (Lame-O)

If any album took me by surprise this year, it was Shannen Moser’s country-tinged I’ll Sing. It feels timeless, a piece of folk for the current age that both borrows from the genre’s storied past and the more recent history of indie rock. “Every Town” paints a vivid picture of a backyard party and the wistfulness of the unknown. “West Texas Blues” sounds like it was recorded on the fly, a quick expulsion of emotion mid-road trip. Meanwhile, “Joanna”, “Trouble”, and “One for Mama” could be from another decade, covers of dusty songs from the canon. Yet, the songs are all Shannen. Her warm vocals and the melancholy of her lyrical portraits are what kept drawing me back, lines like “If I could feel something good, I would share with you/You know I would.” There’s a plaintiveness to each song, one that rolls through the album that’s only enhanced by the emotion Moser pours into each vocal performance. - Lauren Lederman

66. Stove - ‘s Favorite Friend (Exploding In Sound)

After a string of Stove EPs occupying the space left in the wake of Ovlov’s initial breakup, a new Stove release has come to feel like an unexpected gift. Beginning to play with drum machines and softer songwriting sensibilities across their previous records, ‘s Favorite Friend comes not as a bold new direction for Stove’s sound, but a refinement of it. Steve Hartlett and Jordyn Blakely have nailed a sound that departs almost completely from the Dinosaur Jr. fuzz soup we have come to expect from Ovlov, diving into more personal anecdotes and ballads, but not totally stripping away the punch Hartlett is capable of. “Liverwurst” encapsulates this perfectly, with its breezy acoustic riff and touching lyrics, leading way to a loud but orchestrated catharsis. “Duckling Fantasy” gives the listener a welcome foray into drummer Blakely playing frontman. Its frantic feeling and confidence solidify it as one of Stove’s briefest moments of brilliance to date. Overall, ‘s Favorite Friend displays that Stove is its own unique entity, capable of great variety and very effective songwriting. - Daniel Palella

65. Sons Of Kemet - Your Queen Is A Reptile (impulse!)

The title Your Queen Is A Reptile is a strong rebuke of the British monarchy’s mistreatment of black immigrants that gains even more political weight in context of Meghan Markle. But instead of making a protest record, Sons of Kemet shone a light on other queens throughout history–black women who have made a positive impact on society at large. With co-production by Dill Harris and features from performance poet Josh Idehen and Congo Natty, Your Queen Is A Reptile takes you on a journey through a wide variety of black stories and black music.

Read the rest of the review here.

64. Joey Purp - QUARTERTHING (self-released)

My real introduction to Joey Purp was his 2016 mixtape iiiDrops and his connection to his friends in the same scene like Noname and Chance The Rapper. What was so exciting about iiiDrops was Purp’s confidence, and QUARTERTHING not only feels like a step forward for the rapper but a leap into the spotlight. Joey Purp has arrived, confidence and flow surrounded by excellent production. “24k Gold/Sanctified” kicks off the album with a sense of joy and celebration, but lyrically, it recognizes that pull back to reality, the realism of the world and its violence, going from “I’m still alive!” to “I know we still alive / But I wake up to bullets flying.” That’s a theme throughout: the weight between celebration and survival, that pull between idealism and realism. “Elastic” reminds me of a grown-up sequel to “Girls@”, and the footwork-inspired beat of “Aw Sh*t!” is infectious. And while he’s more than capable of carrying out an album on his own, Purp finds some help from local names like Ravyn Lenae and Queen Key, but also a few more instantly recognizable names like both RZA and GZA. It’s a debut for an artist who’s been creating for years, but one that revels in its confidence and self-assured boldness. - LL

63. Foodman - Aru Otoko No Densetsu (Sun Ark)

Toying for years with the traditions of Chicago’s footwork scene, there has always been a sense of child-like playfulness conveyed in Foodman’s compositions. The Japanese artist’s rhythms stutter and juke in ways we have come to expect, but the sounds themselves are the artifice of a mind operating fully on a sense of wonder. On Aru Otoko No Densetsu, Foodman strips away what we expect from a dance record, or even a simple reduction thereof. What we are left with are percussive sounds surfacing, seemingly from toys and simple objects, mingling and slowly taking form--not with an end goal or rhythm in mind, but simply with the intent of play. Despite this, there is no feeling of lackluster or aimlessness--every bleep and hit on Aru Otoko No Densetsu explores what one can do when conventions and expectations are subverted. - DP

62. Years & Years - Palo Santo (Polydor)

Olly Alexander purported to release a concept pop album where gender and sexuality don’t exist and whose title was essentially a dick joke. On paper, Years & Years’ Palo Santo sounds like an ambitious album destined only to disappoint. In reality, it’s ambitious and impresses. The trio of Alexander, Mikey Goldsworthy, and Emre Türkmen have made a forward-thinking, percussive pop record about relationships that simply bangs. Whether Alexander is reflecting about a fling with a supposedly straight man or getting over being left, he’s dancing most of the time.

Read the rest of our review here.

61. Kississippi - Sunset Blush (Alcopop!)

If you managed to catch Kississippi live this year, you’ll likely have seen a full band surrounding Zoe Reynolds, but she alone writes the band’s songs. Sunset Blush sees Reynolds tapping into dreamier, poppier indie fare compared to her last EP, the moody We Have No Future, We’re All Doomed. The shift suits her. Her voice worked well with the starker, lo-fi feeling of that EP and is just as strong on her latest. “Easier to Love” feels lush with its synth-driven melody as Reynold’s voice wraps around the sound. That’s not to say the guitar-driven tracks are few or lacking here. “Cut Yr Teeth” finds strength in circling guitars and a realization in the lyrics: “The person you made yourself out to be / Would feel sorry for what you have done to me”. If Zoe had any nervousness about pivoting to more of a pop sound, Sunset Blush proves that Kississippi effortlessly made that move. - LL

60. Kraus - Path (Terrible)

Kraus’ Path is a triumphant effort of pushing sounds so deeply into the red that their proclamations are felt completely despite such careful shrouding. The Texas artist never felt quite a part of his hometown scene, and this isolation and yearning is felt in every blistering moment of Path. The slow, clean build of “Bum” gives way to an absolutely crushing wall of distortion, giving just enough headroom for Kraus’ adept and feverish drumming, as well as his mangled vocals, to cut through. It is all around a unique entry into both shoegaze and experimental music at large, showing what can be done with simple tools pushed to the point of breaking. The emotional quality of this record cannot be understated, even if it cannot be fully understood. - DP

59. Protomartyr - Consolation EP (Domino)

For a band as consistent as Protomartyr, destined to put out a new collection of movingly bleak post punk every couple years, it’s remarkable that an off-year EP would be just as good as a full-length. It’s even better that the EP offers something new for the band. Containing some of their best songs to date, Consolation, recorded by R. Ring’s Mike Montgomery and featuring Kelley Deal on two of its four tracks, is at times more sad and at times more hopeful than anything the band’s ever done.

Read the rest of our review here.

58. Now, Now - Saved (Trans)

Six years after the release of the atmospheric Threads, Now, Now returned with Saved, which shifted their sound to glossy, danceable tracks that still capture some of the desperate, emo bend of the band’s previous output. That’s not to say that a sense of desperation of heightened emotions detracts from Saved. On the contrary, the album encapsulates those seemingly unquenchable feelings of desire into demands (“I want it all” on standout “MJ”) and declarations (“Don’t you know I’m desperate for you?”), giving the synth-focused music an even more commanding presence. On lead single “SGL”, KC Dalager purrs, “Give in to me.” It’s easy to slip into the slick, desire-and-devotion fueled world of Saved, so let yourself in and enjoy the ride. - LL

57. drowse - Cold Air (The Flenser)

It is hard to not draw comparisons from Droswe’s Cold Air to Have A Nice Life’s reissued classic Deathconsciousness. Themes and feelings of loss and hopelessness are carried by crushing guitars, washed out vocals, and a penchant for doom and gloom. What Cold Air excels at, however, is making this sense of dread feel so personal and connected to the artist. Kyle Bates’ ability to make sonic cacophony convey such personal pain takes his efforts just as much into the realm of Mount Eeerie as it does Have a Nice Life. This isn’t romanticizing the apocalypse--this is a real and unguarded glimpse into the personal dread of one coming back from the brink of death. - DP

56. Thalia Zedek Band - Fighting Season (Thrill Jockey)

You can run, or you can hide. You can love, or you can fight. Or, you can do both sets of both, or all of them at once. Picking your battles–that’s what Thalia Zedek’s Fighting Season is all about. Today, the struggle we all share is balancing the personal and the political, and Zedek dives right in on her latest record. Written–you guessed it–in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the album shows a woman whose voice is weary but whose instrumental chops are ready to battle.

Read the rest of our review here.

55. The Sidekicks - Happiness Hours (Epitaph)

If you’re a fan of The Sidekicks, you’re aware of the magic that awaits in each of their albums, the joy that radiates through the crowd at one of their shows. And if you’re not in the know, someone out there is ready to share with you the virtues of the Ohio band. Their fifth album Happiness Hours glimmers and shines like a Midwest summer. Bright guitars give each song a slick, competent indie rock sheen, one you’d want to blast while walking along a sun-drenched sidewalk. But within each song are lyrics that range from tongue-in-cheek to self-deprecating, juxtaposing so well with the bounce in the music. If you don’t know The Sidekicks, take this as your call to action: go give Happiness Hours a listen and then see how many times you catch yourself recommending it to someone else. - LL

54. Skee Mask - Compro (Ilian Tape)

Similar to Objekt’s brilliant Cocoon Crush, Skee Mask’s Compro seeks to explore the intersection of dance music and ambient music. Unlike Objekt, however, Skee Mask does so by introducing and slowly unmasking more traditional forms. Break-beats and dance floor standards surface among more haunting sounds. Whereas Cocoon Crush swirls and unravels, Compro takes a veteran sensibility for rhythm and allows it to breathe and build, firmly but satisfyingly swaying between danceable cuts and soundscapes in a wholly refreshing manner. - JM

53. Olivia Chaney - Shelter (Nonesuch)

Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Olivia Chaney takes traditional forms of music and standards and imbues them with the type of beauty that can come only from vulnerability and doubt. Shelter, her most recent album, is filled with moments, stories, and broader feelings of letting one’s guard down–whether that’s being open to embrace or being honest with yourself–and the benefits of doing so. “Bare weakness open / There hides strength,” Chaney sings on standout “IOU” over dobro riffs way bouncier compared to her normally downtempo material. That’s the essential idea behind Shelter, an album named after a word that’s got an increasingly negative connotation, whether to describe over-protection of kids or living in a sociopolitical bubble. The type of shelter Chaney sings about is a safe space where she’s supported, can admit to both her shortcomings and her “demons”, and ultimately thrive.

Read the rest of our review here.

52. Restorations - LP5000 (Tiny Engines)

Year-end lists are a great way to encapsulate achievements from the last twelve months, but they’re also a great way to look back and revisit a specific time and place. A listen to Restorations’ cheekily titled LP5000, their first album since 2014, not only shows a band refining their sound but presenting us with a portrait of this year. Punk guitars and Jon Loudon’s tender, graveled voice shine throughout each track, leaving no wasted space in the album. For a short run time, Restorations has a lot to say. It’s a concise, muscular album that clocks in at just under 30 minutes, but Restorations doesn’t need much time to cover the way neighborhoods change and gentrify (”The Red Door”, “Caretaker”), the uncharted territory of suddenly being responsible for more than yourself (”Nonbeliever”), to calling out what so many of us think as we check our phones for the twentieth time in a day: “You’re taking a sip of your coffee / Glance at your phone and you mumble, ‘I hope he dies.’”

It’s an album that commiserates, that takes the time to pull up alongside you if you want to have a conversation or would rather shout along the lyrics, a shared catharsis either way. - LL

51. 공중도둑 (Mid-Air Thief) - 무너지기 (Crumbling) (Mid-Air Thief)

South Korean artist Mid-Air Thief is the musical enigma I never expected this year. Crumbling carries a sense of psychedelia so wondrous and un-forced that wistfully carries the listener through a joyous array of synthesizers and textures. Punctuated by acoustic guitars and soft vocals, this record drifts in ways and through spaces previously untouched. A mysterious release from a seemingly unknown artist, it lends itself to the same sense of wonder explored by many Japanese artists such as Cornelius and Fishmans. Here, however, this curiosity is not tethered by collage, but rather by careful and euphoric movement through moods and spaces, keeping its palette and scope refined but always tinkered with. - DP

50. Sleep - The Sciences (Third Man)

Earlier this year, Sleep released The Sciences, their first new album in 15 years, comprised of some songs that were totally new and some that were written during the sessions for their opus Dopesmoker. But when and where Sleep tracks were born has become increasingly irrelevant since their songs thrive from losing a sense of time and place. They exist seemingly with no beginning or end. And so do the albums themselves.

Read the rest of our review here.

49. The Internet - Hive Mind (Columbia)

Hive Mind is their long-awaited follow-up to Ego Death, and it’s influenced by the aforementioned time away from home and newfound fame and acclaim. For one, Syd hands some singing duties over to Lacy. While previously, especially live, she seemed shy over the course of a full album or show, here, she takes full advantage of the songs she sings, showing off a shiny swagger. Both Syd and Lacy hand over production lead to Christopher Allan Smith. What results is a great album because everyone sounds fresh. The band is wise without being weathered.

Read the rest of our review here.

48. Marisa Anderson - Cloud Corner (Thrill Jockey)

Marisa Anderson’s Thrill Jockey debut Cloud Corner reminds me of something Red River Dialect’s David Morris said to me earlier this year: “Relaxation is a form of growing.” Inspired less by the nihilist expanse of Ennio Morricone scores and more by the necessary buoyancy of Tuareg desert blues, Cloud Corner acts not just as a safety net for Anderson but replenishment during a time of political chaos.

Read the rest of our review here.

47. Half Waif - Lavender (Cascine)

Listening to Lavender, the new album by Half Waif, it’s hard to believe the album is less than 40 minutes long. A bold, maximal, exhausting, and ultimately brilliant affair, Lavender was created by Nandi Rose Plunkett, Adan Carlo, and Zack Levine, all at one point in Pinegrove. Plunkett’s voice and lyrics are centerfold. The album’s title refers to lavender that her grandmother, 95 years old at the time the album was written (and now deceased), would pick and boil. Naturally, the album’s about aging and collapse–of people, of relationships, of the United States of America.

Read the rest of our review here.

46. Bettye Lavette - Things Have Changed (Verve)

On Things Have Changed, LaVette doesn’t just cover lesser-known songs. She covers some of Dylan’s arguably weakest material and makes it her own. Appearances by Keith Richards and Trombone Shorty don’t matter. This album is all LaVette.

Read the rest of our review here.

45. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake! (Rough Trade)

A punk album you can dance to: It’s not a novel idea or even always a good one, but Parquet Courts have made that and more with their latest Wide Awake! With none other than Danger Mouse producing, the band has made a spiritual if not entirely aesthetic sibling to albums like There’s A Riot Goin’ On and Maggot Brain, one that combines their usual biting, witty, and respectful social commentary with heartfelt personal stories. It’s their greatest achievement yet.

Read the rest of our review here.

44. Ruston Kelly - Dying Star (Rounder)

“How the hell do I return to normal / If I'm always ending up flat on my back?”

Ruston Kelly has been through hell, and Dying Star is his document of that time, from overdose to his “return to normal.” For someone who’s made a career out of writing songs for other artists, Dying Star is Kelly’s most focused and refined effort so far, offering sharply painted portraits of addiction and heartbreak. It’s the album of an artist who has been to the brink and stared down the options on either side of a thin line.

Inspired by outlaw lyricists, there is no charm in Kelly’s depictions of drug use and the destruction that so often follows, but there is emotion deep in each track, and even humor (see “Faceplant”). A masterful storyteller, Kelly’s album ultimately celebrates survival and the emergence of a songwriter exorcising his own demons. And if that wasn’t enough to get you to listen, Kelly shows off his figure skating skills (yes, really, he once trained in the sport) in the video for the haunting “Son of a Highway Daughter”. - LL

43. Damien Jurado - The Horizon Just Laughed (Secretly Canadian)

The horizon laughs at Damien Jurado on a song where he illustrates a time he considered ending his life. “The clock is a murderer / My time is her burden,” he sings on the incredible “The Last Great Washington State” on his gorgeous The Horizon Just Laughed. It’s true–everybody dies. But Jurado wants to be there for his own death. “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” he sings. A move from the Pacific Northwest to California has stirred up a lot in Jurado’s mind while simultaneously spurring some of the breeziest Laurel Canyon or 70s AM radio pop he’s ever made.

Read the rest of our review here.

42. Bonny Doon - Longwave (Woodsist)

The songs of Longwave are heartfelt but lighthearted. There is a personal and relatable touch that accompanies it’s 10 track tenure. “A Lotta Things” explores of sense of personal shortcoming, a desire to shirk one’s responsibilities and expectations. But it is held together by an almost sarcastic quality that keeps it from veering into overtly moody territory (“I’m faking my own death, so I can get some rest”). “I Am Here (I Am Alive)” borrows from David Berman’s sonic frontier while maintaining its own sense of brooding and listlessness. “Where Do You Go?” captures and grounds this listlessness with more anecdotes of youthful daydreaming. The way Longwave winds down with a slowed down version of “Try to Be”’s playful riff is a fitting closer to an album whose aim seems to be to wander. - DP

41. Hop Along - Bark Your Head Off, Dog (Saddle Creek)

Listening to Bark Your Head Off, Dog, the incredible new album from Hop Along, I can’t help but wonder how in the hell lead singer Frances Quinlan has the time to think about all she does. Like all of us in this day and age, she wrestles with the idea that even though everyone dies, it’s important to have empathy for those with a harder road to the eventual endpoint. But that’s not where Quinlan’s mind stops. As everyone else broadly analyzes the tale of Cain and Abel, she wonders what their childhood relationship was like. As everyone is aghast at the state of Arkansas rushing lethal injections before the drug reaches its expiration date, Quinlan thinks about the vacation of the judge who presided over the decision. As a songwriter, she’s able to focus on individual events as representative of something larger. Her illustration of her formative experiences causes her to reflect on those of others, and likewise, us on our own.

Read the rest of our review here.

40. Screaming Females - All At Once (Don Giovanni)

I never would have seen All At Once coming from Screaming Females. Three years ago, they traded the Steve Albini-produced punk of Ugly for the Matt Bayles-addled plodding sludge of Rose Mountain. The results were predictable. However, working again with Bayles, generally more known for his work on post-rock, post-hardcore, and metalcore albums, has provided the band to establish a flourishing relationship with the producer. Marissa Paternoster and company have made an album that’s the perfect sonic manifestation of her anxieties and obsessions, each song essential and traversing a different style.

Read the rest of our review here.

39. Glenn Jones - The Giant Who Ate Himself and Other New Works for 6 & 12 String Guitar (Thrill Jockey)

Glenn Jones communicates through his guitar, and never more so than on The Giant Who Ate Himself and Other New Works for 6 & 12 String Guitar. Recorded in New Jersey with Laura Baird and engineer Matthew Avezado, it’s an album that’s at times buoyant and at times melancholy but always transparent. Jones’ strings vibrate on the opening title track, alternating between major and minor chords. The instrument and the medium is just as important as the stories themselves. The arpeggio guitar lines with Flamenco flourishes on “Everything Ends”, the dissonance of the swaying “The Was and The Is”, the blues picking of “Even the Snout and the Tail”–for much of the record, Jones is coming up with contemporary standards.

Read the rest of our review here.

38. YOB - Our Raw Heart (Relapse)

YOB lead singer Mike Scheidt suffered an intestinal disease that threatened his very presence on this earth, let alone during the making of the band’s new album Our Raw Heart. Hearing the album, you’d think it was recorded after recovery when Scheidt was so thankful to be alive he couldn’t help but shout to the heavens. That it was recorded during his time of turmoil only makes the record more life affirming.

Read the rest of our review here.

37. The Field - Infinite Moment (Kompakt)

I was lucky enough to see German producer The Field perform 2 months ago. A night of house music and friends was a well needed break from the scenes I typically find myself in. I recall an energy in the room, a sort of joy typically found on the dancefloor. When The Field began his set, the eerie, distant vocals of “Made of Steel. Made of Stone” might have brought this energy to a halt. But the moodiness of these infinitely stretched notes took the energy of the room and seemed to crystalize it. Infinite Moment could not be a more apt title for this record--I saw its captivating hypnosis take effect on a room full of club-goers. The dancing didn’t cease; it just felt suspended in time. Throughout his set and throughout Infinite Moment, there is a persistent feeling of moodiness, an intangible emotion that is preserved indefinitely, reverberating through the record’s 65 minutes. It’s a worthwhile journey, and one that asks the listener to surrender to peace. - DP

36. U.S. Girls - In A Poem Unlimited (4AD)

The 6th album from musician Meghan Remy as U.S. Girls is a self-described protest, like lots of her other work, but it’s an unlikely funky one. On In A Poem Unlimited, the experimental pop artist recorded with a live band and worked with co-producer Steve Chahley (Neko Case) to make a record that takes just as much from Parliament/Funkadelic and Sly & The Family Stone as it does art rock, tackling the power of patriarchal institutions and lauding the women fighting for some share of the power. But it also notably sympathizes with the everyday struggles women experience without wallowing, using its instrumentation as a celebration for a changing moment in time. It’s fitting that In A Poem Unlimited came out right after so many powerful men have finally faced the consequences of their actions because it dares to be joyous despite all reasons for despair.

Read the rest of our review here.

35. Let’s Eat Grandma - I’m All Ears (Transgressive)

I can’t help but think that the vitriol over the band name Let’s Eat Grandma has had a little to do with the fact that the music comes from two teenage girls. Sure, to some, the band name is the type of phrase that’s often followed with “that should be a band name,” but a simple Google search reveals that the phrase is often used as an example of why commas are important. It’s a tongue-in-cheek move made by the duo of Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, who have followed up their debut I, Gemini with I’m All Ears, an assured album of “experimental sludge pop”. Despite amazing production from Faris Badwan, SOPHIE, and David Wrench, the album is undeniably the duo’s. Its sequencing is perhaps the best of any album all year–it gets better as it goes along. The album itself follows many of its best songs; it starts cautiously and becomes ominous. And it couldn’t have been made by anybody but these two girls.

Read the rest of our review here.

34. Soccer Mommy - Clean (Fat Possum)

Sophie Allison’s debut Clean wraps you up in its world completely, with both its lyrics and warm guitar tones. It’s an album filled with anecdotes that feel personal and universal, the reflections and musings of a young woman navigating relationships of all kinds. It’s revelatory and familiar, soft and angular. Take the opening images of “Still Clean” and the way Allison positions dipping a bloody maw into clear water. Lyrically, the album vacillates between ”I don’t want to be your fucking dog” and “I wanna be the one who makes your stomach tied”, but it doesn’t reflect indecision. Rather, Allison captures what so many of us know so well, whether we’re in our early twenties or beyond: Our desires and relationships are never so simple, but always valid. There’s never a clear answer to the why of it all, but the album’s centerpiece, “Scorpio Rising”, seems to settle on the idea that experience and the chaos that is the universe and genetics might help explain some of it away: “And I’m just a victim of changing planets / My Scorpio rising and my parents.” That this is Soccer Mommy’s official debut can only bode well for the musician’s future output. - LL

33. Culture Abuse - Bay Dream (Epitaph)

Culture Abuse aren’t just a band. They’re a community, they’re on a mission, and their live shows are raucous indoctrinations into their world. Like their Bandcamp bio says, they’re definitely a good time, and Bay Dream’s sunniness feels like a drive down a coastal highway with salt-sprayed air flowing through open windows.

A little less aggressive than their debut Peach, Bay Dream comes in with a stoned, fuzzy optimism that ripples through each track. A song like “Bee Kind to the Bugs” might not work if frontman David Kelling and the rest of the band weren’t so damn earnest. A lyric like “S'why I like you around /' Cause you make me feel good” might not land without a hook, but Culture Abuse’s confidence shines. It’s an album I found myself turning to throughout the year, one that added a little bounce and ray of joy to a monotonous commute or even another rough news day. While Peach was an introduction to the world of Culture Abuse, Bay Dream feels more like is its manifesto. - LL

32. Playboi Carti - Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope)

2 years ago, before Playboi Carti’s debut commercial release, there existed only a small string of Soundcloud tracks to his name. There was an insatiable desire from fans to hear more; I recall playing “Broke Boi” on near-constant repeat. Its simple, airy beat and unending barrage of ad-libs, broken up only by a simple refrain, was so effective and perfect. Carti plays to these strengths--simplicity, energy, and raw confidence, paired with perfectly complementary beat selection--on Die Lit. Much of the production is handled by frequent collaborator P’ierre Bourne, who’s refreshing take on modern rap production has been making huge waves in the past couple years. The most important quality of Die Lit, though, is its completely unrelenting momentum. The beats are unendingly fun, and when Carti is done playing with a track, it moves right forward to more of the same sugar-high. Its frequent comparisons to punk are apt but reductive--the energy and ethos are there, but what Carti accomplishes on Die Lit is unique and a welcome entry in one of the strangest years for hip hop in awhile. Between its never ending joy and a long list of rap’s finest collaborators, Die Lit does so much with such simple terms. - DP

31. Emma Ruth Rundle - On Dark Horses (Sargent House)

To say that misery makes great art is all too fetishistic. Emma Ruth Rundle has made an incredible album about love, creativity, pain, and trauma all at once. Inspired by everything from her past experiences with substance abuse to her move to Louisville and musical and life partnership with Jaye Jayle’s Evan Patterson, Rundle and her collaborators (Patterson, bassist Todd Cook, drummer Dylan Nadon, recording artist Kevin Ratterman) turned On Dark Horses, her third studio album, into a crash, burn, and come out stronger emotional affair. They thrust you in the middle of her head-space on “Fever Dreams”, its bluesy, creepy guitars, keys, and drums starting like the song’s been going on for hours. “Release me away from fever dreams,” Rundle asks, knowing full well her confusion will not subside, as the song slows down in the middle to allow space for swirling, noisy, psychedelic riffs.

Read the rest of our review here.

30. Odetta Hartman - Old Rockhounds Never Die (Memphis Industries/Northern Spy)

Produced by her partner Jack Inslee, who combines beats and field recordings to give Hartman’s tales a sense of space, time, and place, Rockhounds is an album of clear, disparate elements that somehow combine beautifully. I’m not talking about the mere echo on the banjos of the opening track. More like the electronic percussion and static of “Cowboy Song” mirroring her foggy memories of riding a train from San Francisco to Chicago with a real cowboy, remembering his tales of people he met. It’s the unexpected dissonant violins and vocal entrances of the whispered “Widow’s Peak”, originally a studio mistake but resulting in a sense of spontaneity. Or the drifting instrumental autoharp interlude of “Auto”, the stainless steel bowl instrumental “Freedom”, even the electronic beat of “Sweet Teeth” that couldn’t be aesthetically further from the limber banjo picking.

Read the rest of our review here.

29. Mint Field - Pasar de las Luces (Innovative Leisure)

Sure, Pasar De Las Luces is ripe to be described as ethereal, nostalgic, Interpol-meets-Low–whatever. That’s all true. But a track like “Club de Chicas” separates them from the standard descriptors, starting slow with an echo on the snare and building up to a high-speed pop chase and exhaling back to stasis. In a sense, Pasar De Las Luces–translated to “Passing Through the Lights”–is really an album that encapsulates constant movement and texture, always advancing, always there.

Read the rest of our review here.

28. Wild Pink - Yolk in the Fur (Tiny Engines)

You know Yolk in the Fur is going to be unlike anything Wild Pink has ever made from the first breathy synthesizers. “Burger Hill” is a shift in aesthetic for the Brooklyn band who makes some sort of variation on heartland rock. What remains is their specificity, the sense of time and place that an equally expansive band like The War On Drugs only has on one or two songs. Singer John Ross, looking down, describes the setting as being in a “prenatal snow globe.” The image is layered and loaded–a scene in a life, neatly packaged and edited before it even starts. Throughout Yolk in the Fur, it seems like Ross no longer needs to make snow globes out of things that are infinite. “I woke up too fast from a dream,” he sings later on “Burger Hill”, starting his journey to accept the boundlessness of life.

Read the rest of our review here.

27. The Beths - Future Me Hates Me (Carpark)

You might think an album called Future Me Hates Me would be sadsack and self-aggrandizing. But like the title track from which it takes its name, it’s instead a tongue-in-cheek look at contemporary relationship anxiety. It also knows when to turn the sincerity on and off. New Zealand’s The Beths, jazz-trained musicians who play crunchy guitar pop punk, have delivered an instrumentally explosive and confident debut filled with harmonies, hooks, and feeling.

Read the rest of our review here.

26. Eric Chenaux - Slowly Paradise (Constellation)

Paris-via-Canada guitarist Eric Chenaux has given us his most confident, at ease, and best record with Slowly Paradise. Usually solitary, this time around, Chenaux teamed up with Ryan Driver to write the lyrics that sit atop his gorgeous compositions. He recorded it with Cyril Harrison behind the boards (Sandro Perri is credited with engineering work), and the results are as cohesive as they are adventurous.

Read the rest of our review here.

25. Eli Keszler - Stadium (Shelter Press)

The tone and melody of the synthesizers on “The Driver Stops”, a standout track from Eli Keszler’s latest album Stadium, recalls a film noir or mystery. That’s funny, because Keszler’s sonics cause similar quizzical reactions. Even if there’s a video of him playing it all live, Stadium yields the most “How did he do that?”s per minute. He plays his instruments live but uses Sensory Percussion drum software, and so the balance between control and randomness is vulnerable and ambiguous. Nonetheless, he’s managed to create a cohesive album of sounds inspired by his move to Manhattan--lots of randomness, little control--and specifically his East Village apartment. Some of the tracks, like “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System at All” and “Flying Floor for U.S. Airways”, feature buoyant jazzy snare rolls and ripples of one-off high-pitched synthesizer tone, anchored only by perhaps a steady bass line. No matter what, there’s always anxiety. Queasy Mellotron pervades “Lotus Awnings”, and the relentless plinking on “Which Swarms Around It” render the calming cymbals neutralized. Stadium is ironically named--it’s the huge soundtrack for living alone, together, for city commutes and unit isolation, where you do your best to drown out the noise but ultimately accept its inevitability. - Jordan Mainzer

24. Lucy Dacus - Historian (Matador)

“The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit, I had a coughing fit,” begins Lucy Dacus’ great new album Historian. You assume she’s talking about a first kiss only until the next line: “I mistakenly called them by your name.” It sets up an album that messes with your interpretation of time and space, about everything from her breakup with the abusive former bassist of her band, the death of her grandmother, and the loss of her Christian identity. Dacus, in preparation for a new record more ambitious in scope than her debut No Burden (1 track but 12 minutes longer) read epic novels. You can hear it in the complexity of the instrumentation, like on the 7-minute “Pillars of Truth”, and in the constant change of point of view or addressee. Sometimes, as on “Addictions”, she talks to herself. Other times, she chastises or admires others. The whole record is, to an extent, funny and self-deprecating. It’s mostly self-aware.

Read the rest of our review here.

23. Drug Church - Cheer (Pure Noise)

"At least there’s some self in self-destruction,” vocalist Patrick Kindlon sings on “Foam Pit”, one of many songs on Drug Church’s Cheer that chides corporatism and individualism. Like the best songs from Pissed Jeans or KEN Mode, Cheer is a self-hating, sarcastic, satirical take on the fragile masculinity present in both the economically oppressed and the oppressor. Opener “Grubby” hilariously decries both adult male children and the scumbags with “handshakes and lies” in their pockets. “There’s a guy with a search history darker than a sea trench,” Kindlon sings on “Unlicensed Hall Monitor”, the title character a perfect metaphor for undeserved power tripping. Sure, Kindlon shows some sympathy--the twinkling “Strong References” recalls his experience being pushed to uncomfortable situations as a male model, and “Weed Pin” is call to increase the minimum wage--but for the most part, the chugging hardcore punk perfectly complements the bratty nature of the subjects he inherits. “If you live long enough, you’ll do something wrong enough,” he sings on “Unlicensed Guidance Counselor” before describing crimes that, well, most people don’t commit. “Conflict Minded”’s illustration of selfishness, while on the surface level exaggerated, hits close to home. “Leave your Sentra in the tow lane / Take off from your brother’s wedding / Pull the plug on mom days early / This is your window, don’t you blow it,” Kindlon chants. If you don’t have that guy in your family or aren’t perpetually ashamed by narcissists in positions of power, Drug Church make it at least easy to empathize with their victims. - JM

22. Eartheater - IRISIRI (PAN)

What makes us human, and what makes us individuals? These admittedly unanswerable questions are at the center of IRISIRI, the third album for Queens-based multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Alexandra Drewchin as Eartheater. On the record, Drewchin combines voice--both her three-octave chords, live guests, and sampled chatter from humans--with electronics, to blur the lines between technology and the self. Despite her vocal talents, much of Drewchin’s singing is less stunningly operatic or beautiful and more imperfect and at times cacophonous, contrasting the beatific harp strumming on “Peripheral” and the bouncing hip-hop beat on “Inkling”. But despite who’s voice is at the helm, Drewchin’s lyrical wordplay furthers her aims. “OS In Vitro” juxtaposes “computer” with “you can’t compute her,” while on video-only release “Claustra”, Drewchin alternates between “the owning of my loneliness” and “the end of the loaning of my onliness,” cementing a non-ideal state like being alone as the more personal aim than the ideal companionship. Appropriately, despite star turns from Odwalla1221′s Chloe Maratta and the ever-dominant Moor Mother, IRISIRI is unequivocally Drewchin’s statement of self. “Nobody’s looking” repeats a collection of ambiguous, pitch-shifted voices on “Slyly Child”. But for Drewchin, it doesn’t matter who looks or who doesn’t. She’s there; are you willing to listen? -JM

21. Makaya McCraven - Universal Beings (International Anthem)

Universal Beings opens with chatter. Usually, on an album it’s a gimmick, a thematically forced insertion of a document of capital “a” Artists at work. “A Queen’s Intro”, however, is crowd talk before a performance, introducing the various levels of dialogue at work within Makaya McCraven’s defining album to date. The band players–in this case, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Dezron Douglas, vibraphonist Joel Ross, and harpist Brandee Younger–are in collaboration, improvising off of each other. There’s also a level of interaction between band and audience, though, and it’s a fitting introduction to an album that McCraven wished to break down barriers between “scenes” that can often be too academic, insular, and exclusive, whether in terms of social status, class, race, or gender. Launching into a decidedly old school hip hop beat and removing yet another barrier–genre–McCraven and company are ready to go to work.

Read the rest of our review here.

20. Tony Molina - Kill The Lights (Slumberland)

Got a 20 minute commute but still want to listen to a full album? Like power pop? Kill The Lights is for you. Tony Molina’s latest is not just a collection of fantastic spurts of ideas. I haven’t heard an album with this much emotion and style conveyed in such little time since Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again. The influences are all over the board--Molina favorite The Beatles on “Now That She’s Gone” and “When She Leaves”, jangly college rock on the melancholy “Give He Take You”, Nico’s “These Days” on the fingerpicked “Wrong Town”--but it’s the combination of the concision of Guided By Voices and the sweets of Big Star that makes Kill The Lights sound so classic. On “Look Inside Your Mind/Losin’ Touch”, Molina crams in two songs, organ-led pop to folk, with a guitar solo and piano outro to boot. The final track, the instrumental “Outro”, combines country-esque twang with baroque piano pop. You can’t help but wonder that if Molina packs this much in a 14 minute opus, does he have an epic in him? But then you realize that Kill The Lights is perfect as is. - JM

19. Laurel Halo - Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency)

A departure from previous efforts for the revered Hyperdub label, Raw Silk Uncut Wood is somehow more grounded than Laurel Halo’s dancefloor cuts. This comes through both in instrumentation from Oliver Coates and Eli Kezsler (previous collaborator and uniquely frantic percussion virtuoso), but also in the path these pieces take.These tracks are unfractured, moving forward and building in ways that are both calming and fulfilling. Raw Silk Uncut Wood is a record built upon a generous amount of space, allowing Halo’s excellent sense of texture and composition to take the reins. - DP

18. Rival Consoles - Persona (Erased Tapes)

The new album from Rival Consoles, Persona, is purportedly inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film of the same name, but such context is not necessary. Persona is very much an album to experience in the present moment. Its use of analogue-heavy synthesizers, acoustic and electric instruments, and effects pedals toy with perception, space, light, and darkness. In listening to it, you experience emotions ranging from melancholy to joy, and for that, it’s complex in its parts but simple in its sum.

Read the rest of our review here.

17. Camp Cope - How to Socialise & Make Friends (Run for Cover)

With anger, earth-shattering power, and empathy, Camp Cope decry selfish and self-obsessed men, call out sexism in the music industry, and lift each other up--and that’s just in Track 1. “The Opener” is lead singer Georgia “Maq” McDonald’s simultaneous look back on her former relationship with The Smith Street Band’s Wil Wagner, who always tried to one-up her with his laments, and her rallying cry for inclusion. “It’s another man telling us we’re missing a frequency / Show ‘em, Kelly!” Maq screams, inviting bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich to show off her bass chops, bucking tradition for something slinkier, rawer, and better. Recorded in 2.5 days, Camp Cope’s How to Socialise & Make Friends is a melancholic, yet inspiring statement of female empowerment and togetherness. “The Face of God” is Maq’s tale of sexual assault that illustrates a thought process all-too-common among victims, unforgivably due to a culture of toxic masculinity: It can’t be, his music is too good. Ultimately, the band do their part to combat it--“Your voice is loud in my goddamn head, boy,” Maq sings on “Animal & Real”--but also find a common humanity in good people, in the man filling a gas tank on Christmas day, in Maq’s mother who doesn’t like her tattoos, and in her late father who died from complications from prostate cancer. The last story is told on acoustic tearjerker closer “I’ve Got You”. “I’ve got you / You’ve got me, too,” Maq declares to her father, but also to anyone who supports her and each other. - JM

16. Petal - Magic Gone (Run for Cover)

Honesty is a word and a concept we seem to throw around these days, but it can save your life. Magic Gone documents a moment for Kiley Lotz, the artist behind Petal, where coming to terms with her own queerness and mental health comes to a head. But it’s that release, that moment of honesty and acceptance, that can change everything for the better, that can mean survival. “Will they love me if I am honest?” Lotz asks on “Carve”. It’s not just a document of a moment of reckoning for Lotz, but further cements Petal as a songwriter with a knack for poetry in lyrics and gentle, sometimes stark instrumentation that builds a world for those words to live. Take album closer “Stardust”, which begins with a sole, lilting piano that frames Kiley’s clear voice as the song builds. Though the song deals with the strangeness of falling out of love, there’s a sense of hope in the way the final line “I can’t say I didn’t love you,” repeats as guitars crash, only to give way to that same lone piano. - LL

15. Foxing - Nearer My God (Triple Crown)

Foxing has always been able to distill that apocalyptic feeling into their music, taking moments that seem small on the outside and making them monumental. Nearer My God is an expansion on the same idea. Named for the hymn that also soundtracks the dystopian doomsday video CNN was set to play at the literal end of the world, Foxing seem to take everything they can grab and push the limits of just how much one album can hold while not only remaining cohesive but remaining so purely Foxing, too. To simply call it ambitious feels like an understatement.

First single “Slapstick” eased listeners into this new soundscape, offering an approachable and familiar sound, horns coming in towards the end, always a highlight to a live show. But you can find almost every genre within the tracks of the album: Conor Murphy’s R&B-tinged falsetto on multiple tracks, near trap beats, the proggy chaos of “Gameshark”, the absolute shredding guitar solo in “Lich Prince”, and the wait-are-those-bagpipes?-yes-those-are-bagpipes climax of “Bastardizer”. That’s just a start, and to dive into the lyrics of the album would take much more space than this review.

Ever evolving, Foxing has made a statement with Nearer My God, taking the raw emotion fans know and stretching it with finesse. The apocalypse never sounded so foreboding, so danceable, and so damn good. - LL

14. SOPHIE - OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES (Transgressive/Future Classic)

The title of SOPHIE’s debut album is an alternate way of spelling “I love every person’s insides,” a sentiment that pervades the stunning release. First hinted at in 2017 with the release of “It’s Okay To Cry”, the first SOPHIE song to feature her own vocals and image and reveal she is living as a trans woman, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES is a showcase of sexual liberation and aggression and a celebration of individuality. The maximalist production and soulful vocals from Calia Thompson-Hannant, aka Cecile Believe (fka Mozart’s Sister) of BDSM anthem “Ponyboy” propels the album into a sort of ironically synthesized humanity. The pitch-shifted vocals on “Infatuation” become a moving falsetto, and the chopped and screwed singing on “Not Okay” are grounded in comparison to the alien crunch of the instrumentation. But the album peaks at the cheerleader chant of “Immaterial”. “Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live?” sings Thompson-Hannant. The answer? Everywhere, as long as there are people who love people. - JM

13. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs (Tan Cressida/Columbia)

Earl Sweatshirt has so long been mired by a mystique stemming from young stardom and talent that, for better or worse, has been hard to shake. And though we seem to have been granted glimpses into his true self on previous records, his greatest achievement to date, Some Rap Songs, leans fully and perfectly into the haze that surrounds his persona. His tongue-in-cheek wordplay and seemingly effortless delivery have drawn comparisons to the likes of Madvillainy. But the likeness is thin--Earl’s aim is not simply to toy with language and meter. There is an intangible but ever present mood that dangles in front of you through all 24 minutes of Some Rap Songs. Fractured jazz samples and static make up a wall of mist, with Earl peeking through for brief but brilliant nuggets of wisdom and personal anecdotes. - DP

12. Low - Double Negative (Sub Pop)

BJ Burton strikes again. Though he worked with Low on Ones and Sixes, it was this year’s Double Negative that was a true radical shift in sound for the band. Thematically, it’s inspired by everything from an injury Sparhawk suffered to the band members justifying their religion with liberal thought and today’s political world. But a sense of sadness, as always, presents itself through the stunning atmosphere. Alan Sparhawk’s voice oscillates, barely audible on the hissing “Quorum”, thumping “Dancing And Blood”, and whirring “Tempest”. Mimi Parker cries on the shimmering “Fly” and hymnal “Always Up”. But it’s “Always Trying To Work It Out” that actually combines the old and the new. Over a pseudo-hip hop beat and angular, warbling guitar, the two’s auto-tuned vocals flourish over a bed of swirling noise that could find itself on a previous record like The Great Destroyer. Looking back and looking forward, Low march on. - JM

11. Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar (Ninja Tune)

With Cocoa Sugar, Young Fathers become cleaner and more accessible, but they want you to know it’s of their own volition. “Don’t you turn my brown eyes blue,” they sing on “Turn”, a song on an album about celebrating who you are in the face of people wanting you to change. Recorded in their studio, Young Fathers this time around opted for something both mellower and bigger than they’ve ever done, and the result is something immensely personal. “Tremolo my soul,” they chant over snares, hand percussion, and 808 pops. In other words, they crave the ups and downs of real life. “I’ve never seen wicked ones face their fears / Yet I’ve always seen brave men filled with tears,” goes opener “See How” on which dissonance contrasts with steady percussion and a hopeful gospel choir. Honesty and embracing oneself is way more difficult than self-deception, but it pays off. On closer “Picking You”, the trio add another element of Scottish music to their grime-influenced sound: bagpipes and drum rolls. If “good men are strange” and “bad men are obvious,” Young Fathers would take strange any day. - JM

10. Pusha T - Daytona (G.O.O.D. Music/Def Jam)

“I’m top 5″, Pusha T claims in the first words in the first verse of “What Would Meek Do?” He’s always been a braggadocio--this time, that’s not enough. On Daytona, Pusha crosses the line with unparalleled lyrical dexterity. Setting himself up with a couple tracks where--what else--he talks about his history hustling, he goes so far as to be thankful for addiction. On “Come Back Baby”, producer Kanye West starts with a sample of “The Truth Shall Make You Free” by The Mighty Hannibal (a song lamenting addiction) before Pusha reveals how much he makes off of dope. Even the album art--a photo of Whitney Houston’s bathroom taken after she died--is tasteless.

And then there’s “Infrared”, which has now infamously set off a chain of events wherein Pusha claimed Drake uses a ghostwriter, Drake responded with a lame freestyle, and Pusha annihilated him in “The Story of Adidon”, wherein he, among other things, said Drake fathered a child with a porn star (true) and makes fun of Noah “40″ Shebib’s Multiple Sclerosis. Even if “Adidon” were a part of Daytona, the album would still be the most eviscerating listen of the year in less than 30 minutes. Pusha didn’t even need to say he’s top 5. - JM

9. DJ Koze - Knock Knock (Pampa)

Perhaps not since this very site’s namesake has an album reached such sample-based bliss as DJ Koze’s Knock Knock. While The Avalanches’ opus was a crate digger’s paradise, Koze’s source material ranges from the familiar to the recognizable but still manages to make something entirely new out of it. Bon Iver’s voice is twisted over tropical techno thumps on “Bonfire”, while Gladys Knight provides equal parts sorrow and soul over immortal club anthem “Pick Up”. You’ve got Kurt Wagner’s trademark vocoder singing on “Muddy Funster” and Roisin Murphy’s wailing on the propulsive “Illumination” and growling “Scratch That”. But perhaps the most appropriate sample is on “Planet Hase”. Over skittering hi hats and hand claps, Koze takes dialogue from a documentary about Alzheimer’s in which someone pontificates on the need for music and art in achieving scientific breakthroughs. When we pay attention to the physicality of music and what it conjures within ourselves, we can achieve a sort of nirvana, argues Koze on the finest album of his career. - JM

8. Ovlov - Tru (Exploding In Sound)

For many, the expectations for Tru were uniquely immense. Ovlov’s cult status in the world of fuzzed out indie rock--rightfully earned through the adored AM--had left fans daydreaming of more from Steve Hartlett’s songwriting camp. And though the 5 year span has been punctuated by break ups and releases from the Hartlett-fronted Stove, we long awaited the signature blissed out wall of warm guitars and strained, yearning vocals that are unique to Ovlov. From the opening chords of “Baby Alligator”, Tru is a welcome invitation to experience a band’s unique sonic footprint, re-imagined through a matured sense of songwriting. Whereas AM explored a set of themes and icons or characters, Tru feels more obviously personal. Hartlett touches upon feelings of self-care and relationships, as he did in AM, but now with less of a sense of guardedness. You can always tell when he sings about himself and those around him, but the themes and references feel less obtuse. The band’s sonic palette is taken in more varied directions as well, from the screeching harmonics of “Half Way Fine” to the start-stop wail of “Stick”. Tru’s well-crafted blend of loud 90’s indie worship, shoegaze, and punk solidifies Ovlov’s place in the modern indie circuit. - DP

7. Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer (Atlantic)

Though not technically part of her collection of “android” albums, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer takes the theme of human vs robot to a head and adds sexuality to the mix. “Text message God up in the sky / Oh, if you love me, won’t you please reply?” Monae begs on the opener and title track. She struggles with embracing religion because of what many major religions have to say about non-straight people (Monae is pansexual), so Monae realizes that she has no choice but to love her self. “Crazy, Classic, Life” is a thumping anthem to queer black pride, while “Django Jane” is an all-rapped ode to her amazing accomplishments. Her message back is “accept me for who I am,” yes, but its her double entendre-laden ode to her own sexuality in which she finds power. “You fucked the world up now,” she sings on “Screwed”, before declaring, “We’ll fuck it all back down.” Of course, there’s “Pynk”, the Grimes-featuring, finger-snapping gem of a power pop song with a legendary video, that’s a tribute to the vagina, but over the course of Dirty Computer, Monae finds many different ways to say that whether or not our orientations are coded into our DNA, love is love. - JM

6. Objekt - Cocoon Crush (PAN)

An artist solidly known for his bold exploration of techno, Objekt now takes a plunge into a new kind of ethereal beauty on Cocoon Crush. A foray into ambient music, Objekt subverts a lot of what we have come to expect from him. The line between digital and analog is smeared. Tracks are ungrounded, punctuated still by percussion and synthesizers, but in patterns and textures that materialize in mysterious ways. And just as they appear, they stutter and morph in ways unexpected to the listener. The cold machinations of the dancefloor are still present; they are just stretched and masked in exciting and rewarding ways. - DP

5. Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour (MCA Nashville)

We like Kacey Musgraves at SILY and included her last album Pageant Material as one of 2015’s best. So what is it about her that makes us continue to return to her music? With this year’s Golden Hour, she takes a step beyond her tongue-in-cheek takes on small town country living and branches out with a gorgeous collection of songs that look inward. It’s a bit of a “What does it all mean?” album, and Musgraves takes her time with each track, as she says on shimmering opener “Slow Burn”: “Old soul waiting my turn / I know a few things but I still got a lot to learn”. That’s not to say that she leaves that broad, hazy question completely unanswered. There’s her LSD-induced meditation on family on the minute-long “Mother”, or the gentle wonder she conveys at her surroundings on “Oh, What a World”, which sees the use of vocoder, adding another dimension to her “Spacey Kacey” nickname.

That’s not to say her knack for wordplay and tweaking tropes has faded to the background. It’s sharper here. Golden Hour shines a light on a disco ball during “High Horse” and heightens the timelessness of a “classic in the wrong way” fake John Wayne. “Space Cowboy” dares you to not crack a smile at the pause between the title’s two-word phrase as she tenderly sings, “You can have your space, cowboy”.

Yes, Golden Hour is a Kacey Musgraves album through and through, and the title encapsulates its themes so well: that flash of ethereal color in the sky, one that we can all see if we just take a moment to look up and savor it. - LL

4. Mitski - Be The Cowboy (Dead Oceans)

Mitski has found strength in the mythology of the Old West. Her latest album Be The Cowboy sees her wishing to embody the confident spirit of the title character in order to find her strength in music and relationships. Co-produced by Patrick Hyland, the album, like Puberty 2, is concerned with the body, and Mitski’s decision to replace guitars with synths allows her to feel empowered through dancing. She feels wanted on “Nobody”, and while she’s dependent on an ex in “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?”, the disco beat of the song steadies her. “Toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart,” she begs on the bouncy “Washing Machine Heart”, constantly finding new and humorous ways to sing about emotional baggage.

Read the rest of our review here.

3. Saba - CARE FOR ME (Saba Pivot)

Saba’s CARE FOR ME gained prominence as a tribute to the Chicago rapper’s late cousin John Walt, but it’s also a personal record about being a young black man in America. Over warbling synthesizers and minimal, cloudy production perfect for storytelling, Saba alternates between raw stream of consciousness and meticulously arranged poetry to tell his story. Walt’s death, dealing with depression, anxieties about sex, and fear of police are some of the many themes that bookend the record. On “BUSY / SIRENS”, he raps, “Sirens on the way / Now you’re laying where the angels lay,” while the record ends with him stepping into the shoes of someone dying and on his way up to heaven ( “Chalk outline look like the shape of my shadow”). In between, he details how he’s stayed alive. With the directness and dryness of Vince Staples, he blatantly says, “Momma mixed the vodka with the Sprite / They killed my cousin with a pocket knife,” on “LIFE”. But what has he learned? Each of “FIGHTER”’s verses is dedicated to an altercation, whether physical or verbal, but more importantly, introspection about what happened and why its led him to abstain from negative conflict.

All the while, CARE FOR ME seems to be a breathing document of Saba discovering himself. “Wrote the amount of raps just on a mission to find something,” he declares on “CALLIGRAPHY”. He eventually details the circumstances surrounding Walt’s death on the climactic “PROM / KING”, but what’s important is while life is uncertain and violent, no matter our background, we’ll always have art to make sense of it all. - JM

2. Yves Tumor - Safe in the Hands of Love (Warp)

Yves Tumor’s patent interplay of noise with a brilliant sensibility for pop music is fully realized on Safe in the Hands of Love. To be clear, though, this is not a jarring dance between the two worlds. Whereas most music which could be hastily labeled as “noise” seeks beauty in harshness or through a violent deconstruction of what we know to be beautiful in music, Tumor expertly weaves grating, free-flowing chaos into a gorgeous whole, channeling R&B, hip hop, electronica, rock, and everything in between. Opener “Faith in Nothing Except Salvation”, with its stuttering horns and general sluggishness, somehow perfectly sets the stage for a record that feels cohesive despite its tattered and fractured parts. The following track, “Economy of Freedom”, explores a frightening soundscape, punctuated by low, rumbling bass and an ominous thud. It trods along patiently, slowly making way for angelic vocals, creating something that borders on hip hop while also resembling a Prurient track. “Noid”, while situated in this record, could stand on its own as a magnificent pop song. It’s bouncy sense of rhythm and unrelenting energy are twisted in directions both unexpected and rewarding. Tumor’s ability to gracefully merge all of his sonic talents together without seeming even a bit contrived makes Safe in the Hands of Love an unforgettable foray into experimental music. - DP

1. Noname - Room 25 (self-released)

Our #1 album of 2018 was born out of financial obligation, Noname having moved to L.A., living out of different hotel rooms, and struggling to pay rent. That this context birthed Room 25--an expression of a sexually awakened black woman and staunch observer of the world at large--is extraordinary. In between her debut Telefone and Room 25, Noname lost her virginity, something she doesn’t shy away from talking about on the latter. “Fucked your rapper homie, now his ass is making better music / My pussy teachin ninth-grade English / My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism,” she spits on “Self”, calling out those who thought she couldn’t rap--many of whom rap only about sex and money--by rapping about sex and money better than they ever could. “Window” details her sexual encounters over sparse arrangements, strings, drums, and no real beat to emphasize her amazing flow. (“I bought you game 5 tickets / Made my pussy the sequel.”) And “Montego Bae”, featuring sultry sing-speaking from Ravyn Lenae, is a play on a location in Jamaica notorious for its sex tourism; Noname finds empowerment in a potential partner.

But as much as her deserved sexual braggadocio stands out on Room 25, it’s Noname’s self-evaluation that makes the record essential. In other words, before she can “focus on the part of me I’m trying to be,” she has to deal with open wounds. “You title email 'Noname thank you for your sweet Telefone / It saves lives’,” she reveals on the whispered “Don’t Forget About Me” before revealing, “The secret is I’m actually broken.” If posse cuts like “Ace” (featuring Smino and a scene-stealing Saba) and rap battle level punnery like “With You” are surface-level confidence, it’s the final track, “no name”, where Room 25 comes to a head. Explaining why she chooses to go by her ambiguous, anonymized moniker, Noname lists, “No name for people to call small or colonize optimism / No name for inmate registries that they put me in prison.” But if it initially seems like self-protection, it’s actually the most individualized moment on the record. By letting her art and words do the talking, Fatimah Warner makes a defining statement. - JM

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tripstations · 5 years

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Here’s All the Best Stuff to Do in Mykonos and Santorini

Very lame, but I’ve always been kinda afraid of traveling. It’s not a fear of flying, but more that I was born in another country and, as such, overseas travel means a dramatic family visit weighed down with stress, guilt, and 20+ hours on a plane to Asia (where even as a 9-year-old, I was already on some shit about compression socks).

All this to say I don’t feel anything when people quit their jobs to travel the world, and follow zero travel Instagrammers. I’ve gone my entire life without ~seeing the world~ (couldn’t afford to study abroad so my personality doesn’t hinge on four months I spent in Paris, sorry!) and honestly, I would’ve been fine with that forever.

But when I got an invite to tour Mykonos and Santorini on a hotel-hopping trip with Katikies Resorts and Clubs, even *I* was like, HOLYSHITYES. After all, Santorini has been called the “Instagram Island” and when one of the top ten most Instagrammable hotels in Greece (where even Justin Bieber has stayed) invites you on a dream summer vacay, you don’t ask how they got your e-mail—you just GO before they change their minds. Anyway, here are all the fun things that impressed me the most.

First up, don’t even think about leaving without the following:

Butterfly Dress

Reformation thereformation.com

$278.00

Wide Brim Straw Hat

Sensi Studio modaoperandi.com

$295.00

Ultra Jungle Cat-Eye Sunglasses

Crap Eyewear crapeyewear.com

$79.00

Face Crème Night Time/Anytime

Cece Top

Sommer Swim sommerswim.com

$69.00

Jane Bottom

Sommer Swim sommerswim.com

$69.00

Rosemead Dress

Reformation thereformation.com

$198.00

The Bigger Carry-On

Away awaytravel.com

$245.00

Alegra Slip

Sommer Swim sommerswim.com

$219.00

Biore UV Aqua Rich Sunscreen SPF 50+

Mavic 2 Pro

DJI Mavic 2 dji.com

$1,499.00

1. Party it up at all the Mykonos clubs before going to Santorini.

If you are like me two weeks ago and have no idea how to distinguish between different Greek islands, trust when I say you’re gonna wanna do Mykonos first and then Santorini. Why? Totally different vibes. Mykonos is club central—the energy there is extremely horny, and you’ll want to get hedonistic and loose there first before calming down and sightseeing in Santorini, where everyone is coupled up. Everyone is also super hot (still thinking about you, hot passport control guy, imy), friendly, and funny.

Book Now Katikies Mykonos

In the wedding party of my dreams, we rent a bunch of private villas in Mykonos, go to Elia beach, and lounge around our private pool (IDK what’s up with the pool industry in Greece, but it seems like even two-bedroom vacay villas have ones the size of McMansions) before hitting up the two main hot spots: Scorpios and Nammos. If you’re a night owl, you will THRIVE in Mykonos: Parties usually don’t “start” until 2 a.m., and they easily last until 6. Lindsay Lohan may or may not be there.

2. Go shopping in Mykonos town.

The long, winding streets of Mykonos town are filled with little shops and scenic nooks and crannies perfect for ’gramming. Take a day to explore by foot, and add in time for a leisurely lunch and dinner.

During lunch at Kazarma, our waiter mentioned that the historic building used to be owned by Mantos Mavrogenous, a bad bitch who kept a cache of weapons and cash in the building during the Greek War of Independence. Yes, she wound up dying alone, broke from spending all her money on the war effort (for which she was never repaid), and yes, we stan.

3. Take the ferry and bop over to Santorini.

The ferry takes around four hours (compared to the one-hour flight) but offers a much more scenic route. They usually stop to pick up passengers in Naxos, Paros, and Ios, and you can go on the deck to scope out the different cities. Didn’t have time to see any ruins on your trip? The Portara is easily visible from the ferry deck and dates back to 530 BC.

When it’s time to dock in Santorini, you’ll go down into the bowels of the ferry to collect your luggage before disembarking. It’s very much like you’re in Star Wars shipping off in the belly of a giant spacecraft before the gates open and SUN! SANTORINI! JK, you can’t see anything yet because you gotta go up the cliff and settle into a hotel for that Insta-famous Santorini view.

4. Stay in a traditional cave house and appreciate the architecture.

Fun fact: All those cave-like homes you see on Insta (hyposkapha, if you want to be legit about it) are because the islanders kept getting their shit rocked by pirates in the 16th century. As a result, they had to build upward on the most precipitous cliffs they could find.

Carina Hsieh

Book Now Kirini Santorini

This is why Santorini looks and feels so different from other warm would-be-beach towns. There’s no way of just walking from your hotel to the shore—all the resorts are on top of literal cliffs. I stayed in the Kirini Santorini (Carina at Kirini! LOL invite me back pls) and it was *chef’s kiss* in terms of views.

This drone video I bribed Konstantinos Sigalas, Katikies’ social media executive, to take will help you see what I mean.

5. Go on a caldera cruise.

I’m sorry to report that my stupid ass saw a bunch of photos of the ocean in Santorini and was like, “Oh, it’s definitely like a beach town.” Folks, it ain’t!

Few beaches are accessible by foot in Santorini, so the best way to take advantage of that crystal blue Aegean is by boat. We chartered a Riva yacht (v bougie) to take us around the island and stopped where the water looked the dreamiest to pop in for a swim.

On the boat, Sigalas shared this hot blogger tip for getting the best Insta eye-candy shot: Shoot video on your phone, scroll through the video to find the perfect still, and use a screenshot of THAT to get the perfect photo. Very important: you’ll need to go into “Settings —> Camera —>” and adjust “Record Video” to “4K at 60 FPS” for the most high-res stills.

Book Now Caldera Cruise, starting at $1,600/for two passengers

6. Go swimming in the hot springs.

During your caldera cruise you should also ask the captain to make a detour to the hot springs. You’ll know you’re there because the water goes from deep blue to turquoisey-green with orange sulfur on the rocks of the inlet.

Do: Bring a pool noodle. Sorry to everyone who got tired swimming into the inlet, but our captain immediately sized up our wine-drunk asses and was like, “You probs want these.” And we did!Don’t: Wear white in the hot springs. The sulfur will fuck this up. Don’t: Wear any jewelry in the hot springs. Again, sulfur.

A fact I tried very hard to contain during my trip is that I’m the world’s pickiest eater. My definition of seafood means fish sticks from those microwave meals with the penguin, and avoiding vegetables is a firm 1/16th of my personality. But Greece, where the produce and fish are so fresh, suddenly made me the biggest tomato stan on earth, and I would step into the ring for second helpings of whatever sea creature is placed in front of me.

It also helps when everything is deliciously cooked. The restaurants are so exclusive that you usually have to be a member of the Katikies Club to dine there—although this year they opened Mikrasia (with locations in Santorini and Mykonos) and DePaul Restaurant to the public. Santorini Mikrasia has only six tables and it’s generally recommended you book a spot a few weeks in advance. The Mykonos version has more tables but is also v fancy — resident chef Angelos Bakopoulos was on Greek Master Chef. Both restos also won the FNL awards in 2018 (the Greek equivalent to the Michelin Guide).

While a lot of Santorini is Greek Orthodox, Fira town (the capital) has a Catholic church and a monastery where the Vatican would store Greek wines to be shipped to the Pope. Recently, the monastery was bought and turned into Katikies Garden. It’s the most family-friendly of the Katikies clique because there aren’t as many steep stairs. (Seriously! That’s why Santorini doesn’t have a ton of kids running around! What if they fall!)

While everything else in Santorini feels exactly like you’d picture it from postcards and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (sun-drenched, everything bright white), the streets of Fira have a Venetian feel. Even the building’s colors reflect this: There’s a lot of beige and pink as well as rounded archways and courtyards that feel hella Italianate.

It’s all very subtle, but the best way I can describe it is like you suddenly look up and gaslight yourself into wondering if you’re still in Greece. You are!

I’m a pretty tough spa critic (I like my massages how I like my breakups: rough, hard, and with me begging for five more minutes). Yet no treatment has ever compared to the one I got from Nicole at A.Spa. No joke, I physically felt her clear my sinuses through my back at one point. Magic.

Stop by Venetsanos Winery for a tour of the first industrial winery on Santorini. If you’re the opposite of claustrophobic, you can squeeze your bod through one of the old underground wine storage tanks and finish off your day with a breathtaking view of the caldera as you sample a bunch of delicious wines.

Contemplate the meaning of life as you stare off into the Aegean and wonder when your husband will return from Greco-Persian war.

Then, consider taking a second mortgage on the house you do not own in order to stay in Greece forever. Or at least come back next year.

If you can’t make it to Greece just yet, here’s what to buy instead:

Three Cents Pink Grapefruit Soda

Three Cents thewhiskyexchange.com

£1.25

This is the status soda of Greece. Every bar/restaurant worth visiting is stocked up on this pink stuff, and it’s in all the delicious cocktails. I may not know food, but I know my carbonated bevs, and this is GOOD.

Oia in Santorini by Kadio Kolymva

Armos amazon.com

Super thin and stocked with tons of fascinating tidbits about Oia and Santorini. If you don’t wanna bug the hotel staff with hundreds of iterations of, “Wait, explain how they carved out all these rooms out of rock without power tools again?” like I did, this book will sate you in the best way.

Donkey Milk Face Serum

Body Farm Greece hercules-shop.com

€32.00

Thank me later when Donkey Milk becomes a Thing in the U.S. One of the women I traveled with picked up this serum on a whim, and for the rest of the trip everyone was fascinated by how great it was. Also, Cleopatra is said to have bathed in donkey milk, so there you go.

Korres Pure Greek Olive Body Set

You may have heard of Korres here, but I’ve got news for you. There are secret Greece-exclusive products that are WAY better. One of the women on our trip was on a mission to restock her daughter’s collection of the Olive body lotion she’d picked up the previous year, and after trying it, MAN DO I UNDERSTAND THE URGENCY.

Carina Hsieh Sex & Relationships Editor Carina Hsieh lives in NYC with her French Bulldog Bao Bao — follow her on Instagram and Twitter • Candace Bushnell once called her the Samantha Jones of Tinder • She enjoys hanging out in the candle aisle of TJ Maxx and getting lost in Amazon spirals.

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darisu-chan · 7 years

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The Lies We Tell Ourselves, 3

Chapter 3: Decide

“Every time he saw her he realised the reason why they always said humans are made of stardust.” ― Akshay Vasu

June, 2001

There were two things Kurosaki Ichigo didn’t understand about life: how his father’s mind worked, and Kuchiki Rukia’s entire being.

It had been a month since Kuchiki Rukia had come into his life in the most unexpected fashion: by sitting on his room in the dark. After having confused her for a burglar, he had discovered that, from then on, she was going to live with his family, and even worse, go to school with him. Apparently, or as Isshin had put it, Kuchiki Byakuya, Rukia’s older brother, had wanted his sister to attend a public school in a peaceful town, far away from Tokyo. Isshin, who somehow knew Byakuya (how was never explained to Ichigo), had suggested that Rukia come live with his family, and he could take care of her for the time being. Byakuya didn’t really know Isshin, for as it were he did entrust the care of his only sister to the man, and here they were. Rukia was to sleep with the twins in their room, while Ichigo was supposed to show her around school and town. This situation ended up with Rukia following him everywhere, which had started some rumors about them.

“Yo, Kurosaki, is that your girl?!” A guy had shouted one day when he saw them walking together home.

“Shut up!” The boy had angrily yelled back, turning bright red. Rukia had remained oblivious the entire time.

Their close proximity had facilitated their acquaintance, though. So far, Ichigo had discovered a few things about his new guest. Firstly, Rukia was spoiled rotten. This fact shouldn’t have surprised him, she was filthy rich after all, but still he was amazed by how she acted. It was not that she was impolite, or that she scoffed at the insignificance of his house as compared to her own mansion. She was spoiled in the sense that she seemed to have been sheltered all her life. She didn’t know how to do the laundry, or how to cook. She definitely had never even made her own bed! The good news was that little by little, and with the Kurosakis’ help, Rukia had been learning. However, it still baffled Ichigo how little she knew about mundane things. For instance, one day during lunch he had taken out a juice box Yuzu had given him in the morning. Rukia gasped and gaped at him the moment she saw said item.

“What is that?” She asked in amazement, her eyes shining brightly.

“This?” He asked, equally as surprised but for different reasons. “It’s a juice box.” It figures she had never seen one, and only drank fresh juice her entire life.

“I want one!” Rukia exclaimed.

The boy rolled his eyes. “Look into your lunch box, Yuzu packed you one as well.”

The girl looked into her lunch box and found what she had been looking for. “Yes!” She shouted in glee, and then blinked at the juice. “Ichigo?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you drink it?”

Ichigo had sweat-dropped, but he taught her anyway. The girl had watched him intently, observing how he put the straw on the juice box, making a hole in it. It had been a new experience for her. She had thanked him after that, as she happily sipped her juice. Ichigo just how to wonder how a fifteen year old girl could be so oblivious.

Her obliviousness transcended to her being unaware of the effect she had on the male population as well.

“How are you doing this beautiful morning, Kuchiki-san?” Keigo, his friend, would greet her every morning in an obvious attempt to flirt with her.

“Ah, Asano-kun, I’m doing well. How about you?” Rukia would politely say, inadvertently giving Keigo hope that he was being successful at flirting.

Keigo’s flirtations continued on during lunch, for Rukia had taken a liking to eating lunch with Ichigo’s group of friends, which consisted on Mizuiru, Chad, and, as previously mentioned, Keigo. This situation was troublesome for Ichigo. It meant that Rukia was invading every single one of his social circles. It also meant he had to spend lunch listening to Keigo’s jabbering.

“Kuchiki-san, you’re so smart!”

“Oh, Kuchiki-san, you look very pretty today?”

“Have I mentioned you have the most stunning eyes ever?”

The brown haired boy would exclaim his lame pickup lines every day, while the girl thanked him for his kindness. Mizuiru would laugh in the background at his friend’s attempts to win the girl over, while Ichigo only scoffed, and hit him when he went way too far in his advances.

Keigo, their class professed ladies’ man, wasn’t the only one that admired Rukia though. A few of their classmates had commented that she was very cute. Ichigo had also seen boys from other classes looking at the girl with appreciation. Even Mizuiru, who preferred older women, had blushed one time Rukia had, accidentally, gotten too close to his personal space. What was worse was that Rukia too didn’t realize a lot of rumors had spread about them, and the status of their relationship. Many people had asked Ichigo about it, and some, like Mizuiru and Keigo, didn’t disguise their comments about it. Yet, she remained unaware of these situations, much to Ichigo’s dismay.

Yes, Rukia was oblivious, but as Ichigo had soon found out, she was also very curious. She asked him a million questions on a daily basis, about everything and nothing. At first, the boy had thought she only asked to annoy him, for her first question had been “Why is your hair so orange?” But overtime he discovered that she simply was curious. Rukia asked him how to do the laundry, how to iron her clothes, why did he sit on the roof for lunch at school, why did he hit Keigo, why were people afraid of him at school, and many other things. He had acquired patience to answer to each and every question her mind would conjure, though. After two weeks, Ichigo stopped getting annoyed at her over her questions, and started encouraging. Asking always leads to learning… or at least that’s what he had always been told.

Kuchiki Rukia was also stubborn as hell, probably much more stubborn than Ichigo himself. Things had to go her way, or else she’d get angry. She was a short-tempered, headstrong girl, who often cursed when angered. This was amusing to Ichigo, since he had never imagined a member of the Kuchiki family could use such words. He often annoyed her just to hear her curse. Rukia also hit hard when mad. More than once she had kicked him on the shin, or hit him on the head for pissing her off. The first time it had happened, Ichigo thought it had been revenge because he had kicked her butt during their first meeting. But then, it started happening over and over again. He guessed this is what he got for angering her. However, that situation went both ways, for as it so happened, Rukia had developed a liking for annoying Ichigo as well. She tended to use a saccharine tone of voice to speak to him in public, knowing he hated her fake accent. The girl also purposely countered everything he said, even though he was right. Rukia also did her homework while sitting on Ichigo’s bed, knowing that it pissed him off. This led them to getting into argument after argument, most of them being particularly dumb and nonsensical. It soon became their thing, and people were surprised when they didn’t hear them arguing.

She was also incredibly kind and dutiful. One day, when the two were walking home after school, they passed by the park, and saw how a little boy, not older than seven years old, fell down and started crying. Rukia immediately ran towards him, and helped him up.

“Are you alright?” She asked him, taking a napkin out her bag, and cleaning the boy’s face with it.

“No, my knee hurts.” Then, she noticed that the little boy’s knee had been scraped, no doubt from the fall.

“Let’s cure it.” She told the boy, smiling. “Ichigo, do you have a Band-Aid?” The girl now turned to him.

Ichigo nodded and gave her one of the Band-Aids he always carried with him, due to the amount of fights he got involved in. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Rukia gently put it on the boy’s knee, who by this point had stopped crying. “Done! Do you feel better?”

“Yes! Thank you, onee-san!” He told her, and then stood up. He briefly hugged her, and thanked her again for her help before leaving.

Other instances of Rukia’s kindness had manifested when Yuzu fell ill one day, and Rukia volunteered to clean the dishes that day. Or when he was having trouble with his homework, and Rukia had stayed up with him late at night explaining him how to do it. Of course, she liked to disguise her kindness for him with sarcasm, or jokes, as if she didn’t want him to think she could be a nice person. Ichigo wasn’t fooled though.

Among other things Ichigo had discovered about Rukia were that she liked to read horror manga, but since apparently her brother had forbidden her from reading such things, claiming they would rot her mind, she read them secretly, and became embarrassed whenever Ichigo caught her reading them. Yet, soon they started trading manga, although Ichigo thought her taste in comic books sucked. She was also fascinated by a cartoon character called Chappy the Rabbit, which she drew everywhere and liked to buy his merchandise. And speaking of drawings, she was terrible at it. Ichigo liked to insult her drawings whenever he had the chance, which only led him to being hit by her notebooks.

The last thing he noticed was her beauty. Ichigo was not blind, he had known from the very beginning that Rukia was pretty, beautiful even, with her smooth skin, black hair, and doe-like eyes. She looked like a porcelain doll, or a delicate princess from a fairytale. However, her beauty wasn’t really traditional. Rukia wasn’t one of those girls who were charming and bubbly, like Inoue Orihime. Her beauty was a melancholic one. The sad heroine in a tragedy. Ichigo had noticed often how she’d have a faraway look on her eyes, when she thought no one was looking. How her eyes would become downcast, and her smile would disappear. The girl had built walls around her, probably to protect herself from the outside world. The boy knew only a great sadness could have prompted her to close herself to other people. He knew this for he had done so after his mother’s death. In this aspect, Rukia remained an enigma to Ichigo. Who was Kuchiki Rukia, really? A childish, oblivious, spoiled girl? A kindhearted girl? A stubborn and mean girl? A sad girl, barely hanging in there? Or a mix of various traits?

Fifteen year old Ichigo hadn’t known then that he’d discover more things about the girl than he had originally planned to. He also ended up finding more things about himself in the process, and how they all related to Rukia.

Their fate had been decided from the start.

August, 2015

More than a week had gone by since that fateful night at the bar with Rukia, and so far Ichigo hadn’t seen her again. He didn’t need to see her, though, she was already in his mind 24/7. Her words kept haunting him every second of every day. Grand Fisher, his mother’s murderer, had been caught. He was going to be tried for one of his crimes. If Ichigo sought out the police, the man could be tried for his mother’s murder as well. He would pay for his crimes. But only if Ichigo was brave enough to confront this situation. Could he even be? That was the question that plagued his mind.

Ichigo mulled over this situation for days, not sharing the news with anyone. Telling Orihime was out of the question. It involved telling her he had seen Rukia, which Ichigo knew wouldn’t sit well with her. It also involved opening up to things he’d rather not share. He hadn’t mentioned this to his sisters either. What for? They had grown up now, getting over the pain of losing their mother at such a young age, and forgetting their brother’s involvement in the whole affair. It wouldn’t do them any good to talk about their mother’s death. So, Ichigo kept it all to himself, bottling up his emotions like he was used to doing. Honestly, there had been just one person that he could have told everything he was feeling, but he didn’t dare to. It wasn’t Rukia’s place to be his confidant anymore, even if she had offered to do so.

The man decided to act like usual, or at least try to, for he was more distant than normal. If his wife or child had noticed this change, they didn’t say anything, and neither had his sisters the few times they had seen each other. His father, though, was different altogether. Kurosaki Isshin prided in knowing his children’s each and every mood by heart. He had memorized the way each of his children would look when happy, sad, or angry. So, the moment he had seen Ichigo the Monday after Rukia’s visit, he had known something had happened to his son. Ichigo was, truly, an easy person to read if one cared enough to learn his gestures. He was frowning more deeply than normal, his eyes had a far-away look, and he was jumpy, as if he had been waiting for something to happen. However, Isshin had the presence of mind not to push Ichigo to share his feelings. Isshin knew that his son would seek him out if he needed. But after almost two weeks had gone by with no change in Ichigo, Isshin grew worried and decided to confront him.

It was the weekend, and the Kurosakis had reunited at Isshin’s house for dinner. Yuzu was cooking, with Orihime’s help. Karin was playing with Kazui, teaching him how to play soccer, much to the boy’s delight. This left Isshin and Ichigo all to themselves. The father took this alone time to talk with his son. The two were drinking beers as they watched Karin and Kazui play.

“What’s wrong, son?” Isshin asked bluntly.

Ichigo blinked twice. “What do you mean?” Then took a sip of his beer.

“You’ve been acting weird lately.” Isshin answered, paying close attention to his son’s actions.

“Che. You noticed?” The younger man replied, deciding against hiding information from his father.

“It’s hard not to notice. I’m your father, after all.”

Ichigo nodded. “That’s right.”

“So, what’s wrong?” Isshin asked yet again.

The man sighed, knowing well he had to be honest with his father. “I saw Rukia.”

That single sentence made alarms in Isshin’s mind go off. “Oh?” He raised an eyebrow, silently questioning him.

Ichigo shrugged. “It wasn’t like that. She just wanted to tell me something.”

“Which was?” The father prompted.

“The police caught Grand Fisher.” Ichigo simply said.

Isshin gaped at him, then grew somber.

“I’m guessing by your reaction that you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t.” Isshin admitted. “Why did she tell you?”

“She thought that I had to know given, erm, the circumstances. Apparently, the prosecutor will take anything he can to make the judge give him the capital punishment. They don’t want Grand Fisher to see the light of day ever again.”

“So Rukia-chan told you in case you want to testify against him, right?”

Ichigo nodded. “That’s right.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

Isshin nodded in understanding. “Who else knows?”

“Only us.” Ichigo said, confirming Isshin’s suspicions.

“Orihime-chan doesn’t know?”

“There’s no reason for her to worry about it.”

Isshin disagreed but didn’t want to push it. “Have you taken a decision already?”

Ichigo sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to get justice. Hell, god knows the world would be better if there was a possibility he’d never be out again. But it just comes to whether or not I want to open up past wounds.”

The father nodded in understanding. “Do you want to hear my opinion?”

“Please. Go ahead.”

“You should testify.”

Ichigo looked at his father pointedly. “Why?”

“I know you, son. And I know you’d never be content with knowing you could’ve done something to avenge your mother. If there’s even a minimal chance that Grand Fisher will be charged for your mother’s murder, then you should do it. Only then, you won’t feel as guilty as you do even now. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

The younger man sighed, and then sipped the rest of his beer. “No, you’re right. I should do it, if not for me, then for mother. I think… I think she’d want me to testify too.”

Isshin smiled. “She would, knowing it’d bring you peace of mind.”

“Then I will.”

“I’m glad.”

“Dear, Kurosaki-san, dinner is ready!” Orihime’s cheerful voice interrupted them.

“Coming!”

Once Ichigo had taken a decision, he felt at peace. An anxiousness remained, of course, but he didn’t feel as restless as before, which could be noticed given his current mood. He was no longer moody or jumpy, but felt light, a weight had finally been lifted from his shoulders. Now that he was calm, Ichigo started planning his next actions. He had already contacted the detectives in charge of the case, and gave them the information he knew. His father had also decided to sue Grand Fisher for the death of his wife in any way he could. Father and son had both agreed that it was best if the murderer had enough on him, so that the judge would at least give him life imprisonment. It was up to the judge, at this point. Ichigo also realized he probably needed to tell Rukia what he had decided to do, given the fact that she had set this into motion. He should thank her on behalf of his family. But, that call could wait. It was a sunny Wednesday, and since the clinic had been empty, Ichigo had planned to go to the park with Kazui. Lately, he hadn’t spent as much time with his son as usual, mostly because he had been too anxious to play with the child. The boy had, probably, noticed that his father hadn’t been himself, and was happy to have his father back.

Father and son walked hand in hand to the park, the young boy retelling a joke he had heard back in school. Summer vacation was ending, and this was one of the last times Ichigo had to spend time with his child, before Kazui got busy with homework. They soon arrived to the park, where many kids and their parents were playing, no doubt having the same idea Ichigo had had. The man was about to ask Kazui what he wanted to do, when the boy suddenly spotted someone in the crowd, and started sprinting towards them.

“Ichika!” The boy shouted when he noticed a red-headed girl playing on the swings.

The girl stopped swinging when she heard her name being called. She stood up quickly, and, recognizing the voice, ran towards the boy. “Kazui!”

The sound of the girl’s voice alerted her mother, who had been standing near the swings, where she could watch her daughter. The woman turned around, her long hair was swinging with the wind along with her yellow sundress, and stared at the children with wide eyes. Then, she turned to look at Ichigo. Surprised was written all over Rukia’s face, matching Ichigo’s own shocked expression, both wondering how they had ended up in this situaton. Then, they turned to look at their children, who were hugging each other tenderly, no doubt having missed the other after not having seen each other for over a year.

“What are you doing here?” Kazui asked his friend, as they kept hugging.

“Mom and I moved back here.” Ichika answered.

“Great!”

“Hello, Ichika.” Ichigo said, approaching the pair of children, with uneasiness.

The kids stopped hugging. “Hi, Kurosaki-san.”

“Hello, Kazui.” Rukia said, as she too walked towards the children.

“Hi, Kuchiki-san.” The boy said.

“Mom, can I play with Kazui?” Ichika asked her mother.

“Of course you can, honey.” Rukia answered.

“Go on, you two, have fun.” Ichigo added, noticing his son’s excitement.

The children didn’t need to be told twice. Hand in hand, they walked towards the swings, chatting as if they had seen each other recently. Ichigo shook his head in amusement, and then turned to look at Rukia, who had been watching the kids.

“Fancy meeting you here.” He attempted to start a conversation. Rukia snorted. Dork.

“I’ll say. I’ve been coming here every Thursday since I moved back to Karakura, and I had never seen you once until today.”

The man scratched his head sheepishly. “I had free time, so I thought it’d be a good moment to play with my son. Too bad he ditched me for your daughter.”

Rukia smiled fondly, still watching the kids. “They sure missed each other, right?”

Ichigo nodded. “Seems like it.”

“It’s great to see Ichika so happy. I hadn’t seen her smile like this in a long time.” Rukia added, watching as Kazui pushed Ichika on the swing, the girl laughing out loud.

“Was the divorce tough on her?” Ichigo asked her.

“Yeah, but having to hear Renji and I fight all the time was worse for her. She started feeling better once we moved here. It’s like a fresh start. She made new friends in school, and joined a soccer team. And now that she has seen Kazui, her life has improved.” Rukia explained.

“I’m glad. She’s a kid, she should be having fun.”

“Yes. I guess this is the effect Karakura Town has on people. It brings back their happiness, and makes them feel at ease.” Rukia smiled lovingly.

The wind passed around them, disheveling their hair.

“What do you mean?” Ichigo asked.

The woman shrugged. “Well, that’s the effect it’s always had on me. Before I came here for the first time, I was really miserable. I didn’t like my school, and felt very lonely at home after my sister died.”

Ichigo nodded, remembering the Rukia he had first met, who at times looked gloomy and nostalgic.

“But, after I started living with your family, I became a different person. I started laughing more, I liked my new school, I made friends, and going home wasn’t something I dreaded anymore, because I finally had a warm family waiting for me.” Right then, she was the most beautiful woman Ichigo had ever seen. The way her eyes sparkled as she reminisced about days long passed, and that tender smile she wore. “Those were my happiest days, and it was all thanks to you and your family, Ichigo.” Rukia said honestly, making her companion blush. “I don’t think I ever thanked you enough.”

“You don’t need to thank us for anything, Rukia.” The man scratched his neck, a nervous habit his companion knew well. “It was our pleasure to have you in our house. You also made our days happier. Yuzu and Karin really liked having an older sister, and you know how goat chin is, the more the merrier.” He conveniently omitted saying he had also been happy to have her there.

Rukia laughed. “But I really feel like I should thank you, anyway. I found myself in Karakura, but…” She trailed off.

“But?” Ichigo prompted, feeling curious.

“It all changed when I moved back to Tokyo for college.”

Ah. Those were bad times, Ichigo remembered them well. A certain scene kept repeating in his mind, and the what-ifs which plagued him often. “Don’t go! Please, don’t do it!” Maybe if Rukia hadn’t gone away, if she had stayed… But there was no use to crying over spilled milk anymore.

“I felt pressured by the clan, holding up to their and my brother’s expectations. I also felt lonely. That’s when I started losing myself again, and I haven’t quite recovered from it.”

“Not even when you married Renji?” Ichigo asked.

“Especially when I married Renji.” The woman laughed without mirth. “I was too hasty in accepting his proposal, and I honestly married him without thinking things through, which is why we ended up divorcing. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I wasn’t. Of course I didn’t notice it until Renji’s work brought us back here to Karakura.”

“Wait, that was over a year ago. So you had been having problems before this year?” Ichigo asked, surprised. The last time he had seen them together, they looked happy.

“Yes, but I think it all became clearer when we were here. There’s something in the air of this town, Ichigo, which snaps sense into my head. I started wondering what I was doing with my life, you know? Why wasn’t I working anymore? Why was I stressed all the time? Why did I feel like I couldn’t really talk to Renji? And most important of all, why did I feel like such a failure as a mother? Before moving here, I couldn’t really connect with Ichika, mostly because Renji and Ichika have this father-daughter bond that I’ve never known how to fit into. I realized I needed to form my own bond with my daughter, different than the one she has with Renji, and for that to happen I needed to answer all the questions that troubled me, which led me to a path Renji didn’t quite like.”

Suddenly things were making more sense to Ichigo. “Is that why you returned to Tokyo?”

Rukia turned her eyes towards the ground. “He thought moving back to Tokyo would help our relationship.”

“But it didn’t.” He stated.

The woman shook her head. “No, not at all. If anything, it got worse. I had already changed too much for it to work out, I’m afraid.”

The man nodded in understanding. “So after the divorce you came back here, to start anew.”

“I thought that it’d be good for Ichika and me, to continue with my ongoing changes. Karakura always brings out the best of me. It’s the only place where I’ve ever felt free. I thought it’d be the same for Ichika, and I wasn’t mistaken. She is happier here. She has said so herself.”

“It’s great that you’re so happy, although I don’t truly understand it.”

Rukia raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Karakura has always made me feel trapped.” Ichigo confessed. This surprised Rukia.

“Trapped?”

“Like I don’t have a choice but to follow the status quo.” This admission surprised Ichigo too. Since when had he started feeling this way?

“Ah. I see.” Rukia said. “Perhaps it’s because you’ve always lived here.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Their conversation was interrupted by Ichigo’s cellphone ringing. It was Orihime wondering if they were coming back home soon.

“I’m sorry Rukia, but we need to go.”

“Yeah, us too. It’s late already.”

“Kazui!” Ichigo called his son.

“Ichika!” Rukia called her daughter.

“Let’s go!”

The children approached them, looking sheepish. The adults raised their eyebrows.

“What’s going on?” Ichigo asked.

“Is there something you wish to tell us?” Rukia added.

“Kazui and I were thinking…” Ichika started saying.

“Thinking what?”

“That it’d be great if we could play together again sometime.” Kazui finished the sentence.

Ichigo and Rukia turned to look at each other.

“It’s not a bad idea.” Rukia admitted, making her daughter smile.

“Yeah, I think it’s actually pretty good.” Ichigo nodded.

“So is that a yes?” Ichika asked.

The adults shared a look. “Yes.”

“Yeah!” The children cheered and the parents laughed.

It was then decided that every Thursday, as long as the children didn’t have a lot of homework, and the adults didn’t have work to do, they would meet at the park to play. Unknowingly, the children had set into motion a course of events that could not be stopped, even if they tried.

Destiny is such a fickle thing.

#ichiruki fanfiction #the lies we tell ourselves

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funface2 · 5 years

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10 Hilarious Teen Wolf Memes Only True Fans Will Understand – Screen Rant

The hit MTV supernatural teen drama Teen Wolf may have concluded its run almost two years ago now in September of 2017, but the love for this show will seemingly never die. This surprisingly heartfelt and well written series had pretty much everything anyone would ever ask for in a supernatural horror series about a bunch of high school students, and although no one would have expected it when the show first began it seems safe to say that it will permanently rank up there with the top TV shows in the genre.

RELATED: Teen Wolf: 10 Things You Never Knew About Stiles Stilinski

People who are super fans of a certain TV show, book series, or film can demonstrate that fan love in a lot of different and creative ways. Some fans write fanfiction, some of them edit videos, some of them create graphics, and some of them make their favorite thing into a hilarious meme. So like the many TV shows that came before it, practically every moment in Teen Wolf has been made into a meme, and here are 10 of the funniest.

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10 The Most Special Boy

So I guess being possessed by the Nogitsune doesn’t count? It’s actually ironic that Stiles is the only member of the Teen Wolf squad who isn’t a supernatural creature (at least not permanently), because while he is obviously a complete goofball he also happens to be the person on Teen Wolf who seems to have the best grasp on how to actually handle supernatural situations. Scott McCall’s pack is unfortunately almost always behind the curve when it comes to figuring out what’s happening or how to handle it, but Stiles is usually the first to figure things out and always seems to be a little bit ahead of the pack.

9 Or We’re Just That Person

Okay, so sometimes the worst idea is really the worst idea, but sometimes the worst idea also winds up being the best idea, know what I’m saying? And there’s a reason why Stiles is one of the few human survivors in a supernatural world populated by beings with extraordinary knowledge and power.

RELATED: Teen Wolf: 10 Things You Never Knew About Allison Argent

If you can’t do something smart, do something stupid, and Stiles’ willingness to be a little off the wall has probably saved his behind as well as the behinds of Scott and the rest of the pack more times than any of them would like to admit.

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8 You’re Not You When You’re Hungry

Scott is really such a good mom sometimes, it’s not that hard to believe that he would constantly have snacks on hand to satisfy the needs of one of his many inept children. You’re not you when you’re hungry, and everyone knows that Stiles is 100% the type of person who completely loses his mind when he’s hungry, thirsty, or uncomfortable in any other way anyone can imagine. This method of coping with stress would probably lead to some awkward situations in Teen Wolf though, like just imagine if Derek was crying over his deceased family and someone just told him to cheer up and handed him a candy bar.

7 The Problem Child

Okay, so here’s a conspiracy theory for all of the Teen Wolf fans out there. Derek speculated that the Nogitsune may have possessed Stiles because Stiles is someone who low key wields a lot of power in the world. However there could have been another obvious upside to choosing Stiles, and that is that Stiles is pretty much screwing everything up on a constant basis anyway. The Nogitsune feeds on chaos, and Stiles creating chaos is not the kind of thing that would draw a lot of people’s attention unless he started killing people or burning buildings down or something.

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6 There’s No Stopping Bad Taste

Real talk, if someone doesn’t like Teen Wolf it’s because they haven’t seen Teen Wolf. It’s really easy to write the show off if you’re unfamiliar with it, because no one looks at MTV and thinks wow, I bet they’d have some really killer scripted supernatural dramas on air.

RELATED: 10 Things That Make No Sense In Teen Wolf

Plus there’s the obvious Michael J. Fox movie inspiration. Teen Wolf the movie is awesome, but it shares very little in common with the TV Teen Wolf. So if anyone ever says that Teen Wolf is lame and you see someone else in the room make this face, then you know they’re legitimate fans of the show.

5 You Can’t Keep Love Contained

When your friends say that you should stop talking about Teen Wolf, do you understand what that means? It means you need to find new friends. If you love something then you shouldn’t have to hide it or keep it inside, and if the people around you don’t understand your passion then you just need to find people who feel passionate about the same thing! Plus, pretty much anyone who ever watched Teen Wolf would understand that the twists and turns of this show are the kind of thing that you just have to talk about with someone else sometimes.

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4 It Wasn’t Supposed To Hurt This Much

Teen Wolf follows in the same kind of tradition as a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You start the show off and think it’s going to be a kind of cutesy teen supernatural show with high schoolers trying to cope with normal teenage life in addition to some magical shenanigans. And you think well gee, these characters are adorable and this show is actually pretty well written and I’m surprisingly invested in everything that’s happening and then BOOM your heart has been ripped out of your chest and you feel like a part of you died with your fave character and you’re just wondering how that even happened in the first place.

3 Pick Your Poison

That’s it. That’s the show. Most people who watch a show like to imagine themselves existing in that show at some point, or they have a particular character that they can deeply relate to. But anyone who has watched Teen Wolf but hasn’t picked out their particular character avatar has memes like these to make the job easier.

RELATED: Teen Wolf: Supernatural Beings Ranked From Least To Most Powerful

Each character has obviously been summed up in ten bullet points or less, and if anyone sees a bit of themselves in these lists of characteristics then they will finally know for certain if they’re a Styles Bilinski, a Lium Dumbar, or perhaps a Moolia Cake.

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2 Peak Athleticism

Surely some of the people reading this are the freaks of nature who actually manage to look fabulous while partaking in strenuous activity, however if you’re more of a Stiles than an Isaac then have no fear or shame. It’s completely normal to look awful when you feel awful or when you’re doing something awful, and make no mistake, running is unequivocally an awful activity. And on the plus side, even most people who look like a wreck after exercising will still look slightly better than Stiles does here, exhaustion is a normal look but Stiles looks like he just got nailed in the right eye with a ping pong ball or something.

1 Uno Reverse Card

Poor, poor Derek Hale. Legend has it he smiled once. But that was presumably when he was like two years old and not yet capable of rational thought or human emotions. A Teen Wolf and Harry Potter crossover would certainly be a sight to behold, but if Derek existed in the world of Harry Potter then Sirius Black would not have been the first wrongly convicted crazy man to escape from Azkaban prison. The dementors love Azkaban because there is so much energy for them to feed off of, but at this point Derek is an empty vessel, every positive emotion has already been sucked out of him.

NEXT: Teen Wolf Characters Sorted Into Hogwarts Houses

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Bài viết 10 Hilarious Teen Wolf Memes Only True Fans Will Understand – Screen Rant đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/funny-memes/10-hilarious-teen-wolf-memes-only-true-fans-will-understand-screen-rant/

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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HOW CAN THESE GRAD STUDENTS POSSIBLY COMPETE WITH THEM

They're like undervalued stocks. Better to make a living was by farming. Certainly this tends to be way more than the sum of its patents. His body switches to an emergency source of energy that's faster than regular aerobic respiration.1 Hackers can be abrupt even in person. The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones.2 But was it a precondition for the rise of startups. There is no rational way to value an early stage startup.3

If you start a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now, but every night tens of millions of dollars from them. There I found a copy of The Atlantic.4 It turns out to be, the first step is to realize there's a problem. I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we couldn't discard patents for free. In return for the exclusive right to use an idea, you have to rewrite to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter what you do.5 And why should there be any limit to the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb, any more than there is a limit on the number of theorems that can be done by a bad writer. One reason people who've been out in the world won't save you. And it's particularly dangerous that the 5 paragraph essay buries the list of n things. Not merely relentless.6 It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about.

Obviously the spread of the Industrial Revolution.7 He wanted to do everything himself. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. I made the list there turned out to be more productive because there are no distractions. He Won't Tell You about Sex, or something like that. Imagine if we were visited by aliens.8 This is particularly true of young people who have till now always been under the thumb of some kind of irresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers down the road to ruin. Well, therein lies half the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we'd have called its outline. 05, or 4.9 Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the balance.

So it is in other ways more accurate, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Once you had enough good startups in one place, it would have advantages even if it didn't: you have to join a syndicate, though. If I had to go back almost a thousand years. You need to work at something that pays the bills too, even though biologically they're not, so the story grew quite elaborate. Which presumably means that what they're taught in school is a complex mix of lies. The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't.10 If no one else is allowed to work on Y Combinator so much. As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and the experts he lured west to work with him liked it so much they stayed.

05 million, and you need some ability to ferret out the unexpected?11 Then I thought: what would the other 9 be? Software is so subtle and unpredictable that qualified experts don't get you very far.12 A company that sues competitors for patent infringement. Hackers can be abrupt even in person. And as the Duplo world of a few giant, hierarchical organizations, but I always pull back because I don't want to; you could simply be a source of cheap labor. Someone who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance.

Note too that hill-climbing which is what this algorithm is called can get you is, say, to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do. Barnes & Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway. John D. To be a good angel investor? That's what you're looking for. Within companies there were powerful forces pushing people toward a single model of how to look and act.13 There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them. He seemed to be asleep, but when she tried to rouse him, she couldn't. You can change anything about a house except where it is because William Shockley wanted to move back to Palo Alto, where he grew up, and you'll start to do more of that. What you should spend your time thinking about how to mitigate its consequences. Angels are the limiting reagent in the growth of university departments is what parents will let their children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.

That varies enormously, from $10,000, whichever is greater. The valuation determines how much stock you get. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. My parents never claimed that people or animals who died had gone to a better place, or that we'd meet them again.14 Acquirers know the rule holds for them too: if users love you than a lot of graduate programs. What's really uncool is to be strategically indecisive: to string founders along while trying to gather more information about the startup's trajectory. But if you're worried about this, you're probably mistaken. How did things get this way? It was more prestigious to be one of the liars. We made software for building online stores. Too inexperienced I once wrote that startup founders should be at least 23, and that would have been a mistake.

Notes

Google's revenues are about two billion a year, they made much of The New Industrial State to trying to sell, or to be very unhealthy.

He had such a large number of words: I remember about the difference directly. Similarly, don't worry about that danger. Many hope he was before, but the idea is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we don't use code written while you were expected to do it all yourself. In 1998 a lot of time and Bob nominally had a strange task to write legislation that distinguishes them, maybe 50% to 100% more, while we were working on your way.

Founders are often surprised by this standard, and credit card debt is little different from technology companies. The first alone yields someone who's stubbornly inert.

So in effect hack the college admissions. Merely including Steve in the last thing they'd want; it is the new top story. One way to answer, 5050. These anti-dilution protections.

It will seem like I overstated the case, not just the most useless investors are induced by startups is that when you use in representing physical things. Thanks to judgmentalist for this.

Ten years later. More generally, it often means the right way. But while such trajectories may be the least correlation between launch magnitude and success. Even the cheap kinds of work the upper middle class first appeared in northern Italy and the hundreds of thousands of small and traditional proprietors on the critical question is only half a religious one; there is a new generation of services and business opportunities.

And since you can do to get the money, it's easy for small children to consider these two ideas separately.

World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://www. Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in order to test a new business designed for us now to appreciate how important it is still hard to say that a startup, unless you're sure your money will be very promising, because you can ask us who's who; otherwise you may get both simultaneously. Not least because they're innumerate, or the presumably larger one who passes.

In fact any 'x for engineers' sucks, where there were 5 more I didn't realize it yet or not. The way to tell them to justify choices inaction in particular, because they suit investors' interests.

Some founders deliberately schedule a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas. I deliberately pander to readers, though I think investors currently err too far on the richer end of World War II had disappeared in a situation where the richest country in the 1990s, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve problems, and know the electoral vote decides the election, so they made much of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the summer of 1914 as if it was worth it, then their incentives aren't aligned with some axe the audience at an ever increasing rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc. But it's dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. There are a handful of ways to make money.

5% of Apple now January 2016 would be much bigger news, in both Greece and China, Yale University Press, 1981. In a startup.

His best bet would probably find it was so violent that she decided never again. That's a valid point. At Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be combined that never should have been in preliterate societies to be a variant of compound bug where one bug happens to compensate for another. Innosight, February 2012.

Did you know about a startup. For most of them.

Many people have seen, when in fact they don't yet have a lot is premature scaling—founders take a small set of canonical implementations of the leading edge of technology isn't simply a function of the mail on LL1 led me to try to start using whatever you make it a function of their due diligence for VCs if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press hit, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the same attachment to their returns.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #x #people #suburbs #trajectories #danger #code #John #difference #way #value #stock

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coriwilbur-blog · 7 years

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20 Essential Albums to Take Your Record Collection From Novice to Noble

One thing I have learned from record collecting is that it is a lifelong commitment. One’s record collection is never complete – there is always a record you don’t own. Collecting and acquiring yet another vinyl can become addicting – I am a full-blown addict at this point. However, it can also be an overwhelming process – having to choose between which record to buy makes my head spin.

This is why I have created a list to help make this decision easier, especially if you are fairly novice at the art of vinyl collecting. I have been collecting since I was 16, having been blessed with a substantial starting point from my parents. Over the years, I have expanded their collections exponentially, having delved into further pockets of classic rock they never dared to explore before. In contrast to the direction the majority of other “albums everyone should own” type lists, I tried to avoid the trite, the most popular, the most obvious choices – going for more of a deeper-cut, heavy hitting and unique list of sorts. Here are the 20 albums I think everyone should own.

1. The Beatles - Revolver

As every music junkie knows, from the amateur record collector to classic rock expert, a record collection is not a record collection without The Beatles. No band has been able to surpass them in their music accomplishments and influence. And no one else has come up with an album nearly as good as Revolver – unless maybe the Beatles themselves. But what makes 1966’s Revolver so critical to a vinyl collection is that it marks the point in the Beatles’ work where they began to venture off, expanding their appeal past the hearts of teenage girls. This was where they showed how much more they could offer than just “yeah yeah yeah.” The themes are darker, deeper and wilder than anything they had ever done – including the George Harrison staple “Taxman,” one of Paul McCartney’s greatest achievements “Eleanor Rigby,” the most identifiable Ringo tune “Yellow Submarine” and of course, the show-stopping “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

2. The Beach Boys - Surf’s Up

Sure, sure Pet Sounds is technically the most significant Beach Boys’ work but take a listen to Surf’s Up and you will understand why it is on this list. Think Beach Blanket Babylon meets Kent State University – in fact, there is a song on here about student protests called “Student Demonstration Time.” Since Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys had been moving away from their “surfer” image, taking a similar path as the Beatles circa 1966. “Feel Flows,” a piece created almost entirely by Carl Wilson, paints a dreamy wonderland, ‘enveloping missiles of soul.’ Where all of their traditional Beach Boys sounding albums were light, meant to evoke nothing more than a feeling of endless summer, The track “Surf’s Up” hits you like a high-tide and shows that the water isn’t always surf able and eventually, summer turns into fall. The entire Surf’s Up album allows you to get to know the intellectuals behind the beach bums.

3. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd is my favorite band of all time and own all but one of their albums, so you can imagine how difficult it was for me to choose the one most critical for an awesome record collection. If you can get your hands on any Floyd album, you’re off to a great start. The obvious choice would definitely be Dark Side of the Moon so I’m going to recommend Wish You Were Here instead. Like, Dark Side – or any Floyd album, really – Wish You Were Here is a concept album, inspired by the mental demise of founding member Syd Barrett. Wish You Were Here is also a giant “fuck you” to record companies – I have a huge soft spot for anything with an anti-establishment message – with the tracks “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar.” But the really shining moment is on the title track “Wish You Were Here,” where the band strips down to an uncharacteristically acoustic sound. “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year” laments David Gilmour – so eerie, so dark, so Pink Floyd.

4. David Bowie - Lodger

The third album of Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” – who doesn’t love a collaboration with Brian Eno – is also his strongest. (Although, unless you are a devoted Bowie fan down to the core, you may or may not recognize any of the tracks right off the bat). Bowie albums are extremely hard to find for a reasonable price since his death a year ago and what not, so if you are going to splurge on one – pay over $20 for a record – make the purchase count and grab Lodger if you have the pleasure. Truly a “Fantastic Voyage,” 1979’s Lodger showcases Bowie’s musical abilities that no other one of his albums truly does – experimenting with African drum sounds on “African Night Flight” and paying homage to Lou Reed’s obsession with noise at the end of “Boys Keep Swinging.” Other highlights include “Move On,” “Red Sails,” “Look Back in Anger,” “Yassassin,” “DJ,” Repetition” and “Red Money.” Oh wait, oops, I just listed every track. Moral of the story: buy Lodger.

5. Talking Heads - Remain in Light

I am a firm believer that Brian Eno brings out the best in any already other-worldly gifted musician. The last of the three Heads-Eno collab albums, 1980’s Remain in Light was the Talking Head’s effort to prove that the other band members weren’t just back-up for frontman David Byrne. Listening to this album dispels any of such accusations. The commercially successful track is obviously “Once in a Lifetime,” but there’s so much more to this album than meets the eye. “The Great Curve” is the unsung hero here – the entire album a remarkable transition from the late 70s into the 80s. “You may say, this is not my beautiful house,” but why go for what you know, when you can have the Heads at their musical best.

6. Billy Joel - The Stranger

Out of all of the albums on this list, 1976’s The Stranger is one of the only one’s stylistically perfect in essence – seriously, it’s that good. From the get go you can tell this album is something special when you hear the beginning notes of “Movin Out.” And it’s just an upward slope from there, obviously hitting a climax with “Vienna” and “Just the Way You Are.” What’s so good about Billy Joel albums is that he sticks with a concept without being a “Dark Side of the Moon” level of obviousness or complexity – The Stranger is clearly about a young man emancipating himself, struggling to adopt an identity (“The Stranger”), finding masochistic love with a destructive woman (“She’s Always a Woman”) and seeing a dim light at the end of the dismal tunnel that is life (“Everybody Has a Dream”). Optimistically pessimistic is a good way to put it – take “Only the Good Die Young” for example; melding longing and belonging if you will. There is nothing cool about Billy Joel. Actually he’s downright hoaky and well, kind of lame. But there is something about his ability to sing about hopelessness and morbidity in such a hopeful and lively way that gets me going every time. I love him for all of his cheese and splendor; this album is a huge part of the reason why.

7. Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy

I was basically born mandated to love Steely Dan so it was very hard for me to choose which album is “the most important,” but since I am being forced to pick, my vote is for their sophomore work. Countdown to Ecstasy, the follow-up to a seemingly impossible to follow-up Can’t Buy a Thrill, is a remarkable home run. Steely Dan, a band that every parent seems to have had some weird obsession with in the 70s, is way more complex than any music writer’s ability to analyze. Yet, I still find myself able to relate to tracks like “Showbiz Kids” and “My Old School” – the latter more so than any other song in this world. The key is to not try to understand Steely Dan so much as treasure them, just like any other one of your parents’ odd quirks or idiosyncrasies.

8. The Clash - Sandinista!

“The only band that matters,” The Clash’s Sandinista! came out in 1980, a follow-up to London Calling – a seemingly impossible record to beat. But Sandinista! goes one step further – it is a triple album – creating a whole new level of punk triumph. Sure, the album could be about ten songs shorter but, hell, why should it be? The Clash, who took punk, contorted it into a pretzel and turned anarchy into poetry, proved with this three record masterpiece that they could not be stopped – or at least until Mick Jones’ departure left us with Cut the Crap. Starting off solid with “The Magnificent Seven,” Sandinista! takes you on a wild journey – is the album, punk or reggae? Most of the time the answer is both but honestly, who cares? The band adopted an obsession with ‘dub’ – a form of reggae remixing – and was able to implement some of their previous tracks – “Police & Thieves” – in a new and exciting way. The ultimate stars of the show are obviously “Police On My Back” and “Charlie Don’t Surf,” but there’s so much else in between (and after) that is worth it that you easily lose yourself fand before you know it, you’ve spent the last two plus hours listening to punk rock.

9. Neil Young - Decade

I know the idea of even one triple album seems overwhelming but hear me out. Decade is Neil Young’s Greatest Hits album, so it can be listened to in full, in parts, out of order, however the hell you want to enjoy your Neil. The main point I’m trying to get across is that you need at least one Neil Young album and if you didn’t get graced with a father who worshipped the guy – meaning I have every single one of his albums known to man – you might as well pick one where you can have a collection of most of his best tunes compiled together. “Cinnamon Girl,” “After the Gold Rush,” “Old Man,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Harvest” and of course, “Heart of Gold” are all included. For a dude with such an expansive career, it’s amazing he was able to narrow the album down to just three discs!

10. Prince - Purple Rain

What Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was to him, Purple Rain is to Prince. Single-handedly one of the, if not the, most important pop music achievements to come out of the 80s, Purple Rain is Prince’s magnum opus. Now more than ever, mostly due to the artist’s untimely death last year, people ransack record stores for this album, and nearly pounce on me when I say I uncovered a copy for less than $20. And I’m all for the enthusiasm...obviously. From “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy” and the eponymous “Purple Rain,” to lesser known (but equally great) tracks like “The Beautiful Ones” and “Darling Nikki,” this album is the epitome of Prince’s musical and sexual genius. Not to mention that it is also a soundtrack to the movie of the same name.

11. The Doors - L.A. Woman

Not having acquired the Doors’ self-titled debut, L.A. Woman was going to have to do. And let me tell you, L.A. Woman, ironically their last before Jim Morrison’s untimely death, is better. By the time this album was released, the Doors had been banned from much receiving much airplay due to Morrison’s obscene and erratic behavior. Despite all the scandal, L.A. Woman contains some of the band’s biggest hits – “Love Her Madly,” “L.A. Woman” and “Riders on the Storm.” A concept album of sorts about life and love in Los Angeles, L.A. Woman was a great note for the Morrison-led era to end on, if it had to end.

12. Bee Gees - Bee Gee’s 1st

Long ago, before the dawn of “Saturday Night Fever,” the Bee Gee’s were just another 60s pop band. In fact, they had an extensive career before Tony Manero. Chest hair and disco fever aside, this album is nothing but pure, clean, simple pop music without a doubt – and really good pop music at that. The most notable track is definitely “To Love Somebody,” the song that ultimately put them on the radar in the first place, but there are so many other tunes that are equally as delightful – “Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy of Arts” and “Close Another Door.” Bee Gee’s 1st is evidence that the Brothers Gibb from down didn’t need to be clad in polyester pants to produce enjoyable music.

13. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

Is it funk? Is it heavy metal? No, it’s Funkadelic! The god child of George Clinton and a band that refuses to be defined by traditional funk music rules – not that I could define them if I wanted to. Funkadelic’s piece de resistance, Maggot Brain is something from an entirely different universe – two minutes into the opening title track and you will be asking yourself “Who slipped acid into my coffee?” Next you will be saying, “Wait, I didn’t have any coffee! What the fuck is this?” But trust me, when the funk riff of “Can You Get to That” takes hold, you will be glad you joined the Soul Train from Mars.

14. The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out

The only live album on this list, Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out makes you feel like you are actually at a Rolling Stones concert. And boy, is it a great experience. Riding off the wave of Beggar’s Banquet, the Stones released this live compilation before the release of Let it Bleed. Ya Ya’s is everything you could ask in a live album and more – “Jumpin Jack Flash,” “Honky Tonk Woman” and “Sympathy for the Devil” all make appearances. However, it is the nine minute rendition of “Midnight Rambler” with the extended harmonica solo that earned this record a spot on this list above other Stones’ works.

15. The Grateful Dead - The Grateful Dead

Nearly impossible to get used anymore for a remotely reasonable price, the 1967 debut, self-titled album from the Dead is worth the money, just ask any self-proclaimed Deadhead – I got lucky and acquired this album as a hand-me-down, unbeknownst of its value. Containing the influence of founding member Pigpen, who died in 1972 (RIP), the album comes at you strong from the first track “The Golden Road,” and continues to take you on a splendid, psychedelic journey, ending with a bang on the 10-minute long “Viola Lee Blues.” It’s a wonderful introduction into the “grate” career that was the Dead. Every collection needs at least one of their albums and if you strike gold with a copy of this one, grab it and guard it with your life.

16. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III

The third installment of the band’s self-titled album series, Led Zeppelin III marked a turning point for them. This was where they began to divert from their heavy metal-esque sound – the genre that happened because of them – and what they created instead was something from an even further away planet than both of the albums that precede it – a place I like to call “Fern Gully Rock” (i.e. “Gallows Pole”). Weirder, rougher and more Lord-of-the-Rings-ish than anything they had ever done up to this point – 1970 to be exact – Led Zeppelin III is the godliest of the holy trinity. What truly makes Led Zeppelin the metaliest of the metal bands is their ability to start an album with something like “Immigrant Song” and then say ‘fuck it’ and follow it with a beautiful work of poetry like “Tangerine.” And let’s not forget the last track on the first side “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” where Jimmy Page literally puts you into a state of hypnosis with his guitar solo. Definitely the most underrated of the four self-titled albums but by no means is it any less magical.

17. The Cars - The Cars

It’s so easy to dismiss The Cars as another “decent” band to come out of the 80s, you forget a couple of things: a) The Cars actually are a part of the late-70s New Wave movement (this debut album came out in 1978) and b) they are clean, tight and innovative musicians – just listen to that riff a la Benjamin Orr from “In Touch With Your World.” This album is almost like a “greatest hits” type compilation, consisting of hit after hit like “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl” and “Just What I Needed;” the plot twist is that it’s not a “greatest hits” album, but in fact, it is their debut, which put The Cars on the map as punk-new wave pioneers. A part of a movement alongside acts like Blondie and the Talking Heads, it is easy for The Cars to fade into the background. But they shouldn’t and this album will instantly become one of your most played in your collection.

18. Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding

With so many important works under his belt, from Highway 61 Revisited to Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan was obviously going to make an appearance here. John Wesley Harding is definitely way more underrated than it should be. Recorded after his miraculous recovery from that motorcyle accident, John Wesley Harding is more “down to earth” in its lyricism when compared to the wordy nature of his previous albums – “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” is the only relatively lengthy, Dylan-esque ballad. Another remarkable characteristic of this album in particular, is the use of society’s “rejects” as a central figure in the subsequent tracks “Drifter’s Escape,” “Dear Landlord” and “I Am a Lonesome Hobo.” The album also includes his original version of “All Along the Watchtower” – the sole reason I bought this album in the first place. The reasons to purchase John Wesley Harding go way beyond that point, however. Constituted from a dark and simple place – this record is Bob Dylan sans his rambling riff raff, allowing you to truly hear why he is regarded so highly.

19. Supertramp - Breakfast in America

Supertramp, a band with one great albums and a few other, eh not so great ones. But when it was great, it was really really great – case in point, Breakfast in America. Both of my parents managed to contribute a copy of this 1979 record, which is exceptionally remarkable given that they followed two vastly different musical paths in their time. It’s easy to understand why they both loved this album, however, with tracks like “Goodbye Stranger,” “Take the Long Way Home” and obviously, “Breakfast in America.” Even if you have no idea who Supertramp is, I can guarantee you’ve at least heard “The Logical Song” once in your life. A seemingly random choice to be included on this list, give it a chance and you’ll understand why I have deemed it a necessity.

20. Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

The last album of folk legends, Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water is flawless in every sense of the word. What sets Simon and Garfunkel apart from the other musicians of their time is that they don’t just make music, they create art – Bridge Over Troubled Water being their Mona Lisa. “The Boxer” is a triumph, not just for the duo, not just for folk, but for all rock. Other notable tracks are “The Only Living Boy in New York,” “Keep the Customer Satisfied” and obviously, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The last on the list but certainly not the least by any means, this album is guaranteed to make you feel some type of way.

Every list is going to be biased depending on what the author’s collection contains. I am going to be honest, my list is completely biased. However, I’m going to impart it on you anyways because I believe I am an expert on the matter.

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