Glide's 20 Best Albums of 2018

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Saskatchewan-born singer-songwriter Colter Wall learned the feeling well after spending so much time on the road. “Wherever I wander, wherever I stray/The rustle of the wheat fields starts calling my name,” he sings on “Plain to See Plainsman,” his rich baritone echoing the song’s strolling bassline. His sophomore album spins that homesickness into tribute. Produced by Nashville’s Dave Cobb, and featuring harmonica from Willie Nelson’s longtime collaborator Mickey Raphael and pedal steel guitar from Lloyd Green, *Songs of the Plains* situates the Canadian troubadour alongside Southern brethren like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Chris Stapleton. As Wall tells it, Western isn’t a direction so much as a state of mind.

2016’s radiant *Honest Life* was a breakthrough for Courtney Marie Andrews. Here, the Arizona singer/songwriter’s pockmarked country finds broader, more reflective inspiration. There’s a hymn-like solidity to the album’s 10 songs, all telling stories of struggling people, as Andrews describes, “chasing that bigger life.” But she isn’t just in the business of chronicling sadness. The delicate piano on “Rough Around the Edges” belies its message of rugged self-acceptance, while the hearty “Kindness of Strangers” lets the sun pour through.

After breaking through with a batch of restless, itinerant songs on Honest Life in 2016, Courtney Marie Andrews longs for something more permanent on the follow-up. The Seattle singer spends much of May Your Kindness Remain exploring ideas of home and what it means to have roots, on 10 new tunes that are lusher and more expansive while leaving plenty of room to showcase her astonishing voice. Andrews and her band recorded May Your Kindness Remain with producer Mark Howard, whose voluminous credits include albums by Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris. Howard’s understated aesthetic suits Andrews, who pushes herself toward bolder musical arrangements and a fuller, more soulful sound than the traveling-woman-with-guitar feel of Honest Life.- Eric R. Danton of Paste Magazine

Jonathan Wilson had a busy 2017, producing Father John Misty's grammy-nominated Pure Comedy and touring arenas around the globe as a guitarist and vocalist for Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters (for whom he also contributed to the lauded Is This The Life We Really Want? album.) Wilson also saw widespread acclaim heaped on Karen Elson’s sophomore LP Double Roses, which he recorded with her in Los Angeles in 2016. But it's not looking like Wilson is going to get much of a rest in 2018 either, as he'll be continuing on with the worldwide Waters tour and is set to release his own new solo album Rare Birds in the spring. The highly anticipated long player - which features backing vocals from Lana Del Rey, Josh Tillman, fellow Roger Waters bandmates Lucius and an extraordinary musical gift from otherworldly Brian Eno collaborator Laraaji - will be released through Bella Union worldwide. Although much of the album is comprised lyrically of meditations on a failed relationship and its aftermath, Wilson insists that Rare Birds is not really a concept album. “It's meant more as a healing affair, a rejuvenation, a reconciliation, for others, and for me. I wanted to balance personal narrative with the need I feel for calming healing music. I think we need journeys in sound, psychedelic gossamer-winged music that includes elements consciously and purposefully to incite hope, positivity, longing, reckless abandon and regret. It's all in there.” And, for this one, music critics will need to retire the comparisons to heritage rockers and Laurel Canyon troubadours as they’re hardly useful anymore. Wilson's new sound takes a synthetic/acoustic, best-of-both-worlds analogue/digital hybrid approach to achieve the complexity, sonic density and glossy hi-fi coating of Rare Birds. Heard for the first time on a Jonathan Wilson album are the sounds of synthesizers and drum machines. “The Neil Young, CSN, Dennis Wilson and Tom Petty comparisons for the first two records were flattering, but I didn't ever really see it that way myself.” The things that Wilson had been obsessing on, and he can clearly hear the influences of, are artists like Talk Talk, Arthur Russell, maybe a Sleigh Bells-meet-George Harrison kinda thing. “I hear mostly ME actually. On this album I’m quoting from earlier versions of myself, continuing a narrative I’ve had musically since I got my first 4-track when I was thirteen. I hear the influence of my vocal coach. I hear the influence of having worked in my studio with Roger Waters for months during the same time period that I was making this record. That gave me the feeling I could expand into certain psychedelic and found sound labyrinths.” There are voices, sirens, children playing, and more enhancing spatial sounds, while musical compadres Lana Del Rey and Josh Tillman (aka Father John Misty) appear as backing vocalists on “Living With Myself” and “49 Hairflips”, respectively. Wilson describes Rare Birds as a "maximalist," high density album more influenced by 80s British production than anything to do with Southern California in 1970s. It’s a dynamic new approach for Wilson that calls to mind one of Peter Gabriel's early solo albums or even mid-period Kate Bush. “This album is a hell of a lot more Trevor Horn than anything, you know, Laurel Canyon-related,” he adds. The song that “started the whole record” was “Loving You”. Says Wilson, “I was floundering in my studio pacing the floors for months, scratching my head for a clue to how I would embark upon the process of making Rare Birds. I was waiting on a sign, a catalyst.” The catalyst came in the form of experimental ambient and new age musician Larajji. The pair had played together in the past, on the east coast, but it’s rare that Larajji is in Los Angeles and available to record. Wilson invited him to his Echo Park studio for a few sessions. “I had “Loving You” kicking around in a voice note on my phone for a while, something in it was my subtle ode to John Lennon... Larajii is one of the most musical humans I have ever come across, and every twist and turn he takes is documented here, it was not multiple passes, it was pure Larajji in the moment. I then went and sang a “scratch vocal”, which was always meant to be a scratch but I’ll admit it had spirit so I left it all the way down the line.” Wilson says simply of the song, “it’s very authentic in that the longing was very real.” Of “Over The Midnight”, the first track released from Rare Birds, Wilson says, “I wanted to write a song about a sacred place for lovers to exist and I named that destination, process, mood or feeling ‘Over the Midnight’. It’s a place where nothing is savage.” In one of Wilson’s favourite lines on the album he sings “This world it is burning, but don’t it feel incredible? / Whisper in my ear and tell me what you see in the flames.” “On some of the songs with string sections, multiple layers of synths, guitars, vocals - all the moving parts - the track count may reach 120-150 tracks”, he explains. “What I invariably end up doing is setting up a punishing process of giving myself a sonic puzzle where I then have to sort out the relationships of all these ideas, these tracks, these frequencies. This is how I make all of my albums, and even records I produce for others always seem to have that same lush and layered orchestral component. I subject myself to many months of meditation really, figuring out why I was compelled to add this or that, and editing, getting to the essence of what I hear the song as. More and more that’s maximalist, and big.” And while the recording process is often complex, one of the album’s most striking moments came together quickly. “What you hear with “There’s a Light” is the first time the song was ever played”, says Wilson. “I wrote it on my piano during the album tracking and we cut it the next day. This is the first take. It’s completely the first time I ever sang the song in my life, and the drum take that Joey Waronker put down blows my mind every time.” Of Rare Birds as a whole Wilson says, “I want my music to hit people like an emotional tidal wave. With my songwriting it's never about a clever couplet or smug turn of phrase, it's about the intensity, the impact. Besides, we're all fishing downstream from Townes Van Zandt anyway, so the only thing left to do is go BIG." **** Rare Birds was produced by Jonathan Wilson. Engineered by Dave Cerminara at Wilson’s own Fivestarstudios in Echo Park, Los Angeles on the Cadac G series mixing desk. Mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine. Backing vocals on “Trafalgar Square”, “There Is A Light” and “Rare Birds” by Lucius. Backing vocals on “49 Hairflips” by Josh Tillman. Backing vocals on “Living With Myself” by Lana Del Rey. Backing vocals on “Loving You” By Laraaji.

When asked to describe the title track from his new record, Kyle Thomas—aka King Tuff—takes a deep breath. “It’s a song about hitting rock bottom,” he says. “I didn't even know what I wanted to do anymore, but I still had this urge, like there was this possibility of something else I could be doing... and then I just followed that possibility. To me, that’s what songwriting, and art in general, is about. You’re chasing something. ‘The Other’ is basically where songs come from. It’s the hidden world. It’s the invisible hand that guides you whenever you make something. It’s the thing I had to rediscover to bring me back to making music again in a way that felt true and good.” After years of non-stop touring, culminating in a particularly arduous stint in support of 2014’s Black Moon Spell, Thomas found himself back in Los Angeles experiencing the flipside of the ultimate rock and roll cliche. “I had literally been on tour for years,” recalls Thomas. “It was exhausting, physically and mentally. I’m essentially playing this character of King Tuff, this crazy party monster, and I don’t even drink or do drugs. It had become a weird persona, which people seemed to want from me, but it was no longer me. I just felt like it had gotten away from me.” The ten tracks that make up The Other represent a kind of psychic evolution for King Tuff. No less hooky than previous records, the new songs ditch the goofy rock-and-roll bacchanalia narratives of earlier records in favor of expansive arrangements, a diversity of instrumentation, and lyrics that straddle the fence between painful ruminations and a childlike, creative energy untarnished by cynicism. The soulful and cosmic new direction is apparent from the album’s first moments: introduced by the gentle ringing of a chime, acoustic guitar, and warm organ tones, “The Other” is a narrative of redemption born of creativity. As Thomas sings about being stuck in traffic, directionless, with no particular reason to be alive, he hears the call of “the other,” a kind of siren song that, instead of leading towards destruction, draws the narrator towards a creative rebirth. Elsewhere, tracks like “Thru the Cracks” and “Psycho Star” balance psychedelia with day-glo pop hooks. “The universe is probably an illusion, but isn’t it so beautifully bizarre?” he asks on “Psycho Star,” providing one of the record’s central tenets. At a time when everything in the world feels so deeply spoiled and the concept of making meaning out of the void seems both pointless and impossible, why not try? Thomas self-produced the record, as he did his 2007 debut, Was Dead, but on a far grander scale. He recorded it at The Pine Room, the home studio Thomas built to work on the record, and playing every instrument aside from drums and saxophone. He pulled Shawn Everett (War On Drugs, Alabama Shakes) in to assist with the mixing process. While it would be easy to think of The Other as a kind of reinvention for King Tuff, Thomas views the entire experience of the record as a kind of reset that’s not totally removed from what he’s done in the past. “I can’t help but sound like me,” he says. “It’s just that this time I let the songs lead me where they wanted to go, instead of trying to push them into a certain zone. King Tuff was always just supposed to be me. When I started doing this as a teenager, it was whatever I wanted it to be. King Tuff was never supposed to be just one thing. It was supposed to be everything.”

Seven albums in, Parquet Courts deliver their most nuanced, diverse LP so far. While their raw, post-punk side is amply present on tracks like \"Extinction,\" with its Fall-evoking riffs, that\'s just one among many arrows in the Brooklyn band\'s quiver. Between the children\'s choir on \"Death Will Bring Change,\" the trippy, dub-inflected touches on \"Back to Earth,\" the G-funk synth lines on \"Violence,\" and the polyrhythmic, disco-besotted grooves of the title track, Parquet Courts deliver on more fronts than ever before.

"Wide Awake!" is a groundbreaking work, an album about independence and individuality but also about collectivity and communitarianism. Love is at its center. There’s also a freshness here, a breaking of new territory that’s a testament to the group’s restless spirit. Part of this could be attributed to the fact that Wide Awake! was produced by Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, but it’s also simply a triumph of songwriting. “The ethos behind every Parquet Courts record is that there needs to be change for the better, and the best way to tackle that is to step out of one’s comfort zone,” guitarist/singer A Savage says of the unlikely pairing. “I personally liked the fact that I was writing a record that indebted to punk and funk, and Brian’s a pop producer who’s made some very polished records. I liked that it didn’t make sense." It was Danger Mouse, an admirer of the Parquet Courts, who originally reached out to them, presenting them with just the opportunity to stretch themselves that they were hoping for. The songs, written by Savage and Austin Brown but elevated to even greater heights by the dynamic rhythmic propulsion of Max Savage (drums) and Sean Yeaton (bass), are filled with their traditional punk rock passion, as well as a lyrical tenderness. The record reflects a burgeoning confidence in the band's exploration of new ideas in a hi-fi context. For his part, Savage was determined not to make another ballad heavy record like the band's 2016 "Human Performance." "I needed an outlet for the side of me that feels emotions like joy, rage, silliness and anger," he says. They looked to play on the duality between rage and glee like the bands Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, and Black Flag. "All those bands make me want to dance and that's what I want people to do when they hear our record," adds Savage. For Brown, death and love were the biggest influences. Brown has never been so vulnerable on a Parquet Courts record, and the band, for all their ferocity, has never played so movingly; it’s a prime example of Brown “writing songs I’ve been wanting to write but never had the courage.” For the two primary songwriters, "Wide Awake!" represents the duality of coping and confrontation. “In such a hateful era of culture, we stand in opposition to that — and to the nihilism used to cope with that — with ideas of passion and love," says Brown. For Savage, it comes back to the deceptively complex goal of making people want to dance, powering the body for resistance through a combination of groove, joy, and indignation, “expressing anger constructively but without trying to accommodate anyone.”

This is a welcome digital version of saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter’s Grammy-winning 2018 *Emanon* project, initially released as a triple-length set with accompanying graphic novel. The first album features the 85-year-old jazz legend’s long-running quartet in the studio with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, whose conductorless fluidity suits the quartet’s agile improvisation. Shorter is widely considered jazz’s best living composer, but here fans have the chance to hear his sprawling classical writing. While Shorter’s compositional influences for these orchestral tracks range from John Williams to Aaron Copland, they also bear witness to Shorter’s own storied career: On “Pegasus,” we get a fanfare from his 1966 classic *Speak No Evil*; we hear painterly woodwind voicings on “The Three Marias,” first recorded in an electric fusion version on 1985’s *Atlantis*. Recent live recordings of the quartet in London make up the other two albums. This highly influential group (Shorter, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade) revisits the aforementioned orchestral material fast and tight, as if in a sports car, also covering Shorter tunes like “She Moves Through the Fair” and “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean.” It’s not hard to hear the style and spirit of Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report, and other brilliant associations of Shorter’s career in this quartet’s passionate rapport. *Emanon* is nothing less than the fulfillment of a lifetime vision for Shorter.