KCRW's Best Albums of 2018

On his brilliant 2015 debut album, *Coming Home*, Texas singer/songwriter Leon Bridges invited comparisons to Sam Cooke and Otis Redding with his authentic take on soul. *Good Thing*, his 2018 follow-up, finds Bridges leaving the ’50 and ’60s, instead embracing ’70s icons like The Stylistics (“Bet Ain’t Worth the Hand”) and Chic (“You Don’t Know”). More surprises come in “If It Feels Good (Then It Must Be)” and “Bad Bad News,” contemporary jams that show he can swag it out with the likes of Usher and Pharrell too. Bridges\' warm tenor is sturdy and smoky as mesquite wood as he combines deep emotions and nimble wordplay on “Beyond,” “Forgive You,” and “Georgia to Texas”—a moving story of his family’s history.

It’s a good eight minutes and most of two songs into the second album from this Houston, Texas trio before you hear any vocals, and by that point they may well be superfluous. Khruangbin (the name translates from Thai as “flying engine” or “airplane” and the former feels particularly fitting) make immaculate instrumental tracks that effortlessly accommodates psychedelic rock, Thai funk, Caribbean grooves, vintage funk, and Middle Eastern riffs. What makes *Con Todo El Mundo* (another translation, this time from Spanish: “for all the world”) so pleasurable is the way those touchstones tie together to create a singular, gratifying sound. Bassist Laura Lee deftly moves in and out of the beat, guitarist Mark Speer supplies long and supple runs, and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson places a funk kick on the rhythm as these songs unfurl without undue stress. Like gears on a car, the three-piece can shift up into the sharp, reverb-heavy bite of “Maria También” or slow into a nocturnal, jazzy drift on “August 10.” The feel is mellow, but it’s never merely easy listening; the shifting melodies and pinpoint drum parts keep you focused on the many possibilities of this sound.

“Our first album was this imagined world that we created for ourselves,” Josh Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “It was lyrically vague and metaphorical. This album definitely deals with things that have actually happened to us.” There’s been rich content to mine for Lloyd-Watson and Jungle co-founder Tom McFarland since their 2013 emergence. The pair’s modern soul collective swiftly went from viral curiosity to legit chart heavyweights—then absentee stars with their follow-up taking four years to materialize. “We were so keen to write the second record,” McFarland says, “but we were completely unaware of that first period that needs to happen: You actually need something to write about. We didn’t have the experience. We had to go out and live. Touring is not really *experience*.” The stately “House in LA” knowingly nods to the album’s generous gestation period (“Two whole years on the rewrite/Tell my friends I\'m gonna be right there”), and the music here is tangibly more personal and lived-in. “It’s a healing record for both of us,” says McFarland, and it reflects their experiences while living and working in Los Angeles. “I met somebody outside the Hollywood Bowl one day—you fall in love with somebody and get drawn to that area. It could’ve been anywhere and it just happened to be California, which is great because it’s sunny.” Their gilded, could-soundtrack-any-premium-TV-ad soul remains, but there’s an appealing vulnerability here, and a recognition that the world has changed since their last album. “You’ve got to trust your taste ultimately,” Lloyd-Watson says. “We might be completely out of vogue and people might say, ‘Oh, that midtempo funk band’s back with another album.’ And that’s fine.” McFarland is similarly unflustered. “I think there’s a lot of honesty on the record and a lot of beauty—beauty that’s broken. It was painful to put on the record, and somebody will get it. Somebody, somewhere, in some country.”

Father John Misty’s fourth LP is not a happy one. *God’s Favorite Customer* was written during a two-month period when singer/songwriter Joshua Tillman was, as he sings on the glum title track, “on the straits.” Temporarily separated from his wife and struggling, he delivers a literal plea against suicide on “Please Don’t Die” and unravels in a hotel lobby on the twisted folk-pop song “Mr. Tillman.” Heartache has produced his most honest, anguished work yet—but even at its most morose, Father John Misty\'s music is still captivating.

Written largely in New York between summer 2016 and winter 2017, Josh Tillman’s fourth Father John Misty LP, 'God’s Favorite Customer', reflects on the experience of being caught between the vertigo of heartbreak and the manic throes of freedom. 'God’s Favorite Customer' reveals a bittersweetness and directness in Tillman’s songwriting, without sacrificing any of his wit or taste for the absurd. From “Mr. Tillman,” where he trains his lens on his own misadventure, to the cavernous pain of estrangement in “Please Don’t Die,” Tillman plays with perspective throughout to alternatingly hilarious and devastating effect. “We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That)” is a meditation on our inner lives and the limitations we experience in our attempts to give and receive love. It stands in solidarity with the title track, which examines the ironic relationship between forgiveness and sin. Together, these are songs that demand to know either real love or what comes after, and as the album progresses, that entreaty leads to discovering the latter’s true stakes. 'God's Favorite Customer' was produced by Tillman and recorded with Jonathan Rado (Foxygen), Dave Cerminara (Jonathan Wilson, Foster the People, Conor Oberst), and Trevor Spencer (FJM). The album features contributions from Haxan Cloak, Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood, longtime collaborator Jonathan Wilson, and members of Misty’s touring band.

It\'s not enough that rising Spanish star ROSALÍA ingeniously blends traditional flamenco with contemporary pop on her second album—she also gets a narrative based on medieval literature in there, too. Inspired by *Flamenca*, a 13th century book about a woman imprisoned by her jealous fiancé thought to be the first modern novel, each of the 11 songs on this collaboration with producer El Guincho (Pablo Díaz-Reixa) serves as a “chapter” of a running story about a doomed relationship. ROSALÍA went through the album track by track with Beats 1. **MALAMENTE (Cap. 1 Augurio)** “It’s a premonition—this moment when you know in the beginning of the story how it’s gonna end, but even then you go and do it. I was trying to compose a song everybody could understand, doing experimentation with electronic sound but also connected with my roots and flamenco. It’s combining these worlds.” **QUE NO SALGA LA LUNA (Cap. 2 Boda)** “This song is about commitment and that feeling you get when you get in a relationship with somebody. Sometimes you lose something of yourself in the process. It\'s the dark side of getting engaged—it\'s something beautiful but at the same time, there\'s another part, right?” **PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ (Cap. 3 Celos)** “It’s ‘Thinking About Your Gaze.’ This was a song that started from a sample of Bulgarian voices. I did the bassline on an island in Spain, El Hierro. I was so inspired in this place.” **DE AQUÍ NO SALES (Cap. 4. Disputa)** “It’s the most aggressive part of the record...and one of the most risky. I wanted to use the motorcycles in this song with this crazy rhythm that combines \[chapters\] three and four. Khalid told me he liked the song—I would love to do music with him.” **RENIEGO (Cap. 5. Lamento)** “It’s a traditional melody from flamenco. \[Spanish singer\] Camarón was singing with an orchestra; he created the arrangement. I think it sounds very magical.” **PRESO (Cap. 6 Clausura)** “You can hear Rossy de Palma’s voice—she’s an iconic actress from Spain. You can feel the experience in her voice. It’s heavy, you know?” **BAGDAD (Cap. 7 Liturgia)** “I was very inspired by an erotic club in Barcelona called Bagdad and by ‘Cry Me a River’ by Justin Timberlake. He heard the song and said, ‘Yes, you can use the melody’; I was so excited because he never approves anything.” **DI MI NOMBRE (Cap. 8 Éxtasis)** “It’s a very flamenco vibe, very traditional, \[but\] the structure is very pop. It’s about this connection between two people; the sexual moment. The lyrics—\'Say my name, say my name\'—I\'m such a big fan of Destiny\'s Child. \[It\'s\] paying tribute to all these artists I heard when I was a teenager. ” **NANA (Cap. 9 Concepción)** “This is a traditional flamenco melody used when you have a child you’re trying to make fall asleep. I was very inspired by what James Blake does—the space and the production he uses in his songs. I feel like in 50 years, people in universities will study him.” **MALDICIÓN (Cap. 10 Cordura)** “We’d been working with Pablo on the production and composition for a year and a half, and I didn’t like it enough. Then: This Arthur Russell sample—I think it’s perfect in this moment.” **A NINGÚN HOMBRE (Cap. 11 Poder)** “The last song of the record is the first I composed. Pablo was very excited by it and we saw that we sound good together, so I was like, ‘Let’s do the entire record together.’ It’s about the power of a woman.”

Like fellow time travelers (and occasional tourmates) Tame Impala, Unknown Mortal Orchestra manage to update the mind-bending sounds of \'70s psychedelia in a way that doesn’t feel like a retread. Following the direction set out on 2015’s *Multi-Love*, *Sex & Food* dives further into soul and R&B, providing spaced-out takes on Prince (“Hunnybee”), Stevie Wonder (“Ministry of Alienation”), even straight-up disco-pop (“Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays”). As strong as the hooks are, it’s the band’s sound that remains most immediate—a fascinating mix of hi-fi and lo-fi, slick and homespun, with everything crackling in the mix so warmly you feel like you can touch it.

Where are we headed? What are we consuming, how is it affecting us, and why does everything feel so bad and weird sometimes? These are some of the questions posed on Ruban Nielson’s fourth album as Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Sex & Food—a delightfully shapeshifting album that filters these real-deal serious themes through a vibrant sonic lens that spans battered drum-machine funk, doomy and thrashing rock, and pink-hued psychedelic disco. Recorded in a variety of locales from Seoul and Hanoi to Reykjavik, Mexico City, and Auckland, Sex & Food is a practical musical travelogue, with local musicians from the countries that Nielson and his band visited pitching in throughout. Over the last decade, Nielson’s established himself as one of the most inventive sonic traveler currently working, and Sex & Food is the most eclectic and expansive Unknown Mortal Orchestra release yet, from the light-footed R&B of “Hunnybee” to the stomping flange of “Major League Chemicals.” The adventurousness is all the more impressive considering that there’s a bit of DNA from the past UMO discography in Sex & Food: the soft-focus psych of the project’s 2011 debut LP, the lovely melancholia of 2013’s II, and the weirded-out funk of 2015’s virtuosic Multi-Love. But rather than living in the past, Nielson is firmly in the here and now, drawing from personal unrest and generational malaise while surveying a variety of societal ailments. “If You’re Going to Break Yourself” and “Not in Love We’re Just High” chronicle the effects of drugs and addiction on personal relationships, while the lyrics “Ministry of Alienation” drip with modern-day paranoia like the silvery guitar tones that jewel the song’s structure: “My thinking is done by your machine/ Can’t escape the 20th century.” It’s a scary world out there, and it’s been that way for a while—and Sex & Food finds Nielson surveying the damage while attempting to reckon with the magnitude of it all. Along with UMO bandmates and frequent collaborators Jacob Portrait and Kody Nielson, Ruban began work on Sex & Food in early 2016, initially intending to draw musical influence from post-punk luminaries of his youth—think Killing Joke or Public Image Limited’s singular Flowers of Romance. But as he toiled, Ruban began to realize the aesthetic limits of his aims. “Post-punk is so tasteful to my generation,” he states. “There’s no guilty pleasure to it—I just think it’s cool and good. When it comes to rock, I want to get into dodgier territory.” So Ruban exited his comfort zone, literally: even though some of Sex & Food was recorded in his Portland, Oregon home studio (the same one that adorns Multi-Love’s cover), his desire to “get out of there,” as he puts it with a chuckle, led to a quest for creative inspiration that literally spanned the globe—from Reykjavik to Mexico City, as well as the Vietnamese city of Hanoi, where Ruban was inspired to draw influence from the imagery of the Vietnam-based films of his youth, as well as the powerful images conjured by Jimi Hendrix’s recording of “All Along the Watchtower.” “It was just like I hoped it would be,” he gushes about the city. “It’s really hard to record there—everything is so humid—but it was a really inspiring place, too.” At one point in their travels, the recording process was interrupted while in Mexico City, as Ruban and bandmate Jacob Portrait were trapped in the city’s Chapultepec park following the devastating earthquake that hit Central Mexico this past year. “I was terrified,” he states about the experience, which cut off their access not only to the studio but to their lodgings. “I was so shaken up that I ended up getting a bunch of stuff done when I left,” Nielson explains on the effect that the experience had on Sex and Food’s creative genesis. And his journey eventually led him to a curious but fruitful fount of inspiration: his past work. “At first, I thought that this was going to be a sad record, like II,” he explains when discussing how reflection helped push Sex & Food forward. “I was influenced enough by my own early stuff that I went into it thinking, ‘If I was a fan, how would I want to bring some of that back into what I’m doing?’” That old-becomes-new approach is more than apparent on the lush, beautifully understated “Huneybee,” reminiscent of II’s “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)” and drawing lyrical inspiration from Ruban’s daughter whose middle name gave 'Hunnybee' its title. “I was trying to figure out how to write a love song about my daughter,” he states. “She’s seven now, but the song will still be there when she’s a woman, so I was thinking about encoded fatherly instructions. I thought it was cool to say, ‘There’s no such thing sweeter than a sting.’ It makes her the protagonist—she can kill you! I thought that was good. The other line was ‘Don’t be such a modern stranger,” because I was thinking about what if the world is more atomized and isolated as she gets older?” Indeed, the modern world—and all the thorny complications that come with living in it—loomed large on Ruban’s mind while making Sex & Food. But even though he’s not afraid to get topical throughout—as evidenced on the surprisingly boisterous “American Guilt” or the roomy-disco medication-meditation “Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays”—Ruban was also careful not to get too political, and for good reason. “Everything is so soaked in politics, and it’s kind of depressing for everything to be political right now,” he explains. “I wanted to keep it light. I think everyone’s feeling angry, and there’s nothing particularly interesting about my anger.” A statement of selflessness, to be sure—but make no mistake: Sex & Food reaffirms the vitality of Ruban’s voice in today’s musical landscape, and when it comes to navigating the strange and often discouraging pathways our society’s taken, it makes for a damn fine compass, too.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Tom Misch studied jazz guitar at a Conservatoire of Music. A single year, however, proved enough before his attention switched to his own bedroom productions. This debut album perfects a blueprint explored on early acclaimed EPs and singles: unhurried vocals complementing a cross-pollination of deeply attractive pop, jazz, and hip-hop. And the highlights come thick and fast. “Man Like You” and “You’re On My Mind” will illuminate candlelit bedrooms, while Loyle Carner pays tribute to the pair’s South London roots over a hypnotic sax loop on the funk-flecked “Water Baby”. The album’s warm and celebratory mood peaks, however, with De La Soul’s weightless “It Runs Through Me” verses.

Rhye’s exquisite sophomore album finds singer/songwriter Mike Milosh exploring band-oriented arrangements. Inspired by the tour following his first album, *Woman*—in which an organist, string players, and a brass and rhythm section joined him on stage—Milosh sought to bring some of that live energy to *Blood*. He tapped seasoned producers and songwriters (Thomas Bartlett, Justin Parker) and guest instrumentalists (Tamar Osborn, Nate Mercereau) to add subtle doses of warmth and texture (the punctuating horns on “Feel Your Weight,” the plucky strings on “Taste\"). Still, though, nothing can compete with Milosh’s soul-stirring soprano, which soars over the instrumentation like a bird above clouds.