Music & Films for
Common People
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10
JOY AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE
Idles
In times of a new arise of political an social ultraconservatism (that borders into fascism), it was more than logical to have a new wave of punk bands ready to fight back. With unpolished and enraged chants, Joy As An Act Of Resistance is relentless in attacking many of the hot topics of modern world, from toxic masculinity to immigration. Idles is a band that perfectly understands privilege, and while they stand side by side with the working class, they also use their voice of white straight man to question sexism, homophobia and racism.
Fast and aggressive riffs work as a way to canalize the rage from a world that is taking big steps backwards and is threatening the human rights that took several decades to achieve. Using sarcasm as a weapon, Idles' main goal is to mock all those negative topics and the people that supports them, even referencing several pop culture icons: from Dirty Dancing to Harry Potter and Nancy Sinatra, to the point of using Katy Perry lyrics as a subversive bomb. In times of fake news, taking a piss on bigotry is a big act of resistance.
Best tracks: Colossus, Great, Samaritans.
9
NEGRO SWAN
Blood Orange
Dev Hynes' new album is an exploration on growing up marginalized in a society that chokes your desire to be fully yourself with the violence and repression that it executes to those who live in the outside of social norms. It is also a beautiful interpretation of black music through history, by blending jazz, R&B and hip-hop and infusing it with dreamy synths to reach an intense level of retro nostalgia, as if the music was reminding us of how hard has been the struggle over the years to reach this point of history where Negro Swan is possible: a poetic introspection of growing up as a black queer man.
One of the best producers in contemporary alternative pop, Hynes is sensitive enough to get beautiful layers and textures by playing with the mixing of vocals, analog and electronic instruments, spoken word and sound effects (alarms are a recurrent motif throughout the album). Hynes, just like Frank Ocean, is offering creative new paths to explore how a black male musician can be true to his culture and roots while avoiding reproducing toxic stereotypes. It is an album addressed to anybody who has ever felt like a black swan, but showing us that it is exactly those differences the ones that are going to make us a beautiful individual.
Best tracks: Charcoal Baby, Nappy Wonder, Saint.
8
CHRIS
Christine and the Queens
While we understand the marketing purpose of translating her entire album to English, it might have been an unnecessary move (Rosalía proved this year that you can have a successful album entirely in a foreign language) since the French tracks that Héloisse Letissier provides in Chris are just perfect as they are.
Adopting the alter ego of Chris, a gender-bending persona with a seductive masculine attitude, Letissier upfront tackles gender identities and social constructs. Her drag performance is a feminist way to transgress, at once she empowers herself and exposes the ridicule of macho attitudes.
And even when she is doing pop with a purpose, one just can't deny the catchiness in her hooks and the contagious retro style that she develops in the synths while her suave vocal performance demands our full attention, it is as if she is both Michael and Janet Jackson at the same time. Her queerness is not only a political statement, it is also a seduction weapon.
Best tracks: Damn dis-moi (feat. Dam Funk), Doesn't matter (voleur de soleil), La Marcheuse.
7
DOUBLE NEGATIVE
Low
With the level of sound experimentation that it presents, Double Negative will confuse and create an immediate barrier to unaware listeners that try to approach it in the way that they do to a normal pop album. Double Negative needs to be approached as a complex art installation from an avant-garde artist.
With a cryptic structure and a full deployment of the most progressive sounds they've created on their 25 years of career, Low doesn't offer easy answers to understand this work. At first, one should be perceptive to the atmospheres they create, every track tries to evoke a mental state and uses every sound possibility to get us there, but one must be aware that not all of these atmospheres are beauty or contemplative, they could be disruptive and appeal to the darkest sides of our psyche, invoking pain, horror, anxiety and depression.
Then, we must turn towards the technical aspects, specially to how they use distortion as a way to explore human identity and their relationships with others. How noise and silence are as effective as a harmony to convey a message. Placing it in the political context of the empire of hate through fake news, Double Negative is an impressive piece of high art that is complex, solid and original.
Best tracks: Always trying to work it out, Disarray, Quorum.
6
BE THE COWBOY
Mitski
Half Japanese, half American, and having lived in 13 countries, Mitski Miyawaki might know a few things about broken identities, and if in previous albums she has already addressed the feeling of not belonging, it's in Be the Cowboy where she frontally confronts what it means to be herself and how she fits in the world.
Opening with a bang on a statement of liberating her repressed passion and intensity, Mitski allows herself to explore the many facets that she can be, at times a self-conscious introvert that feels minuscule and abandoned, and at times a powerful commanding figure ready to burn whatever is in her way to the top. She also allows herself a free movement in the sweet pop - hard rock spectrum, but always bending a few rules of the textbook and pairing the emotional discoveries with a search for new sounds, textures and structures.
Mitski is ready to confront any preconceptions you might have about a female Asian indie musician, and by exposing her true empowered self in such an open and potent way, she is becoming the daring cowboy that is here to replace that bravado big macho man as the commanding person in town.
Best tracks: Nobody, Geyser, Washing Machine Hear.
5
IN A POEM UNLIMITED
U.S. Girls
Meg Remy's most politically charged album to date, is also her most accessible and enjoyable one. In an age of exposing injustice, specially towards vulnerable groups, Remy is relentless in her incendiary songwriting to expose the wrongdoing in the world, in the same way that Hamlet (from where she takes the title) did: with art.
Exploring different personalities in each track, all of them victims of a choking system, Remy hits at different structures that oppress women: patriarchy, big corporations, romantic love... even "untouchable" figures, like Barack Obama, get severely questioned by Remy, because no matter how next to his successor he looks like Gandhi, he still have to answer for the massive killings in a continued war.
But as interesting as the content of her exposition, it is the form she chose for it: festive disco pop and trippy psychedelic rock. She knows that a revenge will come, and she wants us to enjoy bringing the culprits in front of the justice and it's making the beheading ceremony a danceable party.
Best tracks: Rosebud, M.A.H., Velvet for sale
4
EL MAL QUERER
Rosalía
El Mal Querer might very well be the best album produced in Spanish language in, at least, 20 years. Full of inventiveness, it is an effort to bring Flamenco music (a genre that hasn't evolved much since its creation) into postmodernity by shaking its foundations and mixing it with trap, pop and R&B.
Inspired by a 13th century novel, El Mal Querer is told in 11 chapters (one for each song) and follows a narrative of a love story ruined by jealousy and the woman's path back to empowerment. It mixes the mysticism of the past and the immediacy of postmodernity to create an hybrid that is fascinating in how much it can stretch the limits of traditional rhythms to make them sound as if they were just invented.
Rosalía constantly challenges expectations, and wether if it is using motorcycle engines as a bass or sampling Justin Timberlake, she keeps things interesting in every turn of the album, and her commanding and hypnotic voice won't let your attention wander for a second.
Best tracks: Malamente, Pienso en tu Mirá, De Aquí no Sales.
3
HONEY
Robyn
In a time where every pop-dance record seems to be modeled to Robyn's legacy, the Swedish diva comes back to shake things up again and to show that no one else could ever transform intern turmoil into dancefloor stamina in the way that she does.
Honey is undoubtedly a pure Robyn album, but at the same time it has clear differences with anything that she has done before. For once, there's a sense of space and air in these tracks, there's not an urgency to explode her intense emotions in a danceable beat; instead, she takes time to fully experience every emotional state that she presents, and there's also a warm (almost tropical) breeze that enfolds the synths to reach a sensual atmosphere that was never present in her music before.
Above all, it's Robyn's way of reinventing 90s dance music, of using dated toys to create a new imaginative hybrid to test new realms of pop fascination in an album that effortlessly navigates from loss to regret and then to lust and self-awareness.
Best tracks: Honey, Missing U, Send to Robin Immediately.
2
7
Beach House
Beach House hit the spot in 2010 with their amazing album Teen Dream, and right after it came another three albums that, if there wasn't a single question about their over all quality, felt like a repetition of the same tricks that they had previously mastered.
7 is the game changer. It is the album that finally made the band's sound evolve, the one that saw them daring to go out of their comfort zones and the one that might be their most ambitious project to date. The usual ethereal quality of their sound is confronted with new textures, ones that are spiky and dissonant, we're no longer floating on a day-dream, but teleporting in a hyper-sensorial trip that awakens a kinesthetic sense that allows us to hear shapes and colors.
As a whole, 7 is a complex exploration of the sonic space. An album that will be much more rewarding if listened through headphones due to its experimentation on the dimensions that sound can create and how it can impact on our emotions and perception.
Best tracks: Lemon Glow, Dive, Dark Spring.
1
DIRTY COMPUTER
Janelle Monáe
Dirty Computer is not only the album that 2018 deserved, but the one that it needed. A queer black woman owning and exploring her identity and sexuality at their fullest, questioning and expanding the limits of what means to be the opposite of a white straight male in an industry and a society that has tried to suffocate her voice in so many different ways, and on doing so displaying such level of mastery in her craft. It is the perfect way to sum up a year that has brought so many debates about human rights and so many rebukes of a white patriarchy that is violently giving its death rattles.
Monáe's alternative R&B is bigger, brighter and more assertive than ever, her futurist android persona is embracing the warmest sides of humanity to bring a message of hope and self-confidence to every single person that has ever been ashamed of being themselves. With the blessing of her godfather, Prince, and borrowing his groovy sexual energy, Monáe offers bold riffs and rich synths to expand his musical realm, she is as good in a classic rock n roll ballad as she is rapping, as electric in a modern soul rendition as in a catchy pop tune.
An album full of ideas of what means to live in a postmodern world, a feminist and queer testament of how music can (and should) inflame and affirm the sense of one's existence and force us to make questions and push for a world that is fair, diverse and inclusive, and it also doesn't hurt that she does it overflowing style in every chord and every line.
Best tracks: Make me feel, Pynk (feat. Grimes), Django Jane, I Like That, Crazy Classic Life.
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