One theme that runs throughout Double Negative is dancing, such as the titles “Dancing and Fire” and “Dancing and Blood,” and the club scene of the promo. In drawing on the dance/club side of music, a connection can be made with the cozy compartmentalization of today’s music, in which dance, the music of the body, gives people a way of being seen and finding others within the perplexing hive of genres and bands. These scenes seem to exist now more as a way of being physical and being together than revering one artist over another.
Music has always been a way of being both alone together and together alone. The bedroom ceiling peels away to reveal the lights of a club. This loneliness and presence is like life — it’s not so much that we don’t get out of it alive, we don’t get out of it at all. Everyone is here, so we’re just going to have to learn to live with each other. Because the fact it can be so big and dark doesn’t diminish the fact that it is, and that we can always feel each other’s presence in it all the time. That presence, that physical presence is approximated by music, a true mechanical not electrical disturbance of the air, like arms holding us in the dark….
Double Negative may be a rebellion against the hangups of the past — not as a change of outfit or even attitude, but as a way to feel out the world again, via method, not madness — without bright lights or guarantees, with the frugal companionship of the practices that keep us whole, be they music or work or taking care of other people. Because the physics of sound informs the dynamic of this searching, Double Negative, while glowering and sinister AF at times, reads as a deconstruction rather than a destruction: a dark, gritty band of interference that’s fallen across the path. In a more subtle way, it appears to be Low’s first political album since Drums and Guns. “You put away the book, what are you waiting for?” “Quorum’s” lyrics intone. What happens when we put away the book, relieve the unnerving and isolating Word from its duties, and start thinking (and feeling) for ourselves? It’s not clear, but these days, it’s not merely wistful — it’s urgent. As the lyric that I think I hear on “Rome” suggests: “Let’s turn this thing up before they take us out.”
--J. Monk, TinyMixTapes
#5. Low | Double Negative
(589.653 Points | 24 Votes)
Critics' list: #2
Biggest Fans:
Gillingham (#1), Notbrianeno (#2), ChrisK. (#3), Rob (#3), BleuPanda (#3), JohnnyBGoode (#3), ColdButterfly (#4), Whuntva (#7), Craig (#7), DaveC (#9), Andyd1010 (#10)
Songs in the Top 100: N/A
A decade ago, Meghan Remy used just a 4-track recorder and a microphone to self-produce a collection of caustic musical ruminations. These eerie, seemingly off-the-cuff pieces felt impossible to grasp in the static surrounding them, but the tension in her voice couldn’t be clearer. Six albums later, Remy is still grappling with that same tension. Now, she uses sparkling pop, detailed compositions and a varied cast of collaborators to suck us in, before the darker side of her work looms over.
In a Poem Unlimited is a stunning look at abuses of power, especially those directed at women from men they trust. On M.A.H., Remy delivers the line: 'We can never know the hands we’re in / Until we feel them grip / Choking off our air supply' as if it’s a lullaby. Her theatrical vocal tumbles over an ABBA-channeling disco instrumental. The buoyant basslines, conga drum-breaks and unabashedly classy melody are irresistible. Your stomach drops as soon as the sinister lyrics flicker through.
It’s a clever stylistic choice that carries through the album – by far the brightest sounding Remy has ever released. Velvet 4 Sale opens it all with a weary sigh, before blossoming with sunny horns and a blistering guitar solo. The bombastic Incidental Boogie makes the loud/quiet dynamic sound fresh, while the enveloping disco of Rosebud could pass for a Kylie instrumental if it wasn’t so damn elegant.
Remy’s vocal control commands it all, with its restraint, with its wild, expressive high-end, and with its mysterious coldness. 'Let’s face it! Admit that it’s all related!' she shouts on Rosebud, beckoning the listener to look inward at their own part in injustice. With a few notes, the album clicks into place. On Pearly Gates, she winds a disturbing satire about a woman who is forced into sex by St Peter to get into heaven, supported by slinky backing vocals that feel plucked from Aquemini. That doesn’t sound like it should work, but Remy’s poise and attention to craft sell the twisted parable completely.
While her previous 4AD release, Half Free, used dreamlike samples to evoke its classic American pop atmosphere, In a Poem Unlimited emulates the real thing. Its instrumentals are timeless, genreless and genderless. This is no mistake. On Time, she repeats 'When there is nothing there is still time / There is still time, mountains of time' while her band race forward. Bleating saxophones, dusty guitars and thrashing symbols gallop on, fusing all the Western glitz of her work into an urgent seven-minute freakout. In a Poem Unlimited lives up to its aim and its name. It’s a reflection of abuse that feels all-encompassing, and of this era. It’s a timeless gem of an album that is about as powerful as pop music can be.
--Stephen Butchard, The Skinny
#4. U.S. Girls | In a Poem Unlimited
(664.630 Points | 28 Votes)
Critics' list: #20
Biggest Fans:
Mullholland (#1), Matski (#2), Moonbeam (#3), RumpDoll (#3), StevieFan13 (#4), Rob (#5), ChrisK. (#6), Toni (#7), Schaefer.tk (#8), Jackson (#9), Nassim (#10)
Songs in the Top 100: "Pearly Gates" (#23), "Rosebud" (#100)
There's a line in "Slow Burn," the opening track of Kacey Musgraves' new album Golden Hour, that has been recycled, word for word, from her unreleased crowd-pleaser "John Prine" (better known to her fans as "Burn One With John Prine"). The song was an early introduction to her performing persona, an occasion for her to wear her irreverent outlook as a badge of honor and slyly boast: "Grandma cried when I pierced my nose / Never liked doing what I was told."
To those who have been eager to apply a rebel narrative to an artist testing country music's boundaries, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter's cheekiness and the campy, Instagram-friendly way she has interpreted the cowgirl costuming of her musical Texas youth held quite the appeal. For two consecutive major-label albums she applied her millennial detachment, withering wit and high standards for cleverness and craft to an understanding of how small-town life, a central theme in country music, can be both sustaining and stifling, how genuine caring and self-righteous meddling are both delivered with sugar-coated pleasantries. In her artfully biting way, she played with tone of voice, perspective and inflection, intent on showcasing the intellect behind her country-pop approach.
When Musgraves echoes the line from "John Prine" now, it lands very differently. "I can be cold," she acknowledges, before recalling her grandmother's tearful reaction to her facial piercing once again. This time, her self-awareness has taken on a pensive, lamenting quality, like she's weighing the relational impact of asserting her individuality.
More than in the past, Musgraves is encouraging listeners to hear the autobiography woven through her songs, situating them as the fruit of her finding love and getting married. But there's still a tentative side to her tenderness; she's a reflective songwriter and a reedy, temperate singer, often examining her feelings from a bit of a remove. Besides, she sees no need to separate sentimentality from third-person-perspective psychedelia, weaving easygoing eccentricities into thosegreat, affecting country and pop themes of missing mom and home and getting swept off your feet by a lover. After several years of making space for herself in her genre and the broader musical landscape, Musgraves is nervy enough to let her guard down and embrace her complexity, and that's given her listeners more to grab a hold of than ever.
--Jewly Hight, NPR
#3. Kacey Musgraves | Golden Hour
(742.935 Points | 25 Votes)
Critics' list: #7
Biggest Fans:
JohnnyBGoode (#1), FrankLotion (#1), Andyd1010 (#1), Greg (#1), StevieFan13 (#2), Bruno (#2), FutureCritic (#2), Mullholland (#2), M24 (#5), ColdButterfly (#5), Carlos74 (#6), RockyRaccoon (#7), BleuPanda (#8), Dan (#9), ChrisK. (#10)
Songs in the Top 100: "Slow Burn" (#13), "Space Cowboy" (#25), "High Horse" (#61), "Oh, What a World" (#66), "Butterflies" (#74)
John C. Reilly’s Dr. Steve Brule is a pillar of loneliness. He seeks out companionship through his crudely made public access TV show Check It Out!, a program in which he loutishly explores a tapestry of broad topics in episodes like “Food,” Pleasure,” and the source of the above quote, “Horse.” As he sets out to learn about an episode’s given subject, interviews are conducted with local personalities, during which time the doctor’s desperation for friendship becomes painfully apparent. He inveterately mispronounces people’s names and simple words, commits easily avoidable faux pas, and is quick to overshare information about his horrifying interior life. Brule’s entreaties for human connection are routinely denied, naturally, as his inept social graces and childlike (mis)understanding of the world inhibit any meaningful personal interaction with his respondents. So when Brule makes a comment like the one above about lonesome cowboys taking solace in each other in the absence of their wives, he’s really just projecting, hoping his interviewee (the stolidly even-keeled ranch hand Rolando Wolovich) will admit to feeling the same caliber of loneliness.
Dr. Steve Brule spends much of his life in solitude, unbearably alone and equally self-unaware. And this is the kind of feeling Mitski Miyawaki taps into for Be the Cowboy. The characters in her songs don’t lack the basic savoir faire of Dr. Brule (even if they feel just as socially stunted), but they mostly suffer from a similarly indignant loneliness. There’s the narrator of “Nobody,” whose opening plaint goes, “My God, I’m so lonely,” and soon after compares her debilitating solitariness to the destruction of Venus: “Venus, planet of love, was destroyed by global warming/ Did its people want too much, too?” On the succeeding track “Pink in the Night,” Mitski assumes the role of the spurned girlfriend, tracking the despair of a woman dying to redeem her overzealous affection: “I know I’ve kissed you before,/ But I didn’t do it right. Can I try again?” In these songs, there’s an urgent need for self-flagellation and course correction, but unfortunately the moment for rectification has passed.
Elsewhere, however, Cowboy is a work of unalloyed confidence. “Me and my husband, we’re doing better/[…] We’re sticking together,” Mitski proclaims on the triumphant “Me and My Husband.” On the opener “Geyser,” she uses that eponymous metaphor as an analog for power, verve, and passion, crying “I’m a geyser/ Feel it bubbling from below.” The characters in these songs range from craven and nebbish to empowered and vivacious, but it’s through the lens of Mitski’s songwriting that not one of these perspectives ever feels contrived or underdeveloped.
Miyawaki began her music career with 2012’s Lush, which somehow adeptly melded elements of jazz, chamber pop, and rock together, so Cowboy’s grab bag of genres isn’t necessarily unexpected. Nor is the way she reassembles the multitude of disparate styles. Instead, what’s interesting about this album is the way she goes about vivisecting hallmarks of other genres in indie rock’s periphery. The sickly, domineering synth lines in “Washing Machine Heart,” wrested from the songs of Lady Gaga’s early albums and other mid-00s pop hits, feel unexpected and fresh when removed from the sleek dance floor bombast with which they’re so often associated. Likewise, the staid piano on “Come into the Water” sounds much less dramatic and more atmospheric than the power ballads of The Fray and Train that it’s been cribbed from. The album is a bricolage of small musical samples, but centering Cowboy’s varied sounds is the through line of Mitski’s singular voice.
The title Be the Cowboy seems, at first glance, like a strange, highly specific way of saying, “man up.” After all, the American cowboy has been mythologized into a paragon of honor, individualism, and old school masculinity, with men like John Wayne cast as its figurehead. But this image of the cowboy is complicated by the fact that Wayne’s real name is Marion and that he spent his time wearing makeup and costumes onscreen and propagating white supremacist ideology offscreen. The cowboy, then, is a symbol of duality, at once virtuous and perverse. So Mitski explores a bifurcation of her own here: the vulnerability of self-proclaimed loneliness and the innate empowerment of autonomy and solitude.
Cowboy’s cover art features Mitski sporting bright red lipstick and a neutral-colored swim cap, while the hand of an individual out of the shot looms over to titivate her eyelashes. She looks away, defiantly, fixing her gaze instead on us, intimidatingly, almost accusatorily. Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer. She’s singing for herself, but also for her audience. There’s a little Mitski in us all, pilgrim.
--Jordan Bassett, NME
#2. Mitski | Be the Cowboy
(755.790 Points | 29 Votes)
Critics' list: #5
Biggest Fans:
ChrisK. (#1), Chambord (#3), Craig (#3), Schaefer.tk (#3), ColdButterfly (#3), Acroamor (#4), FrankLotion (#5), Andyd1010 (#5), RockyRaccoon (#6), Moonbeam (#6), BleuPanda (#7), DocBrown (#8), Matski (#9), StevieFan13 (#10), M24 (#10), DaveC (#10)
Songs in the Top 100: "Nobody" (#3), "Washing Machine Heart" (#32), "Geyser" (#33)
Janelle Monáe has devoted years to developing the saga of Cindi Mayweather, a renegade android hunted for having the gall to fall in love with a human. The meticulously crafted character is at the center of much of the Grammy nominee’s work, including the funk-opera Metropolis, and her subsequent full-length releases, The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady. But Cindi has always been more than just the narrative through-line of the artist’s earlier work. In addition to representing the “other,” i.e., any oppressed group, she’s also been a stand-in for Monáe, who took on the persona in real life, assuming the role of a messianic figure branded malfunctioning machine.
Monáe’s preternatural beauty and poise helped her look the part of an idealized life-form created in a lab, while her uncanny ability to fuse seemingly disparate genres and turn out sultry slow jams, affecting ballads, and exuberant bangers across multiple, interconnected albums pointed to a higher intelligence. But Cindi was never intended to represent perfection: Like a human, she is flawed; like Monáe, she is marginalized. The title of Monáe’s third studio album, Dirty Computer, suggests it’s a new chapter in Cindi’s story, and in the vein of the singer-songwriter-actor’s previous Afrofuturist-inspired masterpieces. But the cybernetic fugitive can rest easy, because her life isn’t under the microscope anymore. There is a concept here, but it is Janelle Monáe; there is a story here, but it is Janelle Monáe’s. And she’s outdone herself in both the execution of this vision and its resonance.
The Kansas City native has always had a knack for finding complementary collaborators, including Erykah Badu, Solange, and Miguel, as well as a desire to establish a creative arena in which to play with them (to wit: her label, Wondaland Records). For Dirty Computer, an eclectic and titillating collection of future-pop, trap-driven, and R&B-infused songs, Monáe’s tapped prodigious producers like Pharrell Williams, fellow feminist performers like Grimes and Zoë Kravitz, and music legends like Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder to help broadcast her story. But the album’s most prominent influence—aside from black girl magic—is the late Prince, who was a mentor and collaborator to Monáe. His death in 2016 obviously prevented him from making extensive contributions, but the Purple One did provide the synth line that gets under your skin in “Make Me Feel.” And the joy he took from sex, creation, and flouting conventions can be found in nearly a third of Dirty Computer’s tracks, including “Crazy, Classic, Life,” “Americans,” and the “1999”-inspired “Screwed.”
Monáe knows how to compose a panty/brief peeler (2013’s “PrimeTime” is most definitely grown-folks music), but she’s never displayed this kind of abandon before—and it’s utterly thrilling. Her newfound openness is necessary to tell a tale both timely and timeless; Dirty Computer is as much about falling in love as it is having your rule-breaking relationship denigrated or even outlawed. Or rather, “her” relationship—on tracks like “Pynk” and “Make Me Feel,” each heart-racing in its own way, Monáe makes it clear that she’s no longer dealing in abstracts. The desire she expresses on “I Got The Juice” is her own, as is the anxiety on “So Afraid.” The latter song’s church organ-like synths point to her small-town Baptist roots, alluding to her fear of being rejected by family and friends over Dirty Computer’s secret, which is symbolized by the “bugs” being flushed out of Jane 57821 (a callback to a Metropolis track) in the accompanying emotion picture.
Although Monáe sings that she won’t “spell it out for ya,” the multi-hyphenate artist came out as pansexual in a recent Rolling Stone interview—or, as she put it, “a free-ass motherfucker.” That revelation signifies the next step in her evolution, as an artist and an individual. Technically speaking, Dirty Computer is a wonder, deft and cohesive in its blending of genres, but Monáe’s declaration—really, a call to action—lends the album a sense of urgency. On Dirty Computer, the erstwhile Electric Lady loses the metal and circuitry, but none of her power or artistry, cementing her status alongside Prince in the hall of hyper-talented, gender-fluid icons who love and promote blackness.
--Danette Chavez, AVClub
#1. Janelle Monáe | Dirty Computer
(914.751 Points | 31 Votes)
Critics' list:
#1
Biggest Fans:
M24 (#1), Jirin (#1), ColdButterfly (#1), RockyRaccoon (#1), FutureCritic (#1), Moonbeam (#2), Toni (#3), ProsecutorGodot (#3), Whuntva (#3), Nick (#4), FrankLotion (#4), Bruno (#4), BleuPanda (#5), BonnieLaurel (#5), Dan (#5), Carlos74 (#7), Andyd1010 (#7), Mullholland (#9)
Songs in the Top 100:
"Make Me Feel" (#1), "Pynk" (feat. Grimes) (#21), "Americans' (#37), "Screwed" (feat. Zoë Kravitz) (#55), "So Afraid" (#89)