{"id":30867,"date":"2019-01-02T00:20:57","date_gmt":"2019-01-01T22:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lauramccullagh.com\/blog\/?p=30867"},"modified":"2019-01-10T22:43:51","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T20:43:51","slug":"music-2018-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lauramccullagh.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/music-2018-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Music: 2018 in review"},"content":{"rendered":"
MUSIC<\/div>\n

I felt a disconnect to music in 2017<\/a>, but happily things improved in 2018. While I didn’t listen to that many new releases I did listen to a lot of older music (mostly from familiar artists) that I either hadn’t heard or hadn’t connected with before and for a while I got pretty obsessed with music again<\/a>, which was a great feeling. So while the bulk of the albums I listened to this last year were actually not released in 2018 there was some great current stuff in there too.<\/p>\n

Here’s a collection of some of my favourite music from the last year, informed by my listening data from last.fm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A L B U M S<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was really looking forward to Interpol<\/a>‘s\u00a0Marauder\u00a0<\/em>and it didn’t disappoint. I played it obsessively for about 2 months after it came out. In fact repetitive and obsessive replays is what all my favourite albums have in common this year.<\/p>\n

Backtracking from\u00a0Marauder’<\/em>s August release: I spent the earlier months of the year still stuck in a bit of a rut of musical indifference<\/a>\u00a0and was struggling to connect to anything. I was re-listening to a lot of old favourites but they weren’t really doing the trick. While I wasn’t actively looking for recommendations I kept seeing people talking about A Perfect Circle’s\u00a0Eat the Elephant<\/em>. As it was the band’s first album since 2004 it was newsworthy but moreover people seemed to like it.<\/p>\n

I’d never been a fan, for the simple (and uninformed) reason that my only exposure to APC had been the\u00a0eMOTIVe\u00a0<\/em>album. Fifteen year old me had found it pretty boring (admittedly twenty-nine year old me agrees though some of the songs have grown on me) and being uninspired to look further into the band I dismissed them as “a covers project from Tool’s vocalist”. I honestly didn’t know their other 2 albums existed…so when I went to listen to a few of the new singles and then went back and heard the older stuff I was hooked pretty much immediately.<\/p>\n

It’s really weird because I’ve never been a huge Tool fan either though\u00a0Parabola<\/em> has been one of my favourite songs forever and I listened to\u00a010 000 Days\u00a0<\/em>a lot in high school…again, for whatever reason, I just never really looked any further into much of it until recently.<\/p>\n

I spent about 6 months going deep into a Maynard James Keenan appreciation voyage, revisiting a lot of stuff I knew and discovering the rest for the first time. It was awesome. And it really got me excited to be (obsessively) listening to music again for the first time in ages. Objectively\u00a0Eat the Elephant\u00a0<\/em>is not an amazing album in my opinion, but I did listen to it a lot and it served as a kind of musical gateway for me and for that I’m gratefully awarding it a top slot.<\/p>\n

The other 2018 release that made a notable impression on me was Medicine Boy<\/a>‘s\u00a0Lower<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>It’s a gorgeous album and another one I had on repeat solidly for a month.<\/p>\n

Favourite albums:<\/strong><\/p>\n