#microshift

All individual photos in this post: Olympus OM-1n–OM Zuiko 50mm f/1.8–Candido 400 It finally happened. When I last talked about my custom Bantam bicycle, I mentioned how I was getting tired of the drop bars and looking to change things up. Earlier this month I dropped off the bike at North Portland Bikeworks for a cockpit swap. Gone are drop bars! The project could have gone a few different…

We’re approaching the end of 2018 which means we’re reaching that time when everyone compiles their year end lists. I do this every year just for my own personal satisfaction anyway, but given that this year I’m still in the process of writing a blog about my 100 favourite albums, it seems appropriate to have a brief pause to do a little write-up of top 20 albums of my 2018 too.

20. Phosphorescent – C’est La Vie

I’ve been a big fan of Matthew Houck’s music for years, although his recent flirtations with a more mainstream brand of country have yielded as many tedious lows as they have dazzling highs. This album is no different, but as with its predecessor Muchacho – the highs are high enough to make it just sneak in at number 20.

19. Ólafur Arnalds – Re:member

More experimental modern classical music using Arnalds favoured palette of stately piano, minimal strings and flurries of electronic rhythms. Re:member is more focused than usual though, and at times it’s utterly beautiful.

18. The Low Anthem – The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depth of the Sea

Previous album Eyeland was a bit of a flop; the five year wait and eventual unfocused psych-folk experiments meant the band lost a lot of the momentum they’d built up with the excellent Oh My God, Charlie Darwin and Smart Flesh. This album goes some way to correcting that, as its hypnotic, miniature folk vignettes create a wonderfully unique soundworld full of delicate acoustic instrumentation, watery imagery and squelchy electronic rhythms.

17. Ital Tek – Bodied

It seems since the release of Blade Runner 2049 last year there’s been an influx of moody, epic, noir electronica – although in reality it’s more likely that the soundtrack of that film just increased the appreciation and presence of an already well worn genre. Ital Tek does this style with aplomb, the skyscraping synths and depth-charge basslines creating a compelling dystopian soundscape for his sinuous beats to move through.

16. Wild Pink – Yolk in the Fur

Not the kind of album that I’d usually give more than a passing listen – Yolk in the Fur is all warm, rushing guitars, driving rhythms and breathy, swooning choruses – but something about this album keeps me coming back. There’s an immediacy to the songwriting, as well as an enjoyable depth and summer twilight atmosphere to the instrumentation and production that makes it hard to be cynical about. ‘Lake Eerie’ might be my road trip song of the year.

15. Boygenius – Boygenius

Yes I know it’s an EP, but in the year of the 20 minute album the distinction seems somewhat unimportant. I knew little about Julien Baker or Lucy Dacus before hearing this, and I had only a passing familiarity of Phoebe Bridgers’ solo album A Stranger in the Alps, but the combination of these three singer songwriters makes this EP stand out in a sea of generic guitar wielding indie music. Bright, expressive melodies, backed with tight, soulful harmonies and a gift of lyrical insights make each track a perfect package.

14. Shame – Songs of Praise

Gnarly. That’s the word that comes to mind when listening to Songs of Praise. Scuzzy guitar thrash, pummelling rhythms and a singer who shifts between throaty tunefulness, rowdy strutting and a baritone Vincent Price impersonation. It’s the slightly odd spoken word sections that mar an otherwise fantastic debut album full of grit and passion. Definitely intrigued to see where they’ll go next.

  13. Laura Viers – The Lookout

I’m not sure she’s released a bad album to date, and The Lookout is another offering of warm, summery folk songs and cheerful indie pop. There’s something special in the way in which Viers works with her producer and husband Tucker Martine to create songs that exude a sense of space, place and feeling, and this album is devoted to that craft in its entirety. 

12. Hookworms – Microshift

Psych-rock wierdos learn about brit-pop anthems. A glorious concoction of abstract sonics and direct rock melodicism that’s compelling and catchy throughout, Hookworms have streamlined and opened up their sound to keep the core of their psych-rock wigouts in tact, whilst bringing their knack for strong melodies right to the fore. Where possible I try to hold on to the idea that art shouldn’t pay for the sins of its creator and I’ve enjoyed this album a great deal over the course of this year – however, the recent allegations of sexual assault against frontman Matthew Johnson definitely leave a sour taste in the mouth.

11. Pinegrove – Skylight

Pinegrove are another band whose 2018 release has been clouded by controversy. Whilst the allegation of sexual coercion toward frontman Evan Hall certainly needs addressing seriously, it seems that Pinegrove’s withdrawal from the limelight, year long hiatus and quiet return in the form of self-releasing their third album Skylight has been done in an effort to resolve the situation as sensitively as possible for everyone involved. As a result, it’s hard to not to hear Skylight as a kind of rebirth: “I draw a line in the sand / Singing this is the way I behave now / And actually live by the shape of that sound”. The starry-eyed breathlessness of these songs is beautifully countered by the raw, earthy production – two qualities that raise their country tinged emo-pop leagues above their peers. Any radio-ready glossiness would’ve killed all the charm and genuine earnestness of these songs; instead here they make an understated but worthy claim for importance in the face of their acknowledged shortcomings. If nothing else it all feels refreshingly direct in an era seemingly defined by reflexive defensiveness.

10. Skee Mask – Compro

This is one of those albums that somehow ended up skirting my periphery for quite a while this year – I kept seeing positive reviews of it in the various publications that I look to for recommendations, but I don’t really go out of my way to listen to much modern electronica these days, as braindead EDM has somewhat numbed me to the genre recently (It also has a fairly boring album cover – I know that shouldn’t matter, but honestly, it really does). When I did finally get round to listening to Compro I discovered an album that was refreshingly nuanced and far more enjoyable than I was expecting. The slower, dubbier tracks have a subtle melodicism and textural variety, whilst Skee Mask isn’t afraid to make use of negative space to let sounds breathe. When the pace does finally pick up it’s with an onslaught of breathless, glassy drum’n’bass and vast swathes of looming, buzzing synth pads. One of the most intriguing and original electronica albums I’ve heard in a long time.

9. Ben Howard – Noonday Dream

This was a surprise. I really wasn’t expecting to like this record so much. Apart from the epic title track to his previous album I Forget Where We Were, nothing Ben Howard had done up until this point had bothered me on any meaningful level. Noonday Dream is a whole new level for him though, it’s yawning atmospherics and dynamic ebbs and flows show an artist of far more maturity and skill than I was expecting. Opener ‘Nica Libres at Dusk’ is a series of gentle swells like a breath of warm air on a cool summers evening, whilst the droning, suffocating intro to ‘Boat to an Island on the Wall’ builds perfectly into a funky, buzzy guitar freakout over the course of an epic seven minutes. Throughout it Howard sounds like a stranger in his own soundscape, his murmuring voice is nothing more than one of the many instruments that are weaving the sonic tapestry around him. I’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing where he goes next. (One thing to note – this whole album hugely benefits from being played at a high volume) 

8. IDLES – Joy as an Act of Resistance

Listening to Joy as an Act of Resistance creates a great array of different emotions – on one hand its powerful and violent, on another it’s tuneful and catchy, and at the same time it’s thought provoking, savagely funny and grippingly compelling from start to finish. It’s a bit like having a screaming argument about politics whilst hugging your best friend. Or maybe like being punched in the face by a social activist. I didn’t really click with IDLES’ previous album, it seemed a bit too stodgy and macho for my tastes and I never gave it much time. When I first listened to Joy I felt much the same way; but bit by bit the clever and funny lyrics kept me coming back until eventually their thunderous punk noise had completely won me over. I think IDLES are a genuinely important band – punk was always meant to be a protest, an outsized voice for people with no voice at all, and Joy as an Act of Resistance is one of the few recent albums that addresses the current chaos of modern society and politics head on and absolutely nails it, with all the ridiculousness, ugliness and hope on full display.

7. Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed

Damien Jurado seems like a man who’s been on a vision quest for the last 10 years. Originally starting out in the late 90s as a gifted songwriter releasing album after album of above average country tinged folk, in 2010 Jurado released his first of several collaborations with producer Richard Swift – a collaboration that reaped great success and sent him deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, culminating in Visions of Us on the Land, an excellent but overstuffed record of psychedelic concept folk rock. At some point during this period, Swift developed medical complications relating to alcohol abuse, and tragically passed away earlier this year. This left Jurado to self-produce his latest album; and it seems he’s come out of his run of hyper-creative concept albums stronger than ever – The Horizon Just Laughed is his strongest set of songs since St Bartlett, and quite possibly the best record of his long career. It seems his long term collaboration with Swift has left him a more confident songwriter than ever, with a few twists and production tricks up his sleeve. Dialling back the large scale theatrics, this is an album of high quality, melodic folk songs, subtly and beautifully arranged into a fantastically cohesive whole. It may just be the album he’s always been working towards.

6. Vessel – Queen of Golden Dogs

I’m a big fan of the concept of electronica and classical music colliding. This may be the 90s kid in me – back then the fusion of orchestral grandeur and big beat seemed to be the holy grail of dance alchemy, with acts like Orbital, Moby, Fatboy Slim and William Orbit all giving it their best shot. Very little music has ever managed to make this particular bit of chemistry work though; it usually winds up as overblown film score twaddle or uninteresting elevator music. Queen of Golden Dogs comes at the task from a very different angle though, taking a fistful of traditional stringed instruments and using them to create alternately dramatic, melodic or abstract textures in which his clattering, industrial beats move though like a riot erupting in the middle of a chamber quartet performance. The key seems to be that everything shares the same sense of space – although this music is all undoubtedly created using sequencing software, it manages to create the illusion that it’s all being performed  in one intensely claustrophobic environment; the clashing of metallic percussion, teeth gnashing synths and incendiary string blasts counteracting each other in incredibly physical ways. It’s an intense, exhausting listen, but it’s also original, compelling, thoroughly unique, and on occasion utterly beautiful – maybe this is the first ever ‘Baroque-step’ album? If no one else has invented that term yet then I’m claiming it right now.

5. Mitski – Be the Cowboy

It seems that as Hip-hop asserts itself as the dominant force in 21st century pop music, the genre we traditionally think of as ‘pop’ has slowly been undergoing a radical reinvention. Whilst there are still plenty of the huge, globe straddling stars like Katy Perry and Britney Spears still churning out the same meaningless glitzy dance-pop as ever, there have also been a host of artists changing and subverting the form this year, from the art damaged mutations of SOPHIE to the chart trojan horse that is The 1975. Mitski seems to be part of this movement, chewing up every kind of popular music and replaying it through her own idiosyncratic lens. Be the Cowboy moves through genres like pop stars go through costume changes – ‘Why Didn’t You Stop Me?’ is a blast of horn driven R&B, ‘A Pearl’ is all surging Indie-pop drama, ‘Lonesome Love’ is a country inflected lament, ‘Come into the Water’ is a space-rock drift, whilst ‘Nobody’ repurposes the same sad disco that The Cardigans perfected twenty years earlier on ‘Lovefool’. Barely any of these songs runs past two and a half minutes – it’s like Mitski has taken the core of every idea from the last 40 years of pop music and created a complete encapsulation of each one in a series of short, sweet vignettes of perfect songcraft. At the same time, it’s a thoroughly cohesive record, with a consistent tone and sound palette, and a lyrical concern that ruminates on self-deprecation, self-love, modern philosophising and good old fashioned romance. It’s an album that’s timeless yet totally contemporary, artful yet accessible, and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable listen from start to finish. More pop music like this please.

4. Abul Mogard – Above All Dreams

There’s a great story surrounding the music of Abul Mogard – that he’s an octogenarian, Serbain ex-factory worker who after retirement found himself missing the relentless whiring and humming of machinery and so bought himself some synthesizers and began making drone music. There’s also a large contingent of people who think this is most likely nonsense, and that it’s all a clever marketing hook for some otherwise anonymous bedroom producer. It is a hard tale to believe for sure, but it’s also too good a back-story to ignore. Whoever Abul Mogard really is, this is still a fantastic album full of thick, swirling textures, eerie and simplistic melodies, and slow but affecting chord progressions. Mogard’s drones hang somewhere in between peaceful and foreboding, never slipping over into complete darkness, but always drifting just on the edge of comfort. ‘Quiet Dreams’ continually crests and brushes against the edge of white noise but continually pulls back like the ebbing of the tide. ‘Where Not Even’ is like the aural equivalent of an Escher staircase, always ascending but never arriving, whilst ‘Upon the Smallish Circulation’ makes good use of a shimmering arpeggio that loops relentlessly as the waves of buzzing synths gradually consume it. The two final tracks make up over half an hour of music between them, breaking the sound down even further into a vast environment of suspended tones and queasy textures. It’s like the soundtrack to the best film David Lynch never made, always balancing on a knife edge between dream and nightmare, darkness and light. It might also provide an amazing soundtrack to Serbian factory machines, but I suppose only Mogard himself has the answer to that…

3. Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts

It’s been a hard year to be a Kanye West fan. It’s never easy at the best of times, but 2018 has seen a particular spike in his inconsistent musical output, his cringeworthy attention seeking and his deeply questionable political involvement. It’s getting harder and harder to claim that he’s just a troubled musician who’s been provided a platform to talk about issues that are way out of his depth, as he’s actively waded into the quagmire of Trump MAGA hats and outrageous political commentary. But even ignoring all of that, his musical output has been mostly underwhelming this year, as he seems to be doubling down on the Bob Ross style “no such thing as mistakes” mindset that he began with The Life of Pablo. This isn’t inherently a bad thing – over-zealous perfectionism can often lead to creative paralysis, and with that album it seemed like Kanye was actively making use of the freedom the internet can provide to blur the line between demos and albums, polished and ramshackle, finished and unfinished. Unfortunately his solo album this year just sounded unfinished, its short length and limited quality made it his most inessential release in years. Thankfully his Wyoming project led to the release of several albums, and Kids See Ghosts turned out to be the exact opposite of the underwhelming Ye. A collaboration with Kid Cudi; Kids See Ghosts is still rough and short, but yet manages to be 23 minutes of absolutely vital hip-hop. Opener ‘Feel the Love’ is a frenetic burst of moody synths, martial beats, dramatic vocals and cacophonous, aggressive scatting. It’s as weird and compelling as that sounds. There’s a great variety of style on display here for such a short album – ‘4th Dimension’ is sinister and booming, whilst the title track is an atmospheric trickle of choppy beats, swirling chords and the welcome presence of Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def). Tracks like ‘Freee’ and ‘Reborn’ suggest moments of life affirming epiphany related to the mental health issues Kanye and Kid Cudi have both been open about struggling with, whilst the closing ‘Cudi Montage’ is a transcendent swell of euphoric synths, layered harmonies and finds Kanye musing on the tragic cycle of gun violence found in black neighbourhoods of inner cities such as his beloved Chicago. It’s startling and reassuring to hear him speak with such clarity and consciousness after a year of otherwise confused, rambling political murk, but even without this context it sublimely caps off an album that manages to be textured, melodic, varied, powerful and unique over the course of a mere 23 minutes. It’s a great reminder of the reason Kanye still remains relevant after all this. It’s just hard not to constantly wish he’d stop talking…

2. Jon Hopkins – Singularity

Hopkins’ last album Immunity was one of my favourite records of 2013 and has stayed in fairly heavy rotation ever since (even inching its way into my top 100 list). Hopkins is one of the very best producers of his generation in my eyes, so just like many others I was awaiting his next move with baited breath. When ‘Emerald Rush’ dropped in March, my anticipation reached fever pitch; as its warm, glistening swells of sound and bone crunching beats sounded absolutely transcendent and scratched an itch I’d been waiting 5 years to relieve. The following album did not disappoint; on first listen its symphonic song cycle and epic, complex production absolutely blew me away and I was already convinced it would be my album of the year. However, whilst it is undoubtedly an incredible album, it hasn’t quite stood up over time for me as Immunity did; its ultra glossy sheen actually holds the listener at arms length to some extent, meaning whilst it is impressive and beautiful, it doesn’t have the same sense of envelopment and depth that made that record so addictive. There’s still loads to love here though – the skyscraping melodrama of ‘Singularity’ and ‘Everything Connected’, the percolating, glitchy twinkling of ‘Neon Pattern Drum’ and ‘Luminous Beings’ and the perpetual forward motion of ‘Emerald Rush’ and ‘COSM’ are all incredible fusions of brittle electronics and lush organic matter. ‘Feel First Life’ and ‘Recovery’ both stand up amongst his most beautiful ambient pieces too, the starry eyed choral swell of the former showing a big step forward from the moody twinkling of past atmospheric experiments. I’d love to see Hopkins collaborate with someone like Nils Frahm, a composer whose own electronic experiments would make his orchestration sympathetic and whose grasp of contemporary classical music would allow Hopkins to delve even deeper into the dense, hypnotic beats underneath. That being said, as it stands Hopkins is already carving out a discography that is knowingly pushing toward symphonic electronic transcendence, and it’s only because of the release of something thoroughly remarkable that this hasn’t ended up as my album of the year.

1. Low – Double Negative

I definitely didn’t see this coming. Low have been around for well over 20 years now, yet have just released one of the best albums of their long career, and perhaps one of the defining albums of the decade. Double Negative takes the minimalist melodrama that’s always been at their core of their sound, blows it up to vast proportions and then savagely attacks it; corroding, burning and disintegrating it until the lines between pop, industrial and ambient music have been blurred into irrelevance. All the trappings of modern music have been consumed, chewed up and spat out – the vocal manipulations of artists like Bon Iver and Kanye West are reinterpreted as the cries of the ghost in the machine, whilst the electronic flourishes found in the modern rock of Imagine Dragons or Muse are turned inside out – instead of glossy widescreen production, the unnatural sidechain compression, bright, distorted synthesizers and thundering beats are designed to disorient and degrade. The effect is like stumbling through a sandstorm in the desert only to discover the ruined remains of an epic civilisation that you once knew – triumphant choruses burst out of walls of static, towering drum crashes shatter through the clouds of crumbling texture, ambient drones whistle like the wind through broken crevices, and the harmonising voices of Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk weave through it all like two lost souls amongst the chaos. This culminates with incredible ‘Rome (Always in the Dark)’, the album’s pinnacle – the equivalent of finding Ozymandias’ statue half buried in the sand, with huge pulsing drums, screaming guitar solos and soaring harmonies flickering through the roar of distortion. The themes of despair and helplessness (“It’s not the end / It’s just the end of hope”) and the desolate, post-apocalyptic feeling fully match the fear and uncertainty so prevalent in our current society and politics right now – whilst it may not address issues head on in the way an album like Joy as Act of Resistance does, instead Low manage to capture the feeling of an exact moment in history – the mistrust and anger of a struggling society, the crumbling of an empire and ultimately the yearning hope for a better future.

“Before it falls into total disarray / You’ll have to learn to live a different way”

Breathtaking and absolutely essential. 

Hookworms - Static Resistance

...#MicroSHIFT #GravelBike #BikeReview #CyclingGear #BikeComponents #AffordableBiking #BikeTech #CyclingCommunity #BikeMaintenance #BikeEnthusiast #CyclingLife #BikeUpgrade #GravelCycling #BikeBuild #CyclingReview Source link MicroSHIFT Sword 1x Group Review: Affordable Performance for Gravel and Beyond The MicroSHIFT Sword 1x group is a budget-friendly drivetrain that punches well above its…

Today I really amazed myself. First of all, I tend to shop less. Over that, I restrict myself and stick to basic clothes. Today, I tried out clothes of MY SIZE, not squeezing myself into smaller fits and I looked good. I also bought an outfit that I wouldn't normally wear from home, but deeply love it.

I am unable to comprehend slightly, but I feel a powerful shift within me and I feel incredible. My affirmations, to-do lists, and reflections are helping me recalibrate myself to whatever it is that I want to create in life.

Defining each step is helping me clarify my way forward. I love it!!! One thing I have definitely learned is that the key to anything and everything is balance. Sometimes when one keeps working despite the opposition, it seems to drain one out. I am slowly noticing the habits that are energizing me and I am doing more of them each day.

Cooking is another form of self-care I am learning. I enjoy the prep, looking for ingredients, cooking, tasting, checking the aroma, working the textures, and in general just deciding what I want to eat and making it for myself.

I am assuming this is what it feels like to trust oneself. No wonder those who do feel so powerful about themself.

I now enjoy staying in a zone with open perspectives, where anything can happen. For most things have too many stories behind them, which are also true at once.