An Underwhelming Year
 

As I find myself coming to the end of the 10th year of the period of my life that I would say I'm heavily "into music" so to speak and in turn my 10th year of listening to 100+ albums and cataloging them all into a list at the end (which at this point is almost exclusively just for my own sake as I haven't been active here or on tumblr in quite awhile, and the decrease in popularity of facebook has led me to not even bother sharing my lists/reviews/thoughts there anymore), I feel much more disenchanted with the whole process than ever before.

The end of the year used to bring a nerdy pleasure for me, as I'm sure it does for many of you, re-listening to albums that had a spark but I ended up forgetting about for one reason or another, combing through other's lists for underrated gems I might have missed, and meticulously placing each album into its rightful spot. However, as I look back on 2018 I've come to the conclusion that this is most likely the worst year for new releases in that 10 year span. It is possible I'm just metaphorically hungover from what I felt was a particularly strong year for music in 2017, or literally hungover from all the bourbon last night, but either way there's not a single album that really gripped me in a way that I feel the need to share it with others, much less 10, 25, or 50 albums worth listing. My favorite artists disappointed, acts I find middle-of-the-pack or good to average failed to hook me yet again, and no new artist really stuck out to me as a must listen.

Can anyone else relate to this? If not with 2018, is there a year in the past decade or so that just sticks out to you as a complete miss? If so, which one and why? Or is every year a great year for music and I'm just me being dramatic after not having done enough digging this time around? I'd love to hear some of y'alls thoughts on this and am definitely open to any recommendations.

note: I'm working on some hard data using my rateyourmusic account to back up the above ramblings with statistics and will include them later. (if they ended up serving my point that is...if not eh maybe I won't)

I've listened to plenty of great releases this year. Maybe expand your taste?

I didn't really notice. I mostly just listened to ELO and danced like a dork.

cool! very constructive! thank you!

I'm currently putting together a Mixcloud playlist of just some of the things I've enjoyed this year and
I'm trying to figure out how I can keep it under 5 hours. It's looking like it'll have to be in at least 2 parts,
so I really can't say that I can't find anything good these days. It's actually pretty overwhelmingly good.

You asked. 2018 and 2017 are some of my favorite years of music.

I think that the capacity and rate at which albums come out these days is driving more established artists to pump out lower quality releases just to keep their hat in the ring and not be forgotten. Apart from that and the general oversaturation of music that the internet brought us making it hard to keep up, I think that this has been a pretty great year. Had a bit of a shaky start but came into stride about halfway through imo. It won't be a standout year like 2010 or 2016, but I don't think that it'll be a clunker year like...1987 or some **** idk. There are about 30 or so releases that I'd say I love from this year and a few hundred that I like enough to listen to again, but it did take a bit of digging to find a lot of them.

It's easy to say that your listening habits or taste is the problem here, but I think that with the way music is evolving, this is a good conversation to have. What could be happening is that the internet is less of an open marketplace and more of a cultivation center for niches to become deeply entrenched and isolated. The niches are harboring the truly phenomenal works of our time as the better-known releases are what appeal to an ever-shrinking common denominator. With all of the noise, those niches are harder to tap into, so it takes more work to recognize the cream of the crop. Or maybe choosing your favourite kind of cream is the hard part. Oversaturation brought us as much brilliance as it did garbage.

Or just stop over complicating something that doesn't need to be. Music is music. That's it. If you like it you like it, if not, move on to another form of music. I don't believe in that "too many albums = less quality" ideal.

deep

Well it ain't somethin else