![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/wilson_negrito.jpg\")
<\/p>\nEven having shifted my focus these last few years toward interviews and feature writing, I still manage to listen to and review quite a few albums. In one form or another, I covered some 170 albums of new music in 2018. It\u2019s no surprise that a few have risen to the top, deemed worthy of naming as among the best I\u2019ve heard this year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Top honors are split, and go to two albums. Jonathan Wilson<\/b>‘s album Rare Birds<\/i><\/a> draws from the best influences and synthesizes them into something very much his own. And Fantastic Negrito’s Please Don’t Be Dead<\/em><\/a> redefines the blues (trust me: how you feel about blues will have almost no bearing upon your appreciation of this amazing record). It’s a Grammy nominee for this year’s Best Contemporary Blues Album.<\/p>\n The other nine are, in my estimation, nearly as wonderful. There\u2019s power pop, prog, art-pop, new-wave-ish modern rock and even a bit of Americana(!) on the list. Here they are, in no particular order. Details are in the links; I enthusiastically recommend listening to all of these.<\/p>\n Best wishes for 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even having shifted my focus these last few years toward interviews and feature writing, I still manage to listen to and review quite a few albums. In one form or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15686,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8,13,39,49,51,53,56,58,59,62,73],"tags":[3557,3652,2868,3380,3479,3411,3540,1508,3651,2047,3383],"class_list":["post-15684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americana","category-best-of-list","category-chamber-pop","category-indie","category-new-release","category-pop","category-post-punk","category-prog","category-pub-rock","category-punk","category-rawk","category-vinyl","tag-brother-reverend","tag-downpilot","tag-fantastic-negrito","tag-incredible-vickers-brothers","tag-john-paul-keith","tag-jonathan-wilson","tag-leland-ettinger","tag-monochrome-set","tag-ron-bonfiglio","tag-steve-hackett","tag-wreckless-eric","cat-6-id","cat-8-id","cat-13-id","cat-39-id","cat-49-id","cat-51-id","cat-53-id","cat-56-id","cat-58-id","cat-59-id","cat-62-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15684"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15756,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15684\/revisions\/15756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/2018best.jpg\")
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