VMP Magazine

Country music in 2018 was in a weird place: After close to three years of dominance from Chris Stapleton, and “He’s doing things the right way” talk about Sturgill Simpson, there wasn’t really a giant lightning-rod album that gave the year it’s defining statement. The new Eric Church album was solid, but it had less heat than his revealing Rolling Stone cover story. Sam Hunt still didn’t put out a new album. Stapleton, Simpson, Isbell et. al., mostly sat the year out, or performed live a bunch. Florida Georgia Line had a song at No. 1 for a whole-ass calendar year, but everyone kind of shrugged about it. The main issue in country music — which has been the issue since at least 1963 — is that radio programmers are still being openly sexist, and refusing to play women artists for reasons basically boiling down to a bunch of men being afraid of women.

Without a unifying story, this list of the 10 Best Country and Americana Albums of the year doesn’t have a narrative arc of any kind, but that allowed for a variety of albums, from pop country kings and legends to Canadian boys making C&W records and three women reuniting to deliver their best album yet. Here are the 10 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2018.

Last year, I opened our Best Albums of 2016 list with an essay about how I was glad the era of the genre provincialist was dying. That, in 2016 (and 2017, natch), it was not possible to pretend like all of the best music available in a given year came from a single genre of music.

This year, looking at our list of the 30 Best Albums of 2017 as compiled with ballots by the VMP staff and some of our writers, the thing that sticks out--besides the genre hopping--is that while 2017 might not have had a clear, critical consensus number one album--or at least one that Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Spin et. al can agree on--it had a higher percentage of albums that were amazing than most years I can remember. But it also makes me wonder if along with the days of genre provincialism being diminished, that maybe the opportunity for an album to demonstrably stake its place--like say, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy did in 2010--as that year’s most daring, capital A album has also disappeared.

Because streaming services have given us everything all the time, they also make us more aware of new releases than we’ve probably ever been. And because albums don’t leak like they used to--which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned--we all get new albums at the same time. Which means there’s a weekly scramble to assess what is new, and worth your time. And because every week there’s a turn over at the top of Apple Music and Spotify, it’s hard to not feel like you’re missing out on something if you spend a second week worshipping at the altar of a now-old new album you think is great. So things fall into a pile of things you liked, and then you move onto the flashy new thing. The shelf life for an album at the top of the charts, your hearts, and your queue has gotten smaller than it's maybe ever been.

In some ways though, that new reality makes lists like this--and every other Best Albums of 2017 list you’ve read this month already--more important. Because I’ve always looked at these as an opportunity to learn where someone/someplace ranks the albums they think are important, and use them as a roadmap for my own reassessment of an album I maybe only streamed half of. The din is only getting louder; let us cut down some surface noise for you and help you enjoy the music of 2017 in a new light. These 30 albums are the ones we think were the best of that endless roar of new music.--Andrew Winistorfer

When introducing our Most Overlooked Albums Of 2016 list, we noted that there are something like 75,000 albums released every year, or at least that’s the best guesstimate. To keep up with everything, you’d need to listen to more than 1400 albums a week, which is a physical impossibility even if you capped every album at 20 minutes. Which is to say: you do not have enough time to listen to every album you want to--or should want to-- in any given period of time. Life is short, time is limited, and you can only spend so much of your waking life listening to music.

The goal of any overlooked albums list--this one included--is to try to pause the deluge of those 75,000 albums coming down the pike, and take some time to re-appreciate some albums that, for a variety of reasons (be they genre, timing, promotion, or otherwise) didn’t get the appreciation we think they deserved. We can’t say for sure that these albums will replace the number one on your list of favorite albums of 2017, but they all deserve more time to be considered than they got.

And like last year, we believe in these 15 titles so much, we’re carrying all of them in the Vinyl Me, Please store right now. You can purchase them by clicking the image below.

Without further ado, here are the 15 Most Overlooked Albums of 2017, as picked by the Vinyl Me, Please staff.

Digital/Divide is our monthly electronic column. These are the 10 best electronic albums of 2017.

First Of The Month is our monthly rap column. These are the 15 best rap albums of 2017.

We introduce The Reluctant Jazzbo, our new quarterly jazz column--which will round-up new release jazz--via this, the 10 best jazz albums of 2017.

Deaf Forever is our monthly metal column. These are the 20 best metal albums of 2017.

Last year, I opened this list with a discussion of 2016 was the year that bro-country was forced to reckon with itself, that songs about short shorts and pickups would no longer make you a top country star. 2017 has mostly borne that out; the bros have given way to a gentler shade of male, like singers like Brett Eldredge and Chris Young, guys who won’t sing about Fireball or any other rail whiskey product.

But ultimately, it was a quiet year for country music. Chris Stapleton dominated the charts for more than a quarter of the year, but there wasn’t a lodestar album that dominated the conversation this year, and it seemed like every other week boasted a country album that needed attention. Shania came back, Kane Brown came up, and everybody from Jason Isbell to Brad Paisley took their time at number one.

If there was a debate to be had, it was over that recurs every 10 years debate over who gets to make country music, like it wasn’t decided at least by the moment that Merle “Born In California” Haggard became one of the genre’s biggest stars in the ‘60s that literally anyone anywhere can be “authentic” country. A bunch of performers found themselves embroiled in debates that were litigated in Rolling Stone Country and elsewhere over who qualifies as getting to make “real” country. It’s a debate that’s been had over and over--CMA Entertainer Of The Year Garth Brooks used to be considered “inauthentic”--and the 10 albums below sometimes found themselves embroiled in that discussion. But this year proved, for the millionth time, that great country music can be made by former ad execs, and former models, and former Pistol Annies, and 22-year-old wunderkinds from Saskatchewan.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch a whole lot of late night television in 2017. I didn’t especially want to. The whiplash of the same comedy platforms that helped normalize the encroaching decay of our standards of dignity as a country puffing up a whole lot of hot air against the man who embodied it to record ratings made me at best uncomfortable, and at worst bitter and cynical. I was never in the mood to simply laugh off the appalling headlines that comprised this hellscape of the last 365+ days, especially as they were quarantined off in “opening monologues” from white men all named Jimmy trying to sell me another celebrity’s latest project. Last year I cited late night musical performances as “one of the last remaining monocultures of music consumption,” but as tensions over issues of real consequence become increasingly irreconcilable -- as our self-definition comprises more of what we aren’t than are -- the idea that the shows selling us “carpool karaoke” are going to bring us all together made my stomach churn.

Yet there’s a double-edged beauty to how the internet strips all context from our content, and that’s how we can enjoy our favorite artists tear it up on a national stage without first sitting through commercialized “entertainers” making jokes about political atrocities that in most cases will not affect them. The point is, late night slots are still a uniquely significant setting for live music (if no longer for comedy). They’re often a band’s first exposure to the wider public after toiling away in perpetual print praise. And when veterans return to the platform, they often do so to make a statement out of the space -- rearranging the narrative constructed for them with the powerful combination of simply a camera and their own voice. The following names on this list represent everything from loudmouth breakouts that proved personally validating during a year when our collective rancor felt increasingly unheard, to an expectedly expectation-bending display from the most recently-inducted legend of the form. These musicians continued to make shine the sole bright spot in an increasingly dim medium.

Despite reports that the publishing industry is retracting and there are fewer books that people “care” about each year, 2017 was a robust year in books on another industry repeatedly written off as collapsed: music. This year saw the release of a number of amazing memoirs and biographies, and music histories and compendiums of criticism. These 10 books were the best about music released this year. You’ll find books by and about country music, a music magazine, live music, underground heroes, and, well, the Beatles.

And, while you're at it, don't forget to check out the book we wrote this year.

It’s natural to view any “so far” list with a healthy amount of skepticism. “How can you judge that already?” you’ll ask, as you click the link. “Isn’t the end of June a more appropriate time for this?” you’ll think, as you scroll down. “This list doesn’t have [album of the year to you], this list is trash,” you’ll Tweet when you finish. And that’s part of the accepted process when it comes to lists; we expect it, and you know it’s expected of you.

But I’ve never bought the inherent distrust of list making as a process. It’s a brutally efficient way to take stock of a year. Given that every day brings a torrent of news that makes it feel like mere existence is on the brink of being cancelled, why not stop, this clear June day, and think about our favorite music of the year so far? We hope this list will remind you of some great music that came out this year, or, even better, finally convince you to take the plunge on listening to something you’ve put off.