The 50 best albums of 2018, No 5 - Mitski – Be the Cowboy

The Guardian 0

The singer-songwriter’s remarkable fifth offering paired an arch humour with an underlying maelstrom of drama, loneliness and psychosexual dysfunction

• The 50 best albums of 2018
• See our tracks of the year
• The best culture of 2018

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published the seminal feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the semiautobiographical account of a woman confined to a strange, isolated house who becomes increasingly obsessed with her room’s “repellent, almost revolting” wallpaper, retreating deeper and deeper into psychosis.

The same sense of unease and gradual detachment from reality runs through Be the Cowboy, the remarkable fifth album by the Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki. The first song, Geyser, opens with an organ note: Mitski’s spectral vocals appear, intoning the generic romantic sentiment: “You’re my number one / You’re the one I want.” But as soon as “want” is sung, the music glitches, signalling that all is not well; like the geyser of the song’s title, the music swells, deep-set emotions rising forcefully to the surface. “Somebody kiss me, I’m going crazy / I’m walking round the house naked / Silver in the night,” she sings later.

Related: Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras