It's finally happened. I listened to a stone-cold, balls-to-the-wall classic album this month, and was able to give it my first non-retrospective A* rating. You know that feeling when you listen to an album on release, and you just know it's a god-tier release from the first listen? That happened this month. Take a bow, King Kenny. No one came anywhere near you in April. The Rest:
Alvarez Kings - Somewhere Between - D
Czarface - First Weapon Drawn - B
J Dilla - Motor City - C
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Killing Tingle Lifted Retreats - B
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Solid State Mercenaries - C
OR-L's long list of releases on the Ipecac label is coming to a close, with only a few albums left to go. I'm gonna have to be honest, even as a big Omar/Mars Volta fan, I'm quite happy about that. I really don't think it's been worth it, on the whole. As a fan and a completist, I like listening to everything he puts out, even with this hugely prolific period. But aside from a clutch of genuinely great albums (Sworn Virgins, Arañas en la Sombra, A Lovejoy, Cell Phone Bikini) the series has been fairly average. There's only so many songs with him mumbling unintelligible lyrics that I can hear without it getting samey.
You know how your favourite artists often say they have a vault full of ideas, sketches and unreleased projects? Those off the cuff comments under their breath in interviews that leave tantalising images of albums not yet realised? You think about the great possibilities of what lies waiting to be discovered - What if it's the best thing they've ever done, what if it's like OK Computer or SGT Peppers, just sitting there, ready to be found. Yeah, well there's a reason why they don't get released. Omar seems to be fully clearing out his garage, and we get to watch the whole yard sale. Solid State Mercenaries is another formless, dull record from the box at the back of the room. Apart from Lightning Round. That's a nice song.
The King Blues - The Gospel Truth - D
The Best:
01: Kendrick Lamar - DAMN - A*
This is something very special. Kendrick Lamar has been one of the biggest stars of this current generation of bright prospects in the rap game, his 2015 release To Pimp A Butterfly was an ambitious, sprawling project that stormed the charts and topped many end-of-year lists. Following up on such a roaring success would usually be beyond most artists, but with DAMN, Lamar has surpassed the high water mark from any of his previous work. This is his best album yet.
Lamar's narrative string on DAMN is the best it's ever been. He weaves a highly detailed lyrical soundscape that takes in references from the bible, politics, music, racial tension and his own experience, forming an hour-long statement using a loose theme of the end of days to describe the socio-political turmoil in the USA. DAMN has those harsh vocal hooks and long, winding verses that Lamar has built his brand on. It's got the prophetic edge he touched on in earlier releases, but now it's right at the forefront. It's a dark, direct album that takes no prisoners.
There are catchy singles like Humble, Element and Loyalty that will be counted as huge hits from 2017 mixing with more progressive pieces like Yah, Lust and Fear. While there are several forms of music and style on the album, DAMN is different to Butterfly in that it's concentrated. Lamar has trimmed off the fat on his style to make a leaner, more effective record. I always thought that was a sticking point with Butterfly - Far too many ideas that didn't work. DAMN is different to that. It's short with no filler. It's far too consistent from front to back for me to begin listing any highlights, but the peak moments on DAMN are hair-tinglingly intense. It's a snapshot of a great artist at his zenith.
Lamar's style is hard to pin down, he's not strictly a mainstream Hip-hop artist other than by virtue of his success, but it would also be wrong to call him simply cult or cerebral. He has that righteousness and pomp that assists the finest rappers in delivering their message. His ability to mould pop-rap hooks with minutes-long introspective verses is the key to his ascendancy. His style evokes images of some of the greatest names in rap history - That direct, urgent flow you hear from rappers like Tupac, Kanye West, RZA and Nas.
DAMN will be remembered for years to come as the point Kendrick Lamar officially elevated from Crown Prince to the undisputed king of Hip-hop. DAMN will be ranked alongside the great classics of the genre, alongside the platinum standard releases from the legends Kendrick will have spent his childhood lip-syncing to in the mirror. More mature that Good Kid..., More accessible than Butterfly, More polished than untitled unmastered, and more angry, more vital and more relevant than any other rap record you'll hear for a long time. This is album of the year. We might as well pack up and go home, because it doesn't get any better than this.
02: Animal Collective - Meeting Of The Waters - B
Animal Collective is a fluid ensemble, with members interchanging and evolving with each release. It's a lottery of artistic vision - You'll never know what they're going to come up with from one release to the next. I was quietly disappointed with last year's mushy Painting With, and while I skipped its companion release The Painters, I was still well up for giving Meeting Of The Waters a few spins.
Animal Collective released Meeting for Record Store Day, after recording it live in a rainforest, of course. That's a canny summation of the album's sound. You can hear rain showers and wind rustling through the trees. The album is peaceful and calm on the surface, underpinned with an isolated psychological edge. Meeting is a solitary walk into the forest, it's about being totally alone and trapped with your thoughts. Merely 2 members of the collective are credited on this album, which underlines the disparate feel throughout.
I'm a total sucker for noise and drone on albums. When it's piqued by small islands of song structure, it's all the better. After the 13+ minute journey of the opening track, Meeting turns a corner into Man Of Oil, an acidy acoustic piece, and it's like you've wandered through the forest and stumbled across someone sat playing guitar. Meeting has a subtle playability, It's such a compact record, barely breaching past 30 minutes, but it feels long and involved. It's trippy, broody, dark and reflective. Its weirdness and bohemian sensuality define the sound of a band that repeatedly refuse to conform to categorisation. The Collective don't have any kind of official video on Youtube for this release, but it's only 30 minutes long, so listen to the whole thing, why dontcha.
03: Feist - Pleasure - B
04: Gorillaz - Humanz - B
One of the bigger anticipated releases for 2017, Humanz was dropped as the usual art-and-music double whammy from Gorillaz, one of the finest and most unique pop bands of the last 25 years. With Blur being on recording hiatus for most of the last decade, Gorillaz is arguably Damon Albarn's most important project - Certainly the most popular, and since the post-Britpop era was heralded with one of it's biggest stars forming a virtual Pop/Hip-hop/Electronica/etc, group, we've enjoyed a swathe of high quality albums, with image, art and animation just as important as the galaxy of guest stars that feature on each one. Their self-titled 2001 debut was verging on revolutionary in terms of execution and ambition, and they've steadily improved since.
Humanz is a bit of a damp squib for me, though. It's too disjointed to stand up to the better Gorillaz albums like Demon Days and Plastic Beach. It's a collection of songs which all sound fairly good together, but they could be played in any order and still achieve the same effect. Most of the guest appearances don't uplift the album, and there's no real direction or point to any of it. There's an identity to Gorillaz that fails to come out properly on Humanz. They concede too much creative licence to their guest stars, rendering the album devoid of a cohesive theme. However while this is nowhere near their finest moment, Humanz is worth a few spins and the inevitable world tour that will follow. Gorillaz is a project that still has plenty of mileage left, and if one of their lesser releases is this good, that just goes to show how special Gorillaz is.
At long last, here's the top 40 for 2016's albums. It's a lot later than I'd planned to do it - Blame a 2 week blackout with our internet connection for that. I've given a couple of retrospective A* to the top 2 records, they both are something very special and they deserve it. This blog is already miles long, so I'll just get on with it:
40: Kayo Dot - Plastic House On Base Of Sky – B
39: Nine Inch Nails - Not The Actual Events – B
38: Adult Jazz - Earrings Off! – B
37: Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo – B
36: M.I.A - AIM – B
35: Trixie Whitely - Porta Bohemica – A
34: Czarface - A Fistful Of Peril – B
33: Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep Of Reason – A
32: Iggy Pop - Post Pop Depression – B
31: Kid Cudi - Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin' – A
30: Roisin Murphy - Take Her Up To Monto – A
29: Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker – A
28: Animals As Leaders - The Madness Of Many – A
27: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Cell Phone Bikini – A
26: Avalanches - Wildflower – A
25: Metallica - Hardwired... to Self-Destruct – A
24: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - A Lovejoy – A
23: Anderson .Paak - Malibu – A
22: The 1975 - I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So
Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It – A
21: Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid – A
20: Band Of Horses - Why Are You OK? – A
19: 65Daysofstatic - No Man's Sky: Music For An Infinite
Universe – A
18: Bon Iver - 22, A Million – A
17: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Sworn Virgins – A
16: Melt Yourself Down - Last Evenings On Earth – A
15: Mystery Jets - Curve Of The Earth – A
14: Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool – A
13: Kate Tempest - Let Them Eat Chaos – A
12: The Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation – A
11: De La Soul - and the Anonymous Nobody... – A
10: BADBADNOTGOOD - IV – A
BBNG's 2nd year in a row in my top 10 is a nice surprise to me, a group I'd not heard of 18 months ago but now at the forefront of my listening habits due to their stellar bank of releases. The cinematic, polished Hip-hop beats of Sour Soul, a masterful collaboration with Wu legend Ghostface Killah was one of the finest records of 2015, and they've followed that up with IV, a more orthodox release for BBNG.
What lifts IV above the general hubbub of Jazz records and indeed some of it's very own material is the guest vocal spots, serving as islands of conventional structure that break up the general fuzz of the experimental, drawn-out instrumental bulk of the record. That stuff is the key element to understanding the wonderful creativity behind IV, but those guest appearances - Mick Jenkins' fierce verse on Hyssop Of Love, the only full Hip-hop song on the album, Charlotte Day-Wilson's beautiful vocal take on In Your Eyes, and the top cut from the album, Time Moves Slow, with Sam Herring's velvet-toned delivery - These songs elevate up IV to something really special. Certainly a superb album, but one for those with an acquired taste.
09: Yeasayer - Amen & Goodbye – A
Amen & Goodbye is the 4th studio effort from
experimental rock arty-New-York-dudes-with-crazy-names group Yeasayer. Famous
for their forays into several styles of music at a time, this album is no
different, kicking off with the huge, synth-infused epic I am Chemistry - One
of the finest cuts of the year - serving as the first song proper on the album.
In five minutes, Yeasayer travel through electronica, acoustic guitar
breakdowns and a children’s choir. The mutant vista of the song is accessible
yet complex; it stretches out its lifespan to a sum much greater than its
parts. Songs like Silly Me, Cold Night and Dead Sea Scrolls travel down a more
traditional pop/dance/anthemic groove, while Prophecy Gun and Divine Simulacrum explore more experimental
realms. Amen & Goodbye covers a huge amount of ground within the set
parameters of the group’s earlier work – This feels like a summation of their
career to date.
So it goes for the entire album, as each song starts, a new
journey begins. Baroque Pop cuts a deep vein through this record, and is its
only true leitmotif. The bridging track Child Prodigy attests to this, a
harpsichord solo piece with applause and crowd noise in the background. Some of
the lyrical subject matter is academic to an absurd point, which is actually a
good thing, as it adds to the classical high-art feel and helps to make Amen
& Goodbye a cohesive, end-to-end project. Amen & Goodbye is brimming
with hooks, catchy tunes and downright bangers that make the listening
experience one of the smoothest and most enjoyable rides of 2016, while keeping
the sound fresh and full of variety. Yeasayer’s quirky funkiness is spread
joyously across from start to finish, and makes them a shoe-in for the top 10
for the year. A delightful, unexpected treat.
08: Adrian Younge - Something About April II – A
Something About April II was an early year perk-up from
Adrian Younge, serial songsmith and much-sampled hero of the L.A scene.
Younge’s work has been compared to such disparately positioned artists as Ennio
Morricone, The Beatles and Otis Redding. April is as solid a representation of
his style as anything else he’s put out in his career, and continues a
remarkably prolific arc of releases. Hell, he’s released 2 more since this one!
This is similar to Anderson .Paak’s Malibu,
released the same month and lauded by critics. April was far more slept-on,
unjustly – It’s a supreme, expansive accessible Jazz/Pop record, as short as
you like, 13 songs all under 4 minutes, all sweet, radio-friendly numbers,
simple and polite. Intricacy takes a hike for the beauty of melody. Most of the
rest of this top 10 are well-known hits of 2016. This one’s a bit more
exclusive. Take the time to listen to it.
07: A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service – A
One of the most celebrated rap records in 2016 came from one of the biggest acts in the game, barely 6 weeks before 2017, topping many end-of-year lists and rubbing shoulders with the genre’s newest and brightest stars. There’s a new golden generation coming through, but it seems there’s still room for some of the old heads to have their say.
Thank You’s staying power lies in the weird idiosyncrasy of its content. Nothing sounds quite like a Quest record, the scope of their sound is immense, flitting from the mellow head nodders like Melatonin and The Killing Season to whacked-out nutty sessions like Mobius, Kids…, and Black Spasmodic and the straight-up experimentation from Solid Wall Of Sound, they don’t settle for an easy beat or soft landing.
Quest’s sound has an unmistakable old-skool edge to it, the intro to Dis Generation, the hook to Lost Somebody, the bassline to We The People, it all harks back to their signature 90’s sound. There’s a millennial glow to it all though, and along with the guest spots from some of the finest contemporary princes of Hip-hop, they strike a solid balance. Thank You is a worthy way to honour the late Phife Dawg, and a huge statement for Quest to bow out with.
06: Frank Ocean - Blonde – A
Blonde has that instant classic
quality, the sound you know will go down as the sound of the decade. The vocal
harmonies touch on Pop, Soul, R ‘n B and Hip-hop sensibilities, while
simultaneously transcending those labels and forming into something more. This
multi-textural distilled chill-out is Ocean’s bread and butter, he floats along
the lazy river of each song’s fuzzy-lude-dream delivery and watches as it
dissipates into the atmosphere.
Blonde is the album I think Kanye wanted to make
with The Life of Pablo. It’s light dustings of keys over vocal sketches, field
recordings and library footage. It’s deep organs and vocal trills. It’s short
compartmental suites that flow through together and form sweet little pockets
of 3 or 4 songs you have to listen to in one go. The guest spots are nuanced -
I didn’t notice half of them before reading the credits. This is Ocean’s salutation to life. As Ocean observes in Pink And White:“Like glory
from above.”
Blogger is very helpful and only lets you put videos from Youtube on your blog, so. Yeah. Here's the Vimeo link for Nikes: https://vimeo.com/179791907
05: Bat For Lashes - The Bride – A
Bat For Lashes is the musical vessel for the multi-instrumental efforts of Natasha Khan, one of the most talented and brilliant songwriters to come out of the UK in the last decade. her 4th record The Bride is a concept album about a woman whose fiancee dies on the day of their wedding. The Bride deals with the story from that point, all the fall-out and emotional turmoil that such a life-changing event would bring is explored and laid bare. It's a complex, difficult album, but it's highly rewarding on repeat listens, and that's why it sits comfortably in the top 10 from 2016.
It's tough to categorise this album, Khan's lyrical consistency and song(wo)manship makes it tempting to lump her in the Singer-Songwriter trope, but that's far too broad a definition for her work. At times, the musical content of The Bride is challenging, with some sparse noise tracks, but it's all held nicely together by the concept and storyline. There's no "single" as such on The Bride. It's not easy listening, or something you play in the car with your grandparents. That's the point, though. The Bride pushes you to understand the weight of passion and despair contained within it, and once you let yourself in to the lonely, depressive world of The Bride's eponymous heroine, you unlock a superb record that begs to be listened to in full, over and over again.
04: Laura Mvula - The Dreaming Room – A
This has been one of the most slept-on releases of 2016. I’m
disappointed that more outlets didn’t pick this one up, because it’s exactly
the kind of album music critics love. There’s a lot of styles explored on The
Dreaming Room, Mvula plays around with elements of pop, rock, funk and world music,
but in the end though, I think it’s best described as experimental pop. Mvula’s
song writing touches on a wide variety of themes and that coupled with the
fantastical magic realm of her music makes The Dreaming Room an irresistibly
rewarding album to listen to.
There’s a feeling on this album that I get while listening
to Bjork’s music. The way Mvula sings and manipulates her voice in
post-production makes it sound alien at times, and like Bjork, Mvula uses her
voice as an instrument first, and as a conveyance of lyrics second. This
attitude of her vocals being fair game for experimentation opens up a huge
amount of possibility.
With such a wealth of sounds present on The Dreaming Room,
it’s exciting to think that this is only the 2nd full length album from
Laura Mvula. The work accomplished on this album will hopefully be a taster of
things to come. It’s going to be well worth following Mvula’s career – She’ll
more than likely be putting out records of this calibre for many years.
03: Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life – A
The hugely talented Regina Spektor released her 7th album in
2016, carrying on her legacy of solid, masterful records. It’s another sleeper
release; too many publications shoved Remember Us To Life in the doldrums of a
top 100, or missed it off completely. Such a shame, but their loss is our gain.
The album’s intro salvo is positively rambunctious, Bleeding Heart starts off
as a blippy pop-indie cut and finishes with a full-on rock guitar outro, Older
And Taller is a summery, sentimental American Folk tune, The Grand Hotel’s rich
piano melody sounds like a warm 90’s Hollywood blockbuster soundtrack, Small
Bill$ stalks and undulates through a moderate beat, and before you know it,
Spektor has covered any number of musical styles and genres within 20 minutes.
My top pick from Remember is the vast, symphonic cut The
Trapper And The Furrier, the emotional zenith of the record, a scathing
monolith of a piece that begins with a haunting spoken word intro and builds up
into the stratosphere, at times Spektor’s hands slamming down on the piano keys
make you almost want to click the volume down a few notches to save your ears.
Pure passion.
The rest of the album follows suit, the key element binding
this together is Spektor’s magnificent songwriting, the fact that she sits
alone on the piano writing these tunes and envisions the enormous compositions
they are going to be makes the music that bit more personal. Her lyrical
content deals in the literal, metaphysical and downright cryptic, most songs
encapsulating all three. Spektor enjoys telling us about her personal
tragedies, she creates characters with back stories, and she opines on the
world in her own unique fashion. It’s all tied together sweetly to form a
bright and brilliant gem of a record. You gotta listen to this one!
02: Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered. - A*
Kendrick Lamar’s latest record might just be his finest
moment. From the high reached last year, it would have been understandable if
Kendrick took a break to work on a follow-up, after all, how can you follow
such a huge project like To Pimp A Butterfly? The answer is with untitled
unmastered.
What strikes me about this record is the brazen roughness of
it. Releasing it with no promotion and putting out straight on to Spotify
requires a huge level of self-confidence. The lack of song titles, some tracks
holding more than one song, the extended jam and studio chatter at the end,
it’s all so mutant and frayed. It gives the project a truly unique sound, the
experimentation is magnified with every dud note and odd key stroke.
Kendrick’s the brightest star in a golden generation of
rappers. To Pimp A Butterfly was truly magnificent, perhaps even era-defining,
but it was too opulent. That’s what pushed it off the edge of being a perfect
record. untitled unmastered strips that sheen off and gives us the goods with
no pretension and that’s why it’s so important. History may forget this quicker
than Butterfly, but after all’s said and done, this is the top rapper in the
game at his best.
The nature of this project means there's been no official music video release yet, so take a look at this superb live performance from last year:
01: Chance The Rapper - Coloring Book - A*
Legendary albums are zeitgeist. It’s a vital quality of any
top-tier release to represent the time it was released. People go on about
“timeless” albums, but do they really exist? That’s a question worthy of
lengthy discussion, for sure. When a great record comes out that could only
have been released when it was released, that cranks it up a notch. Coloring
Book is one of those legendary classics.
Chance’s moniker may lead the uninitiated to believe that
this is a Hip-hop record, when it’s actually much more than that. Yes, Chance
does rap, but there’s also a full gospel choir on most of the songs, there’s
Soul and R ‘n B tracks, there’s a centrepiece slow-jam track featuring Justin
Bieber, all this and more to form a sweet, sunny ultra-feel-good album. One of
the songs is just D.R.A.M, a friend and collaborator of Chance’s repeatedly
affirming that everyone is special in their own way – “This I know is true,
when I look at you.” The album’s cover is a shot of Chance smiling and holding
his newborn child, the songs Blessings and Angels are about the joy of
friendship, love and fatherhood. Joy is the theme throughout Coloring Book, and
it never lets up.
One of my absolute favourite songs from 2016 is on this
album, Same Drugs, a sentimental nostalgic piano-led piece about growing up and
seeing old friends after years apart – “Wendy you’ve changed, Wendy you’ve
aged/I thought you’d never grow up, I thought you’d never…/Window closed, Wendy
got old/I was too late – A shadow of what I once was.” Childhood is so fleeting
in memory. A genuinely spine-tingling moment.
With the tumultuous socio-political situation in the USA
becoming more chaotic by the day, it’s comforting to see such a positive record
released by a prominent artist from the POC community. Dark times tend to bring
out the best in good people. Coloring Book implores and obligates you to be the
finest person you can be. An album that spans so many genres, has a unique
sound and has such a peaceful message has to top the list of 2016’s albums.
Another month, another 10 albums, another blog I should've done a week ago. Life's busy, yanno? Mainly good busy, but busy nonetheless. I've gone days and days on end in April not listening to music, which is mad for me because I usually spin 5 or 6 albums a day at least. So it's taken me forever to listen to everything I wanted, and I still have stuff left over I want to try. I'm determined to get April's in on time. Hopefully.
Anyway.
March was interesting, wasn't it? Some steady releases by established artists, pleasant surprises by virtual-unknowns and one big hitter dropping a mixtape on us without warning. It's all here. One album I loved and was all ready to give a super thumbs-up and a big shiny "A" to was Thao and The Get Down Stay Down's 2013 release We The Common, which I had downloaded accidentally while trying to find their latest album A Man Down. It's really good though, and would have come 2nd in my top 5. Chalk that one down to me getting old (or being drunk when I downloaded it at 3am.) Without any further ado:
The Rest:
3 Doors Down - Us And The Night - C
Rock
Denzel Curry - Imperial - C
Hardcore Hip hop
Hælos - Full Circle - C
Electronic/Pop
Matt Corby - Telluric - B
R 'n B/Soul
Nada Surf - You Know Who You Are - B
Indie/Rock
The Best:
01: Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered. - A
Alternative Hip hop/Experimental Hip hop
Kendrick Lamar's status as the golden boy of Hip hop was cemented with last year's ubiquitous list-topper To Pimp A Butterfly, and he's been rocketing upwards ever since. It's a testament to how vital Lamar is when he drops an unmastered mixtape of out-takes and studio jams from the Butterfly sessions with no prior official promotion and it goes straight in at number one on the billboard charts, selling 200,000+ units in under 2 months. King Kunta.
The music itself, as one would expect from such eclectic sessions is a kaleidoscope of themes and moods. Lamar is as much at home with his socio-political remonstrations as with his hood rhetoric. As always, his flow is urgent and direct, and yet at times verging on surreal. The clear radio play choices are the start of Untitled 07, (released as a single titled Levitate) and the final track Untitled 08, the latter dubbed Blue Faces by fans. I'm also totally enamoured with Untitled 03's superb mix of cerebral synth stabs and horn trills mixed with female vocal hooks.
Untitled 06 is a summery happy tune with Cee Loo Green's distinctive voice leading the way before Lamar drops in. You can tell he's got a smile on his face as he cruises through his lyrics like he's reciting his ABCs. This song, like the rest, is effortless. The bulk of the tracks feature a welcome continuation of the collaboration between Lamar and Thundercat, whose wandering basslines and soulful voice are a signature element of Lamar's music. In truth, I could keep going for a while. I don't want to pick out all the bits I like here, because it'd be all of it.
If Butterfly was the arena show, with an adoring crowd of thousands following every move and screaming back the lyrics to the band as they play through a tightly wound, well-versed setlist, then untitled... is the chilled out blunts and beers jam at the after party. Everything's more relaxed, and that's why it's so much more accessible than Butterfly. untitled... asks nothing, assumes nothing, and just gives. It's a representation of an artist at the peak of his game, in the rawest form possible. It's my favourite record of the year so far.
I can't find a proper video for anything from the album but this performance on US TV is AMAZING:
02: Iggy Pop - Post Pop Depression - B
Alternative Rock
Iggy Pop has been around since the dawn of recorded time, and even though I've never been much of a fan, he's one of those artists that I feel compelled to listen to whenever I get the chance. Post Pop Depression is billed as an Iggy solo record, but it would be fairer to label this as a supergroup, as Iggy's band contains members from some of the great princes (and future kings) of this generation's rock royalty.
The result of a collaboration between such artists is as you'd expect - Effective simplistic drum patterns from Matt Helders, triple-decade matured riffs and into-the-hollow weird trippyness from Josh Homme and Dean Fertita, all sitting comfortably underneath Iggy's American poet polemica. Post... is a textbook walk along the path most trodden, using the tried and tested rock four piece method, with almost a century of professional experience between them to give it that cask-aged, instant vintage quality.
Homme will have grown up with Iggy Pop and The Stooges as idols, and I can only imagine the feeling it is to perform with such a legend of your younger years. He steps back and gives Iggy the space his elder-statesmanlike level of rock stardom demands, so the usual ego nonsense that often afflicts such super-pairings is not present. This is definitely Iggy's project, but Homme is always in the passenger seat, pushing harmonised vocals and his signature guitar style in wherever he can.
The lads aren't pulling up any trees with Post...; every single member of this project has bigger fish to fry, and I suspect the A material has been put on ice for their respective main projects. (Come on, Matt, when's the next Monkeys album out?) While Post... doesn't advance any of it's creator's careers much, it certainly hasn't pushed them back, and the high quality of musicianship and songwriting on this record is well worth the 42 minutes. They certainly had a lot of fun doing this, and that's always a good thing. Post... is an extremely listenable and accessible record, and I think it will appear on many end of year best-of lists.
03: The Body - No One Deserves Happiness - B
Experimental Rock/Post-Metal
04: Underworld - Barbara, Barbara, We Face A Shining Future - B
Electronic/House/Ambient
05: The Joy Formidable - Hitch - B
Indie/Rock
The Welsh soundwall churners return after a 3 year break with the suitably epic Hitch. This is a good record that would be great if the fat were trimmed. At well over an hour, and with most of its songs in excess of 5 minutes, Hitch keeps on going and going and going. And then it goes some more. The compositions are huge, and there's plenty of room for reverb-laden guitar and pounding drums while the band are at full stretch.
Singer Ritzy Bryan does well to float strong vocal melodies over the noise, and the overall catchy and friendly qualities that abound on Hitch are pleasant to behold. The band are a perfectly balanced 3 piece; the sound is simultaneously uncluttered yet full.
Songs such as The Last Thing On My Mind and A Second In White are nice enough, but there's just too much to chew on, and the later acoustic tracks come too late to stave off the musical equivalent of eating an entire chocolate cake to yourself. They have a good, original sound, but it's not worth every minute of Hitch.
So that's March. There's about a million things I want to listen to from April, which I have already begun doing. You might even get a top 6. How about that. Tell me what you think, anyway. Should Kendrick be so lauded? Is Denzel Curry actually the king of Hip hop? When is the next Arctic Monkeys album gonna drop, eh? See you in a few weeks.
Here it is. Top 20 albums of 2015. Read 'em and weep.
A quick note on my rating system can be found here.
As this post is already about 4 miles long, I'm not gonna do an intro. Just the list. Agree or disagree? Let me know:
20: Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper - (B)
Psychedelia/Jazz/Electronic Pop
19: Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell(B)
Acoustic Folk/Singer-Songwriter
Haunting, emotional and personal. This album has topped many critic's lists, but I feel that it doesn't showcase all of Stevens' abilities and talents. It's almost impossible to write music of this quality when it's just one guy and a guitar, and sometimes this album feels samey. Nevertheless, his lyrical quality and songmanship shine through on a stark record of reflection, love and loss. Some of this is beige wallpaper, some is tear-jerkingly emotional. It all melds together nicely and flows on down the stream.
18: Squarepusher - Damogen Furies - (B)
EDM/Drill 'n Bass/Electronic
17: Faith No More - Sol Invictus(B) Art Rock/Experimental Metal/Symphonic
16: Foals - What Went Down(B)
Indie/Alternative
15: Czarface - Every Hero Needs A Villain(B)
Hip-Hop
The sleeper record of 2015. I don't think I've seen this on anyone's best-of. Such a shame, as Inspectah Deck, one of the unsung heroes of the Wu-Tang empire brings a full force of intelligent rap, paired with 7L and Esoteric across simple, 90's-era beats. The pace and veracity of Lumberjack Match is a clear highlight, the live guitar and big keys samples urgently mixing a scandalous flow. Effortless. With guest spots from MF Doom, GZA and Method Man, this one is a truly spinnable throwback to the 2nd Golden Age of Hip-Hop.
14: Tame Impala - Currents(B) Indie/Electronica/Pop
Advert-friendly smooth-edged Antipodean indie darlings push out an ambitious sea change for their One After The Big One record. Far more introspective than their previous try-outs, with an emphasis on the vocals and lyrics over long-winded soundscapes this time around. Synths are everywhere in this album; there's an 80's feel to a lot of the music. Most of the songs are based around lead-dude Kevin Parker's failed relationships, with a hopeful and often comical take on love and romance.
I absolutely love The Less I Know The Better, a marching 3 minute pop splurge and also Yes I'm Changing and Let It Happen, the huge intro tidal wave. Hands up who checked to see if their MP3 was skipping during that last one? Cause I'm A Man is the dud on here, with corny simplistic lyrics and an arcane feel of "When men were men" about it.
This feels a lot more personal and is a cold winter compared to the sunny bleached-out summer tones of their previous efforts. Kevin Parker is virtually a solo artist on Currents, which can be restrictive at times.While there are high points here, and the music is subtly complex, the record ends with a feeling of "Oh, was that it?" Lonerism is still the zenith.
13: Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress(B) Post Rock/Ambient
12: Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit(A) Indie/Folk Rock
A long-awaited debut from one of Australia's most promising singer/songwriters, Sometimes I Sit... is full of stories, ideas, moods and shapes, and has sat happily (and deservedly) in many end-of-year lists. Barnett takes storytelling to an effortless level. It feels like she's sat on the sofa next to you the whole time. The songs are hewn from personal experience, Barnett leading her band through tales of road trips, breaking up friendships and dreamy lyrical garden-paths.
Depreston is the top pick, to a sparse guitar backing Barnett loses herself in the emotion of buying a house from a deceased old couple, and wading through the fact that an entire lifetime was spent there. The lyrics to this record have a "less is more" concept, reading back on some songs I can't believe how short they look in text, but that's just evidence of great storytelling.
Some deep moments knock you sideways, and there are enough hooks here to keep a wandering mind interested, but what strikes me about this one is that you could put it on in the background and do the washing up or drift away on the bus with it coming through your ears, listening to every word. An album that brings more than the sum of it's parts.
11: Swervedriver - I Wasn't Born To Lose You(B) Shoegaze/Indie
10: Sleater-Kinney - No Cities To Love (A) Indie/Alternative
In a year of average comeback records (Blur and Libertines, anyone?) Sleater-Kinney's first full length in a decade bursts out the gate with the energy of their previous albums. It's like they stepped out the room for just a moment, you know. The return of the underground indie queens is acutely catchy, with impeccable pacing throughout. Every song on this album runs around in your head for days after each listen. I found myself humming the melody to the title track for weeks after 2 listens.
One top moment on this album is Hey Darling, both exciting and mournful. Lead vocalist Corin Tucker's lament is savoury and sweet all at once: "It seems to me, the only thing/That comes from fame is mediocrity." That's starkly honest, and either a stab at their contemporaries or an admission of failure. I hope it's the former, because this is a superb record. Songs such as Price Tag and No Anthems triumphantly soar along, and never let up or get dull.
The levels are up to the ceiling for the whole run through, and 30 minutes is just about enough. A good quality of production and sequencing is knowing when to stop before it gets too much, and No Cities... ends right at the time you want it to push out for another 2 minutes. Just right. A solid comeback.
09: Between The Buried And Me - Coma Ecliptic(B) Progressive Metal/Death Metal
Complex, precise and layers everywhere. This one shocked me with the quality of the songwriting and musicianship. Wins the award for Most Pretentious Album Title of 2015. These guys have been around for a while now, and with plaudits from such high overlords of Metal as Dreamtheater, they should be churning out riff-fests like this for years to come.
Some of the songs on here need a lot of patience, one of my top picks is The Ectopic Stroll, which jerks through several different levels of crazy, with 2 separate time signatures that are switched unpredictably. The psychotic piano intro with the swaggering guitar hook grooves out for 2 minutes before all hell breaks loose. The genius in this song is how they push your head under the water and only let it surface back again for that intro hook.
This needs several listens to bed in, so give it time. If you do, Coma Ecliptic opens up layer after layer of reward, and testifies to the kinship of a band who have been making music together since 2000. The Coma Machine is by far the best song on this record, but Youtube says no-no, so The Memory Palace, a 10 minute behemoth is your homework:
08: Blanck Mass - Dumb Flesh(B)
Techno/Beats/Industrial
Benjamin John Power of the offensively-titled Drone group Fuck Buttons took a bit of time out in 2015 to carve out this pounding assault, and the result was the tight bundle of skin and tendons we call Dumb Flesh. I'm not too up on my dance music genres guys, so please tell me if I'm wrong, but this is some hard-ass Techno, right? It's got piston-pressured synth cymbals all over it, balancing out the beats with an Industrial influence. The best dance music is one you envision traversing a crowded club floor while listening, and this does just that. Dumb Flesh is an octahedron crystal, pulsating condensed raw energy out into the blackness of space. There might be lasers, but you can't touch them, because the beat is pounding your heart off-kilter. The obvious centrepiece and quintessence is Dead Format, coming with all the fuzz and fury of the other 7 tracks. My personal favourite from this album is Atrophies, a welcome switch-up to a softer, kinder sound in the album's mid-section.
I listened to this one on a whim. A friend of mine is obsessed with dance music, and urged me to give it a chance. After 1 minute of Dead Format, I was fiending. The sound created is that paradox of 90's Techno-Futurism - We all thought this was how the world would be 25 years hence, but now that futuristic sound is dated to the pre-millennial era and coated in nostalgia. That's entirely a good thing, though. Big tunes and big beats make repeated spins of Dumb Flesh a breeze.
07: Tyler, The Creator - Cherry Bomb (A) Hip-Hop/Soul/R 'n B/Alternative Hip-Hop
Our misunderstood friend Tyler has been the source of several waves of controversy and hype over the past few years. The most mainstream-friendly of the Odd Future gang, Tyler's psychotic shape-shifting in his earlier releases earned him a reputation as a shock artist. Yonkers was his statement and breakthrough, painting a picture of a next-gen bizarro-Kanye, and though his work has been lauded for it's overall quality, Tyler has also been tarred with the gimmick brush.
Cherry Bomb is a little different. This is Tyler's mature release, his coming of age. Cherry Bomb plays delightfully, like switching through radio stations while cruising down the freeway. Tyler is a rapper first and foremost, but he has his fill of Soul and R 'n B sections here too, which add levels of depth. This album warrants multiple plays and will keep you coming back over and over because there's so much subtlety you miss the first 4, 5, 6 times. Lead single Fucking Young/Perfect is the top pick, a delicate fusion of soulful string sounds and earnest vocal display, underlying a sinister/comical narrative about falling in love with an underage girl. Add in a daft video (see below) and you've got classic Tyler.
The methed-out nuttiness is still there, but it's peaked. It's no longer a constant barrage, more a methodone-sweet dosage, with just a peek of relapse threatening over the horizon. Tyler is clearly moving away, morphing into his next stage. The goblin grew into the wolf, and now to this. Our little boy is growing up.
06: Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly(A)
Hip-Hop/Soul/R 'n B/Funk/Jazz/Experimental
Everyone's favourite album. Kendrick's stock is sky high in the rap game right now. He is top billing in an era of creativity and inspiration in Hip-Hop. Butterfly is seen by most as a masterpiece of modern music, a magnum opus for an artist who is just getting started. The styles and forms covered on this record are highly expansive, and some of them work incredibly well. Others, not so much.
While King Kunta, The Blacker The Berry, i, and You Ain't Gotta Lie are certified bangers, there are just as many dud tracks on this record. Who wants to hear Kendrick repeatedly announcing "This dick ain't free!" over a busy Jazz jam 4 minutes into the album? Does Butterfly need a bunch of perfunctory skits between songs that add nothing to the musical patchwork? Do we need to hear Kendrick conducting a pretend interview with Tupac for 10 minutes at the end of the record? There is so much self-indulgence here, and it's hard to get through a listen without wanting to skip the statements and random shit at the end of most of the songs. Butterfly wants to constantly re-assess itself, to constantly change into something else. If Kendrick stopped second-guessing and allowed himself to settle into one form, we'd have an A* on our hands, here.
There are more producers than tracks on this album, and I think it's a clear case of Too Many Cooks. Everyone wanted to stamp their brand on this one. The music never decides what it's going to do. Ideas, whether half-baked or fleshed out over months are thrown into the cooking pot, with little discretion over how it affects the tone of the whole album. This album will be remembered for it's social commentary and political slants, for it's timing in the wake of so much racial violence and tension in America. This is fair, as when Kendrick is angry and making a point, he is at his best. Hopefully, the boring, annoying and pointless flourishes that pepper this record will be forgotten. Butterfly, when riding on it's many peaks hits the best moments of 2015, and that's why so many have chosen to top their lists with it. Kendrick is an intensely exciting prospect for Hip-Hop, and has produced diamond quality on about 60% of this album. But there are just as many troughs, and if I have to hear "I been A-1 since day 1/Y'all niggas boom-boom!" again, I might have to break something.
05: Everything Everything - Get To Heaven(A)
Alternative Pop/Indie
4 young men from the north playing guitars. It's a tried and tested trope. Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, Courteeners, all fit for football lads, chunky birds going "Wooo!" in Malaga and men who wear cargo shorts in October. (Disclaimer: I am well into all 3 of those bands but. Come on. You know what I mean.) It's a welcome surprise then, that Everything Everything sound nothing like I thought they would do.
Get To Heaven is brimming with quality songwriting. The form is simple; a standard rock band set-up playing catchy Indie-Pop. The production is clear and crisp, everything sits nicely together, lead singer Jonathan Higgs' distinctive voice wailing over the top; warm, friendly and vulnerable. The album is based around the band's observations of numerous events across the world, with songs about the Arab Spring, Alan Henning and the UK general election. It's a testament to the skill and musicianship of the band that even with such dark subject matter, the album has a cheery upbeat feel throughout. Songs such as Regret, Distant Past and Get To Heaven are hyper-catchy, but display enough quirk and verve to listen to over and over.
The band list such wide-ranging influences as Beyonce, Radiohead and R. Kelly. Their music reflects this, lyrically astute, but also with an eye on how the music sounds, and more importantly, putting that first. One band I kept thinking of with this album is Talking Heads, an act the boys would surely be happy to be compared with.
Get To Heaven is so good because it is of it's time, both in terms of musical style and political and social awareness. It is good because Everything Everything have their own distinct sound, with clear influences from right across the board. Get To Heaven has some serious mileage. You won't get bored, even after 20 or so spins.
Jazz/Hip-Hop
A surprise list-topper from 2015, a collaboration between the greatest Wu-MC and the unfortunately-named BADBADNOTGOOD, a jazzy experimental/covers band, Sour Soul expands the remit of both acts into uncharted territory. This album is a classy statement of New York-flavoured tunes. Ghost is as distinctive and powerful as ever on the mic, pushing forth with all the gusto he had in the 90's, but now having matured into his 40's offering advice on such matters as religion, eating fish ("That food'll make you smart") and life in general. BBNG are his backing band.
Collaboration is the right word, as even though the fame and presence of one of the greatest rappers of all time tips the scales of notoriety, the band fill their boots and soundtrack a 32 minute score that is often chilled, sometimes grand and always fresh. The instrumental breaks littered throughout Sour Soul allow BBNG to showcase their unique brand of cool, laid back Jazz. There are big trumpet walls, subway train percussion sections, and there are also poignant piano moments, delicate keys dropping from the ether. This all adds context and depth to Ghost's New York drawl. He can be rapping about dirty gangsta dealings before the band bring you back down to earth with 8 bars of lush sound, soothing your brain and washing out the dirt like the stark morning sunshine in early spring.
The element of this record I love is the fact that Ghostface is laid bare for all to see. Usually, a rapper can hide behind the hood and cap of studio trickery, long-winded samples, skits, over-production, quality guest performers and so on, but Sour Soul strips all that back, leaving us with the raw energy and rhymes of a true master of Hip-Hop. The guest spots are sparing, MF Doom makes a welcome appearance on Ray Gun, and the cryptically-named Tree brings his brand of laid back not-quite-singing-not-quite-rapping vocals to the fore in Street Knowledge.
All in all, this has the hallmarks of a true classic, and though brighter lights have shone in the Hip-Hop world in 2015, Sour Soul takes it to a higher level. This album is consistent, produced brilliantly, and crafted to within an inch of perfection. Blammo!
03: Jaga Jazzist - Starfire(A) Progressive Jazz
Placing an entirely instrumental album in 3rd is not what most people do with these lists, but Starfire is legitimately one of the best records I have heard in years, and deserves any plaudits it can receive. This was my personal favourite of 2015, and I spun it the most.
Jaga Jazzist are a collective of highly talented musicians, headed by 2 Norwegian brothers, Lars and Martin Horntveth. They have been making music together for over 20 years, and the chemistry is obvious throughout this album. The songs reach newer and newer heights of glory, scraping the top of the stratosphere midway through the 14 minute epic Big City Music and dropping back to terra firma just as quickly. This patterns repeats throughout. The band set up a summit to a song, then trick you into thinking you've reached the top before revealing another platform of music to explore. The emphasis is on building, showing off leitmotifs early on in the song then returning to them later, only bigger and brighter this time.
The peak of Starfire is the swirling beautiful orchestral string section in the final 1/4 of Oban, again the layers sitting on top of one another as the emotion and intensity build and build right up, then dropping everything bar an oboe and a synth line for the last 30 seconds, waking you out of the daydream you've slipped into over the previous 10 minutes. It's incredible stuff. Starfire is like a soundtrack to a 70's futuristic film, an alternate Logan's Run that was never commissioned. The whole project feels cold, but in the best way possible; it makes you feel alone but safe; cut off, but with the advantage of the higher ground. The lack of vocals and lyrics make this all the more enigmatic, and by the time the Middle-Eastern orchestrations of closing track Prungen fade away, you're left none the wiser than you were before, but feeling a whole lot better.
02: Björk - Vulnicura(A) Experimental Pop/Ambient
There are many artists that are said to switch up their style from project to project, but few can claim such enormous upheaval between albums as Björk. She is simply one of the most creative, original and talented artists of all time, constantly pushing the envelope in terms of what can be considered music, and what she can achieve as an artist. Her 2015 album was always going to be high on this list. Vulnicura is nowhere near Björk's best work, and it shows how far ahead of the game she is that an average album by her standards can be so great. Vulnicura deals with the break-up of Björk's 13 year relationship a couple of years back, expressing a wide range of raw emotion and musical insight. The songs display anger, love, heartbreak, despair, hope, joy, lust, and just about any other emotion you can think of, often all in one song. This is a supremely personal album for Björk. She is laying her soul completely bare for the world to see, and some of it is very, very dark. The soundtrack is more often than not very sparse, populated with cold synths and unpredictable string sections. The focus is all on the vocal delivery.
Björk's voice is a true wonder. Now 50, she had surgery a few years back to alter damage caused by bad singing technique in her youth. While some purists would argue this has curtailed her vocal abilities, Björk still possesses one of the most ethereal and versatile voices in music. At times, she sounds like an alien, mashing together language and sound to create a white hot ball of emotional energy. The depth of expression in Björk's voice is stunning, and to my mind, has not dropped much, if at all. She is still one of the big hitters, a true living legend, and she achieved a superb album in Vulnicura without getting out of 2nd gear.
01: Kamasi Washington - The Epic (A) Jazz
The most aptly titled album on this list clocks in at 8 minutes shy of 3 hours, with not a second wasted. Kamasi Washington is listed as the solo artist for this record, but in actual fact, this album was made by a crew of around a dozen musicians. Washington is the band's leader. This project was years in the making; most of the musicians in Washington's collective grew up together in Compton, one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles. They made a point of escaping the drugs and gangs through music. With The Epic, they have done just that.
Jazz is typically an insular style, some folks can recognise the difference between styles, others cannot. The reason I have labelled this simply as "Jazz" is that it actually cover all styles of Jazz, and as such, I believe The Epic is an attempt to sum up the genre in one fell swoop. There are shades of just about any Jazz legends you can name here, (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock initially spring to mind) but Washington leads his band into new territory, splicing up his own style and releasing a fresh, wonderful compendium that utilises an already overpopulated scene to push Jazz into the next generation.
What tips this over the edge for me is the vocal tracks. If it was merely instrumental Jazz, I would have ranked it outside the top 5, but the more traditional lyrical songs on The Epic make it highly accessible, and are islands of calm in an ocean of trumpets and saxophones and solos. The house vocalist Patrice Quinn's performance on The Rhythm Changes and Cherokee, the two centrepieces of the record completely lift and elevate The Epic above all other releases in 2015. The whole project, long as it is, is executed thoroughly by a tight group of talented musicians, and what seeps through is their sheer, unbridled love and enjoyment for the music they make. That's what matters most in the end, and that's why I've made this bright, sunny album my top pick for 2015. Check out Cherokee. It's my favourite song from last year:
If you've made it all the way down here - Thanks for reading! I promise my next post won't be as big as this.
