I listened to a lot of music this month. I'd anticipated some of the albums on this list for ages. Some lived up to the hype, others didn't. I was pleasantly surprised by my top 2 albums, as they came out of nowhere. I listened to them on a whim/the recommendation of others just to fill up space, but they turned out to be my favourite picks for April. It's always great when that happens.
There were several albums that let me down this month. The Rest is littered with records that I wanted to slap a well-deserved high rating on that turned out to be average. But this is why I try to listen without prejudice, because you never know which one is gonna be the dud, and which one is gonna be the bases-loaded home run. As always, the #1 album is a belter. I hope you agree.
The Rest:
Autolux - Pussy's Dead - B Rock/Electronic
Brian Eno - The Ship - B
Ambient/Spoken Word
Explosions In The Sky - The Wilderness - C
Post-Rock
The Heavy - Hurt & The Merciless - C
Indie/Garage Rock/Funk Rock
J-Dilla - The Diary - C
Hip-hop
The Last Shadow Puppets - Everything You've Come To Expect - C
Alternative Pop/Indie
The Last Shadow Puppets are part of a wave of culture that rehashes older styles, be it through art, music or film. The music they make is an attempt to capture the vintage quality that classic 60's pop records had. My issue with this is that it's dated. It's been done before. Will people want to hear this sort of music from contemporary artists in a decade, or will times have moved on? I strongly suspect the latter. Everything You've Come To Expect is an apt title, as the boys cover no new ground with this 2nd record. The debut album was good as a standalone project, keeping the hordes at bay while the 3rd Arctic Monkeys album was in development, and simultaneously giving Turner an alternative songwriting outlet. It was good as a snapshot, but now it seems that The Last Shadow Puppets are very much A Proper Band, and we may have many future instances of a new Arctic Monkeys album being pushed back for a year to make room for this project.
It's like a Tarantino film. Great fun the first few watches, and it looks cool and all the characters are saying cool things and doing cool things and wearing cool clothes but then you wearily realise it's the same aesthetic every time. Art for art's sake.
PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project - B
Soft Rock/Acoustic/Alternative Rock
I really wanted to love this one. When you're a critically acclaimed artist, when 2 of your albums have won the Mercury Prize and when you're known as a shape-shifting experimenter, there is a weight of expectation that comes with each release. Sometimes you meet that expectation, other times you don't.
The Hope... is a bold enough statement as it is; far too little music in this day and age is politically or socially aware. Harvey attempts commentary on most of this album but it's rather laboured and doesn't come out saying much at all. The musical content is dreary and often when a song finished I found myself saying "what was the point in that one?"
One good tune on this is Chain Of Keys, a classic slice of Harvey's gothic/country/effortlessly cool vibe, with minimal instrumentation and percussion that manages to bring a lot to the table. I think that this was the feel Harvey was gunning for on the entirety of The Hope... but it didn't work out. Let England Shake still hangs over this record; 5 years older and a much more accomplished effort.
Royce Da 5'9" - Layers - C
Hip-hop
The Best:
01:Yeasayer - Amen & Goodbye - A
Experimental Pop
There's a wonderful scene right now for several bands that defy categorisation through their creativity and experimentation with multiple genres. A few months ago I lumped praise on The 1975's latest release for being innovative and eclectic. Yeasayer's Amen & Goodbye is more of the same.
Amen & Goodbye is a thoroughly delightful journey through many different sounds and eras. There is syncopated percussion, a Baroque-era harpsichord interlude and floor filler basslines throughout the whole scope of the record, pulling you up and down without getting lost in the clouds or jamming out sections for too long. The whole thing is concise and snappy.
Yeasayer have big anthems in them, making regular waypoints throughout Amen & Goodbye - Silly Me, I Am Chemistry, Dead Sea Scrolls and Cold Night all gleam with the quirky catchiness the band are famed for. Amen & Goodbye is mature, intellectual and just a little bit emotionally vulnerable. Yeasayer have been going for a decade now, and show no signs of dropping their quality levels. What a great little record this is.
02: Melt Yourself Down - Last Evenings On Earth - A
Jazz/World
This came straight out of leftfield, I listened to Last Evenings On Earth mainly because one of the band members of Melt Yourself Down happens to release his solo material through the label I work for. It was well worth the punt. This is blissful Jazzy madness. Last Evenings... plays effortlessly between several different Jazz themes, the band thrashing through sections of tribal drum thumping and whacked-out screaming, maintaining a bizarre and wonderful intensity throughout the whole album. The energy levels hit the ceiling instantly and don't come down until the final note, pulsing and irradiating like a pagan festival echoing through the countryside on a bright summer's day.
What pushes it over the top for me though is the sheer catchiness of it all. The band pour melodies and signature vocal lines into every composition, and this lifts Last Evenings... above the quality of "Just another Jazz album." For a scene that is saturated, that has been hashed and re-hashed, this is refreshing and brings a new element to the fore. It enables the songs to run around your head for days. Melt Yourself Down are having a blinding party, and it's going on all night.
03: Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid - A
Alternative Hip-hop
Aesop Rock has cultivated his style to perfection over the years, drilling out intelligent lines over precise beats, proving his verbosity and spinning off 6 syllable word rhymes to infinity. Some critics say that Aesop does this merely to show off, but what comes across in his music is a real sense of self-introspection. The Impossible Kid is the latest record to bear his signature sound.
Good Hip-hop can be homespun and accessible, it doesn't have to be opulent to be worthy. Aesop talks through heavy subject matter, but is just as suited to lighter songs about ordering ice cream, ("Cherry? No. Whip? Yes") and loveable quirky nerdiness ("My first name is a random set of numbers and letters and other alphanumerics that changes hourly forever") that fills out the experience without cheapening the serious side.
Tunes like Rings, Lotta Years and Blood Sandwich are grand and eloquent, they are well written dynamic songs that push The Impossible Kid up a notch. The beats are self-produced, not an issue as such, but it does have a samey feel towards the back of the album. Some of the tracks are superfluous; Aesop kinda runs out of ideas after the 9 or 10 best tracks on this record. Nevertheless, The Impossible Kid is a solid, vital, cerebral Hip-hop album, and shows the gold you get when you scratch even the tiniest bit below the surface of the genre.
04: Mogwai - Atomic - B
Post-Rock/Ambient
05: Deftones - Gore - B
Post-Metal/Hard Rock
I'm happy with the albums from April. There's tons of variety in my top 5. I have a feeling they'll still be around the upper tier when I compile my year-end best of. May's albums are already giving me plenty of food for thought. I'm looking forward to writing about the Radiohead album, for sure. See you in a month!
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.
February's music made for interesting listening to me, mainly because I hardly had anything I was looking forward to. This made me listen to some stuff I wouldn't usually consider, and some of it was a pleasant surprise. Other bits, not so good. Once again, I'm really happy with my top 3, as all of them were artists I had never heard of or had thought would not be to my taste. That's the beauty of this practice; forcing yourself to listen opens you up to music you'd not usually consider. This one's a little late, and for that I apologise. Had a bit of real world stuff (drinking and job searching, mainly) to go through.
The Rest: Anchor And Braille - Songs For The Late Night Drive Home - C Pop/Electronic Animal Collective - Painting With - C Electronic/Experimental This is one I was surprised by, mainly because I expected so much more. Animal Collective have a solid reputation for musical irreverence amongst the Indie/Experimental/We Like Weird Shit community, and I was all ready to give this one an A and a big pat on the back. Then I listened to it. The issue I have with Painting With is that it's constant noise. There's very little let-up in terms of sonic dynamics, and it all sounds the same. Once you've heard the first 2 minutes of Floridada, the loop is complete and there is no more ground left to cover. This is hard to listen to, not because it's odd music or because it's complex. It's because it all moulds into one lump of goo. Sparkly, interesting goo. But goo nonetheless. I had put the far superior Panda Bear record from last year in my top 20. He's on this record, as with all the Collective's output. That's a better example of the sound Animal Collective are going for here. DIIV - Is The Is Are - C Alternative Rock/Shoegaze/Garage Rock The Best 01: The 1975 - I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It - A Pop/Electronic/Funk/Ambient This is hands down the winner of the Most Pretentious Album Title 2K16 and it's only February. That's the only criticism I can push on this album. It's exceptional. It's difficult to put so many different styles, forms and moods on a record without stretching it out too much and making it incomplete, but with When You Sleep, The 1975 have achieved the impossible. The breadth of this album is monumental, tracks like Please Be Naked are virtually at the level of ambient field recordings, while on the other end of the scale, Love Me, She's American and UGH! bring a mix of quirky, lucid Pop/Funk that will be ringing out across the street from countless student house parties across the UK this summer. I usually hate anything that's over an hour, or anything with more than 12 tracks. When You Sleep gleefully surpasses both of these thresholds and never gets boring. There's an overall youthful optimistic feel from the bulk of radio-friendly hits on here, punctuated by musical curveballs that push out the longevity of the album, and it never gets cynical or jaded. Shoegaze, Acoustic, Ambient, Pop, Funk, Rock. It's all here, and it's all straight from the heart. This will sit comfortably in many end-of-year top lists, and rightfully so.
02: Trixie Whitely - Porta Bohemica - A Alternative Rock/Pop/Blues/Soul
03: Textures - Phenotype - B Metal/Progressive Metal
04: Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo - B Hip Hop/Soul/Pop/Electronic Kanye's one of those artists you absolutely have to listen to. Not because he's that great or innovative, but because he's so ubiquitous. Kanye West is a global brand. In that way, he transcends musical artistry and becomes a form of culture in his own right. That's what gives him his persona, his cult following and what makes a million balding dads tut and shake their heads at him headlining Glastonbury. It's worth listening to his music based entirely on his super-celebrity status. Pablo is a puzzling work. Read the list of contributors and producers, and it's exhaustive. It promises a grand, sprawling epic, but in reality, Pablo is an intimate portrait. It sounds like Kanye did it over a rainy weekend in his front room, just him, a mic and some Protools. Inevitably, this leaves the sound lacking. There are a few choice cuts on here, but all come with a caveat. No More Parties In L.A is far and away the best track on Pablo, though the guest spot from Kendrick Lamar is washed away by the 6 minutes of West's musical dalliances. Even the rare and tender 30 Hours gets soiled by 2 minutes of messing around that passes for an outro, a section West himself describes on a staged phone call near the finish, as an "ad-lib track." So it stands for the rest of the album. Pablo is frustrating to listen to, because there's a real person trying to get out underneath all the braggadocio, but they're lost to the winds of pop culture personification and a need to satisfy the media strawman. Kanye leads the way in terms of how popular Hip Hop sounds. Everyone in the mainstream follows him, and he should get unlimited props for that. He is the pied piper, a Roman prince, followed by an adoring public. But when you strip away all of the bullshit, all of the "I made that bitch famous," all of the rambling nonsense, you get left with an average collection of songs. History will remember the legend, and not the music. (Here's where I'd usually drop in a Youtube vid with the lead single but Kanye has been very "Kanye" about this album and has scorched the entirety of Youtube of any traces of The Life Of Pablo. Listen to No More Parties In L.A, it's a good tune.)
05: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - This Unruly Mess I've Made - B Hip Hop/Pop Macklemore projects an image of a loutish frat boy that used to drink too much and cheat on his girlfriend, then suddenly woke up one day and thought - "Woah. Wait a second. I'm an asshole!" All of a sudden, he's attending Black Lives Matter rallies and holding his still-loutish frat bros to account for their homophobic micro aggressions on Facebook. "That's not cool brah! You can't say that, brah." And so on. While you can't really criticise the guy for wanting to project sincere feelings about the world, Macklemore can be gratingly twee at times. There are a few songs on This Unruly Mess that are genuinely great, Downtown is the obvious single choice for the album, while the intro track Light Tunnels is a gripping epic opening story about winning a Grammy, which is a hard thing to write about without sounding smug or boastful, but Macklemore pulls it off in a nicely humble fashion. Buckshot, another highlight has an enviable turn from Hip Hop god KRS-One. At the very least, This Unruly Mess's words and songs are genuinely heartfelt. A lot of the time it's corny, at one point Macklemore offers a song about how much he loves to eat unhealthy food and how that runs against his fitness regime, ("My girl's shaped like a bottle of Coke/And I'm shaped like a bottle of nope!") but every once in a while, a song crops up on This Unruly Mess that you cannot be cynical about. Even Growing Up, a letter to his young child, a song with Hallmark lyrics, a song that has Ed Sheeran singing on it, is too real and emotionally honest to criticise. There's some delightful piano riffs and musical ideas that make This Unruly Mess a nice, laid back listen. The overall feel is sincere, inclusive warmth, and who can say fairer than that?
The Dud
Wolfmother - Victorious - D
Rock/Alternative Rock
Wolfmother somehow broke the overpopulated guitar scene of the mid 00's, in spite of the fact they sounded like a rough mix of a poor Led Zeppelin covers band and At The Drive-In on a hangover. That was over a decade ago, and nothing has changed about their style. Victorious is their current attempt at defining banality.
One thing that sticks out so readily to me about this band is that although they have absolutely nothing new to say or to add to the pantheon of Rock music, they push every single note of their songs with the triumphant grandiosity usually reserved for the greatest talents of the genre. The immense amount of energy they put into being the soft play area of guitar music is exasperating.
Victorious contains every Rock cliché you can think of, and disappointingly adds no new ones. You have the hard intro track, the cut 'n paste single, the big anthemic ballad, and of course, the quiet acoustic one they play 3 songs from the end of the set at the main stage of Leeds Festival to 30,000 people. Arms in the air, girls sat on boyfriend's shoulders, mobile phones aloft.
All this would be fine, but - They have nothing to say. There is no statement on Victorious, aside from making the statement itself. To use a tired, old phrase, (but certainly relevant in the context) this is all style, no substance. There is no new music on this record. It's all been done before. Wolfmother are in an infantile 1970's cultural vacuum. Let's leave them right where they are.
So that's February. If you only listen to one thing out of this lot, give Porta Bohemica a chance. Trixie Whitely is hardly known out of her own fan base but is a very talented songwriter, and deserves more exposure. Tell me what you think anyway. Catch you laters!
This has been the first full month of my commitment to rating and slating as much of this year's music as possible, and I have a feeling it will be one of the easiest. I have been pleasantly surprised at the amount of releases I've wanted to to listen to this month, and better still the amount I have genuinely enjoyed. I actually haven't listened to everything I wanted to this month, and there may be some I look back on in a quieter month and kick myself for not adding. There's not been too many big hitters releasing this month, and that's left it open for other artists to come in and populate the top 5 with original sounds that some of you may be completely unaware of. I'm really into my top 3, all candidates for a top 20 spot at the end of the year. Each month I'll be ranking at least a top 5 with a video under The Best. Anything else I listened to falls under The Rest. I'm gonna also have a Dud section for truly awful records. None that I listened to were that poor this month, but we might get one in February... The Rest: The Black Queen - Fever Daydream - B Electronic/Ambient David Bowie - Blackstar - B Experimental Pop I know some of you are spitting feathers at me for this right now, but I just don't get this one. Blackstar is meant to be Bowie's last will and testament, the final monologue from seminal artist, but it falls short in so many ways. The music lacks any kind of cohesive direction. It's so hard to fit this in a genre, and not in a good way. The whole thing is grey slush with a few noodlings every once in a while. The intro and title track is 10 minutes long, and nothing happens for the first 5. This trend continues throughout Blackstar to form a whole lot of unsatisfying hot air. Bowie's voice had been ravaged by his illness and is presented to us through a heavy vocoder effect throughout the entire album. That's kind of cool and quirky for a while, but for 40 minutes? No sale. Lyrically, Blackstar is so abstract it hardly makes any sense. The album attempts a zenith with the ending duo of Dollar Days and I Can't Give Everything Away but it's so lethargic that it never gets there. It's a habit of most music listeners to give undue credence to releases from a legendary artist just by virtue of them being so exalted, but that seems to be the only praise this release can muster. One for the purists only. Hinds - Leave Me Alone - C Garage Rock/Indie Ignite - A War Against You - C Melodic Hardcore Savages - Adore Life - C Post Punk/Indie/Alternative Saul Williams - MartyrLoserKing - B Saul Williams is Death Grips for the more subtly-minded. He has a unique style of whispered poetry/accusatory shouting over heavy repetitive motifs that lends him some clout. Williams dips into many different forms on Martyr, but never settles. Each song feels like a bridging track in the middle of an album. You're always waiting for it to start, but it never does. The constant need to make a point gets grating after a while, as does the boisterous vocal shouting. His earlier work covers all musical styles and lyrical themes presented on Martyr, so this is superfluous. It's not a bad album, but it offers nothing new. Villagers - Where Have You Been All My Life? - C Indie/Folk The Best: 01: Adrian Younge - Something About April II - A Soul/R 'n B/Pop/Funk Adrian Younge is part of an exciting scene is Los Angeles, that of the journeymen of local music. This album is neither Soul, nor Hip-Hop, it is neither Pop, nor Funk, yet it is all of those and more at once. Younge hits the quad-point of these styles all the way through Something About April II, pushing out lilting gold nuggets of music. Each song is accessible and radio-friendly, yet deep and creative enough to keep repeated listens a must. April is barely 30 minutes long. You can plug this in for your commute and it'll be done while you're still on the tube. Anderson .Paak released a similar effort earlier this month with Malibu, (see below) and while that has some wonderful melodies and songs, the length is a little prohibitive and some of the tunes can get commercial and samey. Not so with April. This album keeps rewarding with welcome ear worms, a full cadre of back up musicians and other lead singers expand the music far beyond the reach of any other record in terms of style, mood and form I've heard this month. It's smooth, it's funky, it's dirty, it's exciting, and it's everything L.A has to offer right now.
02: Mystery Jets - Curve Of The Earth - A Alternative/Progressive/Post-Rock Mystery Jets have been firmly off my radar for almost a decade. They were one of those names that popped up from time to time, supporting bigger bands and getting sage nods from Indie aficionados whenever their moniker was mentioned. This is their 6th album, but the first I've ever listened to. I'm glad I did, because Curve Of The Earth is a superb record. This is emotional and epic. Curve is soaring, feedback-laden guitars, anthemic choruses and melodic hook lines everywhere, with a couple of ballads in there to spruce it up. The songs are almost all in excess of 4 minutes, but never get too long or outstay their welcome. Mystery Jets have so many sounds and musical progressions in their palate, it's a real effort from them to keep this album at 41 minutes, the perfect length for Curve to be. But keep it they do, and their ideas are ripping apart the edges of Curve minute after minute. Top pick for me is Midnight's Mirror, but check out the video for Telomere:
03: Anderson .Paak - Malibu - A
Hip-Hop/Soul/R 'n B
04: Bloc Party - Hymns - B Indie/Alternative Dance Bloc Party have formed and changed subtly over the years. Intimacy was a flashpoint of divide for their fan base, the band choosing an alternative downbeat direction to contrast their early career Indie sensibilities. This would eventually prove a solid decision, as it extended their material's reach and longevity, making sure Bloc Party didn't die out after The Mid-00's Indie/Garage Rock Revival ebbed away. Kele Okereke's song writing has matured brightly over the past decade-and-a-bit. His mood on Hymns is always upbeat, even on the quieter pieces. Most of the songs are about love, in different guises. The Love Within and Only He Can Heal Me are about Okereke's relationship with god, while Exes, Virtue and My True Name are impassioned, tender messages to a lover. The band are in a solid groove of their own, all the while nodding to their heroes and contemporaries with musical cues. The Good News is my top pick from Hymns, check out the late-career-Blur-esque guitar lick on that one:
05: Daughter - Not To Disappear - B Alternative Pop/Indie
That's that for January, I'm looking forward to the rest of 2016, but I've already got some great shouts for the end of year top picks. As always, tell me what you think, am I right, wrong or just plain daft? See you in a month.
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.
I've decided to start blogging about music again, after a few years off. I took it upon myself to listen to at least 50 albums in 2015, and publish a top 20. I have to say, it was far more fun than I had anticipated. There were a number of albums I was already looking forward to last year, and they were obviously easy to listen to. Some releases I picked because I knew bits about the band and wanted to check them out. Some I picked on recommendation from friends. Others I literally picked because the artwork was cool, or I liked the album title. Most of the music I listened to was at least enjoyable, and some was downright transcendent.
I try to listen to as many different styles of music as possible, sometimes deliberately choosing music I don't like to see if I can get my head around it. While I (like most other people) like to think that I have a broad taste, and that I "like a bit of everything," you'll notice clear prejudices in my ratings. I'm really into guitar music, be that Rock, Metal, Grunge, Shoegaze, Indie or anything else. I also love Hip-Hop and Rap, and Electronic blippy dancey music, and also weird and experimental jazzy music. I like noise, feedback and experimentation, but I like catchy commercial stuff too. So while there's plenty of those kinds of records in there, I do listen to music outside of my comfort zone, to get as broad a spectrum as possible.
I try to listen to everything 5 times in order to get a good feel for it. Some albums were a joy to listen to, and I spun them 20 or 30 times. Others, not so much. Some were instant favourites, others grew over time. Overall the experience was fantastic, I've not listened to this much contemporary music since I was a teenager, and I feel far more informed about music going into 2016. I've made some surprise and welcome discoveries that have coloured my music taste nicely. I'd not even heard of 4 of my top 10 artists before I listened to them. This year I plan to listen to at least 100 albums, and give a top 40. I will be posting monthly round-ups, and then another end-of-year review around this time next year.
You're probably wondering why I left it until now to do my top albums from last year. Most music outlets publish their end-of-year list in December, which seems to make sense on the surface. But if you publish a music magazine in December, it means you write it in November about music that was released in October or before. This leaves out the last 2 months of the year, which is unfair to late releases. Are they not as worthy as the earlier releases? Besides, what do you do if the greatest album of all time gets released on New Year's Eve? By posting my top 20 at the end of January, (read: beginning of February) I have given each 2015 release at least a month to make it's mark.
I've also created a grading system, which I won't go into fully here, but is quite detailed. I took inspiration from Robert Christgau. He grades albums with letters, and writes short (often very brutal!) reviews about them. I want to take a similar route, assessing albums on several categories, coming up with a grade and then writing a short review about them. My grading system is as follows:
A*: Instant Classic.
This rating is reserved for the absolute best albums. The genre-spanning, era-defining multi-million selling stadium-filling records that everyone has heard of. I'm aiming to rate less than 1% of music with this grade. No albums I heard in 2015 reached this level, though my top 3 came close. Examples of past albums that would gain an A* grade would be Dark Side Of The Moon, OK Computer, Thriller, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Blonde On Blonde. The cream of the crop. A: A Great Record.
This rating is for albums that fall short of the top rating, but nevertheless are very good. These albums are often the best of an artist's career, and are just as listenable, quality and brilliant as the A* bracket but drop down as they lack the spark to be a true classic. This rating is an example of a highly commendable record, and should still be counted as "critically acclaimed." Most popular artists will reach this grade at least once. An example from 2015 of an A grade record is Bjork's Vulnicura.
B: A Good Effort.
This rating is for albums that don't quite cut the mustard in terms of critical acclaim, but are generally worth listening to. An album with this rating may be a debut from a young band that are a little rough around the edges, a mid-career release from an established artist that's not quite at their best, or an album that's good but might be too long or have too much filler on it. An album with this rating may be a little unoriginal or lacking in substance. This is not necessarily a bad record, but it's certainly not A grade either. An example from 2015 of a B grade record is Tame Impala's Currents.
C: Average To Poor.
This rating is for albums that aren't recommendable, but may have a number of redeeming features that elevate them above the bottom ranges. These albums are the experimental whacked-out phase of an established artist, they are the gimmicky style-over-substance records that come in the wake of legitimate music scenes. An album with this rating will probably be derivative or badly crafted. It may have poorly thought out concepts or lots of filler and throwaway lyrics. Most of the time, it will be one-note, and boring. There is some worth in albums with this rating, but the official line is proceed with caution. An example from 2015 of a C grade record is Django Django's Born Under Saturn.
C-: Honorable Mention.
This is a rare rating given to albums that would usually receive a D grade but have maybe one or two songs that are worth listening to. This happens when an established artist releases an album and gets asked to write a single to promote it. That song is clearly better than the rest of the album, and is worth a shot. This also may be an album released by a debut artist, signed off the back of them having one good song, but with no other recommendable material. An example from 2015 of a C- grade record is Cappadonna's The Pillage II (52 Blocks is a tuuuuuune, man!)
D: Do Not Listen To This!
This is for the abject worst of the musical landscape. These albums bear no fruit in terms of popularity, relevance, creativity, originality or technicality. It would be a waste of time to listen to an album with this rating. Not many albums will get this grade, as I try to look for the positives and something to love in every release, but some records just stink. An example from 2015 of a D grade record is Method Man's The Meth Lab.
So that's my rating system in a nutshell, (honestly, I could have written WAY more) and I hope it all makes sense. It's open to interpretation, and you can rate it or slate it as much as you want. Or you can ignore it. I'll be posting up my top 20 tomorrow, and I hope y'all like my picks. Some are obvious, others not so much, but I think I got a good selection covered. Until then!
