The Best Albums of 2015

(Lady Lamb says what we're all thinking. Photo from her website.)

***

THE LIST

Because I graded 154 albums this year and a whopping 94 of them were recommendations of some order, I'm quite excited to give you -- for the first time -- my top fifty albums from 2015, judged purely on the basis of personal taste and level of constant rotation at home. These recommendations are heartfelt; when we get into the ones that personally made me swoon the most in 2015 the records are bolded, and of course the top ten is separated with links and stats. Here we go:

50. Lonelady: Hinterland (Warp)
49. Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (RCA)
48. Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (World Circuit)
47. The Internet: Ego Death (Columbia)
46. Shopping: Why Choose (FatCat)
45. The Foreign Exchange: Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey (s/r)
44. Jim O'Rourke: Simple Songs (Drag City)
43. Björk: Vulnicura (Megaforce)
42. Ghost Culture (Phantasy Sound)
41. The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality (Brainfeeder)
40. Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (Rhythm Nation)
39. Darkstar: Foam Island (Warp)
38. Charli XCX: Sucker (Atlantic)
37. Alex G: Beach Music (Domino)
36. Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld: Never Were the Way She Was (Constellation)
35. Lower Dens: Escape from Evil (Ribbon Music)
34. Surfer Blood: 1000 Palms (Joyful Noise)
33. Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (Warner Bros.)
32. Four Tet: Morning/Evening (Text)
31. Kwabs: Love + War (Atlantic)
30. Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (Sub Pop)
29. Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last (Castle Face)
28. Carly Rae Jepsen: E-MO-TION (Interscope)
27. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Interscope)
26. The Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (Merge)
25. Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch)
24. The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes (astralwerks)
23. Jamie xx: In Colour (Young Turks)
22. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (Xango)
21. Pinkshinyultrablast: Everything Else Matters (Shelflife)
20. Meg Baird: Don't Weigh Down the Light (Drag City)
19. Ryley Walker: Primrose Green (Dead Oceans)
18. Ghostface Killah & BadBadNotGood: Sour Soul (Lex)
17. Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home (Hardly Art)
16. Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia)
15. Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (Rough Trade)
14. Built to Spill: Untethered Moon (Warner Bros.)
13. Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD)
12. Tame Impala: Currents (Interscope)
11. Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop)

10. Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There
(Matador) | A- | review

9. Royal Headache: High
(What's Your Rupture?) | A- | review

8. Twerps: Range Anxiety
(Merge) | A- | review

7. Heems: Eat Pray Thug
(Megaforce) | A- | review

6. Lady Lamb: After
(Mom + Pop) | A | review

5. The Wave Pictures: Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon
(Moshi Moshi) | A | review

4. Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People
(Bella Union) | A | review

3. Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
(Mom + Pop) | A | review

2. Joanna Newsom: Divers
(Drag City) | A+ (upgrade) | review

1. D'Angelo & the Vanguard: Black Messiah
(RCA 2014) | A+ (upgrade) | review

***

THE JUSTIFICATION

So I know what you're thinking, which is: that's a very strange list. Because this is the second consecutive (and hopefully the final) year in which I'm extremely overdue posting a year-end list, only completing it well into the following year, we have the unusual opportunity of comparing it to Pazz & Jop and every other individual and aggregate poll published of 2015 albums. Obviously it's an outlier for several reasons. You don't come to someone's personal blog, I would hope, to expect some general reprocessing of the consensus, though there have been times (2010 and 2013, for two) when I was pretty closely aligned with the wider perspective of people who are actually professional about this stuff. I normally wouldn't try to make a defensive case for my list, but in some sense I'm not entirely pleased with it. I don't mean the records themselves; I stand by them all and honestly love every one of them from #21 onward, and there's every reason to guess that others below that line will one day gain even more respect from me. I suppose what I'm displeased with is how my own taste seems to be gradually breaking away from the records that are considered -- and even that I think are -- socially important.

The essay to follow is not a "State of the Union," so to speak; others are far more qualified than I am to expand on what is happening to your music and why. I have no interest in trying to understand the economics of streaming or the eternally conflicting reports on how sustainable it is to be a professional musician in the mid-2010s; it's not that I don't like reading about all that, but what we're about to breathlessly analyze has nothing really to do with anything except me and why I feel the way I do about the big totems of this past year. I'm aware this has very little chance of being interesting to anybody but me, so feel free to move on with your week.

The innocent version of all this is that I fell back in love with guitar music this year; that's innocent and it's true. The beautiful vinyl package of D'Angelo's record comes with this gigantic glossy photo of him clutching an axe and ever-so-subtly sneering, echoing Gene Vincent in both senses. The photograph is strikingly powerful and erotic, an effortless depiction of rock & roll as a force that feeds and expands on itself. Black Messiah also contains an intriguing note explaining, in essence, that it's a political album -- about race, class and injustice -- whether you want it to be or not. In that spirit it seems undeniable that my choices of what music made me sing and dance in 2015 is politically charged, regardless of whether I want or intend it to be, and not progressive in the sense I would like.

In 2014, hip hop topped and covered my list, mostly alt-leaning music that challenged and thrilled me: Cities Aviv, clipping., Shabazz Palaces, the Underachievers, and of course Kate Tempest, who recorded the third consecutive album in the genre that became my top choice for the year. I think this blog has a good track record of taking pop, R&B, hip hop and other genres as seriously as indie and alternative, which are inevitably -- because of how and when I grew up -- my "home base," so to speak, as far as contemporary popular music goes. But this year, hip hop I designated as highly recommended is pathetically thin on the ground; I have no one to blame but myself. I at least sampled every major release of 2015 and most minor ones, solely excluding those by artists like Drake who are hopeless lost causes for me, but somehow I emerged unmoved. Were the above list provided by a publication I would rail at its overwhelming whiteness and its focus on "rock"; it's somewhat less offensive since it's a personal list and I don't believe in judging the politics behind what individual people enjoy listening to, but as someone who does bristle at predictability and tokenism, I do somewhat regret that we only have one rap record in the top ten and only two records whose primary artists are not white.

But these lists I publish here have only ever been rigorously honest, and I work hard on them. I just want to stress that the absence or low placement on the relevant albums here isn't a reflection on their vitality. Rather, as I get farther into my thirties, it may be a reflection on me and my retreat into relative comfort and complacency; regardless of how devotedly I continue to seek out new music, perhaps the things I come back to are destined to become narrower in scope. Try as I might, I can't get anything except relative boredom out of Vince Staples' Summertime '06, and I know it's a significant artistic statement by a lot of measurements. Similarly, can it be a symptom of much except my becoming older and grouchier that I get no pleasure out of Future's music? With DS2 in particular, I have a full awareness of why it's good, the troubled and zonked-out brilliance in it, but as with a lot of music driven so much on chemical highs and lows, it's not something I enjoy listening to at all. That's the sort of priggish statement that's made me roll my eyes at some older critics, and I always hoped as I got older and kept writing about music that I would be one of the Cool Ones who was constantly a-OK and philosophical when it came to the music of the youths, or of democratic and cultural origins totally unrelated to my sheltered status. Maybe this isn't something I can fully control after all.

As a result of all this you might reasonably expect that my cup of tea would be drunken with the likes of Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment and Anderson Paak and THEESatisfaction, all of whom exemplify the spirit of conscious Afrocentrism and sometimes sheer dumb happiness. I support those things and I like Paak a fair bit, but in the other two cases while listening I have the strange feeling I'm in school, which was also the case with some of the recordings from the early to mid-'90s to which they're constantly compared. Still, a love of 3 Feet High and Rising, Blowout Comb and The Score and an aversion to male aggression that crosses all genres and artforms (I don't like Ernest Hemingway, N.W.A. or Martin Scorsese) could easily pigeonhole me as a weedy white hipster unconscious of his footprint of flagrant privilege, blasting Tribe on the headphones and buying brownstones in Bed-Stuy. What could I say to really correct this picture? Nothing, that's what, except the hope that the zillions of words I've written here have made my heart at least kind of trustworthy, and maybe they haven't.

Weirdly, exhibit A in this whole internal crisis -- Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly -- is the item whose placement I can most readily defend. For one thing, while I heard Staples and Future's albums (and Young Thug's, and lots of others) multiple times, I lived day and night with Pimp for weeks. I will unquestioningly tell you it's an accomplished, often masterful and emotionally slash politically righteous recording that I simply found bloated and musically frustrating. I'm not the first to point out that while I'm sure Lamar is flattered by the praise he's received from the mainstream, his music is not designed to speak to us. And by "us" I mean the white music press but also white music listeners as a whole, and that's what gives To Pimp a Butterfly a lot of its revolutionary-sounding power. It's thoughtful but confrontational, in the vein of the Clash. Lamar is a phenomenal artist; there's a certain undeniability to that and it transcends personal taste.

But personal taste is still there. Lamar's previous LP good kid, m.A.A.d. city was another example of something that almost transcended both the fractured culture and the various unpredictable contradictions in my own digestion of music. It showed up in my headphones very late in 2012, after I thought I'd long since decided on my top two or three albums, and almost without debate it immediately topped the list as soon as I was swept up in its intricate, cinematic, redemptive storytelling. The album remains glorious, believable, and impressively well-judged, but it was already an outlier for me in terms of my personal taste: I've always tended to feel annoyed by albums that have "plots," so to speak, but Lamar's entry as well as Tempest's are both exceptions that prove the rule, because they're something else disguised as records. It's probably instructive that Lamar billed good kid as a "film," and that Tempest is turning Everybody Down into a novel. Neither album expands or redefines its form exactly, but both refine and make art of ideas that have been unsuccessfully tested by others before them. In both cases I come away liking a lot of the songs (I don't like a single song on good kid as much as I like "King Kunta" and "How Much a Dollar Cost" from his new one, but I like the older album infinitely more because its cumulative impact is simpler and greater for me; the best songs to hear out of context on Tempest's record are the two or three that don't advance the story, plus the summation "Lonely Daze"), loving the albums, but more than anything overwhelmed by admiration for the two young, gifted artists, capable of so much I could never even think of accomplishing.

All that goes double for To Pimp a Butterfly; offer me any bite-sized sample of it and I'll tell you I'm hearing a tremendous writer and performer operating at peak, full of moral righteousness and zeal and the mere grace and showmanship of all great pop music. Yet whereas good kid -- which allowed Pimp to exist in its messy, uncompromised form -- was a small and modest story with grandiose implications, this is an album of the world, and there's something subtly limiting in this limitless achievement. Even so, it's beyond gratifying to find a creation like this meeting with so much praise and success, and yet again, you must know who it is you're reading: I like Stand! more than There's a Riot Goin' On, like Here, My Dear and Let's Get It On more than What's Going On, and vastly prefer The Conversation to the Godfather movies. I'm not saying this to tell you I'm a contrarian; I hate that sort of logic. I'm telling you this to demonstrate that Lamar's epic construction is already at a disadvantage with me because epic constructions of universal import make me a little queasy; they're just too big for me to get myself fully around them. Much as concept albums bug me but Lamar's last one was so good that you know it means something if I say it's aces, the fact that I have so much admiration for this record that is too overwhelming for me to process and appreciate should indicate something of its value.

Another factor to mention about this list is that it is almost certainly informed by what happened in my personal life in 2015. I moved from an apartment in a small but noisy city to a dead-quiet house in a coastal tourist community that's nearly empty in winter, on stilts and hidden behind a bunch of trees. I got married after a six-year relationship that changed everything about my life and outlook already. Conditions in our very mellow shared quarters are extremely favorable for the likes of Deerhunter, Tame Impala, a reconfigured pure-acoustic Yo La Tengo and, well, Beach House. Ghostface Killah fronting a jazz combo is somehow ideal. Things have become quieter, even as I've also been wrapped up in what feels like a flurry of activity -- though it's a very un-rock & roll flurry, like going on vacation with my parents and getting my teeth fixed and taking the bunny to the vet. It doesn't look to me like this is a list of boring-old-man music, but were that an argument you wanted to make you'd sure as fuck have a lot of ammo.

Let's go back to that guitar, though. This is the first list I've done in a long time dominated to this extent by guitar bands, and what a terrific crop of them it is. There's also a curious overrepresentation of Australia; even with Tame Impala just missing the top ten, Royal Headache, Twerps and Courtney Barnett all show up in the final countdown. Twerps and Royal Headache are pure throwback but both are impressively versatile, and in what seems to be the theme this year, their records are driven chiefly by songs rather than a sound -- indeed, both of them are quite prepared to turn on a whim into another band entirely if the song calls for it.

Another trend, however, dominates from the seventh position on up: these are albums that are about words as much as music. D'Angelo buries his words and vocals however momentous, and Joanna Newsom's sentiments are obtuse and enigmatic, wilfully puzzling, for as smart a wordsmith as she is, her choice is to hit hardest in nonverbal terms. I don't think my life would've been the same in 2015, though, without the things I learned from the poetic rants and raves of the other fine artists in our top ten. Lady Lamb's document of the aforementioned fractured culture, "Billions of Eyes", has a touch of personal pain and apprehension but also an eagerness to share something with the world. That yearning runs across all of my favorite albums this year: Barnett's elevation of mundane day-to-day existence to a ramshackle celebration of life itself, occasionally chided by even some of her champions as some sort of embodiment of privileged millennial self-importance, draws portraits of strange normal lives so convincing and often so refreshingly miniml that they can make you think differently about the way you approach your commute, your best and worst moments, your conversations with your friends, your coworkers, your spouse. (Lady Lamb sings about seeing an old woman yawn on a bus and suddenly wondering why it's just now dawning on her that people are such a bizarre conglomerate.) If a simple house-hunting excursion and idling talk about coffeeshops can turn into a song as deeply moving as "Depreston", built wholly on the conflict of internalized thought and externalized communication, are we not all potentially architects of such dreams? There are only two chords in "Depreston" and even I can play it, sort of.

Dave Tattersall, lead singer and usually lyricist of the Wave Pictures, said in an interview early in 2015 that "I don't believe in stream of consciousness but I do believe that lyrics are everywhere." It became almost comical, I'm sure, to witness my long vendetta against Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon in the last eighteen months, so irritated was I by his new approach to writing completely unfiltered lyrics that were glorified LiveJournal entries. (I'm happy to say that the reception to his 2015 album Universal Themes suggests the world has caught up with me.) The difference between what Kozelek does and what Tattersall and Barnett do is down to the pure curation of art from normalcy. Kozelek simply reguritates, like a motion-capture model of an actor. Barnett and Tattersall are like animators, rendering expressive lines from traces of real life drawn upon by creativity and enthusiasm. So Barnett can talk in aching detail about staring at shapes on the ceiling while longing for someone far away and the various curiosities accompanying that longing. And Tattersall can turn an odd, fleeting experience he had at St. Pancras Station into a two-line fantasy about one woman in a green coat who stands out because everyone else in sight is dressed in black.

The Wave Pictures' words can be lofty, they can be juvenile; they are consistently real and bracing, and delivered in a sharp but emotive manner calling back to the Only Ones, and not just because there are a lot of songs about pets and other animals. "We Fell Asleep in the Blue Tent" might be the most beautiful love song of the decade so far, a chronicle of a scrappy sleepover that includes the immortal sentiment "I saw your handwriting written on everything, and I liked it." Musically, the band is punkish but professional; much as Barnett calls to the classic riffs and yelps of Nuggets-phase garage, they unabashedly nod to classic rock of the late '60s, going so far as to cover Creedence Clearwater Revival not once but twice. The Pictures are an established band in the UK, they've recorded a lot and enjoy a sizable cult that's almost nonexistent in America, but they've been at this a long time and sound relaxed and casual in a manner that doesn't remotely affect their capacity to connect or to communicate passion.

"Passionate" is another fine word for these terrific albums that don't have much to do with one another but strangely still seem to belong together. Certainly Ezra Furman and Heems, each of whom recorded a phenomenal and all but completely ignored album this year, qualify as two sides of a certain coin. Heems is the first former member of Das Racist to record a proper studio album, and while he wanders off on experiments and twice gives the floor to the painful realities of being brown in America after 9/11, his album is at bottom about coping. He and Furman both have talked openly about suffering from depression, and both have spun it into mature work that's often masterful. Nothing on Perpetual Motion People hits as hard as the closing lines from Eat Pray Thug, documenting the deportation of a dad whose daughter won't be around to correct his bad English at the dinner table anymore, and the resulting pressure in Heems' own family to be quiet, keep your head down and don't make trouble.

But Furman also turns his pain around on us, heartbreakingly so. As on each of the top four albums, the highlights are so numerous and so refreshingly different it's a task to determine what to mention here. There is "Ordinary Life," about losing the will to live and trying to find it again; or "Body Was Made," about owning one's identity. There's also "I'm gonna get old so goddamn fast / pass me that bottle with the XXX." But just as frequently as they form distress into the catharsis of universally relatable pain, Furman and Heems approach their work with astounding charm and humor. The personality crisis Heems describes on "Sometimes", wrapped up in lofty self-analysis and obsessively minute detail, is both harrowing and eerily familiar to any adult human. Furman, meanwhile, can engage in black comedy smack-dab in the middle of his moments of hard-living false retribution. His levity is musical as well as lyrical, too, filling every song with hooks and wacky rock & roll arrangements that are equal parts New York Dolls, Phil Spector and Platters. He's wobbly, but the music sees him through. It's not a requirement that those who suffer from mental illness of any sort make accessible art about it that's full of disarming warmth. It's not a requirement that one be troubled or have known instability to create great art. But it is most assuredly impressive as hell when someone is able to pull that off. Perhaps nothing bothers me more at the end of this year than how little attention these two albums received. (The widespread celebration of Barnett's genius is, to some degree, a compensation, but let's not wear her out on public exposure just yet -- I'm sure her best work is still to come.)

To a lesser extent that same fate has befallen Joanna Newsom's Divers; it's received ample praise from the expected quarters, but perhaps as a result of its absence from streaming services, it seems to have made less of an impact than her first three albums. This is an injustice; as time has gone on, it's become clear to me as her finest work to date and the first to truly fuse the most instantly arresting qualities of her songcraft, so evident on the invariably enchanting songs of her debut The Milk Eyed Mender, with her command of wildly ambitious and fascinating arrangements and production. Like Have One on Me, the album has marked divisions that become clearer with more exposure. Its florid, busy first half eventually falls into a mournful, resigned back end that offers some of her starkest arrangements and most straightforward words ever. Even setting apart her clever, busy and cautiously worked-over lyrics for a moment, the sad shake in her voice is obvious even when the album's at its most playful. It's a record of layers, though, as easy to appreciate as simply a beautiful collection of folk music as it is an endlessly revealing box of secrets. It does need time, but less than you expect, and soon enough every single cut reveals its magic, and the funny, despairing, scholarly, reference-filled lyrics will endear themselves to you after a while, but long before that you'll already want to live in that voice and in the clear emotional peaks, like the title cut with its near-magic, balletic feeling of timelessness. In every moment you can hear Newsom's hard work to meld her emotional inner life into something complex to donate to the world.

"Timeless" effectively describes Newsom and D'Angelo's albums equally well. Though it wasn't immediately obvious, both have come to feel like masterpieces to me. Black Messiah is a cheat since it actually was released in December 2014, but that placed it past our window for last year's list -- which, if I'd the proper time to come to fully appreciate it, it would easily have dominated. Divers and Black Messiah feel in many ways like albums that could have been released in the '70s, still the best decade for the long-player. What this might reveal is that even the stick-in-the-mud, aged-out feeling we talked about earlier might not prevent me or anyone from recognizing when someone transcends their era, transcends even the very idea of an era in this microscopic portion of history. These two truly great albums could belong in any time; both boast awesome power, worthy of hushed reverence. Both are exquisitely romantic, sad, worried. Only one, however, is also a banged-out, blissfully rhythmic orgasm of hearts, bodies and minds in an hour-long collision.

The only thing instantly obvious about Black Messiah when you first hear it is that it will take a bit of unpacking. The many years it took to create have paid off more than in just the rigorous, infallible quality-control. (Once again, virtually every track is perfect.) The grooves and hooks are buried under dust, and after a while even the dust becomes intoxicating. Like few albums since the heyday of Parliament-Funkadelic, Exile on Main Street and Sly & the Family Stone, this is a record that becomes markedly different every time you hear it. That's how rife it is with detail and intricacy, but never in the proggy jammed-out sense that sometimes inspires such grand statements. The songs are carefully, immaculately crafted, and though most of them stretch into the four-to-five minute range, were you to strip them down to an acoustic guitar and a voice, they would entrance in their slow, ethereal beauty. It could be funeral music. It could be the music of seduction. It sometimes feels like it contains every iteration of what popular music can be.

It's also a band album, so much so that D'Angelo's frontman status almost seems irrelevant; he willfully recedes more often than not. (This has been turned around as a criticism, actually.) The interplay isn't just an enhancement here, it's the story. That puts the album in good company with the likes of Sign o' the Times and Maggot Brain, but in at least one sense I think Black Messiah has a leg up on its ancestors: its pure, unadulterated, melted-heart beauty. That's not the classic pop beauty of simply a well-turned hook or a lush ballad. It's the beauty of something hard-won, a savior behind the chaos. Chaos dominates the foreground of Black Messiah and, like To Pimp a Butterfly, it emphasizes funk as an expression of and a battle against that chaos. The most important feature of D'Angelo's record, though, is how it perverts funk's formal standards -- On "The Charade", vocal lines that are deliberately abrasive just as George Clinton's once were slowly form into a swirling cacophony that, melded with the band's propulsive plugging away, attain a fevered, almost religious power. It transforms confrontation into sensuality without lulling us as the audience into some sort of passive acceptance. The same basic tenet goes for my favorite moment in all the music I heard in 2015 -- about three minutes into "Till It's Done", when a solo vocal line unexpectedly broadens into a chill-inducing cry. It's among many moments when Black Messiah rushes past even its most obvious and very worthy pursuits, protest and love and sex and everything else, and becomes just inexpressibly sublime. It's also one of those magical moments, so rare but not as rare as some who've not let their ears open in decades will try to tell you, when it dawned on me without question: I will be listening to this for the rest of my life. What a thing for someone to give us.

***

APPENDIX: Recommended 2015 albums that didn't make the list of 50
Shamir: Ratchet (XL)
The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful (Fortuna Pop!)
Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (Transgressive)
Ghostpoet: Shedding Skin (PIAS)
Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone (Motown)
Advance Base: Nephew in the Wild (Orindal)
Tuxedo (Stones Throw)
Talib Kweli & 9th Wonder: Indie 500 (Jamla)
Hot Chip: Why Make Sense? (Domino)
Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (OGM)
Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (Sub Pop)
Twin Shadow: Eclipse (Warner Bros.)
Floating Points: Elaenia (Luaka Bop)
Ducktails: St. Catherine (Domino)
Ty Dolla $ign: Free TC (Atlantic)
Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (Big Dada)
Blur: The Magic Whip (Warner Bros.)
Rachel Sermanni: Tied to the Moon (Linear Labs)
Della Mae (Rounder)
Apollo Brown: Grandeur (Mello Music)
Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)
EL VY: Return to the Moon (4AD)
The Very Best: Makes a King (Moshi Moshi)
Helen: The Original Faces (Kranky)
The Bird and the Bee: Recreational Love (Rostrum)
Dutch Uncles: O Shudder (Memphis Industries)
Bilal: In Another Life (eOne)
Logic: The Incredible True Story (Def Jam)
Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool (Dirty Hit)
Knxledge: Hud Dreems (Stones Throw)
Wire (Pink Flag)
Curren$y: Pilot Talk III (Jet Life)
Nils Frahm: Victoria OST (Erased Tapes)
Natalie Prass (Columbia)
Widowspeak: All Yours (Captured Tracks)
White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again (Polyvinyl)
Bully: Feels Like (Columbia)
Young Ejecta: The Planet (Driftless)
Roots Manuva: Bleeds (Big Dada)
Valet: Nature (Kranky)
New Order: Music Complete (Mute)
Wilco: Star Wars (Anti-)
Stealing Sheep: Not Real (Heavenly)
Sarah Cracknell: Red Kite (Cherry Red)

APPENDIX 2: EP THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE TOP TEN ABOVE IF IT HAD BEEN AN ALBUM
Kelela: Hallucinogen (Warp)

APPENDIX 3: OTHER GOOD EPs IN 2015
AFX: Orphaned Deejay Selek (Warp)
The Paranoid Style: Rock & Roll Just Can't Recall (Worldwide Battle)

The Best Songs of 2015

As mentioned in the last post, I've decided to make this a separate entity from the album post coming in the next few days. This list was constructed throughout the year with a final revision in the past week, which incorporated full-on consumption of numerous other lists of the year's best singles. Though it's missing a few tracks (including #1), I've created a Spotify playlist of the upper layer here, which is in a coherent sequence for ideal listening if you're interested. The missing songs should be easy enough to find on Soundcloud, Youtube, etc.

As usual: only one song allowed per album. The songs listed below that were not part of albums I reviewed have been covered better elsewhere than I could, though it bears mentioning that I believe "Hell You Talmbout" is probably the most resonant and brilliant protest song since the '60s.

1. Janelle Monáe & the Wondaland Arts Society "Hell You Talmbout" [non-album single]
2. Susanne Sundfør "Fade Away" [Ten Love Songs]
3. Heems "Patriot Act" [Eat Pray Thug]
4. Lady Lamb "Penny Licks" [After]
5. Royal Headache "Wouldn't You Know" [High]
6. Twerps "I Don't Mind" [Range Anxiety]
7. Courtney Barnett "Depreston" [Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit]
8. D'Angelo & the Vanguard "Another Life" [Black Messiah]
9. Twin Shadow ft. D'Angelo Lacy "Old Love / New Love" [Eclipse]
10. Ezra Furman "Haunted Head" [Perpetual Motion People]
11. The Chemical Brothers ft. Beck "Wide Open" [Born in the Echoes]
12. Leon Bridges "Pull Away" [Coming Home]
13. Chastity Belt "Drone" [Time to Go Home]
14. Alabama Shakes "Don't Wanna Fight" [Sound & Color]
15. Joanna Newsom "Waltz of the 101st Lightborne" [Divers]
16. Miguel "waves" [Wildheart]
17. Lonelady "Hinterland" [Hinterland]
18. The Wave Pictures "I Could Hear the Telephone (Three Floors Above Me)" [Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon]
19. STS x RJD2 "Doin' It Right" [s/t]
20. Yo La Tengo "Butchie's Tune" {Lovin' Spoonful cover} [Stuff Like That There]
21. Charli XCX "Boom Clap" [Sucker]
22. Blackalicious ft. Vursatyl & Jumbo "That Night" [Imani Vol. 1]
23. Beach House "Bluebird" [Depression Cherry]
24. Jason Derulo "Want to Want Me" [Everything Is 4]
25. Missy Elliott ft. Pharrell Williams "WTF (Where They From)" [non-album single]
26. Built to Spill "When I'm Blind" [Untethered Moon]
27. Kwabs "My Own" [Love + War]
28. Tame Impala "Eventually" [Currents]
29. Kelela "The High" [Hallucinogen EP]
30. Lower Dens "To Die in L.A." [Escape from Evil]
31. Darkstar "Go Natural" [Foam Island]
32. The Mountain Goats "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" [Beat the Champ]
33. Carly Rae Jepsen "Emotion" [E-MO-TION]
34. Ghost Culture "Mouth" [s/t]
35. Kendrick Lamar ft. James Fauntleroy & Ronald Isley "How Much a Dollar Cost" [To Pimp a Butterfly]
36. Beach House "Common Girl" [Thank Your Lucky Stars]
37. Gunplay ft. PJK "Just Won't Do" [Living Legend]
38. The Unthanks "Mount the Air" [Mount the Air]
39. Deerhunter "Carrion" [Fading Frontier]
40. Lianne La Havas "Green & Gold" [Blood]
41. The Underachievers "The Dualist" [Evermore]
42. Kanye West ft. Theophilus London/Allan Kingdom/Paul McCartney "All Day" [non-album single]
43. The Go! Team ft. Samira Winter "What D'You Say?" [The Scene Between]
44. Vince Staples "Like It Is" [Summertime '06]
45. Mary J. Blige "My Loving" [The London Sessions]
46. Ghostface & BadBadNotGood ft. Elzhi "Gunshowers" [Sour Soul]
47. Natalie Prass "My Baby Don't Understand Me" [s/t]
48. Justin Bieber "Sorry" [Purpose]
49. Ducktails "Headbanging in the Mirror" [St. Catherine]
50. Polar Bear "We Feel the Echoes" [Same as You]
51. Ryley Walker "Sweet Satisfaction" [Primrose Green]
52. Apollo Brown ft. Big Pooh & Dynasty "Gettin' By" [Grandeur]
53. Nicki Minaj ft. Drake & Lil Wayne "Only" [The Pinkprint]
54. Advance Base "The Only Other Girl from Back Home" [Nephew in the Wild]
55. J. Cole "St. Tropez" [2014 Forest Hills Drive]
56. Bop English "Dani's Blues" [Constant Bop]
57. Meg Baird "Past Houses" [Don't Weigh Down the Light]
58. Surfer Blood "I Can't Explain" [1000 Palms]
59. Curren$y feat. Styles P "Alert" [Pilot Talk III]
60. The Paranoid Style "New Age Tricks" [Rock & Roll Just Can't Recall]

*******

Also recommended in 2015

(Above: Photo of author coping very well with influx of music while easily managing other concerns.)

This post lists albums I heard once or twice and dug in or around 2015 but didn't have time or energy to write up. A longer list than usual for obvious reasons. This is a very skeletal post intended for your further investigation if you like; I've included brief thoughts where it seems necessary -- skipped this step on established artists or people I've reviewed here before -- and for certain albums I've included between one and three selections I really really like. For lengthy thinkpieces on these consult your favorite internet website.

- Charli XCX: Sucker (Atlantic) [lethal hooks; "Boom Clap" / "Doing It" / "Break the Rules"]
- Young Ejecta: The Planet (Driftless) [relaxed, X-rated shimmer, good for those xx-type nights]
- Ghost Culture (Phantasy Sound) [Martin L. Gore unplugged, weightless and trippy; "Mouth" / "Glass" / "Lucky"]
- Susanne Sundfør: Ten Love Songs (Warner Bros.) [a schizoid singer-songwriter LP that happens to contain the song of the year, which segues from another winner; "Fade Away" / "Accelerate"]
- Songhoy Blues: Music in Exile (Transgressive) [sing-song Malian pop]
- Dutch Uncles: O Shudder (Memphis Industries) [herky-jerky synthpop, like weird time-signatured prog with an OMD bent]
- Tuxedo (Stones Throw) [jammin' 99.9 FM]
- Ghostpoet: Shedding Skin (PIAS) [slightly bland but atmospheric, smart UK hip hop]
- Lonelady: Hinterland (Warp) [soulful synth; "Hinterland" / "Groove It Out"]
- The Very Best: Makes a King (Moshi Moshi)
- Wire (Pink Flag) [same as it ever was]
- Stealing Sheep: Not Real (Heavenly) [fun, lightweight pop]
- Knxwledge: Hud Dreems (Stones Throw) [J. Dilla-lite]
- Della Mae (Rounder) [all-lady bluegrass band hailing from Boston points up the deficiency of alt-country]
- Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (World Circuit) [tight Congo band goes to the moon]
- Valet: Nature (Kranky) [long-dormant electronic project of a Portland bedroom musician comes back, goes pro]
- Sarah Cracknell: Red Kite (Cherry Red) [ymmv depending on how much you love the Saint Etienne singer's voice; musically bland but passable]
- Bully: Feels Like (Columbia) [Nashville dues-paying cassette releasers go for broke; very solid punk rock]
- Four Tet: Morning/Evening (Text) [a bit dramatic, unfailingly pleasant, a solid sunrise drone-out]
- Ducktails: St. Catherine (Domino) [Real Estate offshoot, sweetly immersive if extremely derivative; "Headbanging in the Mirror"]
- Carly Rae Jepsen: E-MO-TION (Interscope) [auteur of 2012's most ubiquitous single gets arty, is not duly rewarded, but the results are disarming if overlong; "Emotion" / "Run Away with Me" / "I Didn't Just Come Here to Dance"]
- Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (OGM) [fast-paced, beat and rhyme-driven throwback; "That Night"]
- Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool (Dirty Hit) [young Londoners make Pretty Good Rock Music]
- Nils Frahm: Victoria OST (Erased Tapes) [vibes, right?]
- The Internet: Ego Death (Columbia) [decent retro-R&B outgrowth of Odd Future collective; relatively absent of irony, which is impressive]
- Rachel Sermanni: Tied to the Moon (Middle of Nowhere) [excellent yarn-spinner wise far beyond her twenties]
- Ghostface Killah: Twelve Reasons to Die II (Linear Labs)
- White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again (Polyvinyl) [I believe in punx]
- The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes (astralwerks) [takes the pathway opened by Daft Punk but they can't resist being more abrasive and arty, and somehow the Beck song is the best thing he's ever recorded; "Wide Open" / "Radiate" / "Go"]
- AFX: Orphaned Deejay Selek (Warp EP) [Richard D. James and our hearts, glitchin' together for life]
- Helen: The Original Faces (Kranky) [Grouper warbles more endearingly here than with her regular gig]
- Widowspeak: All Yours (Captured Tracks) [another Brooklyn duo, another indie rock sham you can't help rooting for]
- Kwabs: Love + War (Atlantic) [full-hearted sincerity on the dance floor; "My Own" / "Make You Mine"]
- Darkstar: Foam Island (Warp) [fly the friendly skies; "Go Natural"]
- Alex G: Beach Music (Domino) [slides from Elliott Smith's Cancun vacation]
- Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone (Motown mixtape) [to quote Pearl Forrester, "it's about telephones or some damn thing"]
- New Order: Music Complete (Mute) [fighting the good post-punk fight in their mutated state as a garage band]
- Shopping: Why Choose (FatCat) [razor sharp new wave]
- Janet Jackson: Unbreakable (Rhythm Nation) [a good record that needs paring down, with an overabundance of soppy ballads]
- Apollo Brown: Grandeur (Mello Music) [photog does Nas-derived rap on the side with great guests who wipe the floor with him; "Gettin' By" / "Who's That"]
- The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful (Fortuna Pop!) [enthusiastic, hyperemotional and friendly pop about identity politics -- did you like Nana Grizol? you'll appreciate this]
- EL VY: Return to the Moon (4AD) [Matt Berninger side project is basically like the National blended out by Danger Mouse and is of course very listenable]
- Ty Dolla $ign: Free TC (Atlantic) [lush and profane, classy and kitschy, smart and gross, sort of like Brian Wilson]
- Talib Kweli & 9th Wonder: Indie 500 (Jamla) [always good to hear from Kweli, a rare uncorrupted nice person in the business, though Macca may issue a public warning about the misattribution of "Let It Be" to John Lennon]
- Logic: The Incredible True Story (Def Jam) [dumb as hell concept -- as the hideous Back to the Egg-like cover suggests, it takes place in space! in the future! -- sick as hell flow]

Yes, that's two consecutive rap album reviews that make jabs at Paul McCartney for no reason whatsoever. No, your blog's predictable.

I think I've decided to make the year-end song and album posts separate this year. Getting them ready during my downtime from trying to make head or tail of Kanye West's new album.

I desire to make amends: 2015 New Release Rush (part 2 of 2)

Majical Cloudz: Are You Alone? (Matador) [NO]
Unbelievably turgid series of self-pitying Tumblr posts set to music -- and not only that, but music that strongly resembles Yanni with bonus sad male tears; thankfully you won't get caught in any lyrical ambiguity thanks to the ver y care ful pro nun ci a tion of every emo-Hallmark sentiment ("I'm already feeling changed," "one summer I fell in love for the fiiiiirst time / it would change my whoooole life / I would learn to looooove someone / and not be alone" etc.). The most godawful album I've actually sat through all year. Amber: "The only excuse for this is if he's either 16 or 80." (He's 27.)

Deerhunter: Fading Frontier (4AD) [hr]
Bradford Cox's disassociation from reality -- the present culprit is apparently antidepressants that have zapped his sex drive -- has come to entirely dominate Deerhunter; for someone who has almost always preferred his one-man side project Atlas Sound, that makes the band's latest record an instantly agreeable experience, like a less smirky version of Tame Impala, their adventurousness even greater but placing far less importance on pleasure. What's not so immediately clear is the sheer loveliness of the music he has constructed despite the loss of emotional connection to the world that he claims. Sounding more like John Lennon than ever (the harrowing closer "Carrion" is Plastic Ono Band-worthy), fronting a band that does indeed rock but also doubles down on a distinctive, detailed sound as their major identity, Cox nevertheless just as readily invites comparisons to David Bowie and Michael Hutchence. The former is because of the way the music seems to live inside the man's head, his neuroses attaining the universal; on "Snakeskin," he and the group ride high on sheer eccentricity with a warm, glam-like flamboyance sorely missing from the motorcycle hard rock of Monomonia. There's always been a hook-filled song or two on each Deerhunter or Cox release, but this album's Peter Gabriel homage "Living My Life" is perhaps their most infectious so far. There are drum machines and a sing-song looseness; there are good, driving guitars; there are songs that sound like Television outtakes with climaxes. (Once again, Lockett Pundt writes one of the best songs, "Ad Astra," but this time not the best.) The big thing is to stick with it; as usual with this band, the more you hear this the more you'll be invigorated and haunted by it.

Beach House: Thank Your Lucky Stars (Sub Pop) [r]
Depending on who you ask, the two Beach House albums released this year -- and cheers to them for nixing the traditionalist album cycle in a very different way than mixtape-happy youngsters -- may or may not have about as much daylight between them as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Maybe that's a lot and maybe it's not very much, but it's comparable. We might all be liberals, but we're getting nasty over one another's preferences. Which means that if you're nuts for Beach House already -- i.e., if you're a filty communist -- you'll hear a lot more difference in the two than someone who listens to Dennis Prager or Michael Savage. Young socialists Berning your neighborhood are likely to favor Lucky Stars because it's unfussy, no-nonsense, very working class shoegaze -- it sounds like demos for their other stuff and boasts a more sparse, "live" sound. It's an actual band performing as opposed to a studio creation. The songs themselves typify the same basic, increasingly hazy and vague approach on both albums, so only an acolyte is likely to make much of the disparity anyway -- but the two albums are more distinct than, for example, Kid A and Amnesiac, a case in which the latter was always unmiskably and admittedly a collection of leftovers from the former. The best songs and moments are nearly equal on both records: the droning but simple guitar on "All Your Yeahs" and the sheer loveliness of its melody are a nice reminder of the beauty these two can create without all the adornments. "Common Girl" is better yet, world-stopping and almost Medieval but still approached with the smart, modest confidence of a rock band that happens to like things delicate and inscrutable. It's pretty impressive that -- however the final results come off -- this band is fervently setting itself to the task of approaching its projects differently, and the off-the-cuff spontaneity here is a nice contrast to the Clintonian size, polish and loudness of Depression Cherry. I'm a Sanders guy (to the extent I'm anything) and I prefer Depression Cherry, but when the moment of truth comes I'll put my energy behind either.

Kelela: Hallucinogen (Warp EP) [A+ (originally hr)]
Whenever R&B chanteuse Kelela gets around to releasing a proper album -- this is her second utterly enchanting project after the free mixtape Cut 4 Me in 2013 -- it seems to me it stands a good chance of blowing everything else that's currently happening to violent smithereens. For one thing, she's doing everything right career-wise -- the slow burn of recognition flowing up from generous helpings of free music to this stopgap collection, both impossibly striking and immediately alluring to everyone who hears them -- to prime herself for a nuclear explosion; and hey, she dropped her icky publicist like a hot potato too. This lasts just 23 minutes, weirder and weirder as it goes on, so it's a short taste but consists wholly of flawless electronic expressions of desire, and improves on Cut 4 Me insofar as it is more than just a vocal exercise over disembodied tracks. The songs interlock impressively with one another: "A Message" slinks and soars, otherworldly but never alien, then "Gomenasai" fills in the bottom layer, so slow but with the most rattling sort of beat, and all about how Kelela intends to make you her bitch. And on from there with enveloping synths, nasty hooks, even a backwards song a la Sandinista!; Kelela laughs, she cries out, she whispers, but at every moment when it matters she's in absolute command. And in the year the Weeknd became one of the biggest pop stars in the world, "The High" takes the entire genre of drugged-out R&B to school. That bass will break you and as with the rest of the EP, it's intensely important you hear it as loud as possible.

Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City) [A+ (originally hr)]
The accessibility of the folky songcraft on Milk-Eyed Mender finally fuses with Joanna Newsom's vastly increased confidence as a singer and sophistication as an arranger since then; you could scare some parties away by announcing it's the album on which she sings a duet with a loon, but those inclined to take the journey will find the author less guarded than ever. The production's also significantly more varied, with injections of keyboards and slide guitar that surprise without becoming a distraction. The record explodes with glossy landscapes and elegantly crafted lyrics; you hardly have to comprehend every word to get wind of the story being told, after the failed relationship of the three-disc epic Have One on Me. This is the story of time moving forward no matter how hard anyone tries not to let it; it's about marriage, and the anxiety attendant to happiness -- which is to say, how will its inevitable end arrive? That sounds morose but this is often a whimsical glance at escaping a city, slowing and settling down, and reveling in love. It includes actual time travel. It has waltzes and folklore and time-stopping moments of ethereal beauty like the title cut. But more than ever before, no matter how much wordy stuff she gets into these songs (see the single "Sapokanikan"") and no matter how impressive and wild and ornate she makes them (the head-spinning "Leaving the City"), the pure, guttural vulnerability, loss, longing are what comes through in the songs and performances, never more than on the stark "The Things I Say," just Newsom and a piano, just spinning her emotions into one of those indelible melodies she seems to snap into existence at will. This feels magic; it is magic, and magic's never seemed so heartbreakingly human.

Roots Manuva: Bleeds (Big Dada) [r]
London rapper's fifth album finds him not so much in "conscious" mode as frozen in political terror; his great gift is making his rapid, cerebral flow somehow agreeably mellow, brutal yet soft. Wish we could say the same for the lumpy, uneven production, offering beats that are often badly matched up and even unpleasant. It's an odd contrast, but this is a grower.

Beach Slang: The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us (Polyvinyl) [c]
This album was made a thousand times before you were born, you have heard it a thousand times in your lifetime, and ever it shall be long after you pass. It is the curse of punk rock. This is the sound of infinity.

Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (Nonesuch) [r]
It seems difficult to do justice to this collection of ambient music and spoken word pieces without having seen the accompanying film, directed by Anderson. The engaging and witty story she tells finds her reminiscing and taking flights of fancy about the loss of her dog. Death hangs over it all but Anderson approaches the project with courageous good humor. It doesn't work particularly well for me as a recreational listen, but it's sublime in its manner.

Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts: Manhattan (Rough Trade)
Once capable of generating surprising emotional depth from simple anecdotes of personal ineptitude, Lewis has -- like a lot of former figures of the anti-folk movement -- become a bit of a blando. He spins similar childhood memories to those of Owen Ashworth but he's far less capable melodically, and the humor that used to seem charming now comes off as forced and childish: there's a deadpan song about the horrors of being an opening act on a more famous performer's tour. He does wake up a bit on the fierce "Sad Screaming Old Man" the same way you can hear the "old" John Darnielle periodically spring into action on Beat the Champ, but part of the problem is I've lost patience with the sort of thing Lewis is selling.

Grimes: Art Angels (4AD) [c]
I'm not anti-pop but I'm very anti-this. I liked Visions fine. I like Carly Rae Jepsen and Chari XCX's albums. I dig some of Justin Bieber's singles. This plays to me like a snide lampoon of such things while somehow managing to outpace their substantial capacity to annoy. Grimes is a self-possessed artist and it's not for me to say she's performing some act of deception by emitting this weird, affected hybrid of Radio Disney and J-pop. Actually, let's stop right there: it's not for me, and that's the only useful thing I can say about this music.

Bill Ryder-Jones: West Kirby County Primary (Domino)
The flipside of Jeffrey Lewis, a British folkie type so morose he makes Bill Callahan and Jim O'Rourke sound like Paul Simon. You know if you're in the audience for sadsack, slightly rock-tinged pub music for the sleaziest of lonely nights. This is your stop, we'll pick you up at 6.

Floating Points: Elaenia (Luaka Bop) [r]
Sam Shepherd's debut might already be the most successful album ever released on David Byrne's record label; Byrne's of course known for associations with Brian Eno and this is one of the better modern appropriations of Eno's electronic non-pop music. It's not as inspired as Eno's most aimless noodling in the '70s but falls on the ears more easily than his modern work. Like most good ambient it's serviceable drift-off music and presumably that's the reason for its relative popularity, though it's sort of funny that it cuts off unceremoniously the very instant it starts to assert your attention with a long build of white noise and increasing temperature. Still, this is a good writer's aid.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete (Warp)
This is too much of a repeat of what Daniel Lopatin has already done and passes frequently over into annoyance. It doesn't reward close listening like R Plus Seven and it certainly doesn't work as ambient music, failing to vary the effects it uses nearly as much as that record or Replica. To be honest, it is a 45-minute session of noodling and modulation that seems primitive and repetitive, all lethal for this sort of recording. The adulation this has received frankly confuses me. As Byrne once put it, "Huh. So you know any new jokes?"

Arca: Mutant (Mute)
I'd review this but I can't remember the difference between it and the two albums above. BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS, it's "fine."

***

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: 2015 EDITION
We now come to the last three albums in our absurdly delayed survey of the big and semi-big releases of 2015. As I've mentioned before, one of our rules is that if we declare a studio album "highly recommended" we somewhat foolishly consider ourselves obligated to examine each studio album and sometimes the peripheral items that artist releases for the ten years to follow. It's sometimes crucial, sometimes a form of masochism. Throughout the year I do my best to keep up with new releases by relevant acts via Twitter and various music news outlets, but in some cases -- especially artists who've, uh, fallen from grace a bit, maybe in my mind or maybe in the world at large -- I miss something or other and one of my closing tasks at the end of the year is to check everyone's discographies and determine what was passed over. I'm in a hurry so this will be brief and informal. Also, I had planned to address Oneohtrix Point Never's Commissions II EP but since I didn't particularly enjoy the new album, it seemed an acceptable casualty in in the interest of saving time.

The Bird and the Bee: Recreational Love (Rostrum) [r]
Apart from a Hall & Oates covers album I skipped, the last I heard of these cats was on Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future, which was so long ago that when it leaked I had not yet met my wife and still had a regular DJing gig. They've gradually fallen out of my regular repertoire, along with a lot of neo-lounge music I used to be very fond of, but I may have to re-investigate some of that music because this is extremely pleasant. Inara George and Greg Kurstin are more professional types than bands like Tennis that strive to do what they do in a less formal tone and the results are polished, danceable and lots of fun even if samey and forgettable. George's lyrics are still quite bizarre and uncomfortable at times ("I would kill myself to please you"), but they are generally not the most noteworthy aspect of the tightly written and arranged pop songs dominating the record. You get what you pay for but you'll like it.

Curren$y: Canal Street Confidential (Atlantic) [c]
Curren$y also probably released ten mixtapes this year but I gave up trying to keep up a couple of years ago; are we sure it's weed and not coke he's constantly ingesting? His studio albums have fallen off more and more into uninspired territory, with this year's good Pilot Talk III an intentional throwback to his best record, which was like three labels ago. This rush-job dominated by Atlanta producer Purps owes a lot to the slow motion melting sound of Future, who's featured on the first track. Curren$y mumbles appreciatively more than he performs. One misses the scrappy low-budget days of "Elevator Musik" and such; now he just seems like a background figure on even his own stuff.

Lupe Fiasco: Tetsuo & Youth (Atlantic)
I loved Lupe Fiasco's first couple of albums but his career quickly darted into a mire of confusion and as a public figure he's so consistently banal I have a hard time taking his music seriously anymore, but this is not a bad record at all -- his flow is forceful and engaging, the production wildly uneven but decent, but the lyrics seem to be getting sillier all the time, and with 78:27 of this it's hard to stay awake.

***

FINAL 2015 REJECTS:
- Dave Rawlings Machine: Nashville Obsolete
- Idjut Boys: Versions
- Jay Rock: 90059
- Low: Ones and Sixes
- Telekinesis: Ad Infinitum [NYIM]
- Mac Miller: GO:OD AM
- Battles: La Di Da Di
- Leona Lewis: I Am [NYIM]
- Ryan Adams: 1989 [NYIM]
- Disclosure: Caracal
- Corb Lund: Things That Can't Be Undone [NYIM]
- Israel Nash: Silver Season
- Glenn Mercer: Incidental Hum [great album cover, though]
- Dilly Dally: Sore [NYIM]
- Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Style
- Guy Garvey: Courting the Squall [NYIM]
- Martin Courtney: Many Moons
- Le1f: Riot Boi [NYIM]

***

The Also Recommended list will follow shortly. I've already almost completed the work on the year-end list and the first 2016 post so believe it or not, we're on schedule!

I got a pretty solid routine these days: 2015 New Release Rush (part 1 of 2)

I'm running low on time, so I broke one of my crucial tenets -- I have heard some of these albums less than four times, though no less than two under any circumstance, even after the point when I was surely going to tear off my hair if I heard Dan Bejar sing another stupid line. These reviews are also very unpolished and casual, but if you don't expect too much from me you might not be let down.

After I got this post ready I noticed that basically every review below is either an impatient pan or an ecstatic celebration. "Real" critics hopefully aren't this beholden to their moodiness.

Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (Southeastern)
A former member of the Drive-By Truckers, this singer-songwriter delivers pretty much what you'd expect from that pedigree. Not being a fan of the band in question I can't say how pleased acolytes would be but to neutral ears the opening cut "If It Takes a Lifetime" suffers from less of the self-seriousness and generic production that plagues the rest, which is largely morose tear-in-beer shit, albeit with some lyrical whoppers like "I thought everyone like me was dead" and a stanza about how God is "a pipe bomb."

Tame Impala: Currents (Interscope) [hr]
Kevin Parker's most delightful album to date finds his absurd mixture of sensibilities reaching its zenith with the fusion of pot-stoked old-fashioned LP listening (there are even two songs on which the record seems to be skipping) and, uh, gay disco and early '80s synthpop. The homoerotic "Cause I'm a Man" rubs up with the catchy purity of "The Moment" and with bass-driven raunch & roll on "The Less I Know the Better". Yet it all hangs together and becomes impressively seductive thanks to Parker's far-out snotty-yet-wistful vocals, crooning out gems like "they say people don't change but that's bullshit / they do" and an entire mumbled psychedelic rant about running into an ex downtown. The center of it all is "Eventually," an act of pop bliss through sheer hypnosis; it makes me dizzy even sober. Since it begins with its craziest tune -- a loping, lumbering epic called "Let It Happen" drenched in synths that fumbles through drugged-out repetition in multiple parts, the world's laziest rock opera -- you learn quickly if this is for you, but if it isn't I gotta wonder what kinda fun you're having out there.

Ashley Monroe: The Blade (Warner Bros.)
Acceptable, mostly melancholy country, well sung with a few biting moments lyrically ("if the devil don't want me, where the hell do I go?" could've been the mantra of Leslie Van Houten or similar). Likely less forgettable for fans of the genre than it is for me.

Eleventh Dream Day: Works for Tomorrow (Thrill Jockey)
Chicago alterna-rock dinosaurs apparently have remained a working unit all these years, which I didn't know; they were only ever on my radar as the support act or headliner for bands I was interested in, and though I barely remember the songs that led me to form my faint opinion of them, nothing here makes me think I've missed much. I admire the integrity of bands who plug away at this very basic guitar-and-propulsion style for decades on end without (seemingly) much financial reward; I'm glad they're enjoying themselves, but not a thing about the lo-fi recording style, the listlessly delivered vocals and yelps or the generally lackluster songs appeals to me. I don't even have the energy to determine if the target is deeply sincere rockers or irony-addicted former slackers but if you fall into either category, Check It Out.

Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge) [c]
Ain't nobody got time for this. Ninety-minute, 29-track collection of proggy punkish shouting resembles Fucked Up's David Comes to Life and is equally insufferable, with almost no variance between songs and an exhausting attempt at a "storyline," which nine times out of ten is bad bad news for an album. The second half is slightly more listenable than the first just because it has a few jarring -- if still fairly insipid -- moments of Celtic pop, blessed silence and general dicking around and isn't all one thing... but as a formerly huge fan of this band, I can't think of a more disheartening record I've heard lately. I could not wait to eject it from my life.

Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly)
Inoffensive Welsh language solo debut for former Pipettes member is Björk-lite, pretty much. It isn't exactly good but it's passable.

Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss (Sargent House)
Noisy, metallic goth wailing run through with some electronic teases here and there; this is music with a very specific audience that I am not in, but it's less awful than a lot of loud droning that comes across the desk.

Future: DS2 (Epic)
Accomplished but irritating, druggy, slightly apocalyptic third album from the increasingly celebrated Atlantan, one of the grittiest rappers to become a bona fide star in recent years. Musically, it's alarmingly spare and confrontational -- taking cues from the sound of latter-day trap but using that aggression to build a sound so paranoid and pained it becomes more disorienting than perhaps any other album of its stature. Future also deserves commendation for his use of Autotune not to bury the seams of his voice a la T-Pain but to emphasize his unworldly paranoia. This is a pretty great idea for an album, but it's an absolute failure in practice because of a combination of poor writing, repetition and the limitations of Future's eye-rollingly infantile persona. If you can look past lyrics about the codeine in his piss, his thumb in her butt, his contractor building him a pool and the day he spent at the laundromat, you still have to get past the unmitigated (and weirdly mismatched) sense of drunken, spaced-out dread pouring from every second of each song. One can easily hear the art and craft in this but it's not a pleasant zone to spend time in.

Royal Headache: High (What's Your Rupture?) [hr]
The sort of thing you didn't know you needed -- a 28-minute slab of tuneful punk rock from Sydney. It reminds me of a Terry Malts a bit, which is to say like a thrashier version of the Jam. In the best tradition of their countrymen the Saints, the band breaks it up brilliantly midway through with the impeccable, soulful Byrdsian ballad "Wouldn't You Know"; it gets under your skin right away. The Replacements-like love song "Carolina" is also a nice outlier. But the fast ones are solid too, all distorted pop with great hooks and sing-song choruses, favorites being "Another World" and the triumphantly big "Love Her If I Tried". Apparently the entire album tracks a broken love affair, a sort of wonderful irony for music this infectious and full of joy; what better way to heal, really?

Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop) [hr]
At times, Beach House can uncomfortably straddle a line between shoegaze and the humdrum mooniness of new age; by removing the amplified live drums and the more conventional pop songwriting of Bloom, this might seem in theory like a step backward. Indeed, I've listened to this dozens of times now and still can't remember which song is which, but what's more telling is that I've listened to it dozens of times and it hasn't yet become remotely tired. The songs might be incomplete in the abstract but they do boast towering melodies and an immersive sound behind their mild sensation of automation. As on Bloom, every sound in the duo's canon is magnified, enchantingly so. In the end even "Sparks," the return to Teen Deam-like discordance, soars rather than digging in its heals. No one who comes to Beach House for more-of-the-same can be dissatisfied with this, but the hints of evolution that reveal themselves with time are surprisingly reassuring, and a lot of them are tied not to the music itself but to Victoria Legrand's singing. Take, for instance, her badass, profoundly beautiful vocal on "10:37," her best ever. Take "PPP," which has her mumbling along in a "Revolution 9"-like trance before she blindsides with a full-throated tune to rival them all. Beyond just being a perfect zoning-out record, this achieves even more than Bloom an out-of-time, floating sensation that seems to freeze the world around it. It's like being stoned in a planetarium, and every song sounds like a grand finale... although it will take them some time to best the mixture of aching beauty and bottom-heavy rollicking on the brilliant "Bluebird," unseating "Norway" (or "New Year" on some nights) as their finest song to date.

The Foreign Exchange: Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey (s/r) [r]
This long-running duo's latest crazed electronica/hip hop slumber party only really works as a nostalgia trip, but what a trip! Genre-hopping cloud of delectable decadence brings us squarely back into the heat of a clubbing night in the hi-NRG days. It's corny, but it's unbelievably sexual and invigorating. It has nothing unique to offer. You won't care.

Advance Base: Nephew in the Wild (Orindal) [r]
Maybe it took a second album to make a guess at the difference between CFTPA and Advance Base, at least one less superficial than the kind of synthesizers and recording devices in use: Owen Ashworth does not seem very concerned with "evolving" any more. In most respects this is practically a twin of A Shut-In's Prayer; the tempo is consistent, the melancholy maybe a tiny bit draggier, the instrumentation and melodies sometimes minute variations on prior songs. That said, no one with a taste for Ashworth's marvelously peculiar sensibility will complain if you put this on at a party, although the other partygoers might give you a tough time. Above everything else he sounds comfortable, which is what allows him to unashamedly put out something called "My Love for You Is Like a Puppy Underfoot," with a vocal by Jody Weinmann that offers no concessions to those who think being adorable and twee is now an unforgivable hipster move. "The Only Other Girl from Back Home" is the strongest cut on offer here, with Ashworth demonstrating his literary penchant for occupying the shoes and hearts of others as eloquently as on Vs. Children. The rest is a little morose and familiar, but also -- in his usual fashion -- extremely lovable.

Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (Matador) [hr]
The warmest band in rock music is telling two stories here. Thirty-one years after their formation, they provide a sequel to their 1990 acoustic album Fakebook, a jangly folk-rock moment in time that shed every trace of inside-baseball indiedom and provided a long exploration of its authors' personalities that was then unprecedented in its intimacy and grace. They've evolved a lot since then, but the Fakebook concept itself is so singularly appealing that it's somewhat incredible they've not returned to the well all these years. It's indeed true that for the hypothetical person who only ever fell hard for Fakebook and otherwise cares little for Yo La Tengo, this is another exception; the album returns to the quartet format of the old release (with long-gone Dave Schramm taking over lead guitar, James McNew replacing long-gone Al Geller on bass) and also closely matches its mixture of covers (the lion's share), acoustic renditions of old Yo La Tengo songs, and a few new originals. Crucially, however, the album also continues down the path laid out by 2013's Fade, especially on the new songs like "Rickety", as the once wildly unpredictable unit continues to attain a hushed, ethereal beauty that increasingly feels like their gorgeous response to a contented aging process. As such, it's a more melancholy and calm affair than Fakebook, but in the end hardly less of a pleasure, especially after you spend some time living inside Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's lovelier-than-ever vocals (Hubley's in particular). Best new song: "Rickety," with the three full-timers echoing in perfect harmony, Kaplan crooning out in front. Best old song: though it's nice to hear the words to "Deeper into Movies" clearly (and nice to have confirmation that nothing could turn "All Your Secrets" into much more than a trifle), the heretofore neglected "The Ballad of Red Buckets," revealing textures as haunting and complex in its stripped-down variation as those on any of the band's old-fashioned raveups. Best famous cover: Hubley wringing new regrets out of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" just barely trumps the fragile, unforced feeling she lends to "Friday I'm in Love." Best obscure cover: Sun Ra and pre-funk George Clinton have their moments of glory but somehow the part that gets a lump in my throat every time is the version of "Butchie's Tune" by the Lovin' Spoonful. That's a band I love but I've never heard that song, and now that Hubley's revision and the band's shattering arrangement has taken up permanent residence in my heart I'm not sure I ever want to.

Destroyer: Poison Season (Merge) [c]
Dan Bejar's follow-up to Kaputt seems to prove my suspicion that I can only put up with him in the context of either that album or the New Pornographers. This is fussy and irritating, without any of the pop smarts and throwback imagination of the vintage dreamscapes of last time out. The preoccupations of a deeply pretentious soul like Bejar's only function outside the blessed privacy of his own home and cult-filled concerts when there is some sort of music for them to rub against.

The Arcs: Yours, Dreamily (Nonesuch)
This straightforward rawk is not surprisingly the work of Dan Auerbach, on vacation from the Black Keys, and notably less offensive than his work with that band (which isn't difficult). Like most side projects it's cluttered and suffers from an serious deficit of identity, but at a time when "roots rock" doesn't seem as automatically bad as it once did, this doesn't warrant too much sniping.

Empress Of: Me (XL) [c]
The most pretentious, overly formalist brand of NYC singer-songwriter meandering; it doesn't become more palatable because it has dance beats and is classified as "indie elctronica." Empress Of's recycled chillwave and "EDM" are one thing but the songs have the same wispy unfinished quality of FKA twigs', only less ambitiously weird. So would you rather be sideswiped by a pickup truck or hit head-on by a car?

Dungen: Allas Sak (Mexican Summer)
Started to mellow out on progressive rock a few years ago, not that it's something I enjoy in the classic sense, but I see how its basic principles aren't so different from some of the trickier art rockers I dearly love, such as Radiohead and Joanna Newsom (though Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear still test every ounce of my patience; it's in my genes probably). There's also the fact that a very different kind of stuffy, snobbish formalism more beholden to the stuff I did like growing up has taken over the indieverse in the last twenty years. That said, while this long-established long-on-hiatus Swedish band seems perfectly polite, they call to mind a lot of what I naturally dislike about prog as a genre, flutes and eternal wanky guitar solos and cerebral compositions, overly mannered vocals and shapeless flaunting of dull musical virtuosity. I don't hate it, I just can't listen to it without fidgeting and/or giggling.

The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality (Brainfeeder) [r]
Part of the base appeal of the Underachievers' weedy east coast revival thing is the obvious counterintuitive contradiction between their woozy psychedelic lyrics and the banging throwback music and delivery: PM Dawn and Leaders of the New School talked a lot of the same sort of mystical guff but hardly ever bounced like these two. Brilliant later artists like Talib Kweli and Mos Def infused their lyrical consciousness with welcome brashness and an eye on the floor, but Killer Mike is the only other rapper I can think of who's so successfully melded rock & roll aggression with KRS-One style preaching, engaging even when it's silly or wrongheaded. This effect is somewhat tempered on Evermore because the group has taken care to split the record into two halves. The first has all the weird stuff, the edutainment, the late-night philosophical smoking; you can get hung up on how flighty and repetitive it all is but they're still great MCs and there's plenty of variance between tracks. Then on the back half, the pair goes on a "Backseat Freestyle"-like rampage of dredging up every hedonistic trope in the rulebook, either for satirical purposes or just to get it out of their system. This is probably the more fun half to listen to but it's kind of a shame to hear them compartmentalize themselves, and not nearly as provocatively as Danny Brown did on Old. Still, it's all in the delivery; you won't find stuff like the uncommonly fierce lite-jazz-plus-Nas masterstroke "The Dualist" or the grinning "Generation Z" on an X-Clan album. Plus AK's a far better critic of hip hop status quo than I am: "My lyrics above gimmicks, my music like drugs / when I listen to yours, I don't even get a buzz."

John Grant: Gray Tickles, Black Pressure (Bella Union) [c]
Right Said Fred meets wispy indie bro shit and Queens of the Stone Age rawk nonsense. Not even Tracey Thorn can redeem this.

Neon Indian: VEGA INTL. Night School (Mom + Pop) [c]
Please please please please please just shut up. This kind of bonkers sensory-overload stuff is bad enough without the elements of various played-out and reappropriated dance music subgenres. A sound collage of good times filtered through the impossible misery of memories xeroxed so many hundreds of times they've faded to a sickly gray.

***

As of this moment I'm about two months behind where I should be on 2015 stuff. To head off a similar catastrophe next year, I'm going to be starting 2016 stuff simultaneously with wrapup on last year's reviews and supplemental stuff. The timeframe I'm expecting will be something like this:
- 2015 New Release Rush part 2: around Feb. 7th
- 2015 Also Recommended: around Feb. 10th
- 2015 Top 10 List & Honorable Mentions: around Feb. 17th
- 2015 List of Lists: around Feb. 25th
- February 2016 music diary: on track for March 1st.
However, if I ultimately run behind on something, it will be the year-end stuff from last year, not new music; it'll be Done When It Gets Done. That should fix the scheduling problem and get me back into a workable routine.

See you along the way!

Hanging on if only by a thread: Autumn 2015 music diary (part 2 of 2)

By now you know the drill and if you don't, you can look back at this post for full explanations. Welcome to the least reliably scheduled music blog on the web. This post was meant for October. It's here now. Two further album review collections will follow, then a best-of-2015 post, and then more timely reviews of old and new music will hopefully resume, new music in posts just like this, old music in a new format I will explain when the time comes. Merry late Christmas.

Shamir: Ratchet (XL) [r]
Giddy Las Vegas vet pumps out solid neo-house music with good beats and great, attitude-laden vocals despite a paucity of major hooks and some pedestrian writing. The throwback, itchy '90s-style production is a real coup in a time when drugginess of a very different, more lethargic kind is the order of the day on the dance floor, but Shamir's sensual yet ungendered singing is the big attraction, solely excluding the unduly stretching they attempt on the ballad "Darker," the only real dud here.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar)
Guitarist Ruban Nielson's project was a big bloghype circa 2010, at which point he generated a lot of buzz by sheer force of mystery, though the work's never seemed like more than polite lo-fi of a kind that often generates undue attention these days. I wasn't compelled to give more than a cursory listen to the group's first album and skipped the second altogether; to my therefore uninformed ears this obvious departure sounds like a midlife crisis album, a bit somber and ponderous with a few well-appropriated R&B textures and one too many heinously overlong acoustic guitar solos (by which I might mean just one, though it feels like a lot). It's totally inoffensive alternative-lite, and pleasant enough.

Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last (Castle Face) [r]
Long-running, hard-driving California garage rockers, historically a blind spot for me, offer up some respectable riffing and are generally impressively eclectic, running through an exciting slate of heavy and soft, sometimes instrumental and often belted, rockers and rollers.

Jamie xx: In Colour (Young Turks) [r]
Nobody familiar with Jamie Smith's previous work with his band the xx and in his collaboration with Gil-Scott Heron would question the idea that he's a bit of a sadsack, having recorded some of the most beautifully morose dance music of the last half-decade. On his first solo album even the sole solid attempt at hedonism, the doo wop-derived Young Thug guest spot "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)", sounds mostly like an anthem for people doing their best to convince themselves they're OK. Parts of the festival of dancing and despair here are sublime; these are specifically, with one exception, the vocal cuts like "Loud Places" and "Stranger in a Room," not coincidentally the songs that feature the other two members of the xx on vocals. However, the four-minute bleep-out "Obvs" finds some sort of gorgeous middle ground between Oneohtrix Point Never and Beach House; the rest is fine, but this stands out because it doesn't seem rooted in Smith's musical past and completely fulfills the album's dream of a moody comfort zone in the weird context of disco.

Sun Kil Moon: Universal Themes (Caldo Verde) [c]
The poet laureate of oversharing returns with an even more ridiculous slate of glorified diary entries; there's a world of difference between this chronic asshole's exhaustively detailed chronicles of his sheltered life and the pain and passion a true artist like Tracey Thorn, Ezra Furman and Patti Smith can wring out of their private worlds. Musically his work remains not-exactly-terrible, but it's really hard to hear that over the din of his man-child puffery. The last song in particular, wherein Mark Kozelek once again flaunts his friendship with a musician (Ben Gibbard) he mistakenly thinks is a hip name to drop then tells us all about harassing Jane Fonda in a hotel lobby and quizzing strangers about their lives (presumably so he can use the information he gains as fodder for either song lyrics or one of his petulant onstage rants), is one of the greatest atrocities ever committed against the idea of recorded music. Actually, it makes me question the value of freedom of expression, civil liberties, etc. Total time: 70 minutes, 9 seconds.

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf (s/r)
"Social," eh? Extremely boho hip hop slash jazz slash R&B commune is plentifully musical and has lots of high-profile guests, but it comes down on the wrong side of uber-friendly "consciousness" like so much hipster rap. I can't be the only one whose bullshit detector goes off the charts when I hear a song informing me of being uncool is actually, like, really "cool," especially when these meaningless, vaguely anti-counterculture platitudes are being delivered straight into my face by the likes of Big Sean and Jeremih. (See also: Miguel's song wondering if he's "normal.")

Sharon Van Etten: I Don't Want to Let You Down (Jagjaguwar EP)
Somewhat easier to digest than Are We There, its full length counterpart, but still rather monotonous despite the singer-songwriter's obvious talents. The songs are angsty but measured and formal, expressing a lot of apprehension about the future of a relationship cracked at its core by a career-based conflict. Blah.

Muse: Drones (Warner Bros.) [c]
I used to think there was something sort of fun about the way this onetime Radiohead ripoff went in the exact opposite direction of fellow Radiohead ripoffs Coldplay and became a schlocky-as-hell outfit just this side of hair-band heavy metal. I was wrong, although props to them for staying abreast of the latest war-mongerer controversies.

Mates of State: You're Going to Make It (Barsuk EP) [NO]
In which the once-vibrant and engaging duo yells at the Youths for looking at their screens all the time and seems to genuinely believe this is a cutting insight. Not only is it a disingenuous and fake thing to be upset about, it's the height of Boomer-like Rawkist hypocrisy, coming as it does from a band who got a big paycheck for a Verizon commercial barely a year ago. As with everyone who grows up and becomes an unempathetic, cantankerous pig, you have to want to look into the eyes of these two and ask them what the fuck happened to make them such boring old grouches, but as a Tuned-In Millennial I reckon I'm 2 busy looking at the "apps" on my "phone" to think about it too much lol!

Lady Lamb: After (Mom + Pop) [hr]
Working as a video store clerk enabled Quentin Tarantino to blossom into the overly clever, emotionally stunted rich kid he fantasized about being in his youth. Taking the same job on the graveyard shift in coastal Maine -- some years after the lion's share of such outlets in the nation had long since shuttered -- apparently helped Aly Spaltro refine herself into a profoundly perspicacious observer of humanity, the sort of collector of details whose grasp on the strands of thought that comprise a person's life can utterly blindside you. She writes a lot about being on trains, and the weird moments shared with strangers; and she writes a lot about the moments of unstated, dead-air strangeness between people who are intimate. And oh, incidentally, she's a Rock God -- and in the best tradition of Rock Gods from John Lennon to Killer Mike, she''s both a personally-driven, self-examining writer and a lover of the well-turned pop hook who can use these gifts to the same end: cathartically self-doubting but never tortured, sunny but never superficial songs boasting wonderful lyrics, high emotion and major musical eclecticism. Armed with some of the best melodic guitar playing on an album this year and a voice that thrills at its highest and lowest registers, she is expressive in a timelessly no-nonsense manner, singular as she is in subtle ways. Her work and interplay with her solid backing band is precise, never slapdash, and without becoming stuffy, really quite ambitious -- especially in its composition, with songs like "Violet Clementine" and "Dear Arkansas Daughter" launching into boldly disparate sections that somehow come together a la "Paranoid Android" or Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow". The most widely praised songs on this criminally overlooked record, "Milk Duds" and "Billions of Eyes," boast the best lyrics -- and allow Lady Lamb to stand apart from the other most moving lyricists-rockers of the year, Courtney Barnett and Ezra Furman, who'd never try to put across songs quite so perfectly worked-out and intricate -- but are in many ways less compelling than the guitar-driven, rock & roll workouts like "Heretic" and "Spat Out Spit"... but why make a distinction? There's not a lackluster moment to be found here, and so much on the offer you'll spend ages pleasurably discovering new nooks and crannies in it.

Everything Everything: Get to Heaven (RCA) [NO]
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. Unlistenable, maximalist British rock about "the state of the world" or something; how many Insightful Tunes do we really need about such cultural horrors as the news cycle and -- oh dear -- "social media"? Stuart Price's involvement in this is befuddling.

Richard Thompson: Still (Fantasy)
How dumb and desperate we get in our old age. Still an engaging guitarist and sometimes a good singer. A lyricist increasingly as shallow as his son. And the arrangements are abysmal folkie MOR; Jeff Tweedy's contributions as producer seem only to enable the blando echo chamber feeling in this trip down sulk lane. Cultists will probably find their hearts in it somewhere.

Kasey Musgraves: Pageant Material (Mercury Nashville)
Musgraves has a fine voice but the songs she cowrites are still awfully generic; the safety of slick Nashville production numbs everything anyway, but one assumes she's capable of something stronger than this many songs about manners, how nice everyone "in town" is, the IMPORTANCE of FAMILEE. She knows her audience, I guess, but that seems to just inflict complacency in this oft-hellish genre. Key I-can't-believe-a-human-being-wrote-this lyric: "Mind your own biscuits and everything will be gravy."

Meg Baird: Don't Weigh Down the Light (Drag City) [hr]
It's right out of the California textbook, really (just like labelmate Joanna Newsom): multi-instrumentalist and artiste of beautiful, stark, sometimes Celtic-ish folk, a sublime collision of the exotic and homegrown, was previously a psych-rocker, now uses a pop-based command of the aural stage to craft songs stirring but minimal. The music of Appalachia runs deeply in her blood quite literally, but you don't need to know that to be mesmerized by her voice and songwriting, immersive and atmospheric but inviting, even incisive at its strongest ("Past Houses" and "I Don't Mind", both ghostly; the relatively rollicking "Good Directions"). I'm aware that Drag City's distribution model isn't incredibly convenient, but take the time and cash to seek this one out if you're at all fond of this kind of music; as far as modern stuff goes, it's like the best moments in Sam Amidon's output sustained for full length.

Thundercat: The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam (Brainfeedr EP)
Lightly funky architect of smooth, backward-looking L.A. R&B is part of the same utopian universe of post-modern soul as Flying Lotus and Shabazz Palaces, but this quick bite of his talents is too bloodless to make a big impression, honestly sounding more like carbon-copy bands like Yeasayer than any new or exciting artist, though Thundercat apparently made crucial contributions to two of the most acclaimed records of 2015: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and Kamasi Washington's The Epic while recording this disc. The music is fine, even promising, just not particularly memorable.

Vince Staples: Summertime '06 (Def Jam)
In interviews, Staples seems like a brilliant dude with a pretty coherent artistic philosophy. So why is none of this evidenced by his actual music? Just like on his EP last year, aside from the occasional undeniable peak, Staples seems like one of the most overly practiced and insincere MCs in the current wave of hip hop. The production choices (No ID is the prominent contributor) are even less moving, a weird aesthetic fixation on Enter the Void-like drugged out dread fused with ringtone-rap minimalism. Sometimes the sheer lethargy of it all is infectious in a way that you can sort of respect ("Lemme Know," the endearingly pathetic hook that leads off "Loca"); otherwise, nearly every song sounds like someone freestyling over one of those fucking haunted house toys you can buy at Dollar Tree. The album picks up near the end, with the last few tracks hinting at a concept of sorts: despair over the spiritually and economically barren world Staples' generation inherits. Maybe I'm just too far out of Staples' age bracket, or maybe I'm not on enough downers?

Miguel: Wildheart (RCA)
The unkind way of looking at this is to say that Miguel's become druggy and a little ridiculous, like a parody of the Weeknd; after the knee-jerk passes, though, it does all make sense. Big guitar songs and the throaty choruses of grunge and hair metal were already in his blood way back, so a guest spot from Lenny Kravitz isn't an out-of-this-world proposition. The rock moves can be silly at times, but not nearly as silly as the coked-up seductions "the valley" and "destinado a morir," which resemble the output an alien might produce if it heard a Prince LP. On the former in particular, Miguel sings the word "fuck" in a high-pitched, oddly convicted register as though it's his first time using or even hearing the word. Pleasures do come around; the Lionel Ritchie-like "waves" is nearly as blissful and fully-constructed a pop song as "Adorn," and "a beautiful exit" is a perfect entrance number. Missteps like "NWA" -- one of the most annoying songs in the history of recorded music thanks to its use of a drum machine sample that sounds like your roof leaking into a wok -- make it a hard slog even as it seems directed at sheer mindless pleasure; does that ever not backfire?

Bilal: In Another Life (eOne) [r]
Bilal's most assured record so far -- if he's no less ambitious than sixteen years ago, he's learned to hide it behind a relaxed Stevie Wonder-like charm. The songs remain derivative but they're a pleasure to listen to, and Kendrick Lamar and Big K.R.I.T. each figure in strong, buried guest spots. This never approaches the best moments of Miguel's album above, but I also never get the urge to turn it off, which is a major advantage.

Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (Bella Union) [hr]
Twenty percent Mick Jagger, all grinning command and pure attitude with the periodic evidence of untold emotional damage; twenty percent Gram Parsons and Janis Joplin in all their abused bottle-swinging sorrow; sixty percent pure unadulterated rock & roll -- big body-shaking chords 'n' drums, doo wop backing vocals, sax solos right out of a Bill Haley & His Comets single, all cleverly interpolated into a cycle of well-turned phrases that chronicle making breakfast naked, sitting and waiting, and teaching friends and lovers how to feel really really really bad. That makes this sound like a festival of practiced and even smarmy playfulness and dread, and to some extent that applies; "Wobbly" and "Hark! To the Music" are funny, catchy tunes that make amusing hay out of the horrors of a life of isolated excess... or just isolation... or just excess. As Furman himself puts it at one point, "I've got a bright future in music as long as I never find true happiness." And yet, when it comes right down to the bitterest moments, the dark nights of the soul from which the best rock & roll ballads were always born and for which they were built, Furman's jokes and slogs have a genuine feeling of torture and loss, and why shouldn't they? The empathy of the spill-your-feelings partnership on "Hour of Deepest Need" expands to the audience to such a degree that you finally feel as if it's us to whom he's singing. The miseries of "Haunted Head" and "Ordinary Life" are devastating to anyone who's ever been in or around depression and mental illness, and the petty casualness with which he tosses them off is part of the design. Anthems come and go, about a restless year, not wanting to be a bad guy, and a body that was made in this particular way so fucking relax, but where he trips and chokes you up is when he issues an emotional tour de force, a plea for understanding and compassion like the Paul Westerberg-worthy "the human mind gets way fucking sick of beauty / and I know, and it's happened to me again and again." One point this can drive home is how wit doesn't have to solely equate to irony: only a real bona fide singer of the most classic brand could peak his best, starkest song with "Sometimes the wound hurts powerful indeed / But sometimes you just got to let that sucker bleed" behind a huge climactic moment of banged-out piano and have it come off not as an appropriated blast-from-the-past melodrama but a fully justified indulgence. Invariably Furman's articulate missives come to us with harrowing detail, good humor and a directness that will knock you on your ass. Invariably he sings them beautifully. Invariably the songs are as engaging and lively as the words. Invariably this is brilliant, soulful music as pure as it comes in this year or any.

Wilco: Star Wars (Anti-) [r]
This self-released, quick bit of raunch panders to consumers like nothing else in the Wilco catalog by sheer virtue of its Google-fucking title and the cat picture that adorns it, but the music itself is also clear fan service to those left in the cold by Wilco's last two or three albums, which legend has it are lackluster blando Dad rock, whereas this is serious unfussed-with straight-ahead guitar punk rock etc. As someone who loved all two or three of those lackluster blando Dad rock albums and admired the band's refusal to second-guess its instincts, I find this a regression; "raw" Wilco seems pedestrial now. There are some good riffs that drone out to oblivion and a few good slow ones, but I prefer the version of the band that doesn't think it's charming to pretend not to give a fuck.

Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia) [hr]
Bridges is younger than I am by six years but the songs he writes and records are American mythology as timeless as something from Woody Guthrie or Skip James, only his language of choice is that of pre-Motown soul of Sam Cooke's era and ethos. Of course Bridges is hardly alone in his ambition to duplicate the extraordinary sound of black radio in the late '50s and early '60s; from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings to Charles Bradley, the urge to connect on nostalgia for some of the finest recorded music in our nation's history is an understandable compulsion that drives a number of careers, specialized and worldwide. What makes Bridges different is not how painstakingly his producer Niles City Sound commits to not only the musical stylistics but the tape hiss and fidelity of the years in question, the audio equivalent of Super 8's lens flare, but that the songs completely deliver; over half of them sound not like forgeries but like lost classics. And the forgeries are pretty good too; it's actually to Bridges' credit that his voice -- heavenly at its best -- is stretched past its limits on a few cuts. It suggests that this is a born experimenter who's simply driven by an out-of-time affinity for something ageless. Past the already beloved title cut, try "Brown Skin Girl" if you want to rock, "Pull Away" and "Lisa Sawyer" if you want to roll, the disarmingly spirited closing "River" if you want to be shattered. The best pure throwback record of any genre in years.

***

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Kwabs: Love + War
* Darkstar: Foam Island
* Alex G: Beach Music
* Erykah Badu: But You Can't Use My Phone
- Dave Rawlings Machine: Nashville Obsolete
- Idjut Boys: Versions
- Jay Rock: 90059
- Low: Ones and Sixes
- Telekinesis: Ad Infinitum
- Mac Miller: GO:OD AM
- Battles: La Di Da Di
- Leona Lewis: I Am
- Ryan Adams: 1989
- Disclosure: Caracal
- New Order: Music Complete
- Shopping: Why Choose
- Janet Jackson: Unbreakable
- Apollo Brown: Grandeur
- The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful
- Corb Lund: Things That Can't Be Undone
- Israel Nash: Silver Season
- Glenn Mercer: Incidental Hum
- Dilly Dally: Sore
- Mogwai: Central Belters
- Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Style
- Guy Garvey: Courting the Squall
- Martin Courtney: Many Moons
- EL VY: Return to the Moon
- Ty Dolla $ign: Free TC
- Talib Kweli & 9th Wonder: Indie 500
- Le1f: Riot Boi
- Logic: The Incredible True Story

***

REJECTS:
Field Music: Music for Drifters [NYIM]
Robert Forster: Songs to Play [NYIM]
LA Priest: Inji
Matrixxman: Homesick
EZTV: Calling Out [NYIM]
Julio Bashmore: Knockin' Boots
Stacy Barthe: BEcoming
Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami [NYIM]
Lianne La Havas: Blood
Golden Rules: Golden Ticket
Public Enemy: Man Plans, God Laughs
Gunplay: Living Legend
yuk: a n a k
Night Beds: Ivywild
The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness
Max Richter: (From) Sleep [NYIM]
Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon
Dave Alvin: Lost Time
Richard Hawley: Hollow Meadows [NYIM]
Craig Finn: Faith in the Future
Gary Clark, Jr.: The Story of Sunny Boy Slim
Micachu & the Shapes: Good Sad Happy Bad
Lucero: All a Man Should Do
Glen Hansard: Didn't He Ramble
David Gilmour: Rattle That Lock
Nicolas Godin: Contrepoint [NYIM]
Baio: The Names
Keith Richards: Crosseyed Heart
Mercury Rev: The Light in You
Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness
Guilty Simpson: Detroit's Son [NYIM]
The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Harmlessness
Graveyard: Innocence & Decadence
Stick in the Wheel: From Here [NYIM]
No Devotion: Permanence
Patty Griffin: Servant of Love
The Dead Weather: Dodge and Burn
Sexwitch
U.S. Girls: Half Free
Girl Band: Holding Hands with Jamie
Peaches: Rub
Chvrches: Every Open Eye
the Icarus Line: All Things Under Heaven [NYIM]
Frankie Lee: American Dreamer [NYIM]
Kylesa: Exhausting Fire [NYIM]
Hey Colossus: Radio Static High
Autre Ne Veut: Age of Transparency
Eagles of Death Metal: Zipper Down
Mercury Rev: The Light in You
Wavves: V
Visionist: Safe [NYIM]
City and Colour: If I Should Go Before You
Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect
State Champs: Around the World & Back
Demi Lovato: Confident [NYIM]
Evil Blizzard: Everybody Come to Church
Luke Haines: British Nuclear Bunkers [NYIM]
Dan Friel: Life [NYIM]
!!!: As If
Son Little
Vanessa Carlton: Liberman
Killing Joke: Pylon
Fuzz: II
The Yawpers: American Man
British Sea Power: Sea of Brass
Wolf Eyes: I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces
Rabit: Communion [NYIM]
The Chills: Silver Bullets [NYIM]
Columbia Nights: In All Things
Young Thug: Slime Season 2
Natalie Merchant: Paradise Is There [NYIM]
Trust Fund: Seems Unfair [NYIM]
Anna van Hausswolff: The Miraculous
Lanterns on the Lake: Beings [NYIM]
Wreckless Eric: AmERICa [NYIM]
Teeth of the Sea: Highly Deadly Black Tarantula
Jeff Lynne's ELO: Alone in the Universe
Alessia Cara: Know-It-All
Boots: Aquaria
Kirk Franklin: Losing My Religion [NYIM]
Jeezy: Church in These Streets
Enya: Dark Sky Island [NYIM]
Ringo Deathstarr: Pure Mood
Freddie Gibbs: Shadow of a Doubt
Adele: 25 [NYIM]
Lubomyr Melnyk: Rivers and Streams [NYIM]
SOPHIE: Product
Jadakiss: Top Five Dead or Alive

***

SONGS OF THE SEASON
I've been listening to what you've all been listening to. It's devastating, really, isn't it? It would be a loss anyway, but he was making some of the best music of his career recently. What's reflected below is pure emotion; as latecoming fan -- only got into most of his albums about seven years ago -- I retain some very emotional attachments to the first custom-made career survey mix CD that my friend Steph gave to me. For more on Bowie, I give her the floor and invite you to read her remembrance of him.

Lianne La Havas "Green & Gold" [Blood]
Gunplay ft. PJK "Just Won't Do" [Living Legend]
/
David Bowie "Five Years" [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars]
David Bowie "Sweet Thing" [Diamond Dogs]
David Bowie "Look Back in Anger" [Lodger]
David Bowie "Andy Warhol" [Hunky Dory]
David Bowie "Moss Garden" ["Heroes"]
David Bowie "Modern Love" [Let's Dance]
Ezra Furman "Hour of Deepest Need" [Perpetual Motion People]
The Chemical Brothers ft. Beck "Wide Open" [Born in the Echoes]
Leon Bridges "Pull Away" [Coming Home]
D'Angelo "Another Life" [Black Messiah]
Lady Lamb "Violet Clementine" [After]
Courtney Barnett "Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party" [Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit]
Miguel "waves" [Wildheart]
Carly Rae Jepsen "Emotion" [E-MO-TION]
Jamie xx "Obvs" [In Colour]
Vince Staples "Like It Is" [Summertime '06]
Meg Baird "Past Houses" [Don't Weigh Down the Light]

*****