2015: My Year in Music — Part 2, My Top Ten Albums
Whelp, 2015 is over. It’s sad to see it go, but it’s also time for that final necessity of taking stock over all the albums I listened to all year and picking out my favorites of the bunch. There’s a lot of self-reflective and introspective work to consider, a lot of re-invention both towards old and familiar sounds and towards innovative and unexpected musical directions, a lot of smooth inspired tunes, and, unlike last year, we have the first out-and-out masterpiece I’ve heard released since… I dunno, Yeezus.
So let’s get to flipping through those album covers…
10. Vulnicura — Bjork
It’s just easy to pick out Bjork as one of my favorite artists, weird as she might be to some others. Every work of hers since her debut maps out her emotional and psychological state during her life, and opens her up as a personality to visit and empathize with in each track. Vulnicura, being the latest, looks back on the loss of a 10-year relationship and what the end of it means for her growing as a person. The swarming and extended length of her songs (pretty much the longest songs of her career, unless I’m misremembering) give them a charmingly intimate stream-of-consciousness feel and you don’t exactly get the sort of underlining pointedness of some other artists who write based on ended relationships such as Adele or Taylor Swift. It’s just sort of vulnerable and willing to think about what happened before taking the next step forward.
9. No Cities to Love — Sleater-Kinney
I don’t watch Portlandia and I’m very late to the Carrie Brownstein train and I totally got baited by the Bob’s Burgers , but I’m glad I’m getting aboard right when Sleater-Kinney is knuckling themselves up. Getting to listen to all of their discography together has answered the question of whether or not they’ve been able to carry their rebellious energy over the last 20 years and the answer is a resounding Fuck Yes.
8. Meliora — Ghost
I’m a sucker for horror. I’m really a sucker for horror-based music and Ghost has been my latest fix since Blue Oyster Cult has been lagging (a band whose style Ghost almost certainly apes both musically and conceptually) and Danzig is busy making cover albums. But they’ve tapped into my sweet spot hard enough for me to overlook the simplicity and derivative aspects to always be ready to jam with whatever hard rocking darkness they spread.
7. In Colour — Jamie xx
Oof, bruh, this album lives up to its name. It’s dazzling, it’s bright, it’s dizzying, and all of the above with its kaleidoscopic construction of beats by the keyboardist of the xx. For an album sort of made on the side, what we’ve ended up with is something that feels more complete than most of the banger-filled big releases that came out this year.
6. The Most Lamentable Tragedy — Titus Andronicus
Punk rock these days seems like relic, forgotten and tossed aside as the adolescent stamp of a time long past. Titus Andronicus, however, aren’t having that shit… this is energy tapped out of what the Who used to be, while mixed in with the raw angry lyrics calling back to Joe Strummer and The Clash, and yet The Most Lamentable Tragedy is still in the end, it’s own beast to be reckoned with. A truly expansive and bombastic composition of guitar/bass/drum synced explosions to punctuate the sprawling mindset of the concept album’s lead, the fact that it’s stripped-down to the essentials of classic punk only makes it call more attention to how dense this album makes itself.
5. Sub-Lingual Tablet — The Fall
It’s not really the best The Fall has made, given how long they have been around, but it might be the best album to showcase as the tip of the iceberg. Garage rock boilerplate, but that’s exactly the type of thing I’m into to begin with, music-making for music-making’s sake. It hits all sorts of happy buttons in me. If you don’t like this, you probably won’t like the band, but if you find tracks like “Auto-Chip 14–15” to be truly encompassing, let me lead you into The Fall, sir or madam.
4. Hamilton — Original Broadway Cast Recording
I occasionally happen upon movies that make me want to dip back into acting (I think the last movie to do this was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), but — while I am a fan of musicals unabashedly — never a Broadway production until now. If the idea of a hip-hop Broadway musical about the founding fathers sounds as much to you like a Simpsons sketch like it did to me (plus, apostasy of apostasies, I actually don’t like In the Heights), you’re going to be floored as I was by this Black Thought/?uestlove produced recording making you feel completely overwhelmed by this three hour epic work (a maximalism piece in the same form the Titus album is pretty damn minimalist epic).
But what really makes this quite unforgettable is not even Lin-Manuel Miranda’s intelligent lyricism to at once accessibly communicate the thoughts and conflicts of characters without removing their gravitas, it’s one voice: Leslie Odom, Jr. as his killer Aaron Burr has a shocking humanity to the descent of the man with simple the soft power of his voice, down to the slightest careful inflection of a word — and that’s just from hearing him sing. If this guy loses the Tony this year, that winning performance better be a miracle.
3. Carrie & Lowell — Sufjan Stevens
It’s sometimes not about the things you say, but about the things you don’t say. It’s the smaller moments in Stevens’ tribute to his mother and memories of her that make this album so easy to tug at, until you do and suddenly everything becomes a surrounding journey through Stevens’ attempt to make sense out of the loss and send his mother off in a beautiful way.
2. The Epic — Kamasi Washington
I really am wondering where the hell Kamasi Washington has been all my life. He’s fearless with the saxophone in a manner you don’t see out of many instrumentalists these days, except the guitarist Buckethead. He’s versatile, he’s got a finger on every possible emotion he might need to paint with his abilities, he wants to say it all in his 3-disc block of musical transcendence. The only reason I don’t have much to say for this is because of his hand in what comes after… my number one album of the year…
- To Pimp a Butterfly — Kendrick Lamar
Kamasi Washington is not one of the only musical tools Kendrick Lamar used at his disposal in his follow-up to 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city, but the album wouldn’t be the same without the snatches of Washington’s saxophone brilliance. Still, the jazz-influenced album has more to it that just the musicality of it, which underscores the radical outrage Lamar shoots out all throughout at the condition of black people in the U.S. Even in spite of more erratic storytelling than gkmc, To Pimp a Butterfly turns the race discussion into an reckless, angry match with tensions flared. And Kendrick is in an interesting position to comment on it, not only because of the black shootings and riots happening all over the country providing perfect timing for this album to exist (it hasn’t been this harsh since Public Enemy dropped), but because his newfound rise in success from gkmc puts him at a heightened position, only to find things still don’t change when you’re at the top. Adding to this an impressively subtle timeline of African-American influenced musical genres (hence Kamasi’s jazz jams sliding in and out of the album) and a willingness to look and illuminate class divisions and even to criticize oneself in half of the lyrics (at points, Lamar almost gets to scathing self-loathing) brings about one of the most potent and powerful musical works I’ve heard in my admittedly so-far short lifetime. If I can dig more and more into finding music this willing to go everywhere philosophically and leave no stone unturned about its themes, I will never let them go.
Honorable Mentions:
25 — Adele, Apex Predator Easy Meat — Napalm Death, Art Angels — Grimes, Beauty Behind the Madness — The Weeknd, Black Messiah — D’Angelo, Currents — Tame Impala, Divers — Joanna Newsom, E-mo-tion — Carly Rae Jepsen, Endless Forms Most Beautiful — Nightwish, Garden of Delete — Oneohtrix Point Never, Hand. Cannot. Erase. — Steven Wilson, Haven — Kamelot, I Love You, Honeybear — Father John Misty, Music Complete — New Order, New Bermuda — Deafheaven, Sol Invictus — Faith No More, Strangers to Ourselves — Modest Mouse, Universal Themes — Sun Kil Moon
And that’s all he had to say.
Salim Garami thinks there was some things in those rambles that might have spoken to everyone, but he’s just a fan of music, not as verbose as he is about Film on his wordpress blog Movie Motorbreath (also on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) or his other pieces here on Medium. God bless Panel & Frame for letting him in, which you should follow for more emerging voices in Film, Comics, Literature, and Art! Thank you for reading!
