NO SLEEP TIL HAMMERSMITH

Tonight we say goodbye to Lemmy Kilmister.

Born Christmas Eve 1945, the English bassist (and occasional singer) was a member of the space-rock band Hawkwind before being caught in Windsor, Ontario with drugs. The band fired him, but the Canadian border guards mistook speed for cocaine and so he was let free on a technicality. He went on to form a band called Bastard before being told that no one would slot a band called Bastard into BBC’s Top Of The Pops. Lemmy renamed the band Motorhead, and…

The man seemed immortal. He was, up until his death, recording high-octane rock ‘n’ roll, pounding back liquor, and touring the hell out of his singular battering-ram vision of music. Listen to that link – the man just turned 70 two days before he would learn that he had a particularly aggressive and incurable form of cancer. Two days after that – today – he is dead. Victory or die, indeed.

There is something incomprehensibly pure about Motorhead’s music. There’s no subtlety in it, whatsoever. It has no finesse, no delicate turn of phrase or hint of pretension. It is straight-ahead, damn the torpedoes, punch you square in the face rock and fucking roll. It is the juggernaut in musical form, bearing down on your with no hope of escape. It was the purest distillation of living exactly as you wanted, with no strings beyond the next city, no regrets beyond not rocking out hard enough.

Tonight, for Lemmy, we listen to No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, a document of the live show that Motorhead was famous for.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015, Part 5: 20-01

#20: The Mountain Goats – Beat The Champ

Wrestling is a sport (sorry, “sports entertainment”) that has elicited a rather divided reaction over the past few decades. To some it’s a tiresome recreation of patriarchal gender roles, emphasizing hyper-masculinity through a series of half-cocked storylines that repeat the same simplistic hero-villain duality over and over again. To others – and John Darnielle is in this particular listing – it’s a pure distillation of justice and morality, set up for ease of viewing and digestion. In many ways Beat The Champ is the aural companion piece to Mickey Rourke’s 2009 film The Wrestler; both focus on the grit and loneliness of being a pro wrestler. These are not the pro wrestlers of the WWE; they are the lonely men that wander the roads between the cities, going from one match in a packed gymnasium to the next, getting television coverage where they can, unknown outside of their own home regions. These are men for whom turning the heel means their career is winding down, men for whom death is always snipping at their heels. When one such character is murdered near San Juan, it is exactly as much as we expect; a life of simulated violence only leads to the real thing in the end. Still, there’s a glimmer of dawn on that deserted road: love, justice, and the raw triumph of the moment are always lingering, like the carrot in the midst of the path.

#19: U.S. Girls – Half Free

Meg Remy emigrated to Canada after toiling in the small noise labels of America for quite a while. Since then, her career has taken an upward trajectory, culminating (so far) in Half Free, which Remy explicitly mentioned was a collection of character studies in the vein of Bruce Springsteen or John Cassavettes. The characters of Half Free are far more Darkness On The Edge Of Town than they are Born To Run. These are women whom life has taken more than a few swings at, women that are on the desperate bleeding edge between life and death. A husband is revealed to have slept with all of his wife’s sisters before settling with her; another dies in a valley in Iraq and the grief of his war-widow wife is palpable. There are women who stand up and say “enough is enough” and leave their philandering and/or abusive men. It’s touched off with a lengthy slab of high-contrast Italo-Disco that stands up as a screed against the dictates of the religion of beauty. It’s a deeply feminist record, and one in which pop tropes and messy noise compositions stand together hand in hand.

#18: Ought – Sun Coming Down

The poppiest band on Constellation Records is really only marginally accessible, as you might imagine. Ought take the ideas and the sounds of early 80s post-punk and run with them, mutating them until they become something vital and alive once again. This is the relentless motorik energy of The Feelies and the skewed tilt of the Talking Heads melded with cut-up riffs from the DIY emo scene of the mid 90s, delivered with a view towards the desperation of modernity. In the hands of Ought, that desperation is surrendered to and, in that surrender, is shown to be a blissful, clarifying escape.

#17: Dr. Dre – Compton: A Soundtrack

The Great Vaporwave Album of Hip Hop – the Chinese Democracy of rap, if you will – was Detox, the supposed third album by the kingpin producer of the West Coast, Andre “Dr. Dre” Young. It was revealed this year that Dre has put Detox to bed permanently, unable to come up with anything that would truly live up to the hype. Instead, we got Compton, inspired by the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton and packaged with the eye of a man who has been watching his city change from idealistic suburb to gang-ridden warzone and back again since the early 80s. The vision and sound presented here are only partially Dre, however. Dre, whose discoveries have included Eminem, 50 Cent, and The Game, found in Kendrick Lamar a talent that would take over; if Compton bears a resemblance to To Pimp A Butterfly, it’s because Lamar has stamped his features indelibly on both. Anderson.Paak takes the Bilal role here, wrapping the retro-facing jazz, soul, and funk slices in warm buttery vocals; the songs become an introduction for every aspiring rapper that Dre has been mentoring over the past few years. It’s a widescreen, cinematic view of Dre, Dre’s city, and the West Coast in general.

#16: Young Fathers – White Men Are Black Men Too

The Edinburgh hip hop group declared that White Men Are Black Men Too, the follow up to their 2014 Mercury Prize-winning debut Dead, would “break them out of the ghetto”. While the album still revolves around a hard centre of hip hop, the songs play with that form until it is at times unrecognizable. White Men reinterprets British pop and distills key elements out of it, then adds in influences from the continent. If calling Young Fathers “hip hop” makes no sense to you, it’s because the group has increasingly less connection to the American sense of the genre. Instead, they choose to move forward, bringing in trip hop, krautrock, British electronic traditions, and avant art-pop to leaven the aggressive vocals and focus on beats that tethers them, however tenuously, to the hip hop tradition. This is Euro-rap, in a sense; bristling with ambition and aggression, but insistent that art should mean something, and that this meaning can take on a life in and of itself.

#15: Earl Sweatshirt – I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

Earl locked himself in his basement so you don’t have to. He details the gory, gritty details of his descent into being a young, cynical curmudgeon so that you can walk outside, feel the sun on your neck, and be thankful for your existence. When OFWGKTA leader Tyler, The Creator started tweeting earlier this year about “people” whose attitudes brought him down and that life was great, you don’t need to do so many drugs, stop being so depressed all the time, etc. it was clear that Earl was who he was talking about. The fact that Tyler’s album was a bomb and Earl’s was not is telling about who should be proferring advice to whom in the rap game.

#14: Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Just Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

Melbourne indie phenom Courtney Barnett caused a lot of heads to turn with her twin EPs, packaged together last year as A Sea of Split Peas. Her debut magnifies what made those two EPs work. Barnett’s eye for detail exceeds pretty much anyone else out there whose name isn’t Dennis Coles, and she uses it to weave quotidian stories that cross class and gender boundaries. These are universalist themes: embarassment, ennui, confusion, creeping depression. The subjects are light-hearted for the most part – a girl who nearly drowns at the public pool trying to impress someone, a guy who skips off work to watch the city from above and gets mistaken for a jumper, a person who can’t sleep picking out all the mundane parts of her room – but there’s a real existential weight that drags at them. There’s real life going on here, in all of it’s ragged glory, and Courtney Barnett is the person to bring it all to the light.

#13: Girl Band – Holding Hands With Jamie

Girl Band is not a post-punk band. Instead, the Irish quartet take the sounds of post-punk and deconstruct them. “Deconstruct” is sort of a misnomer; what they really do is smash them with a hammer, melt them with a blowtorch, and weld them back together in amusing and vaguely horrifying shapes. Their lyrics are bizarre, cut-and-paste, and obsessed with food, in perfect keeping with the sound of the album. Unlike most blasphemous creations, the misshapen, mutated sounds on display here don’t ever croak out a hair-raising “kill me”; instead, they swarm for your jugular and don’t let up until they’ve rinsed your bones clean of flesh. If that sounds like a fun experience, it’s because it is.

#12: Drake – If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late

If You’re Reading This dropped like an atom bomb: completely by surprise and with devastating force. Coming out of nowhere (and a rumoured record label tiff with Birdman and Cash Money Records), it was originally meant to be a free mixtape. At the last minute, Drake decided to release it as an actual album that you had to pay for – and made millions in the process. The entirety of the rest of Drake’s year stemmed from this: the Meek Mill beef, the wild success of his diss track, the frenzy around “Hotline Bling”, and the even-more-hyped anticipation for the forthcoming Views From The Six. And why not? The record is a study in modern beatcraft: spare, menacing, and throbbing with that 808 bass. Drake’s delivery is on point, and his use of ear worms as hooks makes for an album you’ll be humming forever. If this was, as rumoured, the cutting-room floor of the Views sessions, then the future album will be a monolith.

#11: Vince Staples – Summertime ’06

In the summer of 2006 Vince Staples was 13 and being introduced to life in the crime-ridden streets of Long Beach, CA. Summertime ’06, his debut, is an attempt to capture the peaks and valleys of that time of his life, and it cuts deeply. Drug taking, drug selling, gun play, the mercurial interplay of love and casual sex: none of it is shied away from, and Vince Staples keeps a duality of magic and regret in balance for the duration. The production is handled expertly, the bulk of it by No ID and Clams Casino. The Clams Casino tracks are among the best tracks he’s ever had a hand in, especially on the nauseous “Norf Norf”. Summertime ’06 transformed Vince Staples from being merely another OFWGKTA associate to being one of the biggest emerging stars in the rap game.

#10: Viet Cong – Viet Cong

From the ashes of tragedy, a pheonix rises. Women were a Calgary band that garnered a great deal of good press for being hard-edged experimenters with indie rock sounds. When Chris Reimer, Women’s guitarist, died, half the band went on to form Viet Cong with members of Lab Coast. Viet Cong, their debut, fuses post-punk sensibilities with aspects of electronic, lo-fi, and noise to create an art rock that is specifically their own. The tracks on the record are a delicate balance between constructed hook-oriented melodies and messy, coloured-outside-the-lines noise worship. Jangly R.E.M.-indebted 12 string guitars line up next to forceful, droning keyboards and relentless drum patterns; it’s a fusion of man and machine that points toward the future even as it keeps one foot entrenched in the recent past.

#09: Grimes – Art Angels

The effort to follow up Visions, her 4AD breakthrough, has been painful. It’s only been three years, but in that short time the Montreal singer has already recorded and scrapped an entire album, leaving only the enigmatic single “REALiTi” as proof that it had ever even existed. The reasons were probably numerous, but the most obvious one is that the scrapped album featured production work by other people, and Claire Boucher is not the sort of artist to let other people do her speaking for her. Art Angels instead features songs and production by the artist herself, a package of visual and aural media that outlines the particular, peculiar vision that is Boucher’s very own. This is pop that isn’t afraid to be pop, filtered through the lens of someone for whom pop means something different from the way the rest of us use the word. This is an album where “high concept” and “ridiculously catchy” can exist side by side without it ever being considered strange, where the cheerleader-esque vocals on “Kill V Maim” can seem perfectly right, rather than a Gwen Stefani-style effort to seem hip. This is, in short, pop as it should be: willing to move forward, disdaining the safe path in favour of making people think and dance at the same time.

#08: Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy

Patrick Stickles is a weird dude. The New Jersey punk frontman started off as the most literate Shakespeare nerd in the indie punk world, expanded on this with a sprawling concept album that merged the U.S. Civil War with modern post-crash New Jersey, and then retreated into the small and mundane – into “Local Business”. That last album, Local Business, held odd allusions to despair, depression, and eating disorders; The Most Lamentable Tragedy expands on these themes to the extent that the listener becomes uncomfortably aware that Stickles is dealing with his own problems. In lesser hands this would be a slog, but Stickles and his band make the crushing grind of clinical depression and its resultant branching symptoms seem like the most invigorating thing on Earth. Returning to the sprawling form that made The Monitor such a messy delight, the band burns through jagged power-pop, lengthy drone-rock, burningly intimate ballads, and, in “Dimed Out”, the sharpest blast of punk rock to grace the year. It’s a triumph, all the more so because of the obviously painful circumstances that gave birth to it.

#07: Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress

The pillar of the entire post-rock genre have returned, proving that the surprise strength of Polaris Prize-winning album ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend was not a fluke. Asunder finds them paring down their sound to its essentials, cutting the fat that mired them originally in the swamp of 2002’s Yanqui U.X.O. Godspeed in 2015 is a band that has more to do with Black Sabbath than with the avant-garde; every movement, through guitars, strings, or pure noise, is built to evoke a cacophonous drone of doom that sums up all of the existential dread that weighs down the West as we move further into the 21st Century. Godspeed have lost the train noises and the warnings about solicitors in the parking lot, but they have kept all of the apocalyptic fury that powered their best work.

#06: Destroyer – Poison Season

Kaputt brought Vancouver’s Dan Bejar into the limelight, but it was the very last thing he wanted to happen. Tellingly, he dropped the exploration of yacht rock and lite disco that informed his world-weary work on Kaputt in favour of musical snapshots of life in New York City. Poison Season offers the haze of the crowded streets, the sultry jazz of the night, and especially the wailing heartland saxophones of vintage Bruce Springsteen. Not just any Bruce, though; Poison Season channels the Boss as he was on The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. These are songs that aren’t afraid to get lengthy, to shift gears, to fall in love with themselves as much as they’ve fallen in love with their subject matter. This is Bejar at his best, poetic and mystical in as much as he is self-deprecating and uncomfortable with himself and his surroundings.

#05: Sleater-Kinney – No Cities To Love

Rock n Roll comebacks are a tricky thing. While any band that’s ever tasted success tries to come back after a decade or so of being apart to try to cash in on their old fame with new albums, none of them ever manage to make it work like they did before. Black Sabbath tried to recapture the magic with 13 but the only people listening were curmudgeonly “modern rock” stations that were trying to freeze the clock at 2001. Any band that ever lived through the Eighties never made it back. Soundgarden and Alice In Chains have tried to muddle along as though their respective hiatuses never happened, but they’ve never sounded the same since. There’s usually a story – some pheonix-like rise from the ashes of hitting rock bottom – and that story is supposed to galvanize their fanbase into buying the album and pretending that it’s as good as anything they’ve ever heard before. A lot of people are good at that pretense.

Sleater-Kinney, though, don’t have much of a story. Or, rather, perhaps they have the best story. They were sitting around with Fred Armisen watching advance screenings of Portlandia episodes when they decided that it might be fun to play live again. They’d been out of commission since 2005 and The Woods, an album that was commonly thought of as the best possible record to bow out on – go out on top, after all. The ten years between The Woods and No Cities To Love are so chock-full of media projects of various stripes that by all rights it should have been the story of any other band: they should have lost their way, forgotten what it meant to sound like Sleater-Kinney, and turned out a half-baked excuse to tour, like any other band stemming from the 1990s.

No Cities To Love is not that album. It is, simply put, the eighth Sleater-Kinney album. It sounds as though there never was an intervening period of time between the two. The guitar lines are still as knotted and imposingly complex as they ever were, the vocals still as impassioned, topical, and liberating. If Sleater-Kinney were the pillars of the riot grrl movement in the mid-1990s, it’s telling that they’re still a pillar as such. There is just as much room for them to carry the standard for righteous feminism in 2015 as their was in 1995, and they carry it as though it never left their fingers. Unlike their contemporaries, Sleater-Kinney still sounds exactly like Sleater-Kinney, and it’s a fucking rush to hear it.

#04: Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens is best known for his massive pop gestures. Albums like Illinoise or The Age of Adz married blissful pop melodies to orchestral symphonies of folk instrumentation and thereby made his bones. Carrie & Lowell, by contrast, sounds more like 2004’s Seven Swans, an acoustic collection released before either of those aforementioned albums. This is Sufjan Stevens stripped down to his elements – guitar, voice, maybe some piano here and there for effect. Despite this, he manages to fill the sonic room just as well as he does when he’s piling on hundreds of voices and crafting shaky little symphonies to John Wayne Gacy. The songs sound gigantic, and a lot of that has to do with the way he’s learned to use his voice over the past decade.

The origins of Carrie & Lowell stem from the 2012 death of Sufjan’s mother, the titular Carrie. Life with Carrie was difficult as she was both a paranoid schizophrenic and addicted to drugs and alcohol. After Carrie left her family, Sufjan only saw her on vacation with his new stepfather, the titular Lowell – who also manages the Asthmatic Kitty record label that Sufjan has recorded for since the beginning of his career. Carrie & Lowell is a reminiscence of sorts of those times, and as such it performs two functions. First, it allows Sufjan to grieve, by committing all of the good and bad parts of his memories to song. Secondly, it’s consistent referencing to Oregon makes it so that it can be said that Carrie & Lowell is the third in Sufjan’s half-joking ambition to make an album for each of the 50 states (Michigan and Illinois being the first two).

Carrie & Lowell is an album about grief and death, and the hope for rebirth that can spring from them. It runs the gamut from bleak to hopeful, and it encompasses Sufjan’s faith in a way that doesn’t feel overt or forced. It’s a spiritual album by a spiritual man that doesn’t shove its spirituality down your throat – a rare item indeed in these times.

#03: Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

Josh Tillman was originally a member of Seattle neo-folkies Fleet Foxes. When that project went on apparently indefinite hiatus he tried his hand at solo albums. When those solo albums went nowhere, he created the character of Father John Misty, a lothario and a “ladies man” whose mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing made him a compelling, sarcastic, hilarious character on Fear Fun, the character’s debut. There’s only so far you can go with a character like that, though, so when it came time to record a follow-up it was a matter of anything goes.

Character study or not, all things flow from the author. Given Tillman’s subsequent marriage, it is unsurprising that I Love You, Honeybear is an album at once about the fear and uncertainty stemming from one night stands and casual relationship and the surprising stability and comfort of a more lasting relationship. This is an album where a girl almost dies in his bathtub, where he can’t perform for the most annoying girl he’s ever met, where he stumbles in wasted at seven in the morning screaming that he’s going to get some girl pregnant. That this is also an album where two lovers watch the economic apocalypse occur, where Tillman yearns to actually talk to his lover and not just on a phone or tablet, and where he outlines how he met his wife and what he thinks their future holds, cannot be overlooked.

Tillman melds the best parts of the singer-songwriter tradition to create a vision that is, at its core, scruffy folk-pop, but a scruffy folk-pop that sounds fully realized and artistically sound. Strings, pianos, and guitars are everywhere, and yet never does one voice seem to overpower any other, even Tillman’s own. It is worth mentioning that the best part of “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins)” is not Tillman’s impassioned account of giving in and taking the plunge, but the mariachi horns that burst out near the end of the song, a brass orgasm that feels more satisfying than any other musical moment this year.

#02: Deafheaven – New Bermuda

Black metal was long ago relegated to the extremes of even an extreme musical movement like metal. Rather than clearly defined riffs and brutal, gorilla-like vocals, it preferred to blur everything together, approaching shoegaze more than Slayer. It was a movement that was staunchly anti-commercial, trying to be as edgy as possible while conjuring up sounds that eerily approximated the howl of the Norwegian winter.

The second wave of black metal involved the Americans, who adopted the sound of black metal – blurring riffs, blastbeats, howling vocals – while ditching much of the immature, pretentious Satanism that infested the Norwegian bands. Deafheaven belongs to a movement that is beyond even this second wave – a movement often decried as not being pure enough by black metal purists. This includes Liturgy – the ultimate in Brooklyn hipster appropriations of musical styles – and Deafheaven.

Sunbather, Deafheaven’s breakthrough album, was a howling merger between black metal, noise punk, and shoegaze, a metallic meeting of genres that absconded with traditional metal imagery altogether in favour of class struggle, alienation, and isolation. New Bermuda carries on in this vein, albeit in a bleaker way. New Bermuda is, at its core, an album concerned with the abanonment of joy. Nothing feels good anymore. Work is drudgery, and the life that comes after it has become drudgery as well. Hobbies barely stave off boredom. Sex doesn’t happen anymore. Life is intolerable, inescapable, and the only way out is through the bliss of death.

At the same time, New Bermuda musically invokes a chilling, majestic form of joy all its own. The black metal core is still there, but there are also more straightforward nods to traditional heavy metal structures, drone-noise, and hazy dream pop moments. It is as surreal as it is bleak, and it moves New Bermuda from being unrelentingly bleak to be relatably so. It’s the sort of depressing montage of images that can avoid being overwhelming by resonating with nearly everyone who listens to it. This is life, warts and all, dressed up in the best cross-cultural promotion of heavy metal styles heard in decades.

#01: Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

2015 was the year the scab of racial relations in America broke open again, spilling centuries-old pus from coast to squalid coast. It began before the year, with the Trayvon Martin tragedy, but it picked up steam with a dizzying series of shootings of black men by the police. Ferguson, loose cigarettes, and the argument of whether being young, black, and male in America was a de facto death sentence became household talking points in a country increasingly divided along class and racial lines. This was the year of Black Lives Matter, a protest group born out of racial protests and the target of a new young conservative movement that decried social justice, racial justice, and the idea that being white and male gave you privilige at all.

Into this uncertain and divided year came Kendrick Lamar once again, following up the hip hop masterpiece of good kid m.A.A.d. city, an album that examined youth, gangbanging, young love, and alcoholism. From the start To Pimp A Butterfly is completely different, although no less masterful than its predecessor. Beginning with the sample of Boris Gardiner’s “Every Nigger Is A Star”, Kendrick throws racism and racial identity in the face of the listener. The song was the title track to a Jamaican movie from the early 1970s, part of the early attempt to reclaim the racial slur from white racists and encourage black pride across the world. That the world the sample is reborn into is as starkly divided as the one the original was created in is telling, and likely not an accident. This is an album that considers racism and stardom in equal measures, conflating the two in a myriad of ways. “Wesley’s Theory” examines the problem with black men becoming famous and then losing all of their money, having been pimped out by the media industry; “King Kunta” talked about escaping the cycle of poverty and what losses that entails; “Institutionalized” discussed the corruption of wealth and the hardening of the soul that the pursuit of it produced; “These Walls” seeks solace in the allure of sex but can’t escape the circle of violence and retribution; “u” and “i” are the mirror images of each other, showing the duality of self-disgust and self-confidence, self-hatred and self-love; “Alright” became the Black Lives Matter anthem; “Momma” and “Hood Politics” are about being true to himself as an artist and a performer; “How Much A Dollar Cost” has him meeting God disguised as a beggar in South Africa (it was also President Obama’s favourite song of 2015); “Complexion” and “The Blacker The Berry” tackle respectibility politics and the problem of racialized self-hatred; “You Ain’t Gotta Lie” discusses the problem of returning home after finding any sort of fame, especially if there’s a racial element involved.

At the same time as it opens up discussion of the issues, it changes the dynamic in hip hop completely. One of the biggest complaints about the album from hip hop heads was that there weren’t any “bangers” on the album. That is to say, there weren’t any traditional trunk-rattling hip hop anthems (although this is debatable depending on how far you stretch the definition). Instead, Kendrick abandoned traditional “beatcraft” for a swampy mix of funk, soul, and jazz – traditional forms of black music, in other words. The Flying Lotus crew, especially Thundercat, provided a lot of the mixture of bass and jazz freakouts; George Clinton guested in spots and brought the funk; Bilal stepped out of his road up from tragic obscurity to slather his soulful voice over everything. It wasn’t hip hop like the radio was blasting, but it was the first album in a long while to span the traverse of black music and amalgamate them into something greater than merely the sum of its parts.

That’s not even getting into the running theme of the album. On first blush, a lot of people found the title ridiculous, and on the surface it is. “To Pimp A Butterfly” – it sounds cliche and kind of cringeworthy. When Kendrick reveals the real source of the title – in a poem he reads to a cut-and-paste incarnation of the late Tupac Shakur at the end of the album – everything becomes several grades clearer, and the title ascends from the ridiculous to the profound. Kendrick is examining the pimping of black talent – his own and others – by not just the hostile system profiting off of it, but by the artists themselves, whose dual nature and life in the institutionalizing ghetto requires them to survive by doing it to themselves. By pimping that butterfly.

In the end this was basically the consensus pick. Unless you really felt very passionately about a single album, To Pimp A Butterfly was the Album Of The Year. It’s rare these days to find an album like that, or one that elicits such strong reactions on both sides of its divisions. It’s one of those rare combinations of albums and years – The Beatles and 1968, Nevermind The Bollocks and 1977, Nevermind and 1991 – that signals a change in the tone, and furthers an established art form in new and exciting ways for the mainstream. It’s an album that will be talked about for a very long time.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015, Part 4: 40-21

#40: Helen – The Original Faces

Liz Harris takes a break from her day job as the screamingly quiet poet of the interior monologue in Grouper and puts together an actual band instead. True to form, though, Helen makes music that is blurred, lo-fi, and straight out of the cassette tape dream pop of 1992.

#39: Beach House – Depression Cherry

Depression Cherry brought the Chillest Band on Earth into new places in 2015: distorted, heavier places that took the smooth beds of organs and synthesizers and made them darker, dirtier, even somewhat menacing. It was a sidestep from their usual way of doing things, and it solidly affirmed their position as one of the most consistently great bands working today.

#38: Blanck Mass – Dumb Flesh

For Dumb Flesh Benjamin Power, primarily of English drone masters Fuck Buttons, signed to Sacred Bones and produced a collection of noisy, mysterious industrial rock. Like Nine Inch Nails, if you strip away the pretension at being a “rock star”.

#37: The Internet – Ego Death

Sydney Bennett – producer Syd Tha Kid of OFWGKTA – was for a long time the secret weapon in her L.A. skate-rap collective. While the goofball MCs (and Frank Ocean) stole the show, she carved out her own corner of off-kilter neo-soul work. While the early music of The Internet was immature, self-obsessed adolescence, Ego Death marks her group out as one of the contemporary soul bands to watch. Cutting, chilling, and eminently listenable.

#36: Bilal – In Another Life

Bilal Oliver came running out of the gate in 2001 and had his legs cut out from under him. After a decade of struggle, he began his career again. That career has described an arc that leads up to his massive presence on Kendrick Lamar’s album, and his subsequent success all throughout 2015. On his own album, he finds a groove that is lightly funky, deeply soulful, and symbolic of his personal triumphs.

#35: Van Hunt – The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets

Another triumph from another man whose career has been a study in adversity, singer and multi-instrumentalist Van Hunt showed everyone why he’s still in it, and the fundamental injustice in the fact that relatively few people still know it.

#34: Lightning Bolt – Fantasy Empire

The Rhode Island noise band celebrated their twentieth year of carving out pure sonics by releasing arguably the best album of their entire career, and the only one to have a featured spot in a Rock Band game. What a time to be alive.

#33: Blur – The Magic Whip

After the last Blur album, the last Gorillaz album, and that odd foray with the disappointingly mediocre The Good, The Bad, and The Queen, it could be said that Damon Albarn had at long last run out of gas. Then The Magic Whip arrived to show that the fundamental concept behind this was utterly wrong. The record recaptures the magic of the The Great Escape or Parklife more or less intact, mixing a variety of eclectic rock influences into that strange beast known as Britpop.

#32: The Dodos – Individ

The wintry companion to their earlier, sunnier work, Individ found the kitchen-sink twee group deepening the grooves and adding a sharper chill to their sound. It’s still sugary with the sunnier side of the 1960s, but there’s an odd swing and crunch to it now that betrays the darker side of that decade.

#31: Tame Impala – Currents

Kevin Parker has high and being driven around L.A. at twilight when he heard the Bee Gees come on. Inspiration struck, and he steered his neo-psych Tame Impala into a more Seventies direction. Currents amalgamates disco, soul, hip hop, and that old time psychedelic into a thick, bassy stew of modernity.

#30: Miley Cyrus – Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz

Miley Cyrus grew up in public, the daughter of an annoying one-hit-wonder country singer and the face of Disney’s star-making television system. Like many such fresh-faced young girls, as she grew closer to the age of majority her brand grew tired, and a new crop of young Disney hopefuls crowded behind her. Unlike the others, whose grasp on relevance was mired in innumerable shallow pop albums, Miley Cyrus has tried to exaggerate her own blossoming embrace of drugs and sexuality. While the results have been on and off thus far, Dead Petz stands alone as a monument to the messiness of being young, rich, and in your early twenties. Backed by the best parts of the Flaming Lips, she goes balls-out into an exploration of pop, psychedelic rock, noise, and sheer ego.

#29: Ryan Adams – 1989

The question on a lot of music site surveys this year is: 1989 – Taylor Swift or Ryan Adams? The answer is, unequivocally, Ryan Adams. The ability to turn a Max Martin number like “Shake It Off” and play it off like it’s “I’m On Fire” is, alone, worth the price of admission.

#28: Baio – The Names

Chris Baio – bassist for indie superstars Vampire Weekend – turned out to be one of the rare people that can step out from the shadow of their ultra-famous day band and still hold their own. The Names is a pop album that manages to be memorable, fun, and throbbing.

#27: Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss

There’s frigid gothic atmosphere and then there’s Chelsea Wolfe.

#26: Tobias Jesso, Jr – Goon

Before Goon, Tobias Jesso, Jr. was another hopeful songwriter adrift in a vast L.A. scene of hopeful songwriters. Following personal and family trouble he left his dream of writing songs for Adele and went back home to Vancouver, where a collection of very cool people (members of the Black Keys, the New Pornographers, and Haim) helped to produce Goon. Now he’s a critical darling writing songs with Adele. That’s Hollywood, baby.

#25: The Decemberists – What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World

The King Is Dead was a foray into what the Oregon band called “American folk” – code for Neil Young and R.E.M. It was, admittedly, pretty great, but it sidestepped the fact that they had largely disappeared up the ass of their own fey English style on The Hazards Of Love. What A Terrible World resolves this, dialing back the self-indulgence to return to a streamlined version of what made them great in the past. This is the Decemberists of “O Valencia” and “Odalisque”, and it’s a welcome return to form.

#24: Death Grips – The Powers That B

Niggas On The Moon, the first disc of the two-sided The Powers That B, had already been released for free. The band promised a second side, Jenny Death, which became the subject of an internet meme – “Jenny Death When”. Given the band’s infamy as mercurial noise terrorists – more performance art than actual band – it was a legitimate question whether Jenny Death would ever actually exist. The Niggas On The Moon side was greeted mainly with confusion, after all; it was much more experimental and ambiently bizarre than anything the already experimental and bizarre group had released. When Jenny Death dropped it caused a frenzy, and as an album it serves to sum up the band’s career: it had elements of each of their previous releases, from the wilful indulgence of The Money Store to the crushing grind of Government Plates. “I like my iPod more than fucking” Ride declared on “Inanimate Sensation” and it’s absolutely true. The Powers That B is raw and sexual, music made to aggressively penetrate the listener with deeply personal force.

#23: Oneohtrix Point Never – Garden Of Delete

Daniel Lopatin signed to Warp and celebrated with R Plus Seven, an album that embraced the almost-joke genre of vaporwave with abandon. Moving beyond that, Garden Of Delete widens his range to include industrial and metal influences cribbed from his tour with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden. These influences are dealt with in a playfully chaotic way, being amalgamated in much the same way that a tornado amalgamates a whole town into itself. If R Plus Seven existed almost entirely on the surface (and, further, what that surface meant to the listener, in terms of generational discomfort or nostalgia) Garden Of Delete exists in the ever-deepening spirals it casts down with each new sliced-and-diced sample that is presented.

#22: Joanna Newsom – Divers

Divers is a summation of everything that makes Joanna Newsom great: the far-flung prog sensibilities, the pre-modern instrumentation, the odd melodic sense that is at once slightly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and yet sharper, wittier, and – more to the point – altogether more unique than such a comparison can really transmit. Her lyrics are even denser than her music, requiring a lyric sheet, an English degree, and a love of the theatrical to tease out all the most rewarding moments. A modern classic from one of the most fully realized artists of the 21st Century.

#21: Beach House – Thank Your Lucky Stars

If Depression Cherry was the strangely distorted deviation, the jagged wrong notes in the orchestral dream, Thank Your Lucky Stars is the return to bliss, a comforting settling-back-in that expands on their breakthrough album Bloom with a deepening sense of instrumental placement. Everything on Thank Your Lucky Stars seems weighed and measured, crafted with a sense of how it would all play out together in a small room. It was a complete surprise; a month or so after Depression Cherry, the band casually mentioned that they had an entire new album already recorded and ready to go. As far as out-of-the-blue statements from bands, this was one of the best in recent memory.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015, Part 3: 60-41

#60: Waxahatchee – Ivy Tripp

Katie Crutchfield follows up her indie-darling breakthrough with a smokier, more autumn-coloured collection of crunchy rock that would have been called “grunge” twenty years ago. A perfect balance of wistful yearning and fist-in-the-air chording.

#59: Ghost Culture – Ghost Culture

A careful balance between EDM and Depeche Mode-esque synth pop, Ghost Culture manages to give atmosphere to the dance floor, like a thick fog descending onto a crowd of ravers.

#58: Desaparecidos – Payola

Conor Oberst has spent ten years running his Bright Eyes moniker into the ground with increasingly bland and irrelevant releases. So it was a surprise when he announced he was releasing a follow-up to Read Music/Speak Spanish, his 2002 album under the name of his power-punk band Desaparecidos. Despite its out-of-the-blue nature, it hits with genuine fervor, turning politics into heady power-pop with a generous splatter of punk rock bile.

#57: Skyzoo – Music For My Friends

Music For My Friends is the jazz-cat Brooklyn version of Summertime ’06. Both albums feature the artist reminiscing about the year they turned 13 and the way their experiences at that age formed the man they would become. Skyzoo, however, puts together a solid cast of underground producers and creates something lush, dense and sticky. It’s less visceral, but for those with the inclination there’s enough packed in here to keep you satisfied.

#56: John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

The former Czars frontman is getting on in years and his wildly hedonistic younger days have left him with a case of HIV. The “Grey Tickles” is an Icelandic phrase playfully describing middle age; the “Black Pressure” is an ominous Turkish phrase describing existential fear and dread. So John Grant is scared about getting old, but he handles it in his usual deeply sarcastic and faintly vicious way.

#55: CHVRCHES – Every Open Eye

Lauren Mayberry and Co. have shifted down from their debut – it’s gone from being “the best synth pop in years” to “really great synth pop” – but here it’s largely a case of not fixing what isn’t broken. There’s big synth movements, throbbing bass, grandiose pop arrangments, and Lauren’s signature voice. It seems to work well for The National.

#54: Florence + The Machine – How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

After hitting it big with their second album, 2011’s Ceremonials, the English indie group found themselves in the midst of label restructuring, nervous breakdowns, and general chaos. Out of it came a concept album that comes across like a thunderstorm conducted with real thrilling bombast.

#53: A$AP Rocky – At. Long. Last. A$AP

That At. Long. Last. A$AP was actually fairly overlooked this year speaks to how solid a year 2015 was for hip hop. In many other years it would be a real contender: part wicked flow, part smirking absurdity, and a package made out of production that made it all seem so real.

#52: The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven

The emo revival continues, but there are few bands that get the mixture of Sunny Day Real Estate and Taking Back Sunday as expertly correct as The Wonder Years.

#51: AFX – orphaned deejay selek, 2006-2008

Another blast from the Richard D James vault brings us a burbling, breakbeat-studded set that could have passed for one of his earlier Analogue Bubblebath EPs. Rarely does retro sound so post-modern.

#50: Wavves & Cloud Nothings – No Life For Me

Forget splitting a 12″ – Dylan Baldi and Nathan Williams are going to blend one. Each of their strengths is on full display here: Baldi brings the switchblade-punk that informs the howling work of his Cloud Nothings and Williams brings the eerie half-cracked beach croon of Wavves. It even manages to distill out the bad parts – the Cloud Nothings tendency to repeat themselves and the regrettable Wavves tendency towards latter day Weezer. Maybe they should just form a band.

#49: Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

At first Sleaford Mods make you think that punk-rap is an actual thing, Death Grips be damned. Then you realize that what Key Markets – and every previous Sleaford Mods album – is: a scuzzy, angrily working class distillation of the best Fall albums.

#48: My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall

My Morning Jacket finally recover their balance after losing themselves up their own asses. Evil Urges and Circuital were out-there elclecticism that did a massive disservice to the sort of blissed-out festival rock they perfected on 2005’s Z. The Waterfall comes stumbling back around to that sound, still bearing the tatters of their more experimental days. There are touches of prog, disco, and some of the more out-there folk stuff they were mainlining since the first Obama election, but at its core it’s a My Morning Jacket album, like they used to make.

#47: Lady Lamb – After

When I added this album to my ongoing list they were called Lady Lamb The Beekeeper; months later they’ve shortened the name down to Lady Lamb, probably because of the success of “Billions Of Eyes”. Under either name, After is an album of twee-minded, wistfully sung alt-rock, crunchy and whimsical in equal measures – as though Camera Obscura had developed a thing for late 90s college rock.

#46: Erase Errata – Lost Weekend

Why do I keep coming back to this album? It more or less slipped through the cracks of the year, and yet…is it the slick mastery of the riffs? The cracked-out bliss of the melodies? The way the album blurs by before I can even notice it, and yet it feels full and satisfying in a way that albums twice as long can barely achieve? All of the above, probably.

#45: BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul

Toronto neo-jazz band BADBADNOTGOOD manages to pull off the same feat as Adrian Younge: they make the atmosphere behind the greatest Wu member sound both comfortable and menacing. They dial down the flair and concentrate on the pure beat, making an analog backing without equal for the cinematic MC’s particular brand of storytelling. The guest work isn’t bad either; that Danny Brown guest spot almost makes the album all on its own.

#44: Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper

After hearing “Floridada” I can safely say that Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper will be considered the last great Animal Collective album. While “Boys Latin” was played into the ground by the radio, the other tracks on this record are just as good, and very nearly as irritatingly catchy.

#43: Jazmine Sullivan – Reality Show

Jazmine Sullivan had been crawling her way up the R&B ladder since she was 15 when she suddenly made the decision to peace out in 2011. One of the reasons she cited was a lack of belief in herself, and later rumours added on an abusive relationship as a further catalyst. Then in January she returned and the whole “self-doubt” thing was rendered moot: she could sing like a motherfucker, and the songs were a serious cut above, too. Reality Show is R&B with grit and heart, urban pop that is as at home on the streets and in the trap as it is in the club. Call it a comeback, but in a year of competing comebacks, call it a triumph.

#42: Windhand – Grief’s Infernal Flower

Allmusic likes to say that 2015 is the “Year Doom Broke” and while there’s something to that, it’s more of a matter of a lot of high-profile doom metal bands releasing solid albums at the same time. None of them scores higher than Grief’s Infernal Flower, though; it takes the de rigeur Sabbath riffs and cranks up the sinister dial, making an album that threatens to swallow you whole even while it forces your head to bang of its own accord.

#41: Craig Finn – Faith In The Future

Ever since Franz Nicolay ditched out, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minnesota heroes The Hold Steady have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Craig Finn, however, seems to be in finer form than ever. Freed of the need to pile on the rock n roll hijinks, Finn lets his odd voice and his strong authorial tone do the talking for him.

The Best 100 Albums of 2015, Part 2: 80-61

#80: Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl

What is soft dick rock? Using the elements of dick to create a softer, toned-down sound. You’re free now, that battle is over, and feminism is over and socialism’s over. You say you can consume what you want now. Merry Christmas. War is over.

#79: Kurt Vile – B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down

A stronger, more focused collection of songs than his previous efforts, B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down finds the former War On Drugs guitarist coming into his own.

#78: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf

This is most emphatically NOT a Chance The Rapper album. At all. This was drilled into everyone when Surf was released. Instead, it’s a breezy, soulful hip hop album that Chance just happens to be the vocalist on. Either way, it’s a hell of a way to spend an afternoon.

#77: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – The High Country

Hey, remember these guys? They’ve been kicking around the periphery of indie rock since forever. 2015 brings their strongest album in a long series of years, pushing out power pop with a poppy-punk edge like no one’s business.

#76: The Tallest Man On Earth – Dark Bird Is Home

The Dylanesque folkie keeps turning out solid work that bubbles just under the radar. Dark Bird Is Home finds him getting a bit more Paul Simon, and it turns out a bit more romantic than the highs and lows of joy and despair that he’s been known for in the past.

#75: Myrkur – M

Indie popper Amalie Bruun (Ex-Cops) manages to pull off a new persona as the Burzum of the neo-black metal scene. That is to say, she is able to craft an album that is as close to black metal as humanly possible without actually having anything to do with black metal. Sure, there’s the Scandinavian song titles, the occasional chugging riff, and the backbone of screams and blastbeats, but it, like Filosofim, owes much more to dark ambient, goth, and darkwave than anything else.

#74: Prefuse 73 – Rivington Nao Rio

The veteran electronic producer turns in a warm, psychedelic collection of tracks that brings the beat back to his work, something that’s been sorely missing for years. This is an artist who made their bones on fusing hip hop to more stylish electronic elements, and Rivington Nao Rio is a welcome return to that form.

#73: Hop Along – Painted Shut

Painted Shut is strongly dominated by Frances Quinlan’s vocals; once you get over that, though, it’s apparent that the album is at its heart a love letter to the origins of indie rock – your Dinosaur, Jr, your Sonic Youth, your Pixies. Rock n roll is dead? Whoever told you that was sadly mistaken.

#72: Braids – Deep In The Iris

After the emotional apocalypse comes the time of healing; Deep In The Iris is an examination of this state, coming to terms with all sorts of uncomfortable aspects of life and reaffirming that life is there to be lived.

#71: Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer

An old friend I hadn’t seen in a while asked me if there was any good alternative rock being made these days. Speedy Ortiz is the answer to that question.

#70: Matthew E White – Fresh Blood

In a year where the need to go back to mine fresh sounds flipped the calendar from the chillwave Eighties to the piano-man Seventies, Matthew E White stood as the complicated alternative to the chord-on-chord simplicity of Tobias Jesso, Jr, and the synth-heavy sex jams of modern Tame Impala.

#69: THEESatisfaction – EarthEE

Swampy, psychedelic, and built on a solid foundation of R&B and soul, THEESatisfaction made an album that could easily be the bedroom jam of a whole new generation, if not for the sharply political bent many of the songs take.

#68: Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

The British producer pillaged the back catalogues of The Time, Prince, and James Brown to create one of the funkiest albums in recent memory. Everyone knows “Uptown Funk”, but there’s enough great stuff here to keep the party going all night long.

#67: Bjork – Vulnicura

An exquisite examination of the complicated feelings that churn up in the wake of a messy breakup. At first blush Vulnicura feels subdued; there’s nothing of the far-out musical exploration of her previous albums, and yet under the surface there is a strong reverberation of emotion that haunts the listener well after the record closes.

#66: Jamie xx – In Colour

Jamie xx is 2015’s Ravemaster General, and In Colour is his Mission Statement. Kicking off with the ominous drum n bass percussion of “Gosh”, it whips through a shocking variety of forms before peaking on the summer jam of a lifetime, “I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times”.

#65: Faith No More – Sol Invictus

The legendary funk-metal band came back strong in 2015, putting together a record that had all of the wild freedom of their best albums with only a slight blunting of their edge. While there were better comebacks in 2015 (more on this later) there were few that were as animalistically satisfying.

#64: The Sword – High Country

While previous efforts from retro-minded stoner metal demons The Sword were largely based around blissed-out riffs on old Black Sabbath tracks, High Country expanded their pallet to include some breezier stuff from the Seventies – Styx and Blue Oyster Cult, mainly. More rambling than their older stuff, and a bit more fun.

#63: The Sonics – This Is The Sonics

As the sheer force of their primitive, pounding rock and roll pummels you into submission, take the time to appreciate that these men are in their seventies.

#62: Built To Spill – Untethered Moon

The first Built To Spill album in a long while to feature more than one stellar track, Untethered Moon constitutes something approximating a return to form. At the very least, Doug Martsch is still wailing on that guitar in a manner that can only be considered his own.

#61: Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat

The grindcore legends return with more grindcore. What else were you expecting? They’re the best, and this is why.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015: Part 1, 100-81

#100: Sunn O))) – Kannon

The drone-doom-noise band finally follows up 2009’s transcendental Monoliths and Dimensions with a more immediate and visceral trio of noise-soaked dread.

#99: Rose McDowall – Cut With The Cake Knife

If you ever missed spiky, snotty Eighties pop, look no further.

#98: BC Camplight – How To Die In The North

Velvety and yet dangerous, like the upholstery on a late-70s vintage Buick.

#97: Lupe Fiasco – Tetsuo & Youth

He’ll spend the rest of his career living down his ill-fated sophomore album (he recently grudgingly encouraged the destruction of physical copies of it) but Tetsuo & Youth shows where his career should have gone.

#96: Thee Oh Sees – Mutilator Defeated At Last

Six albums, five years, and a couple of big lineup changes finds John Dwyer’s day job band rocking out bigger and harder than ever before.

#95: Destruction Unit – Negative Feedback Resistor

Blown-out industrial noise-punk, like Big Black with a better appreciation for depth.

#94: No Joy – More Faithful

The alternagaze duo returns for a murkier, more complex record that plays directly to their strengths.

#93: Hot Chip – Why Make Sense?

A strong mid-career album for the veteran indie-dance group, with solid grooves and a touch of early 90s UK rave.

#92: Carly Rae Jepsen – E-MO-TION

An 80s banger of a pop record, once you get over the essential Robin Sparkles nature of E-MO-TION it becomes a great soundtrack to an energetic night.

#91: Prurient – Frozen Niagara Falls

A double album of shapeable, moldable pure sound from longtime noise artist Dominick Fernow.

#90: Echo Lake – Era

This record is liquid, in that the sound expands to fill whatever room you play it in. Expansive dream-prog with an ambient touch that is deft and subtle.

#89: Alabama Shakes – Sound And Color

Brittany Howard looks a third grade teacher and sings like the Goddess of Soul. The band is okay too.

#88: Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin

Mercury Prize nominated UK hip hop artist goes full out in an amalgamation of grime, U.S. hip hop, and electronic influences.

#87: Mount Eerie – Sauna

The calmest, quietest sense of dread you may ever experience, and something of a comeback for the former Microphones frontman.

#86: Zun Zun Egui – Shackle’s Gift

A truly world-reaching experience, the Bristol band draws on a number of diverse influences to create hard-hitting, crunchy songs that are close in approximating rock n roll.

#85: Belle & Sebastian – Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance

The band takes a hard skew towards dance pop on their umpteenth album, bringing some much-needed fresh air into their act.

#84: EL VY – Return To The Moon

A meeting of the minds between indie stalwarts The National and Menomena, EL VY is one of the rare side projects that hits all the same pleasure buttons as their respective member’s day jobs.

#83: The Roadside Graves – Acne/Ears

This is a rustic country album, if it were made by a less-crappy Gaslight Anthem, or if The Men took the folk-country side of New Moon and ran with it. Which is to say, it’s as Jersey as anything else you can name.

#82: Wilco – Star Wars

The veteran alt-country band keeps that train a-rollin’, not letting age or maturity get in the way of a good rock n roll hook. It may be “music for dads with receding hairlines” as Shameless put it, but it rocks all the same.

#81: Insect Ark – Portal/Well

Dana Schechter creates a bedroom electronic record that shifts and transforms as much as it makes a serious attempt to claw up your face and wriggle into your ear.

U.S. Girls – Half Free

★★★★

In a recent Vice interview, Meg Remy – long-time noisemaker and the brains behind U.S. Girls – mentioned that the two biggest influences for Half Free were John Cassavetes and Bruce Springsteen. The sense of getting into the heads of characters, then, is an obvious starting point for the album, but it’s really Bruce Springsteen that seems to take on the lion’s share of influence here. It starts with the cover photo: Remy in black and white, staring into the camera with seemingly the exact same expression that the Boss has on the cover of The River. It continues on through the songs, which are all portraits of women in a variety of nightmarish scenarios; the nightmares take on a more visceral bent due to the fact that these are ordinary women in ordinary worlds and the problems that they find themselves mired in are all too depressingly plausible. “Sororal Feelings” examines a woman in a crumbling marriage who discovers that her husband has slept with her three sisters; “Damn That Valley” wraps a vicious examination of the failures of the U.S. War on Terror in the grief-stricken wail of a woman whose solider husband won’t be coming home. “Window Shades” follows up a snide skit on being “another woman with no self-esteem” with a woman who’s finally able to confront her no-account cheating boyfriend. The seven-minute closer “Woman’s Work” is a hazy, cluttered Italo Disco masterpiece that rages against the religion of beauty and growls that a woman’s work is never finished. Half Free is a deeply feminist record, an account of finding inner strength despite the odds stacked against women from all walks of life

This is music, though, so we need to look at the musical aesthetic of the album. This is where Half Free starts to lose me a little. “Sororal Feelings” is flawless, a perfect opener with a deceitful chorus that is probably never going to leave my brain. “Damn That Valley” finds catharsis in a monster reggae beat, and Remy finds the right vocal lilt to ride it perfectly. That said, it feels as though there’s too much piled on to the track – a problem that could be said of “New Age Thriller”, “Sed Knife”, and “Red Comes In Many Shades” as well. This is where Remy’s background comes in; she spent her pre-Toronto years recording shitgaze and noise pop for tiny noise labels, burying her classic radio chops in waves of distortion, instrumentation, and tape noise. Those days are still evident in many places throughout Half Free, and while I enjoy noise and clutter, there are parts of the album that I feel would have benefited from a cleaner mix, or at the very least a couple fewer voices (the hard-as-nails rock of “Sed Knife” is a great example of this).

Still, aesthetic quibbles aside, Half Free is an astonishing record that speaks to both the galvanizing effect that having a greatly increased budget can have on a creative and passionate artist, and to the keen eye 4AD has for picking those creative and passionate artists. If Meg Remy wasn’t on your radar before, put her on it – there are bigger things to come.

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Girl Band – Holding Hands With Jamie

★★★★☆

One of the things you pick up on when you’re married to someone with a Master’s in Political Theory is what the post- signifier is; that is, what the “post” in post-colonialism, or post-modernism, or – more relevant to this review – post-punk means. To keep things simple, it’s an act of space-clearing, a way to make room to deconstruct the implied “pre” portion and to analyze what makes it tick, so that you can put it back together in more meaningful and insightful ways.

Post-punk, then, was a deconstruction of the original first wave of punk rock, the fabled “three chords and an attitude” that came roaring out of Britain during the brutal recession of the late 1970s. A lot more went into punk rock than just three chords, of course; most of those bands were into reggae, ska, dub, country, jazz, and nearly any other form of music that wasn’t boring-as-hell California rock. A band like the Clash, or the Slits, had a lot more going on under the surface than their more popular tracks might have you believe. Post-punk took those blended ingredients, separated them, and then re-blended them into new shapes. Gang of Four took the strident political screeds of the Clash and made them dance; Pere Ubu mutated dub and ska until they were nearly unrecognizable; Swell Maps chopped the general idea of music up into something that still sounded like music, but only if you stood far enough away.

The general popularity of what we’ve come to know as “post-punk” has risen and fallen over the years, and when it’s time came around again in the early 2000s it seemed as though everyone was finding that essence rare. Unlike their forebears, though, the bands that caught the attention of the post-9/11 college kids weren’t all that interested in breaking down their influences to examine and rework them. Interpol didn’t do much to Joy Division beyond adding big basslines lifted right out of the poppier Cure albums. !!! replaced the soul of Gang of Four with disco, which is like switching out butter for margarine and pretending it’s radically different. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were an obvious dead ringer for Siouxsie Sioux. The Strokes wanted to be Television, who weren’t technically post-punk but may as well have been. The only band who really seemed to want to break apart the conventions and get right down into the very essence of revolutionary sound itself was liars, and they got ripped apart for it (They Were Wrong So We Drowned is still one of the best albums of the 2000s, dammit, and I stand by that).

So when I say that Girl Band reminds me of liars, it’s because Girl Band is also willing to take the bands that influenced them, break them down to their atomic components, and rearrange them in a fashion that is, god forbid, actually refreshing. Take “Fucking Butter” as an example: the riff that kicks it off is weirdly familiar, like I’ve heard it on a Sleigh Bells song, but what comes after pounds out that riff so that it becomes increasingly unhinged. Three minutes in and more textures get added – high-gain guitar scrapings mainly – and then it becomes piled on to the point that it feels as though it’s about to crush you. Then it resets, and we’re left with a simple clicking drum beat and wildly shouted Gang of Four-esque vocals – and that’s just the half-way point. A lot of these songs are like that. They take the Gang vocals, the Swell Maps vision of song cut-and-paste, the Pere Ubu attack-noise, but they don’t just slavishly imitate these pieces. They rearrange them instead, using them in ways that their ancestors would never have attempted. “Paul” feels like it might have come out of Big Black’s Songs About Fucking, but rather than overwhelm the listener with feedback and noise like Albini did, they use those textures to build a sonic narrative from ragged beginning to gloriously blown-out ending. You can catch all of the pillars of Eighties post-punk here and there throughout, but it’s like noticing a beak in a slurry of factory processed chicken; by the time you notice it, the line has moved on and you’re left wondering if it was real or if you just thought it was.

Like Viet Cong, Girl Band have brought new life to the spectre that has been haunting punk rock since the early 1980s. Viet Cong, however, were content to make a suit out of the skin-scraps of their influences, while Girl Band performed messy chainsaw surgery, followed by reconstructive surgery that would have made the doctor from The Human Centipede proud. Call it post-post-punk – clearing a space from the space that was originally cleared – or just call it noise. Either way, it’s highly compelling stuff.

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Deerhunter – Fading Frontier

★☆

Okay, here’s the thing Bradford…

Oh Jesus, this is difficult. It’s difficult because Microcastle and Halcyon Digest are two pillars of indie rock. It’s difficult because the haze of Microcastle got me through any number of days at work. It’s difficult because even though you decided to strike out in a more straight-forward, garage-rock (and the Dead, let’s not forget)-influenced direction on Monomania I still thought it was one of the best records released in 2013. Now, though, this album…

Okay, let me start off by saying something blunt. I hate Real Estate. Hate them. I feel like they’re the Coldplay to Deerhunter’s Radiohead. By this, I mean that they take everything good about Deerhunter and water it down for casual listeners to embrace and feel good about. It’s a mess of cutesy arpeggios, clean production, and vocals that substitute reverb for fog and depth. It’s Rote Indie Rock, much as Coldplay became the insufferable face of Rote Alternative Rock.

There’s too many places on Fading Frontier that sound like Real Estate. Too many moments where the haze seems to have been surgically scrubbed clean in some over-stuffed pricey studio. You invited some guests to provide music on this album, which would normally be a nice change of pace. However, in inviting members of Stereolab and Broadcast, you’ve ensured that this album, besides “All The Same” and “Snakeskin”, is powered mainly by drum machines and synths. You have, in Moses Archuleta, one of the finest drummers of the indie rock era, and yet you choose to go the route of bands that, god love them, are not Deerhunter. Instead of songs full of weird noises that are powered by hooks that you’ve made your name on, they’re mushy, meandering tracks that meld together and prove to be utterly forgettable. Out of nine songs, the two I’ve mentioned above are the only ones worth mentioning ten minutes after the end of the album. The fifteen minutes between “Breaker” and “Leather And Wood” are easily the worst fifteen minutes in either the Deerhunter or Atlas Sound discographies.

Look, I get it. You had a car accident and it gave you a new perspective on things, or some such mythos-making. It really just sounds like you decided that you wanted to abandon why people fell in love with you in the first place in favour of maybe making it onto terrestrial radio, as though that’s something people still want to do in 2015. Of course, Monomania just barely missed hitting the Top 40 and it was much better than Fading Frontier – it was noisy, it was passionate, there was some real rock n roll sentiment framing the songs. Fading Frontier has none of that. You abandoned the leather jackets and pyschotropics for…sterile synths and slick mainstream acceptance? I’m sure it works for some people, Bradford, but it sure as hell doesn’t work for you.

Superheaven – Ours Is Chrome

★

I heard Oleander on the radio the other day. You remember Oleander, don’t you? If you’re under the age of 25 the answer to that question is probably a resounding “literally who?” Well, Oleander was a one-hit wonder grunge band from the latter half of the Nineties, and their main claim to fame was “Why I’m Here”. “Why I’m Here” was a crunchy little soft-loud-soft song that perfectly encapsulates how artistically bankrupt the alternative movement was by 1999. It had moody minor key verses, over-produced fuzz guitar on the choruses, and absolutely nothing in the way of originality or progression.

Superheaven reminds me an awful lot of Oleander.

Right from the get go we’ve got the whole checklist going: moody Seattle’s Best Coffee drinking singer, fuzzy power chords, verses that serve as a bridge to soaring-but-doomed choruses, bassist that does nothing but follow along, drummer that learned his chops from a drum machine. It’s like someone was producing a film set in Seattle in 1995 and wanted a band that was specifically a bunch of trend-followers. 1995 was twenty years ago. Hold on a second, though, didn’t we just go through a phase where the kids were wearing flannel again? Are we going to have to live through this all over again. Craig Finn once opined that “at least in dying you won’t have to deal with New Wave for a second time” and I’m starting to realize that I might be experiencing the same thing, but with warmed-over grunge rock.

No more, okay? I listen to Sirius 34/Lithium whenever Dirty Projectors or My Old Kentucky Blog comes on XMU, but I turn off Lithium whenever Alice In Chains comes on. No exceptions. It isn’t even AiC’s fault, really – it’s the legion of shitty bands they inspired that have utterly ruined them for me. Here we go again, apparently.

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