The Besnard Lakes – A Coliseum Complex Museum

★★★☆

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Jagjaguwar Records

Singles:

“Golden Lion“

The Montreal-based six-piece The Besnard Lakes have by now a rather lengthy history of putting out solid, if at times uninspired, new entries into the pop-prog canon. A Coliseum Complex Museum is no exception. The band mercifully dials back the song lengths that mired 2013’s Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO in a swamp of listener fatigue, cutting them down to a sort of fighting weight that they rarely have achieved elsewhere in their discography. Stylistically it’s a throwback to their best album, 2010’s The Roaring Night: “The Bray Road Beast” and “Golden Lion” could both stand beside such luminaries as “Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent Pt. 2” and “Last Train To Chicago” in relative ease. In a way that’s both the ultimate strength and the ultimate drawback of the record. It’s familiar and easy to slip into, like a pair of worn slippers, but they’re slippers that are starting to get a little thin in the sole, a little ratty along the sides. The Besnard Lakes have proven that they can do this sort of thing easily, but now they need to think about changing it up a bit, or risk an ignominious stagnation.

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 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.

HOLIDAY SALE

Like the name says, my novel Disappearance is on sale for 99 cents for all of December. Get it while it’s hot. Or just get it.

GET IT HERE!!!!

If that doesn’t convince you (it’s less than a medium coffee ferchrissake) then let these carefully curated review snippets do their work:

“Zaple has captured the dichotomy of human nature perfectly, our desire for stability at war with our penchant for chaos.” – Ben Bales

“Great book. I recommend this for anyone that’s willing to hack through a thorny, demon-riddled thicket with a fantastic, raw talent.” – Rachel Litt

“The prose used within this book drips with the loving consideration of a man who delights in the english language.” – Heather Friesen

“”Disappearance” is an uncanny, poly-perspectival combination of bone-curdling psycho-social insights, darkly complex Canadians, scheming politicos, singing prophets, and rugged and flimsy individualists encountering displacement and correlation, vile erotica, and subtle narrative injections of theory. If Walt Whitman had a nemesis, it could have easily been Zaple.” – Sallow Siserary

“I loved this book. I think I went through every possible star rating as I read. Ultimately, it deserves high marks.” – Tiger Grey

“An interesting, fast-paced piece that sucks you in and takes you on one helluva journey” – T.J. Sidebottom

“What the hell? I bought this thing for five bucks and now it’s on for a dollar? Asshole.” – Ryan Kinder

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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John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

★★★★

Former Czars frontman John Grant has made a name for himself on his past two albums – Queen Of Denmark yes, but especially Pale Green Ghosts – with weird, synth-heavy albums that sound like what would happen if you took your regular singer-songwriter type and told them to just go with their instincts. On first blush it’s not the sort of stuff that would garner any sort of mainstream attention – the first song, the title track, makes explicit reference several times to his HIV positive status, wishes that he’d just gotten his arm caught in a thresher instead, like his uncle, and realizes that there are children that have cancer, so all bets at garnering sympathy are off. It works on every level though, and so Grant has gotten nothing but rave reviews and awards from publications since day 1.

One thing that takes it over the edge of good to great is the fact that, despite being nearly an hour in length, it doesn’t feel like it’s an hour – half that, if anything. Grant has the uncommon skill to stuff his ideas and quirks into a highly efficient package, and it serves him especially well on Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. It’s for the best, really. The album’s title is an amalgamation of an Icelandic phrase and a Turkish phrase that together say that middle age is a nightmare; it’s an obvious statement for Grant once you read over his lyrics. These are cutting, bitter songs that manage to become palatable through sheer humour and charm; any more of them than there are and it might have become overwhelming. It manages to get in and out in just enough time to feel fresh and sourly invigorating. It may not have all of the electro-pop thrills of Pale Green Ghosts, but it’s got a schizoid internal charm all its own, and it sets Grant apart as a contemporary songwriter of mention.

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.

Deafheaven – New Bermuda

★★★★★

The purists are going to hate this.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Black metal is a form of metal originating in Norway in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It de-emphasized the knotted, complex riffing of the then-popular death metal bands in favour of a more simplified type of movement. The early stuff – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, In The Nightside Eclipse, Under A Funeral Moon, Carpathian Wolves, etc. – built monuments to the bitter Scandinavian winter out of tremolo-soaked guitar, relentless blastbeats, ultra lo-fi production, and vocals that alternated between the screech of a demon and the howl of the wind over a churning field of snow. There is a disturbing documentary called Until The Light Takes Us that chronicles those early days – the madness, the jealousy, the flirtation with fascism, and the vicious streak of pagan-nationalist church burning. For further information, see it.

The aesthetic trappings around the scene were cheesy-Satanist at best and outright Nazi at worst; it failed to catch on much in America beyond finding a home in certain curious circles. Half a decade later, though, Americans began to create their own mutation on Norwegian black metal. Bands like Wolves In The Throne Room, Weakling, and Nachtmystium absorbed the lessons inherent in the sound and left out the immature, arson-obsessed, murdery parts (and, largely, the corpsepaint). Wolves In The Throne Room, as an example, replaced the violent, viking-inspired paganism of the Norwegian bands with a more “back-to-nature”, Cascadian-inspired paganism.

Deafheaven isn’t a black metal band, though.

Per se. Deafheaven isn’t a black metal band per se. Back in the earlier part of this decade, there were a couple of bands that adopted the aesthetics of black metal and amalgamated them into a larger musical philosophy: Liturgy and Deafheaven. Both bands amalgamated the blastbeats, simplified guitar lines, and howling vocals of black metal, but they took them in different directions. Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix spun out a complicated philosophy he called “Transcendental Black Metal” and used the aesthetic as support for his academic work. Deafheaven skipped out on the philosophy and blended the black metal influences with the widescreen gaze of post-rock to discuss class issues, loneliness, and longing. Both were heaped with critical praise, and both were disparaged by black metal purists who derided the bands as not being “true kvlt” enough (many with their tongues in their cheeks, but a large number without). What both did, however, was not “rip off” black metal for gain, but recognized the vanishing point between black metal and shoegaze. Both styles blur the proceedings to the point where the entire song seems to shift for melodic movement, rather than any particular instrument. Everything blends into one defining line, and that line becomes the entire artistic moment.

Both bands have released the all-important followup album in 2015. Liturgy’s The Ark Work came first, and it arrived in a fury of confused reception and crumbled expectations. The Ark Work featured MIDI preset keyboards, hip hop influences, and a general lack of care for what people loved about Aesthetica, their breakthrough album. Reviews were extremely mixed; while I normally am a champion of noisy, difficult albums, The Ark Work felt more like Hunt-Hendrix intentionally trolling his audience rather than forging out a bold artistic statement.

New Bermuda, however, succeeds massively where The Ark Work failed. The album builds upon Sunbather and adds more shade and colour to the mix. On top of the existing mixture of black metal, shoegaze, and post-rock, they add in piano passages, guitar breakdowns straight out of the playbook of The World Is A Beautiful Place And I No Longer Want To Die, Slayer-esque death chugging, and in a couple of places guitar solos that sound as though they could have been lifted whole and breathing out of latter day Metallica albums. It expands out of where they came from to embrace a fuller noise-metal experience; rather than stick to their niche, Deafheaven goes more cinematic in the pursuit of their muse.

Much like Sunbather, New Bermuda examines some fairly heavy ideas that manage to be relatable for the great broad middle of the listening audience. The opening track “Brought To The Water” deals with growing up out of your early 20s and falling into the hypnotizing routines of adulthood. “Where has my passion gone,” he asks, “Has it been carried off by some / Lonely driver in a line of fluorescent light?” Shortly after he acknowledges that “A multiverse of fuchsia / and violet surrenders to blackness now / My world closes it’s eyes to / sex and laughter.” “Luna” looks at the suburban L.A. wonderland imagined in Sunbather‘s “Dream House” and examines how it turned from dream to nightmare; “I’ve boarded myself inside, I’ve refused to exit / There is no ocean for me / there is no glamour / Only the mirage of water ascending from the asphalt / I gaze at it from the oven of my home.” “Baby Blue” and “Come Back” seem to discuss the nature of notoriety and the endless hard cycle of critical acclaim and popular cynicism and it is here that the real intent of the album becomes clear. George Clarke – the main songwriter for Deafheaven – has realized that being in a popular band is a lot like being stuck in the depressing adult cycle of work; the dreams he sought for himself turned out to be even more trapping than the relative poverty he’s left behind. There is no end in sight for this (“I imagined the overcome and fell to my knees / Before the endless truth of instability and futility” he howls on “Come Back”) and so, on the final track, “Gifts For The Earth”, he throws himself into the “waves of the icy seas” which stand in direct cooling contrast to the shimmering mirages and oppressive ovens he writes of back on “Luna”. It’s at once startling, depressing, freeing, and absolutely understandable.

“This isn’t black metal!” the purists will cry, gnashing their teeth and wailing, and that’s sort of the point. Deafheaven has moved themselves completely beyond that pigeonhole trap of being a “black metal band” and has embraced all of the styles that blur and bludgeon and tug movement gracefully through the entire instrumental wall. It isn’t black metal, it isn’t shoegaze, it isn’t post-rock or post-metal. It’s Deafheaven, circa 2015, and it’s a triumph of both heavy music and noise.

Kurt Vile – b’lieve i’m goin down…

★★★☆

Anyone who’s been watching Kurt Vile explore the experience of a man and his guitar for a while now can be forgiven for thinking, upon a listening of “Pretty Pimpin'”, “Oh, he’s found a beat, good for him.” Vile’s stock-in-trade has been hazy dissipation for some time now, through his solo debut Smoke Ring For My Halo and into his excessively sprawling, hazy-to-the-point-of-incoherence sophomore follow up Wakin On A Pretty Daze. On b’lieve i’m goin down… Vile snaps back into focus, like coming out of a particularly deep stoned reverie.

This isn’t to say that he’s lost the meandering quality. A number of songs on here – the ones that stretch out towards the seven minute mark, mainly – are strongly reminiscent of his work on the last album, where you start losing the plot around the four minute mark and you never really recover it. “That’s Life Tho (almost hate to say)” and “Lost My Head There” are the worst offenders of this sort, but they’re balanced off by the melodic success of tracks like “I’m An Outlaw”, “Dust Bunnies”, and “Bad Omens”. The album works on that careful balance the entire way, teetering between focused, song-oriented work and the hazy, lengthy jams he’s particularly known for. The song-oriented tracks are a nice break from the jams, which don’t run quite as overlong as they did on Wakin On A Pretty Daze, but come close.

Ultimately Kurt Vile is at his best when he’s mining out a Crazy Horse-esque pattern with languid, stoned vocals, and that’s precisely what’s on offer here. It can get a bit exhausting at times but there’s always something to draw you back in, especially if you wear your hair long and keep a baggie of herbal medicine in your bedside table.