Tortoise – The Catastrophist

★★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Thrill Jockey Records

Once upon a time Tortoise were one of the most important bands in popular music. Let’s put scare quotes around “popular”, because let’s face it: post-rock has never, aside from brief Godspeed-induced moments, been popular. Still, arguments about popularity aside, Tortoise gave us two albums – Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT – that helped to shape and define the concept of post-rock as it now exists. That was nearly two decades ago, though; Tortoise circa 2016 is on the tail end of three increasingly mediocre albums, and their major conceits – creaky drum machines, jazz splashes, Krautrock rhythms and trance-inducing funk grooves – are all things that their descendants have spun into cliche. Recognizing this, perhaps, the band has chosen to widen their sound a little, to the point of adding vocals (very few vocals, of course, but something is more than nothing). Unfortunately, the overall effect is one that is too little, too late; the world has passed Tortoise by, and releasing an incrementally different album in January is not going to change that. It’s a decent enough album – stumbling wide-eyed into classic rock tropes to spruce up the surroundings as it does – but it’s not one that will be remembered by the time December rolls around.

David Bowie – Blackstar

Blackstar

★★★★☆

Released January 8th, 2016 on ISO/RCA/Columbia Records

Singles:

“Blackstar“

“Lazarus“

In 2013 David Bowie emerged from ten years of quiet to release The Next Day, an album that recalled his work with the Berlin Trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Lodger without ever actually being as wildly experimental or as unsettling as those three albums. Despite this, it was easily the best album Bowie had released in a long time (personally since Earthlings, for most people since 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)) and gave birth to discussions of a new creative renaissance for him. This idea tends to ignore the fact that, aside from the relatively regrettable period of 1983-1987, Bowie has been in a constant state of reinvention. After his pop period, he became a hard rock dynamo (Tin Machine), a purveyor of sax-soaked New Jack Swing and rave rhythms (Black Tie White Noise), an industrial-etched grunge freak (Outside), and a jungle and drum n bass ingenue (Earthling) before settling into a somewhat more sedate period of more traditional pop/AOR songs.

Still, despite this restless nature, there’s nothing in the Bowie catalog quite like Blackstar.

To say it’s “experimental” is to miss the point. To call it “jazz fusion” is to massively generalize what’s going on here. There’s saxophone all throughout the album, in a way that there hasn’t been since 1993, but it’s not jazz-sax in the sense that one normally considers it. Longtime collaborator Carlos Alomar once likened Bowie’s sax playing to the brushstrokes of an impressionist painter, and this is especially true of the sax usage on Blackstar. Between Bowie and his new lieutenant Donny McCaslin, the saxophone is used in unsettling ways throughout the record, as a tonal voice rather than as the typical flurry of notes or jazzy finger-snapper. In fact, “unsettling” is the best way to describe the album, and in that it’s the first Bowie album to truly evoke unease and contemplation since Scary Monsters. So there. It’s his best since Scary Monsters. People have been using that line to describe Bowie albums since Black Tie White Noise but if we’re really going to examine the man’s discography (and I already have) then it’s more in line with being his best since Heroes. More to the point, it’s not quite like anything else, so comparing it to previous albums is almost a useless exercise. “Blackstar” is nearly ten minutes of atonal noise, thoroughly modern percussion, unsettling lyricism, odd voices, and a clean vocal section that feels like it’s the straight man to the experimentation going on around it. “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” is a stellar Bowie song in the tradition of stellar Bowie songs – a more menacing take on something like “Beauty And The Beast”, let’s say – and “Dollar Days” is akin to that, only in the form of a ballad like “Word On A Wing”. “Lazarus” is structured so that every line is punctuated by bursts of sax and distorted guitar, lending it weight and unease; the reworked version of “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” makes what was previously an interestingly curious single into a something altogether more gritty, as though the group decided to take the jazzy feel of the original out of the club and into the dark and rainswept streets. “Girl Loves Me” kicks along like the teeth-bared Bowie of the late 1970s and returns to his love of strange languages (Nadsat, from A Clockwork Orange, and Polari, a slang among gay men in Britain in the 1950s) as well as his previous techniques of Burroughs-esque cut and paste. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is the most straightforward cut on the album, a Bowie crooner like he’d fallen into on Heathen or Reality, although it is far beyond anything that was featured on either (except maybe “Bring Me The Disco King”)

Blackstar does something more than merely prove that Bowie still has it. It presents a worthy addition to the legend that has been created around him. It’s as good as Station To Station, Low, Heroes, or really anything else he’s recorded, and as able to stand on its own.

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 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.

Bilal – In Another Life

★★★★

New York’s Bilal Oliver has been a relatively unknown quantity for the greater part of his career, a time span that stretches back to his debut album in 2001. He had been a hot item back in the early oughts, when his sophomore album, Love For Sale, was slated to be on Interscope and was to feature production work from such luminaries as J. Dilla and Dr. Dre. When Bilal opted to scrap those plans and produce an album built around his own instrumentation, Interscope balked and the album went unreleased. Such a reversal has set back any number of artists in a similar situation, so when 2010 rolled around and Bilal released another album, it was nice just to hear new music from him. Since then, however, he’s put in time working – albums, singles, and appearances on the tracks of much bigger names. He climbed back up the industry ladder rung by rung until he hit a breakthrough this year; Kendrick Lamar’s cultural touchstone To Pimp A Butterfly features quite a bit of work from Bilal, and it’s thrust his name back into the limelight.

All that “comeback from a career-ending event” stuff is heartwarming, to be sure, but it doesn’t mean a damn if it’s not capitalized upon. In Another Life capitalizes. Bilal’s tastes run through a swampy concoction of soul, funk, jazz, and R&B, and the work displayed on the album showcases that perfectly. The singer found exactly the right producer in Adrian Younge, whose gritty soul-sampling work brought Ghostface Killah out of the mid-career doldrums on the two Twelve Reasons To Die albums. The same core beats can be found on In Another Life, but Younge retools it to be lighter, more soulful than street-level. While the synth-and-snare crackle of “Sirens II” could easily have hosted GFK’s cluttered, menacing flow, it’s a more than ample bed for Bilal’s smooth, streetlight voice. It’s this particular formula that provides the best moments of the album: “Sirens II”, “Star Now”, “Satellites”, “Lunatic”, and the Kendrick Lamar “hit ya back” epic “Money Over Love”.

Call it a comeback. This is the apex (so far) of everything Bilal’s been working towards, and if there’s any justice it’ll get him more work in higher profile settings. If you’re a fan at all of any of the kitchen sink of genres that Bilal is bringing to the table, you owe it to yourself to check In Another Life out.

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Goodnight Ornette Coleman

The music world has lost a true game-changer today. Ornette Coleman has died of cardiac arrest at the age of 85.

Coleman was amongst a handful of similar innovators in the late 1950s and early 1960s – a group that includes Mingus, Coltrane, Parker, and Davis – that changed the rules of jazz. The sharp divide between people who hear the word jazz and think of vocal American Songbook exercises a la Norah Jones and people who hear it and think of angular note-heavy freakouts is due in large part to the early work of Coleman, especially his 1959 masterpiece The Shape Of Jazz To Come.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

★★★★★

Sometime over the past few years, trap music has become the dominant form in hip hop. As a subgenre it owes everything to spare, menacing beats, MIDI-triggered snare rolls that resemble the chatter of assault rifle fire, and a sing-song flow of drug-game braggadocio and ignorance that is infinitely more Soulja Boy than Sista Souljah. It’s a cathartic form, to be sure, but in the wake of several high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police (and police wannabes) in America, it has little to offer in the way of commentary besides more nihilism. It’s no wonder then, perhaps, that there has been a recent movement towards the past, a retreat that suggests that the inspiration for progress might be better mined from earlier forms of black music. Joey Bada$$ went back to the gritty streets of New York in the 1990s; D’Angelo enlisted The Vanguard and went back to the conscious movement days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically Sly and the Family Stone, hard soul, and quiet storm; Flying Lotus turned back to a kaleidoscope of jazz forms, and even Kanye has reached back (slightly) in his apparent embrace of British grime.

Then there’s King Kendrick, the man who brought Compton back to the limelight with what was easily the best album of 2012, good kid m.A.A.d. city. That was an album of hard beats and hood politics, a grandiose concept album that summed up what was best about pre-trap hip hop. To Pimp A Butterfly is not that album – it’s an entirely different thing altogether.

Right from the beginning you can smell the p-funk – squelchy instruments, stomping basslines, ass-shaking grooves. Lamar isn’t even subtle about where he’s going – he’s got Parliament/Funkadelic madman George Clinton right there, guesting on it. Then there’s what can best be described as a spoken word poetry piece over squalling jazz improvisation. Then “King Kunta” comes on and conquers the world with one groove. This is Kendrick Lamar, 2015: willing to scribble madly outside the lines, not content to simply be a commercialized unit, making a name for himself as an honest-to-god artist.

That’s what the album seems to be about, incidentally: the constant conflict between Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who made it up out of the streets of Compton, shattered expectations, and became widely recognized as the leading light of hip hop, and Kendrick Lamar, the guy from the streets, still caught up in petty beefs and those hood politics from good kid m.A.A.d. city, a man who abandoned his friends and family to live and die in L.A. while he puffed himself up and toured the world. On one side, “u”, which features a second verse where he breaks down and raps while sobbing, screaming at himself in a hotel mirror about how he failed, he let down everyone he knew, how he wasn’t there when the people he cared about bled out and died. On the other side, “i”, which is much better on the album than it ever was as a single: the To Pimp A Butterfly version has a serious dance groove running through it, making the declarations of self-confidence, love, and the world being more than slow suicide all the more powerful. The conflict is given poetic roots at the very end, following the “interview” Kendrick conducts with Tupac Shakur for the last five minutes of “Mortal Man”. He identifies the caterpillar, the hard part of him that scrambles to survive in the “mad city” of L.A., the part that constantly looks for ways to survive. The butterfly, then, is the beautiful, artistic, human part inside of him, the talent that is only looking for an outlet. Being hardened by the struggles of life in the mad city, the caterpillar only looks for ways to pimp the butterfly out, to use it to continue the survival of the caterpillar. Trapped inside the cycle of thoughts that this produces, the only way out is for the caterpillar to use the butterfly to bring new ideas and ways back to the mad city, and to free itself from the stagnancy of the past.

It’s a heavy concept far removed from the surface-level nihilism that has infected hip hop for the past several years, and I think that’s kind of the point. Lamar conjures up the old ideals of race consciousness and unity, taking specific aim at the idea of dividing a people by arbitrary and useless lines: on “Mortal Man”, he says “While my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one / A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination / Made me wanna go back to the cities and tell the homies what I’d learned / The word was respect / Just because you wore a different gang colour than mines / Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man”. On “Complexion” he discusses the ridiculousness inherent in discussing who’s “more black” than the next person, and segregating each other based on the darkness of skin. “Hood Politics” sets out the bigger picture beyond the constant infighting between street gangs: “From Compton to Congress it’s set trippin’ all around / Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodLicans / Red state vs. a blue state, which one you governin’? / They give us guns and drugs, call us thugs / Make it they promise to fuck with you / No condom they fuck with you / Obama say “What it do?”. On “The Blacker The Berry” Kendrick turns the finger on himself, calling himself a hypocrite for preaching black politics and mourning the death of those like Trayvon Martin when gangbanging caused him to kill another black man and set back unity just as much as any external enemy.

To Pimp A Butterfly is the most powerful album released in some time, an examination of the state of local and national race politics and an examination of the meaning of the conflict between art and money. Married to mutant funk, jazz, and soul, it uses old music to sound new again, in turn escaping the useless cycle of money and violence between rival sets to embrace a much wider scope of “us vs. them” – the struggle between the downtrodden and those that seek to keep them down. It’s much more than simply a worthy followup to good kid m.A.A.d city – it’s takes a gigantic leap forward to establish a much fuller circle with which to define Kendrick Lamar’s artistry as a whole.

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ThEESatisfaction – EarthEE

★★★☆

ThEESatisfaction are a smoky alternative R&B duo from Seattle who first caught the attention of the venerable Sub Pop label through a guest appearance on Shabazz Palace’s modern classic Black Up. EarthEE, the duo’s second album, brings them out from the shadow of their origins and establishes them as a laid-back amalgamation of 70s jazz, soul, and afro-funk. There aren’t many clear-cut hooks here, just a lot of hand drums and throbbing bass – in some places, courtesy of supreme bass player Meshelle Ndegeocello. Soft synth work abounds, providing a cushion between the insistent grab of the bass and the on-the-edge-of-space vocals of Catherine Harris-White. “No GMO”, “Planet For Sale”, “Blandland”, and “Post Black Anyway” all speak to the politics lurking beneath the chilled-out vibe, marking them out as significantly more interesting than your average alt-R&B project. EarthEE makes a great soundtrack for all sorts of fun activities, although the songs seem to run together after a while.

BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul

★★★★

For a long, long time now I’ve considered Dennis Coles to be the elder statesman and Godfather of Hip Hop. He was the first verse heard from the Wu, 22 years ago now, and he kicked open the door to a much more cinematic hip hop world than had been imagined before. Since then he’s been mostly on point, popping out classics like Supreme Clientele and Fishscale on the regular, and delving into some really solid concept work on Twelve Reasons To Die and 36 Seasons over the last couple of years. He’s first and foremost a storyteller, maybe the best in hip hop. Naming a Greatest Of All Time is a fool’s game, given the subjectivity of the medium, but if a gun was held to my head and I was forced to pick, GFK would be it.

BADBADNOTGOOD, meanwhile, has come roaring out of the Toronto music scene to make a global name for themselves. After staking their claim on jazzed-out covers of classic hip hop tracks, they toured behind Frank Ocean and released one of last year’s finest records, III. As an instrumental trio there are few that approach the consistent quality they put out, and as it turns out there’s only one band that makes better for better live hip hop, and they’re currently the Tonight Show band.

So, the two together. Collaborations are always a tricky business, because the egos involved make for complicated arrangements. While Sour Soul isn’t quite perfect, it more than makes the case for why collaborations can work out very well. The sound is a lot sparser than long-time BBNG fans might expect, and while it’s caused some consternation in certain circles I truly think it’s the right choice. They tone down the out-there jazz reaches in favour of a live action version of the kind of gritty, streetlight music that GFK has always sounded best over. They play a sort of hip hop prog-soul, like they’re interested primarily in recreating the moody, smoky soul-snippets that make GFK’s classics so iconic. GFK for his part sounds perfectly at home over it, spinning out his usual dense, on-the-edge-of-ridiculous wordplay; his style may have gone mostly out of favour in an age of trap and drill, but it’s like slipping on a favourite pair of shoes and going for a walk down blocks you know all too well.

Ghost never quite lets himself fully go, however, keeping back the kind of cinematic street stories that mark the tracks on his other albums. “Gunshowers” and “Mind Playing Tricks” are the closest he gets, and tellingly they’re the two best tracks. The usual off-the-wall “WTF are you even going on about” moments happen as well, although here they’re mostly confined to “Tone’s Rap”, a brief sketch of a hard-done-by pimp getting belligerent. Of the four guest verses, it’s surprisingly Danny Brown’s that makes the most impact. His hectoring, Cypress Hill-esque voice is an acquired taste, but his verse on “Six Degrees” makes the case for his greatness. The Tree verse is lyrically dense but flows by without really sticking, and Elzhi verse on “Gunshowers” is oddly indistinguishable from GFK. DOOM’s verse is inspired and would easily be the best on offer if I didn’t keep missing it in the midst of blinking.

Still, this is a winner by a clear and comfortable margin. BBNG might not be the right backing track for every rapper – Keef and Flocka would sound bizarre – but their moody, gritty twilight jazz-soul fits Ghostface perfectly.

Tortoise – The Catastrophist

★★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Thrill Jockey Records

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Blackstar

★★★★☆

Released January 8th, 2016 on ISO/RCA/Columbia Records

Singles:

“Blackstar“

“Lazarus“

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#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

#57: Skyzoo – Music For My Friends

#56: John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

#55: CHVRCHES – Every Open Eye

#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

#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

#47: Lady Lamb – After

#46: Erase Errata – Lost Weekend

#45: BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul

#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

#42: Windhand – Grief’s Infernal Flower

#41: Craig Finn – Faith In The Future

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#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