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.

Ought – Sun Coming Down

★★★★

Montreal’s Ought may be the poppiest band on Constellation Records, but this is a relative status; given the band’s predilection for building off of the discographies of Gang Of Four and The Fall, “pop” is probably not the first term to come to mind on a first listening of Sun Coming Down. Anyone familiar with last year’s More Than Any Other Day will find Sun Coming Down to work on the exact same pleasure centres: angular, nearly atonal guitar work, song forms that follow the tracks of a tidal ebb and flow rather than traditional verse-chorus structures, and Tim Beeler’s half-mad, half-Mark E Smith vocal delivery. It’s equal parts bliss and despair; as Beeler growls on “Beautiful Blue Sky”, “I’m no longer afraid to dance tonight / ‘Cause that is all that I have left”, marking out desperation and joy in equal measures.

Ought is about as classic post-punk as you can get these days. There are a million bands who want to be Joy Division but not many now that look at some of the other canonical bands: Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Swell Maps, Mission of Burma, et al. Ought takes a more holistic approach to post-punk appropriation, chewing and rechewing their influences until they come out sounding like their own band, and a good one at that. If this year’s utterly awful Gang of Four record left you in tears, do yourself a favour and pick up Sun Coming Down, because it won’t steer you wrong.

The Libertines – Anthems For Doomed Youth

★★

Despite the fact that it’s axiomatic by now – nowhere more so than in the hidebound narratives of rock ‘n’ roll – there are always more bands who think that you can, in fact, go home again.

You can’t.

The Libertines were, once upon a time, the hottest thing to exist in post-Strokes Britain, a furious mixture of CBGB punk and Rolling Stones swagger. They were a band whose songs you could put on repeat and never tire of them.

Then drugs and mayhem forced them to take a decade off in the wilderness of C-list glamour and Kate Moss.

Now they aren’t.

End of story.

FIDLAR – TOO

★☆

“40 oz On Repeat” sounds like Weezer. “Punks” sounds like the Black Keys. “West Coast” sounds like the Gaslight Anthem. “Why Generation” sounds like bad radio indie – like if Kula Shaker was covering the original songs of a Strokes cover band. “Sober” is what Nada Surf would sound like if they were a goofy Epitaph pop punk band from the late Nineties. “Leave Me Alone” sounds like an outtake from Colleen Green.

It just gets depressing after that. Nothing sounds like FIDLAR. Fuck this dude, none of this is a risk. It’s the sound of a band that got some recognition for being good and immediately began scrambling towards the wads of cash that were being offered their way.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I’m going to go drink some cheap beer, because I like it, and because FIDLAR obviously prefers Heineken these days.

The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven

★★★★

Emo became a pejorative at some point in the past ten years. I first encountered the word describing a grouping of bands who were described as “the sensitive young man’s answer to riot grrl”, which included such acts as The Promise Ring, early Jimmy Eat World, Texas Is The Reason, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Jawbreaker. It was punk rock with style and grace, with hectoring vocals about girls. Heartbreak, struggle, trying to get over loss, but ultimately about the opposite sex.

At some point this became twisted and emo became redefined. Someone who’s “emo” now dresses in black, has a hairdo that only hair spray and a staunch defiance of gravity could create, cakes on the makeup, and likely bears the scars of cutting themselves. They listen to Pierce The Veil and Black Veil Brides. It’s a fashion statement rather than a particular subgenre of punk, and even though punk rock itself is a fashion statement more than a genre, it’s become a widely derided form. Bands that once rocked the emo label now go by the much safer “post-hardcore” and pretend that other term never existed.

The Wonder Years are a band that is firmly of the older version of the word “emo”. They’re a band whose music has often relied on the tropes pioneered by those bands from the late Nineties; 2011’s Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing was a spearhead in the so-called “emo revival”, coming off as a somewhat poppier Sunny Day Real Estate. Their lyrics were, of course, about growing up, and girls, but they structured it in such a way that it felt searing and sincere rather than pop-cheesy like the spawn on My Chemical Romance. Between that and 2013’s The Greatest Generation they’ve made a name for themselves as an accessible entry point for neo-emo, or post-hardcore, or whatever people are calling it nowadays.

No Closer To Heaven changes up the recipe a little. Their previous three albums – The Upsides, Suburbia, and The Greatest Generation – were a trilogy that examined Dan Campbell’s coming-of-age, with all of the inherent fear and loneliness that came along with it. There was a poppiness to them that allowed for singalong choruses and that dreaded word “accessibility”. No Closer To Heaven, however, is not poppy; it’s a collection of heart-wrenching pieces with bare nods to accessibility, full of midnight confessions, long bridges, circular patterns, and everything that made an album like Diary great. Amidst this are two homages to great artists who died young: Patsy Cline, who predicted her own death in a 1963 plane crash, and Ernest Hemingway, the great author who, ragged from shock treatments, shot himself in his Iowa home in 1961. “Song For Patsy Cline” is particularly haunting: “My airbag light’s been on for weeks / And I keep having dreams / Where I go through the windshield but I don’t fix it / Patsy Cline came and sang to me / She told everybody / How she knew she would die soon before she did”. It’s a fitting setup for the theme of loss that runs through the album. “Cigarettes & Saints” is the most explicit of the examples of this theme, being more or less a eulogy for Campbell’s departed friend Mike Pellone, who died of a drug overdose before No Closer To Heaven was completed. “Twice a week I pass by the church that held your funeral” he sings, “And the pastor’s words come pouring down like rain / How he called you a sinner and said now you walk with Jesus / So the drugs that took your life aren’t gonna cause you any pain / I don’t think he even knew your name / And I refuse to kneel and pray / I won’t remember you that way”. “Thanks For The Ride” talks about another friend that died in a car crash; instead of dwelling on her death, he pretends that they simply lost touch after college, and that she’s living in California, married with a new baby. These themes get tied up together on the final track, “No Closer To Heaven”: dead birds, Patsy Cline, car crashes, Ernest Hemingway, and wandering in circles.

No Closer To Heaven is a summation of everything that the neo-emo/post-hardcore “movement” stands for. It builds upon the bones of much older bands and builds something raw and real out of them, adding on to the canon of those bands rather than engaging in rote recreation of their music. In moving away from the pop-punk end of the emo spectrum they prove their artistic bona fides and set themselves apart.

Wavves & Cloud Nothings – No Life For Me

★★★★

Wavves’ Nathan Willaims used to make the oddest sort of punk rock back in the weird old days of 2008. It was briefly fashionable at the time to write poppy punk songs but to record them so loudly that they clipped, producing a heavy distortion over every sound in the recording. Songs like “Teenage Super Party” and “Beach Goth” and “California Goth” were strangely catchy; underneath the thick, nearly unlistenable layer of distortion were genuine Weezer-indebted songs of being young and lusty and enamoured with the beach. Later, he would record these kinds of songs without the clipping, and would garner a significant indie rock following.

Dylan Baldi of Cloud Nothings first put his name to digital wax producing bored jaded suburbanite songs that were recorded in an almost ambient fashion, garnished with tape hiss and tailored distinctly lo-fi. Since then he’s struck out in his own direction, writing some of the most bleak and emotionally powerful punk rock of the 2010s. Given Williams’ regrettable tendencies towards Weezer-esque crunch pomp (most notably on 2013’s Afraid Of Heights), Baldi seems like the perfect foil for his songwriting. No Life For Me bears this out to a remarkable extent. The best moments, as on “How’s It Gonna Go” and the chorus of “Hard To Find”, involve both Baldi’s tactic of launching out into full head-on abandon and Williams’ easy-going but somewhat eerie ear for melody. There are no real mediocre moments on No Life For Me, but there isn’t much room for them, either; the album gets in and out in 21 minutes, feeling like a split EP more than anything else.

Nathan Williams has spent his career post-2008 slowly working up to writing schlock like “Beverley Hills”, but on No Life For Me Dylan Baldi steps in and brings him back to his hissy, jaded roots, and both of them sound better for it.

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White Reaper – White Reaper Does It Again

★★★

“My little brother just discovered rock ‘n’ roll / There’s a noise in his head and it’s out of control / He no longer listens to A-sides / He made me a tape of bootlegs and B-sides / And every song, every single song on that tape sounds the same / Why don’t our parents worry about us? / Why don’t our parents worry about us?”

-Art Brut

Sometimes people will say of certain bands “every song sounds the same” and you’ll have to leap to said band’s defense, pointing out the subtle intricacies of the band’s sound to show that they are, in fact, diverse.

White Reaper is not that band.

White Reaper Does It Again is 33 minutes of mile-a-minute garage punk, like Bass Drum Of Death on, uh, more amphetamines and peppered with diabetes-inducing keyboard lines to separate it from the Segall-inspired pack. Every song is pretty much exactly like “Make Me Wanna Die”, the hard-charging, drum-driven opener that starts the pyrotechnics immediately. Each one has a little hook that keeps it fresh, although only “Last 4th Of July” and “Wolf Trap Hotel” last beyond the next sugar crash. There are times when the tube-produced reverb threatens to drown the band out, but that’s par for the course for garage rock these days and White Reaper manages it admirably. The album is nothing particularly special, but it does what it does with style and strength, and sometimes that’s all you need.

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Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

★★★☆

What is punk? What has punk ever been? There’s a lot of confusion on this particular topic these days, I find. There are people out there who honestly believe that punk requires distorted power chords played fast in a very short period of time. Hardcore fans think that only hardcore is punk. Pop punk fans think you need a Warped Tour berth in order to make it in punk. Kids have grown up immersed in skateboard commercials and Tony Hawk video games and so associate the sounds pioneered by Adolescents and Bad Religion as being quintessentially punk. Alternately, kids grew up crying about being “friendzoned” and bored in the suburbs and so think of The Wonder Years and The Hotelier (to get some recent examples in here) as being purely punk. The effect is the same: it requires loud distorted guitars and standard verse-chorus-verse structures, like it’s fucking Blue Oyster Cult or something.

People get weirded out when I tell them that Wu-Tang was punk. The whole thing about punk is an ethos. That’s it. It has nothing to do with the music, and that should be patently obvious to anyone who has listened to Devo, the Slits, the Ramones, and Oingo Boingo back to back. The Clash weren’t punk because they sounded a certain way, and neither were the Ramones. . Punk means doing it your own way, without any regard for what the “industry standards” are, and it often means doing it on your own, without much outside help, because the industry is centered around what already sells, not on taking risks. The Ramones banged out three chords in a garage and got together with a lot of like-minded bands to create their own movement, outside of the Eagles and disco and whatever else was popular in 1977. The hardcore bands from the 1980s got together in basements and abandoned spaces and played to people who were just like them – the fringes of society and other hardcore bands. They did so completely outside of the frame of reference of acceptable label-based music and did their own thing. The Wu-Tang Clan share a similar story. Hip-hop was getting big before 1993, but it had a certain sound that needed to happen in order to get record deals and promotion. The Wu didn’t want that sound, so they did their own thing: RZA produced dusty, chopped-up, menacing tracks over which the others spat complicated, gritty stories that felt like more literary versions of the accepted gangsta music coming out of the West Coast. They made their own sounds, crafted their own image, and forced the industry to come to terms with them. In doing so they molded the shape and sound of their genre for years to come, much as the Ramones and the Clash did in the late 1970s. In other words, the Wu? Punk as fuck. The bands who adopt an image and a sound to get record deals and Warped Tour slots? About as punk as Donny Osmond.

So, Sleaford Mods. The Nottingham-based duo are not at first glance very punk, for the reasons outlined above. They most assuredly are, however. In 2015 they make what can be tagged as hip-hop, but hip-hop in 2015 sounds unlike this. 2015 hip-hop requires 808 bass, trap rolls, aggression, menacing string stabs, and a minimalist sing-song sort of flow that comes straight outta Soulja Boy. Sleaford Mods utilize drums and bass, often cut live, crafted in a vision of hip hop seen through the eyes of English rockers. That’s pretty much it in terms of instrumentation – no samples, no semi-automatic gunfire-type hi-hat fills, no deeply booming bass. Over this stark arrangement, Jason Williamson spits off-kilter rants about capitalism, unemployment, shitty living conditions, live shows, the failures of the record industry, and how, after seeing the Von Blondies, he wouldn’t fuck around with Jack White. All of this is rendered in an East Midlands accent, like Mark E. Smith had grown up listening to rap in the Nineties. It does not sound like anything that should be on anyone’s radar, and yet, much like Death Grips, it is.

Death Grips, the leading light of the not-at-all-a-movement punk-rap movement, are noise terrorists, playing not only with their sound but also with their label and with audience expectations. Sleaford Mods keep it more working class than that delivering the goods without making it flashy or more complicated than it needs to be. Key Market is even more straightforward than their previous album, 2014’s Divide and Exit, and this proves to be both a blessing and a curse. While the no-frills arrangements allow Williamson’s personality to really come to the forefront like never before, it makes the album sound musically like an updated version of The Fall. That said, of course, there’s nothing particularly wrong with taking your cues from both hip hop and The Fall, leaving Key Markets as an exciting, bewildering album that shows off the band’s talents at blazing a new punk trail.

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Titus Andronicus – The Most Lamentable Tragedy

★★★★☆

New Jersey punk rockers Titus Andronicus first appeared fully formed, as a balls-out whisper-to-a-scream theatrical unit on The Airing Of Grievances. For me it was love from the first moments. They were a band that was more than willing to add off-kilter bits to their songs – quotes from Shakespeare, references to Camus, snatches of Springsteen, doo wop, and late-70s guitar-worship heroics. It was as though Conor Oberst had taken up fronting Fucked Up in order to bring it out onto a stage and perform, and their follow-up, The Monitor, doubled down on this. The Monitor was a full-blown epic, taking the American Civil War and comparing it to New Jersey circa 2010. It’s an album of widescreen guitar fireworks, teetering back and forth between shaky whiskey-soaked balladry and full-out punk firebreathing. It’s easily one of the five best albums of this middle-aged decade, which makes the sharply reduced scale of 2012’s Local Business all the stranger. Frontman Patrick Stickles seemed to dial back his ambition in favour of being more accessible, or maybe just in favour of being able to play the songs correctly live. Either way it was a misstep for a band whose strengths lie in being utterly ridiculous with regards to their songs and their whole albums. It is without (much) hyperbole to say that when the band announced that it would be recording a new album, it was tacitly suggested by nearly everyone that it would be their make-or-break moment. They needed something big and ambitious to cement their legend.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy delivers on this.

29 songs over an hour and a half. A five-act rock opera about Our Hero (a stand-in for Stickles) and his struggles with manic depression. Seventies bar stomping, modern punk fury, ballads, intermissions, Zeppelin-esque nine-minute riff mining, a Pogues cover, “Auld Lang Syne”…there is literally something for everyone in the sprawled-out fences that mark out the album’s territory. “Dimed Out” leads the charge as the standard-bearer of the punk heroics that marked the band out as one to watch in 2008, with “Look Alive” and “Lookalike” rushing headalong with it. The “No Future” saga ends with parts IV and V; IV kicks the door open on the album with the screamed slogan “I hate to be awake”, while V sets up the ending of the album before the slow, falling-apart ballad “Stable Boy”. Tracks like “Mr. E. Mann”, “Fired Up”, “Funny Feeling” and “Fatal Flaw” feel like stretched out takes on the cleaner, poppier sound of Local Business. “More Perfect Union” and “(S)HE SAID/(S)HE SAID” set out on a different direction entirely, mining slow changes and moods over the course of nearly ten minutes each. 2012’s “My Eating Disorder” could be considered a precursor to these sorts of songs, although both are more complicated and atmospheric than that song. What’s most surprising, however, is Stickles’ melodies. He’s always been more of a screamer than a singer, but “Lonely Boy”, “I Lost My Mind (+@)”, “Come On, Siobhan”, and the closer “Stable Boy” all speak to his strengths as a sort of corrosive pop vocalist, like Kurt Cobain with a better sense of theatrics and a musical vocabulary that extends beyond ripping off Black Flag and Killing Joke.

There’s a desperation to the band that plays well to its audience. After all, unless you’re settled into a career and are making good money, the future projected out from 2015 is starting to look a little desperate all on it’s own. The Sex Pistols screamed about “no future” but Patrick Stickles has taken up that line as a mantra, alternately raging against the brick wall of nothing that awaits and tiredly accepting it. It’s a back-and-forth that seems all too familiar to those trying to balance part-time work with rising costs and seeing no appreciable relief coming in the future. Stickles’ take on his state of being is grim: While “No Future Part IV: No Future Triumphant” begins the album screaming about how he hates to be awake, and “No Future Part V: Endless Dreaming” closes the saga by whispering that if hates to be awake, he should just end it all and sleep forever. Fittingly, the final track on the album, “A Moral”, is silent. The Most Lamentable Tragedy takes the bands nihilism to its logical conclusion and it’s hard to imagine where they could go from here. They’ve spent their past doing everything within the range of ragged-edged punk rock, and on this album they bring it all together into one big blowout. Afterwards, there’s something akin to a hangover: a lost feeling, confused ideas about what to do next, and the slightly more positive generalization to Stickles’ main theme: if you hate to do something, why are you still doing it? It’s a question you can apply to so many aspects of your life, even when Stickles is applying it personally to life itself.

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Viet Cong – Viet Cong

★★★★

Women were Calgary’s premier alt-noise band, and when guitarist Chris Reimer died mysteriously in 2012 it was a huge blow, breaking up the band at a time when they were a hot topic amongst the indie blog literati. Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace are now part of Viet Cong, another project that fuses noisy art explosions with GBV and Joy Division-esque lo-fi pop sounds. Throughout much of the album they seem on the verge of falling apart, a shuddering makeshift weld-job of Jesus and Mary Chain guitar fuzz, thundering drums a la A Place To Bury Strangers, and the deathly vocals of Flegel. This last is where some of the influences become obvious; Flegel’s voice is strongly reminiscent of both Ian Curtis and Spencer Krug, and the gloomy surroundings only serve to strengthen those comparisons. Viet Cong is an album of what modern bands consider retro post-punk: gloomy, semi-gothy atmospheres with big drums and keyboards that wouldn’t sound quite out of place on a Sisters of Mercy track. Everything comes to head on the final track, “Death”, where the threatened breakdown finally occurs about seven minutes in, a collapse into bashed-out noise-chords after an intense, speaker-rattling build-up. It’s assuredly a strong debut, likely a contender for year-end lists, and absolutely a recommended listen.