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

#80: Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl

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

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

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

#78: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment – Surf

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

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

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

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

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

#75: Myrkur – M

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

#74: Prefuse 73 – Rivington Nao Rio

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

#73: Hop Along – Painted Shut

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

#72: Braids – Deep In The Iris

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

#71: Speedy Ortiz – Foil Deer

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

#70: Matthew E White – Fresh Blood

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

#69: THEESatisfaction – EarthEE

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

#68: Mark Ronson – Uptown Special

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

#67: Bjork – Vulnicura

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

#66: Jamie xx – In Colour

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

#65: Faith No More – Sol Invictus

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

#64: The Sword – High Country

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

#63: The Sonics – This Is The Sonics

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

#62: Built To Spill – Untethered Moon

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

#61: Napalm Death – Apex Predator – Easy Meat

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

Barrence Whitfield & The Savages – Under The Savage Sky

★★★

If the late 2000s and the 2010s have proved anything, it’s that good old-fashioned garage rock seems resistant to the vagaries of time. The late 1960s and the early 1970s – whether it’s the retro-funk/soul of an act like the Honeybears or the raw, amphetamine proto-punk revival of Ty Segall – have proved to be a continually fertile source for people who are nostalgic for a time they never lived through. Barrence Whitfield and the Savages fall under the former, fusing old-school R&B, Stones-esque garage music, early funk, and Motown soul into a compressed nugget of Nuggets. This is pure rock ‘n’ roll, free of toxic adolescent angst, radio-chasing pop blandness, and cutting-edge trend chasing.

There may be some out there who remember Whitfield from his first decade, running from 1984 to 1995, where he traded in pretty much the same stuff he’s got on display here. His hiatus ended in 2011; since then he’s put out three albums just like Under The Savage Sky, cloaked in nostalgia and dripping with raw, crunchy attitude. The only misstep is “Angry Hands”, which sounds too close to Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” to be entirely comfortable. Otherwise this is a solid collection of retro-rock that hits all the right notes. While it doesn’t break new ground, it also doesn’t really have to. Certain sounds, while they may not be chart-topping, are timeless; the sound that Whitfield has staked his name on is one such.

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.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

Hiatus Kaiyote – Choose Your Weapon

★★★

The neo-psychedelic haven of Melbourne, Australia is also home to the Grammy-nominated “Future Soul” group Hiatus Kaiyote, whose second album, Choose Your Weapon, is making people go “like, wow”. There’s some good reason for the hype: Hiatus Kaiyote crafts some next-level soul music out of the cutting-edge sounds of contemporary hip hop and R&B and then adds the funk-mining groove that the group is best known for. When gets into a serious thing, it’s some of the best head-nodder music you’ll find.

The problem, though, is that beyond an unearthly ability to find their way into the pocket there isn’t much to recommend on Choose Your Weapon. Tracks like “Shaolin Monk Motherfunk” and “Atari” are stone killers, but there’s sixty-nine minutes of tracks just like them, and after a while it wears thin. By the time “Building A Ladder” comes along it’s exhausting, and you’re left feeling tired and aimless. Choose Your Weapon is at its heart a groove in search of a message, or an anthem, or something to bring it up to the next level and turn them from a pretty great jam into a band worth encapsulating on an album. Choose Your Weapon feels like a demo reel of its maker’s talents, which is unfortunate when you consider those talents.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

Van Hunt – The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets

★★★★

2014-2015 is already shaping up to the be the year that cool, slinky funk slips back into the hipster playlists of the world. Between D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly the sounds of the early 1970s are coming back in a big way. Add in Van Hunt to this conversation. Hailing from Dayton, OH – home of Guided By Voices! – Van Hunt has been on an upward swing since the early 00s through a judicious usage of soul, funk, R&B, and smooth sexuality. He’s also the poster boy for talent being screwed around by major labels; after two albums with Capitol Records he was shuffled around to a subsidiary label and his third album, Popular, was shelved despite being a solid album by all accounts. Van Hunt struck out on his own afterwards, turning to crowdfunding to get The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets made. Thank god for a generous internet, because this is one rewarding album.

It’s a subtle album, full of understated percussion, slinky basslines, versatile keyboard work, and expertly integrated guitar lines, almost all of which are played by Van Hunt himself. It’s a tour de force for a talented man, a modern day disciple of Prince with a hint of both Sly Stone and David Bowie. The Prince influence is the big one though; subtle and restrained as The Fun Rises, The Fun Sets is, it is absolutely awash in sexuality. In that it sets itself apart from the political and cultural examinations of America that characterize both Black Messiah and To Pimp A Butterfly. This is the bedroom addition of the modern retro-funk movement, the freak in the sheets in contrast to the righteous movement in the streets.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color

★★★☆

Boys & Girls was a blast from the past, a reaffirmation of soul music and a vehicle for the impressive pipes of singer Brittney Howard. It found the neat balance between being a critical darling and achieving a wide-ranging mass appeal, and in doing so it set the band up for that most awkward of situations: the Eagerly Anticipated Follow-Up Album.

Typically, such an album sees the band looking to expand on it’s sonic pallette;”Look at us!” it screams, “we aren’t just about (blistering blues rock, Stax Records soul, Janis Joplin without the crippling addictions)! Check out what we can also do!” Then the band will normally fire in all directions at once, trying a little bit of everything to prove that they have staying power. Sound & Color is that album. Sure, they still have all of the above-mentioned elements – they’ll never escape their roots – but they add shade, gradient, and at one point something that seems to approximate punk rock. There are some downright funky moments – the solid groove underpinning “Don’t Wanna Fight” for one – and some oddly psychedelic moments as well, as on the ever-evolving “Future People”. The drawback to this, of course, is that there’s very little coherency beyond Howard’s artillery-fusillade of a voice. Each song goes off in a different direction and it’s very easy to get distracted mid-way through.

That said, despite the fact that it took me three attempts to get through the album from beginning to end, it’s well worth the effort. The band is tight enough that you could easily be fooled into thinking that they were on album number ten, and Howard’s voice is, as always, a juggernaut of emotional resonance. A fine sophomore effort, if a typical one.

Young Fathers – White Men Are Black Men Too

★★★★

Scotland’s Young Fathers have defied classification since day one. Their sound remains staunchly between all things, preferring to take day trips through soul, R&B, funk, hip hop, and TV On The Radio-inspired indie rock. None of these are particularly accurate, since at any one given time Young Fathers have taken a fuzzed-out view of these discrete genres and stamped them with their own particular ideals.

White Men Are Black Men Too rolls through all of these points and more in just under forty minutes. When things start to get a bit too conventional, the group will throw in some sort of oddball gesture – a key change, a time-shift, some squalling noise over top of what otherwise might be a lost classic from Return To Cookie Mountain. It gives the album a sense of familiarity, but that familiarity is then ripped away on a constant basis and replaced with something almost familiar, but also distressing, moving, and utterly modern.

Of course, at first glance no one cares about the music, because they’re all wondering what the hell the title of the album is going on about. The line comes from what is arguably the best track on the album, “Old Rock ‘n’ Roll”, which in itself is partial reframe of an argument between the group’s management and frontman Alloysious Massaquoi. Massaquoi, who came to Edinburgh via Liberia, takes the position that he’s “tired of playing the good black…tired of having to hold back”, and that he’s “tired of blaming the white man / his indiscretion don’t betray him / a black man can play him / some white men are black men too.” He wonders in the full argument with his management why questions of race always have to be discussed “behind closed doors and never confronted head on”. In a way it melds well with the state of affairs in 2015, given Kendrick Lamar’s release of To Pimp A Butterfly, which touches on many of the same issues. The group holds no fear, but forges ahead into the future of both music and politics with their eyes wide open.

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.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

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.