Also, I believe I have mastered the art of the Spotify embedding process so there is a song from every album right there! You see it? You see that thing right underneath that album? That's the thing, the thing of which I am talking about! It should really allow you to enjoy what my descriptions will be poorly trying to describe, and also, if you like it, you might listen to it on the reg, and pass it on, also possibly on the reg.
The List!!!!
Let's start this list off with some West-Coast rap from a current college student. Iamsu's production is so simple and so dirty, it's just really easy, really awesome rap from a dude looking to hold up some street cred while he gets his diploma. Get It In will make you want to dance with your honey til the sun comes up.
Mr. Ocean exploded on the music scene this year with his debut studio album, earning him Grammy noms, a Saturday Night Live appearance, and the love and adoration of every music critic in the great United States. This album is good though, Ocean's beautiful voice, both aurally and lyrically, permeate every track. on Super Rich Kids, he laments the struggle of rich kids over the piano stolen straight from Bennie and the Jets. And on Sweet Life he wonders why ever leave the life you have if there's not a better one out there, setting the scene while singing of peaches and mangoes. The album starts with the sounds of a Playstation booting up, you know what follows must be good.
Trail of Dead is now on their eighth album, with this year's Lost Songs. To be perfectly honest with you I wasn't a huge fan of albums six and seven, and their fifth album So Divided, I enjoyed but the band has disowned and never plays any songs of live, ever. So needless to say, Trail of Dead and I have been on different pages musically pretty much since Source Tags and Codes came out in 2002. However, I very much enjoy this album, it's a return to the simple swag of prog-hard rock that they really are great at. No pomposity, no stupid album artwork cartoons. Just badass, hard rocking Trail of Dead. Every song on this album is good, just turn it on and get lost in the guitars churning through your ears into your brain, and scrubbing it thoroughly, but certainly not gently!
Simple, gentle, electronic based indie music. Soft, beautiful vocals from singer Caroline Polachek, this duo stays strong after losing one of their original members before recording this album. The synths on this one are also extremely reminiscent of the simple hair spray synthesizers of the eighties. The less poppy songs are the most successful including Take It Out on Me and Frigid Spring.
Absolutely breath taking R&B vocals over dark, smooth beats, mixed in with some slick slow running guitar beats, Jessie Ware comes at you hard with strong track, one after another. You listen along and bob your head and you can see the damaged relationship in Wildest Moments and feel the need she reaches out with in Night Light.
So, maybe this duo's moniker sounds like a porn site. That doesn't stop this album from being one of my favorite sleek, slow, low-key electronic albums of the year, and trust me this is a niche that I explore heavily. Teengirl Fantasy's brand of not necessarily dancy electronic beats are exactly what I need on the train to work in the morning, or when I'm coming down from being really messed up at four in the morning. Thank you, two dudes from Oberlin!
Cleveland rockers, Cloud Nothings, graced this record on us, and then promptly blew up and hit up the entire festival scene this past year, and deservedly so. Dylan Baldi spits his lyrics at you and the guitars churn and churn, while the drums are beat senseless. Wasted Days runs just short of nine minutes, and it is worth every second. It starts upbeat, spins into a wasteland of swirling instruments, followed by a breakdown, followed by spooky noises from a computer hell, and then ended by a chant of "I thought I would be more than this!" Don't worry, more than this would make my computer's brain explode.
I just recently discovered this Brooklyn band, through the magic of Spotify. Yes, Spotify, despite your terribly organized library, and stupid commercials, you do occasionally help me discover awesome bands. This band combines the vocal style of folk rock cousins My Morning Jacket, with the synths and blips of the current electronic dance music craze into some really swirling crazy indie-new wave-greasy jeans music and I love it. If this is where EDM is headed, I am completely on board. I included the trippy, free flowing World of Freakout. Turn it on, chill it out.
This shit's cold. Cold as ice. Hollow computer sounds, being relayed through a mountain of ice. It's as minimal as techno gets, but its also super catchy, and each song is its own little thing. British DJ, Actress, gets it just right and the whole album fluctuates between tiny little beats and mondo techno crunch, but it always sounds so clean.
This is probably my favorite album by The Raveonettes, and that is saying something since this is their sixth album and I own all of them. Same poppy, bleached out, indie, surf-rock, but just a little bit darker with a touch more pain in the ever dreamy voice of Sharin Foo. I was starting to get bored with The Raveonettes, but they rise from the ashes on this album, with a tear in their eyes.
Second album by this trio, consisting of singer Andrew Wyatt, and electronic due Avant and Bloodshy, aka Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg. This album is basically an upgraded, cleaner version of their debut, tinged with the same melancholy that Wyatt's vocals always are. Same awesome electronic and symphonic accoutrements. This album includes my absolute favorite song of the year, Bavarian #1 (Say You Will). Listen to it, for it is mighty awesome.
Disappears is a band from Chicago, and for this one album the drummer from Sonic Youth was their drummer. This album is full of scratchy guitars pumping out the same repetitive licks over and over, while singer Brian Case drones. The guitars go in circles and circles, the drums beat slowly, and the bass beats slowly, like a heartbeat, building and building and fuzzing and building. And it culminates in one of the best rock albums of the year. I listened to this album so much last spring that I named my fantasy baseball team Minor Patterns after my favorite song.
Side band of Portishead drummer, Geoff Barrow, with his buddies Billy Fuller and Matt Williams, Beak> is something quite unique. Mostly recorded in one long take and live, the vocals are almost a non-factor, they are so quiet and most of the lyrics are indecipherable. But Beak> still manages to create a minimal techno form of a jam band, and each song is bewitching. It sucks you in, despite being over five minutes of a lot of the same beats over and over. Eggdog sounds like a long trek through the desert, camel in tow, immediately followed by Liar which resembles running from aliens in a corn maze. Listen to this and you will probably listen to it again...and again....and again.
This is easily the most beautiful album on this list. French duo Air, return to the soundtrack scene, creating this album to score the newly released colorized 1902 film Le Voyage Dans La Lune. This record consists of some lengthened versions of the songs from the film, and also a couple of tracks that were created solely for the album but exist in the same universe as the soundtrack. Mostly instrumental, La Voyage is full of lush synths, and soft piano, creating the sensation of being on the moon. Moon Fever sounds like bouncing along the lunarscape with Earth lingering overhead. Air continues to deliver on a career that has produced some of the prettiest, interesting music of the last fifteen years.
Indie rock band, White Rabbits' third album Milk Famous is a masterpiece of the genre. It is succinct, the production is Spoon-tight, which is not surprising due to their work with Spoon singer, Britt Daniel. The songs are so damn catchy, the third time through you know all the choruses and you've got Back For More stuck in your head. I delivered pizzas with this cd in my four disc player for the entire summer because it is a rocking good time. Yeah, I said it.
Beach House returns triumphantly! Their second album, Devotion, was a haunting piece of dream pop, the pinnacle of the genre. The follow up to that record was 2010's Teen Dream, a glossier version of the previous album, not their strongest work in my opinion, but it garnered alot of attention for the Baltimore duo, and led to Bloom, which is extremely similar in tone as Devotion. It's swooping and jangly, filled to the brim with articulate, beautiful garage pop, covered with the layered vocals of organist Victoria Legrand. This album wraps you up in a blanket and lets you know everything is going to be ok, so drink that hot cocoa and relax!
The best way to describe the music of Young Magic is probably psychedelic, electronic, dreamy, trippy, distorted, indie rock. Young Magic's style at times resembles Neon Indian in the juxtaposition of the echoey vocals with distorted electronic pulsating. There are elements of world music, with the sampled noises and the almost tribal percussion section. It starts low, and builds up until a wave of noise washes over you but you feel dirtier and you want to listen again and figure out what all those weird noises were in the background.
Eleven years since their last release, No Doubt comes back stronger than ever. Push and Shove doesn't try to be complicated about what it is: dance music. It's got new wave keyboards, Gwen Stefani crooning her love tales, and it is just as effective as No Doubt has ever been. They have constantly been shifting and evolving and when they released Rock Steady in 2001 they were already ahead of the game with their love of new wavey, electronic dance beats. While they were on hiatus, the rest of the country caught up, and this new album fits perfectly in this landscape of dubstep drops and new wave top forty hits. Title track, Push and Shove, a collaboration with DJ duo, Major Lazer, sounds as if it was recorded in Jamaica on the dancefloor, while poppier tracks like the inevitable next single, Easy, show that ND still has its top 40 roots. This album is a welcome addition to the No Doubt catalog.
"So you should pump this shit, like they do in the future," starts off The Full Retard, the second track on El-P's paranoid LP. Producer El-P brings his usual low-key production, coated with his fist fight style of rapping. This album is hard-hitting, and it sounds as if it has been pumped in the future. A future run by robots who allow humans only to live in the sewer and subside on arcade games for sustenance. If you don't know what that means, you'll just have to listen yourself. Plus, you have to love an album that contains the line "I'm the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer!"
Former Dum Dum Girls drummer, Frankie Rose's debut album is amazing. It switches between cold minimal space techno and jangly eighties hair pop with ease. Her voices lilts over the soft synths and upbeat guitar with her lilting voice. This is stargaze, shoegaze in space. Every song on this album offers something different, and every single one of them delivers something interesting. The fast upbeat Night Swim is followed by the soft, sombre Apples in the Sky which repeats the same five notes on an organ, fades out, fades back in and sweeps you back up again. I have listened to this album on many a train ride, and it always makes it much more enjoyable.
Best original rap album of the year, I don't want to hear about no one else. No One! Killer Mike kills it with this album, straight up country rapping over some familiar funky beats from producer, El-P. Killer Mike raps about politics, dirty cops, ducking the system. Everything you could possibly want. Jojo's Chillin' tells the tale of a dude running from the cops, gets a grandma arrested who tries to call him out for cutting in line at the airport, gets on a plane with weed in his pocket, has mile high club sex with a stewardess while she does blow, gets past the drug-sniffing dogs when they land because the stewardess has the coke that the dogs smell and she gets arrested too. Basically best song ever.
Deftones never cease to amaze me. I have never been averse to screaming (see album numbers 25 and 20), but I really only gravitate towards a screamer who uses it as a form of singing and not just to scream, and that is definitely the best way to describe Deftones' front man, Chino Moreno. He goes from 11 to 2 in a heartbeat, and the music accompanying him can switch just as quickly. Deftones have always been one of the most adventurous of the nu-metal band, a term that hardly describes them anymore than it did then, and the luxurious keyboards and synths of Frank Delgado continue to move them towards the forefront of the hard rock scene. Deftones also definitely name their songs better than anyone else out there, this album includes such awesome titles as Leathers, Poltergeist, Gauze, Rosemary, and Goon Squad. As hard hitting as it is gentle, Koi No Yokan is a welcome step towards my favorite aspects of Deftones, their willingness to explore eighties pop music for inspiration and their relentless attack on my eardrums.
Silversun Pickups are the kings of fuzz. Every guitar note is soaked in it, every bass note is soaked in it, the drums are tinny and break through it, Brian Aubert's high pitched vocals pierce through it. It's all about the fuzz. And singing along. And I love both. This album is definitely the band's heaviest, and also the band's best. Every song is catchy, and long, no song is shorter than four and a half minutes, there are so many awesome break downs. This album is just jam packed with amazing music and tiny little sounds, it plays well in headphones or when you are driving on the highway. Pick this album up, because it is something you need to listen to!
It is remarkable how with every album Grizzly Bear continues to grow towards being a flawless band. Every record expounds on the former and now the band has meshed in a way that you cannot tell whether Edward Droste or Daniel Rossen is singing. Their styles are so similar, and you cannot tell which song is written by which. Somehow they always manage to sound and look like a band that exists only in Sepia toned pictures. The Hunt is slow and churning, but so somber and painfully majestic, What's Wrong starts with a tiny, tiny little bell playing repetitively over a string orchestra. This album is absolutely beautiful, constantly enjoyable, and honestly its so good that I no longer expect anything short of having my mind blown any time I listen to any Grizzly Bear album.
True kind of defies description. There are sweeping songs of indie folk, similar to Fleet Foxes, but then those moments decompose into a swirl of heavy rock guitars. The extreme of this is the minute and a half instrumental Lavender Forces which sounds like the flying war-ship that Mario jumps on to kill Bowser. The guitars can be gentle and soothing such as on Watch the Streams or can be pounding and aggressive as on All Night Low. This album surprises me every time I listen to it, and I can only imagine that it was recorded in a field of wheat as a storm was approaching in the distance. Followed by a dusty rainbow, with only orange and yellow really visible.
Master mashers, Chicago's The Hood Internet, have been blowing up the scene this year. It also could be that I live in Chicago so I have many opportunities to see them, as I did on the subway (that's right STV SLV, I saw you on the red line, once...). But let's get real here, Mash-ups are not necessarily looked at as the most glamorous or cool or not totally douchey genre, HOWEVER The Hood Internet does it right! They mix indie rock, classic rock, eighties new wave, or electronic dance music, and put modern or old school raps over the top, creating such concoctions as Polish City, a combo of Neon Indian and Tyga, or the Santigold, Beastie Boys, Weird Tapes mix-up Don't Play No Trash. I have introduced this mixtape to every single person I possibly could, and everyone has liked it. It is amazing, and you can download it for free at this link: The Hood Internet - Mixtape Volume Six.
Best Album of the Year goes to Liars for WIXIW!!!! Liars has been known to drastically change their style of music from album to album, and WIXIW (pronounced 'wish you') is their take on electronic music. No. 1 Against the Rush starts with a slow bubble and builds on a slow drum beat, as Angus Andrews drones over it in a low monotone. Liars employs many sound effects as percussion and back beats and samples and samples and samples. It's hard to tell what devices are being used to create the sounds you are hearing, but it doesn't matter because every song is amazing and the experience of listening to this album is so enriching. I have yet to grow old of a single track and I listen to it constantly. Please please please for the love of all things holy, listen to this album, cherish it, because the next Liars album is going to be completely different and I don't know what the hell could ever top this masterpiece. Thank you Liars for this album, I will love it forever and ever.
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