11 | New Orleans Swim Team | Walls
I've been following Jacob Ulickij's work for a few years and I think he's really created something special with this album. Musically it's indie pop / emo, with primarily spoken word vocals, delivered powerfully and aggressively at some points, and more quietly at others, but always rapidly and precisely. Ulickij sings occasionally, but spoken word is definitely the primary vocal style. The songwriting on each track makes each one thoroughly distinct. Ulickij throws all of his emotion into his delivery, spilling his guts with his lyrics, his voice often shaking as if holding back tears, making it an intense and heartfelt experience backed up by considerable technical skill.
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12 | Eskimeaux | O.K.
O.K. is a beautiful album combining blissful indie pop, rock, and folktronica. The songs are lyrically and thematically delicate and heartfelt, but they are backed by strong yet tasteful production, with light instumentation and vocals at one moment breaking out into a breathtaking chorus the next, composed of guitars, electronic instruments, and excellent percussion. "Broken Necks" is one of the single best pop songs of the year.
Bandcamp
13 | LoneLady | Hinterland
Hinterland is an expertly crafted piece of post-punk with heavy funk, dub, and new wave influences. The music contains bits of Talking Heads, Gang of Four, and Liquid Liquid, but does not sound entirely like any of them. The songs are primarily composed of slick grooves, peppy riffs, upbeat rhythms, and funky basslines, with some more dissonant guitar tones occasionally included to remind you that this is still a post-punk album, even if it is upbeat. Every track is infectious and danceable, except for "Flee!," which is the odd track out with its droning strings and solemn vocals. The entire album is just fun to listen to.
Bunkerpop
14 | Enablers | The Rightful Pivot
Enablers have released yet another brilliant noise rock album. Pete Simonelli's free verse poetry and spoken word delivery are as cool and confident and aggressive as ever, a style I can only describe as beat poetry revival. The noisy guitars and drums ebb and flow with the loud/quiet changes and the immense crescendos, accompanying the poems' narratives and tones. This is also the first Enablers album, as far as I can recall, to feature singing, though only on the track "Look." I have to admit I wasn't crazy about
Tundra or
Blown Realms and Stalled Explosions compared to
End Note and
Output Negative Space, but
The Rightful Pivot is a wonderful return to form. If you're a fan of noisy post-rock and restrained post-hardcore along the lines of Slint, you owe it to yourself to listen to Enablers.
Bandcamp
15 | Joanna Newsom | Divers
After her massive triple album
Have One on Me, Joanna Newsom scales back to something a bit less huge and ambitious - at least by her standards, since
Divers still clocks in at close to an hour and still features her excellent, meticulous arrangements and lyrics. Every track has a wonderful flow to it, rising and falling, reaching a beautiful crescendo, coming back down. If I had to find fault with
Divers, I'd say Newsom doesn't really do anything particularly new here compared to her previous albums. Not to the extent that I would call it "more of the same," though even if it were I wouldn't have much of a problem with that. The shorter track lengths seem like a throwback to her style circa
The Milk-Eyed Mender, but with the experience she's gained through
Ys and
HOoM. The bottom line is that Newsom has put out an album that holds up perfectly well even in the wake of her last two masterpieces, even if those albums overshadow this one a bit.
Sapokanikan
16 | Chelsea Wolfe | Abyss
Chelsea Wolfe's songwriting skills continue to improve, and her fifth album may be her best yet. Her trademark combination of doom metal, folk, and pop is still present, but it's presented in its most fully realized form. The range of dynamics on the album is insane, with Wolfe quietly murmuring into the microphone at one moment, then belting out her lyrics over sludgy guitars that threaten to drown her out the next. The album even features some electronic touches, such as a thoroughly unexpected dancy beat in the middle of "After the Fall" that works surprisingly well. Wolfe has been at the top of her game for several years now, and it seems like that top just keeps getting higher.
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17 | Grooms | Comb the Feelings Through Your Hair
I was only recently turned on to this band and they deserve a lot more attention than they get, considering they've been making awesome music for more than five years now. Their dreamy art punk approach isn't quite like anything else I've heard before.
Comb the Feelings features tons of interesting ambient sounds, intricate guitar work full of fuzzy shimmering chords, captivating basslines, and fantastic drumming. "Bed Version" and the title track start the album off with a burst of energy, while tracks like "Cross Off" and "Half Cloud" are more laid back. The album takes on a different kind of energy with the driving motorik beat of "Doctor M."
Comb the Feelings is an excellent addition to Grooms' already impressive body of work. If you're a fan of Radiohead, Clinic, or Suuns, I highly recommend it. At least, those are the closest comparisons I can come up with.
Bandcamp
18 | U.S. Girls | Half Free
The production on
Half Free is much more polished than Meg Remy's previous work, but it retains her signature eerie, trippy style. It kicks off with "Sororal Feelings," which sounds like a 60s girl group song in terms of structure and vocals, but with strange distorted tones and depressing lyrics giving it a disconcerting feel. Remy also delves into other genres and gives them similar treatments, such as 80s ballads with "Navy & Cream," 50s songstress tunes with "Window Shades" and "Woman's Work," 80s pop with "New Age Thriller," and 70s/80s hard rock with "Sed Knife." These tracks are not solely influenced by one era or genre each, however; they often combine multiple genres and time periods into a strange mish-mash. Despite the variety of genres present on the album, the similar warping of their sounds allows them all to fit together very effectively.
Half Free is a strange, dark album, despite its generally dancy and upbeat sounds; or perhaps it is the juxtaposition of those conventional elements with the darker, more experimental features that make it the unsettling but catchy listen that it is.
Sororal Feelings
19 | Jenny Hval | Apocalypse, girl
Hval tackles social, political, sexual, and religious issues in blunt fashion, both with spoken word and song, often with sexual metaphors that are even more direct than those on her previous album,
Innocence Is Kinky. The crude language Hval uses frequently on this album might be off-putting to some, but I appreciate how it harkens back to various revolutionary 20th century writers - Ginsberg, Nin, Miller, Burroughs, etc. - artists who used obscenity in the pursuit of their art. The music provides a fitting accompaniment to Hval's vocals, sometimes taking on a more pop-oriented feel on tracks like "That Battle Is Over" but also veering more toward noise, field recordings, and sound collages to accompany spoken word sections. Definitely a worthy followup to
Innocence Is Kinky, which is quite an accomplishment because I adore that album.
Bandcamp
20 | Whatever Brains | ____ LP
The final album by the difficult-to-classify Whatever Brains. It's full of noise and strange sounds that all somehow come together to form an impressive whole with a very weird punk aesthetic. It harkens back to the no wave scene in many ways, but there's too much going on at any given time for that to be a truly apt comparison. One could also draw comparisons to early industrial post-punk like This Heat or Chrome, but those don't entirely fit either. Regardless, it's an odd and thoroughly satisfying swan song for the band.
Bandcamp
21 | Sufjan Stevens | Carrie & Lowell
Sufjan Stevens seems to have reached the height of his bombast on Age of Adz, so Carrie and Lowell sees him returning to the style of his older material with a much calmer, more folk-oriented sound that still incorporates the experience he's gained through his more ambitious albums. It's a very somber album, but it feels removed from the subject, more like a reflection on the past than an examination of the present. This removes some of the immediate feeling from the music, but allows for more careful craftsmanship and polish that result in a subdued, accomplished, cohesive album that still provides an emotional punch in the gut.
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22 | Negative Scanner | Negative Scanner
A pure, driving post-punk album that's just as "punk" as it is "post." The guitars are jagged and dissonant, the riffs are intense, the drums are steady and heavy, Rebecca Valeriano-Flores's vocals are aggressive and sound a bit like Siouxsie Sioux at times but more untrained and sardonic. It's fierce, relentless, abrasive, moody, short and simple; it's 27 minutes of punk that's perfectly executed and infinitely relistenable.
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23 | Kamasi Washington | The Epic
A very long, very enjoyable jazz album with long-form tracks. It's a daunting listen at almost three hours, but it remains exciting and interesting throughout its formidable runtime. Tracks range from relatively slow, laid back affairs such as "Isabelle" and "Seven Prayers" to more frantic, drum-heavy tracks like "Miss Understanding" and "The Magnificent 7." Saxophones, trumpets, trombones, drums, bass, keyboards, a choir, occasional solo vocals, and more come together to form a product that's entirely worthy of its title - it really does feel like a journey.
Miss Understanding
24 | Susanne Sundfør | Ten Love Songs
The title makes it sound simple enough, but
Ten Love Songs is actually a remarkably complex and varied pop album. The genres covered range from folk pop to dream pop to synth pop to baroque pop and even a bit of classical, all flowing together seamlessly, with synths effortlessly transitioning to organs and back, along with harpsichord, piano, and lush string arrangements. Sundfør's voice displays enough range to do all of these genres justice. The result is an ambitious album that packs a huge variety of styles into a mere 45 minutes and makes every minute of it satisfying.
Silencer
25 | Pinkshinyultrablast | Everything Else Matters
I've been eagerly awaiting PSUB's debut LP since their excellent EP Happy Songs for Happy Zombies, and it doesn't disappoint. It does mark a significant departure from the more straightforward shoegaze sounds of the EP, but I consider that a good thing. It contains plenty of the classic walls of scintillating guitar noise characteristic of the shoegaze genre, but it also incorporates some nice crunchy riffs along with some dancy beats and ethereal vocals and loops. Easily the best shoegaze album of the year, even if it doesn't fall entirely under the shoegaze umbrella - or perhaps because of that fact.
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