Best Albums of 2015

Or another way of putting it, the albums from last year I listened to, ordered by how much I enjoyed them.

Best of 2015

6/7. Beach House - Depression Cherry/Thank Your Lucky Stars


It's sort of the nature of dream pop that it puts you in a trance-like state and doesn't do a lot to differentiate itself from song to song, so when Beach House put out two albums without a couple months of each other, forgive me for saying that you could play a random track from one or the other and I might struggle to tell you which it came from. That's not to say they're exactly the same, or that I didn't enjoy both of them. It's just that I can't make a strong case to myself that one really stands out from the other.

5. Modest Mouse - Strangers to Ourselves


Hey, I listened to an album with electric guitars this year! Modest Mouse returns from a long hiatus from the studio with another solid album, one which doesn't reach the heights of their earlier work but has a few great songs and a few more pretty good ones. There aren't any big surprises here, but there can be value in a band knowing what people expect of them of delivering exactly that.

4. Chvrches - Every Open Eye


There was a bit of experimentation on Chvrches' first album, experimentation which is absent here. They figured out what people like about them, catchy electro pop, and really drilled in on that. I'm fine with that, although there aren't quite as many stand-out tracks as I would have liked. None of it is bad though, and a couple songs, especially the opener, are fantastic.

3. Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper


I'm not sure, but I think I might like Panda Bear's solo work more than Animal Collective. There's a bit less variation, but there's also a confidence that he knows what his strengths are and how to play to them. Sometimes it's a little weirder and more psychedelic than the typical radio-friendly indie stuff, but he also finds some hooks that dig deeper than others can usually manage. It's good.

2. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell


I like when Sufjan gets into the really big chamber pop stuff, but Carrie & Lowell is much smaller and folkier, and I think it's among his best work. It's pretty much just him with a guitar and double tracked vocals, as he sings very personal songs about his relationship with his mother and stepfather. I tend to ignore lyrics with a lot of music, but they're important here, lending emotional weight to his beautiful playing and breathy singing.

1. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly


There are so many things Kendrick Lamar can do. He can put out a hit single that will play in clubs for months as well as anyone, but he has a lot of other sides to him. He raps with a lot of different emotions and tones, from pure bravado, to voice-breaking sorrow, to vicious anger. He likes experimenting with different styles of music, from jazz to guitars to more traditional hip hop sounds. And he has the audacity to do something like end an album with a constructed conversation between him and archival audio of Tupac. I can't wait to see where he takes his career from here.

Delayed Entry

This is the best album that wasn't released in 2015 but I didn't hear until then.

Sufjan Stevens - Michigan

Sufjan's predecessor to Illinois in his short-lived "50 states" project isn't as good, but it's hard to make something as good as one of the best albums ever made. Michigan is still a solid, eclectic album full of his strong pop folk sensibilities.

Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from non-major label Modest Mouse. Obviously less polish, but I didn't know what else. What it ended up being was almost shockingly good, although it didn't quite click for me until somewhere during the fourth track, "Lounge (Closing Time)". It's basically making sure the "rock" in indie rock makes sense. The album is very long, almost 74 minutes, though it never seems like it drags or gets long-winded. Several songs last well past the six minute mark, and they all seem like they earn it. The end product is quite good, and possibly my favorite guitar album of the 90s. Very few songs don't have at least a couple great riffs that sound unique to the band, and occasionally they just get into a jam that could last forever. Isaac Brock obviously doesn't need Johnny Marr to rock the heck out, in any case. His vocals tend more towards shouting than on later releases, but there's still plenty of his regular unusual voice saying some odd, usually clever lyrics. Some songs are relatively serious, and others are in that darkly humorous mode.

Any of the five tracks that last at least six minutes are worth listening to. They all shift tempo repeatedly, and manage to stay interesting long enough to make you wish they lasted even longer. Maybe not the eleven minute "Truckers Atlas", but you get the point. "Heart Cooks Brain" is unique among the songs, featuring record scratching of all things and a nice mellow mix of bass and guitar that keeps it cool. "Jesus Christ Was an Only Child" is this album's "Wild Packs of Family Dogs", a hokey acoustic piece that's a lot more sinister than it appears in the first few seconds. "Doin' the Cockroach" gets pretty groovy about halfway through, and "Shit Luck" is a good example of the band's lighter side, as some heavy guitar accompanies Brock's shouts of things like "This boat is obviously sinking!" One of the things I like about Modest Mouse is how they manage to be playful with themes and vocals and serious with the music at the same time. They have their own thing going away from most of the rest of the scene, and I think it works pretty well. It makes me sort of depressed that I was listening to all the stuff on mainstream radio in the late 90s instead.

Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica

Modest Mouse's prior studio release to Good News for People Who Love Bad News is of a very similar standard of high quality. What I find interesting about them is their ability to cover a wide range of styles and moods despite the singer Isaac Brock's voice's tendency to sound a bit silly. It's perfectly suited for offbeat songs like "3rd Planet", and you'd think it wouldn't work as well if they tried to get harder, but it does. "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" is the perfect example of how he makes it work. The verses feature a double layer in both a falsetto and baritone that mix effectively, and the chorus is shouted and distorted. Mix in a great bass line and atmosphere and you have a song way cooler than you'd expect out of the band that did "Float On".

"3rd Planet" is fairly innocuous and catchy on a casual listen, but if you pay attention to the lyrics it's deeper than meets the eye and sets the tone for the whole record. "Gravity Rides Everything" follows it well, with pleasant strumming and a nice refrain. "A Different city" is another example of how they can make a serious track just as well as a quirky one. As the album goes on, some tracks are musically interesting but a bit overlong, sticking around when they don't need to, and others seem like silly throwaways, even if they're much darker when you pay attention to their lyrics. Still, although it's not as tight as it could be it's still quite good most of the time, solidifying Modest Mouse as one of my better liked artists. "What People Are Made Of" is the last song, and puts it together well, although the version I have is a rerelease that tacks on four extra tracks, all of which are alternate versions of existing songs, three of which appear originally on this very album. They don't add that much, but it's hard to say more music is a bad thing.

Music Update 1

AFI - Sing the Sorrow


AFI has been around for a while. I haven't heard anything they made before this album, but apparently it was different enough to alienate a lot of fans. In any case, I like it. They make quite capable pop punk with catchy choruses, a high voiced vocalist, and pretty normal guitars. It's not exceptional, but it's solid. Why I really like them is the bombast. Just the tone of the album is a little mightier and significant-seeming than most other stuff in the genre, starting with the opening song's war-cry esque vocals. They do a good combination of the singer's lone voice and several people shouting in unison, and it has the same feel as a general leading his troops into battle.

It could have been front loaded, with all of the singles in the first half, but it maintains quality throughout. The songs do kind of blend together as it goes on, but it's catchy enough that it's hard to care too much. It ends strongly, with the second to last track (which is oddly the first part of the two-part song that ends on the second track), which is a nice softer song, before the epic finale "...But Home Is Nowhere". It has one of the better anthems in it, than after it ends, there's a short silence before a sequence of voices progressing in age tell a creepy story backed up by a minimal piano tune. It then finishes with a stripped-down, well performed capper of a hidden track. Sing the Sorrow is a pretty good punk album helped out by elements that go deeper than the music.

Deftones - White Pony


Of all the bands stuck with the reviled nu-metal label, Deftones was one of the first, and it didn't do them any favors. They aren't like some of the other bands known for it, who inserted mediocre rap vocals and highly computerized and studio-perfected sound. They do have a bit of rap on the opening bonus track, although it's not obstructive and is pretty cool because the chorus is recalled in a different way on the album's final song. The hard rock music is decent, but the reason I really like Deftones is the vocals. The guy can sing, and his high voice contrasts in a very nice way with the crunching guitars.

He can scream as well as sing, and this is used along with the music to great some very nice shifts between hard and soft in the same song. Just listen to "Back to School (Mini Maggit)", "Elite", "Teenager", and "Passenger" to get an idea of how many things they can do and still sound like the same hardcore band. The single "Change (In the House of Flies)" interested me when I first heard it years ago, although I never got around to really listening to them until now, and I'm not sure why. Every song is enjoyable, and they manage to avoid all sounding the same which happens to a lot of bands with a similar style. It's not astounding but it's good hard rock.

Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News


I am becoming more and more of a fan of this kind of off-beat, different music. I guess I can't help myself. I liked the single "Float On" when I heard it a few years ago, but again, I didn't pursue the album until later. Good News is interesting because of its contrasting moods. The plucky guitars and catchy harmonies conflict with the cynical lyrics that attack religion and certain kinds of people. The vocals range from pleasant sounds in the background to aggressive, near shouting tirades. The singer isn't all that great at singing, but he's great at using his voice to convey any mood he wants.

"The World At Large" starts off the album about as happy as it gets, with flutes and meaningless vocals in the background. "Bury Me With It" is about as angry as the band gets musically, though not lyrically. That would be "Bukowski", which is completely pleasant musically. "The View" sounds like kind of like dance music. "Satin In a Coffin" uses prominent drums and older sounding instruments to create a very interesting sound. "The Good Times Are Killing Me" finishes off the album while perfectly illustrating the conflict of sound and message, and it's produced by The Flaming Lips, which is cool. Modest Mouse is a unique band, and a good one at that.

Nirvana - Nevermind


I like Nirvana, and I understand the influence they had on mainstream music, but I can't say I love their stuff as much as others do. Nevermind is a good album, but it's front loaded, and just doesn't have that something that makes it great. You can totally see all the ways their sound is replicated by other bands, but I don't find any of them to be terribly interesting either. Cobain's raspy vocals fit with his dark-natured guitar playing and lyrics, and he's a talented musician. But I think he's put on too high of a pedestal just because of how his career ended.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is considered by many to be the best song of the decade, and one of the best ever. It's good, to be sure. It might just be hard for me to put it in context, having heard it for a long time without really knowing much about music when it was first popular (I had just turned four when the album was released). It's followed by four more good grunge songs I've heard before, and then six that I haven't. None of it's bad, it's just a little boring after the first half. The last track has the earliest instance I know of a hidden song after several minutes of silence. It goes with the whole album, respectable, high quality stuff, not quite what I'd call amazing.

Opeth - Damnation


Opeth is a metal band, but Damnation is not a metal album. It is the second half of a broken up double album, and is almost purely progressive rock. Deliverance, which was released about six months earlier, is supposed to be one of their hardest records, and this is quite a counterbalance to that. Opeth is known for switching between hard and soft moments, and that's part of why I liked Ghost Reveries, but without that, they are free to just let the softer stuff do what it wants, and it becomes a more enjoyable overall record. Despite his growling, he can definitely sing, and they don't seem out of place doing music like this.

"Windowpane" proves you can be good at regular guitar playing and fast-paced metal shredding. The more downplayed musicianship is combined with creepy sounding ambiance and strong vocals, and this combination is heard throughout. My favorite part is the end of "Closure" which combines different kind of music to create an awesome sounding groove that could last forever if it wanted to. The whole thing is a bit brief compared to their other stuff, which makes some sense considering it was once just half of an album. It's quite entertaining while it lasts, and shows how much range a band can have.

Papa Roach - The Paramour Sessions


I got all of these albums through BMG. They have pretty good deals, if you don't mind buying the sometimes unwanted stuff they offer you. I'm not a big Papa Roach fan, but I was willing to get their latest album if it meant 5 that I actually wanted for only the cost of shipping.

I don't think Papa Roach is that good, but they're really not bad either. I've never been that critical of rock as long as it's entertaining to listen to and has some catchy hooks, which Paramour Sessions does. The band has long since steered away from rap and is now pretty standard hard rock. Nothing they do is really extraordinary, but they're quite capable of radio-friendly noise.

The single "...To Be Loved" is a pretty solid fast-paced jam. "The World Around You" has a nice guitar line in the verse and a hard chorus. "Forever" is one of the band's better slower songs, and is matched with an anthemic refrain. "Time Is Running Out" kind of sounds like a pop punk song, and is fun to listen to. "My Heart Is a Fist" is one of the more hardcore songs on the album, and "Roses On My Grave" is a departure with a string section, and is a nice way to end it.