Posts Tagged ‘Best Albums Of 2015’

WAXAHATCHEE – ” Ivy Trip ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: March 20, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Waxahatchee - <em>Ivy Tripp</em> (Merge)

Home-recorded DIY punk rock does not have to sound like aural dogshit. Case in point: Katie Crutchfield and a couple of friends rented a house in Long Island, played around with the acoustics in different rooms, and knocked out a handful of songs about longing and frustration. They walked away with a huge, gleaming song-cycle, a towering heap of melodies and feelings. And if they can make something they did on their own sound this amazing,

Waxahatchee, the solo musical project of Katie Crutchfield, is named after a creek not far from her childhood home in Alabama and seems to represent both where she came from and where she’s going. Ivy Tripp drifts confidently from its predecessors and brings forth a more informed and powerful recognition of where Crutchfield has currently found herself. The lament and grieving for her youth seem to have been replaced with control and sheer self-honesty. “My life has changed a lot in the last two years, and it’s been hard for me to process my feelings other than by writing songs,” says Crutchfield. “I think a running theme [of Ivy Tripp] is steadying yourself on shaky ground and reminding yourself that you have control in situations that seem overwhelming, or just being cognizant in moments of deep confusion or sadness, and learning to really feel emotions and to grow from that.”

Over the years, Katie Crutchfield has proven herself a master of the form: ’90s-inflected, nasally, home-recorded punk. Ivy Tripp is yet another subtle but meaningful step forward from what she’s been doing in various iterations for a decade now. It’s the perfect fall record: the crunch of leaves, the crisp morning air can be felt in every note. It’s the sound of stumbling and brushing the dirt off, feeling like shit, not knowing where to go or what to do next. It’s a record for wanderers, for those of us who are unable to or refuse to settle down

Recorded and engineered by Kyle Gilbride of Wherever Audio at Crutchfield’s home on New York’s Long Island—with drums recorded in the gym of a local elementary school—Ivy Tripp presents a more developed and aged version of Waxahatchee. “The title Ivy Tripp is really just a term I made up for directionless-ness, specifically of the 20-something, 30-something, 40-something of today, lacking regard for the complaisant life path of our parents and grandparents. I have thought of it like this: [Waxahatchee’s last album] Cerulean Salt is a solid and Ivy Tripp is a gas.”

DU BLONDE – ” Welcome Back To Milk ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: February 22, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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“Welcome Back To Milk” is the studio album by Beth Jeans Houghton and the first for her under the project  Du Blonde, released in the United Kingdom on 18th May 2015 by Mute Records. The album was written, composed, and performed by Du Blonde and produced by Bad Seed and Grinderman member Jim Sclavunos.

Du Blonde is not a persona or a character, it’s then 25 year old Beth Jeans Houghton ripping it up and starting again. Welcome Back To Milk is the Newcastle-born and sometimes Californian based singer’s second album, but her debut as Du Blonde, and it’s a complete reinvention: new name, new sound, new band, new attitude. Where 2012’s debut Yours Truly Cellophane Nose threw everything at a song, Welcome Back To Milk strips everything back and is one massive release of pent up aggression, captured perfectly by Jim Sclavunos. Heavy riffs, loud drums, vocal snarls contrast beautifully with more poignant balladry and tenderness that fans of Houghton’s previous work will recognise. Future Islands frontman Samuel T Herring also provides guest vocals on My Mind Is On My Mind. Our first taste of Houghton’s latest project is a confident and brilliantly delivered collection of songs. What she does next really is anyone’s guess – perhaps she doesn’t even know herself. Ultimately, though, I guess this complete lack of predictability is a big part of what makes Beth Jeans Houghton such a great artist.

This would appear to be Beth Jeans Houghton’s vision, from start to finish. She’s credited with song writing and vocals (obviously) but also with playing many of the instruments too. No small undertaking then. What you get is intelligent and cutting songcraft. The words (and the way they’re presented) have been honed and re- honed to perfection. There’s a fine intellect at work here. For me (and these things are always personal taste), the simpler arrangements worked best, just piano and voice. There’s a real intimacy and baring of the soul in this album, and it’s done with total honesty and conviction. After Beth Jeans Houghton’s debut album Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose’s release in 2012, she and the band toured extensively, performed at high-profile musical events, including Glastonbury, The Great Escape, Latitude and Bestival.

In November 2012, midway through recording the follow-up in Los Angeles with The Hooves of Destiny, the crisis broke out.  “When I listened back to what we’d recorded, I didn’t see any of myself in it… None of it was angry, none of it was sad. I wasn’t being true to myself,” the singer said, speaking to The Observer. She broke up the band and ditched her name, opting for a different sound, described as “spiky, propulsive” and “exhilarating.” This drastic move had been preceded by a breakdown she had in the summer of 2012 in a Zurich hotel room, during a European tour. “I felt my head go. It was the scariest thing. It felt like my brain was melting,” Houghton remembered. After several months of dieting and meditating she completely recovered.

“This is a new sound, a new project. Du Blonde is a new incarnation and one step closer to assuming my ultimate form. Having freed myself from the rusty and bloody shackles of Beth Jeans Houghton – both musically and spiritually – I felt it only right to step forth under a new name and let the rituals commence,” Houghton stated, explaining the moniker conversion. Asked what has prevented her from playing louder on Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, Du Blonde said: “I think a lot of it had to do with the way I learnt how to write and play guitar. I taught myself, and therefore had no concept of time signatures and keys, so often my songs would turn out pretty experimental because, well, they were experiments… Due to the complex or odd nature of the songs I was writing, putting distortion on things just didn’t work. To make the best of a raw, overdriven sound, I needed to keep it simple, which is only something I learned once I had a better grasp on chord progressions and rhythms.

There aren’t many musicians in the country as creative and as interesting as her at this point in time, and “Welcome Back To Milk” represents another triumph in her weird and wonderful saga.“ So BJH ditched the hooves, went blonde and hitched her wagon to a brand new edgier sound. Good for her, so it seems. Sold to the fish in the corner on the chorus alone, with it’s epic drum/guitar mash-up, she’s got one hell of a vocal range that wallops a whole range of emotions into orbit.

Would recommend her new album Lung Bread for Daddy as well.

NATALIE PRASS – ” Natalie Prass ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: March 13, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Welcome to the world of Natalie Prass co-produced by Matthew E. White. It looks a lot like our own, but it’s all painted in bright smears of blue and light pink. There are a lot more horns this time. The year of the ’70s singer-songwriter never really took off again, but Prass album certainly did, and that’s mainly due to the boundless creative energy she exhibits on her debut, where the limits are only as high as her ambition. The 2015 album from the Nashville-based singer/songwriter. Not only one of the sharpest up-and-coming songwriters in Nashville, Natalie Prass possesses a rare artistic method she infuses into all her endeavors. She handcrafts album artwork and flyers and organizes local vinyl listening parties/drawing sessions, and there appears to be little end to the homespun creativity of this bright young talent. She’s also no slouch in the pipes department either — the girl can sing. While her delicate alto evokes clear benchmarks of influence — see early Rilo Kiley, Feist, Karen Carpenter, etc. Natalie Prass never seems weighed down by the artists she’s absorbed. Instead, she has developed a refreshing guitar-grounded musical vocabulary and a knack for infectious and entrancing tunes. Still, it’s a spirit of invitation and friendship that continues to be Prass’ most pronounced attribute.

By crafting ornate, grandiose arrangements about heartbreak and loss and desire, she imbues all of these emotions with the dramatic flair they deserve.

Natalie’s live set also got better as the year went on, but she was never short of surprises throughout it all. One night at the Los Angeles’ Troubadour, Prass brought out Ryan Adams on stage for a couple songs that left the crowd speechless (and she was opening for San Fermin mind you). Prass essentially courses through the entirety of her brilliant debut album (Top Albums of 2015) and her incredible backing band is just as mesmerizing as she is. Trey Pollard on guitar, Michael Libramento on bass and Scott Clark on drums all—like Prass—hail from Richmond, Va. and are all essential to enacting Prass’s live experience. In late October, Natalie performed at a few of our festivals this year, her set was highly intimate. She had a few drinks in her and the confidence of her budding career came through with every joke and every gorgeous note as she was among  one of the best live performances I saw all year

METZ – ” II ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: January 1, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Metz, II
These mild-looking Canadians revive the golden age of early Nirvana and ’90s grunge with 10 walloping noise-rockers—but there are surprising hooks amid all the Sturm und Drang. The sludgy, tinnitus-inducing sound of the ’90s’ Seattle Sound lives on with this Toronto trio. From the thumping bass lines of album opener “Acetate” to the deafening wall of distortion of closer “Kicking a Can of Worms,” II is ten rounds of pummeling noise-rock that never lets up

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OUGHT – ” Sun Coming Down ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: November 12, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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“If post-punk speaks the language of disaffection, then don’t call Ought a post-punk band. It’s easy to listen to Tim Darcy’s wry vocal inflection and find cynicism in it, but Ought’s music swallows angst and spits it back out in the form of life-affirming songs. They seek to inspire with “Sun Coming Down” its an impulsive, interpretive ode to existence that, on particularly bad days, reminds me of all that I have left under this big, beautiful, blue sky

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Ought Known the value of a song’s lyrics, David Byrne once said, “In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words—the inflection and the way it’s sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue—that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.” It seems Ought’s Tim Darcy takes a cue from this emphasis on lyrical delivery over lyrical content in the Montreal-based, post-punk band’s newest single “Men for Miles”. It’s the second track off their sophomore LP Sun Coming Down on Constellation Records

As you listen to the song’s frantic energy unfurl, you get a sense that Darcy is someone who lives in his own head most of the time. He proposes anarchy (“bringing this whole fucker down”) only to follow it up with clinical logic and rationality (“It came with instructions / It’s neither here nor there”). Over a heaping layer of rhythmic guitars and drums, he asks with a combination of paranoia and distrust, “What did you see? / What did I see?” In “Men For Miles”, the mental cage breaks open and unleashes an anxiety-ridden stream of consciousness that makes more sense and feels more potent in listening to the idiosyncratic tone in  voice than it ever would on paper.

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SUFJAN STEVENS – ” Carrie and Lowell ” Classic Albums

Posted: November 1, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Sufjan Stevens - <em>Carrie & Lowell</em> (Asthmatic Kitty)

Before the year was even two weeks old in 2015, we were greeted with the wonderful, news that Sufjan Stevens had an album on the way, a return to his “folk roots.” It was about time! After a run of three classics in three years — 2003’s Michigan, 2004’s Seven Swans, and 2005’s Illinois — Stevens wandered around the wilderness for a decade, reporting back only with sporadic news . It was easy to imagine we’d lost him forever.

When “Carrie & Lowell” arrived in early 2015, though, we realized it wasn’t a return to anything. Like so many soldiers, convicts, and mystics, Stevens had been irretrievably altered in his time away. The guy who made Illinois was gone. On that record, Stevens occasionally tackled subjects such as substance abuse and mental illness and mortality (all three in the same song on “John Wayne Gacy”),

On Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens is directly singing about his own mother’s drug addiction, her schizophrenia, her death from stomach cancer. He’s singing about his own terror and sadness and loss — his own childhood, his own grief. There’s no glockenspiel, no grand concept; there’s little more than a finger-picked acoustic guitar and a whispering, quivering voice. And that voice doesn’t just sound haunted; it sounds like a fucking ghost. Listen to Carrie & Lowell on headphones, it doesn’t feel like Stevens is singing to you; it feels like he’s singing inside you.

It’s a discomfiting experience. Stevens’ most obvious musical touchstone here is Elliott Smith — another damaged person who wrestled with demons his whole life — but Carrie & Lowell is somehow even more devastating than any of Smith’s records. That’s partly because Stevens‘ soft voice is so prominent in the mix. Elliott Smith buried his vocals in layers, tangled them in knots; you can listen to an Elliott Smith record and just get lost in the loveliness of the sound if you don’t want to think about the ferocious pain conveyed in the words. Carrie & Lowell refuses you that option: You get trapped in the loveliness of the sound.

But Carrie & Lowell isn’t a morbid record, like the moments of Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, it is meditative, honest, and open. It claws at the world. It fights back at the darkness. It rips you to shreds and moves you to tears, but it’s not asking you to dwell on death — it is forcing you to experience life. And when I immerse myself in Carrie & Lowell, I’m engaging with every single verse, but here, now, I will engage only with this one, which closes “Eugene”:

“What’s left is only bittersweet/ For the rest of my life, admitting the best is behind me/ Now I’m drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away/ What’s the point of singing songs/ If they’ll never even hear you?”

Carrie & Lowell captures a life full of bittersweetness — several lives, really. And in the music, all those voices, the living and the dead, are reflected, amplified.

The best is not behind Sufjan Stevens. He has never been better than this, never really even been close. He can push the world away and walk off into the woods if he wants . Not anymore. Carrie & Lowell forces us to hear everything, to feel everything.  Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell was released a few years ago, and while some records lose their luster over time, this one remains stunningly, painfully intimate to this day. The record details Stevens’ troubled relationship with his mother, and also marks his return to a more traditional folk sound. Full of intricate guitar picking and ghostly vocals, listening to Carrie & Lowell is like bearing witness to one person’s beautifully rendered emotional wreckage.

SCREAMING FEMALES – ” Rose Mountain ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: October 6, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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There’s no other way to say it: This album kicks so much ass. Instead of rattling around your brain, the hooks on this thing punch right through your skull. Screaming Females sound less ragged and more polished, and to some, the sanding down of their punk edges could be a disappointment. But that polishing leaves them a towering rock machine, every one of Marissa Paternoster’s guitar heroics and defiant wails perfectly calibrated to make you want to go stomp a dragon in the teeth. And if that makeover paves the way for something like “Wishing Well,” a downright pretty alt-pop song that still manages to shred, I’m all for it.

WIDOWSPEAK – ” All Yours ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: August 21, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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When “Girls” was released in the spring of 2015, we woke up and took notice. We’d loved Widowspeak’s Jarvis Taveniere-produced debut in 2011, but found the follow-up, 2013’s Almanac, a trifle problematic, as Molly Hamilton’s ethereal voice, lathered on too thick, can be like a cake that’s all icing and air. Yet “Girls” was a nutritious harmonic pastry, still sweet but plenty nourishing, and a few months later when “All Yours” was released, we prayed that the full album would be as good as those two songs. Happily, Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’s move from Brooklyn to Upstate New York has filled their music with fresh Hudson Valley air, and any cloying sensibilities have been washed away. The sugar high is gone, we happily declared with All Yours came out in September 2015, and it was a wonderful backdrop to autumn.

SLEATER KINNEY – ” No Cities To Love ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: April 4, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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They came back roaring. The greatest punk band of the late-’90s and early-’00s didn’t have to make any music; they could’ve toured for years on past glories and Portlandia recognition. Instead, they gave us 10 songs of feverish, desperate urgency. Musically, they went full-bore, keeping the tangled intensity of their last album, the psych-rock experiment The Woods, but streamlining those sounds into power-pop anthems with strangled-robot guitar effects. And once again, they’re completely locked-in with one another, generating riffs and grooves with the sort of chemistry few bands throughout history can match. It’s like they never left. It’s beautiful.

As if Sleater-Kinney’s grad return and triumphant “No Cities To Love” weren’t enough in 2015, the riot grrrl group teamed up with the creators of the Fox animated series Bob’s Burgers for “A New Wave.” The video shows the band playing this song in 13-year-old Tina Belcher’s bedroom. Everyone is jumping up and down, which, yeah, is pretty much was Sleater-Kinney makes you want to do.

HORSEBEACH – ” II ” Best Albums Of 2015

Posted: March 22, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Opening with the subtle rumble of early morning Chinatown, hazy instrumental shape into focus with languid guitars, gently welcoming you into a dream .  The Manchester-based multi-instrumentalist/producer Ryan Kennedy,and his  dream pop group Horsebeach. Based around chiming guitars and Kennedy’s downbeat croon, Horsebeach draw inspiration from classic jangle pop. Becoming critics’ favourites with the release of their eponymous debut album in 2014,

The summery groove and the pop majesty of ‘It’s Alright’ soon sends you spinning into infinity, cares eased by the warm tones of chiming guitars, while Beth de Cent’s smokey vocals come together in perfect harmony with Kennedy’s. ‘Andy’ treats you to a yearning tale of forbidden love, packed with erotic overtones so full blooded they’d make Morrissey blush , while the marbled melodies of ‘Broken Light’ come on in nostalgic ripples and waves of sepia-tinged beauty. ‘Let You Down’ finds Kennedy’s voice sounding better than ever, detailing visceral regret over a full bodied groove .

Opening the B-side with a masterful subtlety, synth led instrumental ‘Midnight Pt.2’ sees Kennedy taking us for a moonlit stroll by the ocean before ‘Dana’ ushers in the dawn with the greatest X-Files inspired song ever written (sorry Cerys). The antithesis of over-serious hipster cool, the earnestly emotional lyrics, anthemic chords and shimmering should be enough to prompt John Hughes to rise again and make a much needed sequel to The Breakfast Club. ‘Disappear’ finds Kennedy and drummer Matt Booth drinking in the cosmic vintage of Düsseldorf ’72, as their chiming West Coast guitars are joined by celestial keys, head nodding bass grooves and a motorik rhythm. ‘Clouds’ draws us back into the haze as Kennedy’s multi-tracked vocals gently melt into the swirl of flanged guitar, while ‘Avoid The Light’ closes the LP with a plea to stay in the dreamworld just a little longer.

Alive with lyrical depth, melodic intricacy and lush production, ‘II’ is the work of a confident and mature multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, and it’s your new favourite LP all of a sudden.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. It’s Alright
3. Andy
4. Broken Light
5. Let You Down
6. Midnight Part 2
7. Dana
8. Disappear
9. Clouds
10. Avoid The Light

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