E s t a r a - Teebs (Brainfeeder, 2014)
FlyLo protege Teebs brings together a collection of tracks which are the sonic equivalent to a sun-bleached, frayed Persian rug. Beautifully ornate, yet ragged and organic. Also very soft and comfortable. The squishiest lil album of the decade. - BR
Fez - Disasterpeace (OverClocked, 2012)
For me, the music in FEZ is more than just a beautiful soundtrack: it’s the root of the FEZ experience. Diasterpeace wonderfully establishes different moods and emotions without distracting from the game or straying from FEZ’s central focus: creating a calm, relaxing experience of puzzling and exploring.
FEZ has very little story--which isn’t a bad thing. The lack of story allows you to fully concentrate on gameplay. The beautiful visuals shift between safe, comforting zones with warm colors and dark areas with graveyards, creepy statues, and ominous lightning. The soundtrack matches the ambience of these areas but also contributes to that ambience. It shouts “lovely” or “scary” but always remains slow and calm; even the haunting pieces are stress-free. The songs fluctuate in pace, volume, and sometimes mood, creating an “active” soundtrack that wants to be heard instead of blending into the background. For a game without story, that’s incredibly important. The music tells its own story and draws your attention to that story.
It’s the calm, living soundtrack that makes FEZ so enjoyable. Without music, the unpopulated world would feel empty, and the challenging puzzles would become infuriating. The music made FEZ not only relaxing but enchanting; I often stopped in the middle of a level to enjoy the incredible music and visuals. The soundtrack is wonderful on its own but, more importantly, adds to FEZ’s ambience and keeps players immersed and motivated within the game. - Del Miller
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Fin - John Talabot (Permanent Vacation, 2012)
“Balearic Beat” sounds like such a fun, sunny genre. Ibiza sunrises, paella dinners, walks around cafes in Malaga. Strange then that the master of the sound has done something so profoundly fucked up with that foundation.
John Talabot shimmered his way into the scene with his disco-friendly single “Sunshine,” which matched the title in light and joy. Then he promptly started making some of the most insular and creeping music on the Mediterranean with his debut Fin. From the opening field recordings of an expansive jungle threatening to swallow the sound, Talabot isn’t here to hold your hand. The chorus of what sounds like chirping frogs could have been cartoonish, if not for the long build that makes it pretty explicit he’s about to sacrifice you in a blood ritual.
The spaced out trip of “El Oeste” melts in our ears, and even the catchy “Destiny” has fellow Spanish playboy Pional cooing come-ons until they become threats. Hell, he takes The Temptation’s smiley “Just My Imagination” and crafts an utterly haunting album closer, flooded with weeping ghosts sweeping the dancefloor. Album centerpiece “Oro Y Sangre” is built off a Slasher-flick scream sample and mutates into a bit-crushed horror show, as danceable as it is terrifying. But, like the best thrillers, there’s no turning away from Fin. - NS
Forget - Twin Shadow (4AD, 2010)
The rise and demise of Chillwave was probably overstated. Yes, we did need a splash of synths that sounded like Moby’s “Porcelain” had been made in 1985, but its sudden proliferation and just as rushed death followed the usual boom and bust of musical genres. Chillwave marched happily on, absorbed by the rest of the decade’s Yazoo and Depeche Mode worshiping artist. And someone knew that the lush, lazy waves of the 2010s were perfect for a pastiche and love letter to Breakfast at Tiffany’s postcards and swooped in glitz, glamor and melodrama.
Dominican-born George Lewis Jr. got what the ‘80s were about. Emotional resonance that matched with ridiculousness. He snatched iconography from disparate eras, cooing about “your Elvis song in my ear” as detuned synths muttered threats. “For Now” was Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” gone paranoid, unsure if it should jitter itself to the dancefloor or a tearstained bed.
Lewis made it work thanks to his unflinching charisma. Having made nearly every sound on the album, he had to stitch it together, making his esoteric visions make sense beyond pop hook logic. And the romantic, floral patterned rush of “At My Heels” or the snickering self-deprecation of “I Can’t Wait,” made this mysterious one-man-band intimate. Release this in ‘86 and he’s an international superstar. Release it now, and it’s one of the sleekest albums of the decade. - NS
Galaxy Garden - Lone (R&S, 2012)
Synesthesia is a condition where neurons create screwball pattern recognition, shuffling senses into new associations. There was an Opera singer who swore certain tunes left the taste of marshmallows on her tongue and Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman’s study Wednesday Is Indigo Blue was accompanied by a long, chalk-color spiral of rainbows interspaced with numbers.
But that’s all abstract. If you want to hear synesthesia, experience it like your synapses are misfiring in the most spectacular ways, Galaxy Garden is your drug. Matt Cutler was a maximalist chameleon this decade, rushing through impeccable tributes to his favorite artists and genres while still retaining an exact sense of self. Levitation remixed Jungle and Drum&Bass to his own feverish logic while Reality Testing lived up to his billing of Madlib reworked by Boards of Canada. But Galaxy Garden even out did its title. Over 12 hallucinatory songs, Cutler matched Pollock splatter with neon glow plastic and other, undefinable hues that giggled and chortled as the album bounced its merry way. The unstable funk of “Lying in the Reeds” hurked and jurked over a spiraling keyboard line like a waterfall suddenly forgot how gravity worked “Raindance” raved to some primordial god for the return of good weather and “Dream Girl / Sky Surfer” delivered sheer bliss in the most romantic instrumental in recent memory.
Galaxy Garden was Cutler at his best because it was everything all the time. Each track would have been a pantheon-setter for another artist, for Cutler they coalesced into a flawless whole, each supporting the other through detours and building a simmering joy as the foundation. When he finally blew the lid off with album centerpiece “Crystal Caverns 1991,” it was Mario Kart at lightspeed, interstellar rave that we’ll be bumping until 3992. And that was Galaxy Garden’s central grace. The exploding colors, the impossible rhythms were all servants to the euphoria. - NS
Get to Heaven - Everything Everything (Big Picnic, 2016)
The best Post-Brexit, Post-Trump, Post-Kashmir, Post-”12 Years ‘Til We’re Fucked” album came out before all of them even happened. Everything Everything were writing Black Mirror jitters since 2009, focusing on the anxious fusion of man and machine exacerbated by the ever growing greed of the 1%. But 2015’s Get to Heaven was the album everyone tried to make after the shit hit the fan. Everything Everything were prophets that also knew how to craft a hook and a smashing rock ode to the apocalypse. Jonathan Higgs’ soaring countertenor was an oracle by way of Twitter feed, scrolling through atrocities before comprehension could set in.
Due to shipping issues, I got my copy of Get to Heaven a day before the Bataclan shootings. Everything Everything themselves played Paris less than a week later. Of all the horrors crashing down every day, that direct attack on art, on the enjoyment life, was what Get to Heaven was most scared of. The homeless man singing as the cops drag him away for merely existing on the title track, the activist admitting “bet you’ll see me on the news then never again” on “Regret” or the terrified refugee escaping his past on “Zero Pharaoh,” these were the all too familiar melodramas Everything Everything made.
And the music itself was a wonderfully glitchy ode to the omnivorous tastes of the internet age. “Get to Heaven” was Paul Simon and David Byrne jamming while getting wire tapped and the tale of a corporate assassin gunning for the Queen on “Fortune 500,” sounded like The Wall fed through an industrial rave. But, as they do on all their albums, Everything Everything closed with a personal rapture. “Warm Healer” found two lost souls in the midst of carnage slipping further and further away from empathy. “Babe, they call me the medicine man/ But my old spells don’t work anymore,” coos Higgs. And as Get to Heaven turns inward, it gasps for what it always cried for. Healing, of any sort, when human touch feels impossible. - NS
Good Kid m.A.A.d City - Kendrick Lamar (Top Dawg, 2012)
To call Good Kid mA.A.d City a groundbreaking album would be insufficient. The second album by Kendrick Lamar, it would solidify him both as one of the foremost examples of a self-aware and self-critical 2010s “conscious rap” rebirth as well as a cultural tastemaker in his own right. Lamar’s lyricism and trademark voice-shifting, chameleon-like twisting through spacey beats was a landmark. The age of Lamar had come.
GKMC was also autobiographical, at least loosely so. Like the best poetry, it weaved together both real histories and the dreamlike fictional world of Lamar’s own creation. The city of Compton is present in every track, the struggles and realities of race and poverty put at the forefront. Lamar is as both cognizant of the past as much as he is present in formulating a future, capable of straddling the authorial line of intellectual, soul-searching lyrics with a radio- and club-friendly sound.
Kendrick comes off as your knowledgeable older brother, your precocious partying friend, and an ethereal prophet of the streets all at once. Drawing on a history of gangsta rap as much as the baroque instrumentation of his contemporaries, Good Kid m.A.A.d City is a masterpiece of the form and an immediate classic. - DD
Grief’s Infernal Flower - Windhand (Relapse 2015)
Sure grief might be in the title, but let’s not get it twisted. EVIL is the primary feeling on display. Windhand have been the decade’s primary providers of Doom, alongside fellow Sabbath worshippers Pallbearer. But unlike Pallbearer, the Virginia quartet preferred a deep, dark hypnotism to control their music. I was lucky enough to see frontwoman Dorthia Cottrell do a cover set of Towns Van Zant in Texas, and the fact that her enthralling voice works both for “Flyin’ Shoes” and the almighty sludge of Grief’s Infernal Flower is a testament to her absolute control over the audience. These are abyssal meditations on the end, from the opening pillar of flame “Two Urns” to their usual scope-destroying closer “Kingfisher” which sprawls for an almighty 14 minutes. So, as a wise wrestleman once said, kneel down, put your hands like you’re holding two orbs and let the evil flow through. - NS
Harmonicraft - Torche (Volcom, 2012)
To certain delirious citizens of metal, Torche providers of Sludge-Pop, a ridiculous but apt description of the cotton-candy-colored destruction they wreck. They’d label themselves as a rock band, which is fair enough. The towering solos take inspiration from Van Halen, there are twin guitar duels to make Thin Lizzy envious and, of course, there’s Brooks’ Adonis-plus vocal delivery that soars like a bird, no a plane, no superman!
And Harmonicraft isn’t just their best work, but the best damn rock album of the decade. From the thunderous opening drums of “Letting Go” to the bashing weight of closer “Looking On,” Harmonicraft is a thrill a minute rock album that scoffs at the idea of downtime. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear “Kicking” on a modern rock station, if the speakers could handle the grandeur. And a part of that monumental energy is the positivity flowing through. - NS
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Heathen - Thou (Robotic Empire, 2014)
“Submit” is the implied opening word of Heathen. It’s there in the title, the guitar squeal, the slow build ambiance. And Heathen holds its title and its demand to submission in two minds. One is tradition: a Heathen is someone to be cast out, a lesser. The other is acceptance: we are all Heathens, ready to dance around a bonfire at any moment, indulging in our basest desires, succumbing to no morals beyond pain and pleasure.
And the music, somehow, matches it. When Bryan Funck stretches the word “we” it bellows forth like a collective unconsciousness demanding respect. The music grinds along, sledgehammering every down beat, dragging our ears through soil. The production allows both for ample amounts of seething distortion while making the thwack of drums echo out like an eruption. “Open your eyes and exalt In this fragile world/ In this knowing flesh/ In this very moment,” howls Funck on opener “Free Will.”
Though best paired with its spiritual kin Magus, which explored the inner-world of the mind, Heathen stands as the crowning moment of Thou’s absurd run this decade. Tyrant, Summit and Magus all stand as testaments to Thou’s fearless view on music and humanity, and Heathen meets its lyric visions of absolution and disintegration at the foothills of a Louisiana mountain, of a young deer fleeing through the underbrush, of a gnashing hoard of gibbering voices flowing through the body. “Take Off Your Skin and Dance in Your Bones,” isn’t just a title, but the only thing to be done as the crushing and euphoric Heathen marches on. - NS