Psychopomp - Japanese Breakfast (Yellow K, 2016)
The first few glistening seconds of delicate piano guide listeners into “In Heaven,” the first track off of Japanese Breakfast’s debut album Psychopomp. Balancing an upbeat catchiness with tangible melancholy, “In Heaven” serves as the epitome of the album itself — singer and songwriter Michelle Zauner’s coping with her mother’s death while attempting to still continue on with her own life.
At its emotional highs and lows, the album makes use of swirling dream pop and lo-fi, beautifully depicting Zauner’s grieving process. Capturing the whole emotional spectrum, from the gentlest sadness to “fuck it all,” like in the short and bittersweet track “Heft,” Psychopomp is nostalgia personified, in the best and rawest ways possible.
Recorded in Eugene, Oregon, where Zauner grew up — the idea of “home” is integral to the album, but it also realizes that home isn’t necessarily always physical place. It can be a person, a fleeting feeling or a dusty box of old memories on a shelf. - Meerah Powell
Run the Jewels 2 - Run the Jewels (Mass Appeal, 2014)
The kinetic energy shared between producer/rapper El-P and the great Killer Mike is barely containable. From Run the Jewels' paranoid first album to their comedic and sometimes even celebratory third, the duo has covered a range of emotions in their work, all with an uncompromising swagger that feels custom-fit for the terrifying era we live in. Yet time and time again, it's their angry, direct, and sometimes unhinged sophomore outing that has defined what Run The Jewels is and what they mean to us. Run the Jewels makes you want to fuck something up. It’s not just because Zach De La Rocha appears on RTJ2. It’s because Killer Mike and El-P want you to know what’s going on. They want you to get mad about it.
Defiant and uncompromising, Run the Jewels 2 came out at the height of a rash of killings of unarmed black people at the hands of police, and Killer Mike especially posits scenarios that are cathartic, realistic, and brutal all at once ("Now get to pillow torchin' / Where the fuck the warden? / And when you find him, we don't kill him / We just waterboard him"), with El-P’s densely packed, aggressive beats the perfect, apocalyptic backdrop for his savage flow. But let's be real: when El-P and Killer Mike are as fired up as they are here, absolutely nothing can get in their way, as on "Early", which features Killer Mike depicting an all-too-real, all-too-common arrest scenario that leaves his wife dead by a cop's gun. They take flamethrowers to the fuckboys and systems that stand in their way. Scared? Then just close your eyes and count to fuck. - BN/ES
La Saboteuse - Yazz Ahmed (Naim, 2017)
Yazz Ahmed weaves myths with her horns. The legend of Gilgamesh, the tales of John Coltrane, of her family in Bahrain, of her own struggle to combat her insecurities as they take the form, all flow through La Saboteuse. And La Saboteuse isn’t just an album, but a character. The manifestation of self-doubt that hovers at the edge of every song, claiming to be a friend, but cutting down every inch of joy or creativity within reach.
But Ahmed has skillfully bested her shadow. La Saboteuse is a triumph, easily casting itself in the pantheon of Jazz greats, for both its ambition and execution. Snaking, sneaky, ambient interludes drift in like smoke before the haze clears for monstrous tracks to glide into earshot. The technical chops on display on the mammoth “Jamil Jamal” or “The Lost Pearl” are breath taking, but only if you know where to look. On a simpler level, this is enchanting, late night music that floats on the liminal space between dreams and reality. And for sheer, unconquered beauty, there are few albums of any genre that reach these heady heights. Ahmed, in diving deep within herself, comes back up for air with a mysterious, wondrous artifact humming in her hands. - NS
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Shrink Dust - Chad Vangaalen (Sub Pop, 2014)
A universe-eater, Kafkaesque transformations, country music! What else could you ask Shrink Dust for? A Möbius strip of psychedelia, folk and plain, freaked out beauty, Shrink Dust was playful and horrifying in equal punches. Mad genius Chad Vangaalen funneled in a cosmos worth of characters in this mutated opus. From Neil Young resignment (“Hangman’s Son”) to sheer gorgeousness (“Frozen Paradise”), Shrink Dust took the same twists and turns as a grand graphic novel or HG Wells adventure. The scenes shift rapidly, beings futz into the air, Vangaalen goes from howling his death song to a lullaby coo. The only certain thing is a placid feeling of melancholy resting below.
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Vulnicura - Bjork (One Little Indian, 2015)
Only a few other lyrics better captures Bjork’s creative impulse than her opening words in “Stonemilker”: “Moments of clarity are so rare/ I better document this.” Since her first album, Debut, she has let listeners inside the intimate space of her restless mind, and her verses have followed an idiosyncratic beat that sounds less like a pop song than a conversation with her own subconscious. Vulnicura, however, speaks as autobiography more than any of her albums: her eighth album openly outlines her emotional journey recovering from the collapse of her real-life partnership in chronological order.
Recollected in “History of Touches,” the very day of collapse understandably sounds the most devastating with her once-animated voice withered to a weak sigh; the ghostly synths gives it more frostbite and a sense of total detachment. The more one advances into her timeline, the more the album seethes with warranted rage. “Mouth Mantra” confesses to an exploit of power dynamics with her providing bloody imagery of a mouth sewn-shut -- now imagine that metaphor applied to someone who expresses her emotions in such a large, intense manner like Bjork. But as intense as the album may get, Bjork is simply looking for viable answers to perplexing questions like about the impact this crisis will have on the future of her, him, their children and everyone around them.
A personal favorite moment in Vulnicura is from “Notget”: “If I regret us/ I’m denying my soul to grow/ Don’t remove my pain/ It is my chance to heal.” I can only dream to achieve such emotional maturity and bravery. The album truly expresses that process of transformation from its embryonic production to the shifts in the mind of Bjork, who presses on with increasingly more complicated questions as the album goes on. She chooses to document every step because she knows it’s essential to her growth as well as her survival. She was silenced once. With Vulnicura, Bjork won’t be silenced anymore. - RM
So it Goes - Ratking (XL, 2014)
It was fascinating to watch Ratking evolve. Go to 2011 and see videos of Patrick “Wiki” Morales freestyling and asking for beats. Skip forward a year and you’ll find a video of two hooded men rapping on tracks called “COMIC” and “SNOWBEACH.” By the end of 2012, Ratking was a fully formed crew with a solid EP release. With So It Goes, the group finally felt like a powerful presence in the hip-hop world. The key to their growth, and eventual undoing, came from an untenable duality between MCs Wiki and Hak. Wiki was the spitter, muttering threats and smiling through his gap-tooth. Hak was the sentimental poet, singing as often as he rapped, preferring abstraction while Wiki couldn’t do anything but concrete.
Sporting Life’s fluttering production proved to be the best foundation for both of them, sputtering into beauty with the King Krule sampling “So Sick Stories,” or decimating the car speakers on “Canal.” “Remove Ya” was classic Bomb Squad, with Wiki and Hak’s vicious images of stop and frisk devolving into racist attacks proving nothings really changed. Ratking broke up with only So it Goes under their belt, but their legend will continue to grow. Wiki went more insular as he went solo, but the title track of his first salvo into myth still rises up, ghostly, triumphant, ascendant. “Six million trains to ride, choose one / Six million stories to tell, whose one?” He crowed, confident he’d tell them all. - NS
Summertime ‘06 - Vince Staples (Def Jam, 2016)
Sounding like the expanse of oil derricks and rail yards that dot the southern part of Los Angeles county, Summertime ’06 was short, sweet, and one of the most powerful LPs to come out of the 2010s. Vince Staples crafts an urgent ode to his youth, full of anger and yearning and built on the bones of some incredible technical rapping and writing. Summertime ‘06 is at once hopeless and hopeful, an album that opens with “Lift Me Up” and ends in “I gotta be the one / to make it up to heaven, despite the things I’ve done.”
Staples effortlessly raps over the sinister sound, dropping verses rife with nihilism and bravado. His swagger has an underlying tension, as he warns “just don't move too fast, I'm too crazy”. There’s a sonic claustrophobia; the realization that the beat sounds like police sirens grows more apparent as the repetition builds. The album refers to the summer when he turned 13. This is when Staples believes he lost his innocence, making Summertime ‘06 a dark, toxic trip that is far more about exorcising demons than waxing nostalgic. A melodic, excellently produced exhibit of Staples’ prowess as a rapper and collaborator, and a showcase of producer No ID’s work. No lifting required. - BN/DD
Sun & Moon - Timbre (Cierpke, 2015)
As much of a child of Radiohead as Holst, Timbre was always going to go big with her breakthrough. Sun & Moon traces the connective issue of the made up walls between orchestral and pop with grace. For classical nerds, yes there’s a “Sanctus” and Fleet Foxes fanatics, don’t worry there are folky harmonies a plenty, but she crafts them all not to shove ahead as disparate sounds, but show what unites them.
With her sterling, warm voice, she recasts ancient archetypes as musical avatars, discovering each others’ worlds. On the elegant, quarter-hour closer “Day Boy,” there’s Brahms roaring with romantic offerings, but also the outsized, alien beauty of Sigur Ros reverberating in the chorus. Safe was never a word to describe Timbre, and Sun & Moon is as daring as it is gorgeous. - NS
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Sunbather - Deafheaven (Deathwish, 2018)
You know what’s metal? Salmon pink. That color, which makes the sleeve art of Deafheaven’s sophomore album Sunbather so iconic, was said by its designer Nick Steinhardt (of Touché Amoré fame) to mimic the color you see when you look up at the sun with your eyes closed. That description makes Sunbather sound more like the subject of an art installation than an album which counts Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse as one of its influences. But if any band could successfully make a metal record that evokes the sun-drenched gentrified streets of the California Bay Area, it’s Deafheaven. The band showed promise on their 2011 full-length debut, Roads to Judah, which melds post-rock and shoegaze with searing black metal in a manner first pioneered by the French outfit Alcest, who Deafheaven count as friends and colleagues. Never have major key chords and arpeggios sounded so resoundingly powerful and heavy as they do here. Instrumental interludes like “Irresistible” provide moments of summery respite in between thundering, ten-plus minute epics like the title track and the cathartic finale “The Pecan Tree.” And Sunbather gave the 2010s perhaps its iconic metal moment: at the halfway mark of “Dream House,” the music drops out, leaving only a gently strummed clean guitar (Kerry McCoy, an ace player) that aurally conjures up a walk on a beach, all gentle breeze and waves. Then, the song explodes back into full volume, and frontman George Clarke screams the simple yet immortal words: “I want to dream!” Seven years removed from its public release, Sunbather isn’t drowned out by any of the ham-fisted debates about “what it means for metal” or “can a band that sounds sometimes like Explosions at the Sky and also evoke the phrase “true kvlt?” Standing on its own as a relic of this decade, the album remains what it always was: a masterpiece. - BE
TOSS - Shugo Tokumaru (Polyvinyl, 2017)
One of the greatest bedroom pop artists ever to walk this blue marble, the way that Shugo Tokumaru crafts every second of his utterly insane recordings is something downright magical. For TOSS, his seventh full-length proper, he goes off the deep end, crashing styles together like two different cartoons being played over each other, and the result is a record that never ceases being innovative. While opener "Lift" is based off a very simple guitar riff, it's the many other elements that fly in during it (AOR rock guitar, Aaron Copland-styled orchestrations, a fuckton of flutes) that transform it into an out-of-body experience, as you the listener are getting an aerial tour of the entirety of music and every subgenre that you could imagine is rushing beneath you. When "Taxi" kicks into full gear, with its xylophones-rolling-down-staircases style of jazz colliding with hip-hop structures, there are echoes of outfits like the gloriously nonsensical Cibo Matto, but it quickly becomes clear that just as he's done throughout his whole career, Tokumaru works in a style that he developed himself and can be applied to only him. The more steeped you are in music history, the more rewards can be extracted from this fever dream of a pop album, but for all its bluster and excitement, hearing Tokumaru tone things down for a semi-by-the-numbers ballad with "Hikageno" is a real treat, showing that for all his contagious madness, there's still a beating heart under all these goofy sound effects. - ES