What follows is my personal, highly subjective list of the best music of 2015, including songs, albums, and live performances, organized in ascending order from 20 to one. If you disagree, that is your prerogative. But I will personally judge you very, very harshly. Alright, with the preliminaries out of the way, on y va!1
20. Gary Pryor - "Grizzly Bears"
Normally (Uncanny Valley Magazine contributor) Gary isn't deserving of "best of" accolades, neither as a person nor as a musician. But with "Grizzly Bears", he has improbably managed to create an excellent synth-pop song that represents his varied, eccentric tastes. He put three different versions of this song up on his SoundCloud profile this year. All three are good but my personal favorite is this fuzzy take. In addition to the fucked up Sega Genesis style production, the song features such inspired lyrics as "Feel the power in your hand / You know it's time to be a man / Like a grizzly bear" which come across as a mutated version of some inspirational song from a 1980s sports movie. Honestly, Gary has no fucking right to make music this good. Oh well.
19. Kamasi Washington - The Epic
Saxophonist Washington's appropriately titled album2 evokes both the large-band hard bop of Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and the sort of post-Coltrane, earthy music that artists like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp released on Impulse! in the late 1960s.
Of course, that explicitly retro quality does undermine the importance of the album quite a bit. Everything that Emily Lordi told Eric Ducker about Leon Bridges is more or less equally applicable to Washington's album. It is good but non-essential music. Of course, this leads me to wonder why I would include The Epic on my list of the best music of 2015 but wouldn't even begin to consider Leon Bridges's pleasant-but-limp album, Coming Home. Is it because Washington is reviving a style of music that was even underappreciated in its own time while Bridges is just engaging in limp, displaced nostalgia that exists purely to provide an empty but affirming answer the meaningless question "Why don't they make music like they did in the old days?" Is it because my personal tastes align more with Washington's music than Bridges's? Or is it just that The Epic is simply a better album in every way than Coming Home? I'd suspect that the answer lies in a combination of the three.
18. BAUS - DEMO 2015
I saw these Oakland post-punk weirdos open for Violence Creeps a couple of years ago and they only seem to have gotten better since then. Their demo from this year is a straight shot of groovy, nervy, distorted goodness.
17. Ghostface Killah & BADBADNOTGOOD - Sour Soul
The only reason this album isn't higher on my list is because I included one of its singles on my list for 2014. But this excellent album that he made with the otherwise horribly dull, Canadian trio of jazz dweebs, BADBADNOTGOOD, continues the late career resurgence of 2013's Twelve Reasons to Die and 2014's 36 Seasons. 3 With all the other bummers associated with the Wu-Tang Clan this year, it's nice to know that we can count on Tony Starks to provide us his usual high-quality, idiosyncratic blend of drug dealing tales, oddball slang, and dark humor.
16. Death Grips - Jenny Death
Welcome back, Death Grips. Stay weird.
15. David Bowie - "Blackstar"
I think the Classical—whose album Diptych was on my best of 2014 list—summed it up best:
You might think David Bowie is ripping us off but actually we're just both ripping off the same Scott Walker era https://t.co/Gr1gkQ4rLN
— The Classical (@the0classical) November 24, 2015
God bless David Bowie.4
14. Vince Staples - Summertime '06
My dislike of Drake and Kendrick Lamar and general indifference toward Future kept me mostly out of the hip hop zeitgeist this year. But Summertime '06 is a really good album and the music video for "Señorita" is awesome.
13. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
Most of Courtney Barnett's songs blend together in my mind, but that's not necessarily a problem because they are generally very good. She reminds me a bit of Pavement in that she makes clever, unassuming songs that are memorable despite the fact that they are mostly unremarkable. Her music is much better than my description makes it seem.
12. Shannon and the Clams - Gone by the Dawn
Our friends, the Clams have long since established their signature blend of 60s pop melancholy, punk energy, and outsider music weirdness. Gone by the Dawn is their most fully realized album, featuring their most sophisticated songwriting, production, and vocal harmonies. "Corvette" and "Telling Myself" are particular standouts.
11. Joanna Newsom - Divers
I am unable to explain why I love Joanna Newsom's music without delving into my feelings and personal life. So let's just say this album is really good and leave it at that.
10. Violence Creeps - On My Turf
Crushing, funny, angry, weird—the best of Oakland in microcosm. All hail Violence Creeps!
9. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell
I didn't actually listen to this album much but I want to include it because of the concert I saw him perform on Halloween. While his (admittedly amusing) cover of "Hotling Bling" got most of the attention, the entire concert was an intense, immersive, borderline religious5 experience. Sufjan and his band of multi-instrumentalists created a sound that veered from spare, fragile, achingly pretty acoustic numbers to loud, electronic, almost violently cacophonous sounds. And the lights and projections were fantastic.
As a side note, my friends and I met a friendly, middle aged, Chinese tourist on the train to Jersey City. My friend who had bought the tickets struck up a conversation with this man and offered him a spare ticket. So this man, who had never heard of Sufjan Stevens and had not begun his night with any intention of attending a concert, joined us. His look of awe and amazement at the end of the concert spoke to the power of Sufjan's music.
8. Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness
Her music reminds me of several artists from across the spectrum of catchy pop weirdos, particularly Karl Blau and Kate Bush. This album is full of strange earworms. Highly recommended.
7. Titus Andronicus - "Fatal Flaw"
The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Titus Andronicus's rock opera about manic depression is, in its entirety, borderline unlistenable. But "Fatal Flaw" succeeds where much of the rest of the album fails, with its sugar rush, in-the-red6 pop punk giving way to an energy deflating crash.7
6. Built to Spill - Untethered Moon & There's Nothing Wrong with Love
Built to Spill's new album, Untethered Moon, is not markedly different from the rest of their oeuvre, both in terms of style8 and quality.9 Additionally, the music videos for "Living Zoo" and "Never Be the Same", when viewed in succession, make for two of the most genuinely funny music videos I've ever seen. Doug Martsch is a strange man.
Also, this year, Sub Pop reissued Built to Spill's classic 1994 album There's Nothing Wrong with Love. I don't know if there are any funny music videos to go with that reissue, but it is an excellent album.
5. Kurt Vile - "Pretty Pimpin"
I read a description of "Pretty Pimpin" as the best song that Neil Young never wrote. I find that description apt, as this song has the same hazy, addictively catchy stomp as some of Young's stonier 70s hits such as "Walk On" and "Are You Ready for the Country?". The rest of Vile's album is unmemorable but this is one of the best songs of the year.
4. Ben Goldberg - Orphic Machine
I wrote a review of this album for Elmore Magazine. This is an album of incredible depth and weight. It rewards repeated listening.
3. Dave Rawlings Machine - Nashville Obsolete
Nashville Obsolete is an excellent album that seems both consistent with the music Rawlings and Gillian Welch have released under her name and something different in and of itself. Letting Rawlings's excellent guitar playing and warm, reedy voice take centers stage complements the relatively long, shaggy songs on this album. Like with Vile's song, there are strong shades of 70s Neil Young, particularly on "The Trip"—which also evokes Bob Dylan's long, addled mid 60s songs like "Desolation Row" and "Queen Jane Approximately" (which the Machine has covered in concert). "Pilgrim (You Can't Go Home)" is more like the songs on the Gillian Welch albums: a beautiful, humanist tune that fits snugly within the tradition of American folk and country music.
2. Unoperator - Something Something Something: Part 1
Returning to my list for the third time, Dak has crafted another unique, bizarre album. As is his wont, he released a bunch of music this year, including multiple versions of some songs. And, as is also his wont, he subsequently made much of that music unavailable. But this particular album was his best of the year and one of his best ever. It is the fullest realization of the dichotomies he so often explores with his music: catchy and noisy, funny and terrifying, fragile and heavy. If he makes it available again, I will update this entry.
UPDATE: He made it available. Here it is.
1. Rihanna - "Bitch Better Have My Money"
When this song first came out back in March, I declared it the best song of the year. Eight and a half months later, this remains true.
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 In the interest of blatant self promotion (hidden in a footnote as a nod toward modesty), I'd like to point out that Doug and I released three new albums this year. Check them out here.↩
2 It is a triple album.↩
3 In retrospect, I should have put this album on my 2014 list↩
4 During a recent Uncanny Valley Magazine editorial discussion, Professor Editor-in-Chief Douglas Slayton actually said that he didn't think that David Bowie was cool. Despite the extremely evident stupidity of this statement, we ultimately decided against asking him to resign from his post. We support the freedom to express indefensibly dumb opinions here at UVM.↩
5 Not necessarily (for me) due to the overt religiousness of Sufjan's lyrics while still acknowledging that the religiousness is probably inseparable from the meaning of the music.↩
6 Or, to use a term from another song on the album, dimed out.↩
7 I asked a friend of mine who is diagnosed as schizo affective to offer her analysis of the song with regards to the experience of a manic episode. She said that the song was far too slow to accurately reflect her experience of manic episodes but that the wooziness at the end did evoke some of the sensations of the crash that comes at the end of the episode.↩
8 Melodic, knotty, guitar-driven.↩
9 Really fucking good.↩
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