Over the nearly decade-long history of this blog, most of the predictions I made about future posts failed to come true. (Note the evasive use of the passive voice.) So perhaps it’s only fitting that January’s Top 10 music post, which I declared would likely be the last post on Pop Tones has now turned out not to be the final post after all. This post, however, will indeed be the last one. This prediction will come true because all that is required is inaction, which happens to be my natural state.
My annual Oscars/Top 10 movies post has been a tradition on this blog since its inception—or more accurately, two traditions, both predating the existence of Pop Tones, that merged into a single annual post after I moved away from New York and lost access to press screenings, effectively making it impossible to compile a reasonable Top 10 list by the end of December. I plan to continue writing these posts on my new blog, but this post seemed like an inappropriate beginning for a new project. The perfect way to kick off the new blog will be with a discussion of Silence, a novel by Shusaku Endo and now a film by Martin Scorsese that will play a bit part in this post, thus providing a bridge from the old to the new. The reasons for this will become clear in time.
But for now we should move on to the business at hand. The recent history of the Oscars has revealed a couple trends: the quality of the Best Picture nominees has improved (once again, there’s nothing I hate in this year's field of nine), and the awards have been distributed more widely. Last year’s Best Picture winner, Spotlight, won only two Oscars, and no film this decade has won more than six. But if you’re nostalgic for the days when some mediocre film would arbitrarily swoop in and sweep the awards, tonight is your lucky night. Damien Chazelle’s musical La La Land, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as an aspiring actress and jazz musician, appears poised to win the most Oscars since at least Slumdog Millionaire, which took home eight awards for 2008, and possibly even The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which won a record-tying 11 Oscars for 2003, taking every award for which it was nominated. La La Land’s 14 nominations (including two in the Best Song category) tied All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997) for the most in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Those films won six and 11 awards, respectively, including Best Picture in both cases.
I’m hardly the first to note that La La Land feels like a dissonant Best Picture choice for the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Its total lack of political relevance seems almost quaint, and its upbeat tone could hardly be less appropriate for the angry, depressing era we're living through. The movie is allegedly set in the present, but you’d only know that by its implicit assumption that going to jazz clubs and watching old movies in theaters are hopelessly passé activities. Indeed, for about an hour or so, I thought La La Land might develop into a self-aware argument for the continued vitality of aging artistic forms in the 21st century, but instead it turns into a movie about…uh, the importance of following your dreams, or something. La La Land will be the fourth Best Picture winner in the past six years to center on show business, and it’s easy to see why AMPAS voters have embraced it. More troubling to me has been the unwillingness of many film critics to point out the glaringly obvious flaws in the film. The script feels like a skeletal early draft that should have been sent back for some fleshing out. In addition to the unconvincing contemporary setting, the film has no meaningful supporting characters. Two of the next three actors in the billing order after Gosling and Stone play characters known as “Famous Actress” and “Coffee Spiller.” Rosemarie DeWitt shows up early on as the Gosling character’s sister and is hardly seen for the rest of the movie, while John Legend’s bandleader is little more than an ambulatory plot device. The whole thing hinges on the charm of its two leads, which is almost enough to carry it. Still, La La Land is by no means a bad film, and Chazelle deserves credit for attempting something more ambitious than the usual Oscar bait, even if the execution wasn’t entirely successful. It should go down as an average Best Picture winner, a tick below Spotlight and a tick above 2014’s Birdman. I can live with a La La Land win for Best Picture, but if it wins for Screenplay I’m liable to start banging my head against the nearest wall.
Heading up the list of also-rans in the field of nine are the two most critically lauded films of the year, Moonlight, a lyrical three-part film from writer-director Barry Jenkins about the coming of age of a black boy (and eventually, man) in inner city Miami who gradually realizes he is gay, and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, the story of a fortyish New Englander struggling with a decision about whether to adopt the son of his recently deceased brother while working through the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy of his own. The film is built around a career-best performance from Casey Affleck, a key player in the only competitive race in any major category tonight. I really like both films, particularly Manchester, which manages to weave quite a bit of humor into its closely observed drama. (There’s one bit involving a stretcher and an ambulance where I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.) Moonlight would be a more radical choice, less on account of its tripartite structure than its fundamentally elusive, poetic character. The first part, dominated by tonight’s likely Supporting Actor winner Mahershala Ali as a sensitive soul miscast by circumstance as a dope-dealing tough guy who becomes a mentor to the fatherless lead character, is particularly fine cinema, communicating far more with lighting and facial expressions than with words. I don’t know if the Academy would have nominated such an aesthetically challenging film if not for last year’s #OscarsSoWhite campaign, but in any event I’m glad they did.
The Best Picture field also features a pair of ambitious, technically assured genre pieces: Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson’s World War II drama about the exploits of Desmond Doss, a devout Christian whose strict interpretation of the Sixth Commandment precluded his carrying a rifle, who went on to save the lives of dozens of soldiers as a medic during the battle of Okinawa; and Arrival, a science fiction film about first contact with extra-terrestrials, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams as a linguist enlisted by the U.S. military to help communicate with the new visitors. Hacksaw is not immune from some of the standard war movie criticisms and the ending of Arrival was a major letdown, but both are fine films. Hacksaw should take the Oscar for Sound Editing, while Arrival is competitive in several categories, although not favored to win anywhere.
Four other movies round out the field. Fences is Denzel Washington’s adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play by the late August Wilson that’s barely adapted at all. It’s a very good play, deftly portraying the psychological and generational consequences of racism, but I wish Washington had decided to make an actual movie out of it. Hell or High Water is a solid sociological drama about a pair of Texas bank robbers that’s now overrated for being underrated. Hidden Figures is a feelgood drama about a trio of black women who worked for NASA during the preparation of a key early-’60s space flight by John Glenn that delivers exactly what it promises. And finally, there is Lion, which remains unseen by me.
This looks to be a boring predictions year, perhaps just as well given my poor performance the past two times out. I did correctly predict that last year’s bandwagon pick, The Revenant, would not win Best Picture but unfortunately went with PGA winner and personal favorite The Big Short, over the more middle-of-the-road Spotlight. I shouldn’t have to worry about missing Best Picture this year, but there are some competitive races. In addition to Best Actor, which I’ll get to below, there is Sound Mixing, where Hacksaw Ridge could challenge La La Land, and Costume Design, where Jackie stands a good chance of interrupting the parade of La La Land wins. The other category to watch tonight is Foreign Language Film, where Iran’s The Salesman is widely expected to beat out the German film Toni Erdmann, which had been the favorite right up until President Trump’s reprehensible and unlawful travel ban tipped the scales. The order led to director Asghar Farhadi’s first being unable to attend the ceremony and then declining to attend in protest. I don’t blame him for not coming, but I do hope Academy voters don’t allow Trump to essentially make their choice for them. Truth be told, I haven’t seen The Salesman, but I was underwhelmed by Farhadi’s previous Oscar winner A Separation. Toni Erdmann is one of the great films of the decade and would be an unusually deserving winner in this troubled category. If Farhadi wins his second Oscar tonight, he will, ironically enough, have Trump to thank for it.
With so many categories seemingly sewn up, this could be a dull ceremony. Jimmy Kimmel will be the host. I have no strong feelings about Kimmel, but I am glad they picked someone new. There will undoubtedly be a fair amount of foot stamping against Mr. Trump, but hopefully no one will mention football or mixed martial arts. At least one winner will be rudely interrupted by the house band, and I will get upset about it. Hopefully, something surprising will happen at some point. Without further ado, we shall move on to the picks. I’m going chalk this year thanks to the results of my recent risk-taking. Please stay tuned for my own Top 10 list at the bottom of the post. As always, thank you for reading. When I reemerge with a new blog, I will post a link here.
Best Picture
Sentiment for Moonlight and the late-breaking Hidden Figures notwithstanding, there is virtually no chance of an upset here.
Will win: La La Land
Should win: Manchester by the Sea
Best Director
This feels nearly as locked as Best Picture. Picture and Director have actually gone to different films three of the past four years, but with Jenkins and Lonergan favored to take the two Screenplay awards, there’s little incentive for Academy voters to honor either here. There doesn’t seem to be enough sentiment for Arrival to consider Villeneuve here, but I can’t help thinking there’s a minuscule chance of a Roman Polanski–style shock victory for Gibson, which would surely make for the most memorable moment of the broadcast.
W: Damien Chazelle, La La Land
S: Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
Best Actor
The sole major race that calls for any sort of analysis should come down to a close vote between Affleck’s hollowed-out janitor in Manchester by the Sea and Washington’s embittered ex-ballplayer turned tough-love father in Fences. Affleck has won most of the major precursor awards, but Washington took home the Best Actor prize at the Screen Actors Guild awards, which has matched the Oscar winner the past 12 years in a row. On the other hand, most of those races weren’t particularly competitive. A crucial detail is that Washington had never won a SAG award, so his victory could be interpreted as a lifetime achievement award of sorts. Washington has won two Oscars, including one for Best Actor. Only six actors have ever won a third, with Daniel Day Lewis having achieved the feat most recently four years ago. Washington won a Tony for the same role on Broadway, and his performance, like everything else about Fences, feels a bit theatrical at times. Perhaps he was let down by his director. Affleck, on the other hand, does some brilliant, naturalistic screen acting, so if I’m wrong here I’ll once again blame it on having actually watched the movies.
W: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
S: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
Best Actress
Stone is favored to win here, but to do so she’ll have to overcome the best performance of the year by the greatest screen actress of her generation. And also Meryl Streep. The French actress Isabelle Huppert remains shockingly unknown to non-cinephile American audiences, but perhaps that’s about to change as a result of her typically fearless performance as a businesswoman who is raped—victim hardly seems like an appropriate word—and attempts to track down her attacker in Paul Verhoeven’s provocative Elle. No film this year was more reliant on the success of a single performance. Without revealing too much about the story, let’s just say that the movie would have been downright offensive with nearly anyone else in the role. Huppert scored an upset victory at the Golden Globes, although she and Stone have yet to face off directly at any major awards show.
W: Emma Stone, La La Land
S: Isabelle Huppert, Elle
Best Supporting Actress
This might be an even easier call than Best Picture, with Viola Davis, who’s nearly a co-lead in Fences, having swept the relevant precursor awards. Davis gave a fine performance, as did Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea, but I’d personally give the slightest of edges to Naomie Harris as the troubled mother in Moonlight.
W: Viola Davis, Fences
S: Naomie Harris, Moonlight
Best Supporting Actor
Mahershala Ali looked like a slam dunk for the win until he somehow lost at the Golden Globes to Aaron-Taylor Johnson for the fourth-best performance in a lousy movie. Johnson was not nominated here, although his co-star Michael Shannon was, setting up a battle of the Texas lawmen with Hell or High Water’s Jeff Bridges. But Ali, his great performance in Moonlight now bolstered by a memorable SAG acceptance speech, should win easily here. If there’s an upset, it will probably come from Dev Patel of Lion.
W: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
S: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Screenplay, Original
W: Manchester by the Sea
S: Manchester by the Sea
Screenplay, Adapted
W: Moonlight
S: Moonlight
Animated Feature
W: Zootopia
Documentary Feature
W: O.J.: Made in America
S: O.J.: Made in America
Foreign Language Film
W: The Salesman
S: Toni Erdmann
Cinematography
W: La La Land
S: Silence
Production Design
W: La La Land
S: Hail, Caesar!
Editing
W: La La Land
S: Moonlight
Visual Effects
W: The Jungle Book
Costume Design
W: Jackie
S: Jackie
Makeup and Hair
W: Star Trek Beyond
Sound Mixing
W: La La Land
S: Arrival
Sound Editing
W: Hacksaw Ridge
S: Hacksaw Ridge
Original Score
W: La La Land
S: Jackie
Original Song
W: “City of Stars,” La La Land
Animated Short
W: Piper
Live Action Short
W: Ennemis Intérieurs
Documentary Short
W: The White Helmets
And, finally, we arrive at my own Top 10 films of the year. Despite my best efforts, I missed several promising contenders, most of them foreign-language films. I'll try to add some more blurbs to the list later in the week, if only for posterity's sake. I now have two children; some things are slipping.
1. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, Germany)
This German comedy (!) from director Maren Ade, whose Everyone Else would have made my never-finalized Top 10 list for 2010, nearly defies description. It is on one level a scathing satire of contemporary EU culture, encompassing family, sex, friendship, and particularly the corporate world. On another level, it’s a father-daughter comedy built around a pair of brilliant performances. But lurking beneath both is a poignant existential drama, concerned with deep questions like what makes life worth living. Sandra Hüller stars as a German businesswoman living in Bucharest whose life is disrupted by an unexpected visit from her father (Peter Simonischek), who eventually manages to insinuate himself into her professional life by taking on the titular persona, a self-styled life coach. The film hums along briskly for the first two-thirds of its 162-minute running time before shooting into the stratosphere with a pair of absolutely brilliant scenes, both involving parties of one sort or another, that would by themselves be sufficient to elevate Ade into the front ranks of global directors, her boldness matched by her mastery of tone. Appropriately enough, the movie ends on an unresolved chord, but I can safely say that the father-daughter bond ultimately proves to be one of great love, if not quite the greatest love of all.
2. Silence (Martin Scorsese, U.S.)
3. Sully (Clint Eastwood, U.S.)
4. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, U.S.)
5. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, U.S.)
6. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
7. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, U.S.)
8. Little Sister (Zach Clark, U.S.)
9. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, U.S.)
10. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, U.S.)
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Elle (Paul Verhoeven, France); Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, U.S.); Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman, Ireland/France); No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France); Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
26 February 2017
26 January 2017
Best Music of 2016
This post is already ridiculously long, so I’ll try to keep the introduction short. This is a blog post about my favorite albums of 2016. Most people seem to think 2016 was a bad year, and they have their reasons. Among the things that happened in 2016: David Bowie, Prince, and Merle Haggard died, along with many other people, some of whom were talented and famous musicians; Donald Trump was elected President of the United States; the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I could tell you which of these events upset me the most, but I’d rather not. On the other hand, it was quite a good year for music, with seemingly everyone releasing an album at some point during the year. While there was nothing from 2016 that I liked as well as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, last year’s No. 1, nearly all the albums on my list of favorites would have made a run at the top five in an average year. If there was ever a year for an unranked list, it was this one. So if you’d prefer these in a different order, that’s okay with me.
I should also note that this will likely be my final post on Pop Tones. This blog originated as an offshoot of Essays & Fictions, a literary journal that existed from 2007 to 2014 on which I worked as an editor, proofreader, and sometime contributor. The blog probably should have ended when the journal did, but I have an unfortunate tendency to procrastinate. I am trying to get better about this, as I am trying to get better about many things.
I am not, however, done with blogging. I hope to launch a new blog in the next few weeks. I’ll post a link here once I have a post up. Perhaps this post will be about Endo/Scorsese’s Silence, or maybe it will be my annual Oscar predictions/year in movies review. But you will be able to get there from here if you so desire. The important thing is that you won’t be able to get here from there. Traffic will move in one direction, and that direction will be forward. I suspect the new blog will be superficially similar to this one, but there will be differences. I feel that I’ve become a different person over the past few years, and these changes in myself will doubtless manifest themselves in what and how I write. But that is a subject for another day. For now, we move on to the list.
1. Radiohead—A Moon Shaped Pool
I may not have had a clear favorite album this year, but the one I listened to the most? A Moon Shaped Pool by a mile. Appearing nearly a quarter-century after their debut, Radiohead’s ninth album is a resolutely middle-aged record. Now in his late forties, Thom Yorke writes in the voice of one with a sizable chunk of his life in the rear view mirror. The brief moment of clarity “Glass Eyes” begins with the singer emerging from a fugue state, stepping off a train and looking around as if wondering whether the past five or 10 years ever existed. But by the end of the song he’s able to move forward without knowing where the path in front of him leads, content to “feel this love to the core.”
There are regrets here too, of course. Many of the lyrics on A Moon Shaped Pool were reportedly inspired by the dissolution of the singer’s 22-year relationship with the mother of his children. “And it’s too late/The damage is done,” he sings on the melancholic “Daydreaming.” The following “Decks Dark” begins with the line “And into your life there comes a darkness” before insisting, “It was just a laugh” (or is it “just a lie”?). The song plays like a callback to “Subterranean Homesick Alien” from the band’s 1997 masterpiece OK Computer, which also used the metaphor of an extra-terrestrial encounter to map out hidden recesses of the human psyche. And the closer “True Love Waits,” part of the band’s live repertoire since the late ’90s, takes on a sense of deep loss here, a sense that has tragically grown even deeper since the album’s release.
But A Moon Shaped Pool is not all backward-looking by any means. While the previous Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, too often used the blips and bleeps characteristic of Yorke’s solo collaborations with longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to signal “innovation,” A Moon Shaped Pool moves the band’s sound forward in more satisfying ways. This is the Radiohead album where guitarist-keyboardist Johnny Greenwood’s avant-classical excursions become fully integrated into the band’s sound, his string arrangements playing no less a lead role than Yorke’s vocals. His chopping, percussive strings propel opener and lead single “Burn the Witch.” Elsewhere, as on “Daydreaming” and “Glass Eyes,” the strings function more traditionally as color, but they never fade into the background. “Decks Dark” and “Identikit” both feature choral arrangements, albeit to very different effects, with the latter’s chorus of “Broken hearts/Make it rain” providing a rare moment of comic relief. And “Desert Island Disk” even finds room for an acoustic guitar, which in context sounds as alien as anything else here.
The first six songs are all transcendent, but it’s one from the second half, “Present Tense,” that most explicitly engages with the increased urgency of living well that comes when you realize that time won’t stretch out forever. “Don’t want to get heavy,” Yorke wails, and he does and he doesn’t. “Keep it light and keep it moving,” he exhales, and he’s being ironic and he isn’t. “I’m doing no harm,” he says, and he knows it’s not nearly good enough. I may never love this album as passionately as OK Computer or Kid A, both touchstones of my younger years, but one of the lessons of both A Moon Shaped Pool and of middle age itself is that different types of love are possible. (“Daydreaming” “Decks Dark”)
2. David Bowie—Blackstar
Released a mere three days before Bowie’s death last January at age 69, Blackstar appears to have been intended as a final testament of sorts, filled with lyrical reflections on death, departure, and transition. “Dollar Days” considers the bittersweet experience of seeing and doing things for the last time, while “Lazarus” even ponders a resurrection of sorts. But it’s the experimental bent of the music here that makes this Bowie’s best album since his ’70s heyday. Largely eschewing the tasteful alternapop of other late works like Heathen and The Next Day, Bowie’s final album embraces sounds and rhythms from jazz and electronica without forsaking his pop sensibilities. The two-part title track and “Lazarus” break out of traditional song structures, which allows the more conventional closing tracks to hit even harder, as Bowie leaves us for good with “Dollar Days” and, finally, the Cheshire Cat grin of “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” In all of modern Anglo-American popular culture, only John Wayne, as un-Bowielike a figure as one could imagine, was able to write his own epitaph as effectively in his final work. (“Blackstar” “Dollar Days”)
3. Chance the Rapper—Coloring Book
Chance’s second solo album—excuse me, mixtape—was a much-needed shot of positivity in a year where there was little to be found in American public life. High on God, marijuana, fatherhood, and hip-hop itself, the 23-year-old Chance oozes the joy of life while making his best music to date. In the context of an online culture that’s largely hostile to religion and more inclined to wallow in its own misery than attempt to do something about it, asking “Are you ready for your blessings?” is a radical act indeed. Chance's insistence on labeling Coloring Book a mixtape seems based less on artistic principle than commercial calculation—he can still play the “debut album” card in a year or two. In any event, if this isn’t an album, then neither was What’s Going On. There are still a few callow moments—I could have done without Chance describing himself and the Almighty as “mutual fans”—and the anti-label shtick rings hollow from someone who gave Apple a two-week exclusive window to distribute his album—pardon me, mixtape. But I shouldn’t be so nitpicky; there is a lot to like here. “Same Drugs” nails the bittersweet feeling of growing up and growing apart, an evergreen topic for a pop song, while the casual intimacy of “Smoke Break” works the other side of the street. The single “No Problem” must be the least threatening-sounding threat in hip-hop history, while the house jam “All Night” injects some levity, as well as some BPM, onto the record. The gospel-inflected tracks feel unusually organic; “Finish Line/Drown” in particular sounds more like a Kirk Franklin record than like anything else in hip-hop (perhaps because Franklin himself is on it), while the soaring intro to “How Great” almost literally takes us to church. There’s already so much variety in Chance’s music that I can’t wait to hear where he goes next. I’m actually looking forward to that debut album. (“Same Drugs” “Finish Line/Drown”)
4. Angel Olsen—My Woman
As its title and cover indicate, My Woman is an work about self-possession, about coming into one’s own, and on her fourth LP singer-songwriter Angel Olsen has done just that, finding a musical language that perfectly expresses her artistic personality. Olsen came onto my radar with 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, and while that album often had me reaching for comparisons with other artists—a bit of Linda Ronstadt here, a bit of Leonard Cohen by way of Hope Sandoval there—her influences are relegated to the margins on My Woman. (I’m reminded of the leap Tori Amos made from Little Earthquakes to Under the Pink, less a question of quality than of finding oneself musically, although Amos and Olsen otherwise have little in common as writers or performers.) The first half is all compact pop songs, mostly about love and longing, that would have fit nicely on Olsen’s last album, but the second side is something else entirely, a series of slow, spacious, semi-acoustic reveries with an undeniably spiritual vibe. The highlight is the extraordinary “Sister,” the best song by Olsen and maybe by anyone this year, an eight-minute interior epic about the hard-won peace that comes from learning how to feel comfortable in one’s own skin. Olsen may still be figuring out herself and life, but she is ready for her blessings. (“Sister” “Those Were the Days”)
5. Car Seat Headrest—Teens of Denial
It’s fitting that this indie rock epic from Will Toledo & Co. was released on Matador, as much of the music here can be traced back to onetime label stalwarts like Pavement and Guided by Voices, as well as nerd-rock godfathers The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Teens of Denial tells a more or less coherent story about a kid named Joe who gets kicked out of school for doing drugs with friends and has to figure out how to deal with the emotional demands of life—or at least how to not get drunk every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and why not Sunday. Toledo demonstrates a strong command of pop song form on early tracks like “Fill in the Blank” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” before stretching out on “Cosmic Hero” and “The Ballad of Costa Concordia,” which run a combined 20 minutes and bring the album’s musical and narrative drama to a head. This is the rare 2010s album on which the lyrics are the real star: Teens of Denial has some of the funniest lines of the year (“So there I was, just another shitbag civilian/Afraid of the cops when I was outside/Afraid of my friends when I was inside”), as well as the best song about drunk driving ever. (“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” “Vincent”)
6. Tim Hecker—Love Streams
The eighth solo album from Canadian maestro Tim Hecker is notable as his first to make use of vocals, although he hasn’t exactly gone pop. Hecker enlisted the Icelandic Choir Ensemble to sing nonsense words then used Auto-Tune to distort the resulting recordings. The effect of this mashup of early-modern and hip-hop aesthetics is of hearing a remixed centuries-old liturgy sung in an alien tongue. The presence of vocals and relative absence of sudden squalls of noise (the latter would be playing to the base for Hecker) make this a bit of a departure, but Love Streams is methodologically consistent with his previous work, appropriately so for this most theoretical of artists. Hecker manipulates the choral vocals like any other acoustic instrument, mercilessly subjecting organic sounds to the ravages of technology. (“Music of the Air” “Violet Monumental I”)
7. Elza Soares—The Woman at the End of the World
Some of the most original music of the year can be found on this remarkable album from 79-year-old samba singer Elza Soares. Made in collaboration with producer Guilherme Kastrup and a group of musicians mostly decades younger than Soares, The Woman at the End of the World is a decidedly experimental take on the genre. I must admit that I’d never heard of Soares prior to this album and know next to nothing about samba, so I’m unable to comment on the provenance of most of the music here, although there are elements of funk, rock, and Afro-pop, among other genres. The overall aesthetic reminds me of art-punk groups like Gang of Four or Public Image Ltd. as much as anything else. Soares grew up poor and black in mid-century Brazil, finding fame by winning a talent show as a teenager, and the album’s lyrics largely center on the struggles of marginalized peoples in Brazil, featuring characters such as a vengeful domestic violence victim and a well-endowed trans woman, with darker themes of death and apocalypse lurking beneath. The CD release includes English translations of the Portuguese lyrics, which are invaluable, but it’s Soares’s indomitable rasp and the utterly sui generis music here that landed this one on the list. (“A Mulher do Fim do Mundo” “Solto”)
8. Run the Jewels—RTJ3
Released as a free download on Christmas Eve, the third album from the duo of Killer Mike and El-P is less immediate but more sonically adventurous than its predecessors. Depending on how 2017 shakes out, I may end up wishing I’d saved this one for next year’s list but after consulting the precedent of D’Angelo v. Pitchfork (2014) I decided it had to count for 2016. Unapologetically old school, Run the Jewels frequently go to the tag-team style that peaked back in the days when rap was still mostly a group phenomenon (there’s even a song about Ticketron!). The lyrics, however, are very much of the present, with Mike occasionally referencing his recent political activism on behalf of the black community and the Bernie Sanders campaign, which included some high-profile media appearances (“The evening news giving yous views/Telling you to pick your master for president/Been behind the curtain seen the devil workin’/Came back with some evidence”). El-P’s dense, layered production captures the feel of the walls closing in on America, yet RTJ3 is an energetic, even optimistic album, particularly if your definition of optimism encompasses a vision of police-shooting victims returning from the dead to take their revenge. (“A Report to the Shareholders/Kill Your Masters” “Talk to Me”)
9. Parquet Courts—Human Performance
After the mild disappointment of 2014’s Sunbathing Animal, the Brooklyn band returns with its best album to date, achieving a seamless blend of the classic rock and indie rock traditions. Singer and primary songwriter Andrew Savage hasn’t been above some hipsterish smirking in the past, but here he shows a new vulnerability on songs like “Keep It Even” and the devastating title track, even as the stone-faced Krautrock of “One Man No City” reassures us that there’s still a place for ironic detachment. The album sounds terrific too, with tracks like the opening “Dust” and the muscular “Paraphrased” popping out of even the cheapest speakers. (“Human Performance” “Berlin Got Blurry”)
10. Frank Ocean—Blond
This is the one I’ll wish I’d either ranked in the top five or left off the list entirely by this time next year. Ocean’s second official album (not counting Nostalgia, Ultra, which was a mixtape) scans as a welcome left turn from his excellent 2012 breakthrough Channel Orange. It’s much less pop-oriented, with some tracks feeling more like sketches than finished songs. At times the languorous feel of the album is like a drug haze, or like lazily staring out a car window at the world rolling by. Sometimes it works, with tracks like “Skyline To” evoking the evanescence of summer, youth, and time itself. It’s undeniably an aesthetic progression from his previous work, and yet…there’s something off-putting here I can’t quite put my finger on. Like Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Blond trades a little too much on the push-pull between celebrity guardedness and forced intimacy, although Ocean is wise enough to tone it down. (He’s too sensitive to ever write anything as execrable as “I Love Kanye” and too tasteful to release it even if he did.) But the real problem runs deeper, a sense of the unbearable lightness of being that strikes me as what the kids call #problematic. (“Nights” “Skyline To”)
Six runners-up (in alphabetical order)
For the first time, I’ve expanded the runners-up list from five to six, because rules are arbitrary and need to be broken sometimes. Also, it was an exceptionally good year for music and I didn’t feel like cutting any of these.
PJ Harvey—The Hope Six Demolition Project
After radically changing direction with 2011’s Mercury Prize–winning Let England Shake, PJ Harvey follows it up with an album that’s both similar and radically different, another formalized look at war and politics that replaces World War I with the new world order and eloquent poetry with blunt, journalistic observation. The embrace of ugliness as an aesthetic, perhaps inevitably, yields mixed results, and Harvey at times struggles to find an adequate sonic language for her ideas. Many people did not like this album, and indeed it was responsible for the single worst piece of music criticism I read last year. But even with its flaws, The Hope Six Demolition Project is a much-needed boot to the face of respectability politics and its defenders, summing up the political frustrations of the past year as well as anything I’ve seen or heard. At its best, it’s the sound of the world breaking. (“The Ministry of Defence” “A Line in the Sand”)
Huerco S.—For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
The second album from Brooklyn producer Brian Leeds could be described as “experimental ambient” or “abstract techno” or perhaps in terms of other subgenres so hip that I don’t even know their names. It’s easy to get lost in the spaced-out textures, but For Those of You Who Have Never rewards close listening as well, with tracks like “Lifeblood (Naïve Melody)” using reverb to create rhythm in the absence of beats. (“A Sea of Love” “Promises of Fertility”)
Bob Mould—Patch the Sky
The latest from the postpunk legend caps a terrific three-album run, beginning with Silver Age (2012) and continuing with the slept-on Beauty & Ruin (2014), that represents the peak of Mould’s long career as a solo artist and comes within shouting distance of his best work with Hüsker Dü and Sugar. Tracks like the buzzing opener “Voices in My Head” signal that Mould hasn’t entirely left his electronica adventures behind, but any sonic flourishes are placed firmly in the service of the hard power pop that he does best. (“The End of Things” “Losing Sleep”)
Margo Price—Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
This solo debut from 33-year-old Margo Price, self-financed before being picked up by Jack White’s Third Man Records, brims with a quiet confidence born of professionalism and of having waited for the chance to do things on her own terms. A versatile lyricist and restrained vocalist, Price has made me a believer in the trad country revival. (“About to Find Out” “Hands of Time”)
Solange—A Seat at the Table
As on To Pimp a Butterfly, the FUBU ethic rules the day on Solange’s carefully considered, occasionally perturbed, and always dignified third album. Most of the R&B tracks and spoken-word interludes here are firmly rooted in the specifics of being black in America in 2016. But the best song here is as universal as they come. (“Cranes in the Sky” “Mad”)
White Lung—Paradise
Clocking in at over 28 minutes, Paradise is the longest album yet from the Vancouver-based postpunk quartet. In addition to their admirable commitment to brevity, White Lung offers a welcome musical and ideological flexibility on this album. Soaring power ballads “Below” and “Hungry” bust the band out of the punk straitjacket, while singer Mish Barber-Way chafes at the boundaries of feminism on songs like the riches-to-rags “Kiss Me When I Bleed” and the marital-blissful “Paradise.” (“Kiss Me When I Bleed” “Below”)
I should also note that this will likely be my final post on Pop Tones. This blog originated as an offshoot of Essays & Fictions, a literary journal that existed from 2007 to 2014 on which I worked as an editor, proofreader, and sometime contributor. The blog probably should have ended when the journal did, but I have an unfortunate tendency to procrastinate. I am trying to get better about this, as I am trying to get better about many things.
I am not, however, done with blogging. I hope to launch a new blog in the next few weeks. I’ll post a link here once I have a post up. Perhaps this post will be about Endo/Scorsese’s Silence, or maybe it will be my annual Oscar predictions/year in movies review. But you will be able to get there from here if you so desire. The important thing is that you won’t be able to get here from there. Traffic will move in one direction, and that direction will be forward. I suspect the new blog will be superficially similar to this one, but there will be differences. I feel that I’ve become a different person over the past few years, and these changes in myself will doubtless manifest themselves in what and how I write. But that is a subject for another day. For now, we move on to the list.
1. Radiohead—A Moon Shaped Pool
I may not have had a clear favorite album this year, but the one I listened to the most? A Moon Shaped Pool by a mile. Appearing nearly a quarter-century after their debut, Radiohead’s ninth album is a resolutely middle-aged record. Now in his late forties, Thom Yorke writes in the voice of one with a sizable chunk of his life in the rear view mirror. The brief moment of clarity “Glass Eyes” begins with the singer emerging from a fugue state, stepping off a train and looking around as if wondering whether the past five or 10 years ever existed. But by the end of the song he’s able to move forward without knowing where the path in front of him leads, content to “feel this love to the core.”
There are regrets here too, of course. Many of the lyrics on A Moon Shaped Pool were reportedly inspired by the dissolution of the singer’s 22-year relationship with the mother of his children. “And it’s too late/The damage is done,” he sings on the melancholic “Daydreaming.” The following “Decks Dark” begins with the line “And into your life there comes a darkness” before insisting, “It was just a laugh” (or is it “just a lie”?). The song plays like a callback to “Subterranean Homesick Alien” from the band’s 1997 masterpiece OK Computer, which also used the metaphor of an extra-terrestrial encounter to map out hidden recesses of the human psyche. And the closer “True Love Waits,” part of the band’s live repertoire since the late ’90s, takes on a sense of deep loss here, a sense that has tragically grown even deeper since the album’s release.
But A Moon Shaped Pool is not all backward-looking by any means. While the previous Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, too often used the blips and bleeps characteristic of Yorke’s solo collaborations with longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to signal “innovation,” A Moon Shaped Pool moves the band’s sound forward in more satisfying ways. This is the Radiohead album where guitarist-keyboardist Johnny Greenwood’s avant-classical excursions become fully integrated into the band’s sound, his string arrangements playing no less a lead role than Yorke’s vocals. His chopping, percussive strings propel opener and lead single “Burn the Witch.” Elsewhere, as on “Daydreaming” and “Glass Eyes,” the strings function more traditionally as color, but they never fade into the background. “Decks Dark” and “Identikit” both feature choral arrangements, albeit to very different effects, with the latter’s chorus of “Broken hearts/Make it rain” providing a rare moment of comic relief. And “Desert Island Disk” even finds room for an acoustic guitar, which in context sounds as alien as anything else here.
The first six songs are all transcendent, but it’s one from the second half, “Present Tense,” that most explicitly engages with the increased urgency of living well that comes when you realize that time won’t stretch out forever. “Don’t want to get heavy,” Yorke wails, and he does and he doesn’t. “Keep it light and keep it moving,” he exhales, and he’s being ironic and he isn’t. “I’m doing no harm,” he says, and he knows it’s not nearly good enough. I may never love this album as passionately as OK Computer or Kid A, both touchstones of my younger years, but one of the lessons of both A Moon Shaped Pool and of middle age itself is that different types of love are possible. (“Daydreaming” “Decks Dark”)
2. David Bowie—Blackstar
Released a mere three days before Bowie’s death last January at age 69, Blackstar appears to have been intended as a final testament of sorts, filled with lyrical reflections on death, departure, and transition. “Dollar Days” considers the bittersweet experience of seeing and doing things for the last time, while “Lazarus” even ponders a resurrection of sorts. But it’s the experimental bent of the music here that makes this Bowie’s best album since his ’70s heyday. Largely eschewing the tasteful alternapop of other late works like Heathen and The Next Day, Bowie’s final album embraces sounds and rhythms from jazz and electronica without forsaking his pop sensibilities. The two-part title track and “Lazarus” break out of traditional song structures, which allows the more conventional closing tracks to hit even harder, as Bowie leaves us for good with “Dollar Days” and, finally, the Cheshire Cat grin of “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” In all of modern Anglo-American popular culture, only John Wayne, as un-Bowielike a figure as one could imagine, was able to write his own epitaph as effectively in his final work. (“Blackstar” “Dollar Days”)
3. Chance the Rapper—Coloring Book
Chance’s second solo album—excuse me, mixtape—was a much-needed shot of positivity in a year where there was little to be found in American public life. High on God, marijuana, fatherhood, and hip-hop itself, the 23-year-old Chance oozes the joy of life while making his best music to date. In the context of an online culture that’s largely hostile to religion and more inclined to wallow in its own misery than attempt to do something about it, asking “Are you ready for your blessings?” is a radical act indeed. Chance's insistence on labeling Coloring Book a mixtape seems based less on artistic principle than commercial calculation—he can still play the “debut album” card in a year or two. In any event, if this isn’t an album, then neither was What’s Going On. There are still a few callow moments—I could have done without Chance describing himself and the Almighty as “mutual fans”—and the anti-label shtick rings hollow from someone who gave Apple a two-week exclusive window to distribute his album—pardon me, mixtape. But I shouldn’t be so nitpicky; there is a lot to like here. “Same Drugs” nails the bittersweet feeling of growing up and growing apart, an evergreen topic for a pop song, while the casual intimacy of “Smoke Break” works the other side of the street. The single “No Problem” must be the least threatening-sounding threat in hip-hop history, while the house jam “All Night” injects some levity, as well as some BPM, onto the record. The gospel-inflected tracks feel unusually organic; “Finish Line/Drown” in particular sounds more like a Kirk Franklin record than like anything else in hip-hop (perhaps because Franklin himself is on it), while the soaring intro to “How Great” almost literally takes us to church. There’s already so much variety in Chance’s music that I can’t wait to hear where he goes next. I’m actually looking forward to that debut album. (“Same Drugs” “Finish Line/Drown”)
4. Angel Olsen—My Woman
As its title and cover indicate, My Woman is an work about self-possession, about coming into one’s own, and on her fourth LP singer-songwriter Angel Olsen has done just that, finding a musical language that perfectly expresses her artistic personality. Olsen came onto my radar with 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, and while that album often had me reaching for comparisons with other artists—a bit of Linda Ronstadt here, a bit of Leonard Cohen by way of Hope Sandoval there—her influences are relegated to the margins on My Woman. (I’m reminded of the leap Tori Amos made from Little Earthquakes to Under the Pink, less a question of quality than of finding oneself musically, although Amos and Olsen otherwise have little in common as writers or performers.) The first half is all compact pop songs, mostly about love and longing, that would have fit nicely on Olsen’s last album, but the second side is something else entirely, a series of slow, spacious, semi-acoustic reveries with an undeniably spiritual vibe. The highlight is the extraordinary “Sister,” the best song by Olsen and maybe by anyone this year, an eight-minute interior epic about the hard-won peace that comes from learning how to feel comfortable in one’s own skin. Olsen may still be figuring out herself and life, but she is ready for her blessings. (“Sister” “Those Were the Days”)
5. Car Seat Headrest—Teens of Denial
It’s fitting that this indie rock epic from Will Toledo & Co. was released on Matador, as much of the music here can be traced back to onetime label stalwarts like Pavement and Guided by Voices, as well as nerd-rock godfathers The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Teens of Denial tells a more or less coherent story about a kid named Joe who gets kicked out of school for doing drugs with friends and has to figure out how to deal with the emotional demands of life—or at least how to not get drunk every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and why not Sunday. Toledo demonstrates a strong command of pop song form on early tracks like “Fill in the Blank” and “Destroyed by Hippie Powers” before stretching out on “Cosmic Hero” and “The Ballad of Costa Concordia,” which run a combined 20 minutes and bring the album’s musical and narrative drama to a head. This is the rare 2010s album on which the lyrics are the real star: Teens of Denial has some of the funniest lines of the year (“So there I was, just another shitbag civilian/Afraid of the cops when I was outside/Afraid of my friends when I was inside”), as well as the best song about drunk driving ever. (“Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” “Vincent”)
6. Tim Hecker—Love Streams
The eighth solo album from Canadian maestro Tim Hecker is notable as his first to make use of vocals, although he hasn’t exactly gone pop. Hecker enlisted the Icelandic Choir Ensemble to sing nonsense words then used Auto-Tune to distort the resulting recordings. The effect of this mashup of early-modern and hip-hop aesthetics is of hearing a remixed centuries-old liturgy sung in an alien tongue. The presence of vocals and relative absence of sudden squalls of noise (the latter would be playing to the base for Hecker) make this a bit of a departure, but Love Streams is methodologically consistent with his previous work, appropriately so for this most theoretical of artists. Hecker manipulates the choral vocals like any other acoustic instrument, mercilessly subjecting organic sounds to the ravages of technology. (“Music of the Air” “Violet Monumental I”)
7. Elza Soares—The Woman at the End of the World
Some of the most original music of the year can be found on this remarkable album from 79-year-old samba singer Elza Soares. Made in collaboration with producer Guilherme Kastrup and a group of musicians mostly decades younger than Soares, The Woman at the End of the World is a decidedly experimental take on the genre. I must admit that I’d never heard of Soares prior to this album and know next to nothing about samba, so I’m unable to comment on the provenance of most of the music here, although there are elements of funk, rock, and Afro-pop, among other genres. The overall aesthetic reminds me of art-punk groups like Gang of Four or Public Image Ltd. as much as anything else. Soares grew up poor and black in mid-century Brazil, finding fame by winning a talent show as a teenager, and the album’s lyrics largely center on the struggles of marginalized peoples in Brazil, featuring characters such as a vengeful domestic violence victim and a well-endowed trans woman, with darker themes of death and apocalypse lurking beneath. The CD release includes English translations of the Portuguese lyrics, which are invaluable, but it’s Soares’s indomitable rasp and the utterly sui generis music here that landed this one on the list. (“A Mulher do Fim do Mundo” “Solto”)
8. Run the Jewels—RTJ3
Released as a free download on Christmas Eve, the third album from the duo of Killer Mike and El-P is less immediate but more sonically adventurous than its predecessors. Depending on how 2017 shakes out, I may end up wishing I’d saved this one for next year’s list but after consulting the precedent of D’Angelo v. Pitchfork (2014) I decided it had to count for 2016. Unapologetically old school, Run the Jewels frequently go to the tag-team style that peaked back in the days when rap was still mostly a group phenomenon (there’s even a song about Ticketron!). The lyrics, however, are very much of the present, with Mike occasionally referencing his recent political activism on behalf of the black community and the Bernie Sanders campaign, which included some high-profile media appearances (“The evening news giving yous views/Telling you to pick your master for president/Been behind the curtain seen the devil workin’/Came back with some evidence”). El-P’s dense, layered production captures the feel of the walls closing in on America, yet RTJ3 is an energetic, even optimistic album, particularly if your definition of optimism encompasses a vision of police-shooting victims returning from the dead to take their revenge. (“A Report to the Shareholders/Kill Your Masters” “Talk to Me”)
9. Parquet Courts—Human Performance
After the mild disappointment of 2014’s Sunbathing Animal, the Brooklyn band returns with its best album to date, achieving a seamless blend of the classic rock and indie rock traditions. Singer and primary songwriter Andrew Savage hasn’t been above some hipsterish smirking in the past, but here he shows a new vulnerability on songs like “Keep It Even” and the devastating title track, even as the stone-faced Krautrock of “One Man No City” reassures us that there’s still a place for ironic detachment. The album sounds terrific too, with tracks like the opening “Dust” and the muscular “Paraphrased” popping out of even the cheapest speakers. (“Human Performance” “Berlin Got Blurry”)
10. Frank Ocean—Blond
This is the one I’ll wish I’d either ranked in the top five or left off the list entirely by this time next year. Ocean’s second official album (not counting Nostalgia, Ultra, which was a mixtape) scans as a welcome left turn from his excellent 2012 breakthrough Channel Orange. It’s much less pop-oriented, with some tracks feeling more like sketches than finished songs. At times the languorous feel of the album is like a drug haze, or like lazily staring out a car window at the world rolling by. Sometimes it works, with tracks like “Skyline To” evoking the evanescence of summer, youth, and time itself. It’s undeniably an aesthetic progression from his previous work, and yet…there’s something off-putting here I can’t quite put my finger on. Like Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Blond trades a little too much on the push-pull between celebrity guardedness and forced intimacy, although Ocean is wise enough to tone it down. (He’s too sensitive to ever write anything as execrable as “I Love Kanye” and too tasteful to release it even if he did.) But the real problem runs deeper, a sense of the unbearable lightness of being that strikes me as what the kids call #problematic. (“Nights” “Skyline To”)
Six runners-up (in alphabetical order)
For the first time, I’ve expanded the runners-up list from five to six, because rules are arbitrary and need to be broken sometimes. Also, it was an exceptionally good year for music and I didn’t feel like cutting any of these.
PJ Harvey—The Hope Six Demolition Project
After radically changing direction with 2011’s Mercury Prize–winning Let England Shake, PJ Harvey follows it up with an album that’s both similar and radically different, another formalized look at war and politics that replaces World War I with the new world order and eloquent poetry with blunt, journalistic observation. The embrace of ugliness as an aesthetic, perhaps inevitably, yields mixed results, and Harvey at times struggles to find an adequate sonic language for her ideas. Many people did not like this album, and indeed it was responsible for the single worst piece of music criticism I read last year. But even with its flaws, The Hope Six Demolition Project is a much-needed boot to the face of respectability politics and its defenders, summing up the political frustrations of the past year as well as anything I’ve seen or heard. At its best, it’s the sound of the world breaking. (“The Ministry of Defence” “A Line in the Sand”)
Huerco S.—For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
The second album from Brooklyn producer Brian Leeds could be described as “experimental ambient” or “abstract techno” or perhaps in terms of other subgenres so hip that I don’t even know their names. It’s easy to get lost in the spaced-out textures, but For Those of You Who Have Never rewards close listening as well, with tracks like “Lifeblood (Naïve Melody)” using reverb to create rhythm in the absence of beats. (“A Sea of Love” “Promises of Fertility”)
Bob Mould—Patch the Sky
The latest from the postpunk legend caps a terrific three-album run, beginning with Silver Age (2012) and continuing with the slept-on Beauty & Ruin (2014), that represents the peak of Mould’s long career as a solo artist and comes within shouting distance of his best work with Hüsker Dü and Sugar. Tracks like the buzzing opener “Voices in My Head” signal that Mould hasn’t entirely left his electronica adventures behind, but any sonic flourishes are placed firmly in the service of the hard power pop that he does best. (“The End of Things” “Losing Sleep”)
Margo Price—Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
This solo debut from 33-year-old Margo Price, self-financed before being picked up by Jack White’s Third Man Records, brims with a quiet confidence born of professionalism and of having waited for the chance to do things on her own terms. A versatile lyricist and restrained vocalist, Price has made me a believer in the trad country revival. (“About to Find Out” “Hands of Time”)
Solange—A Seat at the Table
As on To Pimp a Butterfly, the FUBU ethic rules the day on Solange’s carefully considered, occasionally perturbed, and always dignified third album. Most of the R&B tracks and spoken-word interludes here are firmly rooted in the specifics of being black in America in 2016. But the best song here is as universal as they come. (“Cranes in the Sky” “Mad”)
White Lung—Paradise
Clocking in at over 28 minutes, Paradise is the longest album yet from the Vancouver-based postpunk quartet. In addition to their admirable commitment to brevity, White Lung offers a welcome musical and ideological flexibility on this album. Soaring power ballads “Below” and “Hungry” bust the band out of the punk straitjacket, while singer Mish Barber-Way chafes at the boundaries of feminism on songs like the riches-to-rags “Kiss Me When I Bleed” and the marital-blissful “Paradise.” (“Kiss Me When I Bleed” “Below”)
28 February 2016
Here We Go Again
Last year after the Golden Globes got our hopes up by handing out top awards to the likes of Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences instead chose to shine the beams of its approval on Birdman, a cynical and gimmicky showbusiness comedy from director Alejandro González Iñárritu. One year later, following a second consecutive win at the Directors Guild of America, Iñárritu is poised to become the first director in 65 years to win consecutive Best Director awards. His latest empty spectacle, The Revenant, which leads the way with 12 nominations, is also a slight favorite to win Best Picture. So already we're not off to a great start. Fortunately I have nowhere to go but up after last year’s predictions trainwreck, but we shan’t linger on that.
This year’s awards have also been overshadowed by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, which has reignited some long-simmering discussions about the slow progress of nonwhite filmmakers in Hollywood. Complaints about the nominations are fine as far as they go, but the truly discouraging reality is that only two films with a primarily nonwhite cast were even in the running: Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spinoff Creed and F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. (Each received one Oscar nomination, the first for Sylvester Stallone and the latter for its white screenwriters.) The dearth of Oscar-type movies starring and directed by nonwhite filmmakers has the additional negative effect of making the conversation around the few exceptions more fraught, unfairly burdening the likes of Selma and 12 Years a Slave with a lot symbolic baggage. So while changes to the Academy voting membership and rules should help with the nominations, the greater problem lies with the industry at large. Tonight’s host, Chris Rock, penned a thoughtful article on this very subject for The Hollywood Reporter about a year ago. We’ll see what he has to say from the stage Sunday night.
Tonight’s show should be more interesting than last year’s dud for at least a couple reasons. First, Rock will certainly be funnier than Neil Patrick Harris, who appeared to buckle under the pressure of hosting the Oscars last year. Second, there should be some suspense as to the identity of tonight’s Best Picture winner right up to the announcement of the big prize, with three of the eight nominated films having a real shot at winning. This year continues the generally upward trend in the quality of Best Picture nominees over the past decade or so. With a couple exceptions, it’s a mostly averagish slate, but there’s nothing I hate this year. The worst of the bunch is The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio grunts and wheezes his way through a skeletal revenge story against the snow-covered backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, beautifully rendered by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The movie is entirely ridiculous, but it’s worth seeing if you’re a fan of watching either 1) wintry mountain landscapes or 2) people getting stabbed, speared, impaled, disemboweled, slashed with machetes, or shot with arrows. Otherwise you can skip it.
If The Revenant doesn’t take the top prize, it will almost surely go to either Spotlight or The Big Short. Set in Boston in the early 2000s, Spotlight follows a group of Boston Globe reporters over the course of a yearlong investigation into the Catholic Church’s coverup of sexual abuse claims against dozens of priests. Written and performed with the same quiet competence displayed by its characters, Spotlight is a solid, respectable, and somewhat overfamiliar drama whose reputation has been slightly inflated by journalists, presumably drawn to its highly flattering view of their profession. Even judged merely as a prestige picture, the movie lacks a suitably dramatic climax. Indeed, aside from a brilliantly subtle performance from Liev Schreiber as the Globe’s editor, there’s nothing remarkable about Spotlight at all. Still, it’s a movie that almost no one dislikes, which could be enough to put it over the top.
A better choice would be The Big Short. Directed by frequent Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, the ensemble comedy follows the paths of several investors who bet against the housing market in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Based on a novel by Michael Lewis, McKay’s terrific screenplay distills the complexities of the eventual meltdown into easily understandable bits without condescending to the viewer, effectively deploying YouTube-like bits featuring guests ranging from actress Margot Robbie to economist Robert Thaler that interrupt the narrative to explain relevant bits of financial jargon. The ensemble cast is terrific, with Christian Bale and Steve Carell giving two of the year's best performances. The Big Short is the funniest movie of the year, the most infuriating, and maybe the timeliest.
Among the likely also-rans, the clear standout in terms of both quality and Oscar attention is Mad Max: Fury Road, which scored 10 nominations George Miller’s careening post-apocalyptic road epic stars Charlize Theron as the indomitable Furiosa and the suddenly ubiquitous Tom Hardy as the title character, who’s mostly just along for the ride. Theron was sadly, if predictably, overlooked in the Best Actress category, but the movie’s distinctive look should snag it a well-deserved Oscar for Production Design and a shocker Best Director triumph for Miller isn’t out of the question. Already well on its way to iconic status, Fury Road allows the action sequences to drive the story instead of the more conventional use of story as a vehicle for action. I suppose it’s technically a franchise movie, but you’re unlikely to notice or care.
Also nominated are a pair of pleasant dramas set in the postwar era, old-fashioned in mostly the best ways: Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks as a lawyer who finds himself running around on the wrong side of the emerging Berlin Wall, and the Nick Hornby-scripted Brooklyn, directed by John Crowley and built on a spirited perfomrance from Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York. And rounding out the field are Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, an effectively high-concept mystery-thriller for its first half that moves into more conventional territory in its second hour, and Ridley Scott’s The Martian, a space rescue movie that appears to be set in a parallel universe where everyone on Earth is a supergenius.
While Best Picture is up for grabs, this feels like a relatively easy predictions year, with strong favorites across the board. Costume Design is a bit tricky, with the double-nominated Sandy Powell (Carol and Cinderella) going up against Fury Road. The two sound categories should be closely contested between Fury Road and The Revenant, and one of the two could upset The Force Awakens in the Visual Effects category. And of course there’s the usual fun with the shorts. Stay tuned for my own Top 10 films of the year after the predictions below.
Best Picture
Following Iñárritu’s DGA win, many prognosticators are picking The Revenant to win Best Picture as well as Director, and it may well do so, if only on the principle that the Academy will always choose the worst of the frontrunners. One possible factor working against it is the Academy’s preferential balloting system for Best Picture. Rather than voting for one film, Academy members are asked to rank the Best Picture winners on their ballots. I’m not going to get in to the details of the tabulation system here, but the upshot is that movies can boost their chances of winning by placing second or third on voters' ballots. The theory is that this might put a comparatively divisive film like The Revenant at a disadvantage compared to Spotlight or The Big Short, which fewer people seemed to dislike. The only other awards group that uses a preferential ballot is the Producers Guild of America, which gave its top prize to . . . The Big Short! In the six years since the Academy went to this balloting system, the PGA winner has matched Best Picture each time.
Will win: The Big Short
Should win: The Big Short
Best Director
John Ford and Joseph Mankiewicz are the only directors to win consecutive Best Director Oscars, with Ford winning the second and third of his record four statuettes for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley (1940-41) and Mankiewicz winning for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve (1949-50). Making Iñárritu the third member of this group seems about as apt as putting Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore, but clearly we live in strange times. A win for McKay or Spotlight's Tom McCarthy here virtually guarantees his film will win Best Picture as well.
W: Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant
S: Adam McKay, The Big Short
Best Actress
This is a stronger group of nominees than usual and better than the Best Actor field. I’d give the edge to Cate Blanchett’s poised, withholding performance as a bourgeois lesbian housewife in 1950s New York who runs away with a younger woman (Rooney Mara) in Todd Haynes’s deeply moving Carol. The film somehow got six nominations without scoring nods for either Best Picture or its director. It would have been nice to see the Academy finally recognize Haynes, who’s been one of the most interesting American filmmakers of the past 25 years. Carol would have been a better choice in both categories than, say, Room, for which Brie Larson will almost certainly win here for her taut portrayal of an embattled mother.
W: Brie Larson, Room
S: Cate Blanchett, Carol
Best Actor
DiCaprio will win his first Oscar at age 41 for playing a paper-thin character in an absurd movie. The role seems perversely designed to eliminate every attribute that makes DiCaprio interesting as a screen actor, but he did eat raw bison liver and fight a bear and stuff, so there's that to consider too. DiCaprio should have won two years ago for The Wolf of Wall Street. But that’s how the Oscars have always been. Actors usually win for the wrong movie.
W: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
S: Matt Damon, The Martian
Best Supporting Actor
This will most likely go to Sylvester Stallone for Creed, which I regrettably have not yet seen. Stallone is the shakiest of the four acting favorites for a couple reasons: 1) He was not nominated at the Screen Actors Guild Award, which then went to Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation (who was not nominated for the Oscar), and 2) As the only nominee from Creed, it’s unclear whether the #OscarsSoWhite controversy helps or hurts him. If there’s an upset, I suspect it will come from Mark Rylance for his quiet portrayal of a Soviet agent in Bridge of Spies, although any of the five nominees could win here. I would like to have seen Schreiber nominated instead of Mark Ruffalo for Spotlight, and Steve Carell for The Big Short instead of Tom Hardy or possibly Stallone.
W: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
S: Christian Bale, The Big Short
Best Supporting Actress
As with Supporting Actor, this is likely to go to the only performance I haven’t seen, Alicia Vikander’s in The Danish Girl, which along with her turn as a humanoid AI in Ex Machina made 2015 a breakout year for the 26-year-old Swedish actress. Mara is essentially a co-lead in Carol and Kate Winslet gets tons of screen time as the great man’s invaluable assistant in Steve Jobs. Either could pull off the upset, but I’ll stick with the favorite here.
W: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
S: Rooney Mara, Carol
Screenplay, Original
W: Spotlight
S: Bridge of Spies
Screenplay, Adapted
W: The Big Short
S: The Big Short
Animated Feature
W: Inside Out
Documentary Feature
W: Amy
Foreign Language Film
W: Son of Saul
Cinematography
W: The Revenant
S: The Revenant
Production Design
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Editing
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: The Big Short
Visual Effects
W: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Costume Design
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Makeup and Hair
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Sound Mixing
W: The Revenant
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Sound Editing
W: The Revenant
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Original Score
W: The Hateful Eight
S: Carol
Original Song
W: “Til It Happens to You,” The Hunting Ground
Animated Short
W: Bear Story
Live Action Short
W: Shok
Documentary Short
W: Body Team 12
And here are my Top 10 films of 2015. I can’t remember a year where I felt less strongly about the order. Perhaps I have rankings fatigue. I'm working on trying to have fewer opinions in general. Anyway, the first three films were clearly my favorites of the year, although there wasn’t much separation among them, and the titles from No. 4 on could be listed in pretty much any order.
1. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
The world’s greatest living director (non-JLG division) returns after a seven-year absence with another masterwork. Set in ninth-century China during the latter years of the Tang dynasty, The Assassin is both a painstaking historical reconstruction and a work of visionary formalism. The Assassin is a martial arts movie in more or less the same sense that Andrei Rublev is a biopic, with conventional generic expectations taking a backseat to its director’s formal and spiritual concerns. At 68, Hou remains a cinematic master, his deft blocking and camera placement allowing shots and scenes to develop at their own pace in rapturous confluences of color and light without ever seeming to strain for effect.
2. The Big Short (Adam McKay, U.S.)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, Australia)
4. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany)
This melancholy thriller from German director Christian Petzold transplants Hitchcock’s Vertigo to postwar Berlin. Nina Hoss stars in one of the year's best performances, as a concentration camp survivor looking for the husband who may have betrayed her. Compact, suspenseful, and multi-layered, Phoenix ultimately proves to be a worthy variation on the film that inspired it.
5. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)
Somewhere along the way Bruno Dumont developed a sense of humor to go along with his relentless pessimism about humanité, and the result is the best film of his career. Originally a four-part miniseries made for French TV, Li’l Quinquin is nominally a murder mystery set in a small seaside town, where a pair of bumbling policemen attempt to get to the bottom of a series of brutal killings. At heart, it’s a comedy about the breakdown of social relations and utter ineptitude of authority not altogether different in spirit from Dumont’s earlier work, even if it’s a lot more fun to watch.
6. Heaven Knows What (Ben and Joshua Safdie, U.S.)
One of the most visually daring films of the year, this raw and intimate portrayal of a loosely connected group of junkies on the streets of New York City finds the humanity in some of society's most despised, vulnerable, and often invisible members.
7. Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Using a variety of narrative styles and visual techniques over three parts, nine sections, and 381 minutes, director Miguel Gomes weaves together a tapestry of life under austerity in contemporary Portugal. The film borrows its structure and some of its narrative techniques from the collection of medieval-era tales, but the problems of its characters are all too contemporary.
8. Carol (Todd Haynes, U.S.)
9. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania)
The ill winds of jihadism blow into a small Malian village, disrupting the lives of a cattle herder and his family. Despite its sometimes violent subject matter, Timbuktu is an oddly placid film, the camera often lingering on still shots of human faces and desert landscapes
10. The Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France)
A middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant (shoulda-been Best Supporting Actress frontrunner Kristen Stewart) talk about art and life in the latest from the great Olivier Assayas. As with many of his films, it’s very much in the spirit of the nouvelle vague.
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, U.S.); The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, U.S.); The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid, Israel); Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, Canada); Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, U.S.)
This year’s awards have also been overshadowed by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, which has reignited some long-simmering discussions about the slow progress of nonwhite filmmakers in Hollywood. Complaints about the nominations are fine as far as they go, but the truly discouraging reality is that only two films with a primarily nonwhite cast were even in the running: Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spinoff Creed and F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. (Each received one Oscar nomination, the first for Sylvester Stallone and the latter for its white screenwriters.) The dearth of Oscar-type movies starring and directed by nonwhite filmmakers has the additional negative effect of making the conversation around the few exceptions more fraught, unfairly burdening the likes of Selma and 12 Years a Slave with a lot symbolic baggage. So while changes to the Academy voting membership and rules should help with the nominations, the greater problem lies with the industry at large. Tonight’s host, Chris Rock, penned a thoughtful article on this very subject for The Hollywood Reporter about a year ago. We’ll see what he has to say from the stage Sunday night.
Tonight’s show should be more interesting than last year’s dud for at least a couple reasons. First, Rock will certainly be funnier than Neil Patrick Harris, who appeared to buckle under the pressure of hosting the Oscars last year. Second, there should be some suspense as to the identity of tonight’s Best Picture winner right up to the announcement of the big prize, with three of the eight nominated films having a real shot at winning. This year continues the generally upward trend in the quality of Best Picture nominees over the past decade or so. With a couple exceptions, it’s a mostly averagish slate, but there’s nothing I hate this year. The worst of the bunch is The Revenant, in which Leonardo DiCaprio grunts and wheezes his way through a skeletal revenge story against the snow-covered backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, beautifully rendered by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The movie is entirely ridiculous, but it’s worth seeing if you’re a fan of watching either 1) wintry mountain landscapes or 2) people getting stabbed, speared, impaled, disemboweled, slashed with machetes, or shot with arrows. Otherwise you can skip it.
If The Revenant doesn’t take the top prize, it will almost surely go to either Spotlight or The Big Short. Set in Boston in the early 2000s, Spotlight follows a group of Boston Globe reporters over the course of a yearlong investigation into the Catholic Church’s coverup of sexual abuse claims against dozens of priests. Written and performed with the same quiet competence displayed by its characters, Spotlight is a solid, respectable, and somewhat overfamiliar drama whose reputation has been slightly inflated by journalists, presumably drawn to its highly flattering view of their profession. Even judged merely as a prestige picture, the movie lacks a suitably dramatic climax. Indeed, aside from a brilliantly subtle performance from Liev Schreiber as the Globe’s editor, there’s nothing remarkable about Spotlight at all. Still, it’s a movie that almost no one dislikes, which could be enough to put it over the top.
A better choice would be The Big Short. Directed by frequent Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, the ensemble comedy follows the paths of several investors who bet against the housing market in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Based on a novel by Michael Lewis, McKay’s terrific screenplay distills the complexities of the eventual meltdown into easily understandable bits without condescending to the viewer, effectively deploying YouTube-like bits featuring guests ranging from actress Margot Robbie to economist Robert Thaler that interrupt the narrative to explain relevant bits of financial jargon. The ensemble cast is terrific, with Christian Bale and Steve Carell giving two of the year's best performances. The Big Short is the funniest movie of the year, the most infuriating, and maybe the timeliest.
Among the likely also-rans, the clear standout in terms of both quality and Oscar attention is Mad Max: Fury Road, which scored 10 nominations George Miller’s careening post-apocalyptic road epic stars Charlize Theron as the indomitable Furiosa and the suddenly ubiquitous Tom Hardy as the title character, who’s mostly just along for the ride. Theron was sadly, if predictably, overlooked in the Best Actress category, but the movie’s distinctive look should snag it a well-deserved Oscar for Production Design and a shocker Best Director triumph for Miller isn’t out of the question. Already well on its way to iconic status, Fury Road allows the action sequences to drive the story instead of the more conventional use of story as a vehicle for action. I suppose it’s technically a franchise movie, but you’re unlikely to notice or care.
Also nominated are a pair of pleasant dramas set in the postwar era, old-fashioned in mostly the best ways: Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, starring Tom Hanks as a lawyer who finds himself running around on the wrong side of the emerging Berlin Wall, and the Nick Hornby-scripted Brooklyn, directed by John Crowley and built on a spirited perfomrance from Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York. And rounding out the field are Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, an effectively high-concept mystery-thriller for its first half that moves into more conventional territory in its second hour, and Ridley Scott’s The Martian, a space rescue movie that appears to be set in a parallel universe where everyone on Earth is a supergenius.
While Best Picture is up for grabs, this feels like a relatively easy predictions year, with strong favorites across the board. Costume Design is a bit tricky, with the double-nominated Sandy Powell (Carol and Cinderella) going up against Fury Road. The two sound categories should be closely contested between Fury Road and The Revenant, and one of the two could upset The Force Awakens in the Visual Effects category. And of course there’s the usual fun with the shorts. Stay tuned for my own Top 10 films of the year after the predictions below.
Best Picture
Following Iñárritu’s DGA win, many prognosticators are picking The Revenant to win Best Picture as well as Director, and it may well do so, if only on the principle that the Academy will always choose the worst of the frontrunners. One possible factor working against it is the Academy’s preferential balloting system for Best Picture. Rather than voting for one film, Academy members are asked to rank the Best Picture winners on their ballots. I’m not going to get in to the details of the tabulation system here, but the upshot is that movies can boost their chances of winning by placing second or third on voters' ballots. The theory is that this might put a comparatively divisive film like The Revenant at a disadvantage compared to Spotlight or The Big Short, which fewer people seemed to dislike. The only other awards group that uses a preferential ballot is the Producers Guild of America, which gave its top prize to . . . The Big Short! In the six years since the Academy went to this balloting system, the PGA winner has matched Best Picture each time.
Will win: The Big Short
Should win: The Big Short
Best Director
John Ford and Joseph Mankiewicz are the only directors to win consecutive Best Director Oscars, with Ford winning the second and third of his record four statuettes for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley (1940-41) and Mankiewicz winning for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve (1949-50). Making Iñárritu the third member of this group seems about as apt as putting Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore, but clearly we live in strange times. A win for McKay or Spotlight's Tom McCarthy here virtually guarantees his film will win Best Picture as well.
W: Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant
S: Adam McKay, The Big Short
Best Actress
This is a stronger group of nominees than usual and better than the Best Actor field. I’d give the edge to Cate Blanchett’s poised, withholding performance as a bourgeois lesbian housewife in 1950s New York who runs away with a younger woman (Rooney Mara) in Todd Haynes’s deeply moving Carol. The film somehow got six nominations without scoring nods for either Best Picture or its director. It would have been nice to see the Academy finally recognize Haynes, who’s been one of the most interesting American filmmakers of the past 25 years. Carol would have been a better choice in both categories than, say, Room, for which Brie Larson will almost certainly win here for her taut portrayal of an embattled mother.
W: Brie Larson, Room
S: Cate Blanchett, Carol
Best Actor
DiCaprio will win his first Oscar at age 41 for playing a paper-thin character in an absurd movie. The role seems perversely designed to eliminate every attribute that makes DiCaprio interesting as a screen actor, but he did eat raw bison liver and fight a bear and stuff, so there's that to consider too. DiCaprio should have won two years ago for The Wolf of Wall Street. But that’s how the Oscars have always been. Actors usually win for the wrong movie.
W: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
S: Matt Damon, The Martian
Best Supporting Actor
This will most likely go to Sylvester Stallone for Creed, which I regrettably have not yet seen. Stallone is the shakiest of the four acting favorites for a couple reasons: 1) He was not nominated at the Screen Actors Guild Award, which then went to Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation (who was not nominated for the Oscar), and 2) As the only nominee from Creed, it’s unclear whether the #OscarsSoWhite controversy helps or hurts him. If there’s an upset, I suspect it will come from Mark Rylance for his quiet portrayal of a Soviet agent in Bridge of Spies, although any of the five nominees could win here. I would like to have seen Schreiber nominated instead of Mark Ruffalo for Spotlight, and Steve Carell for The Big Short instead of Tom Hardy or possibly Stallone.
W: Sylvester Stallone, Creed
S: Christian Bale, The Big Short
Best Supporting Actress
As with Supporting Actor, this is likely to go to the only performance I haven’t seen, Alicia Vikander’s in The Danish Girl, which along with her turn as a humanoid AI in Ex Machina made 2015 a breakout year for the 26-year-old Swedish actress. Mara is essentially a co-lead in Carol and Kate Winslet gets tons of screen time as the great man’s invaluable assistant in Steve Jobs. Either could pull off the upset, but I’ll stick with the favorite here.
W: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
S: Rooney Mara, Carol
Screenplay, Original
W: Spotlight
S: Bridge of Spies
Screenplay, Adapted
W: The Big Short
S: The Big Short
Animated Feature
W: Inside Out
Documentary Feature
W: Amy
Foreign Language Film
W: Son of Saul
Cinematography
W: The Revenant
S: The Revenant
Production Design
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Editing
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: The Big Short
Visual Effects
W: Star Wars: The Force Awakens
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Costume Design
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Makeup and Hair
W: Mad Max: Fury Road
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Sound Mixing
W: The Revenant
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Sound Editing
W: The Revenant
S: Mad Max: Fury Road
Original Score
W: The Hateful Eight
S: Carol
Original Song
W: “Til It Happens to You,” The Hunting Ground
Animated Short
W: Bear Story
Live Action Short
W: Shok
Documentary Short
W: Body Team 12
And here are my Top 10 films of 2015. I can’t remember a year where I felt less strongly about the order. Perhaps I have rankings fatigue. I'm working on trying to have fewer opinions in general. Anyway, the first three films were clearly my favorites of the year, although there wasn’t much separation among them, and the titles from No. 4 on could be listed in pretty much any order.
1. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan)
The world’s greatest living director (non-JLG division) returns after a seven-year absence with another masterwork. Set in ninth-century China during the latter years of the Tang dynasty, The Assassin is both a painstaking historical reconstruction and a work of visionary formalism. The Assassin is a martial arts movie in more or less the same sense that Andrei Rublev is a biopic, with conventional generic expectations taking a backseat to its director’s formal and spiritual concerns. At 68, Hou remains a cinematic master, his deft blocking and camera placement allowing shots and scenes to develop at their own pace in rapturous confluences of color and light without ever seeming to strain for effect.
2. The Big Short (Adam McKay, U.S.)
3. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, Australia)
4. Phoenix (Christian Petzold, Germany)
This melancholy thriller from German director Christian Petzold transplants Hitchcock’s Vertigo to postwar Berlin. Nina Hoss stars in one of the year's best performances, as a concentration camp survivor looking for the husband who may have betrayed her. Compact, suspenseful, and multi-layered, Phoenix ultimately proves to be a worthy variation on the film that inspired it.
5. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)
Somewhere along the way Bruno Dumont developed a sense of humor to go along with his relentless pessimism about humanité, and the result is the best film of his career. Originally a four-part miniseries made for French TV, Li’l Quinquin is nominally a murder mystery set in a small seaside town, where a pair of bumbling policemen attempt to get to the bottom of a series of brutal killings. At heart, it’s a comedy about the breakdown of social relations and utter ineptitude of authority not altogether different in spirit from Dumont’s earlier work, even if it’s a lot more fun to watch.
6. Heaven Knows What (Ben and Joshua Safdie, U.S.)
One of the most visually daring films of the year, this raw and intimate portrayal of a loosely connected group of junkies on the streets of New York City finds the humanity in some of society's most despised, vulnerable, and often invisible members.
7. Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Using a variety of narrative styles and visual techniques over three parts, nine sections, and 381 minutes, director Miguel Gomes weaves together a tapestry of life under austerity in contemporary Portugal. The film borrows its structure and some of its narrative techniques from the collection of medieval-era tales, but the problems of its characters are all too contemporary.
8. Carol (Todd Haynes, U.S.)
9. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania)
The ill winds of jihadism blow into a small Malian village, disrupting the lives of a cattle herder and his family. Despite its sometimes violent subject matter, Timbuktu is an oddly placid film, the camera often lingering on still shots of human faces and desert landscapes
10. The Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France)
A middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant (shoulda-been Best Supporting Actress frontrunner Kristen Stewart) talk about art and life in the latest from the great Olivier Assayas. As with many of his films, it’s very much in the spirit of the nouvelle vague.
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, U.S.); The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, U.S.); The Kindergarten Teacher (Nadav Lapid, Israel); Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, Canada); Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, U.S.)
20 January 2016
Best Music of 2015
Hello again. I didn’t blog very often last year. I think I will blog more often this year, although I’m not making any promises. But here we are again. It's time for me to do a blog post with a list of my favorite albums of the year. These lists are intended as nothing more definitive than my own personal take on the year in music, committed to the interwebs as much for the purpose of closing the book mentally on another year as for public consumption (although I’m glad you’re reading—really!). This one feels more personalized than usual. I've been thinking a lot about the winnowing that happens in one’s thirties: Simply put, I care about fewer things now, while desiring a deeper engagement with the things I do care about.
Unfortunately, the category of things I no longer care about includes a fair amount of the most-discussed music of 2015 and—perhaps more to the point—nearly all of the discussion itself. Much as the internet increasingly seems to speak with one voice, the year’s musical output seemed to converge into a formless electropop blob, the ongoing fixation with rearranging conceptual and musical ideas from the 1980s now having lasted nearly as long as the decade itself. Call it decadence, call it the hyperreal, but please call it something. In that sense, the album of the year was Tame Impala’s Currents, a cynical attempt to capitalize on this tendency ironically disguised as an artistic evolution.
Most of the albums listed below have a more oblique relationship to the present moment, some retreating into musical languages of the past to create a sense of isolation or temporal suspension, others finding formal equivalents to contemporary modes of experiencing reality. The first three in particular, otherwise having very little in common, all require a considerable amount of time and effort from the listener.
But before we get to the list, a word on David Bowie. The outpouring of tributes over the past several days have highlighted the many important dimensions of Bowie’s life and musical career, most of which won’t be touched on here. For me, one of his greatest contributions was his demolition of the ethos of authenticity in rock and roll. This was partially effected by the use of characters like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, the antithesis of the confessional singer-songwriter ethic that was commercially dominant for much of the ’70s. But just as important was his omnivorous approach to musical forms, what is often referred to as his “chameleon-like” tendency. It’s easy to forget that this adjective was more often a put-down than a term of praise in contemporary reviews of Bowie’s music. His genre-hopping, ranging from eclectic traditional pop to glam rock to prog to plastic soul to icy art pop in the ’70s alone, and later encompassing techno, industrial, and Scott Walker-style crooning, was viewed as suspicious, a mark of soulless inauthenticity. Now of course, this eclecticism is seen as evidence of Bowie’s prolific conceptual genius, essential to his singular impact on popular music and culture. As ever, the true greats change the rules and make the world’s first impressions of them obsolete.
Aside from revisiting some of the music discussed below for writing inspiration, I was listening to Bowie nearly the whole time I spent writing this. I can’t remember such a binge having so greatly enhanced my appreciation of an artist whom I thought I knew pretty well. Much of this has to do with Bowie’s terrific new album. But we can talk about that one a year from now.
1. Kendrick Lamar—To Pimp a Butterfly
The crucial thing to understand about this album is that its implied audience is black. Not that we white folks aren’t welcome to listen in, of course, but we shouldn’t expect any of the music or lyrics here to be tailored to the finer points of our political and cultural sensibilities. This is important to remember when thinking about the N-word riff at the end of “i” or the encounter with the homeless man on “How Much a Dollar Cost” or even the simple notion that we gonna be “Alright.” Kendrick’s comprehensive view of Black America encompasses everyone from that homeless guy to Obama himself, the street gospel of “Alright” sitting alongside the feral rage of “The Blacker the Berry” to render To Pimp a Butterfly resistant to any reductive political descriptors.
Musically, To Pimp a Butterfly is a conscious attempt to create a masterpiece that transcends hip-hop, with Kendrick instead placing himself within the broader black musical tradition. George Clinton shows up on the opener, and the whole album has both the sound and the musical freedom of 1960s jazz. More complex is Kendrick’s relationship with his hip-hop forebears. The straight-up G-funk of “King Kunta” is a nod to Dr. Dre, even as the literal appearances of Dre via voicemail on the opening “Wesley’s Theory” and Tupac Shakur in the extended “interview” that concludes the album are a bit harder to interpret. When Tupac suggests that black people are ready to take up arms against their oppressors, Kendrick responds by pivoting to the stirring testament to the transformative power of art that concludes the album. We're left waiting for ’Pac's response. (“Alright” “The Blacker the Berry”)
2. Deafheaven—New Bermuda
Perhaps inspired by complaints that their 2013 breakthrough Sunbather wasn’t metal enough, Deafheaven returned with their heaviest music to date. New Bermuda is less the Difficult Third Album than a roots move. That it was perceived as the former is evidenced by its relative lack of prominence on year-end lists and reader polls, despite its musical superiority to its predecessor. Seeing the band live in late October, it was evident that the new material is simply on a different level of intensity. Leadoff track “Brought to the Water” is typical in its structure. After a portentous buildup featuring church bells, the song breaks into full-on thrash before singer George Clarke comes in, roaring through the verses while a wall of guitar noise swells around him (Clarke’s black-metal rasp is mixed a bit higher than on Sunbather—another barrier for many non-metalheads.) Just past the halfway point, the song switches gears entirely, as if we’ve reached the top of the mountain and are looking out on some new vista. A descending guitar chime takes over as the song moves closer to the shoegazer territory familiar from Sunbather, before alighting on a soft piano figure. The remaining songs mostly follow suit, starting off heavy, reaching up toward some ecstatic electric guitar epiphany, and ending somewhere else altogether. The big exception is the closer “Gifts for the Earth,” which rages against the dying of the light via a propulsive ’90s rock riff. Just in case you thought they’d gone soft. (“Brought to the Water” “Come Back”)
3. Joanna Newsom—Divers
This 52-minute song cycle about space and time, love and death, might actually be Newsom’s most easily digestible album to date. The singularity of her style—crudely approximated as baroque chamber music blended with the American folk tradition and seasoned with pinches of rock-era spice—can obscure the amount of musical ground Newsom covers. “Sapokanikan” morphs fluidly from an easy, jazzy amble to its choral crescendo, while “Leaving the City” nearly rocks. Newsom’s subtle command of dynamics maintains a sense of drama throughout, while her lyrics are tricked out with allusions to history and literature, ripples that may obscure as much as they reveal about the underlying currents of the songs. Like the ocean itself, Divers retains its mysteries no matter how often one plumbs its depths. (“Leaving the City” “Divers”)
4. Kurt Vile—B’lieve I’m Goin Down…
Kurt Vile has it all figured out. He just wants to play his music, hang out with his family, and, um…I forget what else. Still, B’lieve I’m Goin Down… adds some dark shadings to its idealized portrait of domestic life. The jaunty opener, “Pretty Pimpin,” finds the singer not recognizing his own reflection (although by the end it’s unclear whether the experience is disquieting or liberating) and “That’s Life, Tho (Almost Hate to Say)” finds hints of impending death lurking in the most peaceful of landscapes. Vile doesn’t venture too far outside his wheelhouse here: a few songs could easily be outtakes from his 2013 masterpiece Wakin on a Pretty Daze. But when you’re in this kind of groove, why not ride it out for as long as you can? (“Pretty Pimpin” “Stand Inside”)
5. Viet Cong—Viet Cong
One of two albums this year featuring former members of the essential Calgary band Women (Cindy Lee’s softer, more experimental Act of Tenderness is also worth checking out), Viet Cong supplements that group’s hard-edged Velvets drone with more explicitly postpunk influences. (Joy Division looms large, particularly on the multipart “March of Progress.”) Postpunk is spoken as a dead language here, with guitar distortion, dissonant chords, and chugging industrial rhythms expressing an unbridgeable disconnect between singer Matt Flegel and the outside world; as some have pointed out, it’s the sort of feeling one gets from the extreme cold of a Calgary winter. (“March of Progress” “Continental Shelf”)
6. Courtney Barnett—Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
The first proper full-length from 27-year-old Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes down easily thanks to Barnett’s witty, closely observed lyrics and highly ingratiating persona. It’s all harmless fun, of course, as well as a disarmingly casual portrait of mediated 21st-century consciousness. Riffs on organic vegetables and coral reefs cross the streams of fact, myth, and rumor that we call news. Barnett realizes we’re all implicated, and shrugs. (“Pedestrian at Best” “Dead Fox”)
7. Jason Isbell—Something More Than Free
The onetime Drive-by Trucker follows up his 2013 solo breakthrough Southeastern with this more relaxed, less autobiographical affair. Along with Chris Stapleton’s Traveller, this album shows the artistic and commercial strength of a new strain of Americana that owes at least as much to classic rock as to Nashville. (“24 Frames” “Speed Trap Town”)
8. Jamie xx—In Colour
The first official solo album from Jamie xx relocates the intimate electronica of his band the xx from late night/morning after bedroom confessionals to the dancefloor. Less verbal and more beat-driven than either xx album, In Colour throws in some new wrinkles including a guest appearance from Young Thug. But happily, bandmates Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim stop by too, elevating Jamie to places he still can’t reach without them. (“Loud Places” “Obvs”)
9. Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and the Rajasthan Express—Junun
With Radiohead mostly on hiatus over the past several years, Jonny Greenwood has kept himself busy with various collaborations, movie soundtracks, and other solo compositions. Last spring, Greenwood and Nigel Godrich traveled to India to record an album with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and a group of Indian musicians in a 15th-century fort in the state of Rajasthan. Ben Tzur composes Qawwali (an ecstatic form of Sufi devotional music best known in the West from the work of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) primarily in Hebrew, which gives an idea of the pan-religious spirituality that suffuses his music and lyrics. As for Greenwood, who produced the album and plays several instruments, Junun may be the best musical project he’s been involved in since In Rainbows. (“Kalandar” “Allah Elohim”)
10. Hop Along—Painted Shut
The second album from shambolic Philadelphia indie rockers Hop Along soars on the strength of singer Frances Quinlan’s bleary-eyed tales of people trying to adapt to a world that’s grown “so small and embarrassing” in more ways than one. The low-fi sound and studied sloppiness of the arrangements combine with Quinlan’s mercurial vocal stylings to capture the emotionally tenuous state of characters ensconced on the margins of society. In a world of lowered expectations, the closest thing to paradise anyone here can imagine is a future where we all remember things the same. (“Waitress” “Powerful Man”)
Five runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment—Surf
This one is nearly as interesting for how it was released—a free download exclusive to iTunes—as for the music on it. Given away freely but still corporately released, it feels somewhere between a mixtape and a proper album. Surf is also notable as the second full-length from Chance the Rapper, one of the five official members of this Chicago jazz-soul-rap collective. The best tracks here are easily worthy of Top 10 placement, but repeat listening makes the copious filler hard to ignore. (“Sunday Candy” “Familiar”)
Future—DS2
Atlanta rapper reaches for the full armor of God but settles for Percocet and strippers. (“I Serve the Base” “Blow a Bag”)
Oneohtrix Point Never—Garden of Delete
The only way for Daniel Lopatin to surprise at this point would be to repeat himself. As expected, Garden of Delete marks yet another departure for the Brooklyn electronic musician, with a more abrasive use of sampling and fractured evocations of genres like pop, rock, and R&B. It’s not his best album (I’d stick with 2011’s Replica), but it’s surely his funniest. (“Sticky Drama” “Ezra”)
Sleater-Kinney—No Cities to Love
The mighty Sleater-Kinney return after a decade-long hiatus with an album that would have fit right in with the music they made in their late-’90s/early-’00s heyday. This is both a strength and a weakness. (“A New Wave” “Bury Our Friends”)
Tenement—Predatory Highlights
The third album from this rock trio, who hail from my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, features 25 songs over a whopping 78 minutes. It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but if you respect the double-album structure outlined in the liner notes (yeah, that’s right), Predatory Highlights begins to take shape, with the slower and more exotic excursions of side three providing an ambitious change-of-pace from the hard, crisp powerpop that dominates the proceedings. (“Feral Cat Tribe” “Garden of Secrecy”)
I’ve finally decided to euthanize the “top songs not on those albums” list, which outlived its usefulness years ago. It probably would have been topped this year by “In Time” from FKA Twigs, whose 19-minute EP M3LL155X was good enough (if not long enough) for the Top 10. There was also a Colombian pop song called “Mar (Lo Que Siento)” by Bomba Estéreo that I was briefly obsessed with. So you can check that out too.
Unfortunately, the category of things I no longer care about includes a fair amount of the most-discussed music of 2015 and—perhaps more to the point—nearly all of the discussion itself. Much as the internet increasingly seems to speak with one voice, the year’s musical output seemed to converge into a formless electropop blob, the ongoing fixation with rearranging conceptual and musical ideas from the 1980s now having lasted nearly as long as the decade itself. Call it decadence, call it the hyperreal, but please call it something. In that sense, the album of the year was Tame Impala’s Currents, a cynical attempt to capitalize on this tendency ironically disguised as an artistic evolution.
Most of the albums listed below have a more oblique relationship to the present moment, some retreating into musical languages of the past to create a sense of isolation or temporal suspension, others finding formal equivalents to contemporary modes of experiencing reality. The first three in particular, otherwise having very little in common, all require a considerable amount of time and effort from the listener.
But before we get to the list, a word on David Bowie. The outpouring of tributes over the past several days have highlighted the many important dimensions of Bowie’s life and musical career, most of which won’t be touched on here. For me, one of his greatest contributions was his demolition of the ethos of authenticity in rock and roll. This was partially effected by the use of characters like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, the antithesis of the confessional singer-songwriter ethic that was commercially dominant for much of the ’70s. But just as important was his omnivorous approach to musical forms, what is often referred to as his “chameleon-like” tendency. It’s easy to forget that this adjective was more often a put-down than a term of praise in contemporary reviews of Bowie’s music. His genre-hopping, ranging from eclectic traditional pop to glam rock to prog to plastic soul to icy art pop in the ’70s alone, and later encompassing techno, industrial, and Scott Walker-style crooning, was viewed as suspicious, a mark of soulless inauthenticity. Now of course, this eclecticism is seen as evidence of Bowie’s prolific conceptual genius, essential to his singular impact on popular music and culture. As ever, the true greats change the rules and make the world’s first impressions of them obsolete.
Aside from revisiting some of the music discussed below for writing inspiration, I was listening to Bowie nearly the whole time I spent writing this. I can’t remember such a binge having so greatly enhanced my appreciation of an artist whom I thought I knew pretty well. Much of this has to do with Bowie’s terrific new album. But we can talk about that one a year from now.
1. Kendrick Lamar—To Pimp a Butterfly
The crucial thing to understand about this album is that its implied audience is black. Not that we white folks aren’t welcome to listen in, of course, but we shouldn’t expect any of the music or lyrics here to be tailored to the finer points of our political and cultural sensibilities. This is important to remember when thinking about the N-word riff at the end of “i” or the encounter with the homeless man on “How Much a Dollar Cost” or even the simple notion that we gonna be “Alright.” Kendrick’s comprehensive view of Black America encompasses everyone from that homeless guy to Obama himself, the street gospel of “Alright” sitting alongside the feral rage of “The Blacker the Berry” to render To Pimp a Butterfly resistant to any reductive political descriptors.
Musically, To Pimp a Butterfly is a conscious attempt to create a masterpiece that transcends hip-hop, with Kendrick instead placing himself within the broader black musical tradition. George Clinton shows up on the opener, and the whole album has both the sound and the musical freedom of 1960s jazz. More complex is Kendrick’s relationship with his hip-hop forebears. The straight-up G-funk of “King Kunta” is a nod to Dr. Dre, even as the literal appearances of Dre via voicemail on the opening “Wesley’s Theory” and Tupac Shakur in the extended “interview” that concludes the album are a bit harder to interpret. When Tupac suggests that black people are ready to take up arms against their oppressors, Kendrick responds by pivoting to the stirring testament to the transformative power of art that concludes the album. We're left waiting for ’Pac's response. (“Alright” “The Blacker the Berry”)
2. Deafheaven—New Bermuda
Perhaps inspired by complaints that their 2013 breakthrough Sunbather wasn’t metal enough, Deafheaven returned with their heaviest music to date. New Bermuda is less the Difficult Third Album than a roots move. That it was perceived as the former is evidenced by its relative lack of prominence on year-end lists and reader polls, despite its musical superiority to its predecessor. Seeing the band live in late October, it was evident that the new material is simply on a different level of intensity. Leadoff track “Brought to the Water” is typical in its structure. After a portentous buildup featuring church bells, the song breaks into full-on thrash before singer George Clarke comes in, roaring through the verses while a wall of guitar noise swells around him (Clarke’s black-metal rasp is mixed a bit higher than on Sunbather—another barrier for many non-metalheads.) Just past the halfway point, the song switches gears entirely, as if we’ve reached the top of the mountain and are looking out on some new vista. A descending guitar chime takes over as the song moves closer to the shoegazer territory familiar from Sunbather, before alighting on a soft piano figure. The remaining songs mostly follow suit, starting off heavy, reaching up toward some ecstatic electric guitar epiphany, and ending somewhere else altogether. The big exception is the closer “Gifts for the Earth,” which rages against the dying of the light via a propulsive ’90s rock riff. Just in case you thought they’d gone soft. (“Brought to the Water” “Come Back”)
3. Joanna Newsom—Divers
This 52-minute song cycle about space and time, love and death, might actually be Newsom’s most easily digestible album to date. The singularity of her style—crudely approximated as baroque chamber music blended with the American folk tradition and seasoned with pinches of rock-era spice—can obscure the amount of musical ground Newsom covers. “Sapokanikan” morphs fluidly from an easy, jazzy amble to its choral crescendo, while “Leaving the City” nearly rocks. Newsom’s subtle command of dynamics maintains a sense of drama throughout, while her lyrics are tricked out with allusions to history and literature, ripples that may obscure as much as they reveal about the underlying currents of the songs. Like the ocean itself, Divers retains its mysteries no matter how often one plumbs its depths. (“Leaving the City” “Divers”)
4. Kurt Vile—B’lieve I’m Goin Down…
Kurt Vile has it all figured out. He just wants to play his music, hang out with his family, and, um…I forget what else. Still, B’lieve I’m Goin Down… adds some dark shadings to its idealized portrait of domestic life. The jaunty opener, “Pretty Pimpin,” finds the singer not recognizing his own reflection (although by the end it’s unclear whether the experience is disquieting or liberating) and “That’s Life, Tho (Almost Hate to Say)” finds hints of impending death lurking in the most peaceful of landscapes. Vile doesn’t venture too far outside his wheelhouse here: a few songs could easily be outtakes from his 2013 masterpiece Wakin on a Pretty Daze. But when you’re in this kind of groove, why not ride it out for as long as you can? (“Pretty Pimpin” “Stand Inside”)
5. Viet Cong—Viet Cong
One of two albums this year featuring former members of the essential Calgary band Women (Cindy Lee’s softer, more experimental Act of Tenderness is also worth checking out), Viet Cong supplements that group’s hard-edged Velvets drone with more explicitly postpunk influences. (Joy Division looms large, particularly on the multipart “March of Progress.”) Postpunk is spoken as a dead language here, with guitar distortion, dissonant chords, and chugging industrial rhythms expressing an unbridgeable disconnect between singer Matt Flegel and the outside world; as some have pointed out, it’s the sort of feeling one gets from the extreme cold of a Calgary winter. (“March of Progress” “Continental Shelf”)
6. Courtney Barnett—Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
The first proper full-length from 27-year-old Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes down easily thanks to Barnett’s witty, closely observed lyrics and highly ingratiating persona. It’s all harmless fun, of course, as well as a disarmingly casual portrait of mediated 21st-century consciousness. Riffs on organic vegetables and coral reefs cross the streams of fact, myth, and rumor that we call news. Barnett realizes we’re all implicated, and shrugs. (“Pedestrian at Best” “Dead Fox”)
7. Jason Isbell—Something More Than Free
The onetime Drive-by Trucker follows up his 2013 solo breakthrough Southeastern with this more relaxed, less autobiographical affair. Along with Chris Stapleton’s Traveller, this album shows the artistic and commercial strength of a new strain of Americana that owes at least as much to classic rock as to Nashville. (“24 Frames” “Speed Trap Town”)
8. Jamie xx—In Colour
The first official solo album from Jamie xx relocates the intimate electronica of his band the xx from late night/morning after bedroom confessionals to the dancefloor. Less verbal and more beat-driven than either xx album, In Colour throws in some new wrinkles including a guest appearance from Young Thug. But happily, bandmates Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim stop by too, elevating Jamie to places he still can’t reach without them. (“Loud Places” “Obvs”)
9. Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and the Rajasthan Express—Junun
With Radiohead mostly on hiatus over the past several years, Jonny Greenwood has kept himself busy with various collaborations, movie soundtracks, and other solo compositions. Last spring, Greenwood and Nigel Godrich traveled to India to record an album with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and a group of Indian musicians in a 15th-century fort in the state of Rajasthan. Ben Tzur composes Qawwali (an ecstatic form of Sufi devotional music best known in the West from the work of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) primarily in Hebrew, which gives an idea of the pan-religious spirituality that suffuses his music and lyrics. As for Greenwood, who produced the album and plays several instruments, Junun may be the best musical project he’s been involved in since In Rainbows. (“Kalandar” “Allah Elohim”)
10. Hop Along—Painted Shut
The second album from shambolic Philadelphia indie rockers Hop Along soars on the strength of singer Frances Quinlan’s bleary-eyed tales of people trying to adapt to a world that’s grown “so small and embarrassing” in more ways than one. The low-fi sound and studied sloppiness of the arrangements combine with Quinlan’s mercurial vocal stylings to capture the emotionally tenuous state of characters ensconced on the margins of society. In a world of lowered expectations, the closest thing to paradise anyone here can imagine is a future where we all remember things the same. (“Waitress” “Powerful Man”)
Five runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment—Surf
This one is nearly as interesting for how it was released—a free download exclusive to iTunes—as for the music on it. Given away freely but still corporately released, it feels somewhere between a mixtape and a proper album. Surf is also notable as the second full-length from Chance the Rapper, one of the five official members of this Chicago jazz-soul-rap collective. The best tracks here are easily worthy of Top 10 placement, but repeat listening makes the copious filler hard to ignore. (“Sunday Candy” “Familiar”)
Future—DS2
Atlanta rapper reaches for the full armor of God but settles for Percocet and strippers. (“I Serve the Base” “Blow a Bag”)
Oneohtrix Point Never—Garden of Delete
The only way for Daniel Lopatin to surprise at this point would be to repeat himself. As expected, Garden of Delete marks yet another departure for the Brooklyn electronic musician, with a more abrasive use of sampling and fractured evocations of genres like pop, rock, and R&B. It’s not his best album (I’d stick with 2011’s Replica), but it’s surely his funniest. (“Sticky Drama” “Ezra”)
Sleater-Kinney—No Cities to Love
The mighty Sleater-Kinney return after a decade-long hiatus with an album that would have fit right in with the music they made in their late-’90s/early-’00s heyday. This is both a strength and a weakness. (“A New Wave” “Bury Our Friends”)
Tenement—Predatory Highlights
The third album from this rock trio, who hail from my hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, features 25 songs over a whopping 78 minutes. It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but if you respect the double-album structure outlined in the liner notes (yeah, that’s right), Predatory Highlights begins to take shape, with the slower and more exotic excursions of side three providing an ambitious change-of-pace from the hard, crisp powerpop that dominates the proceedings. (“Feral Cat Tribe” “Garden of Secrecy”)
I’ve finally decided to euthanize the “top songs not on those albums” list, which outlived its usefulness years ago. It probably would have been topped this year by “In Time” from FKA Twigs, whose 19-minute EP M3LL155X was good enough (if not long enough) for the Top 10. There was also a Colombian pop song called “Mar (Lo Que Siento)” by Bomba Estéreo that I was briefly obsessed with. So you can check that out too.
22 February 2015
Everything Is Awesome
One year ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did itself proud with the selection of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave as Best Picture, arguably its best choice of the 21st century. Your blogger did himself a bit less proud, scoring a not unimpressive 19/23 on my Oscar predictions, prior to blowing Best Picture by refusing to go along with the Picture/Director split between 12 Years and Gravity’s Alfonso Cuarón, widely predicted by the pundits. Like I said, never predict a split. We’ll get back to that later.
For most of the awards season, it looked like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a coming-of-age story shot over the course of 12 years with the same cast, would become the second uncommonly good Best Picture winner in as many years. Yes, dear reader, it was just a few weeks ago that Oscar bloggers and commenters were loudly holding forth about how boring the Best Picture race was, how it was the worst year ever, and really above all, just how incredibly bored they were with the Oscars, movies, and (presumably) life. Never mind that many of these same people claimed to actually like Boyhood. It was the frontrunner and must be taken down.
They got their wish. And it now appears that Birdman, a cynical showbusiness comedy about a veteran actor (Michael Keaton) who’s left superhero movies behind to direct and star in an independent theater, will take the big prize tonight, having won awards from the Producers Guild, Directors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild. The only time this combination failed to produce a Best Picture winner was 1995, when Apollo 13 fell to Braveheart, after director Ron Howard had been unexpectedly left out of the Best Director field. There are no such worries for Birdman or its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Birdman would hardly be the worst Best Picture in the history of the Oscars. Given the existence of The Artist, it wouldn’t even be the worst this decade. It has its share of amusing moments, mostly involving Edward Norton as a prima donna actor called in at the last minute to save Keaton’s production. But it’s the frontrunner mainly because it speaks to the current angst among Hollywood professionals that the industry has become too reliant on comic book movies and other branded material at the expense of, you know, art. It reassures Academy members that, deep down, they’re better than that. And the copious references to Twitter in the movie tell them they’re still hip, even if not still young. As for what kind of “real art” they might be making in the absence of the industry’s franchise addiction—I mean, can we talk about the fact that Birdman’s idea of art in 2014 is a play based on Raymond Carver stories? Good grief. And the one-shot gimmick has been done better elsewhere.
Still, the underlying complaint about the disappearance of serious, middle-budget movies based on original characters and stories is not without merit. And yet, lo and behold, we have just such a film in this year’s Oscar race: a serious drama about an important contemporary subject that’s not a remake or sequel. Based on a memoir by Chris Kyle and directed by Clint Eastwood, who’s still got his fastball at age 84, American Sniper follows Kyle from his rural Texas childhood to the war in Iraq, where he became the most lethal sniper in American military history. Appealing to a rural audience that rarely sees people like themselves onscreen, the movie has exploded at the box office and attracted a lot of flak from critics and pundits, mostly for being insufficiently didactic about the relationship between 9/11 and the war in Iraq and for not portraying the Iraqi characters more sympathetically. The film’s commitment to Kyle’s point of view makes both complaints tantamount to saying Eastwood should have made a different movie entirely. Sniper does pull a few punches, no doubt with an eye on the box office, delivering a smoothed-over version of its protagonist. I also wish Kyle’s wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), had been given something to do during the middle stretches that didn't involve complaining about something. Still, buoyed by a career-best performance from Cooper, American Sniper is one of the more interesting war movies in recent memory, effectively visualizing Kyle’s PTSD-induced isolation from both his fellow soldiers and his family back home. Setting aside the politics of the war, the film nevertheless digs deep into the roots of American militarism and its consequences for the men who uphold its values. Chris Kyle may be a war hero, but he’s hardly a role model.
As for the other nominees, The Grand Budapest Hotel finds Wes Anderson doing his thing. I’m not a hardcore Anderson cultist and this wasn’t my favorite of his movies, but he’s a true original worthy of respect for carving out a nice career in an inhospitable industry. The nine nominations for Grand Budapest indicate that many Academy members feel the same, and I think there’s a good chance he receives what would amount to a mid-career lifetime achievement award tonight in the Original Screenplay category. Setting aside Whiplash, which remains unseen by me, we’re left with three middlebrow dramas of vastly different quality. Selma isn’t quite worth all the hand-wringing about its exclusion from the major Oscar categories aside from Best Picture, but it’s a solidly crafted docudrama about a critical episode in recent American history—just the type of mainstream drama that has often competed for this award. I was less enthusiastic about The Imitation Game, a mostly acceptable British prestige picture about Alan Turing and his ultimately successful effort to crack the Enigma code during World War II that devolves into unbearable and all because he was gay sanctimony in the last half-hour. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything from our era for future generations to tsk-tsk about. Last and certainly least, we have the Steven Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, a thoroughly uninteresting movie about a very interesting man.
Sorry for that detour into non-awesomeness. Really, those last two films aside, it’s not such a bad Best Picture field. Perhaps I’m mellowing as I move into middle age, but I just can’t muster the outrage required to get upset about the nominations anymore. Replacing the two rote British dramas with, say, Selma and Gone Girl would have made the Best Picture slate better and more diverse, but it wasn’t that many years ago when three or four of the then-five Best Picture slots were routinely filled by stodgy prestige dramas, with nary a nonwhite or female filmmaker in sight. Institutions change slowly, but they do change, and I expect the Oscars will continue to evolve in the coming years.
What’s indisputably getting better is the distribution of films online. Thanks to Netflix, Amazon, and other VOD services, I was able to catch up with most of the interesting 2014 releases I had missed, including many that never opened theatrically in my town. It’s taken a couple years longer than I would have thought, but film distributors are finally making the technology work for them and for us. As a result I’m quite pleased with my own Top 10 list (at the bottom of this post, below the picks), with fewer “I still haven’t seen this” caveats than in recent years.
Last year I griped about Ellen DeGeneres hosting the Oscars again, but she ended up being really good. I have high hopes for NPH this year. As for the predictions below, I’m going against the consensus on Best Actor and Best Song, with “Eveything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie upsetting Selma’s “Glory” in the latter category. Other close races include Editing, a three-way contest between Boyhood, Sniper, and Whiplash, and Sound Mixing, where either Whiplash or Sniper could win. And while three of the acting races have been locked since October, there should be plenty of suspense regarding Best Actor, Best Director, and maybe even Best Picture. Again, stay tuned for my Top 10 list at the bottom of the post.
Best Picture
Richard Linklater has been one of the most reliable American filmmakers of the past 25 years. I don’t think Boyhood is one of his very best movies—I’d recommend Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly, or even the underrated Bernie—but it is a fine film and an altogether unique project, never to be repeated. This should be close and Boyhood may yet triumph, but I think the self-involved flattery of Birdman will be too much for the Academy, making it the third showbusiness movie to take the big prize in the past four years.
Will win: Birdman
Should win: Boyhood
Best Director
Never predict a split. I lectured extensively on this subject last year. So this one should go to Iñárritu. Of course I turned out to be wrong last year. And come to think of it, Picture and Director have split the past two years in a row. And actually the Directors Guild Award has been a more reliable predictor of Best Picture than Best Director over the years. And even if you didn’t love Boyhood, there’s something impressive about keeping a project like this going for 12 years…
W: Richard Linklater, Boyhood
S: Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Best Actor
This category isn’t as strong as everyone seems to think it is. Cooper and Keaton are both fine, but the Academy screwed up by failing to nominate either Ralph Fiennes as the debonair hero of The Grand Budapest Hotel or Jake Gyllenhaal as the sleazy news videographer at the center of Nightcrawler. Redmayne seems to be the consensus choice here, with Keaton close behind him, but it's Cooper who best fits the profile of the established, mid-career star who tends to win this prize, and I can think of about 300 million other reasons why he might be the one walking to the podium tonight.
W: Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
S: Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Best Actress
The most pleasant surprise of the nominations was the appearance of Marion Cotillard in this category for her bravura performance in the terrific Belgian film Two Days, One Night as Sandra, a factory worker battling depression. Sandra spends a weekend visiting various coworkers to try and convince them to forego a 1000-euro bonus in exchange for keeping her job. It’s a tricky role. The movie wants you to be rooting for Sandra, even as her fragile mental state makes life difficult for those around her. Cotillard walks the tightrope perfectly. Directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have been cranking out aesthetically rigorous, politically astute, and spiritually challenging dramas, including a few masterpieces, for nearly two decades now. It’s nice to see one of their films recognized by the Academy. Anyway, Julianne Moore is going to win for that Alzheimer’s thing.
W: Julianne Moore, Still Alice
S: Marion Cotillard; Two Days, One Night
Best Supporting Actress
Boyhood was as much about Patricia Arquette’s Mom character as about her son. She gave the performance of a lifetime, allowing herself to age naturally for 12 years onscreen. This will be a landslide.
W: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
S: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Best Supporting Actor
Like the last two categories, the winner here is a foregone conclusion. I enjoyed both Ethan Hawke’s turn as the dad who grows up along with his son in Boyhood and Norton in Birdman, but I strongly suspect that J.K. Simmons’s universally acclaimed performance as a music teacher in Whiplash blows them both out of the water. So I'll withhold judgment.
W: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Screenplay, Original
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Screenplay, Adapted
W: The Imitation Game
S: Inherent Vice
Animated Feature
W: How to Train Your Dragon 2
Documentary Feature
W: CitizenFour
Foreign Language Film
W: Ida
Cinematography
W: Birdman
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Production Design
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Editing
W: Boyhood
S: Boyhood
Visual Effects
W: Interstellar
S: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Costume Design
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: Inherent Vice
Makeup
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Sound Mixing
W: Whiplash
Sound Editing
W: American Sniper
S: Interstellar
Original Score
W: The Theory of Everything
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Original Song
W: “Everything Is Awesome,” The Lego Movie
Animated Short
W: The Dam Keeper
Live Action Short
W: The Phone Call
Documentary Short
W: Joanna
And finally, my own Top 10 films of 2014. I hope to have a separate post about No. 1 sometime later this year, so I won’t say anything about it now.
1. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S.)
2. Goodbye to Language 3D (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland-France)
See “First Impressions of Earth,” posted November 14
3. Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
4. The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, France)
This 220-minute documentary can be thought of as an appendix to Lanzmann’s monumental 566-minute Shoah (1985), one of the essential works about the Holocaust in any medium. But The Last of the Unjust is a major work in its own right. The film is built around a week of interviews Lanzmann conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last elder of the Jewish Council at the so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was maintained by the Nazis for public relations purposes (one of the film’s most remarkable sequences quotes at length from a Nazi propaganda film of the era), and Murmelstein, the only Jewish elder from any of the ghettos to escape the war alive, has remained a controversial figure among survivors. The interview segments are intercut with footage of Lanzmann, now in his late eighties, visiting sites discussed in the film. The loquacious Murmelstein dominates the film, as Lanzmann recasts the questions about moral responsibility that dogged Shoah onto one man, to compelling effect.
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, U.S.)
6. The Immigrant (James Gray, U.S.)
This slow-building period piece represents a departure for Gray, possibly the best American director who remains virtually unknown to the general public. The terrific cast includes Marion Cotillard as the titular immigrant, along with Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner as a pair of cousins, who, each in his own way, help shape the course of her life in the new world.
7. Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, U.S.)
I didn’t catch up with Interstellar until Christmas night, and my expectations were not high. The movie runs off the rails a bit in its final third, but for most of its first two hours this is sci-fi of the highest order, using its space travel plot to dig into some heavy material about parents and children, the nature of human community, and what we do or do not owe to one another. Critics who say its reach exceeded its grasp are not wrong. But no film reached farther last year. It’s Nolan’s best movie by a mile.
8. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, U.S.)
9. Gone Girl (David Fincher, U.S.)
This pitch-black satire of American marriage, directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Gillian Flynn, who adapted her own novel, was hardly the most pleasant viewing experience of the year, but Best Actress nominee Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck both resist the urge to overplay their parts, and Fincher never lets the proceedings get too heavy.
10. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
The formalist critics liked this one, and for good reason. The story is structured like a videogame, each train car another world to be cleared.
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, U.S.); Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund, Sweden); The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, U.S.); Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, U.S.); Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)
For most of the awards season, it looked like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, a coming-of-age story shot over the course of 12 years with the same cast, would become the second uncommonly good Best Picture winner in as many years. Yes, dear reader, it was just a few weeks ago that Oscar bloggers and commenters were loudly holding forth about how boring the Best Picture race was, how it was the worst year ever, and really above all, just how incredibly bored they were with the Oscars, movies, and (presumably) life. Never mind that many of these same people claimed to actually like Boyhood. It was the frontrunner and must be taken down.
They got their wish. And it now appears that Birdman, a cynical showbusiness comedy about a veteran actor (Michael Keaton) who’s left superhero movies behind to direct and star in an independent theater, will take the big prize tonight, having won awards from the Producers Guild, Directors Guild, and Screen Actors Guild. The only time this combination failed to produce a Best Picture winner was 1995, when Apollo 13 fell to Braveheart, after director Ron Howard had been unexpectedly left out of the Best Director field. There are no such worries for Birdman or its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Birdman would hardly be the worst Best Picture in the history of the Oscars. Given the existence of The Artist, it wouldn’t even be the worst this decade. It has its share of amusing moments, mostly involving Edward Norton as a prima donna actor called in at the last minute to save Keaton’s production. But it’s the frontrunner mainly because it speaks to the current angst among Hollywood professionals that the industry has become too reliant on comic book movies and other branded material at the expense of, you know, art. It reassures Academy members that, deep down, they’re better than that. And the copious references to Twitter in the movie tell them they’re still hip, even if not still young. As for what kind of “real art” they might be making in the absence of the industry’s franchise addiction—I mean, can we talk about the fact that Birdman’s idea of art in 2014 is a play based on Raymond Carver stories? Good grief. And the one-shot gimmick has been done better elsewhere.
Still, the underlying complaint about the disappearance of serious, middle-budget movies based on original characters and stories is not without merit. And yet, lo and behold, we have just such a film in this year’s Oscar race: a serious drama about an important contemporary subject that’s not a remake or sequel. Based on a memoir by Chris Kyle and directed by Clint Eastwood, who’s still got his fastball at age 84, American Sniper follows Kyle from his rural Texas childhood to the war in Iraq, where he became the most lethal sniper in American military history. Appealing to a rural audience that rarely sees people like themselves onscreen, the movie has exploded at the box office and attracted a lot of flak from critics and pundits, mostly for being insufficiently didactic about the relationship between 9/11 and the war in Iraq and for not portraying the Iraqi characters more sympathetically. The film’s commitment to Kyle’s point of view makes both complaints tantamount to saying Eastwood should have made a different movie entirely. Sniper does pull a few punches, no doubt with an eye on the box office, delivering a smoothed-over version of its protagonist. I also wish Kyle’s wife, Taya (Sienna Miller), had been given something to do during the middle stretches that didn't involve complaining about something. Still, buoyed by a career-best performance from Cooper, American Sniper is one of the more interesting war movies in recent memory, effectively visualizing Kyle’s PTSD-induced isolation from both his fellow soldiers and his family back home. Setting aside the politics of the war, the film nevertheless digs deep into the roots of American militarism and its consequences for the men who uphold its values. Chris Kyle may be a war hero, but he’s hardly a role model.
As for the other nominees, The Grand Budapest Hotel finds Wes Anderson doing his thing. I’m not a hardcore Anderson cultist and this wasn’t my favorite of his movies, but he’s a true original worthy of respect for carving out a nice career in an inhospitable industry. The nine nominations for Grand Budapest indicate that many Academy members feel the same, and I think there’s a good chance he receives what would amount to a mid-career lifetime achievement award tonight in the Original Screenplay category. Setting aside Whiplash, which remains unseen by me, we’re left with three middlebrow dramas of vastly different quality. Selma isn’t quite worth all the hand-wringing about its exclusion from the major Oscar categories aside from Best Picture, but it’s a solidly crafted docudrama about a critical episode in recent American history—just the type of mainstream drama that has often competed for this award. I was less enthusiastic about The Imitation Game, a mostly acceptable British prestige picture about Alan Turing and his ultimately successful effort to crack the Enigma code during World War II that devolves into unbearable and all because he was gay sanctimony in the last half-hour. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything from our era for future generations to tsk-tsk about. Last and certainly least, we have the Steven Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, a thoroughly uninteresting movie about a very interesting man.
Sorry for that detour into non-awesomeness. Really, those last two films aside, it’s not such a bad Best Picture field. Perhaps I’m mellowing as I move into middle age, but I just can’t muster the outrage required to get upset about the nominations anymore. Replacing the two rote British dramas with, say, Selma and Gone Girl would have made the Best Picture slate better and more diverse, but it wasn’t that many years ago when three or four of the then-five Best Picture slots were routinely filled by stodgy prestige dramas, with nary a nonwhite or female filmmaker in sight. Institutions change slowly, but they do change, and I expect the Oscars will continue to evolve in the coming years.
What’s indisputably getting better is the distribution of films online. Thanks to Netflix, Amazon, and other VOD services, I was able to catch up with most of the interesting 2014 releases I had missed, including many that never opened theatrically in my town. It’s taken a couple years longer than I would have thought, but film distributors are finally making the technology work for them and for us. As a result I’m quite pleased with my own Top 10 list (at the bottom of this post, below the picks), with fewer “I still haven’t seen this” caveats than in recent years.
Last year I griped about Ellen DeGeneres hosting the Oscars again, but she ended up being really good. I have high hopes for NPH this year. As for the predictions below, I’m going against the consensus on Best Actor and Best Song, with “Eveything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie upsetting Selma’s “Glory” in the latter category. Other close races include Editing, a three-way contest between Boyhood, Sniper, and Whiplash, and Sound Mixing, where either Whiplash or Sniper could win. And while three of the acting races have been locked since October, there should be plenty of suspense regarding Best Actor, Best Director, and maybe even Best Picture. Again, stay tuned for my Top 10 list at the bottom of the post.
Best Picture
Richard Linklater has been one of the most reliable American filmmakers of the past 25 years. I don’t think Boyhood is one of his very best movies—I’d recommend Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly, or even the underrated Bernie—but it is a fine film and an altogether unique project, never to be repeated. This should be close and Boyhood may yet triumph, but I think the self-involved flattery of Birdman will be too much for the Academy, making it the third showbusiness movie to take the big prize in the past four years.
Will win: Birdman
Should win: Boyhood
Best Director
Never predict a split. I lectured extensively on this subject last year. So this one should go to Iñárritu. Of course I turned out to be wrong last year. And come to think of it, Picture and Director have split the past two years in a row. And actually the Directors Guild Award has been a more reliable predictor of Best Picture than Best Director over the years. And even if you didn’t love Boyhood, there’s something impressive about keeping a project like this going for 12 years…
W: Richard Linklater, Boyhood
S: Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Best Actor
This category isn’t as strong as everyone seems to think it is. Cooper and Keaton are both fine, but the Academy screwed up by failing to nominate either Ralph Fiennes as the debonair hero of The Grand Budapest Hotel or Jake Gyllenhaal as the sleazy news videographer at the center of Nightcrawler. Redmayne seems to be the consensus choice here, with Keaton close behind him, but it's Cooper who best fits the profile of the established, mid-career star who tends to win this prize, and I can think of about 300 million other reasons why he might be the one walking to the podium tonight.
W: Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
S: Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Best Actress
The most pleasant surprise of the nominations was the appearance of Marion Cotillard in this category for her bravura performance in the terrific Belgian film Two Days, One Night as Sandra, a factory worker battling depression. Sandra spends a weekend visiting various coworkers to try and convince them to forego a 1000-euro bonus in exchange for keeping her job. It’s a tricky role. The movie wants you to be rooting for Sandra, even as her fragile mental state makes life difficult for those around her. Cotillard walks the tightrope perfectly. Directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have been cranking out aesthetically rigorous, politically astute, and spiritually challenging dramas, including a few masterpieces, for nearly two decades now. It’s nice to see one of their films recognized by the Academy. Anyway, Julianne Moore is going to win for that Alzheimer’s thing.
W: Julianne Moore, Still Alice
S: Marion Cotillard; Two Days, One Night
Best Supporting Actress
Boyhood was as much about Patricia Arquette’s Mom character as about her son. She gave the performance of a lifetime, allowing herself to age naturally for 12 years onscreen. This will be a landslide.
W: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
S: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Best Supporting Actor
Like the last two categories, the winner here is a foregone conclusion. I enjoyed both Ethan Hawke’s turn as the dad who grows up along with his son in Boyhood and Norton in Birdman, but I strongly suspect that J.K. Simmons’s universally acclaimed performance as a music teacher in Whiplash blows them both out of the water. So I'll withhold judgment.
W: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
Screenplay, Original
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Screenplay, Adapted
W: The Imitation Game
S: Inherent Vice
Animated Feature
W: How to Train Your Dragon 2
Documentary Feature
W: CitizenFour
Foreign Language Film
W: Ida
Cinematography
W: Birdman
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Production Design
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Editing
W: Boyhood
S: Boyhood
Visual Effects
W: Interstellar
S: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Costume Design
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: Inherent Vice
Makeup
W: The Grand Budapest Hotel
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Sound Mixing
W: Whiplash
Sound Editing
W: American Sniper
S: Interstellar
Original Score
W: The Theory of Everything
S: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Original Song
W: “Everything Is Awesome,” The Lego Movie
Animated Short
W: The Dam Keeper
Live Action Short
W: The Phone Call
Documentary Short
W: Joanna
And finally, my own Top 10 films of 2014. I hope to have a separate post about No. 1 sometime later this year, so I won’t say anything about it now.
1. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S.)
2. Goodbye to Language 3D (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland-France)
See “First Impressions of Earth,” posted November 14
3. Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
4. The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, France)
This 220-minute documentary can be thought of as an appendix to Lanzmann’s monumental 566-minute Shoah (1985), one of the essential works about the Holocaust in any medium. But The Last of the Unjust is a major work in its own right. The film is built around a week of interviews Lanzmann conducted in 1975 with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last elder of the Jewish Council at the so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was maintained by the Nazis for public relations purposes (one of the film’s most remarkable sequences quotes at length from a Nazi propaganda film of the era), and Murmelstein, the only Jewish elder from any of the ghettos to escape the war alive, has remained a controversial figure among survivors. The interview segments are intercut with footage of Lanzmann, now in his late eighties, visiting sites discussed in the film. The loquacious Murmelstein dominates the film, as Lanzmann recasts the questions about moral responsibility that dogged Shoah onto one man, to compelling effect.
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, U.S.)
6. The Immigrant (James Gray, U.S.)
This slow-building period piece represents a departure for Gray, possibly the best American director who remains virtually unknown to the general public. The terrific cast includes Marion Cotillard as the titular immigrant, along with Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner as a pair of cousins, who, each in his own way, help shape the course of her life in the new world.
7. Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, U.S.)
I didn’t catch up with Interstellar until Christmas night, and my expectations were not high. The movie runs off the rails a bit in its final third, but for most of its first two hours this is sci-fi of the highest order, using its space travel plot to dig into some heavy material about parents and children, the nature of human community, and what we do or do not owe to one another. Critics who say its reach exceeded its grasp are not wrong. But no film reached farther last year. It’s Nolan’s best movie by a mile.
8. American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, U.S.)
9. Gone Girl (David Fincher, U.S.)
This pitch-black satire of American marriage, directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Gillian Flynn, who adapted her own novel, was hardly the most pleasant viewing experience of the year, but Best Actress nominee Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck both resist the urge to overplay their parts, and Fincher never lets the proceedings get too heavy.
10. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
The formalist critics liked this one, and for good reason. The story is structured like a videogame, each train car another world to be cleared.
Honorable mentions (alphabetical): Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, U.S.); Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund, Sweden); The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, U.S.); Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, U.S.); Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, France)
05 February 2015
Best Music of 2014
So this is embarrassingly late, even by my degraded standards of punctuality. Sorry about that. Part of the reason it’s taken me so long to get this post written is that, for the first time since 2009, I had trouble filling out my Top 10 albums list. I wouldn’t say it was a bad year for music. Regardless of one’s opinion about the state of contemporary music, we are most certainly living through a golden age of recorded-music distribution. With so much new music at our fingertips, it’s hard to conceive of an entire year being truly bad. But 2014 did feel a bit below average to me, at least in the rock, hip-hop, and electronica worlds that make up most of the new music I listen to regularly. And there were long stretches where I wasn’t listening to much new music at all, instead delving deeper into the catalogues of greats like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Lucinda Williams, and of course Neil Young. I even made a serious attempt to listen to Led Zeppelin.
Long story short, the list kind of drops off a cliff after No. 4, or maybe No. 5. I doubt anything below that would’ve made last year’s Top 10, and probably not next year’s either. That’s not to say there weren’t many enjoyable records released in 2014, just that the pool at the top was a bit shallower than usual. But the first four albums on the list below are genuinely terrific, and the others are all at least pretty good.
Also, this list is boring, which is another reason I’ve been putting it off. A whopping six of my Top 10 albums also finished among the 10 best in the recent Pazz & Jop poll. I’ve spent the 2010s oscillating between consensus-type lists in the even-numbered years and more leftfield choices in the odds, and form held this year. The only consensus favorite missing from my list is the inexplicably overpraised Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs. I’ll have an opinion on that one whenever the first song finally ends, which should be sometime in mid-June.
1. Run the Jewels—Run the Jewels 2
Killer Mike and El-P consciously invoked the spirit of hip-hop’s golden age with last year’s Run the Jewels mixtape, a triumph of streetwise bravado and taut, no-nonsense beats. But old school hip-hop wasn’t just boasting and battle raps. It was political too, as much by its very existence as the lyrical content of greats like Public Enemy. And so what could have been a mere victory lap became a major statement.
Unlike its predecessor, Run the Jewels 2 is a full-fledged studio album, and it sounds like it. El-P’s bring-the-noise production snaps with a crispness presumably impossible to get on the budget-constrained mixtape. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also sounds more forceful and confident as a rapper. Highlight “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry” hums like a swarm of locusts, with El calling out the crimes of the rich and powerful in one breath and boasting of his sexual prowess in the next, to say nothing of advising his detractors to “go run naked backward through a field of dicks.”
But it’s still Mike’s show. From the already classic intro to the closing sendoff of “Angel Duster,” the Best Rapper Alive unleashes verse after verse of hard-hitting street politics. Complementing the tough-guy raps of “Blockbuster Night Part 1” and “Jeopardy” is the first verse of “Crown,” in which Mike struggles to forgive himself for the damage he caused during his days of drug dealing. Generally suspicious of organized religion, he’s dumbstruck by a former addict who’s found Christ and releases him from the pain he caused her. Mike’s full vocal range is on display in the second verse of “Lie, Cheat, Steal,” a riff on class, power, and privilege ostensibly about former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Mike tears through the verse with impressive technical virtuosity, subtly shifting his tone of voice and changing cadences on a dime.
And of course there’s the first verse of “Early,” a chilling account of a petty arrest that escalates into tragedy. I tried to write a post about RTJ2 back in November after seeing the group (a trio onstage including DJ Trackstar) play live, but my thoughts about the music got too tangled up in my frustrations about the Michael Brown shooting and associated events. I can’t really talk about “Early” now either, except to say that it's the song I will most associate with 2014, maybe not the best song of the year, but the most emblematic. It was only fitting that the Run the Jewels tour wound up in St. Louis the night the inevitable grand jury verdict was announced. And if you haven’t watched this yet, then you should. (“Early” “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry”)
2. Aphex Twin—Syro
The first album in 13 years from Richard D. James under his primary Aphex Twin moniker is a triumphant return. Most of the tracks are based on the skittering rhythms of the ’90s drum-and-bass genre that James helped develop, built around melodic ideas that recur without ever quite repeating themselves. Staccato tones mingle with gauzy synthesizer washes, occasional human voices, nimble bass lines, and the (except in the final track) nearly ever-present beats to give each piece a unique texture. It’s intricate music that never sounds fussy, labored over just enough to achieve the illusion of effortlessness. James himself seems nonplussed, telling Pitchfork he didn’t think any of the tracks were particularly innovative and concluding, “It just totally makes me want to not do anything else in that particular style.” (Indeed, the recently released Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP goes off in a completely different direction, with jagged, beat-driven pieces juxtaposed with brief piano interludes.) He’s not wrong that Syro doesn’t break a lot of new ground. Like most of the recent high-profile comeback albums—My Bloody Valentine’s mbv and Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities to Love, as well as another we'll get to shortly—there’s more consolidation than innovation happening here. But James speaks a musical language all his own and accusing him of repeating himself would be petulant and absurd. His confidence and craftsmanship bring an unexpected warmth to a musical genre often described as chilly. Syro is a fun record, the most inviting of James’s career. In its own peculiar way, it’s nothing less than an expression of the pure joy of creating—which is to say, of being alive. (“CIRCLONT6A [syrobonkus mix]” “XMAS_EVET10 [thanaton3 mix]”)
3. FKA twigs—LP1
The year’s best debut album belonged to 26-year-old Tahliah Barnett (aka FKA twigs). Generically, LP1 scans as fractured R&B, with the spare arrangements at times evoking Prince (apparently a fan), but primarily rooted in various experimental British musical subgenres of the past two decades. Tricky’s Maxinquaye looms in the background, as it will, and slower songs like “Hours” and “Numbers” have the intimate feel of the XX. The lyrics mostly deal with love/sex/relationships, but often from oblique perspectives. The extraordinary “Pendulum” eyes a fading relationship, the cryptic lyrics and spacious production ceding the emotional heft of the song to Twigs’s soaring, multi-tracked vocals. Closer “Kicks” is a song about masturbation that’s not calculated to shock or offend, and the lustful “Two Weeks” appears to take place entirely inside the singer’s head. Twigs comes off as confident but vulnerable, inviting but never coy. That the album feels so unified despite the presence of nine producers (including Twigs herself, as well as the ubiquitous Arca) is a testament to the strength of an artistic persona that already appears fully formed. This was some of the most challenging, original music I heard in a year when too many artists played it safe. It actually stretched me a bit. (“Pendulum” “Hours”)
4. D’Angelo & the Vanguard—Black Messiah
You can tell who actually waited until the end of the year to make their best lists by whether Black Messiah showed up. This year’s Pazz & Jop winner, D’Angelo’s first album in 14 years, didn’t drop until December 15, well after the year-end deadlines of most magazines and websites. The comparisons to There’s a Riot Goin’ On don’t quite make sense to me—politics aside, D’Angelo is on a far different spiritual wavelength than Sly Stone was in 1971, and, unlike Sly, he’s basically a classicist—but this is a groove record, with D’Angelo’s vocals often buried in the mix. (A lyric sheet is essential here.) I don’t have much else to say about this one, but its many virtues—elegant compositions, precise arrangements, expert musicianship—are obvious enough. (“The Charade” “Really Love”)
5. Angel Olsen—Burn Your Fire for No Witness
The third album from Chicago singer-songwriter Angel Olsen stitches various threads of folk, rock, and country music into a reasonably coherent neo-Americana thing. Stylistically, the songs range from the fuzzrock of “Forgiven/Forgotten” to the acoustic dirge “White Fire” (think Leonard Cohen by way of Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust”) to the wistful lounge pop of “Iota.” As the title suggests, this music has a quiet strength at its core, a steely resolve possibly born of heartbreak. (“White Fire” “Hi-Five”)
6. Iceage—Plowing Into the Field of Love
After making the best punk rock album in years with last year’s You’re Nothing, the Danish trio takes a left turn into postpunk, lowering the tempo and volume, and echoing a more eclectic set of antecedents, including Nick Cave and the Libertines. Still only 22, singer Elias Bender Ronnenfelt tries on personas like hats throughout the record, from the privileged manchild of “The Lord’s Favorite” to the doomed romantic of “Against the Moon.” (“Stay” “Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled”)
7. St. Vincent—St. Vincent
8. Spoon—They Want My Soul
Better than solid but not quite great, the latest from [St. Vincent/Spoon] is a triumph of tastefully arranged sonic clatter that lacks a standout song and doesn’t venture too far outside the comfort zone established by previous work. It’s not [her/their] best album, but nonetheless represents another strong entry from an indie stalwart. [(“Digital Witness” “Prince Johnny”)/ (“Outlier” “Rainy Taxi”)]
9. Flying Lotus—You’re Dead!
A jazztronica concept album about death seems like a tough sell. A sense of humor helps (note the exclamation point in the title), as does a relatively short running time. Still, I thought to myself, there’s something vaguely unsatisfying about this album that I can’t put my finger on. FlyLo has said he intended You’re Dead! to be listened to in sequence as a single piece, but perhaps the album was somehow less than the sum of its parts. And then came Robert Christgau’s capsule from last week, which I quote in full: “The problem isn’t that it’s less than the sum of its parts—the problem is that there is no sum, only parts.” Yeah, that was it. (“Coronus, The Terminator” “Moment of Hesitation”)
10. Cloud Nothings—Here and Nowhere Else
Singer Dylan Baldi and his band tend to go back to the same bag of tricks over and over (e.g., cranking up the volume halfway through the chorus, seemingly random screaming of lyrics), but with eight songs in just 32 minutes, this throwback to ’90s-style lo-fi hard rock doesn’t stick around long enough to become tiresome. Most of the lyrics deal with the loss of reality, so there’s that too. (“I’m Not Part of Me” “No Thoughts”)
Five runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Drive-by Truckers—English Oceans
The veteran Southern rockers return with their best album since 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. Lead Trucker Patterson Hood is a bit off his game this time around (at least until the majestic closer “Grand Canyon”) but bassist Mike Cooley, whose relative dearth of songwriting production normally relegates him to second-fiddle status, writes and sings half of the album, contributing most of the highlights. (“Made-Up English Oceans” “Shit Shots Count”)
Ex Hex—Rips
With her former Wild Flag bandmates returning to Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony starts something new with this trio, also including bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris. Timony plays it straighter than usual on the guitar, but if you check any expectations at the door, these power pop tunes are plenty enjoyable on their own terms. (“Radio On” “How You Got That Girl”)
Grouper—Ruins
Liz Harris has been putting out music under the Grouper name for a solid decade now but had somehow escaped my notice until a few months ago. The songs are slow and quiet, with Harris’s voice and piano accompanied by ambient sounds. The atmosphere is so compelling, that the sudden beep of a microwave (I think) is truly jarring. This is the one I may regret not including in the Top 10, but I need to live with it through a few humid summer nights first. ("Lighthouse" "Call Across Rooms")
Julian Casablancas & The Voidz—Tyranny
People seemed actually upset about the existence of this album, which is reason enough to include it here. Tyranny could admittedly be described as “sprawling,” but I would argue this surprisingly eclectic work of noise-rock skronk is the most interesting Casablancas project since The Strokes’ also widely hated First Impressions of Earth. (“Father Electricity” “Human Sadness”)
White Lung—Deep Fantasy
I almost missed this one, mainly on account of a Pitchfork review that wrongly made it sound like a screeching ideological tract. This Vancouver quartet could be described as post-post-riot grrrl, or post-post-post-riot grrrl, or…something. Wait, one of them’s a guy? Whatever. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s admirably brief (10 songs in 22 minutes!). It’s good. (“Down It Goes” “Face Down”)
Top 5 Songs Not on Those Albums
1. U2—“California (There Is No End to Love)”
Songs of Innocence will almost surely have a better reputation 10 years from now, once the actual music becomes separated from the album’s ill-conceived release strategy. But all that noise aside, it remains a strange U2 album. The band’s usual producers are unfortunately absent, Bono’s lyrics are unusually autobiographical, and most of the best songs are stacked toward the end. The spotty first half does have one classic U2 song, inspired by the band’s first visit to the West Coast.
2. Sia—“Chandelier”
This one goes some dark places for a pop song.
3. Real Estate—“Navigator”
4. Parquet Courts—“Instant Disassembly”
The centerpiece of Parquet Courts’ slightly disappointing second album channels Blonde on Blonde in a way I hadn’t heard in a while. The closing refrain sure took on a different meaning by the end of the year, though.
5. Cymbals Eat Guitars—“Jackson”
Long story short, the list kind of drops off a cliff after No. 4, or maybe No. 5. I doubt anything below that would’ve made last year’s Top 10, and probably not next year’s either. That’s not to say there weren’t many enjoyable records released in 2014, just that the pool at the top was a bit shallower than usual. But the first four albums on the list below are genuinely terrific, and the others are all at least pretty good.
Also, this list is boring, which is another reason I’ve been putting it off. A whopping six of my Top 10 albums also finished among the 10 best in the recent Pazz & Jop poll. I’ve spent the 2010s oscillating between consensus-type lists in the even-numbered years and more leftfield choices in the odds, and form held this year. The only consensus favorite missing from my list is the inexplicably overpraised Lost in the Dream by The War on Drugs. I’ll have an opinion on that one whenever the first song finally ends, which should be sometime in mid-June.
1. Run the Jewels—Run the Jewels 2
Killer Mike and El-P consciously invoked the spirit of hip-hop’s golden age with last year’s Run the Jewels mixtape, a triumph of streetwise bravado and taut, no-nonsense beats. But old school hip-hop wasn’t just boasting and battle raps. It was political too, as much by its very existence as the lyrical content of greats like Public Enemy. And so what could have been a mere victory lap became a major statement.
Unlike its predecessor, Run the Jewels 2 is a full-fledged studio album, and it sounds like it. El-P’s bring-the-noise production snaps with a crispness presumably impossible to get on the budget-constrained mixtape. Perhaps not coincidentally, he also sounds more forceful and confident as a rapper. Highlight “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry” hums like a swarm of locusts, with El calling out the crimes of the rich and powerful in one breath and boasting of his sexual prowess in the next, to say nothing of advising his detractors to “go run naked backward through a field of dicks.”
But it’s still Mike’s show. From the already classic intro to the closing sendoff of “Angel Duster,” the Best Rapper Alive unleashes verse after verse of hard-hitting street politics. Complementing the tough-guy raps of “Blockbuster Night Part 1” and “Jeopardy” is the first verse of “Crown,” in which Mike struggles to forgive himself for the damage he caused during his days of drug dealing. Generally suspicious of organized religion, he’s dumbstruck by a former addict who’s found Christ and releases him from the pain he caused her. Mike’s full vocal range is on display in the second verse of “Lie, Cheat, Steal,” a riff on class, power, and privilege ostensibly about former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Mike tears through the verse with impressive technical virtuosity, subtly shifting his tone of voice and changing cadences on a dime.
And of course there’s the first verse of “Early,” a chilling account of a petty arrest that escalates into tragedy. I tried to write a post about RTJ2 back in November after seeing the group (a trio onstage including DJ Trackstar) play live, but my thoughts about the music got too tangled up in my frustrations about the Michael Brown shooting and associated events. I can’t really talk about “Early” now either, except to say that it's the song I will most associate with 2014, maybe not the best song of the year, but the most emblematic. It was only fitting that the Run the Jewels tour wound up in St. Louis the night the inevitable grand jury verdict was announced. And if you haven’t watched this yet, then you should. (“Early” “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry”)
2. Aphex Twin—Syro
The first album in 13 years from Richard D. James under his primary Aphex Twin moniker is a triumphant return. Most of the tracks are based on the skittering rhythms of the ’90s drum-and-bass genre that James helped develop, built around melodic ideas that recur without ever quite repeating themselves. Staccato tones mingle with gauzy synthesizer washes, occasional human voices, nimble bass lines, and the (except in the final track) nearly ever-present beats to give each piece a unique texture. It’s intricate music that never sounds fussy, labored over just enough to achieve the illusion of effortlessness. James himself seems nonplussed, telling Pitchfork he didn’t think any of the tracks were particularly innovative and concluding, “It just totally makes me want to not do anything else in that particular style.” (Indeed, the recently released Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP goes off in a completely different direction, with jagged, beat-driven pieces juxtaposed with brief piano interludes.) He’s not wrong that Syro doesn’t break a lot of new ground. Like most of the recent high-profile comeback albums—My Bloody Valentine’s mbv and Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities to Love, as well as another we'll get to shortly—there’s more consolidation than innovation happening here. But James speaks a musical language all his own and accusing him of repeating himself would be petulant and absurd. His confidence and craftsmanship bring an unexpected warmth to a musical genre often described as chilly. Syro is a fun record, the most inviting of James’s career. In its own peculiar way, it’s nothing less than an expression of the pure joy of creating—which is to say, of being alive. (“CIRCLONT6A [syrobonkus mix]” “XMAS_EVET10 [thanaton3 mix]”)
3. FKA twigs—LP1
The year’s best debut album belonged to 26-year-old Tahliah Barnett (aka FKA twigs). Generically, LP1 scans as fractured R&B, with the spare arrangements at times evoking Prince (apparently a fan), but primarily rooted in various experimental British musical subgenres of the past two decades. Tricky’s Maxinquaye looms in the background, as it will, and slower songs like “Hours” and “Numbers” have the intimate feel of the XX. The lyrics mostly deal with love/sex/relationships, but often from oblique perspectives. The extraordinary “Pendulum” eyes a fading relationship, the cryptic lyrics and spacious production ceding the emotional heft of the song to Twigs’s soaring, multi-tracked vocals. Closer “Kicks” is a song about masturbation that’s not calculated to shock or offend, and the lustful “Two Weeks” appears to take place entirely inside the singer’s head. Twigs comes off as confident but vulnerable, inviting but never coy. That the album feels so unified despite the presence of nine producers (including Twigs herself, as well as the ubiquitous Arca) is a testament to the strength of an artistic persona that already appears fully formed. This was some of the most challenging, original music I heard in a year when too many artists played it safe. It actually stretched me a bit. (“Pendulum” “Hours”)
4. D’Angelo & the Vanguard—Black Messiah
You can tell who actually waited until the end of the year to make their best lists by whether Black Messiah showed up. This year’s Pazz & Jop winner, D’Angelo’s first album in 14 years, didn’t drop until December 15, well after the year-end deadlines of most magazines and websites. The comparisons to There’s a Riot Goin’ On don’t quite make sense to me—politics aside, D’Angelo is on a far different spiritual wavelength than Sly Stone was in 1971, and, unlike Sly, he’s basically a classicist—but this is a groove record, with D’Angelo’s vocals often buried in the mix. (A lyric sheet is essential here.) I don’t have much else to say about this one, but its many virtues—elegant compositions, precise arrangements, expert musicianship—are obvious enough. (“The Charade” “Really Love”)
5. Angel Olsen—Burn Your Fire for No Witness
The third album from Chicago singer-songwriter Angel Olsen stitches various threads of folk, rock, and country music into a reasonably coherent neo-Americana thing. Stylistically, the songs range from the fuzzrock of “Forgiven/Forgotten” to the acoustic dirge “White Fire” (think Leonard Cohen by way of Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust”) to the wistful lounge pop of “Iota.” As the title suggests, this music has a quiet strength at its core, a steely resolve possibly born of heartbreak. (“White Fire” “Hi-Five”)
6. Iceage—Plowing Into the Field of Love
After making the best punk rock album in years with last year’s You’re Nothing, the Danish trio takes a left turn into postpunk, lowering the tempo and volume, and echoing a more eclectic set of antecedents, including Nick Cave and the Libertines. Still only 22, singer Elias Bender Ronnenfelt tries on personas like hats throughout the record, from the privileged manchild of “The Lord’s Favorite” to the doomed romantic of “Against the Moon.” (“Stay” “Glassy Eyed, Dormant and Veiled”)
7. St. Vincent—St. Vincent
8. Spoon—They Want My Soul
Better than solid but not quite great, the latest from [St. Vincent/Spoon] is a triumph of tastefully arranged sonic clatter that lacks a standout song and doesn’t venture too far outside the comfort zone established by previous work. It’s not [her/their] best album, but nonetheless represents another strong entry from an indie stalwart. [(“Digital Witness” “Prince Johnny”)/ (“Outlier” “Rainy Taxi”)]
9. Flying Lotus—You’re Dead!
A jazztronica concept album about death seems like a tough sell. A sense of humor helps (note the exclamation point in the title), as does a relatively short running time. Still, I thought to myself, there’s something vaguely unsatisfying about this album that I can’t put my finger on. FlyLo has said he intended You’re Dead! to be listened to in sequence as a single piece, but perhaps the album was somehow less than the sum of its parts. And then came Robert Christgau’s capsule from last week, which I quote in full: “The problem isn’t that it’s less than the sum of its parts—the problem is that there is no sum, only parts.” Yeah, that was it. (“Coronus, The Terminator” “Moment of Hesitation”)
10. Cloud Nothings—Here and Nowhere Else
Singer Dylan Baldi and his band tend to go back to the same bag of tricks over and over (e.g., cranking up the volume halfway through the chorus, seemingly random screaming of lyrics), but with eight songs in just 32 minutes, this throwback to ’90s-style lo-fi hard rock doesn’t stick around long enough to become tiresome. Most of the lyrics deal with the loss of reality, so there’s that too. (“I’m Not Part of Me” “No Thoughts”)
Five runners-up (in alphabetical order)
Drive-by Truckers—English Oceans
The veteran Southern rockers return with their best album since 2008’s Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. Lead Trucker Patterson Hood is a bit off his game this time around (at least until the majestic closer “Grand Canyon”) but bassist Mike Cooley, whose relative dearth of songwriting production normally relegates him to second-fiddle status, writes and sings half of the album, contributing most of the highlights. (“Made-Up English Oceans” “Shit Shots Count”)
Ex Hex—Rips
With her former Wild Flag bandmates returning to Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony starts something new with this trio, also including bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris. Timony plays it straighter than usual on the guitar, but if you check any expectations at the door, these power pop tunes are plenty enjoyable on their own terms. (“Radio On” “How You Got That Girl”)
Grouper—Ruins
Liz Harris has been putting out music under the Grouper name for a solid decade now but had somehow escaped my notice until a few months ago. The songs are slow and quiet, with Harris’s voice and piano accompanied by ambient sounds. The atmosphere is so compelling, that the sudden beep of a microwave (I think) is truly jarring. This is the one I may regret not including in the Top 10, but I need to live with it through a few humid summer nights first. ("Lighthouse" "Call Across Rooms")
Julian Casablancas & The Voidz—Tyranny
People seemed actually upset about the existence of this album, which is reason enough to include it here. Tyranny could admittedly be described as “sprawling,” but I would argue this surprisingly eclectic work of noise-rock skronk is the most interesting Casablancas project since The Strokes’ also widely hated First Impressions of Earth. (“Father Electricity” “Human Sadness”)
White Lung—Deep Fantasy
I almost missed this one, mainly on account of a Pitchfork review that wrongly made it sound like a screeching ideological tract. This Vancouver quartet could be described as post-post-riot grrrl, or post-post-post-riot grrrl, or…something. Wait, one of them’s a guy? Whatever. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s admirably brief (10 songs in 22 minutes!). It’s good. (“Down It Goes” “Face Down”)
Top 5 Songs Not on Those Albums
1. U2—“California (There Is No End to Love)”
Songs of Innocence will almost surely have a better reputation 10 years from now, once the actual music becomes separated from the album’s ill-conceived release strategy. But all that noise aside, it remains a strange U2 album. The band’s usual producers are unfortunately absent, Bono’s lyrics are unusually autobiographical, and most of the best songs are stacked toward the end. The spotty first half does have one classic U2 song, inspired by the band’s first visit to the West Coast.
2. Sia—“Chandelier”
This one goes some dark places for a pop song.
3. Real Estate—“Navigator”
4. Parquet Courts—“Instant Disassembly”
The centerpiece of Parquet Courts’ slightly disappointing second album channels Blonde on Blonde in a way I hadn’t heard in a while. The closing refrain sure took on a different meaning by the end of the year, though.
5. Cymbals Eat Guitars—“Jackson”
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