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”)
26 January 2017
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.
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