Best Singles of 2015

The infectious stuff I couldn't get enough of in 2015:

The Weekend, I Can't Feel My Face - MJ should sue.

The Chemical Brothers, Wide Open -  Beck's coming with us. Put the top down.

Carly Rae Jepson, Run Away With Me - The "Call Me Maybe" girl could secretly be Grimes.

Boxed In, Mystery - Everybody, double time.

Ryley Walker, Primrose Green - This must have been left off the Dead's "Europe 72."

Eryka Badu, Cel U Lar Device - She's covering Drake's Hotline Bling, but in her Badu way.

City and Color, Lover Come Back - Heartbreak in technicolor.

El Vey, Return to the Moon - Matt Berringer in a rare lighter moment.

Alabama Shakes, Don't Wanna Fight - A nasty little groove with a Stones "Black and Blue" era bite.

Matt Simons, Catch and Release - Pure pop pleasure.

Jamie XX, Loud Places - "I feel music in your heights." The peak.

Best Albums of 2015

In a year of some strikingly original music, the choices seemed somehow easier this year.  My musical DNA is on display in all these albums:  the long shadow of Prince and Sly; the pulse of early electronic sounds by Kraftwerk and Eno; the pounding noise of the Clash and the Ramones;  and the California pop of the Beach Boys and mid-period Fleetwood Mac.  It's all in the mix, made endlessly new to make the world understandable -- and danceable.

In no particular order:

Tame Impala, Currents - An irresistible blend of R&B and electronica proving once again that we're all from somewhere else originally.

Deerhunter, Fading Frontier - The perfect melancholy of the Beach Boys "In My Room," except that now there's weed and the internet in the room.

Sleater-Kinney, No Cities to Love - Hunger makes them modern girls.

Bob Moses, Days Gone By - Like floating on a raft in a swimming pool, McCarron Pool in Brooklyn that is.

Father John Misty, I Love You Honeybear - If this generation has a James Taylor, it might be him.

Lizz Wright, Freedom and Surrender - If this generation has a Roberta Flack, it might be her.

Thundercat, The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam - Sixteen minutes of perfect trip-hop, from the Flying Lotus branch of the tree.

D'Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah - Searing and salving, D'Angelo came blazing back.

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit - Because the best rock has a sense of humor. 

Jaime XX, Colours - The DJ/producer/percussionist as auteur, visionary as Jimi Hendrix at his peak.  No shit, really.

Stay tuned: best singles of 2015 coming right up.

Sitting In

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

After it won the National Book Award in November, it can't be news to you that Coates has written a sobering book about what it means to be a Black American in 2015.  It's time to read it.

I devoured it in August in a five hour fever dream and was at a loss.  It's a complex work full of anger and pessimism, a tale of promising lives cut short even when you play by the rules.  Composed as a letter to his 15 year old son, there's not much light and even less hope.  What could I do with this?  "Live with it," turned about to be the answer.

Now with campuses across the country having a noisy conversation about race, Coates' missive offers some much needed perspective about the institutionalized inequality we have yet to address. Don't be making that face.  Listen for a minute.

Late Harvest

December.  Can it be?  Before the songs of Christmas both ancient and new start to fill your ears, here's one more dose of the Zeitgeist -- new sounds full of the confusion and promise of 2015.   No Adele here folks; you get enough of that in your spin class.

Blood Orange, Sandra's Smile - Dev Hynes just keeps topping himself and "The Gloved One."

El Vy, Return to the Moon - C'mon, you always wondered what The National would sound like on anti-depressants.

Beirut, Gibraltar - Best handclaps of 2015.

Janet Jackson, No Sleep - She's back, all slinky and fly like it's 1999. 

Ryan Adams, Bad Blood - Covering all of Taylor Swift's 1989 seemed like a stunt, but damn if he doesn't pull it off.

Son Little, Lay Down -  Slow cooking on the back porch, with a dash of Bill Withers and Michael Kiwanuka.

Cross Currents

Tame Impala, Currents

Tame Impala first came my way with their 2011 single, "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," a swirly ballad full of synthesizers that could have come straight off John Lennon's Mind Games in 1973.  It was at once a big wet kiss to psychedelia and at the same time a brilliant re-imagination of the genre.  The album was Lonerism. Critics swooned.  Early '70's psychedelia was back from the dead.

Cut to 2015 and pivot:  TI frontman Kevin Parker surprises us again with a fresh take on another old-school sound.  The synth-y wash is still present, as is the moody obsessiveness.  But this time it's R&B  that gets a re-boot.  Not the gritty, Stax soul that Elvis Costello repurposed so memorably on Get Happy.  What Parker has in his mind is R&B as the lovechild of the Chi-lites and the Electric Light Orchestra. Todd Rundgren tried this kind of mash-up years ago but nobody paid much attention.  But when you hear "Yes, I'm Changing," you will take some serious notice:

Then there's the finger-popping, blue-eyed soul of "The Less I Know the Better."  Operator, get me Hall & Oates:

But the piece de resistance here is, "Cause I"m A Man," with Parker channeling Michael Jackson. Hoo-rah. 

This post-millennial time warp can be so confusing, but so much fun. 

Take Me To Church

Lizz Wright,  Freedom and Surrender


In the classic 60's soul era, you could hear the sound of gospel music in most every R&B hit: the note-bending vocals, the call and response, and the longing for transcendent love: think Aretha, Wilson, Otis, Marvin, Sam, Solomon, Mavis.


But as the R&B form aged, the church influences waned and its own secular traditions -- first funk, then disco and later hip-hop -- exerted a more powerful gravitational pull.





Lizz Wright comes from that earlier church-y place but with a distinctive jazz style.  On Freedom and Surrender, she brings a gospel foundation to a repertoire that runs from Nick Drake to the brothers Gibb to contemporary neo-soul.  With a voice recalling Paula Cole, phrasing to rival Cassandra Wilson, and a glossy production matching Joni Mitchell's classic, Court and Spark, she has produced the year's best grownup album of vocal performance.



Here's her take on the Bee Gee's nearly forgotten, "To Love Somebody," which her aching longing rescues from cheesiness forever:

"The New Game," shows she can bring us out into the aisles, too.  

Somebody give me an "Amen."

Roasting Chestnuts

Three recycled disks have given me rare pleasure these last few months. While their age will keep them off my "Best of…" list in another couple of months, they deserve a place in your rotation, too.

The Postal Service, Give Up (2003)

This gem, the only album recorded by Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard 's Postal Service project (with Jimmy Tamborello and, sigh, Jenny Lewis) turned ten this year, with a deluxe reissue to prove it.  You probably know its most memorable tune, "Such Great Heights," but not this gem, "Sleeping In."  My discovery: the whole disk is full of warmth despite the synth-y surface.  Drum machines never sounded so good.

Tom Rush, Blues, Songs and Ballads (1963)

This double album collected two releases from the start of Rush's career, (Blues, Songs & Ballads and Got a Mind to Ramble) before his versions of early Jackson Brown and Joni Mitchell songs showed what impeccable taste he had in the then-emerging generation of confessional singer-songwriters.  Here he displays his equally superb ear for the blues and ballads of the folk revival era -- a Harvard guy singing the songs of hobos.  Hard to find but worth the hunt.

Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (1974)

Pretzel Logic is the pivot point for Steely Dan, where they give up being a rock band and turn into…well, whatever we call them.  Like Workingman's Dead and The Band, Pretzel Logic wove the disparate threads of American music into something new that seemed like it had been around forever. While the Dead and the Band looked back to country, bluegrass and Appalachian music, Becker and Fagan looked to jazz. But instead of a music class, they give us "Ricki Don't Lose That Number."

Exiles

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit And Think and Sometimes I Just Sit

Way back in the pre-Cambrian period of alternative music (1993), Liz Phair surfaced out of nowhere with Exile in Guyville, a wonderful work of tunefulness, guitar noise, and tales of a love sought and lost in Guyville. Overly long?  Sure.  But it was full of orginality, wit and sharp observation.  What made it buzz-worthy, though, was the story that came with it: that this was Phair's reworking of the Stones' classic Exile on Main Street.  I heard slim evidence for this claim apart from the title. Tweny years later, your experience of this music is actually enhanced if you forget this little bit of misdirection.

Australian Courtney Barnett doesn't need such a ploy.  Sometimes I Sit and Think hails from the same musical neighborhood as Exile, but Barnett is traveling lighter. She's way less angry and, thanks perhaps to Phair, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon and the generation of Riot Grrrls who came along since, she has nothing to prove as a guitar toting woman. She certainly needs no invented story and, as a gay woman, couldn't give a rat's ass about Guyville.  Phair is an obvious musical touchstone, but so are Neil Young, Beck and especially Jack White.  

"Sometimes..." opens with a quick stomp sung to an "Elevator Operator:"

"Depreston" is a sentimental, strummed winter's tale that almost makes you feel the low angled January sun. 

Barnett hits her angst-y stride with "Nobody Really Cares if You Don't Go to the Party," and its ultimate FOMO refrain: "I want to go out but I want to stay home."  

Sisters are doing it for themselves.  For real.  

Powerbrokers in the House

Bob Moses, Days Gone By

I think I would love any Brooklyn duo who name themselves after New York's great, but deeply flawed, master builder.  But these guys actually deliver the goods with a smooth take on deep house and electro-pop that is the perfect sound for changing seasons.

For me it recalls Rhye's staggeringly beautiful Woman from 2013. Like that disc, Days Gone By has a warmth and humanity perfectly communicated by its album cover: these are love songs.

"Too Much Is Never Enough" is my favorite cut.  On headphones, this is the stuff of daydreams; playing through your house, you're in clubland.

Last one in McCarren Pool is a rotten egg. 

Singles Going Steady - September

"Now it is September and the web is woven"  - Wallace Stevens

Here's what's playing at my house during my favorite month of the year.

Matt Simons, "Catch and Release" - A little bit chillcore, a little bit Seals and Croft.  But tasty.

Tame Impala, "Cause I'm a Man" - Go, ahead reach for that high note in the shower.

Yo La Tengo, "Automatic Doom" - Your soundtrack for the summer's last batch of margaritas.  Not too sweet, now.  

Bob Moses, "All I Want" - I'm wearing out this deep house track.

Oh, and this:
The Turtles, "You Showed Me" -  The "Back to School" sound of 1969.

Turn it up. Really.

Cover Up

Sing Into My Mouth 

Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell

Here in midsummer, we don't need things to be any more complicated than boiling corn.  The musical equivalent is surely the cover album. On this new release, Iron & Wine's Sam Beam and Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell pair beautifully and simply on some lesser known tunes.

Listen to them turn David Gilmour's "No Way Out of Here," into what sounds like an outtake from the Burrito's "The Gilded Palace of Sin."  

You get the idea.  Fire this up around sunset while these lazy days last.

The Sound of Staying Up All Night: Jamie XX, In Colour

Last summer brought "All Under One Roof Raving," a strange and hypnotic single from Jamie Smith, part of the brilliant techno-pop trio, the XX. Smith is transfixed by the Manchester rave scene of the '80's, in his mind a Xanadu moment that looms like the "Summer of Love" for those of us of a certain age.  He's not wrong, but that moment is just as gone as the Airplane at Winterland.

Still, even a generation older than Smith, it's hard not to have a sense of yearning when you hear this track:

So now we have an album of Smith's reprocessing of this sound of staying up all night.  When I  listen to many of the tracks here -- and "Gosh" is a perfect example -- I keep wondering what I would have made of this music had it been beamed to my radio forty years ago in 1976.

I hear how he stylizes gospel and hip-hop brilliantly a la Moby in "There's Gonna Be Good Times":

But it's this track, "Loud Places," the pop masterpiece here, that makes it all click for me.

My staying up all night nights are rationed now, tempered by the knowledge that transcendence is not more available at 4AM.   But In Colour can give you a tiny taste of the abandon in the wee small hours anytime you want.

With the year half gone, this is one of the best we'll see in 2105.

Samba: A Beat for Your Grown-up Self

I was 11 when Stan Getz had his inescapable hit with "The Girl from Ipanema." Brilliant as I now understand it to be, for my younger self it was just more fluff washing ashore on the tide that brought the Tijuana Brass.  Get me the Dave Clark Five, quick. 

So it was years before I gave a proper listen to Bossa Nova, to Jobim's Wave, Getz and Joa Gilberto's  classic, eponymous collaboration, Davis' gorgeous Quiet Nights, and Ellis & Tom (where you can find Jobim's true sound). By then my British Invasion jets had long cooled and my ears were better trained.  I was old enough to hear the "new beat" that always animated this music and patient enough to listen to lyrics in a language unknown to me.

Which brings me to Gilberto Gil.  A couple of his classic '60's hits turned up on David Byrne's Tropicalia collection in the '80's and piqued my interest, especially "Andar Com Fé." 

But that disc sent me into the arms of Caetano Veloso and Milton Nascimento, which proved short lived infatuations. Gil was still out here making music and The Times regularly noted his NY appearances and the new discs they promoted.  It's happened again.  

At 72,  Gil (once Brazil's Minister of Culture) has a transporting new collection of sambas, titled plainly enough Gilbertos Samba, including some classics you'll know the sound of, if not their names.  Here are 12 tracks that do what Bossa Nova sambas do -- break your heart (in the best way) with strummed guitars, brushed drums and 2/4 time. 

These songs, especially "Desafinado" and "Desde Que o Samba É Samba," make me keep wondering -- is it too late to learn Portuguese?

Luv and Haight: Connecting D'Angelo and Sly

Smack in the middle of Michael Brown and Eric Gardner, D'Angelo drops his first disc in 14 years, a funky opus full of songs connecting the political to the personal.  Its texture is dark, even if it's punctuated by pop hooks.  The bass is mad -- propulsive, danceable and erotic.  It calls to mind the underworldly feel of his own Voodoo and the sweep of Prince's Sign of the Times.  But on repeated listens, I sensed another touchstone.  Hmmm, haven't we been here before? 

And then it hit me: There's a Riot Going On.  No, not the one on the streets of Ferguson -- the 1971 masterpiece by Sly and the Family Stone that marked the end of Stone's greatness.   Just like Riot, Black Messiah is about the impossibility and the necessity of living life in a disrupted world.  "I can't go on; I must go on." But even as history gets made, life keeps happening, love keeps surprising, babies keep arriving. 

Both of these albums are extraordinary documents of their time, from artists who stretch the limits of their genres, informed by anger, optimism and, yes, drugs.  They share a sly humor, too (sorry), winking at how fucked up things can be and how little notice gets taken. They start with dissonance, daring you to come along on this ride. Then they reward with the simplest musical pleasures. 

Listen to D'Angelo's "The Door" alongside Stone's "Family Affair":

Make no mistake, Black Messiah is as fresh and real as anything that's come my way lately.  And the best thing on it, is this promise of enduring love -- "Betray My Heart":

 Makes sense that Black Messiah would put love above everything else, right? 

Best Tracks of 2014

Ten reasons to turn it up even louder.  Each one is a gem.


Courtney Barnett, Avant Gardener - Is she on acid or Ritalin?

Lake Street Drive, You Go Down Smooth - Big horns, big hook, big-voiced woman. Heaven.

 

Ray LaMontagne, Airwaves - The trippiest song of 2014 gave me an urge to tie-dye something.

Damon Albarn, Lonely Press Play - The guy from Blur and Gorillas gets all existential on us.

Temples, Shelter Song - Was there a track on Rubber Soul that I missed?

 

Mark Ronson, Uptown Funk - "Don't believe me, just watch."

Usher, Good Kisser - Soooooo smooth.

Jaime XX, All Under One Roof Raving - ...if the rave in question were in Trinidad. Headphones, please.



 

Jenny Lewis, She's Not Me - A little bit Petty, a little bit chamber pop. All Jenny.

 

Curtis Harding, Heaven's On the Other Side - This is what Mayer Hawthorne really wants to sound like.

Honorable mentions:
Chet Faker, Talk Is Cheap
Prince, This Could Be Us
SBTRKT, New Dorp, New York
Mary J. Blige, Therapy
Pablo Nutini, Let Me Down Easy
The War On Drugs, Red Eyes