The Best Albums of 2015

The Best Albums of 2015

The Top 20:
1. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie and Lowell

A return to the beautiful folk music, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.

2. Tame Impala - Currents

Best psych-rock album of their career.  Now with soul and R&B added to the mix.  Best pure music of 2015.

3. Joanna Newsom - Divers

Most unique talent in pop music.  These are startlingly beautiful, fiercely inventive songs, couched in the metaphysical, touching on the universal, born from a deeply personal place.  Love her or hate her, you have to respect her.

4. Deradoorian - The Expanding Flower Planet

Expanding on Dirty Projectors’ avant gardeisms, she bravely eschews the traditional language of pop music to create her own pictures and conversations.

5. Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Panda Bear’s toughest, grimiest,  funkiest album to date.  All the good of Animal Collective; none of the bad

6. Arca - Mutant

Most challenging non-dance dance music of the year,  Unique, abstract viewpoint that embraces strangeness, ugliness, and beauty equally.

7. Jamie XX - In Color

It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done—moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists—and packing them tightly into a glittering ball.

8. Viet Cong - Viet Cong

With music sounding this raw, vibrant and strikingly different than most modern music, yet achingly familiar to those of us that remember the first wave of post punk, this band continues to grow and tap into something exciting. 

9. Aphex Twin - Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 

More of the sophisticated, complex geniosity of RJ.

10. Eartheater RIP Chrysallis

It’s as if they had raided The Anthology of American Folk Musicbut only absorbed the songs about ghosts. 

11. Sleater - Kinney -- No Cities to Love

The songs are short, taut and lethal, harking back, if anything, to their earliest albums. But they’re more complete songwriters now.

12. HEALTH - Death Magic

HEALTH’s commitment to making the brain flush dopamine through sensory overload is unfailingly undermined at every turn by their commitment to an aesthetic that’s oppressive, suffocating, bordering on malevolent.

13. Scuba - Claustrophobia

The sonics are dazzling. Rattled keys, wind chimes, rubbed wineglass rims, half-heard voices, and all manner of incidental rustle serve to make the music leap from the speakers. 

14. Thee Oh Sees - Mutilator Defeated at Last

Their 14th psych-rock album packs everything they’re good at into one concentrated effort: frenetic rock, pulsating psychedelia and buoyant melodies.

15.  Lakker - Tundra

Lakker weave voices in the style of sacred music into contexts where they wouldn't normally be heard. The resulting effect is spit-shined patches of perfect sonority that make the noise sound brighter, like there’s something alive inside it.

16. Deerhunter- Fading Frontier

New old school sound; tight when they need to be, loose enough to explore the cosmos.  And Cox being Cos, its always smart.  

17. Kurt Vile - b'lieve i'm goin down

The hardest working slacker in rock; strong humorous album slightly below Smoke Rings…

18. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit

By channeling her anxiety into shaggy, relatable and catchy songs, she’s made a compulsively listenable rock n’ roll record.

19. Milo - So the Flies Don't Come

Most interesting rapper today; which he manages to capture Nietzche-esque nihilism with the comic simplicity of the shrugging emoticon.

20. Ought - Sun Coming Down

You can hear their art school forebears - Wire, Mission of Burma, the Fall - running through their music.  But its performed with an intensity and modernity that is their own.

And the 60 Runners up:

1. Protomartyr - Agent Intellect
2. Speedy Ortiz - Foil Dear
3. Circuit des Yeux - In Plain Speech
4. Six Organs of Admittance/William Tyler/ Bishop-Orcutt-Corsano, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Yo La Tengo, Caught on Tape, Bardo Pond - Parallologram comp.
5. Julia Holter  - Have You in My Wilderness 
6. Masayoshi Fujita - Apologues
7. Blanck Mass - Dumb Flesh
8. Bjork- Vulnicura
9. Chelsea Wolfe- Abyss
10. Gun Outfit - Dream All Over
11. Six Organs of Admittance - Hexatic
12. Pinkish Black - Bottom of the Morning
13. Mount Eerie - Sauna
14. Holly Herndon- Platform
15. Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass
16. Tom Carter - Long Time Underground
17. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin chapter 3
18. Earthly - Days
19. Pearson Sound - Pearson Sound 
20. Rival Consoles- Howl 
21. Prurient - Frozen Niagara Falls
22. Bop English - Constant Bop
23. Kowloon Walled City - Grievances
24. FIS - The Blue Quicksand is Going Now
25. Battles - La Di Da Di
26. Bell Witch - Four Phantoms
27. Wrekmeister Harmonies - Night of Your Ascension
28. Container - LP
29. Alif - Aynama-Rtama
30. Shye Ben Tzur, J. Greenwood and the Rajasthan Express - Junun
31. Peacers - Peacers
32. Sambra Touré - Gandadiko
33. Low - Ones and Sixes
34. Laura Marling - Short Movie
35. Michael Chapman - Fish 
36. Hot Chip - Why Make Sense?
37. United Bible Studies - The Ale's What Cures Ye
38. Ballak Sissoko/Vincent Segal - Musique de Nuit
39. Master Musicians of Bukkake - Further West Quad Cult LP
40. Ghostface Killah / BADBADNOTGOOD - Sour Soul
41. Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Tragedy
42. Wand - 1000 Days
43. Sunn 0))) - Kannon
44. Garden of Worms - Idler Stories
45. Bitchin Bajas and Natural Information Society -Automaginary
46. Archy Marshall - A New Place to Drown
47. Tomeka Reid Quartet - Tomeka Reid Quartet
48. Rabit - In Communion
49. InAeona - Force Rise the Sun
50. John T. Gast - Excerpts
51. Lychgate - An Antidote for the Glass Pill
52. M.E.S.H. - Piteous Gate
53. Hieroglyphic Being - We are not the First
54. Myrkur - M    
55. var. - Hamiltion sdtk.
56. Carter Tutti Void - f(x)
57. William Parker - For Those Who Are, Still
58. Jlin - Dark Energy
59. Vince Staples - Summertime 06    
60. Yo La Tengo - Stuff Like That There                                                                                                              Also great comp/releases this year: Elvis Costello-Unfaithful Music and Soundtrack Album, Bruce Springsteen-The Ties That Bind; The River Collection; Christian's Catch Hell-various