2015 may well come to be seen as a transitory year in many facets of life, and few of those are so clear as in the world of music. With the last of the euro-tinged EDM that dominated the first half of the 2010s fading out of the public conscience, 2015 saw the sound of the decade began to solidify. The amalgam of southern hip-hop snare rolls, bouncy tropical house, the funk of the era formerly led by Prince, and the power ballads setting the stage for the late release of Adele was what permeated the culture. What’s more, we saw the complete dominance of streaming services in what may well be seen as the end of the digital download era. It was a year of diversity, a year of change, and a year of excitement as entrepreneurial artists seized the sounds of modern music software and instruments to create some incredible works. It’s my pleasure today to tell you a bit about five of the releases that defined my own year, as well as the year of many others.
5. Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper
After the bleak Tomboy and a series of critically acclaimed releases as part of Animal Collective, Panda Bear looked simultaneously inward and outward for his fifth album, the ambitious Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper. Melding his signature psychedelic sound with hip-hop drum programming inspired by the likes of J Dilla and A Tribe Called Quest, Panda Bear comes face to face with his own mortality in a haze of bubbling synths and murky bass lines. First single “Mr. Noah” is the weirdest and catchiest song about a dog getting bitten on the leg that you’ve ever heard; follow-up “Boys Latin” uses delayed vocals to create a fog of tenor as Panda Bear laments on the shadow moving in. Between and beyond those two are a series of auditory hallucinations, with highlights like “Come to Your Senses” leaving the listener questioning whether they themselves had been swept up in Panda Bear’s stream. Late-game standout “Tropic of Cancer” finds Panda Bear grappling with death through the lens of his father’s mortality over an ingenious sample of “The Nutcracker Ballet”. My personal favorite of the album, “Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker” evokes the musical image of water streaming peacefully over rocks, with the ambient vocals contrasting as perfectly as the reflection of the blue sky.
4. Majical Cloudz – Are You Alone?
Don’t let the hip-hop tinged spelling of their name fool you – Majical Cloudz are dead serious about their craft, and their sparse yet layered music reflects their commitment. Lead singer Devon Welsh’s plain but powerful voice is paired with the flowing, minimal soundscapes of producer Matthew Otto to create a world draped solemnly in white, the color of the ghosts of the past. In comparison to their previous effort, the sublime Impersonator, Otto allows his electronic influences a little bit further out of his leash; brushed snares urge the momentum of “Control”, and an echoed but muted drum machine perfectly carries the ever-building title track. On that title track, the duo speak equally to a lover, a friend, and even the world of music itself; “Do you hear what I’m saying?” becomes frustrated and desperate in that context, though it is not belittled by any other interpretation. Therein lies the genius of Majical Cloudz – these lyrics are charged, but relatable. These instrumentals are familiar, but chilling, like a look back at an old photograph faded by age. By the time the album reaches the lonely sidewalk dirge of “Downtown”, Walsh has contorted his voice into the exact middle of a wail and a whisper from a mouth curled into a knowing smile. “If suddenly I die, I hope they will say,” he says turning toward the infinite city sky, “that he was obsessed, and it was okay.” That kind of raw honesty and emotion is the perfect vessel to deliver the kind of craft that Majical Cloudz deals in. You begin to feel the emptiness of the streets that they describe, and the magic of their collaboration seeps through the cracks.
3. Shlohmo – Dark Red
The aptly named “Ten Days of Falling” begins with a hazy synth that quickly blooms into an almost operatic series of organ chords, only to give way to a screeching minor synth line atop building electronica stabs as the listener takes a swan dive into Shlohmo’s hazy world. That flair for the dramatic is the driving force behind Dark Red, whose name accurately depicts the thick, cloudy smog that creeps from behind each piece. “Emerge From Smoke” takes a crushed arpeggio line and accents it with sparse, breathy bits that simulate a digital take on a guitarist’s slides. From there, Shlohmo adds his tightly controlled hip-hop drum sequences that landed him an acclaimed collaborative EP with Jeremih earlier this year and brought him into the same breath as the likes of Baauer and Clams Casino. The lines between electronica and trip-hop blur even further on “Slow Descent”, which begins somewhere in the VIP lounge of a club and ends up as a breakneck drum ‘n’ bass odyssey over half-time synth melodies. “Apathy”, the lone collaborative effort with D33J, is the furthest foray into the world of southern trap, but still retains the compositional and melodic tropes of Shlohmo’s dark, rhapsodic electronics. To deftly move between these worlds is to fully embrace the sounds of mid-2010s electronic music; to innovate as Shlohmo does is another beast entirely. By the ending chords of “Beams”, one has to gasp for air, finally surfacing from the brash waves of Dark Red’s sonic ocean with a newly invigorated appreciation for what lies in the murky deep.
2. Jamie xx – In Colour
Coursing through the veins of opener “Gosh” is the blood of 90s house infused with the intoxicants of early hip-hop turntablism; the dizzying speed changes that momentarily halt the track are clever nods to Jamie’s own past as a master of the spinning wax. Retrofuturism is the name of the game on the debut solo album from the quiet producer of The xx, and the way that Jamie pulls from the past in ingenious sampling decisions create a world all his own adorned with historic relics on every wall. From the 90s-indebted breakbeat of “SeeSaw” to the shrewd chorus of “Loud Places”, the producer brings modern sounds together in perfect concordance with the ghosts of years past. Nowhere is this better executed than the year’s least expected hip-hop masterpiece, “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” featuring the unlikely but perfect pairing of Young Thug and a sample of 50s acapella group The Persuasions. Though it’s hard not to be distracted by Thug’s amphibious and sometimes charmingly gross rhymes, the glue here is the masterstrokes of Jamie’s steel pans and perfectly compressed bass lines. In Colour at times feels like the ideally minimalist canvas art of an artist too long left behind the scenes, the craft of a perfectionist finally ready for exhibition. Each carefully crafted instrument has its place, and no song feels overcrowded; even relatively ambient tracks like “Hold Tight” use each individual chord in perfect tandem. By the ending stomp of “Girl”, Jamie has cleverly broken down the divisions between triplet and four-on-the-floor time while continuing to hone his signature sounds. The poignant chorus of “Loud Places” puppeteers a defeated-sounding echo of the past, lamenting, “I will never reach such heights”. If In Colour is any indication, Jamie xx will not only reach those heights, but also breezily surpass them.
1. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly
2015 was the year that the conscious American was forced into uncomfortable contemplation on the plight of their black brothers and sisters by horrific systematic violence against such names as Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, the Charleston church massacre victims, and countless others. From there, movements from #BlackLivesMatter to Concerned Student 1950 rose to echo the anger boiling over the pot, the sound of a generation tired of complacent maintenance of the racist structures of their nation. At the top of the year, Kendrick Lamar released his long-awaited follow-up to his acclaimed debut album, good kid, m.A.A.d city, giving musical voice to the frustrated and righteous fury of the black man and woman at exactly the correct time. The clear symbolic and chart hit was “Alright”, which found an exasperated Kendrick acknowledging the struggles that he and his kin face, but fortuitously exclaiming the now-iconic chorus: “we gon’ be alright.” Those words, bellowed over a pounding beat by Pharrell Williams, were repeated at countless marches and protests throughout the year, and will forever be contextualized as the anthem of a year in which black America rose with confidence to give a much-needed shake to dust-covered national attitudes. Behind the social support that elevates To Pimp A Butterfly, however, is one of the most perfect rap albums this side of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The album is strung together, loosely at first but taught as bridge wire by the finale, by a continuing poem that gives way to a chilling moment when Kendrick is revealed to have been reciting those words to the ghost of Tupac Shakur. This reverence to the history of black American music is reflected throughout the project’s running time; jazz (“For Free?”), funk (“King Kunta”, “These Walls”), and the tropes of classic rap (“Institutionalized”, “How Much A Dollar Cost”, “Complexion”) are seamlessly introduced to Kendrick’s signature lyrical style with increasingly impressive results. It’s a testament to his refusal to adhere to modern hip-hop standards that the closest thing to a 2010s trap “banger” here is “The Blacker The Berry”, a stinging indictment of the kind of hypocrisy that leads a black man to weep over Trayvon Martin and then turn around and kill one of his brothers in gangbanging. No moment here is too uncomfortable for Kendrick to tackle, most painfully displayed in “u”, a breakdown of Kendrick’s own inner demons underscored with the clinking of glasses and the choking back of tears to audibly paint a portrait of a man damn near broken under the weight of his own savior status. But he never does break, and in fact uses his own pain as steam to power the antithesis of that track – “i”, the positivity anthem that rap fans weren’t ready for when it released the year prior. The world wasn’t ready, but the unrelenting chorus of “I love myself” was exactly what it needed to hear. “i” is the beating heart of To Pimp A Butterfly, and it succinctly defines the modus operandi of the work as a whole: to lift. To Pimp A Butterfly aims directly at the heart of a generation with ears wide open for Kendrick Lamar, and it pierces. It leaves no white American unswayed, no casual rap listener able to ignore the historical context of the genre and the pain on which it was built. But most importantly, it gives a rally cry to a generation of black Americans desperately in need of one. As our nation moves toward a more cognizant future, the echoes of “we gon’ be alright” will sound from the many, and that positivity will shine a light through the darkness of our past.
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