2016 in Review: Quarter Three
10/23/2016 06:34:00 PM
Hi, everyone. Let me get straight to the point: I know I'm a terrible blogger. I've had a couple other posts drafted for at least two months now, but I haven't been in any sort of mood to finish them. Hopefully, this is the post that knocks me out of whatever writing slump I'm currently in.
A lot of exciting albums came out during this year's third quarter, particularly in September; in fact, about a third of this list was released in the last couple weeks of the month, which is why I waited slightly longer to post than I might have otherwise. You'll also notice my favorites don't particularly align with the big releases everyone else has been talking about, either because I find them overrated or because listening to them is an overwhelming prospect. Besides, I'd rather focus on smaller (but no less important) releases that are more likely to slip under the radar. You can go read about all those other albums somewhere else.
With My Woman, Angel Olsen explores bold new territory but stays true to her folk-country roots, resulting in her best album yet. Its early singles hinted at reinvention: "Intern," a sultry synth-ballad, and "Shut Up Kiss Me," feisty retro pop with a quirky charm rivaled only by its video. As fun as these diversions are, the rest hews closer to Olsen's signature style. On expansive centerpieces "Sister" and "Woman," her tormented torch singer drawl soars above the organic, nuanced swell of instrumentation. The latter culminates in an impassioned command, "I dare you to understand what makes me a woman," delivered with stunning conviction. Yet, in the midst of such confidence, Olsen remains fully in touch with her vulnerability: "I'll be the thing that lives in the dream when it's gone," she sadly concludes on haunting closer "Pops." 
One could argue that Banks is only a watered-down version of FKA twigs and that the market for chilled-out electro-R&B has reached its saturation point, and neither statement would be particularly untrue. But even if Banks' second album, The Altar, offers little in the way of innovation, the dark energy conjured by its atmosphere is still undeniably appealing. Many of its tracks are immediate earworms: "Gemini Feed," "Fuck with Myself," "Trainwreck." Yet they're weird enough - their melodies a touch off-kilter, their vocals bluntly confrontational - to also be vaguely unsettling. Elsewhere, downbeat mood pieces like "Mind Games" and "27 Hours" succeed on Banks' emotionally potent vocal delivery and theatrical shifts in tempo. Unfortunately, a handful of dull ballads makes for inconsistent listening.
Bellows' Fist & Palm opens with a seemingly simple question: "Can you be kind?" It proves its complexity when Oliver Kalb spends most of the album unpacking it in various ways, directing it at both himself and outside forces as he deconstructs the painful unraveling of a friendship. The conflicted emotions inherent to the situation are on display not only in Kalb's lyrics but the music itself. There's a nervous, jittery tension in "Thick Skin" and "Beauty," polyphonic strands of manipulated vocals colliding to create darkly-textured webs of anxiety. Meanwhile, "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter" and "Bully" are calm, reflective surfaces of water, all soft harmonies and subtle folk melodies, until, that is, they are disrupted by unsettling ripples of chaos. As a whole, Fist & Palm is a compelling portrait of humanity - ugliness, flaws, and all.
Freetown Sound, Devonté Hynes' third album as Blood Orange, is a document of black existence in the volatile environment of contemporary America, a theme upon which I don't feel qualified to speak except to say that it is treated in an incredibly sobering way. The music itself is equally compelling, exuding an effortless cool in its amalgamation of countless genres into a sonic journey that is both funky and smooth, retro and futuristic. Hynes often highlights his collaborators: Lorely Rodriguez (Empress Of) injects youthful exuberance into the bubbly "Best to You," and "Hadron Collider" succeeds on Nelly Furtado's emotionally nuanced delivery. But his own voice, alternating between rasp and falsetto, acts as an anchor, grounding the album in weary gravitas ("Augustine," "Hands Up").
After a certain point, all of those ethereally macabre folk albums by female singer-songwriters I've heard over the years begin to blend together. But Emily Jane White's They All Moved in Shadow Together reached deep into my soul from first listen, striking the perfect balance between severity, morbidity, and beauty with its masterfully-controlled atmosphere. White's velvety croon, both serene and sinister, presides over lush acoustics. Her melodies have a soothing, pastoral quality but are twisted by shivering swells of otherworldly vocal harmonies. While the Gothic storytelling in some songs feels unfettered from the constraints of time and place ("Hands," "Nightmares on Repeat," "Rupturing"), White's abstract lyrics elsewhere shift to contemporary racism ("The Black Dove") and sexism ("Womankind").
Speaking of ethereally macabre singer-songwriters, Emma Ruth Rundle is another who has successfully avoided falling into angst-ridden clichés time and time again. Last year, she released the towering Salome with her post-rock band, Marriages. Her latest solo endeavor, Marked for Death, treads similar territory without dulling its edge, veering darker and heavier than 2014's Some Heavy Ocean. Standout track "Protection" lyrically centers on a violent relationship ("I let him tie down the frailest part of my body") and the self-perpetuating cycle of abuse ("You offer this protection no one else has given me"), but its snarling guitars and aggressive vocals signify an emerging superhuman strength. There's a glimmer of hope, too, in the bright, soaring openness of closer "Real Big Sky," in which Rundle emphasizes resilience in the face of adversity.
Jenn Wasner is best known as one half of Wye Oak, but she's been quietly working solo under the name Flock of Dimes for years. Her efforts culminate in If You See Me, Say Yes, which takes the electronic experimentation of Wye Oak's Shriek in a decidedly brighter, catchier direction. Lead single "Semaphore" is a perfect slice of electropop, a trend that continues in tracks like "Everything Is Happening Today" and "Given/Electric Life," hook-laden synth collages inside of which Wasner's husky voice fits with surprising ease. However, others take a more abstract and expansive approach. The calculated build of "Birthplace" wouldn't sound out of place on Shriek, and the rich, ominous "Flight" begs to soundtrack an arty psychological thriller. As a result, the album's surface-level appeal unfolds to reveal great depths.
In 2013, Caroline White released a prolific number of lo-fi recordings under the name Infinity Crush, the abrupt outpouring of a life's worth of experiences. In contrast, her first label-backed album, Warmth Equation, is largely centered on a single theme: the paralyzing grief of her father's death. As on White's previous releases, the muffled intimacy of its production, enriched by fuller instrumentation and vocal harmonies, suits her overwhelmingly personal lyrics. Yet such brutal honesty comes at a high cost. "No one wants it sweet/They want it to hurt," she admits on "Heaven" before resigning herself to an inevitable fate: "You can be the feet/And I will be the dirt." Luckily, relief arrives in the form of upbeat, jangly pop songs like "Pete and Pete" and "Over You," which embody the lighter side of a girl singing alone in her bedroom.
Last year, Johanna Warren's nūmūn was among my favorite releases. Gemini I, the first in a two-album series, refines its predecessor's gentle folk stylings, but what it lacks in surprise, it makes up for in beauty. More than ever, Warren's classical, calming piano and acoustic guitar melodies and warm, rich vocals mask uncomfortable secrets. She frames her character flaws as incantations, imbued with the impossible potency of dark magic. "I was abusing language to have power over you," she admits serenely in "The Blessing / The Curse," and the bewitchingly pretty "circlenot astraight" climaxes in a troubling dichotomy: "My addictions make me hate/But my afflictions make me kind." Even the bright cadences of "Hungry Ghost" are betrayed by its chirpy chorus, "All I hear is people grieving, even in my head."
In only six tracks, Kelsey Lu's Church leaves an impression that far outlasts its thirty-minute run time. Using only cello and voice, she crafts complex, classically-inspired pieces wherein neo-soul and baroque coalesce seamlessly, guiding the listener through a seductive labyrinth of emotions. "Dreams" takes the most leisurely path, blossoming over 7.5 minutes from a solitary, quivering opening into a swell of dreamy strings presided over by Lu's soulfully raw vocals. Needless to say, it takes several listens to fully digest. Other tracks are more compact and immediate: "Time" has unwavering forward momentum and melodies that quickly root into your head, and the moody "Morning After Coffee" is built on repetition, each new cycle charged with twice as much passion as the last thanks to Lu's nuanced delivery.
Put Owen Pallett into a blender with a generous fistful of eighties hits and you might come out with something resembling Kishi Bashi. Sonderlust follows on the heels of 2014's Lighght, which was a breakthrough in terms of establishing Kaoru Ishibashi's signature bombastic sound. When it comes to bells and whistles, Ishibashi rarely holds back, but he is also adept at wrangling the unwieldy layers of his compositions into tightly-paced pop songs. "m'lover," "Hey Big Star," and "Honeybody" are obvious standouts for their kaleidoscopic atmospheres, silky-smooth vocals, and sugary choruses; an entire album's worth of them, however, would be exhausting. Luckily, comparatively subtler tracks like "Can't Let Go, Juno" emphasize the strength of Ishibashi's songwriting on a base level.
At its core, Lady Pills' music is pure punk, albeit conceived with plenty of space for both catchiness and vulnerability. Ella Boissonnault's sardonic vocals fit this take on the genre like a glove, effortlessly toeing the line between sincerity and sarcasm. Despite, the band's debut, concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of a 21st-century woman. Boissonnault stumbles haphazardly through a world in which "everyone I know hangs with their boyfriend" while she just wants to "smoke cigarettes without being hit on." The scrappy, exuberant rock instrumentation complements the lyrics' conversational tone, swinging easily between frenzied pop-punk diatribes ("Daddy Warbucks," "Eat Them"), folk-leaning ballads ("Without a Fight"), and '90s-inspired grunge slow-burners ("Secondhand Trash," "The Only One, Pt. 1").
Local Natives' second album, Hummingbird, was the definition of a grower: its subtle melodies, devastating lyrics, and slow crescendos greatly rewarded repeat listens. Its follow-up, Sunlit Youth, sacrifices some emotional potency for immediacy, taking a trendy electronic brush to the band's sweeping melodic rock canvas. "Past Lives" and "Fountain of Youth" are successful stabs at this, marrying tasteful synths to atmospheric guitars and impeccable harmonies, not to mention deeply contagious choruses. True to form, though, the album shines brightest in its more inward moments. "Coins" sits alongside the band's best ballads, stripping away the bombast to highlight Kelcey Ayer's pained delivery. Later, closing duo "Everything All at Once" and "Sea of Years" achieve tranquility through hypnotic repetition. 
Martha is an English rock band that blurs the line between punk and twee in the tradition of forebears like Los Campesinos! and Johnny Foreigner. Blisters in the Pit of My Heart is their second album, and it's charmingly ramshackle, combining sloppy instrumentation, cutesy boy/girl harmonies, and punchy choruses into one undeniably infectious package. All four members - Nathan Stephens Griffin, J. Cairns, Naomi Griffin, and Daniel Ellis - trade off on lead vocal duties throughout. Good luck getting any of their scrappy melodies out of your head, from "Christine" to "Precarious (Supermarket Song)" to "Do Whatever." On the sweetly romantic "Ice Cream and Sunscreen," the band reveals a more vulnerable side with the refrain, "I know you only melt in the middle like ice cream and sunscreen/Blisters in the pit of my heart."
Nearly a decade ago (!), I discovered a band called Agent Ribbons and became infatuated with their quirky brand of twang-infused pop. Unfortunately, the band failed to take off, but from its ashes, singer/guitarist Natalie Gordon formed Tele Novella. Their debut, House of Souls, seems to pick up where Agent Ribbons left off. It has tighter songwriting and fuller instrumentation, but Gordon's gutsy drawl and morbid sense of humor remain intact. Its opening trio - "Sacramento," "Carpathia," "Waiting on an Answer" - combines the ease of surf rock with the vibrancy of psychedelic pop, in stark contrast to the darkly cryptic lyrics ("All our names are spelled the same in the lobby of the flesh arcade"). Later, "Dead Canary" and "Even Steven" allow Gordon to showcase her voice's wilder, more eccentric side.
If Yohuna's music were an element, it would undoubtedly be water. Not as vast as the ocean but more insular: murky and still, imbued with ancient mysticism. "Lake," then, as Patientness' opener is so appropriately titled. The lazy, sodden cadences of the album's melodies bob gently against your ears, submerging you in a dark bog of thickly-layered synths and Johanne Swanson's honeyed vocals. A sense of treading water permeates the lyrics, too, as in the drudging nihilism of "The Moon Hangs in the Sky Like Nothing Hangs in the Sky." However, flashes of self-contentment lessen the burden of existential stasis. On "Badges," Swanson concedes, "I'm not pretty/I'm not nice," only to counter, "I am radiating light." This fragile confidence is mirrored in the acoustic openness of the closing title track.
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