NYTimes-The Best Albums of 2015

7/23/2019 NYTimes-The Best Albums of 2015

1/7

http://nyti.ms/1Q0bksf

MUSIC

By JON PARELES, BEN RATLIFF and NATE CHINEN DEC. 9, 2015

The music critics of The New York Times share their picks for the best pop and

jazz albums of the year.

1. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly(Top Dawg/Aftermath

/Interscope) Monumentally ambitious and just as ambivalent, Kendrick Lamar

shoulders a spokesmans burdens on To Pimp a Butterfly, an album-length

immersion in all the choices and contradictions facing a rapper with a conscience.

Race, poverty, fame, lust, cultural heritage, the direction of America and thetrajectory of his career are all on his mind. Ideas and atmosphere govern the

tracks, not immediate catchiness. But its an immensely musical album: a dense

caldron of funk, jazz and soul that draws hope and determination from the past,

confronting problems that past eras have left unsolved. (Read the Critics

Notebook | Listen to the Popcast)

2. Joanna Newsom Divers(Drag City) The melodies on Joanna

Newsoms Divers have a foundation of vintage American simplicity:Appalachian tunes, waltzes, ragtime, parlor songs, lullabies. She sings them in her

high, guileless but determined voice, accompanied by her harp. But things get

more intricate from there. Edifices of counterpoint materialize around her; verses

stretch and detour toward incantations. The lyrics ponder time, mortality, love,

war, nature, cities and the elusive joy of life often cryptic and allusive,

sometimes utterly transparent. The songs add up to a cycle, illuminating one

anothers mysteries. (Read the review | Listen to the Popcast)

3. Grimes Art Angels(4AD) Art Angels is a solo tour de force.

Best Albums of 2015 - The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/arts/music/best-albums-of-2015.html

7 10/12/2015 06:36


2/7

Everything on it, except for selected guest vocals, is by Claire Boucher, a.k.a.

Grimes. As songwriter, singer, instrumentalist, producer and engineer (not to

mention illustrator and video director), Grimes has reverse-engineered the

high-gloss, short-attention-span mechanisms of current pop to give it her own

spin a matter of bravado, feminism, taunts, questions, eccentricities, hurdlesovercome, commodifying all the pain and, every few seconds, another musical

zinger. (Listen to the Popcast)

4. Sleater-Kinney No Cities to Love(Sub Pop) Reunited for its first

album in 10 years, Sleater-Kinney returns as joyfully rigorous as ever, sinewy and

ready to grapple. Once again, Corin Tuckers lead vocals make her a banshee with

a mission, singing about minimum-wage purgatory, fervent iconoclasm and

dread in our own Gilded Age. And once again, Janet Weisss gut-punching beatpropels the endlessly wrangling, endlessly interlocking electric guitars of Ms.

Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, which also bristle now with multitracked

passages. Its not a nostalgic reunion; its a united front, renewed and

contentious. (Listen to the Popcast)

5. Bjrk Vulnicura(One Little Indian) The paralyzing sorrow of a

breakup, and the slow recovery that followed, were the makings of Bjrks

Vulnicura, an album thats simultaneously emotionally open and meticulouslyplotted, plush and austere. Bjrks voice is constantly exposed, inhabiting some of

her most declamatory melodies. Around her, a string orchestra provides

cushioning, cinematic expansiveness and sometimes desperate turbulence, while

electronics add flickers of rhythm and startling, ominous swaths of noise. She

sounds all alone in unstable realms, wounded but strong coping. (Read the

review | Listen to the Popcast)

6. Adele 25(XL/Columbia) In an era of ever-narrowing niche targeting,

its an achievement to make the album virtually everyone wants to hear to be

the big-voiced, sympathetic, vulnerable, natural woman who overshadows all the

bionic pop superstars and unites a fragmented pop audience. From piano ballads

to booming programmed (but organic-tinged) pop, Adele radiates empathy. The

vengeful rejected lover of 21 has moved on; at 27, she is already mourning lost

youth and striving for deeper connection. Sure, she can be lachrymose, but we all

need a good cry sometimes. (Read the review | Listen to the Popcast)

7. Alabama Shakes Sound & Color(ATO) A soul-revival time capsule


7 10/12/2015 06:36


3/7

was too confining for Alabama Shakes. The band still shows its roots, from

Brittany Howards swoops and shouts on down, and its songs still have

down-to-earth messages like Dont Wanna Fight. But the music steers away

from echoes of particular eras; with arty determination, the band uses different

tempos (sometimes daringly slow), different production approaches (sometimesbarbed, sometimes subdued), different instrumental sounds and colors. For

Alabama Shakes, soulfulness isnt a thing of the past.

8. Sufjan Stevens Carrie and Lowell(Asthmatic Kitty) Mourning is

inextricably tied to memory on Carrie and Lowell, which reflects on the 2012

death of Sufjan Stevenss mother, a mentally troubled woman who was largely

absent as he grew up. Mr. Stevenss voice is gentle to the point of ghostliness as it

floats amid dainty webs of fingerpicking and eerie clouds of reverberation. Thelyrics struggle with kinship and estrangement, need and loss, luminous details

and possibilities forever unrealized. On this intimate whisper of an album, the

songs are pretty yet utterly unsparing. (Read the review)

9. Mbongwana Star From Kinshasa(World Circuit/Nonesuch)

Bouncy Congolese pop music that has been a blissful contrast to decades of

dictatorships and civil wars gets a startling, spooky makeover on From

Kinshasa. Mbongwana Star is a band from the Democratic Republic of Congo,led by singers from the band Staff Benda Billi, that added its Irish producer as a

member. Their collaboration is driven by the bands crisp, versatile rhythm

section, its angular guitar and its lived-in voices, but the album is emphatically a

studio concoction. It warps sounds and spaces with distortion, reverb, filtering

and hyper-close-ups on unexpected details; rhythms ricochet, small sounds loom,

silences gape. With all its shadows and scars, the surreal music conjures harsh

realities.

10. Miguel Wildheart(RCA) The funk-rock-psychedelia-soul

songwriter Miguel Pimentel, who concentrated on carnal pursuits on his previous

albums, made Wildheart a push toward self-realization and a panorama of his

hometown, Los Angeles, in both music and lyrics: from funk to rock, from

Hollywood to the ghetto. Defying most current R&B, he favors electric guitars,

using them like the smog that makes sunsets more colorful. But he hasnt

forgotten the erotic; the albums best song, Coffee, happens to be about a

blissful morning after. (Read the review)


7 10/12/2015 06:36


4/7

1. Kamasi Washington The Epic (Brainfeeder) This is an album that

runs nearly three hours, with a 10-piece jazz band, orchestra and choir; at its

center is a crew of Los Angeles musicians in their 30s whose musical connection

goes back half their lives. It evokes Coltrane, 70s funk, gospel and a classical

education, and if you think it should be more streamlined and concise, youre

missing the point: The muchness of the telling is central to the tale. (Read the

review | Listen to the Popcast)


/Interscope) Mr. Lamars hip-hop statement record is all paradox all the time

self-absorbed and proactive, dense and agile, groovy and bleak, triumphant and

downhearted. (Listen to the Popcast)

3. Jen Shyu Sounds and Cries of the World(Pi) The singer Ms. Shyu

represents a new kind of improviser-composer-ethnomusicologist hybrid; this is

the result of her own fieldwork (in East Timor, Indonesia, Taiwan and South

Korea), pushed through an extraordinary voice and a circle of high-level

improvisers. (Listen to the Popcast)

4. Ava Rocha Ava Patrya Yndia Yracema(avarocha.com) The

Brazilian singer Ms. Rocha has inherited the aesthetic breadth and playfulness of

the late-1960s Tropicalia movement and connects it with new rock, funk, samba,

free improvisation, serious composition, and noise; few records this year were

as deep and fun.

5. Tenement Predatory Headlights(Don Giovanni) Bright, melodic

punk, on the face of it, from a do-it-yourself Wisconsin trio. But punk wide

enough to absorb master-class songwriting detail, ballads and long passages like

loose impressions of John Cages early percussion pieces. (Read the review |

Listen to the Popcast)

6. Joanna Newsom Divers(Drag City) Like many of the other best

records this year, Ms. Newsoms newest was layered and complex, art done the

long way around. But it was also the condensed version of her gifts, an argument

that shes not an odd-voiced outlier but one of the best singer-songwriters weve

got. (Read the review | Listen to the Popcast)


7 10/12/2015 06:36


5/7

7. Helen The Original Faces(Kranky) A beguiling record involving Liz

Harris, who records on her own as Grouper and who here applies her usual

principles of distance, erasure and triple-strength echo to a rock band. Its always

there and not there.

8. Big | Brave Au De La(Southern Lord) Big | Brave is a young, loud

and minimal power trio with two guitars and drums, from Montreal. But the

spaces, chanted through by the singer Robin Wattie, are as important as the

heavy moments.

9. Marta Snchez Quintet Partenika(Fresh Sound) Ms. Snchez, a

Spanish jazz pianist living in New York, writes strong and sometimes folklike

melodies but allows for all kinds of drift and smear from her band.

10. Royal Headache High(Whats Your Rupture?) A second album by a

scrappy Australian band, adding heart and substance to what you could call

garage punk and led by an exceptionally soulful singer named Shogun: your tour

guide to love, desire and outrage. (Read the review)

1. Steve Coleman and the Council of Balance Synovial Joints (Pi

Recordings) The alto saxophonist and composer Steve Coleman hasnt met a

complex system he couldnt hijack and adapt for creative uses. On this absorbing

album, partly inspired by anatomical terms of movement, he leads an improv-

chamber group woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, the whole deal

through oblique tangles of counterpoint. The results could have felt impenetrable,

but Mr. Coleman and his crew keep the music light and lithe, with a slithery sense

of groove.


/Interscope) Furious, exhortative, self-excoriating, grandiose: Kendrick Lamars

latest album is all of these, and a show of staggering lyrical and musical ambition

besides. Pulling from gangsta rap, psychedelic funk, hard bop and neo-soul, its a

word-drunk magnum opus that can still feel at times like a taut psychological

thriller. And while its earnest sprawl recalls a bygone concept-album heyday, its

grim urgency is blisteringly of the moment. (Read the Critics Notebook | Listento the Popcast)


7 10/12/2015 06:36


6/7

3. Maria Schneider Orchestra The Thompson Fields(ArtistShare)

Ethereal in its effect but firmly grounded in its purpose, The Thompson Fields

is a large-group jazz album of extraordinary depth, precision and subtlety. Ms.

Schneider has been the leading composer in this style for a while now, but here

she exceeds her own high bar, with an elite corps that has fully internalized herlanguage. And the pastoral glow and painterly shading of her arrangements carry

an implicit point about the delicate balance of the natural world. (Read the

review)

4. Vijay Iyer Trio Break Stuff(ECM) The pianist Vijay Iyer has led this

deftly incantatory trio, with Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on

drums, for almost a dozen years, and it only keeps getting better. Theres a

futurist slant to its stride, no less on several jazz standards than on Mr. Iyersdarkly ruminative compositions, which flesh out stark rhythmic ideas with a

deep, gathering intrigue.

5. Joanna Newsom Divers(Drag City) A breathtaking work of elegiac

reflection, gothic detail and flinty self-assurance, Divers is the most potent

distillation yet of Joanna Newsoms extravagant aspirations. Some songs

resemble chanteys, and others inhabit a pool of stillness, but what never wavers is

the intensity of her focus as a wry, allusive lyricist; an ingenious harpist andcomposer; and a calm, deceptively guileless singer. (Read the review | Listen to

the Popcast)

6. Rudresh Mahanthappa Bird Calls(Act) Charlie Parker, the eternal

bebop paragon, serves as a distinctly permissive muse on this volatile tribute, by

one of his many heirs. Featuring a bladelike quintet with Mr. Mahanthappa on

alto saxophone and the impressive young Adam OFarrill on trumpet, its a

whirligig of brisk dynamism and bustling modernity.

7. Ben Wendel The Seasons(self-released) The multireedist Ben

Wendel enlisted a dozen eloquent duet partners accomplished peers like the

pianist Aaron Parks and personal heroes like the tenor saxophonists Mark Turner

and Joshua Redman for The Seasons, a series of finely drawn chamber pieces

inspired by the months of the year. He posted them at regular intervals as online

videos, bringing a welcome visual element to each exchange, a sensation of being

in the room. So why call it an album? Why not?


7 10/12/2015 06:36


7/7

8. Chris Lightcaps Bigmouth Epicenter(Clean Feed) Mr. Lightcap, a

well-traveled bassist with a feel for sturdy song form, presents a new batch of

tunes for Bigmouth, a band with two expressive tenor saxophonists, Chris Cheek

and Tony Malaby, and an adaptable rhythm team. Beyond the loose New York

City theme and a stylistic frame that runs from Ornette Coleman to WestAfrican kora music to the Velvet Underground its an album of alert cohesion

and unpretentious charm.

9. DAngelo and the Vanguard Black Messiah(RCA) After taking 14

years to release his follow-up to Voodoo, DAngelo couldnt wait an extra few

weeks to hit a January target. So Black Messiah landed earlier than expected,

but still too late for last years tabulations. Put an asterisk on it, then, but dont

put it aside: The album, a viscous haze of Mothership funk and unhurried soul,sounds as intoxicating now as it did on first arrival. One measure of a good

comeback album, evidently, is that it makes people forget you ever left. (Read the

review)

10. Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Mike Reed Artifacts (482

Music) To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Association for the

Advancement of Creative Musicians, this collective of broad-minded younger

association members the flutist Nicole Mitchell, the cellist Tomeka Reid andthe drummer Mike Reed made a rare sort of repertory gesture, drawing from a

well that isnt tapped often enough. The results are intrepid, soulful and, on a

piece like Steve McCalls Ill Be Right Here Waiting, hauntingly beautiful.

More highlights from the year, as chosen by our critics:

Movies, Television, Classical Music, Dance, Theater, Art and Performances

2015 The New York Times Company


Documents

NYTimes-The Best Albums of 2015