10. Algiers, Algiers (Matador Records)<\/strong> 9. Nervosas, Nervosas (Dirtnap Records)<\/strong> 8. Holly Herndon, Platform (4AD)<\/strong> 7. Jenny Hval, Apocalypse, Girl (Sacred Bones Records)<\/strong> 6. Guantanamo Baywatch, Darling… It\u2019s Too Late (Suicide Squeeze Records)<\/strong> 5. JD Allen, Graffiti (Savant Records)<\/strong> 4. Sarah Kirkland Snider, Unremembered (New Amsterdam Records)<\/strong> 3. Anthony De Mare, Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim from the Piano (ECM)<\/strong> 2. Jason Isbell, Something More Than Free (Southeastern Records)<\/strong> 1. Mary Halvorson, Meltframe (Firehouse 12 Records)<\/strong> Top 10 Albums 10. Algiers, Algiers (Matador Records) This Atlanta band starts with the dark gospel heart that\u2019s always been the engine powering rock & roll and adds noisy, choked guitar and keys over layers and layers of raw percussion. The sparseness of these arrangements makes the intensity of the songs almost unbearable, but intoxicating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2479],"tags":[1536,1531,1266,1535,1347,1533,1534,1530,1532,1367],"class_list":["post-4174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-of-the-year","tag-algiers","tag-anthony-de-mare","tag-guantanamo-baywatch","tag-holly-herndon","tag-jason-isbell","tag-jd-allen","tag-jenny-hval","tag-mary-halvorson","tag-nervosas","tag-sarah-kirkland-snider"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nThis Atlanta band starts with the dark gospel heart that\u2019s always been the engine powering rock & roll and adds noisy, choked guitar and keys over layers and layers of raw percussion. The sparseness of these arrangements makes the intensity of the songs almost unbearable, but intoxicating at the same time. Algiers<\/i> is a magical record with some obvious influences played so ferociously and recombined in such a unique way that it makes you forget anything that came before it within a few minutes.<\/p>\n
\nColumbus\u2019 Nervosas took a big step onto the national stage after years as the favorite band of the hometown cognoscenti with this debut on Dirtnap records. Featuring their most personal and intense writing, this eponymous record is a three-dimensional look at a breakup with big hooks and a frenzied intensity. Bassist-singer Jeff Kleinman, guitarist-singer Mickey Marie, and drummer Nick Schuld have never been recorded better: every sound on this hits like a fist concealing a roll of quarters; and the atmospheres are landscapes painted in ink-wash. It\u2019s a breathtaking quantum leap from a band I was already crazy about.<\/p>\n
\nHerndon takes on decay and finds an opportunity for rebirth in it. Simultaneous destruction and recreation are the fires that illuminate this intense music, with rhythms that fracture and resolve in ways that are satisfying, but never easy. There\u2019s an almost uncomfortable intimacy in tracks like \u201cLonely at the Top\u201d (featuring Claire Tolan on vocals) that conjures Laurel Nakadate\u2019s visual art as much as any music antecedent. \u201cNew Ways to Love\u201d and \u201cInterference\u201d burst with light and promise, breaking through fog and burning off cataracts. Platform<\/i> has the whole world in it, viewed through a very personal, deliberately cracked glass.<\/p>\n
\nHval\u2019s albums get more personal and simultaneously more worldly with each release. In many ways, Apocalypse, Girl<\/i> feels like her New York record, a comparison made explicit with the Laurie Anderson\u2013recalling opening track and its speeding-past elements that feel more like a combine than a collage. Throughout the record, Hval\u2019s characters grapple with overcoming themselves and trying to keep a record of the changes, with arrangements in gorgeously, torturously slow tempos.<\/p>\n
\nRaunchy shimmies like \u201cSea of Love,\u201d hillbilly stomps like \u201cBoy Like Me,\u201d and overheated slow dances (with plenty of groping) like \u201cDo What You Want\u201d bob to the surface of this record that glistens with darkness like an oil slick. Enough melancholy pervades Darling… It\u2019s Too Late<\/i> on tracks like \u201cToo Late\u201d and \u201cBeat Has Changed\u201d to give it a center of gravity without ever bogging it down. This merging of gleefully lustful lyrics with riotous surf-punk sonics was my favorite Saturday night record of 2015.<\/p>\n
\nTenor saxophonist Allen reconvened his classic trio with Rudy Royston and Gregg August to continue his streak of some of the best straightforward jazz records anyone\u2019s making today. Allen refines his gorgeous tone and digs deeper into the classic Sonny Rollins mode than anyone I can think of working right now, but this trio is never beholden to any single template. They have enough reverence for the history of the genre to not be afraid to joust and challenge it. It\u2019s a record full of pulse-pounding rhythms shooting incandescent melodies right into the sky.<\/p>\n
\nThis is a lush, mysterious record full of rich harmonies about where myth and storytelling meet with reality and peering into the gaps that meeting creates. Snider further cements her reputation as one of today\u2019s greatest composers for voices (with vocals by Shara Worden, DM Stith, and Padma Newsome) with this song cycle that works with distance, light, and shadow. In a year full of terrific chamber music by up-and-coming composers, Unremembered<\/i> stands out among its peers. Listeners will still be unpacking its mysteries well into the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
\nSondheim\u2019s pyrotechnic lyrical virtuosity often causes the harmonic and melodic content of his music to go unnoticed. De Mare takes steps to redress that with this dazzling, almost overstuffed panorama of newly commissioned solo piano readings by some great composers. Gabriel Kahane\u2019s \u201cBeing Alive\u201d deliberately obfuscates its gorgeous melody, making the reader work for that catharsis; and Frederic Rzewski\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m Still Here\u201d balances its innate melancholy and defiance in a way that feels like cracking the piece\u2019s chest open and massaging its heart. Nico Muhly\u2019s \u201cColor and Light\u201d plays with slippage and brightness in a way that evokes the Seurat paintings being conjured, while Steve Reich\u2019s \u201cFinishing the Hat\u201d from the same show conjures the grandeur of finishing something while grounding it in the grinding stasis of working and only seeing the final product in brief glimpses and flashes. For a Sondheim fan, this is almost like eating too many of your favorite chocolates and being surprised by nuances you didn\u2019t expect.<\/p>\n
\nWhile not as immediate nor as grand as its predecessor, Southeastern<\/i>, Something More Than Free<\/i> did something I connected with strongly even when I couldn\u2019t quite articulate it. It\u2019s the best example I heard all year\u2014and one of the best I have ever heard\u2014of an album used as an instrument of empathy. In these 11 songs, Isbell grapples with history and gratitude and tries to find a way to live in the world without shame or rancor, and he does it with fine lyrical detail and low-key hooks that burrow their way into the listener\u2019s head and explode over time.<\/p>\n
\nAlthough a unique album in Halvorson\u2019s oeuvre in a couple of regards (it\u2019s her first record using all outside composers and her first solo guitar record), Meltframe<\/i> doesn\u2019t feel like a departure. From the crunching, raunchy churn of the opening \u201cCascades\u201d (Oliver Nelson), this record shot light into my veins. The slow-burn anger of her takes on Annette Peacock\u2019s \u201cBlood\u201d and Carla Bley\u2019s \u201cIda Lupino\u201d stand among the best versions of those pieces I\u2019ve ever heard. This is the most exciting guitar music anyone\u2019s making now, personified for me by the chewy melancholy center of the record: Ornette Coleman\u2019s \u201cSadness\u201d full of string bends and tumbling lines bumped right up against Duke Ellington\u2019s \u201cSolitude\u201d played like a mist of atomized blood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"