Music & Films for
Common People
PROCESS
sAMPHA
10
There was a time not long ago (until 2013 to be exact), that the Mercury Prize was one of the biggest and most legitimate awards in music. But after three years of terrible mistakes, it pretty much lost all relevance, so if Process does really deserves the accolade, it's not enough to mention "Mercury Prize Winner" to imply its greatness.
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For years, we got to know Sampha by giving voice to other people's music or being a side-kick that added depth and personality to any recording. His debut LP let us realize that we weren't even close to know who this musician really is and what is the scope of his talent.
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Process is a meditative and dense album with heavy reflections on loss and mortality, even when at times he masks them with upbeat electronic. It creates intimacy and targets emotional response, while mixing genres and balancing his sonic experimentations with his gifted voice.
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Best tracks: Blood on Me, Plastic 100ºC, (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.
Slowdive
slowdive
9
Every single one of those 22 years in between albums were entirely worthy if that was what it took to reach Slowdive's self-titled album. A cult band that just turned themselves in legendary thanks to a masterful come-back able to add substantial new pages to their own history that seemed happily completed. It's so smart and thoughtful in its structure and arrangements, but so emotional and rich in its potential to create sonic landscapes, that we only can imagine that it took those 22 entire years to be crafted.
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In a time where revivalist bands have toyed with new ideas to take shoegaze through new paths, it had to be Slowdive the ones who came to clarify how is it that the genre can evolve by creating an atemporal leap that connects past and future through atmospheres and textures that are ethereal and harsh at once. The album is a master class on how is it that a band should never come back if they are not going to make vital additions to their canon.
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Best tracks: Sugar for the pill, Star Roving, Slomo.
SLEEP WELL BEAST
the national
8
The National is one of the few bands where the term "adult rock" actually means mature and sophisticated instead of boring and outdated. With every new album, they jump into the opportunity to refine their sound and present new ideas that expand the sonic and thematic possibilities of the band.
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Sleep Well Beast is the most adventurous The National has ever been: exploring and experimenting, getting to new places, even to shiny pop corners, but keeping a cohesion through the entire album, that is consistent enough with the sound that they have mastered through all their career.
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In turns reflexive and in turns outspoken, part tenderness and part straight bluntness, the album is subtle and careful in its transitions, but very clear in painting the emotional and mental state that the band wants to transmit in each of their tracks.
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Best tracks: The System Only Sleeps in Total Darkness, Carin at the Liquor Store, Day I Die.
a crow looked at me
mount eerie
7
Phil Elvrum put all his pain after the death of his wife into A Crow Looked at Me. It is a heart-breaking testament of everlasting love, a recollection of moments and ideas that surrounded this very specific loss, but put together in a way that feels entirely cinematic because of the extreme detail on which is narrated.
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We are transported to the rooms and the spaces of the end of their life together and the beginning of his life as a widower taking care of their baby daughter. The grief is overwhelming, giving birth to some existential questionings that linger in the air because such a devastating event leave us without possible answers, just a hoard of feelings and memories that shake our foundations and make us try to find signs and hidden meanings in everything that surround us. But above all the sorrow, we feel the strong love, the need to honor Geneviève Castrée, to tell the world about her and transform their history in the only thing that is able to transcend death: art.
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Best tracks: Ravens, Seaweed, Real Death.
I See you
the xx
6
I See You is the album that made The XX take the leap from obscure cult band to generational icon. The band took consciousness of the elements that made their debut album so influential that eventually it shaped the path for minimal dub electronic music to global domination (both in alternative and commercial music), and also got self-aware of the particular talents and interests of their individual members, and came out with an ambitious synthesis that broadens their sonic palette with such scope and maturity, that they have put to rest any doubt on their talent and potential for being a living legend.
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It's a record where the three pieces work as a mirror and a catalyst for each other, establishing such a deep connection that the music flows as if it was an intimate conversation that bares the vulnerabilities and the raw emotions, but sublimes them to an ethereal storytelling, richer in textures and finer in arrangements than anything else that they have created before.
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Best tracks: Say Something Loving, A Violent Noise, I Dare You.
DAMN.
kendrick lamar
5
Damn. is the incendiary record that was fundamental for the resistance front against the resurface of white supremacy. It is loud, poignant and a source of inspiration to raise our fist (or take a knee) against bigotry and repression. Once again, Lamar is showing the power of rap music to be a weapon in the most crucial fight that western world is facing; rather than just rhyming, Lamar is confronting and exposing, questioning and demanding; he is not a conventional story teller, he is bending the rules and setting fire to preconceived notions on what rap music is about.
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At the same time, he has raised the bar (that he previously raised himself with To Pimp a Butterfly) on the possibilities of the genre, and is forcing his peers to get much more creative since he has put to shame every pretension of self-claimed-grandeur, and has exposed the threads and the vices that rap music has carried for ages, and has subverted them with mind-blowing experimentations.
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Best tracks: Humble., DNA., Fear.
masseduction
st. vincent
4
It was going to be nearly impossible to make something better that her 2014 album, St. Vincent, but if she didn't surpassed herself, Annie Clark still delivered another piece of high art in the form of a pop record. Her approach is Warholian, she takes the culture of masses and imprints an industrial technicolor manufacture to deliver a vibrant, contemporary and colorful piece, that contains multiple layers of complexity once you try to disentangle its contents.
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But Masseduction, beyond being a performative act on the status of contemporary western society, is focused from the very individual point of view of its creator, so as critical and political it is, it also exudes the honesty of an artist who is baring her heart and her mind, exposing her fragilities and her frustrations, and questioning how much her own self has became a celebrity and how is she balancing the frivolities with her artistic sensibility. In a Bowie-less world, Clark is our hope for finding the common ground between art and pop.
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Best tracks: New York, Los Ageless, Pills.
american dream
lcd soundsystem
3
Any band's reunion album should be approached with suspicion. If the motives for a comeback tend to be money and fame related, LCD Soundsystem proved themselves with an album that has as much to say as any of their three previous cult productions.
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Here's a band with a reason to be and with so many thinks to say, that American Dream seemed like the unavoidable record to be released. It's a channel for all the thoughts that a world that transformed itself for the worst in just one single year, inspired in one of the most iconic figures of the generation of cultured, non-conformist early-Millennials (or to simplify it: hipsters).
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American Dream is James Murphy coming to terms with aging in a decadent country where being smart and critical is now prosecuted by the commander in chief. But as much introspection it has, it refuses to let go of the personal way of partying that defined his cool persona.
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Best tracks: Tonite, Call the Police, American Dream.
No shape
perfume genius
2
Mike Hadreas has the type of career that we wish every musician had, an always ascending line that with every new album is able to experiment and add new layers of complexity while staying true to himself.
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No Shape is still an exploration of what means to be queer. Perfume Genius still is exploring and questioning his place in this world, but now is not only from the pain or the protest, but also from pride. No Shape is just about musical grow (a bolder sound, bigger in its instrumentation, more adventurous in arrangements and more clever in its lyrics), as much it is about personal grow (an individual embracing his idea of self, and reclaiming his right to be, to do and to love).
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The biggest surprise is, in the middle of all this stridency, colors, emotion and orchestrated frenzy, to find so much intimacy, tenderness and elegance.
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Best tracks: Slip Away, Die 4 You, Alan.
melodrama
lorde
1
It takes someone with an extraordinary wit to analyze and synthesize all the processes and feelings involved in coming-of-age into an album that is youthful and fully mature at the same time, one that never condescends just because its target is young people. The combination of an exceptional talent to write smart songs and a great ambition to transcend the industry expectations for a female pop artist, is what makes Melodrama the best (commercial) pop album in this decade so far.
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Lorde pushes boundaries and refuses to settle into the commodities of Top 40 hits; instead she takes the difficult way, challenging assumptions in song structures and literary figures to tell her version of a break-up and a house party. Melodrama is a woman acknowledging her privileges: her topics are pure banality (hence the album title), but confronts them as if they were vital (and for a privileged teenager, they are vital), and in the end uses them to transform pop music in something meaningful and whole. She is veering the industry towards her art, and not the other way around.
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Best tracks: Green Light, Perfect Places, Homemade Dynamite, The Louvre, Supercut.
