Music & Films for
Common People
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
Julien baker
25
At 22, Julien Baker has already faced mental health illness, substance addictions and an internal war to reconcile her Christian faith with her homosexuality. By putting all her demons into music, she is able to create honest, beautiful and haunting compositions that will be cathartic for her suffering and ours, as well.
The delicate but confident instrumentation gives support to her meditations, and if she writes about pain and the darkest parts of a young person's mind, she's the opposite of emo; she doesn't rejoice in those states, she fights with her music to stay out of them.
Best tracks: Appointments, Turn out the Lights, Claws in your Back.
BLAck origami
jlin
24
Rather than a musician, Jerrilyn Patton is a sound architect. The way she constructs her tracks in Black Origami is more a installation rather than a narrative. She takes pieces of everything to erect a piece that mutates, evolves and reacts, demand interaction from the listener. One can't remain passive to the clash of feral and industrial sounds; she's bending the norms of music, and taking us out of confort zones.
This inventive thinking is reinvigorating for electronic (dance?) music, it offers new visions of what can be achieved if we break its linearity and we start seeing it in four dimensions
Best tracks: Carbon 7 (161), Nyakinyua Rise, Black Origami.
Need to feel your love
sheer mag
23
After three fantastic LPs, Sheer Mag finally treats us to a proper LP that is as incendiary and forceful as they promised to be. They might be a hard rock band, but their lyrics of social transgressors, angry on how society work and setting themselves as opposition figures to the regime, draws them much closer to garage punk bands.
Their message is clear: love and unity are the answer to fight bigotry, but they are not subtle in their means, those fiery guitars and Halladay's powerful voice are violent enough to force you to look their way and listen to everything they are here to say.
Best tracks: Suffer Me, Just Can't Get Enough, Expect the Bayonet.
Out in the storm
Waxahatchee
22
Before the release of Out in the Storm, Katie Crutchfield's career was a slow but steady ascending path, but she always felt like a secondary figure compared to other similar singer-songwriters. Her new album is probably the breakthrough statement that will position her as a central figure in indie rock, this record finds her ready to play big leagues.
Out in the Storm follows the narrative of a failed relationship and the realizations that come after it. It's a bold and empowering both in its narrative and sound, a kind of honesty that immerse us in her world now that she has found certitude and personal power.
Best tracks: Recite Remorse, Silver, Never Been Wrong.
Love what survives
mount kimbie
21
Mount Kimbie decided to step up their game, to go beyond the dark electronic DJ music and offer an album that expands their range and finds them with a renewed energy that achieves their rawest moments in their career, and finally pointing to a distinctive individual sound that sets them apart from the rest of the alternative dubstep scene.
Maker and Campos incorporate wilder sounds and risky experimentations, and pair with great musicians like King Krule and James Blake, who help them to achieve their whole potential and to explore unexpected corners that add so much to the equation.
Best tracks: Blue Train Lines, We Go Home Together, Delta.
lust for life
lana del rey
20
Four albums later, any doubts on the talent and/or relevance of Lana del Rey are totally dissipated. Lust for Life is our tragic diva looking towards the biggest picture of the world, and incorporating the iconic elements of her writing (Mustangs, beaches, Hollywood) into an album that couldn't avoid getting political.
It is the uncertainty of her beloved America the one that is renewing her desire to live to the fullest, it is this woman that is lusting life an opposition to the one who was born to die. It's a personal discovery of connection: with another person, with the society, and with the world.
Best tracks: Love, Get Free, Lust for Life.
UTOPIA
Björk
19
For Björk, every single emotion should be experienced with intensity. We have seen her through states of magnified sadness, anger and elation, but in Utopia, Björk is showing us that the zen state of calm and peace could also be expressed through maximalism. This emotions of "peace and love" most of the time only inspire boring hippy recreations of The Beatles, but in the hands (and heart and mind) of somebody like Björk, we get unrestricted access to the full sonic palette that such a state of blissfulness can comprise.
Utopia is Björk's gift to a turbulent world: her own imaginary Paradise. With a renewed optimism, Utopia is as imaginative, theatrical and visionary as the best works of this artist.
Best tracks: Blissing Me, The Gate, Utopia.
the ooz
king krule
18
The Ooz is pure decadence in the poetry of Archie Marshall; the loneliness and desolation found a unique way of expression in his mix of jazz, trip-hop, rap and punk rock. This obscure experimentation could very well come out from a trippy episode of Twin Peaks, a brutal out of the box thinking that challenges in every track.
It's dark, almost sinister, a catharsis that goes back in time and uses the disenchantment with the world to go into a stream of consciousness that is able to reveal the depth of a tormented sould, but that also will draw him closer to a nihilist understanding of life.
Best tracks: Czech one, Dum surfer, Half Man Half Shark.
PLUNGE
fever ray
17
Plunge is an album that provokes. Karin Dreijer is a rebellious figure that aims to transgress the politics of music and the social politics through her music. With her imageries that rejoice in the aesthetics of the obscure and the grotesque, and her scathing lyrics that push for a feminist and a queer agenda, she makes Lady Gaga's act look mild and puerile.
Plunge is an audacious exploration of the politics of sex and gender, a compromised queer and feminist manifesto that uses bold experimentations that want to conflict the listener and force them to open their mind to new possibilities, both in music and in social perceptions.
Best tracks: IDK About You, To the Moon and Back, Mustn't Hurry.
relatives in descent
Protomartyr
16
For all the rage and furious experimentations throughout Relatives in Descent, it reveals a highly intellectual band, one that really committed to their History and Philosophy lessons and now is using that knowledge to create metaphors and a theoretical framework to explain the horrors that Trumplandia, and the world in general, is facing. Above all, it is an album about Truth.
But this academic approach doesn't compromise the urgency of their sound, as a clash between Leonard Cohen, Joy Division and Sonic Youth, Protomartyr is pure raw ferocity.
Best tracks: A Private Understanding, My children, Don't go to Anacita.
halo
Juana molina
15
If non-Anglo music wants to stand a chance against the popularity of English music, it should think outside the box; and that's what Molina is doing in her best album to date. The dark electronic experimentations in Halo are of such sophistication that is quite a paradox that it is this Argentinean woman in her 50's the one pushing the boundaries of Latin music.
Halo is almost a conceptual album on witchcraft, where Molina takes the role of different female figures in magic: an erudite sorceress, a crafty potion-maker, a folk witch, and uses her songs as the hoaxes that enchant and hypnotize.
Best tracks: Paraguaya, Lentísimo Halo, Cosoco.
run the jewels 3
run the jewels
14
Run the Jewels keep advancing their chemistry to create music that works as a political manifesto and as incendiary avant-garde rap. In their third album, it's clearer than ever the power of the duo to pairs explosive sounds with poignant lyrics to be at the forefront of subversive and revolutionary urban music.
A frontal attack to the groups of political and economical power, fronted by a demagogue racist Oompa-Loompa, couldn't have found a more enjoyable and thrilling way to be addressed, having us waiting for the next subversive turn in the direction of their songs.
Best tracks: Legend Has It, A Report to the Shareholders / Kill Your Masters, Don't get Captured.
a deeper understanding
the war on drugs
13
It's outstanding the way in which The War on Drugs makes an 80's rock sound feel like something totally newfangled. A Deeper Understanding doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it is just a clear Springsteen revival with a dash of experimentation and very well-thought variations in textures and instrumentations.
The energetic punch achieved by the contrast of the strenght and power of the guitars against the glowing synths and twinkling keyboards. The album is also entirely Americana rock, working as a road trip through the iconic desert landscapes of Route 66.
Best tracks: Holding On, Thinking of a Place, Pain.
cigarettes after sex
cigarettes after sex
12
Combining the sexual dark intimacy of The XX with the daydreaming atmospheres of Beach House, and the instrumentation (slightly most polished, though) of My Bloody Valentine, the debut of Cigarettes After Sex is a compilation of arousal stories where the limits between flesh contact and emotional infatuation get very blurred.
It is an album for late night, for the moment where a chain of deep thoughts unfurls by the brief memory of a smile or a wink. It is the idealized mental repetition of sexual moments that in real life could have been clumsy and dull, but in our hazy mind become infinite.
Best tracks: Apocalypse, Sunsetz, K.
pure comedy
father john misty
11
Josh Tillman is aware of the powers of his quirky and smart handwriting, so in times where it's impossible to stay apolitical, he uses his very particular talent to throw philosophical truths and sickening questions about the human condition, reminding us of Albert Camus' theory of the absurd.
Tillman goes against the political system, religions, entertainment industry, and everything that has took us to this new sad chapter in the history of human hatred and bigotry. Harsh reflections that are taken to greater levels thanks to a masterful soul-pop orchestration.
Best tracks: Pure Comedy, Total Entertainment Forever, Ballad of the Dying Man.
