Music & Films for
Common People
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10
ART ANGELS
Grimes (2015)
In the credits of Art Angels, there are only four other names besides Claire Bucher's, two guest singers (Janelle Monáe and Aristophanes), a mixer and his assistant. It is an album that was written, produced, performed, played and engineered by Grimes (she even designed the album's artwork and directed the music videos).
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Art Angels showed us, perhaps for the first time in history, what is auteur pop. As the old saying says, "if you want things to be done in certain way, do them yourself" and Boucher takes every measure possible to avoid compromising her vision. It is a bold movement and an artistic statement: in an industry where women are normally just expected to be the face of a project, she decides to be the brain, the hands and the heart.
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Art Angels rejoices in the purest elements of bubblegum pop, but Grimes twist the idea of what genre could be, and splashes her songs with uncanny and disorienting elements aiming to push our boundaries and question the idea of music as an enjoyable experience.
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Best tracks: Flesh Without Blood, Realiti, Kill V. Maim, Venus Fly, World Princess Part II.
9
OVERGROWN
James Blake (2013)
Once there was no doubt that James Blake was a genius of sound experimentations, he decided to put them in the background, as beautiful landscapes full of texture and a cold winter color palette. In Overgrown, the focus shifts to the songwriting and the voice, just to let us very clear that there is not a musical thing that he can't do right.
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Blake's sophomore record is a haunting introspective trip of a tormented soul trying to understand his feelings and find his place in the world. He might be one of the most creative persons in the industry right now, but this album opened his true artistic self, showing that beyond the technique and the revolutionary sonic style, he has intricate personal ghosts to deal with, and with bravery he decides to turn them into art.
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Overgrown finds Blake in a perfect balance between glorious avant-garde technical sound, and the development of a deep emotional and existential poetry.
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Best tracks: Retrograde, Overgrown, Voyeur, Life Round Here, I am Sold.
8
MELODRAMA
Lorde (2017)
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.
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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), with a wisdom to portray the complexity of being young that very few musicians under 20 years old have achieved. She is veering the industry towards her art, and not the other way around.
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Best tracks: Green Light, The Louvre, Supercut, Homemade Dynamite, Perfect Places.
7
ST. VINCENT
St. Vincent (2014)
Throughout the decade, Annie Clark has transformed herself many times in order to reinvent her music and her project. But it was her self-titled album in 2014 the one that gained her the nickname of "The New Bowie". Grey hair and highly stylized outfits that matched her eccentric looks with the high-art music she was producing, it was as if she was ready to stand out from any other indie rock songwriter.
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But it was not only her visual aesthetics the ones that changed, this was St Vincent's sound at her most developed and mature. Anyone that has seen her live can attest that her guitar skills are unmatched nowadays, and she acknowledges that strength and delivers electrifying riffs with poise and elegance, using the power of rock music to enrich her pop-art aura. She wants to show-off how much a virtuoso she is.
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In St. Vincent, Clark reflects on modernity with complex lyrics that incisively question our humanity/virtuality and existencial simulacra in the worlds and alternate realities we've created in social media.
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Best tracks: Digital Witness, Birth in Reverse, Prince Johnny, Rattlesnake, Severed Crossed Fingers.
6
LET ENGLAND SHAKE
PJ Harvey (2011)
Extremely intellectual in its design and its execution, Let England Shake is a conceptual album about war, and the horrors that it conveys. Influenced by the writing of TS Eliot, the lyrics approach different points of view to the idea of an armed conflict: the soldiers, the survivors, the rulers; Harvey's voice has never sounded more like classic poetry, her use of words and rhetoric figures is superb and poignant.
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She made sure to have an element of timelessness in the sound, the instrumentation is purely organic, and even when she is classic in her selection of instruments, she takes liberties to experiment at many levels, like the heavy use of the autoharp, or the incidental inclusion of militar trumpets.
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Harvey is a modern folk troubadour, that with all seriousness recounts the sordid stories of how war has marked humanity and how this violent confrontations have systematically engulfed cultures and have stripped the humanity out of the people that it has touched. It is the glory and fullness of an artist in the whole extension of that word.
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Best tracks: The Words That Maketh Murder, Let England Shake, Written on the Forehead, On Battleship Hill, The Glorious Land.
5
JAMES BLAKE
James Blake (2011)
The wonder kid of the 10's, after intriguing us with a trio of fantastic EP's that already pointed at something unlike anything we've heard before, released his debut album to surprise the world with one of the most successfully experimental albums in years.
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If a couple of years early, The XX made a point for minimal dark electronics, it was Blake who take the sound to its most extreme, playing with robotic sounds and spooky drum and bass, distorting his beautiful voice that mostly repeated the same lines again and again as suffocating mantras, it was insane abstract art made by a then 22 year old.
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But there are moments in the album that are stripped of any artifice, haunting piano ballads that give space and depth to an album that transported music to the future and that shaped what many artist would be doing in the following decade, in the experimental alternative scene (from Bon Iver to Arca), in the commercial pop (from Lorde to Beyoncé), and, surprisingly, even impacting rap music (from Kendrick Lamar to Kanye West).
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Best tracks: The Wilhelm Scream, Lindisfarne II, I Never Learnt To Share, Unluck, To Care (Like You).
4
CHANNEL ORANGE
Frank Ocean (2012)
"4 summers ago, I met someone. I was 19 years old. He was too." Although these words by Frank Ocean are not part of any of the tracks in Channel Orange, the letter that contained them and that was published on Tumblr around the time of the release of the album, changed urban music forever: Ocean's coming out as queer was the moment where the patriarchal structure in rap started to crumble.
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Channel Orange above all, is a statement of courage. If before him, all male urban artists showed their bravado by bragging about the women they fucked and the cars they owned, Ocean showed his bravery by opening up his emotions and putting them in an album that broaden the horizons of what was possible to do in R&B and rap. "I could never make him love me", he cries, using a clear HIM to signal the object of his affection.
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But Channel Orange is as original as it is brave. There are unpredictable swifts in style, not only from one song to the next one, but even within single tracks. The exploration of new paths is not only lyrical, but also for the textured sound. His creativity and scope made fall every limited wall that urban music had constructed for decades and paved the way for much richer creations.
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Best tracks: Pyramids, Thinkin Bout You, Bad Religion, Forrest Gump, Super Rich Kids.
3
NORMAN FUCKING ROCKWELL!
Lana del Rey (2019)
Lana del Rey is an artist that listens. Every one of her albums has been a clear example on how she is open to adjust the parts of her project that have chances to improve. No matter how many times her talent was questioned, she came back once and again to prove that she is far more interested in leaving a substantial legacy in music, rather than to please the crowds (and yet, by the number of followers, she could qualify as a huge celebrity).
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Norman Fucking Rockwell is the final step towards artistry perfection. Her unique narrative lines have been refined and polished, she's not the tragic seductress anymore, now her voice is the one of a mature poet trying to find sense in her love for a country that fascinates her as much as it repulses her.
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But beyond the full wisdom and maturity on the lyrics, there's a new found elegance in her sound, a baroque pop that is refined and classic, but yet with edgy psychedelic touches that give the sound a unique personality that she can claim as entirely hers. Lana jumped so many leagues, and right now she might be sitting comfortably with Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits as a poet of pop.
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Best songs: The Greatest, Venice Bitch, Fuck it I Love You, Norman Fucking Rockwell, Mariners Apartment Complex.
2
BLACKSTAR
David Bowie (2016)
On January 10th of 2016, David Bowie passed away after a career of nearly 50 years and 25 studio albums, being widely considered the "God of Pop Music". But exactly two days before his death, we were gifted with an album that if by itself it's magnificent, with the added symbolism that implied being Bowie's farewell letter, it became an instant cult record.
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For his final act, Bowie, the epitome of the avant-garde music artist, wasn't going to conform with a recycling of his best tricks, instead he pushed boundaries one last time with a frenetic jazz album with touches of dark minimal electronics and drum & bass. With no interest in making it accessible, conventional or radio friendly, Blackstar is a free musical exploration of his refined raw passion for life and art, and making his life (and his death) an art in itself.
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Obscure and cryptic lyrics that explore the idea of death and the legacy that he'll leave in music (he's not a popstar, he's a Blackstar), Bowie made a complex and fantastic exit, that just added new stories to his mythical figure.
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Best tracks: Lazarus, Blackstar, I Can't Give Everything Away, Dollar Days, 'Tis A Pity She Was a Whore.
1
THE SUBURBS
Arcade Fire (2010)
Although many people consider Arcade Fire's debut album, Funeral, as the masterpiece that they'll never be able to surpass, a closer look to their third work reveals that it is a much more complex and sophisticated piece than anything else that the band has produced.
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A conceptual album about growing up in suburbia, The Suburbs is a deep existential analysis, almost philosophical, on profound topics like individuality, globalization, absurd and anxiety. The lyricism is mature and paints a nostalgic picture of the life of a young person in the outskirts of a big city, that is incredibly personal in its details as it is profoundly universal in the themes.
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Sonically, the baroque pop sounds that the whole band crafts manage to capture the essence of a generation transitioning into adulthood in the middle of a digital global revolution that is changing every single aspect of their life. The elegant harmonies that gives weight and space to each instrument, give a sense of timelessness that charges the whole album with potent emotions of melancholy, grief, hope and excitement.
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Best tracks: Sprawl II (Mountains beyond mountains), We Used To Wait, Ready To Start, The Suburbs, Modern Man.