The music of 2015 was so spectacular. The following albums directly impacted my life in 2015, giving me new perspectives on different aspects of my social, political, and personal life. These albums allowed me to meditate on my state of life in 2015. I hope these albums will speak to you in a profound way and help you think about the individual you want to be and your place in the world.
5. Painted Shut – Hop Along
Every positive review of Hop Along’s Painted Shut starts with Frances Quinlan’s voice. It can be shrill and scraping like Kurt Cobain but transition to soft and sweet with an expansive range. Quinlan’s voice explodes with such passion. Every word sung on Painted Shut comes with micro expressions of pain, strain, angst, and understanding as it cracks and breaths. Her singing ability is a powerhouse that overshadows the band’s virtues of storytelling and instrumentation.
Hop Along fills the hole Modest Mouse left this year with Strangers to Ourselves. Quinlan’s intimate storytelling abilities create a communal microcosm in each song. She is able to capture point of views (“Horseshow Crabs”) that aren’t hers, but with what she empathizes with. Quinlan’s empathy is imbued in many of her songs, such as “Powerful Man,” where she witnessed a father hitting his kid and she stopped dead in her tracks to keep herself uninvolved. The band’s sound plays with indie rock and grunge instrumentation with impactful power chords, while the lead guitar contains a melodic chaos with bends and octaves. The dynamic and raw production work with Quinlan’s shrill and powerful voice.
TL;DR: Listen to this album to experience a new perspective on the small stories in people’s lives: empathize.
Favorite Songs: “The Knock”, “Texas Funeral”, “Powerful Man”
4. The Most Lamentable Tragedy – Titus Andronicus
With New Jersey roots, Titus Andronicus creates a raw sci-fi punk tragedy that stands as a metaphor for the manic depression that can be described as Bruce Springsteen Americana combined with the hardcore punk sound of Fugazi and with the storytelling of Neutral Milk Hotel. The Most Lamentable Tragedy tells a tale of depression, aggression, and identity through a five-act folk-punk rock opera that weaves in and out of man’s present dilemma and familial past.
The Springsteen wall of sound creates a grand tone with pulsating synths between tracks, big chord piano tracking, thrashing drums, saxophones, and multi-track power guitar chords. This pastiche of sound hits the ears so hard that they send a boom of epicness, at least for a theme that deals with the interior. Patrick Stickles’ coarse and angry delivery make you want to chant, rant, and scream with him. This record spans to Springsteen-esque punk romp rocks to slow uneasy slogs that drag you with Stickles’ protagonist.
Titus Andronicus’ record produces its empathy for the depressive and broken by punching the listener with its raw earnest production and story. The music attacks and reaches to the listener to support Stickles’ tale about the frustration, anger, and sadness of the interior life: “Inside we’d find the frozen ghost but we won’t expose his decomposing soul.”
TL;DR: Listen to this album for a ride of catharsis. Listen to it to understand someone stuck in their own mind.
Favorite Songs: “Fired Up,” “Dimed Out,” “Fatal Flaw”
3. I Love You, Honeybear – Father John Misty
Follow this man’s instagram; he’s a soulful jokester. I Love You, Honeybear deconstructs all the cliches we think about love as a narrative humorist essay would. Josh Tillman (aka Father John Misty) humorously explores the aspects of love and romance that he never quite understood before he himself met the love of his life. With the heavy layer of humor and irony on the album, Tillman’s effort results in a genuine success.
I Love You, Honeybear makes fun of many of the overtly romantic aspects of love, but like many relationships that joke about the cliches, Tillman embraces them as well. At its core, the album’s lyrics find love in a culture filled with problems of materialism, existentialism, and postmodern irony. Accompanied with string orchestrations and his band, Tillman makes singing sound easy. His voice is warm and full of life. He strings through melodies with a fluidity and ease that strikes the heart with genuine feeling as he makes you parse through his view of love, from cynicism to sincerity. Tillman witnesses that through all the despair over connection in our contemporary culture, love plays its role our lives in the simplest yet powerful way: love will always be there not matter how much we reject it or lampoon it.
TL;DR: Whether you listen to this album with a whole romantic heart or a broken skeptical one, it will make you think about where you find love in your own life.
Favorite Songs: “Holy Shit”, “I Went to the Store One Day”, “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)”
2. To Pimp A Butterfly – Kendrick Lamar
If you haven’t listened to it, go to your local streaming service now. You will learn more from this almost eighty minute Hip Hop epic than you have in the classroom this semester. It’s an important album to understand, as far as what’s happening in this country pertaining to race, self-love, community, responsibility, and music. The production is unlike anything that has happened this year in music. Not one word or note is wasted. Grab your headphones and jack into a musical and cultural experience that won’t repeated for a long time. It’s perfect.
TL;DR: Listen to this album to gain perspective on prevalent issues in our present social and political forum. It’s also one hell of an album.
Favorite Songs: “King Kunta” “Alright”, “The Blacker The Berry”
1. Carrie & Lowell – Sufjan Stevens
Stevens is known for Illinois, an album filled with bombastic instrumentation of string and woodwind orchestras connected with a folk framework and ridiculously long song titles. Illinois was playful and sweet yet dramatic in many ways, as Stevens used Illinois’ historical allusions to ground his opinions of American life in the 2000s. His last album Age of Adz was an electronic melodramatic explosion. Carrie & Lowell is just the opposite: it’s his most somber and personal album yet.
Listening to Carrie & Lowell is like going to church. It’s quiet and meditative. You can hear the room’s air and atmosphere in the recording. The atmosphere creates intimacy with the listener about Stevens’ grief and suffering. No more big orchestras for Stevens; he utilizes his guitar, piano, bells, ukulele, voice, and synthesizer to strip the music down to its bare core. Stevens’ breathy double-tracked vocals establishes a voice of despair along with a subtle whisper. The plucked acoustic guitars spring and bounce as the notes ebb and flow, ascend and descend, down chords and scales as synths establish a heavenly expansiveness that can turn darkness into light, and seemingly immutable depression to transcendence. Stevens’ stripped down folk music places the listener in an imagined landscape of an altar in the middle of the woods. The album explodes with color and catharsis that can resemble a fireworks show, but it eventually flows back to its roots of solemn contemplation.
Carrie & Lowell at first listen may seem a pit of despair about life and grief, but Stevens finds his way out with a new perspective of acceptance and journeying.
TL;DR: Listen to this album because it processes the functions of grief and moving on in the face of death
Favorite Songs: “Death With Dignity”, “Should Have Known Better”, “The Only Thing”
Steven Coco