For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Tamaryn
Cranekiss
[Mexican Summer]
A Year With 13 Moons, Everything Else Matters, Sleep Through It, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, The Original Faces, and Static Daydream — these are the cream-of-the-crop shoegaze albums that have come out in 2015. I feel like Tamaryn’s Cranekiss deserves a slot here, too. For two albums prior to it, Tamaryn and guitarist Rex John Shelverton cranked out incredibly dense, guitar-heavy dream-pop; if many of Tamaryn’s other fans had their way, Cranekiss would sound a lot like The Waves and Tender New Signs. But choosing this time to work with Weekend’s Shaun Durkan and getting Ariel Pink/No Joy producer Jorge Elbrecht to work the boards resulted in a significantly different album. When Tamaryn told V Magazine that she was attempting to reference both Art Of Noise and Madonna while still working within the realm of shoegaze, she wasn’t kidding. Her overtly pop vocals rub up against the kind of synthetic textures common in works by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro, yet these things swim here in a fog of ethereal reverb and glide guitar that tie it into the shoegaze realm. And in a genre known for its latent sensuality, Tamaryn upends expectations by foregrounding sexuality itself and, in the process, ends up with some of her best work yet.
Yves Tumor
When Man Fails You
[Self-Released]
Rolling drums, noodling guitars, and ephemeral words. The exact nuances of meaning expressed by each layer were second in line to the overriding texture of opening track “Mssng Naw.” The single effect produced by the harmonious whole was powerful and persuasive. It was also symbolic of Yves Tumor — the alias of an elusive totality, whose other projects include Bekelé Berhanu, Shanti, Rahel Ali, and as part of Silkbless. Before Yves’s feature on Dogfood Music Group’s C-ORE — a compilation of united voices — the tracks on When Man Fails You sounded like single bodies, pushing microscopic solidarity in sound beyond its aural confines through an abiding synthesis of lush piano loops and affected Kylie Minogue on “Slow (Subcutis Version)” or the harsh noise of “Keloidal (Porto Novo),” with a gothic air.
Heather Woods Broderick
Glider
[Western Vinyl]
Glider comes at you softly, carefully, as a gentle presence, assuring and understanding. It’s been here before, it knows your feelings. They’re something familiar, of course, and it has stories to tell you to take your mind off your problems. But at first, you find it too cold, too frail, and you’re shocked at how slow it moves from faded guitar to soporific piano to mouthy multi-track — perhaps you don’t believe it. In fact, you say it’s an alien, a ghost; you say it’s barely there. You don’t want to hear it drone on; in fact, it reminds you of death. But then a strange, keen mind emerges; you spot it from a shrewd turn of phrase you can’t ignore, a sudden rush of human warmth and sympathy glowing from Heather Woods Broderick’s voice and the soft music that aligns just right, and you realize it’s just trying to connect with you and share something that it’s learned. Can you just listen for a second?
Phil Minton
A Doughnut’s End
[Fataka]
Aren’t we all living the endgame? Austerity. Fiscal collapse. Corporate greed. The senescence of the body itself. A Doughnut’s End is a culmination of sorts, what with it being the purported final album in Phil Minton’s solo singing series and a decidedly less optimistic outlook, but it’s not without its contradictions. Too exploratory to provide any kind of eschatological closure, A Doughnut’s End is an exercise in revolting vocal technique and mangled language, flitting between any and every (in)conceivable function of the larynx, teeth, and lips. Alternately resonant and breathless, Minton’s improvisations are as much a vocalization of collective discontent as a personal one: few albums this year have evoked disgust and terror quite as excitingly as here, a record documenting the wordless yelps of one man. The abandonment of existing lexicon and narrative is a challenging prospect, yet Minton pulls it off with both intrigue and humor. “After all, singing is only living flesh and muscle vibrating in air.”
ANGEL-HO
ASCENSION
[Halcyon Veil/NON]
Angelo Valerio’s ANGEL-HO was born from the artist’s performance practice: a weaponized body launched by means of race- and gender-shattering theater at all those fixed and oppressive boundaries of culture and state. Translated to the mode of pure sound and co-transmitted via Rabit’s Halcyon Veil and Chino Amobi, Nkisi, and Valerio’s co-founded NON, ANGEL-HO becomes an even greater force. All the moorings slip, the bass aerates, the body ascends — ASCENSION bumps by its own fundamental laws. Wide-open space, acidic noise, and globally-sourced dance rhythms react by a paranormal physics. The rapidly globalizing sound of Jersey Club coils with the still quite local South African style of Qgom. It wire-walks above sheer musique concréte. Dogs bark, demonic horses whinny, tires squeal, and guns blast in nigh incidental rhythmic fashion. The idea of space and its power asserts itself above all. Valerio has spoken of the EP as a dredging up of the oft-ignored dislocation and fracturing of colored peoples throughout his home of Cape Town’s violent history. In this light, ASCENSION becomes a metaphor for the way club music can produce emancipatory, but never thoughtless or sterile, public space.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
