Before we enter the final, release-heavy months of 2015, we take a look back at some of our favorites from the last few. And compared to the first two quarters of the year, there was much less consensus this time around at TMT. While Elysia Crampton’s American Drift and M.E.S.H.’s Piteous Gate were near-unanimously praised, albums like Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and Titus Andronicus’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy were refreshingly contentious. Call it an inconsistency of gluttony: from Chief Keef’s devastating weightiness on Bang 3 and Phil Minton’s bold voice experiments on A Doughnut’s End, to the indelible dream pop of Helen’s The Original Faces and the critical esoterica of albums by Yves Tumor, In Media Res, Khaki Blazer, and Eyeliner, the last several months saw our attention being pulled in wildly different directions, our quixotic outlooks stretched out and fried under the hot, boiling sun.
And before you freak out, it should be noted that we were too late to vote on newer releases like Julia Holter’s Have You In My Wilderness, Young Thug’s Slime Season, and Drake & Future’s What A Time To Be Alive, among others. But that’s why we have a year-end feature coming up soon, right?
Scope our favorite 20 releases from the third quarter of 2015 below, followed by a bunch of others that didn’t quite make the cut.
M.E.S.H.
Piteous Gate
[PAN]
At a time in history when even our selves have been spectacularized into a bricolage of alienating images, Berlin’s M.E.S.H. is forging a way out, by forging a way in. The arrhythmic tech-neurotics and disembodied haze-tronics of his debut plunge him further into the artificial tropes that reduce lesser mortals to piles of homogenized click-fodder, yet in his case, they’re melded with such inimitable finesse and singular determination they endow him with more individuality, not less. The explosive clicks and synthetic whoops of an “Epithet” distinguish him from the faceless huddle, while the digitized throbs of the title track imply that behind such manufactured distinction there beats a genuine heart. Yes, a genuine heart, since even if the spectacle may have M.E.S.H. in its clutches, the Berlin-based producer has used it to his advantage and for his own ends, thereby neutralizing its de-individuating effects at the same time as producing what no doubt will prove one of the strongest electronic records of the year.