#djbroccoli

I’m not qualified to use the word ‘best’ and doubt any individual in the world of music journalism can exercise that kind of authority.  Firstly to say “best” implies a complete knowledge of the whole, in this case every musical release of AD 2015, and secondly in a subjective judgment of an interpretable art form, “best” is nonsensical and as much a claim of personal taste as the music in question.  So until speed listening technology and the Ministry of Culture passes down the guidelines of music judgement and take the joy out of it all, I’m going to stick with “favorite.”  These are my favorite musical releases of 2015, a collection I wanted to share and collect more for myself than you (no offense).  It’s a matter of practice, one of of conscious listening and categorization and reflection that drives a collection like this.  My intentions are not to flex some sort of musical knowledge or imply that my favorites are better than your favorites, my intention is to share.  To share music that struck me profoundly in hopes that you may experience some sort of congruent bliss.  2015 frightened and depressed and enlightened me in many ways, but through the year new and inspiring music kept me based.  2015, if nothing more, was a fantastic year for music, I hope you were able to enjoy it as much as I was. I’ve parred down this list to those rock show appropriate picks, you can find the full unedited list here.

Holding Hands With Jaime // Girl Band

My job at WNUR includes helping our wonderful music director Camille sort through the piles of mail the station receives and adding appropriate albums to the stacks.  If I’ve learned anything in this process of sifting and reading and judging it’s how really important first impressions really are.  Or maybe a better way to approach to call it is the expectations each piece of a music release create for a listener, from the packaging and album cover to that first downbeat.  So when an album by Girl Band shows up at 1877 Campus Drive, so do a set of expectations.  The four dudes from Dublin, not only play with expectations with their band name, the album is an exercise in repetition and the tension and release expectations in repetition create.  It’s an edge of the seat kind of listening experience, like watching a buckling tree in a hurricane, when is going to break, is it going to break, why do I want it to break?  It’s that nervousness that lies at the core of Holding Hands With Jaime, the claustrophobia repetition creates that powers my favorite new add to the stacks this year.

Kind of Blah // frog

In a year with so many novel and interesting releases in computer produced music, guitars and drums certainly had a tall order if they were to stay relevant in 2015.  Enter frog, a duo from Ithaca, New York and a cheekily named LP Kind of Blah.  This album soundtracked my springtime thaw in Chicago this past year, the first of at least four for this San Diego transplant.  There is something very genuine about frog’s music, something counteracting the constant validation that seems necessary with every stylistic decision artists make in the current state of affairs.  Instead of somehow proving worth or irony frog plays music they enjoy making.  Music that doesn’t need an accompanying thought piece for the audience to figure out what is going on or make them feel relevant.  None o’ that, Kind of Blah is simple beautiful rock music.

Depression Cherry // Beach House

People often talk about sonic space, whether in reference to a venue or the perceived space recording engineers try to create on record.  “The sound” as we often refer to it, is something we experience and develop a taste for throughout our lives, and it’s often specific to individual experience.  Beach House have a definite sound, one that I experienced in high school as they filled a hazy Los Angeles night sky like no other band I’ve seen since.  It was space, not just sonic but the air around my body that moved and flowed with the layers of sound.  Their records have never been the same for me, only ever a symbol for the experience that once was, but never something I listened to for its intrinsic worth until 2015.  Beach House must have injected some of that Los Angeles smog filled air into Depression Cherry, it’s the glue that holds together every simple little fractal of this album together and the space that made me fall in love with music a little more that summer night not so long ago.  

There’s an obsession with this concept of ‘simple beauty,” it’s a buzzword in conversations about Bob Dylan and is more accurately described as surface level simplicity masking a very organic and imitation-proof complexity.  Depression Cherry is simple in a different way, it’s a collection of simple parts that achieve complexity in their relationship and dialogue with one another.  So maybe it’s opposite, like a ‘complex beauty,’ beauty in this case being a facade hiding the process and components, or maybe its just that air, no doubt distilled and presented through the same process of combination.  Either way Depression Cherry finds its way on this list because I really enjoyed it and I hope you have had the chance to as well. 

 Escape From Evil // Lower Dens

Some albums gain acclaim on a sort of novelty; to critics they are works completely new that could only have been released in 2015 and function as a direct artifact of the present moment.  The problem with this expectation however, is that it fails to acknowledge the inherent unoriginality of all music, that ‘originality’ is always something that applies more to taste than product.  Escape From Evil is an album that begs comparison, rejects any critical claim of unprecedented material and this ‘influence on the sleeve’ mentality makes for atmospheric post-punk someone born in 1996 can listen to and feel relevant and modern.  Some, usually old and/or cynical, will claim the best of music and art is behind us.  They’re right obviously, if they mean pop music will never be like it was in the 60s and krautrock isn’t coming back around anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean the history is dead.  Setting that aside for a moment and focusing on something more abstract: sometimes I’m struck by the weight of simple action, the feeling that my entire life has led to every instant and breath and decision I make.  A beautiful feeling.  A moment of bliss and purpose.  And music shouldn’t be any different.  Maybe the same feeling distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ in music, a feeling of weight.  Deliberate weight of the musician’s experiences and tastes that power each downbeat to create something new and meaningful.  Listen, its all there, Ian Curtis and Liquid Liquid and Kraftwerk and Iggie Pop, packaged and called Lower Dens.

Quema Quema Quema // Kanaku y El Tigre

Hice uno función de música español en la radio el entero pasado y un razón que yo decidí hacerlo era la banda Kanaku y El Tigre.  Escuché a Quema Quema Quema mucho el verano de 2015, me ayudaba en los días depresivos durante mi trabajo en LEGOLAND.  Hay una cosa muy linda sobre las palabras en español, es una idioma con un ritmo especial, especialmente en la música de Kanaku y El Tigre.  Mi español no puede hacerle justicia, pero Quema Quema Quema es un disco muy especial, escúchalo por favor.

Gardens of Delete // Oneohtrix Point Never

And it comes out of nowhere really, its pixels on a screen and 0s and 1s then volts then air and its music.  It starts dark and it stays that way, pulses of some synthetic motor, not so human voices laughing like they know something we don’t and maybe they do, but by 1:13 of “Ezra” I think I understand it too and fall into the ride.  Our entire lives are under a process of digitization and our music cannot escape from this, I guess we can call it ‘fate.’  Sometimes its scary to think about, as someone not quite born into this world we now start to inhabit, born on the cusp of the internet’s formation and to parents who came from a different time (but don’t they always?). And sometimes music is sad because of it.  It lacks that human quality, the hope of the human soul, the spark of creation, because computer screens hurt my eyes sometimes and my fingers are tired of speaking for me.  Gardens of Delete tore me from that place of cranky naysayer, of elitism, in short Gardens of Delete inspired me.  Oneohtrix Point Never, as he’s called when making music, showed me once again that music is powerful, digitization is not the end but rather the present, and those 1s and 0s can be beautiful on occasion.

Sold Out // DJ Paypal

To work in a medium, in a genre like footwork that appears as a tiny blip on the timeline of dance music, one specific to Chicago and one that could be considered post- with the death of a founding father, takes a little humor.  DJ Paypal, acknowledges the absurdity of it all: Buy Now, Sold Out, The Mall Music crew, footwork? But then again what isn’t absurd about 2015, at least DJ Paypal can admit and move on, for acknowledgement is where creation begins and where Sold Out leaves off.  It’s post-Rashad music, and if Double Cup is really sacred and really holy then Sold Out is testament music, a witness to the greatness and by acknowledgment a transcendence of the former.  By repetition.  Whether the saxophone line on Awakening” or the cycle of collaboration and recycle and feat. within Teklife. by repeating simple acts of beat and music and life footwork is going somewhere and this album is a beautiful testament to that fact.

Carrie & Lowell // Sufjan Stevens

Lyrics mattered in 2015.  And that means people are listening, people are looking again to music not for the beat or a mindless release but for answers and poetry and words.  Courtney Barnett told us how it is in the plain way we cannot, Kendrick made these walls talk, Dr. Yen Lo rhymed with orange, and people listened.  I gave Carrie & Lowell to my mom for her birthday.  It might seem like an odd choice given the subject matter, and I hope my mom didn’t take me for some kind of fatalistic strange son for it (she didn’t).  I gave her Carrie & Lowell because listening to “Fourth of July” I couldn’t help but think about my own mother.  How much I love her, how much she has done for me, how one day she will die.  And then “The Only Thing” played and I wept.  Out of fear, and beauty and “sea lion caves in the dark.”  

Sufjan repeatedly hits these emotional intensities on Carrie & Lowell not only lyrically but with his sparse instrumentation and brilliant melodic writing.  It’s the kind of album that keeps giving, the album I’m still unpacking a little more every time I listen eight months later, the kind of beauty a mother deserves on her birthday.

So how much music is in WNUR’s collection?

Hmmm maybe like a couple thousand CDs and just as many records.

Wow, that’s pretty impressive.

Yeah, it’s pretty great. Definitely humbling to walk into every show and know you’ve probably never heard at least 75% of the music you’ll pull.  Some people use their laptops and Spotify, but I think that’s a little bit narcissistic.

Why do you say that?

Well, that’s a little harsh, maybe their just having a rough day or feeling a certain laxity.  But, no, what the laptop and Spotify say to me is “I already know enough music to fill this show, I don’t need to go to the stacks.”  And maybe you’ll put on a more cohesive show because of it, but this being college and college being a supposed place of learning, did you encounter any new musical experiences in your iTunes library?  Besides sharing your broad and impressive music collection with your listeners, the plug and play radio show is really not much different than the plug and play homework session you had the night before.  Take interest in the music you play, take advantage of the stacks, take some serious ownership of the show and the music you present.  It’s probably the last time you will have access to a library of such well curated music, get in there, you might even find some good music.  

Sounds like someones on a mission?

Haha I guess you could call it that, I’m out here trying to preach the WNUR gospel, it just makes sense.  I think our shows in general are declining in quality and DJ engagement and to me a big part of that seems to be a shift away from the stacks. The most valuable thing for me so far about having a show without a doubt, has been the musical knowledge I’ve gained.  And sometimes you are going to play some shitty music.  The stacks are not flawless.  But I keep going back for the gems, the songs that knock me out, that I come back the next day to burn to my computer.  There’s so many of them in there, trust me.

And so why are we here, on the laptop?

Very funny.  I wanted to create a column to show case the gems, prove to people we do have great stuff in the stacks. One album a week, let’s go.

Under Byen - Samme Stof Som Stof

Hailing from Denmark, Under Byen (translation: Below The City) create unorthodox rock, that in the modern scope of rock music in 2015, is a little orthodox.  The band commits themselves to an eclectic lineup of instruments, often employing cello, electric saw, various percussion and acoustic piano to create a unique and consistent sound throughout the album.  In this territory of eclectic instrumentation there tend to be bands who let their instrumentation act on their composition and those who fit their instrumental limitations into preconceived compositional structures.  Under Byen, leans toward the latter of these two tendencies on Samme Stof Som Stof to contrast rock music rather than some determined brand of orchestral pop.  Track 2,“Den her sang handler om at få det bedste ud af det" demonstrates this concept as the instruments themselves nearly cloak the repetetive and slightly sludgy compositional concept.  Katrine Stochholm’s vocals center themselves in the often eclectic mix of sounds and seem to ground floatier compositions like “Tindrer.”  She sings in her native Dannish tongue throughout the album, often accompanied by back up vocalizations (whether those are actual voices or instruments emulating the human voice), and maybe because of the language barrier I tend to hear a vocal timbre rather than lyric.  The timbre is dark, cloudy, sometimes growling, and flowing in a way that reminds me of Joanna Newsome one second and Björk the next.  Under Byen dismisses typical song structures throughout the album, though some songs sit in a more “popular” soundscape, particularly “Af Stof Som Stof” and the industrial sounding “Palads.”  But in between these are instrumental interludes of contemporary classical composition and 9 minute monsters devolving into harsh noise, its varied but subtly so, and not so much the album looses focus.  And in my opinion, that’s what good albums eat for breakfast, focus, at their most basic core, focus, along with intention and execution.  #6 LP of 2006?  That’s what our respected WNUR forefathers claim. Listen for yourself, a gem from our Scandinavian kin, found in the stacks and brought to you.