2015: First Quarter Favorites 21 picks from the first three months of the year


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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


Chicklette
Unfaithful

[Hundebiss]

Neighborhoods rewarding the antihero for slaying a den full of fiends; nobody ever questions the unfaithful. By definition, unfaithful is “not adhering to promises, obligations, or allegiances.” The word’s foundation stabilizes itself by relying on unreliability; inherently, being unfaithful is consciously contradictory and flawed. In comparison with the term based, unfaithful riots in a realm of lies and in-your-face shrugging that amounts to a glib, naive nihilistic purity. Not only does Chicklette broke-vocalize Unfaithful in a manner of lyrical abandonment, but it also aggressively tackles the desertion of belief with lackadaisical melodies, noises strewn and dropped-in throughout, and malicious deterioration of pop, all while retaining a mindset akin to never getting the name of that ravished body from last night. Your body. Chicklette’s Unfaithful is self-destruction because fuck meat and this body, your body; “Are you on the fucking PHONE, rn — like…” Most importantly, music doesn’t get this sort of ALPHA-FEMALE very often, or as much as it should be. And even though she makes it hard to joyfully celebrate, Chicklette is the (literal) care-free champion outsider, and Unfaithful is the crown she willfully adorns. To “turn back” only insinuates pre-destination, so leave or w/e.

D’Angelo and The Vanguard
Black Messiah

[RCA]

D’Angelo the wallflower, the grinning jester, the genius, the Hendrix disciple, the sexual icon, he who “used to get real high,” the redeemed — this man claimed that the title Black Messiah was “about the world.” Yet instead of slipping into the universalizing ether, instead of simulating a selection of styles to denote variety and virtuosity, D’Angelo the human being was wholly present for us. His voice stacked onto itself as a choir of falsetto reports and rejoinders. His guitar crunched through dense chordal riffs, spiraled into fried psych soloing, and whispered in gypsy jazz scales. His compositions unfolded detail by detail: the sudden onset of a knotty progression behind an established groove, handclaps fused at the hip with hi-hats, hiccups planted in willfully broken rhythms. All of this reached us at a benchmark level of production clarity. Other marquee releases of 2015 found Kendrick Lamar struggling to empower the marginalized in the face of commercial exploitation and social decay, Earl Sweatshirt exorcising his personal demons from within the vacuum of the studio, and Kanye West claiming that his forthcoming album would “embrac[e] joy […] in service of the people.” On Black Messiah, D’Angelo compressed his version of all of these narratives into a single album, and we, with mouths agape, swayed as we listened.

ZS
Xe

[Northern Spy]

Xe retells the fable of Jonah and the Whale, but instead of a cetacean, it’s the machine that’s swallowed him alive, and instead of him, it’s all of us. Trapped, disoriented, and alone, we’re forced to listen to ultra-rational circuits of steel guitar and the perpetual multiplications of an iron drum, losing ourselves in a boundless latticework that encloses us again and again in its totalitarian system. We struggle to escape, to claw our way out of its belly, but its sterile maxi-minimalism, its webbing of antiseptic guitar, chromium skins, and Sam Hillmer’s disarming sax, transform our every move into an extension of its own unfeeling structure. Yet just when we think all hope is lost, the machine’s own absolutist logic turns in on itself, recursively generating chaos out of order and unveiling the incoherence lurking beneath its coherent façade. It begins eating itself in a fit of senselessness, horns whelping discordantly as atonal cracks emerge in its perfect walls. At last, as the death throes subside, we break out, only to rush off in search of a superior machine to devour us all over again.

Javier Estrada
Tribal Prehispánico

[N.A.A.F.I.]

The Aztecs had two types of songs: devotional hymns and ghost chants, both used to contact the spirit world. In the latter, dancers would work themselves into a trance, becoming one with the gods and their ancestors before going into battle. Tribal Prehispánico, a work of Amerindian futurism in league with A la izquierda del colibrí, aims for a fusion of both. But while Jorge Reyes and Antonio Zepeda’s 1985 LP took a kosmische-influenced approach, Estrada follows Drexciya’s afro-futuristic route, using tribal — a DIY-friendly version of techno spliced with autochthonous sounds — as the foundation for a style that embraces Aztec cosmovision and comments on Latin America’s history of colonial subjugation. The album opens recounting the mythical foundation of Mexico, the Spanish Conquest, and mestizaje, until it reaches a contemporary-sounding interlude. Up to that point, future gradually emerged in the tracks, as tecciztli and teponaztli samples gave way to electronic beats, climaxing in the album’s final third, depicting a EDM-propelled confrontation between Aztecs and extraterrestrials. But we are in a sonidero now, witnessing human sacrifices reenacted in state-sanctioned narco executions, as Estrada performs his ghost chants. And we suddenly understand. In the XVI century, Aztecs fought aliens who looked like Queztalcoatl, though they were only human. America as we know it emerged from that clash. Yet, time is cyclical for the Aztecs, and just like their music’s ritualistic essence endures in tribal, Aztecs and aliens are bound to rematch. This is not science fiction fodder, as Estrada’s “Civilizations War” highlights, underlining the colonial/neo-colonial/intra-colonial tensions intrinsic to the Latin American experience. This time, the aliens are within, and in Tribal Prehispánico, Estrada devices a transtemporal place for the the perpetually-in-flux identity of the heirs of the original battle, to settle the score.

OG Maco
OG Maco [EP]

[Quality Control]

The OG Maco EP stole my girlfriend. The OG Maco EP went to my family reunion and now my parents want to adopt it. The OG Maco EP talked my boss into giving it a raise and cutting my pay. The OG Maco EP went on a ski trip with my friends and didn’t invite me. All of them, my friends and family, said, “Sorry, Taylor, it’s something about the way that Maco yelps and yawps and grinds his gravelly husk of a flow into the woozy production — it just really gets to us. The EP’s just packed with hits. ‘U Guessed It,’ of course, but ‘Seizure’ really bugs us out every time too, and ‘Heat,’ with that sick Zuse verse, is actual fire. For a 15-track long ‘EP,’ it really is amazing how every single song can bang so hard and still pack in constant surprises at the textural and production level, you know?” Friends and family, first off, thanks for writing my blurb for me. Second, I hear you! There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t find a stereo somewhere and crank this shit. But, I don’t know, call me sometime? Let’s have lunch.

Graham Lambkin & Michael Pisaro
Schwarze Riesenfalter

[Erstwhile]

No, no, no: night is a no. I can’t sleep, and I’ve never been a good sleeper, so I am staying up and listening to Schwarze Risenfalter again. Regardless of intent, the music elucidates the deep drift of insomnia: a slow restlessness that, inevitably, softens clenched jaws and loosens tight shoulders and dulls, long enough, the empty dark in a subtle, tragicomic relief. No, no, no: a vibrating cell phone, another YouTube clip, the sustained thud of a ghastly note. A voice upstairs, downstairs, somewhere. Lambkin and Pisaro, like sleeplessness, disrupt and disorient. This music upsets me, but I’m not ready to go to sleep — even if I tried. Somewhere in this “no,” I listen closely, and I am home.

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



This feature is made possible by Nusiki. Join Tiny Mix Tapes, Fake Shore Drive, and others in sharing your favorite music with your favorite people. [What is this?]

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