Best Albums of 2015

 12. Grant – The Acrobat [The Lauren Bacall]

The Awful Truth

An unknown artist on an unknown label was responsible for one of the year’s most mesmerising deep house LPs. Grant’s sound is decidedly subdued yet his production talents should not be underestimated. Grainy rhythms and swooning pads are everywhere yet this is no standard house-by-numbers – flashes of warehouse techno, sublime ambience and snarling acid are teased into a single slinky package. Like the striking photo on its cover, these tracks are rich moments of suspended animation: joy, movement, and grace.

11. Sven Atterton – The Cove [Omega Supreme]

The Cove

Omega Supreme and People’s Potential Unlimited have spent the last few years issuing the very best of modern funk, and nothing came better than Sven Atterton’s early 2015 debut The Cove. An outstanding musicality stalks through these sun-drenched jams, played out through sinuous keyboard solos, hazy pads and languid basswork. Absolute killer for the summer chill.

10. Palmbomen II – Palmbomen II [Beats In Space]

 

Mary Louise Lefante

"As a Dutch transplant to LA, Hugo is clearly a sun-worshipper, a fact abundantly clear in his colourful, saturated take on club music. The sun blazes through a thick haze over these tracks, which corral burbling house, dew-eyed new age melodies and the occasional foray into gurgling acid into a memorable, mesmeric package… It’s a winner, an album that invites you to wander through an alien landscape guided by a warm, comforting hand. It’s a walk you’ll want to take time and again.”

Read the full review here

9. Linkwood – Expressions [Firecracker]

Off Kilter (No Midi Mix)

“It’s been four years since the last Linkwood emission, and six since his debut LP, and you can hear how slowly these tracks have matured, offering a richness and attention to detail uncommon in the fast-paced dance scene, particularly when it comes to albums. Whether you come for the gorgeous ambient meditations, the compelling club cuts or the whole opulent package, Expressions is an album you’re not going to want to leave anytime soon.”

Read the full review here

8. Lifted – 1 [PAN]

Bell Slide

“Lifted’s debut is the rare album which feels purely next-level, like music beamed from an idealised future. The sound that the group have created is like an unstable chemical: constantly mutating, joyously effervescent. So few artists who chart fresh electronic terrain manage to do so with such lightness and joy in their sound. Because Lifted do, you won’t just follow them willingly – you’ll do it with a broad smile on your face.”

Read the full review here

7. Domenique Dumont – Comme Ca [Antinote]

L’esprit de l’Escalier

“These aren’t really tracks or cuts, they’re songs, addictive and hummable, but with a fine producer at the helm, who has a light touch but never lets things get too sugary… a curious and winning package from yet another great Antinote discovery, as if they needed another feather in their cap.”

Read the full review here

6. DJ Sotofett – Drippin’ For A Tripp [Honest Jon’s]

 

  

Drippin For 97 Mix

Honest Jon’s struck gold this year, offering us the broadest exploration of DJ Sotofett’s demented musical world yet. Here the inimitable producer teams up with an array of collaborators but takes his own tools along for the ride – birdsong, reggae rhythms and acres of post-euphoric ambience. It was a tripp that took us from future-afrobeat to humid house via beatless excursions poised impossibly between prog and Balearic. Absolutely essential for fans of the Sex Tags crew.

5. Project Pablo – I Want To Believe [1080p]

 

 
Sky Lounge

“The beats crunch and shuffle, lush pads drift like smoke, and the basslines are summoned straight from a 70s funk record. Then there’s the rising melody, hitting the perfect balance between hope and introspection. With this first track, Project Pablo hits a wondrous note which he sustains across the album without a single misstep… Listening to I Want To Believe, faces seem happier, objects prettier, and all those pesky problems seem like they might just work out okay, after all.”

Read the full review here

4. Dwig – From Here To There [Dwig]

Different Days

“It’s immediately accessible yet generous to the attentive listener, excelling in the mesmeric capabilities of the genre while pushing a varied, refreshing palette. If there’s any upside to the fact that this graceful album is unlikely to sell out or chart on critics’ lists at the end of the year, it’s that those few listeners who caught it and engaged will forge a more intimate relationship with this music, unhindered by hype or popularity. For theirs is an album of rare substance and beauty, something to treasure for them and them alone.”

Read the full review here

3. J Albert – Dance Slow [Exotic Dance]

Love Delivered

It’s a shame that J Albert’s stunning debut came out on such a limited cassette run, because this is music that demands to be heard. Deftly weaving between starry-eyed house and ruff analog exploits, Dance Slow is a twilit masterclass in 4/4 dance.

Read the full review here

2. Floating Points – Elenaia [Pluto]

Silhouettes (I, II & III)

After six years of stunning singles, we were expected big things from Floating Points’ debut. Yet Sam Shepherd’s long-awaited debut album, the fruit of five years’ work, wasn’t what anyone expected. Slow, slight, strangely ineffable, Elaenia makes you come to it. But when you do, and give this music time and attention, a world of sumptuous detail reveals itself, with a lifetime of emotions and influences ever-shifting across its dappled surface. This is a record of a subtlety and mastery that only Floating Points could achieve. We’ve rarely been so happy to be wrong.

1. DJ Richard – Grind [Dial]

Nighthawk

“DJs will find some great club tracks if they choose to skim it for parts, but that would be to miss the holistic effect of the album. This is narrative techno, and in typical artistic form, the narrative of conflict draws us inexorably towards reconciliation. This is heard on Vampire Dub, a confection of twinkling synth work, gauzy keys that leave behind calming jet-trails, and bubbling mechanical accents. Here the feelings of displacement are left behind, resolution can be found in a composition which is nakedly beautiful. This is the deserved conclusion to a great artistic accomplishment; a dance album with no fat, no misfires, every tune essential, surprising and rewarding. We hear darkness and conflict resolved through artistic expression, and we find peace.”

Read the full review here

***

What we listened to when we couldn’t bear to hear another synth:

You can’t always listen to electronic music. Well, we can’t. Every so often you need some nice acoustic earthiness to soothe those throbbing ears. 2015 was a rich year outside of electronic music, with Kendrick Lamar pulling an astonishingly ambitious jazzfunkhiphopsoul album off to perfection that’s still got us reeling. Young Thug picked up a lot of the excess hip hop weight with an endless slew of tunes baring his half-crazed flow and stark trap production.

Meanwhile Beach House kept doing exactly what we want them to with two new albums of dreamy, nostalgic pop, D'Angelo returned after 14 years with an RnB masterclass and Sufjan Stevens bared everything on the supremely affecting Carrie & Lowell. Finally, White Noise patron saint Joanna Newsom made a welcome return after five years with the satisfyingly dense and complex Divers, packed with allusions, esoteric instrumentation and heart-rending melodies.

***

That’s all for the best albums of 2015. Come back next week for a roundup of the best tracks of the year.

Dwig - From Here To There

Label: Dwig

Sometimes you hear an album and you just know it isn’t going to get the attention it deserves. Perhaps it's a case of timing, publicity, or trends, but all too often superb LPs fall through the cracks. This bittersweet success story seems the sure fate of From Here To There, a truly remarkable deep house longplayer from Giegling affiliate Ludwig Völker, aka Dwig.

Dwig is an acronym for Die Wiese Im Garten, ‘the meadow in the garden’, an image which aptly evokes both the tranquillity and the dislocated otherworldliness of his music. Across his second LP, Völker proves himself a consummate sculptor of deep house music, drawing in accents of jazz and hip hop while blending acoustic and synthetic instruments with an elegant and deliberate touch.

The album’s front end is loaded with the kind of warm deep house that has made Giegling and Smallville such success stories, promoting the ideals of subtlety and hypnotism. True Story gives us the first glimpse of how deftly Dwig mixes unexpected sounds into a gorgeous whole. Here there are scuffed kicks and aqueous synths, a slide guitar and clinking glass, fashioned into music which blooms and recedes as gently as the deep breath of sleep. Gentle Memories is one of the album’s most wistful moments, its keening synths and garbled vocals rooting us in a bittersweet nostalgia trip, an easy saxophone sliding into the close. Meanwhile Little Boy turns up the funk, riding out on a mellow key riff, synths served up filtered and chopped, a bassline wandering down in the deeps.

From Here To There

Yet even the best deep house albums can run aground by doing too much of the same. Thankfully Dwig is fully in control of the album’s pacing and variety, and the moments when From Here To There diverges from the deep house template are among its strongest. Opener Spring flirts with hip hop rhythms, tuning up the sounds which will appear across the LP, and the cruelly short Morning Break is the finest Saturday morning jam, with a light shuffle and brass straight out of a black and white movie.

But it’s in the album’s last three tracks that Dwig really steps up a gear, backloading the LP with all of its best tunes. Different Days is a superbly moody hybrid, moving at the pace of hip hop with the mechanics of house. Here tension and release are subtly managed with a blossoming vocal sample, and you can again hear how carefully each element is selected and arranged – the brass, piano and synth flutters each set off a pleasure chain reaction in the music cortex. Lost Telegram is particularly adventurous, ruled by a rapidly filtering synth that hums like a looming UFO, set over a surprising 2step beat pattern that lends an addictive shuffle to the groove. Another joy of the pacing is how Dwig keeps his best traditional deep house tune for the end. The title track is fathoms-deep house par excellence, where melancholic keys are locked against one of Völker’s simplest, most emotive basslines.

From start to finish From Here To There is a deep house masterclass. It’s immediately accessible yet generous to the attentive listener, excelling in the mesmeric capabilities of the genre while pushing a varied, refreshing palette. If there’s any upside to the fact that this graceful album is unlikely to sell out or chart on critics’ lists at the end of the year, it’s that those few listeners who caught it and engaged will forge a more intimate relationship with this music, unhindered by hype or popularity. For theirs is an album of rare substance and beauty, something to treasure for them and them alone.

8.5/10