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.

Guest Mix

Our main man Moth has come up with another sweet mix, this time charting some chilled summer house and disco, with a lot of WN favourites in the mix. Listen here:

 

Just for WN readers, here's the tracklist:

Moodymann – The Thief That Stole My Sad Days

Unknown Artist – A Jazz Thing

Metro Area – Piña

Mark Barrott – Saviours Or Savages

Domenique Dumont – L’Esprit de l’Escalier

Ben Sun – Seven Sisters

Ben Morris – Polarna Flyger Till Kuba

Paxton Fettel – Dots on the Skyline

Alice Smith – Love Endeavour (Maurice Fulton Remix)

Pablo Mateo – Roxy

J Albert – Love Delivered

Panama Brown – Theme From Panama Racing Club

Merwyn Sanders – Mimi Likes 2 Dance

Davina – Don’t You Want It

Move D – Eastman

Kornél Kovács – Malon

The Bass Foundation – Recognition (Club Rave)

Dream 2 Science – My Love Turns To Liquid

Samo DJ – Flyer Edit

Jean Adebambo – Say That You Love Me (DJ Nick The Record Re-Edit)

Aphex Twin – Alberto Balsalm

J Albert - Dance Slow

Label: Exotic Dance Records

Many of the best electronic producers won’t be rushed, leaving fans waiting months and sometimes years for the next short dispatch (looking at you: Burial and Floating Points). Mostly it’s a good sign though, choosing quality over quantity, as a prolific artist is often one whose music is worth about as much time as they themselves put into making it, rehashing the same sounds or letting the quality control drop considerably.

Yet there are always exceptions. Brooklyn-based J. Albert, aka Jiovanni Nadal, has come out of absolutely nowhere in 2015 with a slew releases (four of them in six months) which have charted among the year’s most exciting music. On top of three excellent EPs (the recent Black Opal release was particularly winning) there was Dance Slow, a cassette album released with little fanfare on a new label in March. Here Albert’s sound encompasses some of the great contrasts of the house/ techno spectrum, veering from raw to melancholy, dreamy to sinister, dense to stark without ever breaking stride.

Come Across

One of Albert’s favourite modes is a sinister vein of house-leaning techno (or vice versa) which trades in eerie samples and spare soundfields, such as on the mellow yet sinister Dance Slow, whose vocal is subtly manipulated over Spartan percussion. A similar trick is pulled off in more robust fashion on Rough Kiss the Ground, whose high-pitched whine and narcotised percussion prove a late highlight (though the track is presented in a fuller form with a real ending on Albert’s Untitled Black Opal 12”). Elsewhere the mood gets weirder, as on the unsettling synth endlessly looped over hollow claps and muttered vocals on Listen To The Crowd, or the single fluorescent tone that rattles uncertainly over a field of knife-edge snares and vicious hi-hats on album closer Feel No Evil.

These techno outings are moody and well-executed, but most of Dance Slow’s moments are when Albert steps out of the horror-movie frame. Opener Come Across is a glacial slice of deep house which is utterly consuming, as a synth wash drifts over glistening arpeggios, like staring at the stars from a gentle electronic sea. Later album highlight Love Delivered starts with a disco loop which is assailed by a blue-tinged melody with the force of a hurricane, providing an intense trip which is over far too soon. Follower My Passenger takes a stripped-raw acid line and shifts from rough to smooth, ending up with a reedy synth line and crystalline 80s-referencing melodies.

Love Delivered

What is remarkable across Albert’s output is how comfortable he seems in different styles, shapeshifting across the great plurality of 4/4 dance, coming up with different sounds but setting a coherent tone which is all his own. Of course, we can’t know if J Albert is producing all this music at the rate that he’s releasing it, perhaps there’s a serious backlog of material, but very few new producers have announced themselves with such style and consistency in recent years. Dance Slow is not only a supremely accomplished album with a host of great tunes, it also looks to be the launchpad for a career which is about to – deservedly – take dramatic flight.

8.5/10

Read this review in context at Inverted Audio