As I take stock of 2015, it was hard not to notice how many of my favorite albums were filled with what sounded like full orchestras or brass and strings accompanying singers living in some sort of beautiful time warp—a world immune to keyboards and “drops” and laptops. Don’t get me wrong, there is a select strain of electronic music that I adore, but this year’s best music is more a tribute to the past than a nod to the future. Sadly, I bid Rdio farewell and returned home to Spotify, where the rest of the world was listening. And thanks to Sonos and my iPhone, I have almost the full history of recorded music at my fingertips.

1. Tobias Jesso Jr.—Goon (SubPop)

Tobias Jesso is a very tall, shaggy-haired 20-something, who writes and performs near perfect slow piano ballads in the tradition of Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and the much lesser known Epic Soundtracks. He is an old soul, with a modern sensibility. He tugs at your heart, but almost with a kind of a wink and a nod. There was no album quite like “Goon” in 2015. It is a rich but spare meditation on love and loss.

Lyrically it is about as vulnerably beautiful as anything I could both stomach and love. On the sublime “ Without You” he croons “I can hardly breathe without you / there is no future I want to see without you / I just don’t know who I would be without you.” But as much as “Goon” is remarkable for its intimacy, the album’s producer , Girls mastermind JP Snow, has created something so warm and close that it’s hard to imagine what it would have been in someone else’s hands. If there is one record to listen to over and over again this year, until you memorize every word and phrase, it is this one.

2. Julia Holter—Have You In My Wilderness (Domino)

On her third full length album Julia Holter channels the best elements from everyone from Bjork, Dirty Projectors, St. Vincent to Sufjan Stevens. Somehow I missed her first two, but this a revelation. There is nothing more exciting than discovering a new voice, especially one accompanied by complex musical arrangements, provocative lyrics and a decidedly non-pop, but poppy take on modern music.

She sings like an angel, composes like Brian Wilson, and writes as efficiently as William Carlos Williams: “Figures pass so quickly/That I realize my/ Eyes know very well/ It’s impossible to see/Who I’m waiting for in/My Raincoat,” she sings on the album opener “Feel You.” This album is simply magical.

3. Destroyer–Poison Season (Merge)

Destroyer (aka Dan Bejar), the lesser known third wheel in the super group The New Pornographers, has been making music for almost 15 years now. His music has always toed the line between sleepily esoteric and jazzily lost in time. Between moments of legitimate brilliance like 2011’s “Kaputt,” and the vocally and lyrically distinctive New Pornos tunes, Bejar has been on the cusp of something resembling a masterpiece.

“Poison Season” is finally the consistent daydream I have been waiting for. His seductively nasal vocal stylings, and reclusive rock star ways, are accompanied by a rock chamber orchestra of sorts. “Poison Season” is part musical, littered with brass and strings, part non-sensical beat-poetry, part love letter to life. On the magical “Times Square” he writes like Allen Ginsburg tripping on Stephen Sondheim : “Jesus is beside himself / Jacob is in a state of decimation / The writing on the wall isn’t writing at all / Just forces of nature in love with a weather station.” Tune in.

4. Sufjan Stevens—Carrie and Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)

There hasn’t ever really been a songwriter and composer like Sufjan Stevens. His hushed vocals and fully realized orchestrations live in this kind of nether world between here and there, now and then, and rock and church music. Always confessional and intimate, his albums have been ambitious attempts to understand the world around him, but also the world that exists in his head.

On “Carrie and Lowell,” his sadly uplifting mediation on his absent mother Carrie, and her second husband Lowell, he unpacks a lifetime of trying to reconcile how he should feel. Even when he sings “When I was three or maybe four / She left us at the video store” he is less angry than merely trying to understand. Yes, this record is heavy, both in spirit and composition, but like most of his work, there is a joy lying right below the surface and that’s what makes this so special.

5. Paul Weller—Saturns Pattern (Polydor)

At 61, Paul Weller might be the only legitimate rock star from the 70’s still making new music that is both vital and groundbreaking. While the Stones, The Who, and Zeppelin are still touring big stadiums on lucrative nostalgia tours, Weller is still writing, recording and performing new music with the same urgency and intensity as he did while leading the Jam and the Style Counsel. Beginning with his eponymous solo album in 1993, Weller has unpacked the history of rock music from R&B, to soul and blues, and the hybrids that live so comfortably in between. Some of these efforts have been legitimately mind bending like “Stanley Road” and the “Heavy Soul,” but others have lacked the kind of recognizable origin that helped create cohesion.

“Saturn Pattern” is something of the completion of a long virtuous cycle that began with The Jam and delivers us to today where artists seem to be embracing the lost genres of the not so distant past as some kind of revolt against the soullessness of electronic music. Vocally, Weller miraculously still sounds like a young man, and his band is filled with the kind of studio super group most artists only dream of. On “Pick It Up,” arguably his best most infectious song in a decade, you are almost transported back to that moment in time when you first heard his deliciously serious groove that hooked you the first time.

6. Shamir—Ratchet (XL)

Shamir is a genre and gender-bending enigma. “Ratchet” is also one of the most hopelessly addictive records of 2015. He is part dancehall diva, part hip-hop, and part melodic electronica. It is an album littered with big bouncy beats, but also one filled with cowbells and Casio’s. The music is hard to place from a timing perspective, but feels as if it could be comfortable in almost any decade starting in the 70s.

Lyrically, Shamir is some sort of weird savant, both funny, “Don’t try me I’m not a free sample / Step to me and you will be handled”, and also a bit angry. But it doesn’t really matter because once you let the beats wash over you on the dance floor it just kind of finds its way to you.

7. José González—Vestiges & Claws (Imperial Recordings)

Like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, and perhaps Simon & Garfunkel before him, González has the uncanny ability to use his voice as an instrument as much as he turns an acoustic guitar into a voice. Both with his band Junip and his solo work, the Argentine Swede, creates a kind of slow burning intensity, serious and heavy but also weightless.

For an acoustic album “Vestiges” has a deep, steady groove throughout it. On the album’s standout track “Leaf Off / The Cave”he takes his own brand of melancholy optimism to a kind new high: “Take a moment to reflect where we’re going / Let reason Guide you / See all tracks lead you out from the dark. “ In 2015 there was no better example of musical mediation than this one.

8. Tame Impala—Currents (Interscope)

If I hadn’t been riding the Tame Impala train from their not so long ago first album, I’m not sure I’d know how to feel about this record. I know I’d love it, but once you know where this band is going, everything they do will be challenged by expectation. “Currents” is a fully realized masterpiece that seems to be following the kind of mainstream psychedelia that only Pink Floyd was ever fully able to pull off.

Not only are they a fully bankable live band with a light show that nods to the early acid tests, their swirling guitars and keyboards seem to have nothing in common with more popular modern music. I guess it makes sense that this group of outsiders in their 20s hail from Perth, Australia. They have managed to write an album of near perfect songs, and I sense that they will have a long creative career bridging the gap between the past and the present.

9. Kurt Vile—b’lieve i’m goin down (Matador)

Strangely, the 35 year-old Kurt Vile has become the flag bearer in the renaissance of a kind of uniquely American music that Tom Petty and Springsteen promulgated in the 70s. This is guitar rock rooted in the kind of blue collar experience where the subjects of songs have real jobs, go to the local bar after work, and drink Budweisers and smoke cigarettes while rock music blares from the battered juke box in the corner.

Along with fellow Philly based conspirators, and sometime band mates and fellow Adam Granduciel (War On Drugs), and the underrated Steve Gunn, Vile writes dark rambling songs all beginning and ending with his silky guitar work. Alternating between stark acoustic numbers like “All in a Daze Work” to the oddly uplifting “Life Like This” where he sings “Wanna live, wanna Live / A life like mine / Well I’ve been doin’ it all the time / To do so you gotta roll with the punches.” This is an album meant to be listened to from top to bottom, and over and over again.

10. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds—Chasing Yesterday (Sour Mash Records)

Who didn’t like Oasis, at least a little bit, in the 90’s. Although they were never my favorite Brit Pop band at the time, they had a real knack for timeless songwriting in the tradition of the best British bands. Although Liam Gallagher was the vocal face of the band during their heyday, it was Noel who was the real genius writing most of the music and lyrics.

“Chasing Yesterday” is one of the most surprisingly triumphant comebacks I have heard in a decade. Songs like “Riverman” and “The Right Stuff” are cut from that beautiful anthemic rock quilt that seems to have been kept alive only by bands like My Morning Jacket and Radiohead with not only the leverage and access to spend real time in a studio, but also with the vision to create rock in an age of electronica and Hip Hop. This is an album filled with long jammy, brass and string?—?adorned guitar driven rock that tend to build into something you haven’t heard since you last really loved Zeppelin and The Who.

11. Matthew E. White—Fresh Blood (Domino)

This wonderfully genre defying retro jazz rock exists somewhere in that nether world between Lou Reed, Hall & Oats, and Flight of the Conchords. It is groovy in a hard to place way, either in the past or deep in the future. It is funny, or ironic or perhaps even a bit sad. It’s hard to say really.

White idolizes the great Randy Newman, and I am assuming Brian Wilson; the music has a kind of similarly whimsical intensity. He creates slow building anthems that tend to explode out of something that moments earlier seemed merely a ballad. Just drop the needle and let it flow over you like a warm bath.

12. Mercury Rev—The Light In You (Bella Union)

Twenty years ago Mercury Rev released an indie rock classic called “Deserter’s Songs.” Along with The Flaming Lips “Soft Bulletin,” these two albums will be remembered as the definitive examples of a very specific moment in time where the druggy beauty of mid-career Pink Floyd met the weird orchestral cousins of 90s alternative rock. It’s been almost a decade since we last heard from Mercury Rev, but “The Light in You” is a surreal day dream.

On one of the year’s best tracks, “Central Park East,” you simply lose yourself in the song “Am I the only lonely boy to ever walk in Central Park … I’m listening to the sound of champagne glasses spilling out daydreams on the ground.” Waking, lucid dreams?—?I seem to remember having them more often when I was younger. Real life happens; thank god we still have music like this to help take us away.

13. Beach House—Depression Cherry / Thank Your Lucky Stars (Sub Pop)

There hasn’t been a band as perfectly consistent and as dreamily accessible as Beach House since the glory days of 4AD and the Cocteau Twins. Although neither of this years’ two excellent releases is individually better than any of the prior three, the sum of the parts, 18 songs in all, more than makes up for it. “Depression Cherry,” the more commercial but still experimental of the two albums, alternates between sonic My Bloody Valentine type rhythms and percussive sounds.

Of the two, I prefer the more stripped down simplicity of the surprise “Thank Your Lucky Stars” release. On it we can more freely bathe in the angelic vocals of Victoria Legrand, letting the gentle keyboards and guitar wash over everything. Most often our favorite bands eventually evolve away from the place where they start (U2, REM) and find themselves lost, unable to go back home. Others like Radiohead make only minor adjustments on that long path while still seeming fresh and relevant. Beach House is one of those bands, making small steps towards a far off future?—?one I hope is lit with many more beach houses.

14. Courtney Barnett—Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom & Pop)

If Stephen Malkmus were a 27 year-old woman from Melbourne, making music today he would sound like Courtney Barnett. Seemingly out of nowhere, she was shot from a cannon in the 2014 hype cycle with a quirky mix of bookishly clever lyrics and addictive melodies. On her first full length she has crafted a kind of survey album filled with all the elements of the 90s indie rock: loud guitars, whip smart lyrics, and a slackerish vibe.

Although perhaps an outlier, on the beautiful ballad “Depreston,” she sings “Now we got that percolator / Never made a latte greater / I’m saving / $23 a week.” This pretty much sums up her approach to music, holding a magnifying glass up to the little bits in life. She makes them funny, but also emphasizes how creativity is just sitting in front of us in the form of the mundane.

15. Leon Bridges—Coming Home (Columbia Records)

Some music just transcends the hype, the novelty and all of the weird inflections that come with breaking out of the convoluted music business in 2015. How would this album have stacked up against all the great R&B-Soul records of the 50’s and 60’s if it came out today? Who knows? Who cares really? Those records aren’t being listened to by youngsters, so if it takes an out of left field effort like this to inspire a look back, I’m game.

In addition to 25 year-old Leon Bridge’s silky smooth voice, and superb backing band (thanks to White Denim’s Austin Jenkins) there are ten legitimately great songs captured here. The real standout is clearly the hopped up “Smooth Sailin” but if you want songs that just kind of have you longing for an earlier life during a simpler time, songs like “Coming Home” and “River” will put you in that contemplative kind of mood.

16. Kamasi Washington—Epic (Brainfeeder)

There must be something in the water in LA these days. Fifty years ago, the jazz greats stomped around NYC, but thanks in part to Kendrick Lamar, space jazz freaks like Kamasi, Thundercat, Robert Glasper and Flying Lotus are picking up those faded clothes left behind by “Bitches Brew” era Miles, and soul jazz era Coltrane, Sun Ra and Funkadelic, and rebuilding the genre.

“Epic” is a three hour (yes three hour) masterpiece of blissed out jazz for the hip hop generation. In the mid-90’s Guru’s Jazzmatazz, US3, and The Solsonics and merged hip hop and jazz into a kind of cultural bridge, but slowly the real players were replaced by synthetic beats, samples and over-produced radio friendly chart toppers. This is as a refreshing and as important an album as any this year. Invest the time. Unpack history.

17. Kendrick Lamar—To Pimp a Butterfly (Interscope)

I am surprised that I have fallen for this record as hard as I have. Unlike its predecessor, which was a more traditional Hip-Hop album I am rarely moved by these efforts. But with collaborators like the Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, George Clinton and others, this was bound to be special. This is an album that feels more like a classic 90’s Acid Jazz (Guru, Digable Planets, etc.) than modern Hip Hop.

As an MC, Kendrick sounds almost understated here, letting the players play. This is a record about race, and about how little has changed in America. This especially hits home on the “The Blacker The Berry,” a not so subtle allusion to the seminal Wallace Thurman novel of the same name that explores racism within the black community in the late 1920’s. Sure there is anger, but it is buried into a weirdly wonderful survey course in the history of black music. This is a powerful reaction to the hedonistic trend where the most powerful MC’s end up in public pissing matches with each other, and forget about everything that came before them.

A bunch of other stuff that you must hear … [Read more…]

1. Sharon Van Etten – Are We There (Jagjaguar)Along with Neko Case, Sharon Van Etten has one of the most powerful and hypnotic voices in modern music. Lyrically she mines her soul for that triumphantly broad range of emotions that comes with a broken heart and then, like shooting clay pigeons, picks them off with gorgeous but unsentimental detachment.“Are We Here” is an album of wonderfully varied styles, from the ethereal folktronica of “Our Love” to the rustic countrified Americana (think Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams) on “Every Time The Sun Comes Up” to the stinging, soaring rock of “Taking Chances.” Despite covering so much elegant ground there is nothing derivative about anything she creates. In some cases seeing an artist live creates the necessary context to fully appreciate the recorded music, and although one might imagine a dark and quiet show, Sharon Van Etten brings a relentless humor to her otherwise dark and contemplative music. There was no other record that moved me quite as much this year.

2. War On Drugs – Lost In The Dream (Secretly Canadian)Sometimes you just need to believe the hype and listen to the music and then separate yourself from the ancillary praise. I was too young to really understand the pre-MTV music of Tom Petty and the rest of the early 80’s post classic rock Americana, but with the silky smooth Lost in The Dream War on Drugs have recreated something largely forgotten over time.Led by the hazy understated vocals of Adam Granduciel, the band blends old timey guitar rock with modern synthesizers to create something that transcends the genre. This is mood music, recalling long summer days or cold winter nights. On “Eyes To the Wind” something that resembles a kind of forgotten anthem, the music just takes its time getting somewhere that feels like the kind of dream you remember only faintly. In an “albumless” era, this is a work that is much more than the sum of its parts.

3. Nick Mulvey– First Mind (Harvest Records)Following in the recent onslaught of precocious brilliant young British folkies (Laura Marling and Michael Kiwanuka to name a few), Nick Mulvey has written one of lushest records of its kind in quite a while. With his intricate guitar fingering, and silky smooth vocals, Mulvey channels everyone from Nick Drake to Sweden’s Jose Gonzalez.His largely acoustic framework often builds to anthemic compositions filled with violins, and subtle electronica and steady percussive beats. Like most Mercury Prize nominees, his music somehow missed both the American hipster set, and the crossover landscape that has embraced Mumford and Hozier. Standouts like “Cucurucu” and “Meet Me There” would be legit singles if they had been released by Dave Matthews, but fortunately will be beautiful private secrets for a while longer.

4. Future Islands – Singles (4AD)Funny how the modern hype cycle works: Ten year-old band, three records into their critically acclaimed but essentially niche career, perform their song “Seasons” on the David Letterman show (not even Fallon) led by a singer who looks like a young balding Marlon Brando, but sounds more like Fine Young Cannibal’s Roland Gift, dressed in pleated pants, and dancing like a new wave duck. The performance blows up on YouTube, launching them from 200 person live venues to 5,000 seat affairs. Couldn’t happen to nicer guys who seem so genuinely appreciative of the opportunity.Backstory aside, Singles is a great record from beginning to end. It’s 80’s synth-driven new wave pop, but unlike the icy computer music of the late 70’s and early 80’s, this music is rich with emotion. On “Sun In The Morning”, Samuel T. Herring wears his heart shamelessly on his sleeve and on “Seasons (Waiting On You)” you hear the sound of the band celebrating the pure joy of making music for its own sake.

5. Real Estate – Atlas (Domino)Real Estate makes some of the most pristine and oddly upbeat yet introspective music today. Shimmering, but steady guitars and drums create a kind of surreal canvas through which you can almost see time passing slowly before you, but it’s almost like you’re being drawn back into your youth. Like Luna, and fellow New Jerseyites The Feelies before them, the ten songs on “Atlas” are pure dream pop, escapist rock for the nerd set.There is nothing abstract lyrically, but merely perfectly crafted pop songs about people and places and states of mind. Tunes like “Hard to Hear” and “Talking Backwards” just kind of roll along towards some kind of ambiguous destination on the long road of life. Simplicity is the easily the hardest thing to accomplish creatively, but Real Estate make it look so .. well .. simple.

6. Angus and Julia Stone – Angus and Julia Stone (American Recordings)Great records occasionally fall between the cracks. They are too perfect and too complete as a whole to be consumed quickly enough in our attention-challenged world. Aussie siblings Angus and Julia combine rock and folk, are hip but not hipsters, and write songs that just take a little while to get under your skin before making a familiar kind of sense.Under the tutelage of Rick Rubin, this eponymous album is a groovy tribute to all that has come before, complete with jazzy keys and steady percussion. All that has come back in the form of modern guitar rootsiness. Julia sings in a kind of hushed smokiness (“My Word For It”), while Angus seems to take his time meandering through quiet jams like the sublime “Get Home.” That Angus and Julia still haven’t nailed the audience they deserve makes this record even more special.

7. Asgeir – In The Silence (One Little Indian)Imagine an Icelandic Bon Iver–dreamy, ethereal songs filled with brass, jazzy drums and icy cool electronic blips. Imagine a singer whose smooth falsetto vocals just melts into the music and hangs quietly, the kind of atmosphere you assume defines a wintery island that is home to a volcano. That is what Asgeir Trausti’s beautiful debut album does. It transports you to some kind of peaceful place.On the sublime “Head in the Snow,” if you listen closely, you hear a quiet, fragile optimism that sounds familiar, but is actually quite special. This is not party music. This is not superficially cool, but points to a kind of precious confidence that just kind of works as the diamond in the rough you’ll be able to share with the small handful of people lucky enough to have found it.

8. Beck – Morning Phase (Geffen)When you have been making music for as long as Beck, for a large and both commercial and critical fan base, through many mutations, you have the freedom to make whatever kind of music you want. Although there have been a few Beck records over the years that veered off course for me, it was always the outliers that resonated the most: Mutations, Sea Change and the criminally under heard One Foot In the Grave.Morning Phase is the culmination of everything he has been working on since he started as a fixture on the anti-folk circuit in the early 90’s. It is a gorgeous experiment in mood and tone. It is music by which to watch clouds move across the sky, or snow fall, or suns rise. It is a waking dream of sorts – both melodramatic and mellow.

9. Temples – Sun Structures (Fat Possum Records)I wasn’t old enough to read when the music that inspired Temples, a band of young Brits literally half my age, was making waves. On the surface Sun Structures shares more in common with bands like The Byrds and Hurdy Gurdy era Donovan than it does anything made in the past twenty years, but despite these older reference points, the music is aggressively modern. The breezy ten songs are a mix of psychedelia and pristine pop.Like Tame Impala and Artic Monkeys before them, what’s old is very much new again. On tunes like “Sun Structures” there are beautifully fuzzed out guitars and silky smooth vocals rising and falling like stars from the late 60’s. On the inevitably classic “Move with the Seasons” it is easy to forget you are living in the internet age, but more the age of Aquarius. Just let the record play.

10. Yellow Ostrich – Cosmos (Barsuk Records)In a year without new music from Local Natives and Grizzly Bear, “Cosmos” was the album that neatly plugged that gaping hole. Yellow Ostrich plays moody, serious music that mixes soaring vocal melodies with steady drum lines and occasionally stinging guitars.The album drifts between rock jams like “Any Wonder” and dreamy percussive driven ballads like “Neon Fists.” Although “Cosmos” becomes more accessible with every listen, this is a dark experimental album that makes one contemplate the meaning of the relationships that we have and the ones that we wish we had.

11. Elbow – The Take Off and Landing of Everything (XL)For some reason Americans just don’t get Elbow. Perhaps it is that to really appreciate what they are doing takes patience, and Americans are not patient people. More than any band I can think of, they write songs that often start off slowly before exploding like time-lapsed flowers into beautiful walls of sound.On “My Sad Captains” (perhaps my favorite song of the year) there are lyrics that could have been lifted from a Dicken’s novel: “I’m running out of miracles / and the streets alive with one man shows / the corner boys were moved along;” vocals sung by a hipster choirboy, Elbow transports you somewhere else completely. Their music is always grounded in a steady percussive backdrop, but Elbow garnishes each song with a small orchestra of brass and keyboards adding another layer of beauty and complexity.

12. Sturgill Simpson – Metamodern Sounds In Country Music (High Top Mountain Records)This might be the most purely “country” album I have fallen for this hard since discovering the classic Gram Parsons records in college. Metamodern Sounds is cut from a much different cloth than the increasingly popular modern country music that is popular today. It taps into older musical themes like religion, booze, and love lost and found, but lyrically sounds somehow strangely contemporary.This is an album is filled with old-timely outlaw country jams like “Living the Dream” but also meanders between warmer acoustic stories like “Voices” and more 70’s hippie country ballads like the desert island classic “Turtles All The Way Down.” Blues and Country are America’s most original musical inventions. Sometimes you just need to go back in time to understand the present. This is really something special.

13. Mac DeMarco – Salad Days (Captured Tracks)This is a slithering melodic ramble through some sort of hazy modern dreamscape. For all its apparent whimsy, DeMarco (not his real name), hailing from Brooklyn (by way of Montreal) and sounding stony (despite the fact that he claims he doesn’t) is a serious (or seriously good) second album by a guy who wants us to believe “it was no big deal.”Salad Days is part Beck, part Brian Wilson, part something that used to come on late at night at the local college radio station played by some reclusive music nerd. There are weird pop songs like the exquisite ‘Blue Boy’ and jazzier numbers like ‘Brother’ that feel more like Steely Dan than something out of Williamsburg. This is a weird and wonderful concoction.

14. Hospitality – Trouble (Merge)Another infectious 90’s retro throwback album alluding to Luscious Jackson by way of something else strangely contemporary. This is a pop record filled with conventionally standard guitar and drums, but also with endless catchiness and wonderful songwriting. Led by the relentless upbeat vocals of Amber Papini, the band’s second album is a minor masterpiece, pulling no punches but hitting all the right chords.There are a few songs that probably just miss hitting the same main street vein that Haim or MS MR hit last year like the infectious “I miss You Bones.” Unlike many of the more serious records that I loved this year, ‘Trouble’ is 100% fun. It asks only that you enjoy the music, and get lost for 38 minutes in a sea of shiny pop.

15. Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks – Wig Out at the Jagbags (Matador)Once a Malkmus fan always a Malkmus fan. There will never be another indie rock run as perfect as the one he cut with Pavement in the 90’s. In some ways it reminds me of what the Grateful Dead did in the 70’s which is why Wig Out’s homage to the Dead seems so perfect. Alternating between straight up guitar riff lifting like the opening strums of “Cinnamon and Lesbians” that channel “St. Stephen,” and the lyrically brilliant “we lived on Tennyson, and Venison and the Grateful Dead” from “Lariat.”Still the cleverest lyricist on the planet, Malkmus seems perfectly comfortable settling into his middle 40’s a hunkered down family man living in the Portland, no longer concerned with keeping up with the cool kids – if he ever really did? He has always managed to infuse a kind of academic whimsy into his music, but this time around we get two great tastes that taste great together.

16. TV on the Radio – Seeds (Harvest Records)For over a decade, TV on The Radio has been making some of the most challenging, genre bending albums on the planet. Punk, funk, electronic, and new wave – it’s all weirdly there. The band’s earliest records were discordant difficult efforts, hard for me to connect with emotionally, but oddly compelling.Seeds is the bands most accessible, most purely pop record yet. Still edgy at its core, and driven by the soaring vocals of Tunde Adebimpe, the band packs a kind of urgent intensity into increasingly compact pop songs. ‘Careful You’ and ‘Trouble’ are two of the best songs they have ever written, but dark and light and filled with some of their own unique brand of passion.

A bunch of other stuff that you must hear below the fold…

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