More Favourite Songs of 2015
In addition to the music I wrote about earlier this year, here are some of my favourite songs from the last six months. I also talked about a few others from Sufjan Stevens and Jeffrey Lewis with varying degrees of clarity in the latest Memory Tapes Podcast episode.
- There’s a few songs on Arthur Ashin’s latest album that I could have written about, but this is the one that’s made me feel more insanely alive than almost any other piece of music this year. It’s an epic seven-minute journey from the crashing, choir-filled introduction to the acapella gospel fade-out that channels the passionate fervour of Otis Redding singing Try A Little Tenderness. Redding published a dictionary of soul in the liner notes of his album of the same name, although there was never any real need to overthink or translate the cathartic heights of the soul great at his best. Similarly, while I don’t have any special relationship with Ashin’s lyrics in this song, it feels all the more like a crowning achievement from the man who can sing the word ‘baby’ one thousand ways and make me feel something different each time.
- Trevor Power’s voice can sound fragile to the point of discomfort. There are moments on Savage Hills Ballroom when its fraught qualities lend the album the awkward feeling of paranoid oversharing, as he sings lyrics about prescription medication and genetically modified food in a trembling whisper. However, Highway Patrol Stun Gun finds him matching this openness with appropriately vulnerable subject matter, as he sings about the death of a friend and the tragic consequences of police brutality. The opening lines, “Possessed by something in the wind, they watch me like I’m a threat to them,” are a stunning marriage of weakness with strength, as Power’s lyrical directness is juxtaposed with his feeble voice, singing like he’s begging on his knees.
“I want to exist outside it all,” Lachlan Denton sings. Guess Work was apparently written by Denton in an attempt to rip off New Order, although a shower of brilliant Springsteen-referencing piano work before each chorus quickly shifts the musical reference point backwards by a decade as he confesses his desire for detachment from the responsibilities of globalisation. In a sense this actually works better to address some of the shared themes from the Youth Lagoon record, as Denton describes their effects on his personality rather than trying in vein to point at their various causes. He sounds positively born to run when he sings lines like “I want to watch everything fall,” with the type of insincere cynicism that crystallises the mixed feeling of helplessness and determination that I get from listening to the nighttime news.
- The first song from Florist’s latest release sounds like the beginning of spring and feels like the end of the world. “I don’t know how to be what I wanted to be when I was five,” Emily Sprangue sings in the opening lines of Vacation. I recently found my diary from the third grade in primary school, and rediscovered that my career path aspirations at the time had been to become either an artist or a librarian. Desperately trying to find some type of grand and overarching purpose in my life, I started to think about what it would look like if I dropped everything and tried to become one of those two things. Would I feel more fulfilled as a result? Would that be the ultimate satisfaction, as I addressed some repressed desire from my past? Emily Sprague sounds like she might understand this type of overthinking. “At least I know that my house won’t burn down down to the ground,” she sings, finding firm stability in the tangible world around her. It’s a similar feeling to the one I get seeing a large body of water from the window of a train, as the ripples dissolve my soluble worries. However, the song doesn’t end there. “Or maybe it will,” she adds, as the fleeting reassurance gives way to inevitable doubts and insecurities once again.
- Trust the sensitive Sam Cromack to write a beautiful love song that sounds hauntingly similar to a funeral song by another artist. While it interpolates the synth line from Someone Great, the substance of Cromack’s track instead functions as a mountainside meditation on the borderless and sometimes giddy feeling that marks the beginning a serious commitment. Lines like, “I’ll move in, I might as well,” capture familiar uncertainties; ideas we are aware of on an intellectual level, but have no idea how to perform. While there were other great songs on this album about growing older, this was the moment that managed to show with nuance how feelings of jubilance and fear are often closely entwined.
- There’s been plenty of writing about the second verse of Downtown, as Devon Welsh sings the show-stopping line, “And if suddenly I die, I hope they will say that he was obsessed and it was okay.” The gravity of this statement exists in direct contrast to the shadowless beat, barely audible as it circulates peacefully in the background like a shallow breathing pattern. Everything is suspended in a white ether as Welsh summons immortality and mortality in one heavenly moment. The ability to love and be loved is by far the most valuable experience that we posses. Even the angels in Wings Of Desire, which Downtown always reminds me of, can’t resist the temptation to know what it would feel like to live in a world of colour for just a few days. “Loneliness means I”m finally whole,” one of the characters says. It’s the centre point of our most personal senses of identity, the ultimate measuring stick of a life well-lived. Downtown elevates this idea further, remaining transcendental in the most humanly way possible.
- “How do you do that? How do you sleep so newborn?” Martin Phillipps asks similar questions to the rhetorical queries Robert Smith was singing about almost thirty years ago on Just Like Heaven. The hypnotic guitar line unspools like an infinite sine wave, as the band sing billowy backing melodies that compliment the cumulonimbus synthesiser sounds. There are other great moments on Silver Bullets, but as the gentle opener to the band’s first album in almost two decades, Warm Waveform serves as a friendly reminder that Phillips can still wrap us in his embrace after all this time.
