For all the great albums that grab the music media spotlight, there’s many more that slip by the warm glow of recognition. It’s not always for lack of quality either, given the huge array of ways we listen to music these days, both online and off, as well as the speed at which we all consume, it’s little wonder that many great releases slip through the cracks. So much music, so little time.
But here’s the chance to take a little pause for breath and reflect at the month that’s been, picking over the best releases that may have missed the love they deserve when first landing. Maybe they were overshadowed by a major label blockbuster, unnecessarily overlooked or misunderstood, perhaps suffered a case of bad timing. No matter the reason for them slipping under the radar, we’ve switched on our musical sonar to help you discover and explore a raft of releases you may well have missed the first time round.
D’Angelo – Black Messiah (RCA Victor)
While everyone’s busy applauding the album’s timeliness, heaping comparisons to Sly’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and dissecting D’Angelo’s measured articulation of his clued-in racial awareness and desperate romantic struggles, which consists mostly of looking for answers in the spaces between the murmurs, scats, and moans, what gets lost in the ether is the music.
Upon first listen, this proves to be a great shame, because no other album before Black Messiah has managed to articulate D’Angelo’s genius for nuance in such a gripping or enjoyable manner. Between Questlove, bass virtuoso Pino Palladino, guitarist Isaiah Sharkey, horn master Roy Hargrove, and the man himself, D’Angelo has curated a sweeping tome of irresistible rhythms that brim with energy and humanity.
Charli XCX – Sucker (Warner)
While it may not go down as her best album, this is merely a consequence of the promise she’s shown over the past 12 months. Instead, what Sucker may be remembered for is being the last essential release of the year that the New Wave of Pop became a bonafide movement.
As far as that goes, Sucker has all the requisite hallmarks: it’s loud, clever, tongue-in-cheek, loves a gimmick, and while every track doesn’t have the earworm characteristics of a single, the quality of the production would make you think they were prepping every track for a place in the Top 40. Ultimately, it’s the whip-smart songwriting that keeps you coming back, which isn’t to say it’s full of lyrical profundities, but neither were Madonna or The Go-Go’s, and she takes a great big swing at both.
Ben Frost – V A R I A N T (Bedroom Community)
Like any good collection of precision-made sound artistry, Iceland-based producer Ben Frost’s sterling 2014 album A U R O R A was bound to leave at least one, if not several, remix EPs in its wake. The first is V A R I A N T, which takes three tracks from Frost’s challenging and explosive full-length effort and distills them into what essentially amounts to a genre sampler.
As luck would have it, the distillation was not merely a reduction, and the results of knob-tweaking from the likes of Yeezy ally Evian Christ, Dutch E Germ, our very own HTRK, and others, is a transmutation of the cold, avant-garde sounds of A U R O R A into works that would sound at home on a dance floor, such as Kangding Ray’s take on ‘No Sorrowing’, or in a Nicholas Winding Refn film (HTRK’s remix of ‘Venter’).
Mogwai – Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. (Rock Action)
In much the same way that it’s almost a foregone conclusion that an album like Ben Frost’s V A R I A N T will result in at least one remix EP, it’s usually safe to assume that any release from Scottish post-rockers Mogwai will yield at least one collection of extras. In this case, Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. continues the band’s knack for titles and consists of three original tracks recorded during the sessions for their 2014 album Rave Tapes and three remixes.
After kicking off with the shoegaze-y splendour of ‘Teenage Exorcists’, the band take listeners through a winding chill session as cathartic and cinematic as anything you could expect on one of their full-lengths. But coming in at just over half an hour, it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome like some of their full-lengths.
Afrikan Sciences – Circuitous (PAN)
In the same vein as Flying Lotus and Ras-G, Afrikan Sciences makes music that is at once extraterrestrial and brilliantly human. As the creative spawn of ’80s electro and hip-hop icon Afrika Bambaataa, Afrofuturist sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, and jazz visionary Sun Ra, Eric Douglas Porter is taking the genre into the 24 1⁄2th century.
The New Yorker’s ethereal productions contain all the groove of ’90s deep house, the free-form style of ’70s jazz fusion, the inventiveness of ’80s electro, and the ingenuousness of the best of today’s new guard of savvy experimentalists, including FlyLo, Toro Y Moi, Arca, and just about anyone else you can name. Over an intricately crafted sounbed of African and Latin rhythms, Porter lets his creative mind wander and the result is something that transcends genre.
Jonny Greenwood – Inherent Vice: Motion Picture Soundtrack (Nonesuch Records)
It’s only right that the universe would eventually bring Greenwood, Anderson, and Pynchon, three of the modern era’s most impenetrable artists, each operating in respective fields, together. Having crafted one of 2007’s most haunting soundtracks with his work on There Will Be Blood (his first collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson), the Radiohead icon returns to Anderson’s ensemble, complete with his circuitous musical mind, to take on a genre he seemed destined for – noir.
The result is a success for the same reasons There Will Be Blood worked so well and that is Greenwood’s ability to unsettle you with the familiar. Over the course of ten tracks, interspersed with cuts from Neil Young, Can, and others, Greenwood reveals the sinister face of everything from film orchestras, to the acoustic guitar.
