See what happens when you rush these things? You leave stuff out.
Concerned that everyone else (yeah, like they matter) was posting their “Best of 2015” lists, I furiously trotted mine out earlier this week, breezily ruminating on a few of the things that hit my ears in a positive manner over the past twelve months.
That all said, I pushed “publish” way too soon, as it turns out that I failed to mention three albums that, to my mind, were very important, very distinctive and very different from each other. Let’s review, shall we?
The first of the three was evangelized to me by my good friend and former colleague Drew. Back in the early `90s – y’know, when the Earth was young and the skies were still filled with the piercing shrieks of pterodactyls – I regularly wrote blustery little music articles for a freebie weekly called New York Perspectives (long, long gone), prompting my editor to refer to me in a year-end editorial as “a cutting edge that never seems to dull.” If that flowery assertion was ever true, it certainly isn’t anymore, but Drew is now that figure for me. About a decade my junior, Drew is a tireless sponge for pretty much exactly the kind of new music I appreciate. As such, I’m entirely fortunate that he regularly hips me to new artists that I really ought to know and/or care about. I don’t always agree with him (I am still loathe to condone, for example, the sonic antics of Deerhunter and Blood Orange), but more often than not, his recommendations are on the money. This year, an album by the Downtown Boys (that’s them above, as captured by Christopher Grady) was one of those recommendations.
Should you be unfamiliar with them, the Downtown Boys (who, naturally, have a female lead singer) are an explosive outfit from Providence, R.I. who play a spirited blend of shouty, saxophone-fueled punk rock that is at once celebratory and socially conscious. They can certainly be a bit shrill, at points, but it’s otherwise great, energetic stuff. The album in question, Full Communism, also features an unlikely, high-octane cover of Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”
The next album I forgot to mention was the long-awaited release of COIL’s Backwards. This one probably slipped my mind, as it’s technically not new at all (as I wrote about in great detail here), but rather a project that was put on ice, upon completion, at some point in the mid-`90s, for a variety of enigmatic reasons….although pretty much everything COIL did was driven by enigmatic reasoning. In any case, after Cold Spring issued it earlier this year, it has swiftly become my favorite full length effort from the band (rivaled only by the singularly disquieting listening experience that is Horse Rotorvator). I was playing Backwards at home, not too long back, when a friend came by. Upon hearing the track, “Be Careful What You Wish For,” he emphatically exclaimed how very little he enjoyed the shit I was listening to. Again, not for everyone, I guess.
The last album that slipped my mind was by, of course, Joe Jackson. I hadn’t originally planned on picking Fast Forward up, but after seeing him perform at Town Hall with my bro-in-law, I literally snapped it up the very next day, and it’s as lovely and accomplished as you’d expect.
In fact, let’s go there now, shall we?
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