2015 was a really, really bad year for music

i shd check out the new enya

Music hasn't been the same since Randy Rhodes died IMHO.

a lot of albums i anticipated a lot were kinda garb

action bronson
ellie goulding (mostly)
best coast
grimes imo
1/2-ish of ldr
sleater-kinney

Can we go back to where Whiney said that there were a lot of "great" albums released in 2015 and therefore 2015 was a terrible year for music because none of them were "amazing"?

this was what is known as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_(poker)

i did not hear any albums that really resonated w/ me this year but i guess that was mostly my fault -- i didn't listen to very many albums in general and more than usual were released over a year ago

albums

heard a lot of good songs this year

Ridiculous conceit for a thread. Don't give it oxygen. You can't ever say empirically, objectively that a year was 'good' or 'bad' for music, obviously. Just Whiney whining.

I've had t he busiest work year ever and been raising a baby and I've still found more than enough really good / great / amazing music to listen to. And now I'm not even trying to write about music anymore I'm completely free to ignore and explore as I wish, rather than trying to keep up with trends or developments or scenes or whatever.

history getting written by the whiners

Cardinal Fuzz still seem to be delivering the goods.
I got Minami Deutsch through them too, though i think it originates elsewhere. & that is pretty great
Was Kikagaku Moyo this year or last year?

& there have been some awesome reissues. Astral Weeks remaster widespread availability for the first time in 28 years.
The Velvet Underground stuff is great too.

I think there are a lot of others I''m not immediately thinking of too

feeling what the frogs wrote e.g. I heard at least 3 or 4 records from africa alone that I would call amazing, and I know that as a dilettante who's basically being spoonfed the stuff that I'm not even scratching the surface there

obviously a troll thread but even aside from my usual view that there's no such thing as a good or bad year, there are just years where the best stuff aligns with where you're already looking and years where you have to look around and maybe fail...even aside from that i'm pretty comfortable saying 2015 has been one of the best years for music in my lifetime. maybe even the best. this after 2014 which was maybe the first year i felt disappointed at the time.

a lot of artists really stepped it up or brought their best selves to the game this year, and many of them did so in ways which wrongfooted and, yes, amazed me - the feeling of an artist i already lived being even greater than i thought they were has happened several times in 2015.

- did critically acclaimed artists' follow-ups meet or exceed expectations? it seems by this measure the answer is 'yes.' just quickly looking thru p4k BNM and bjork, grimes, dre, aphex twin, sleater kinney, etc etc all passed the test
- did the year produce any new artists of acclaim? i think by this measure, the answer is 'no.' i didn't see any debuts scanning the p4k BNMs, and off the top of my head can't think of any new artists i hadn't heard of before 2015 that i fell in love with.

this is a pretty ~scientific way of looking at it (and ignores the vast swathe of artists between "critical consensus picks" and "brand new artists" which is usually where the amazing stuff happens) but re: the latter, i thought the debuts from years & years, abra, rae sremmurd, helena hauff, nozinja, flava d, jlin and natasha mosley were all really great (first five "amazing").

if any area was disappointing it was mainstream pop tbh, lots of big pop stars took the year off and the gomez/lovato/bieber generation didn't exactly step up to make statement albums (great singles from selena and demi though). years & years was a great mainstream pop album but they're hardly global megastars yet and i never emotionally clicked with CRJ as much as most (i find it easier to admire than love). still, hyped for rihanna tomorrow!

and obviously there was a lot of bad music released, much of which is dominating the EOY lists, but i didn't feel like i was severely disappointed by many artist i had high expectations for in 2015 - kacey musgraves and ciara, i guess

I've felt a bit 'this year wasn't as good as last year' since about 2013, but I always seem to come round by the time the EOY lists are out. In fact, a good chunk of 2015 was spent discovering things I'd missed from 2014. 2015 has been alright though - CRJ, Susanne Sundfor, Vince Staples, Miami Horror, Algiers, Fetty Wap and a bunch of others have released music that's really blown me away, which is a good amount. Elsewhere people like Future, John Tejada, Jlin, Young Thug, Nozinja have released stuff that simply reinforced and bettered their previous work in my eyes.

I haven't quite felt the rush of 'OHMIGOSH there are so many great albums coming out, how am I going to afford them all??' since about 2011/2012 but who needs that?

every year is both a great and a horrible year for music!

i mean, there's the music you've heard, and then there's 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the music that was recorded (let alone made) this year. and even if we're just talking about albums that were widely reviewed, there's no way to take it all in; i'm still catching up on interesting classical music released in 2011, 2012, etc. that i'm only just now finding out about. hell, i'm still discovering great things made in 1925, 1955, or 1985 that almost nobody heard at the time.

i guess it just seems like a weird form of tunnel vision or hubris or delusion or something to make pronouncements about how "bad" or "good" a month, a year, a decade was for "music."

sometimes there are years when i find a great deal of engagement and enjoyment out of new, fairly popular music. (like this year!) then i can go for three, four years being mostly disengaged with the stuff that most other people are listening to. but that reflects upon me and the stuff i choose to spend my time (and money) on, rather than any inherent property of the "year in music," a concept that i really have never thought to me of any use. (for example i always felt bad for robert christgau who had to write those essays for the pazz&jop poll in which he had to pithily and wittily summarize the year in music.)

sorry for being a literalist killjoy.

#traffic

There's something to be said for the fact most music fans don't listen exclusively to new music from the current year, and also that everything is subjective. If there are multiple banner releases in, say, metal, then it can feel like an especially great year to some and not to others.Sometimes I do catch myself thinking 'It's been a while since something I really like came out'. Equally, I can look at upcoming releases lists and feel disappointed, but it never stops me listening to music and trying to find out about new (to me) things - I'll just look in a place other than the big albums of the current year, and I think that goes for most people.

So what I mean is that it's a bit weird trying to define one's listening year simply by the music that came out during it. In 2014 and 2015 I continued checking out modern jazz, delved into the afrobeats tracks from the last 3-4 years, enjoyed a lot of 70s and 80s radio pop, sought comfort in Joni Mitchell, rambled through a lot of old Latin American music in my mum's record collection, was forced to endure the Tame Impala and Other Lives albums thanks to my band mates, listened to all the EOY 2014 stuff I'd missed, downloaded a shit-ton of hip hop mixtapes, saw a lot of my friends' bands play local gigs etc - all of which have defined my year just as much as albums by D'Angelo, Kendrick Lamar and Courtney Barnett.

2014 was a bad year for music, I heard the end of year poll, an elaborate practical joke I wont fall for this time around.

2015 was much much worse, a colleague playing what literally sounds like capitalists ripping trees out of the ground with their bare hands and replacing the serene restorative canopy with strip lighting and hectoring voices.

2013 and 2014 were the first years where I felt: shit, I'm getting too old, I don't understand, etc. But I've had a great 2015 for new music, my best in many years. That said, my last good year for mainstream Top 40 pop was 2010, and perhaps that's never going to reverse.

2015 was a really, really bad year for music: an autobiography

haha

there are definitely years where I feel more musically inspired than others, if I catch a lot of great shows, fall in love with some new/old style/genre, feel like I'm taking part in a "scene"...

2015 hasn't been too special for me but tons of great stuff all the same

glad this thread brought out tylerw's top10 :P

xps lex- true i forgot about years&years and srems

so since people are still taking this thread seriously, i wanna talk about a year which crit consensus says is one of the worst years for music: 1975 (with a brief nod to 1962).

first is that there was amazing music that came out during both of these years- telstar in '62, mothership connection in '75, both of which were not only fabulous but which redefined what listeners believe music is capable of (my personal criterion for "amazing music").

second is that the relative perceived weakness of these years is very much culturally relative- the dominant music of the previous years had passed its peak, and the dominant music that would emerge in the succeeding years had yet to be fully formed.

third is that this model is fundamentally inapplicable to the music of 2015, because it assumes the existence of a popular music monoculture, or at least a technologically limited polyculture. new music of worth simply takes longer to get filtered through the landscape. this phenomenon existed in 1975- we can see this by looking at, for instance, "paebiru", which i would wager appeared on relatively few year-end charts in '75- but is much more pronounced today.

fourth is that this filtering process means that we discover every year great records from the past, to the apparent detriment of contemporary music. i will readily grant that the record i heard this year that blew my mind most is arthur miles' "the lonely cowboy", from 1929. this does not by any means make 2015 a "bad year" for music; it simply means that past and present are no longer as clearly separable as they were in previous years. novelty is less of a key criterion than recombinatorial expertise is.

conclusion: it no longer truly makes sense for someone who spends any significant amount of time listening to music to talk about the present year as a "good year" or "bad year" for music. in addition, it barely makes sense to talk about the music of "2015" as distinct from the music of "2014" or "2016". we will have no more 1977s in the foreseeable future, but we will also have no more 1975s.

unfortunately, we will have a 1975 early next year ;)

- did critically acclaimed artists' follow-ups meet or exceed expectations? it seems by this measure the answer is 'yes.' just quickly looking thru p4k BNM and bjork, grimes, dre, aphex twin, sleater kinney, etc etc all passed the test
- did the year produce any new artists of acclaim? i think by this measure, the answer is 'no.' i didn't see any debuts scanning the p4k BNMs, and off the top of my head can't think of any new artists i hadn't heard of before 2015 that i fell in love with.

I can appreciate the grasping for some kind of schema here, but this is a really limited approach. Maybe it was a great year for music not covered by p4k? I don't think my favourite records for this year will have been covered by them, and even if they have they're probably so niche that they won't have got publication-wide push behind them come end-of-year or whatever. That's fine.

2008 was the only year I've felt was 'bad' straight from the off, but it was also a really crappy year for me personally and professionally - job was crap, I was really ill, Stylus had shut down so some of my musical networks and support systems had collapsed - and I have no doubt that my personal situation massively influenced my perception. As it happens, when p4k (hypocrite alert) did that 'vote for your favourite albums of our lifetime' thing a couple or more years later, 2008 was a definite trough year in terms of the number of albums included, which is about the closest thing I've seen to (in any way satisfactory) 'objective' evidence that it was a poor year as far as everyone is concerned. (When I've mentioned thinking 2008 was crap on here people have generally, and rightly, disagreed.)

I like EPs. What EPs this year have amazed people?

i really loved the dej loaf ep but have seen hardly a mention of it elsewhere

if you like pc music (lol) the new danny l harle ep is great, and if you like doom metal the king woman ep is a doozy

would say the danny l harle is 'amazing' but few others probably would

I like EPs. What EPs this year have amazed people?

― nashwan, Thursday, November 26, 2015 1:31 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sevyn streeter, honey cocaine, maxsta, geko, annie

I like EPs. What EPs this year have amazed people?

― nashwan, Thursday, November 26, 2015 1:31 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Szjerdene, IamTruStarr, The Japanese House (x2), Salomon Faye, Bosco, Kissey, Tei Shi, Polygrim, Vicktor Taiwò, and probably 5 or 10 more I can't even think of atm.

i like the laurel halo ep

I need to check out that Dej Loaf EP

same

her mixtape from last year was really great

it's pretty good

I can appreciate the grasping for some kind of schema here, but this is a really limited approach. Maybe it was a great year for music not covered by p4k? I don't think my favourite records for this year will have been covered by them, and even if they have they're probably so niche that they won't have got publication-wide push behind them come end-of-year or whatever. That's fine.

― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Thursday, 26 November 2015 13:23 (58 minutes ago) Permalink

you could do it for other publications. they all seem to write about the same music though IMHO. as someone has probably already said itt no one is really talking about the totality of music released in 2015 when they say 'this was a bad year for music.' no metric will correspond to everyone's idiosyncratic taste, you have to be your own BNM, but IMO people tend overestimate how idiosyncratic their tastes are.

It depends on the company you keep.

I think the two most popular/populist album I rode for this year were Carly Rae's and Kendrick's, one of which was a commercial flop and the other seems to have installed itself in the canon in no time.

autismwave > futurewave

So, so many of these artists I've never heard of, nor seen any discussion of on other ILM threads. Where do I start?

Mr. Snrub,

Are you aware of Fresh Finds on Spotify?

Spotify - Every Fresh Find
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0/playlist/6Rz1nHuFleZtPxcdy9rFlB

roughly 25 tracks a day to christmas, so would be achievable

Subscribe for weekly updates (updated wednesday)

Spotify Fresh Finds
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/3rgsDhGHZxZ9sB9DQWQfuf

that's cool. how does it work out what a 'fresh find' is?

organic, locally produced, not creted w/ antibiotics

go to the spotify thread on ilm, search for fresh finds, there are several links to describe the methodology. basically its part human curation by internal spotify staff, part data analysis by monitoring a select group of spotify users that are leading curators and external monitoring of blogs.

Who the fuck is Gaz Coombes?

― Mr. Snrub, Monday, November 16, 2015 3:36 PM (1 week ago)

fourth is that this filtering process means that we discover every year great records from the past, to the apparent detriment of contemporary music.

this is what I think happened to me this year

completely - I spent more time digging up past nuggets than seeking out new stuff

feel like music collections can be more surgical now, they're less based on what you stumbled across in the racks at Sam Goody and more meticulously picked. good and bad to that approach - some of my favorite albums were "oh hey this look interesting" moments browsing in a store. but there's something to be said for reading about an amazing album that's quite obscure and being able to legally purchase it and download it moments later from even a large big box like Amazon (as opposed to when I was in college and going to Napster or Dalnet to find shit).