My favourite albums of 2015

This year has seen such an embarrassment of riches, I've found it exasperating trying to keep up. Case in point: I think I'd only just started to digest disc two of the three that comprise Joanna Newsom's monumental Have One On Me when she released the impossibly dense Divers in October. Then, when I learned that January 2016 will see new releases by Shearwater, The Besnard Lakes and David Bowie, I laughed out loud. How does anyone absorb all this wonderful music with just one pair of ears?!

The following 10 albums felt the most deep and satisfying, and knocked me about in various beautiful ways:

10. Never Enough Hope – The Gravity of Our Commitment (Milk Factory Productions) 
I have Roommate's Kent Lambert to thank for introducing me to this monster: four massive pieces totalling 80 minutes of some of the most intelligent, dense and wonderfully played instrumental jazz-rock. Notable for including the instrumental talents of luminaries such as Colin Stetson on saxophone, Dina Maccabee (Julia Holter's touring band) on violin and Nick Broste (Roommate producer) on trombone, but amounting to way more than the sum of its parts, it's dizzying to imagine how composer Toby Summerfield pulled all this together. Imagine Frank Zappa's epic '70s Wazoo ensemble updated for the 21st century, or Jaga Jazzist minus the synthesizers. Pretty mindblowing. 

9. Destroyer – Poison Season (Merge)
Until now I've never fully understood the appeal of Dan Bejar's droll songcraft. He's always come across as an aging hipster with one too many ironic accessories, tongue firmly in cheek, and one foot out the door. Maybe I've just never got the joke? However, on Poison Season he's invested his MOR pastiche with a degree of intimacy that feels more engaging. His lyrics are oblique, but his delivery is more direct, and the music is unashamedly gorgeous. I still don't trust Bejar, but for as long as Poison Season is playing, I'm bewitched by his bullshit.

8. Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld – Never Were The Way She Was (Constellation)
Saxophone and violin – and that's it. Admittedly, Colin Stetson is the kind of player who's able to make a single instrument sound like a weird, underwater dub orchestra, but it's the mesmerising interplay between his saxophone and Sarah Neufeld's violin that's most notable here. Like the tree on its cover, Never Were The Way She Was is dark, gnarled and far-reaching, persistently refusing to be relegated to background music.

7. Jaala – Hard Hold (Wondercore Island) 
Short, sharp and sinuous, the debut album by Melbourne-based art-rock quartet Jaala shields its tender, bruised heart amid dazzling guitar-bass-drums interplay worthy of prime Magic Band, while at the centre of it all, Cosima Jaala's voice ricochets from a wounded coo to an ear-splitting scream. (Plenty of open-ended major-seventh chord voicings to satisfy my inner music geek, too.) I was gutted to have missed December's album launch, so one of my new year's resolutions will be to catch Jaala live in 2016. Looks like they'd be unbelievable.

6. Jim O'Rourke – Simple Songs (Drag City)
It's been a six-year wait since The Visitor, so a new Jim O'Rourke solo album is a cause for celebration. Thankfully, Simple Songs is an achingly beautiful salvo from a master craftsman. Here he's unashamed of pulling classic '70s rock and MOR moves. With typical O'Rourkian verve, these songs are far from simple. Knowingly absurd at times, but never resorting to cheap shots. He's too damn good for that. He may have his back to us, but the man is wearing his heart on his (cardigan) sleeve.

5. Björk – Vulnicura (One Little India)
Ouch. It's sad to think that Björk suffered a painful separation from partner Matthew Barney in order to create her greatest album since Vespertine. Album as open-heart surgery? Perhaps. But what's most heartening about Vulnicura is alluded to right there in the title: the cure for her vulnerability, the salve to her volcano of emotions, is to express her pain through the process of musical creation itself. And what music, updating the awesome strings-and-beats template of Homogenic with the help of Arca and The Haxan Cloak. 

4. MG – MG (Mute)
While most critically acclaimed electronic music this year seems to have been preoccupied with warping the boundaries of what's possible/listenable (Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca, etc.), leave it to an old master like Martin Gore to create one of the mightiest electronic albums I've ever heard. A gloriously deep, thick and crunchy record that combines the best of minimal electro, kosmische and science-fiction soundtracks, MG is an unbelievably satisfying experience, a lesson on the wonderful music you can create on vintage synths if you know what you're doing. The sketch of a knob on the front cover feels like an imperative: turn it up.

3. Fred Thomas – All Are Saved (Polyvinyl) 
Listening to this album feels like rooting around under the sofa cushions for the remote control, only to find a photo of your beloved departed dog, an unopened bottle of beer, a dusty cassette compilation made by an old friend, a dog-eared journal, and a pack of gum. It's surprising, ridiculous, hilarious, infuriating, brilliant, silly, beautiful, profound, knowingly throwaway and deadly serious. And the baffling thing is that the deeper I dig into what I love about All Are Saved, the more elusive its appeal becomes. All I can do is put it on again, writhe around in its warm recesses and itch-scratching edges, and let Thomas's inspired outpourings work their dark magic. 

2. Jenny Hval – Apocalypse, girl (Sacred Bones)
It may be confrontational and unsettling in both its lyrics and musical settings, particularly on opener 'Kingsize', but there's no denying that Apocalypse, girl is a humane and beautiful record, dazzling in its artistry and deeply moving on many levels. While it's not an album I can listen to often, each time uncovers new wonders in both Hval's vocal delivery and the eerie musical settings she's painstakingly crafted with Lasse Marhaug. A work of art.  

1. Roommate – Make Like (Strange Weather)
Having been unhealthily obsessed with this album for the last few months, I think I'm finally ready to take a break from it. There's no denying the hold it's had over me – more so than any other album released this year. I've already detailed all the reasons I love it, plus I've interviewed Kent Lambert about its creation, so all that's left to say is this: if you haven't heard this album, I strongly recommend you spend some time with it (and its predecessors Guilty Rainbow and We Were Enchanted). It's not flashy, it's not trendy, but like a good friend, the time you spend in its company will be handsomely rewarded.

And here are 10 more I also love:
Oren Ambarchi & Jim O'Rourke – Behold (Editions Mego)
The Balustrade Ensemble – Renewed Brilliance (Serein)
Ian William Craig – Cradle For The Wanting (Recital) 
Steve Hauschildt – Where All Is Fled (kranky)
Julia Holter – Have You In My Wilderness (Domino)
Julia Kent – Asperities (Leaf)
Matchess – Somnaphoria (Trouble in Mind)
Lee Noble – Un Look (Patient Sounds)
Joanna Newsom – Divers (Drag City)
The Singleman Affair – The End of the Affair (Strange Weather)  

Roommate – Make Like

Make Like

Amid the devalued, ever-evolving music stream, most craft are bright and flashy yet flimsy and insubstantial, offering little more than brief respite from the waves before they dissolve into nothing or sink from view. Precious few craft give pause, feel solid or lovingly constructed, make you feel you could sail in them a while. Roommate's Make Like – which came to my attention thanks to a glowing review on Coke Machine Glow – has stood me in excellent stead for weeks now, its reassuringly lived-in, woody timbre holding me close like an old friend. I have no plans to abandon this ship anytime soon.

Roommate

Roommate is the songwriting vehicle of Kent Lambert, now four albums deep. Kent and his band – including Sam Wagster on guitar, Gillian Lisée on bass, and Seth Vanek on drums – have brought all their sensitivity and expertise to bear on these eight songs. As much as I'm warming to their preceding albums – Songs The Animals Taught Us (2006), We Were Enchanted (2008) and Guilty Rainbow (2011) – the more I listen to Roommate's discography, the more Make Like feels like a culmination of all that's come before it – a distillation of an aesthetic and a refinement of purpose. Just shy of forty minutes, the album is astute, economical, meticulously performed and produced, and deeply affecting, both lyrically and musically. It's a thoroughly satisfying whole, an unselfconsciously classic-sounding record with masterful segues and a neat division into two sides that no doubt rewards listening on vinyl (the album was mastered and cut by the legendary Rashad Becker). In what remains of 2015, it's quickly assuming the same prominence in my life as Adult Jazz's Gist Is had in 2014.

What's most beguiling is how the album reminds me of several other artists and bands I love without being obviously influenced by anything in particular. At moments I hear the measured cadence and melodic nous of early Shins; the aching piano-driven beauty of Automatic For The People-era REM; the stoic magic of the sorely missed Sparklehorse. However, its true beauty, and singularity, only reveals itself with intimacy.

Make Like gets its (secret) claws in early thanks to something as simple as a drum beat. Back in the early '00s, I took a road trip across the US with my close friend Will. The album on continuous rotation during that trip was The Sebadoh, which kicks off with the great Jason Loewenstein song 'It's All You'. The drum beat that begins Make Like's opener 'People On Screens' is similarly catchy. Drum sounds tend to be fetishised to an absurd degree, but my instinctive response to this beat is to get fired up, ready to stick around for the duration.

As a commuter myself, the image of 'People On Screens' is all too familiar: half-asleep humans glued to their smartphones, unable to bear being alone with themselves, semi-engaged with shallow, distracting content. The song crams in enough devious production details (shakers, synths, effects) to make Spoon jealous, before building to an agitated crescendo of flanged guitars. Then, a segue into 'Secret Claw', which cements the feeling of experiencing something special, its eerie swells of brass and piano akin to a giant existential yawn.

Despite being one of the least musically dynamic tracks, 'Dancer Howl' is easily the most lyrically affecting – and seems to hold the key to the themes of the whole record: fear, dishonesty, redemption, all wrapped up in the mystery of human stupidity. Towards the song's climax, as Gillian Lisée joins Lambert on vocals, handclaps crunching disconsolately behind them, the atmosphere is close to overwhelming. Rounding out the first side with peals of aching pedal steel, 'Curses' features a winning vibraphone and piano melody that vividly reminds me of something I can't quite put my finger on (dEUS, perhaps?).

The first half of side two is unashamedly gorgeous. 'Wilderness' evolves from a desolate piano ballad into a delirious, widescreen extravaganza akin to The Besnard Lakes, before seguing into the fidgety 'Old Golden', with its anxious refrain, "I am choking on an old golden rule". While the closing two songs took the longest to win me over, they end the album on an ambiguous note, inevitably sending me back to 'People On Screens'; indeed, the lyrics of 'Riot Size' suggest this circularity with the lyrics, "Shiny things on tiny screens inviting us to fight, to justify". Plus, the way 'Tri Twi' weaves its tapestry of jazzy flutes and wah-wah guitar suggests a hazy, cinematic dissolve, leaving one indelible line to ponder at the album's climax: "I've been you / One day you will have been me, too".

A thread of heartening resilience runs through Make Like's atmosphere of confusion and frustration, while the balance it sustains between the widescreen and the intimate rewards repeat listens with fresh revelations. Ultimately, perhaps the single enduring idea I take away from this extraordinary album is a line from 'Dancer Howl': "Don't make like hate, when you're really just afraid".   

Make Like is available now on cassette, vinyl and digital download.