2015 IN MUSIC

I'm not much of a keeping-up-with-the-trends kind of guy and I never have been, and consequently don't really do these "best of" lists unless forced to. I prefer to think of myself as more of a rock historian, really, and consequently my year's best list is largely composed of what older bands got up to this year. Maybe when a few years have gone by and I've done a little more digging around and listening, my Best Of 2015 list will look very very different, but here's how I feel on this very last day of 2015.

Let's just begin by saying that Robert Pollard had a pretty good year in 2015. Ever since Guided By Voices actually-split-up-for-real-this-time-honest halfway through their 2014 tour, the 58-year-old has been taking it easy, by which I mean he's released six full-length albums under four different names and presided over the release of GBV's fourth "Suitcase" compilation, "Captain Kangaroo Won The War." It's a hundred tracks strong of unreleased GBV and GBV-related rarities, and has some real choice cuts, including Hallway Of Glass. a fascinating proto-version of GBV's 1994 "hit," The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.

It wasn't easy to find quality in amidst Pollard's overwhelming quantity this year, however, with Ricked Wicky's "Swimmer To A Liquid Armchair" feeling especially halfhearted, like he'd rather be watching the game or something. Circus Devils were reliably engaging on this year's effort, "Stomping Grounds," their thirteenth album in fourteen years. Plumbing the depths of what would be considered too experimental or frankly bizarre for GBV, they have long since established themselves as a remarkable little band in their own right, enjoyable not just to GBV fans, but to anyone down for a little freeform slow-roast stoner garage weirdness. Without a doubt, "Stomping Grounds" contains the best of Pollard's new material this year, blowing his solo album and three releases with Ricked Wicky clean out of the water.

Electric Six definitely take home the prize for best album title and best Christmas song of the year with 'Big Red Arthur' off their eleventh studio album in twelve years: "Bitch, Don't Let Me Die!"

Electric Six kind of reinvented themselves on 2013's "Mustang" as back-to-basics garage rockers, abandoning the steady ascent into hi-fi that culminated with 2012's drum machine-driven "Heartbeats & Brainwaves," and while it may have been a wise decision, they seem to be having some trouble finding their stride again. The new stuff is heavy-hitting and lyrically potent as ever, but there's hardly more than a handful of real 'hits' on the last three albums. Here's hoping they keep on trucking and reclaim that mojo soon.

Other honorable mentions from this year include Silversun Pickups' deepest foray into smoothed-out radio pop yet, "Better Nature," and "Dark Sky Island," Enya's return from her seven-year hibernation within the crystal coffin that hovers over Ireland's peat bogs, accessible only by rainbows. It's a stripped-down sound (by her standards), and doesn't always work, but when it does, it ranks among her best stuff. "FFS," the long-awaited collaboration between Franz Ferdinand and their heroes Sparks, was frankly disappointing, but now that I know that Franz Ferdinand are huge Sparks fans, I can totally hear it in all their old songs, which is nice. Last year's Panda Bear single, 'Boys Latin,' was expanded upon with this year's full-length, "Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper," with generally satisfactory results, and if it wasn't technically released last year, 'Boys Latin,' with its undulating synths and trademark ping-pong vocal harmonies, might just have been my favorite new song this year.

Modest Mouse failed to deliver this year, in my opinion, with "Strangers To Ourselves" proving once again that the good times are indeed killing Isaac Brock, or at the very least his passion. Even at their peak, Modest Mouse were never really very imaginative songwriters, with the bulk of their appeal resting on Brock's frantic attempts to simultaneously vent and articulate his misery and frustration, and with that mostly gone, all the band can really do is rehash modern rock cliches and sound largely forgettable. The patent silliness of Brock's manic upswings contain the only part of Modest Mouse still blessed with any vigor, as 'Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL, 1996)' succinctly proves.

Ratatat finally fulfilled their contractual obligation to XL Records with a predictable-sounding, if playfully and competently-made fifth album, and it seems all but certain that something's going to have to change in their repertoire soon if they are ever to be more than the sum of their parts again. Jim James's rough year resulted in a My Morning Jacket album lackluster and self-indulgent enough to get itself nominated for a Grammy, and I'm beginning to think they hit their peak on 2008's "Evil Urges."

Now that we're done with the hits-and-misses, I think we can safely shift into countdown mode. Drum roll, please!

5. - ASH - KABLAMMO!

After a short hiatus and some major family trauma gave us frontman Tim Wheeler's devastatingly sad 2014 solo album, "Lost Domain," Ash returned to their full-frontal roots with the explosive "Kablammo!," proving once again that subtlety and nuance are no match for incendiary riffs and merry singalongs... or are they? Frankly, I felt that some of the earnestness and intimacy of "Lost Domain" could have worked wonders for Ash, and rather than save it for the solo stuff, Wheeler could have reinvigorated Ash and let the band's style shift and age with its members. Perhaps the miserly reviews for 1998's "Nu-Clear Sounds," the band's only real foray into serious emotional depth, made Wheeler permanently wary of opening up, or maybe "Kablammo!" is just a continuation of his recovery, laying the past to rest by rocking harder than he's ever rocked before; a kind of musical flucht nach vorn, if you will.

In any case, "Kablammo!" is still a fine and refreshing rock album, especially the surging head rush of opener 'Cocoon' and stalwart chug-chugger 'Let's Ride.' There's always a kind of special untouchable purity to Ash, as if the fact that they rose to fame in their teens has left them frozen in a permanent innocence, and "Kablammo!" is the strongest example of this since their turn-of-the-century commercial heyday.

4. - DICK VALENTINE - HERE COME THE BAGS!

No shortage of exclamation marks in this year's album titles, that's for sure. For four years now, Electric Six frontman Tyler Spencer has let his lyrical ruminations and obsessions run riot on his trifecta of fine solo efforts. The barebones sound gives the lyrics center stage, and I think it's safe to say that he stands a serious chance of out-weirding his idol, Captain Beefheart. Potently dark humor gets the show going on 'Black Sea Brides,' while Spencer's left-leaning political ideas are given hilarious voice on 'Saddam Hussein' ("How much for the skin suit of Saddam Hussein!?"). 'Enough Embarrassment For One Day' and 'The Marching Band That Never Goes Away' continue with deft social satire, while 'List Of Lovers' is yet another twisted tale of modern romance from a man who's already given us countless more, only this time cunningly intermixed with Spencer's ever-pertinent current affairs commentary("Words become weapons / weapons become girls / girls become property of sultans in the Arab world").

While it may musically not amount to much more than a darkly entertaining comedy album (even though 'One-Dimensional Steve' has definite party potential), there's a focused kind of honesty to Spencer's obvious lyrical gift, honed by decades of Detroit shock-rock silliness. Here is a man with a message, and I don't feel it at all detracts from it that Spencer has chosen comedy as a method for its delivery; in fact, it adds to it. It's unclear to me if Spencer considers 'Dick Valentine' to be simply a stage name or a separate persona altogether, but whatever the case may be, he is always a man worth listening to.

3. - JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD - WASTED ON THE DREAM

About the only people on this list roughly my own age, JEFF The Brotherhood had a brief fling with the major-label world this year, and even if they were promptly dropped by Warner before the latter could release "Wasted On The Dream," the results remain pretty darn great. "Wasted On The Dream" is wonderfully catchy pop-rock in all its simple glory, with a fair dose of entertainingly tasteless stoner riffage thrown in for color. The sun-baked hooks and carefree attitude recall 1990s Linklater films, the sensation of being so drunk on the aweXomeness of yourself and life in general that there simply isn't time to feel down about a damn thing. This album should also receive some sort of award for managing to have Ian Anderson contribute to a track without turning it into an unlistenable shitfest.

2. - JOHN CARPENTER - LOST THEMES

Seldom have one man's musical and directorial efforts produced such beautifully confluent results. John Carpenter's soundtracks have always perfectly reflected the mood of his films: ambitious, unconventional and grandiose, but also endearingly cheap and cheesy and rough-hewn. His first filmless soundtrack very much continues in the same vein, and could in fact have been used to score any one of his movies; one cannot help but wonder if Carpenter doesn't write his soundtracks first and his films second, just sort of writing down whatever pops into his head as he's listening to mixes.

Carpenter's soundscapes are as wondrous, dark and exciting as his films, with nameless horror and danger encroaching from all sides, and yet a unique personality is never far from the surface. "Lost Themes" is both idiosyncratic and universal in its appeal, and it's actually kinda weird he's never released an original album before, considering how impossible it is to dislike his whimsy, grandeur and wicked sense of fun.

1. - BUILT TO SPILL - UNTETHERED MOON

Another band returning from hiatus this year were Built To Spill. After following their 1999 magnum opus "Keep It Like A Secret" with three albums of laid-back, unassuming and subtly excellent guitar reverie that nonetheless failed to produce anything quite as arresting as what came before, the band slowly faded from public consciousness, only to return quite suddenly with a rip-roaring new record that aims for somewhere halfway between KILAS's methodical tightness and the later albums' laconic soundscaping.

Although it is unfortunately marred by the lazy and uninspired "2015 sound," which seems to basically consist of recording the band playing the songs and leaving the mix as-is before redlining the master (see also: this year's Modest Mouse album and this year's Ash album; all three sound exactly the same), "Untethered Moon" draws immense strength from its excellent lyrics, documenting as they do the ever-fractured psyche of frontman Doug Martsch as he muses about the past, transience and the nature of truth ("I can't explain anything to anyone / don't believe that nothing isn't true"), and perhaps finds relief in the discovery that his never-ending search for wholeness and understanding is in itself a cure for what ails him. There is no secret trick to feeling better for the rest of your life, but knowing that fact is, paradoxically, the closest thing there is to such a trick ("I don't know how to never fall apart / no matter how you ever fall apart").

Blanketing all of this lyrical excellence is layer upon layer of fuzzy guitar that always manages to sound just as frustrated, resigned and glum as Martsch's own voice, which has lost none of its bite over the years. Fresh faces in the rhythm section give the songs a certain urgency not heard since 1994's "There's Nothing Wrong With Love," and while this is not necessarily a welcome regression, it certainly gives the album a new feel, quite distinct from its predecessors.

And yet, the album's greatest strength might be that it is so distinctly a Built To Spill album, rich in emotional complexity and yet blessed with an accessible everyday simplicity that their contemporaries have never quite managed to emulate. It is abrasive, welcoming, unrelenting, passive, forthcoming and opaque, somehow all at the same time, and an immensely rewarding listen, offering up new morsels on every revisit. It is everything a Built To Spill album should be.