Reverb Party's Favorite Albums of 2015

While legions of artists show fidelity to psychedelia's roots, Unknown Mortal Orchestra has always shared the rare quality that makes the genre's legends vital, a constant need for exploration. Last year, frontman and multi-instrumentalist Ruban Nielson descended into his home studio in a Portland basement to chart out where's he traveled since his last set of unhinged psych-soul ballads. He discovered that the best way for him to move forward would be to look back. Where Nielson addressed the pain of being alone on II, Multi-Love takes on the complications of being together...read more.

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Much has changed since Tame Impala first emerged with an EP of dusty home recordings in 2008. By and large Kevin Parker’s approach to recording has not, though the sound coming out of his home studio has vastly expanded, as has the number of people anticipating the fruits of his labour. Tame Impala’s third album is titled Currents, and on it Parker addresses a blindingly colourful panorama of transition in the most audacious, adventurous fashion he’s yet to capture on record.
Dense with heady lyrical introspection, musically the most playful, bold and varied Tame Impala record to date, Currents is Parker putting down his weapons and embracing change as the only constant - sonically, thematically, and personally.

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b’lieve i’m goin down... is Vile’s 6th album, and shows Kurt both deeply introspective and briskly self-assured. As longtime fan Kim Gordon wrote about the album: “Kurt does his own myth-making; a boy/man with an old soul voice in the age of digital everything becoming something else, which is why this focused, brilliantly clear and seemingly candid record is a breath of fresh air. Recorded and mixed in a number of locations, including Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, b'lieve i'm goin down... is a handshake across the country, east to west coast, thru the dustbowl history ("valley of ashes") of woody honest strait forward talk guthrie, and a cali canyon dead still nite floating in a nearly waterless landscape. The record is all air, weightless, bodyless, but grounded in convincing authenticity, in the best version of singer songwriter up cycling.”
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2015 sophomore album by the indie rockers. Recording with Chris Woodhouse at his Hanger studio in Sacramento, Wand summons the dark and heavy power of the riff. Back in September 2013, Wand was quietly dismembered and ritually eaten in the hills near Dodger Stadium. Wand was reborn as "Wand"-an obese organ falsely organized as four over joyous nerds. Four flesh balloons betting on a few aging amplifiers. Rumor has it they listen to Here Come the Warm Jets on loop all day and plot mail fraud. What's more, they allegedly stole Dale Crover's car and sacrificed it to the weather near the Los Angeles County Line. A few things, at least, are certain: Wand hears ghosts. Wand prefers serpents. The Sun is the mother of every fiction. All phenomena will be consumed in alphabetical order, but desire will re-circulate ad infinitum. If all else fails, Wand will just devour more hands. Wand is coming your way soon.
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Fuzz has abandonment issues. Abandoning expectation. Abandoning reservation, consummation, resignation, and trite dictation. Instinct is all there is when it comes to the divination of harsh salvation. Segall, Moothart, and Ubovich are exploring all the blank-ations of what will be, or has always been, Fuzz II. Tried and true methods mixed with tongue twisting, teeth shattering, seizure-inducing stabs at the norm. Who knows … maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s all done. Played out. Maybe it’s not for want of new but for lack of old. But probably not. Bathe in the heat wave that is Fuzz, and regret nothing in the time freeze. Necessity is the mother of creation; and devolution stakes its claim in the past as it continues to bind itself to the future...read more.
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Just as the sun revolves around the Earth, so does the nation’s psychedelic pop scene revolve around Pond. Formed in 2008 after good friends Joseph Ryan, Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson hit upon the idea of an all inclusive, ego-free collaborative, the boys immediately recorded their debut album Psychedelic Mango with a little help from good friend Kevin Parker. Not content to sit on their laurels – Pond followed up less than a year later with Corridors of Blissterday, a frenzied effort recorded live with an eight piece band at some point (nobody seems to remember exactly when) in 2009. Next up was Frond, their third album released in 2010 on the back of a serious Prince and Fleetwood Mac binge. This was the point at which things really began to kick off for the lads. Frond was a kaleidoscopic classic, dripping with funk and falsetto which hinted at the fact that Pond was maybe a little more than just a footloose collective of ridiculously talented young men...read more.
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Opening to the scream of F1’s speeding around a racetrack, and maintaining that intensity with booming guitar riffs and psychedelic effects throughout, the forthcoming album from Toro Y Moi is definitely making a statement. Or maybe a few statements. But Chaz Bundick, the frontman and songwriter, is leaving it up to you to figure out what they are. While it is obvious that each song is crafted around a personally meaningful experience, Chaz seems to purposefully leave the lyrics just vague enough to let each listener mold it into something unique. Chaz presents you with a few themes: love, beauty, nature; and gently lets go of your hand so you can wander off on your own...read more.
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Here we have a new batch from Thee Oh Sees for your absorption - nine muscular tunes primed to pummel to. Last year’s Drop was more schizophrenic, ranging from heavy to whimsical and back - Mutilator Defeated At Last has more in common with the monolithic hugeness of Floating Coffin - with only two slight reprieves in heaviness this is a record made to be played loudly and that demands bodily sacrifice inherently. Despite the plutonium heavy feel, Thee Oh Sees continue to be omnivorous - synths and acoustic guitars expertly wind their way throughout like veins of gold through granite - any and all that stands in its way will be devoured and assimilated.
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New Wand aloft! So how to explain....Wand manufacture a little life within an elaborate craftwork of sound amongst the endless social contrivances of popular music - that almost says it? On their Drag City debut, 1000 Days, Wand move restlessly and gracefully through divergent phases of music in a single passage of a song. This is how they make their music. Recorded in their hometown of Los Angeles and San Francisco, 1000 Days finds Wand searching in corners and finding extra texture via synthetic animation. The atmosphere is quicksilver and the space acoustic; as a beacon sparks electric, a cascade of hi-fi noises for everyone’s ears – raucous, impassive, inevitable musical expressions. The hope is to use your head, to escape the chains wrapped invisible around us...read more.
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Fading Frontier is the new studio album by Deerhunter, set for release on 16th October 2015 on 4AD. The record was made by founding members Bradford Cox, Lockett Pundt, Moses Archuleta, and bassist Josh McKay. Written in their hometown of Atlanta, GA, production duties were shared by the band and Ben H. Allen III, continuing a collaboration that began with 2010’s Halcyon Digest. Following the death-rattle garage catharsis of Monomania, the group have shifted towards something strikingly balanced, focused on melody and texture. The songs are brighter; if not in content, then in the album's production. Starkness plays against clutter in what is the band’s most complex yet accessible work to date...read more.
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Allas Sak. It’s a short phrase with enormous implications. Those two Swedish words translate loosely into English as “everyone’s thing” or maybe “anyone’s thing.” They not only provide the title for Dungen’s latest collection of sophisticated psychedelic rock, but explains how the band works creatively and collaboratively. “I was told by a friend once that as a songwriter and as a musical artist, you have to understand that as soon as the music leaves your body, it is no longer strictly yours,” explains Gustav Ejstes, Dungen’s mastermind and main songwriter. “The listener also owns it and filters it through their personality, their thoughts and feelings.” In other words, the music is everyone’s thing. It belongs to the band and to whoever hears it, which means that everyone is empowered to decipher the Swedish-language lyrics for themselves, to locate their own stories in the magisterial instrumental jams, to make all of this mean whatever they need it to mean. For Dungen, this communion between artist and audience is a beautiful and necessary process that makes the music mean more, not less. It becomes, in a sense, infinite. “These songs are my everyday experiences, my thoughts and stories from the life I live,” says Ejstes. “I hope people can create their own stories around the music and maybe we can make music together, the listener and I.”...read more.
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John Dwyer has a surprise for us…while we’ve all been eagerly anticipating the next Oh Sees record, he’s been tirelessly working in his synth laboratory as Damaged Bug and has hand-crafted a followup to last year’s neon-noir Hubba Bubba that shakes up the snow globe considerably. If Hubba Bubba was a brush with a robotic exoskeleton on deep-space patrol, Cold Hot Plumbs is a visit to the alien world that sent it into the cosmos - lush, textural, psychedelic at times, the songs breathe with a otherworldly sadness and heart, with barbed and sophisticated arrangements flowering in every direction. The vintage-perfect sound palette would be but window dressing if not for the songs themselves, which sound fresh, vital, and above all catchier than the flu. Cold Hot Plumbs is a strange, beautiful, and oddly infectious addition to Mr. Dwyer’s oeuvre, and not one to be missed.
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Global Chakra Rhythms is a psychedelic trip that recalls their more experimental pieces from The Boys R Back In Town and Rafiki's Vision, bringing free saxophones, organs, pedal steel guitar, ghostly background vocals, and unidentifiable yet familiar textures into the mix, summoned by the beat of Jamin's drum and shephereded by Jake's words and guitar. Recorded under mysterious circumstances, it features current JEFF touring shredders Kunal Prakash and Chet Jameson, but also fellow Nashvillians Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather), Reece Lazarus (Bully), Jessica Mcfarland (Heavy Cream, Savoy Motel), Luke Schneider (Natural Child, Promised Land Sound), Christina Norwood (D. Watusi), label-and-tourmates Music Band, and more.
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AFTER SEVEN ALBUMS AS ONE HALF OF CELEBRATED MUSICAL DUO AIR, NICOLAS GODIN'S FIRST SOLO ALBUM CONTREPOINT HAS REACHED BACK IN TIME TO MOVE FURTHER FORWARD.

FOUR YEARS IN THE MAKING, CONTREPOINT IS A DAZZLING RECORDING THAT CONJOINS GODIN'S HABITUAL MUSICAL FUSIONS - DRAWN FROM MODERN POP, FILM SOUNDTRACKS AND RETROSPECTIVE POP (SOFT ROCK, EXOTICA, '80S EURODANCE, YÉ-YÉ) - WITH THE CLASSICAL FORMS OF JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH. EIGHT WORKS OF GERMANY'S 18TH CENTURY CLASSICAL MUSIC GENIUS HAVE SERVED AS INSPIRATIONAL JUMPING-OFF POINTS FOR GODIN'S OWN COMPOSITIONS, WITH FELLOW BACH FANATIC, THE LATE, GREAT CANADIAN PIANIST GLENN GOULD, SERVING AS A SPIRITUAL GUIDE...read more.

Thank Your Lucky Stars is the sixth studio album by American dream pop band Beach House. It was co-produced by the band and Chris Coady, and was released on October 16, 2015, on Sub Pop and Bella Union. The album was released less than two months after their fifth studio album, Depression Cherry. Described by the band as "not a companion to Depression Cherry, or a surprise, or b-sides," Thank Your Lucky Stars was unexpectedly announced nine days before its release via the band's Twitter account.[1] It received mostly positive reviews from critics...read more.
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Beach House is Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally. We have been a band for over a decade living and working in Baltimore, MD. Depression Cherry is our 5th full-length record and was recorded at Studio in the Country in Bogalusa, Louisiana from November ’14 through January ’15. This time period crossed the anniversaries of both John Lennon’s and Roy Orbison’s death. In general, this record shows a return to simplicity, with songs structured around a melody and a few instruments, with live drums playing a far lesser role...read more.
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After mind fuzz and quarters i was starting to get over concept records. I wanted to make an album with a collection of short unrelated songs. I wanted to steer away from electric guitar music which i felt like we’d explored pretty heavily on the last couple. So paper-mache-dream-balloon, the concept-less concept album got a concept. No electric instruments. Just acoustic guitars, flute, double bass, fiddle, harmonica, drum kit, clarinet. what ever we could find really. we recorded it mostly in an empty shipping container on my parents farm in country victoria. it was all horses, emus and tim tams...from Bandcamp.
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Michael Rault is a Toronto based singer, guitarist and songwriter fronting his own eponymously named band. A gifted multiinstrumentalist and arranger, his hooky blend of pop rock refracts an evolution of guitar based music through the ages. An era-defying mischievousness defines his synthesis of jukebox R’n’B, and acid psych as refracted through the experience of an adolescence spent idolizing the clever craftsmanship of the Beatles and the wiggy New Orleans textures of Dr. John in equal measure...read more.
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Like the days of Steely Dan, Harry Nilsson or Prince releasing a classic every year (or less) comes Mac DeMarco’s Another One, a mini-LP announced almost one year to the date of the meteorically successful Salad Days. Conceived and recorded entirely by himself in a short period between a relentless tour schedule at his new place in Far Rockaway, Queens, Another One is eight, freshly written songs, expanding the arsenal of Mac’s already impressive catalog. There’s a bittersweet, romantic sensibility present. The overall feeling is lost love, or perhaps love never found, yet Mac embraces this without making it an overly somber experience for the listener. It’s at times haunting and warm, and a bit more refined and sophisticated, but still plenty playful, retaining the guts and soul of classic Mac...read more.
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Bizarre? Scrappy? Deranged? Sonny & the Sunsets’ latest record sees them in perhaps their strangest and most lyrically explorative phase yet. A big soup of sonic ideas that wouldn’t normally be glued together, the songs on Talent Night at the Ashram make a large collage that mixes cinematic stories of fringe characters.
Initially envisioned as a film project, each song was originally a short film that, when strung together, formed a feature-length movie. As Sonny Smith was writing the scripts and hiring the actors (even shooting a few of the clips), the scripts began to morph into songs...read more.
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If there’s a secret to time travel, Kool Keith owns the patent. Even a flying DeLorean seems too conventional for the Bronx legend. He’d more logically orbit throughout the galaxy in a gleaming chrome spaceship, teaching the stars and aliens new forms of originality. He is too weird to live, too rare to die, too uniquely ultra-magnetic to be accurately mimicked. Released on Mello Music Group, Time? Astonishing! is the latest dimensional warp from hip-hop’s premiere astral traveler. His union with MMG producer L’ Orange finds him exploring uncharted terrain: choppy volcanic rock planets, ice glacier moons, new surgical procedures, and fresh rappers to toss into the ether. The scalpel remains eternally sharp...read more.
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To call Jacco Gardner a daydreamer may not be as farfetched as he’d have you believe. Its meaning may refer to a fear of sleep, but with Hypnophobia, the brand new album from ‘baroque pop’ prince and Dutch producer/multi-instrumentalist Gardner, he’s all set to cast a majestic and vibrant psychedelic spell that will hypnotise listeners at the point dreams and reality meet.
“I came up with the title “Hypnophobia” while falling asleep and part of my brain just didn’t turn off,” explains Gardner. “I often have trouble letting go of reality, even though I prefer the world in my dreams... Hypnophobia comes from a place where fears, darkness and creativity collide, like a slightly scary lucid dream. Fearing a loss of control definitely plays a big part of it.”...read more.
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Sour Soul is the collaborative album from Toronto jazz/hip-hop band BADBADNOTGOOD and Staten Island rap champ Ghostface Killah. Inspired by 1960s and 70s music - taking inspiration from the recording techniques and production of that era, and eschewing sampling in favour of live instrumentation, BBNG with producer Frank Dukes have created a dramatic, cinematic musical staging for Ghostface’s vivid storytelling. Sour Soul also features guest spots from MF DOOM, Elzhi (Slum Village / J Dilla), Danny Brown and prodigal new rapper Tree (Project mayhem)...read more.
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Count on this group of Australian weirdos to come up with an idea like this - a 12” of four songs, each 10 minutes and 10 seconds long, accompanied by an insane painting of four different worlds melding together. Who are we to refuse them? This not quite an EP not quite an LP take a sharp turn into the wispy and mellow - The River tumbles down a Brubeckian 5/4 meander right into a Leslie’d wicker counter pattern, Infinite Rise rides a groovy yawning wake-up call through the commune, God Is In The Rhythm effervesces like a prom dance when the acid starts kicking in, and Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer circles ever upward like a friendly smoke signal from a beach fire...read more.
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