Dream Catalogue has quickly become one of my favorite music labels. Their aesthetic is a utopian ideal for tomorrow’s world. The music they release is futuristic, wrapped in a warm emotional embrace, full of nostalgia and hope. Everything I’ve heard is, naturally, painted with a deeply dreamlike palette. Edges are blurred, time vanishes, and the listener becomes unmoored from tactile reality.
For a week now, I’ve woken with this song stuck in my head.
Modern Love takes off like a bottle rocket, perfect as the lead tune on David Bowie‘s 1983 pop opus, Let’s Dance. It’s about as get-up-and-go as any song has ever been. I feel an electricity pulsing through me the second those first guitar stabs hit, and it doesn’t let up even when the melody fades a few minutes later.
If you’re not already in the mood for this kind of energy, I present a pair of films that absolutely nailed it. I can’t help but get caught up when seeing either of these scenes; the positivity is infectious:
I just read on twitter that Colin Stetson, one of the greatest saxophonists alive, is working on a new version of one of the greatest symphonies of the 20th century.
Here’s the trailer, featuring a minute of the newly recorded composition:
Here’s an album that received so little mention upon its release, I’m surprised to learn that anyone else got to hear it. Gabriel Saloman’s Movement Building Vol. 2 is a self-contained explosion. It made my best of 2015 list, but I didn’t see it on literally any other. Here’s my bid for wider recognition.
This is the full album:
Yesterday I decided to have a fresh listen of one of my old favorite bands, Rachel’s. This chamber-post-rock outfit may have disappeared soon after I was introduced, but they left an impact for years.
It was nearly 15 years ago when, funny enough, a girl named Rachel gave me a burned CD of Selenography, the band’s 1999 masterpiece. It’d been at least a decade, but when I cued the music up on spotify yesterday, this is the tune that struck me hardest, shooting right through the years to that old memory. It’s an incredibly catchy harpsichord jam called The Mysterious Disappearance of Louis LePrince.
I hear a lot of great music almost every day, and it really adds up. I might not be rich or famous, but my life is wealthy with incredible music. I want to make everyone else as wealthy, too. Every single year, there are so many great albums that I’d recommend anyone, far more than I’d feel comfortable putting on a top ten list.
So here we are, my “honorable mention” list of 2015 albums. Every one of these albums are worth your time. Unlike my top list, they appear in the order that I heard them.
After you’ve checked this out, make sure to see the 17 Best Albums of 2015 here.
Read on to hear the best of the rest of 2015:
2015 was an incredible year for music, full of surprises and second comings, weird new genres and unbelievable evolutions of existing sounds. Of course, every year is great for music as long as you’re open to new sounds. That’s how this whole thing works.
Every year, I enjoy writing down my favorites as I go along, adding them to a simple text file on my laptop. Sometimes I add stars to the albums when I realize I’m completely mad for them. For some albums, this means I find myself listening day after day, racking up dozens of plays. For others, this means that I’m struck so deeply on an emotional, intellectual, or even physical level that I can’t bring myself to listen again for a few days. Both experiences bring lasting rewards, especially when considered in the long view. This is why I love looking back and appreciating the permanent impact from these powerful pieces of music.
As it turned out, this year’s list included over twenty starred albums. I left a handful for my Best of 2015 Honorable Mention list, but the rest were simply indispensable. My list would not be complete without all of these albums.
So please, read on and enjoy. These are the 17 best albums of 2015.
Optimistic Underground 