Top 10 Releases of 2017: Part 3

4. Bjork - Utopia

(2017 One Little Indian)

In some ways, Utopia plays out like an endearing parody of Bjork's past decade of output, piling on the pan flutes, stretching its 10-minute compositions in to frayed bubblegum strands, and wallowing in its own futurist-but-also-naturalist aesthetic: she samples animal sounds in lieu of snare drums on "Body Memory", for God's sake. 

The new effort is wildly pretentious and impenetrably academic, two usually undesirable traits that I'm weirdly always hoping for a Bjork album to embody. Like Kanye West, who's also collaborated with Utopia's co-producer Arca in recent endeavors, the Icelandic art-pop mainstay has the grandiose presence and creative drive to back up her musical hyperbole. And from the new record's explosive blossoms of melody to its diary-entry lyrics that bridge the mundane and divine, it's evident that Bjork has cultivated what might be her most hyperbolic material to date.

Though blooming as slowly as "Stonemilker", the string-swathed opener to Bjork's 2015 effort Vulnicura, Utopia's intro track "Arisen My Senses" produces a flower that's exponentially more fragrant/gaudy/harmonically layered/abstract-expressionist than its predecessor. When Bjork's not belting gale-force cries into the exosphere, she's filling in the space below with the whispered germination of love. "Weaving a mixtape, with every crossfade," she sneaks beneath her own synthesized chorus: the affection here is as seemingly world-changing (and unwieldy) as a teenage crush, carefully curated playlists sent as gifts and all.  

The title track is the album's most solid cut. Beginning with a lengthy instrumental section, its woodwinds and sampled insect sounds are spooky and humid as the alien landscape record's visual accompaniments depict. Digital percussion clicks and shuffles to the speedy rhythm of Chicago's footwork scene. Woozy orchestral arrangements approximate a trap melody, the twittering of "unseen birds never seen or heard before".

Listening, you really feel as if you're walking through a conservatory or an aquarium only to discover that you're what's behind the glass.

3. Neatpop - The Ongoing Tragedies of Spectra and Little Lucille
(2017 Vore Music)

FULL REVIEW

It sounds chewed-up and spit-up. Not quite recycled in the way that hip-hop chops and screws its samples: The Ongoing Tragedies is almost fully digested, tinged with acid burns and vaguely speckled with the folksy bedroom pop it must have been in some earlier state. Detuned keyboards crumble against creaking drum loops, tapping out skeletal beats. Neatpop fills these haunted spaces with the sad-sack spirits they've summoned, which giggle and screech in their own, nightcore-d language. The music's sickly, but oozes a sweetness I almost feel bad for enjoying: The Ongoing Tragedies feels gloomy without trying to, like taking a bite out of a microwaved burrito that's still too cold, or stepping in a lawn you didn't realize was sopping wet from yesterday's storm. 

2. XAMBA XUICE GANG - XAMBA XUICE
(2017 Xamba Xuice)

If you consider the thinking man to be the type of guy who has illegally streamed every episode of Yu Yu Hakusho, flips retro Tommy Hilfiger sweaters on Depop, and is quick to drop a tweet about your mcm's aesthetic shortcomings, then Xamba Xuice is the thinking man's Brockhampton. The Soundcloud collective debuted in July with their self-titled tape, its 12 members exploring their streaming platform's sonic breadth: opening track "YESS" melts jazzy chords across crunchy kicks and snares while SWIMCOACH and Yungbabyman trade laid-back bars between the repetitions of a dancehall chorus on the ultra-hummable "SWITCHIN 180". The gang gets quasi-political atop the the new-agey synthscape of "GEORGE W. BUSH" to hilarious effect and rattle off Nintendo-themed punchlines on "GAMECUBE"'s nimble production. The collective hops from genre to genre with grace, eschewing uniformity in their production for cleverness. Whether Cloudie's comparing himself to Republican presidents or Nicx Alexander is waxing ultraviolent and poetic at the same time, Xamba Xuice oozes originality while still staying at the forefront of Soundcloud's subcultural zeitgeist. 

XAMBA XUICE is a humble tape, clocking in at just below 30 minutes, but it's so loaded with memorable flows and dorky charm that it feels much longer. It's the cool cousin you're only able to see around the holidays--the one who's always down to race you in Double Dash and toss a nerf around in the backyard if it's not too cold. What's sometimes lacking in depth here is always made up for in in dry wit, raw sauce, and a diverse range of timbres and styles. 

Top 10 Releases of 2017: Part 1

10. Mormon Toasterhead - monocarpic

(2017 Self-Released)

adjective [BOTANY]

(of a plant) flowering only once and then dying.

...and what it leaves behind is prickly, sturdy, and puzzling. Aligning itself with the pineapples and durians of the botanical world, Mormon Toasterhead's first of two 2017 LPs houses acid-sweet flesh inside its tough shell, which admittedly took a few attempts for me to peel. 

Toasterhead frontman Ben Klawans isn't the most hospitable host on monocarpic: the Chicagoan songwriter loads the first 15 minutes of the record with its most challenging, incoherent content. Opener "drooling, delirious, red," for example, is constructed around a rapidly looping sample that sounds like throttled windchimes, throwing back to the glitchy atonality of Animal Collective's 2002 live album Hollinndagain: Klawans mumbles a spoken word poem, his vocal fry acting as a coagulant that holds the spooky soundscape together long enough to phase into "more than monotony" and "hollow rain," two cuts that nod to Alex G's cherubic college-rock delivery while dipping into Sonic Youth's tertiary palette of free-jazz asides and ambient cooldowns.

Clocking in at six and eight minutes respectively, the pair of tracks give the listener ample time to get used to their too-trebly mastering and almost non-existent structures, filled out by full-band arrangements that defy Mormon Toasterhead's cozy, lo-fi back catalogue. As if writing a sentence that travels for pages, full of parenthetical phrases and em-dashes, Klawans jerks the reader by the wrist from dissonant riff to keyboard drone, and it's all worth it because these weird little asides are just as fascinating as the free-associative lyrics that bridge the gaps. 

Finally making your way to closer "Bright Green" is worth the price of admission. Materializing in a pretty cloud of feedback and harmonics, Klawans and Co. trudge their way through a cocktail of narcotic alt-country haze and rubber-band guitar twang that recalls Doug Martsch's work with Built to Spill. 

"remember how teeth and dandruff used to show up bright green? 

under UV disco lights, 

at your favorite bowling alley"

Metal fences rise from the gutters to catch you as you glide down the waxed lane, into the reversed guitar samples that cap the album off like the faded edge of a watercolor stroke. 

9. Aria Rostami - Reform

(2017 Zoom Lens)

FULL REVIEW

Among the ZOOM LENS label's discography of washed-out blues and cyberpunk gloom, Aria Rostami's Reform is a fragrant explosion of olives and pinks, huffing warm synth-pop melodies against IDM drums that rattle and hiss. It's wordless, but mouthed by samples and patches that could be mistaken for human voices: a chorus of hushed tones and yawns. For nearly an hour, Rostami sustains the feeling of stretching out in bed after a hard day's work, dozing off as the soreness circulates from your shins to your chest, leaving the body as a sigh of relief. If "Flim" is your favorite Aphex Twin song, this record is right in your wheelhouse.

8. youthcomics - Shower of 411 sec.

(2017 Miles Apart Records)

Kyoto quartet youthcomics stretch toward the future while still keeping a back foot planted in the pastry-flake crackle of 90's twee-punk. Their first and only release to date is this lone cassingle, but there's enough power-pop fizzed bottled up into its seven minutes of tape to overshadow many full albums released within the genre this year. 

A-side "Youth in Our Backyards" defies language barriers to supply an impossibly-catchy chorus, bookended by echoing vocals, kaleidoscopic chord changes, and crisp guitar solos that feel as hypnotic as anything DIIV pressed on their 2011 debut, Oshin. Narutoshi Ohino's vocals phase and flange beneath the cramped instrumentation, and they sound almost autotuned in a beautiful way--through vaguely folky, the record is bursting with mechatronic energy, powered by air-tight drumbreaks that'll win over any fans of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. 

B-side "Falling" feels a bit more delicate, peeling back the distortion to let Ohino extend syllables against gummy basslines and bluesy licks. If you've ever jammed to The Field Mice, Joanna Gruesome, or early Yuck, you won't be able to resist Shower of 311 sec.

Top 10 Tracks of 2016: Part 4

1. Chance the Rapper - "Finish Line / Drown"

"And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us" - Hebrews 12:1

Despite the nearly universal acclaim Chance's sophomore effort, Coloring Book, has garnered for its seamless suture of bubblegum-trap and gospel music, the neo-sincere hymnal's most reverential cut has been unfortunately overshadowed by the more secular bombast of "No Problem" and "Mixtape". 

"Finish Line / Drown" is an ambitious, fragmented meditation on the importance of perseverance. Angling their lyrical lens at the New Testament's repeated metaphorical references to footraces, Chance and fellow Top 10 list inductee Noname relay their way through a marathon's worth of life's trials - addiction, parenthood, loss - while keeping their sights set firmly on the paradise that is promised to postdate our earthly tribulation. 

Pasted together with T-Pain's transhuman mastery of autotune and punctuated in with a spoken-word coda delivered by choir director Kirk Franklin, "Finish Line" proves to a be a double-decker sandwich that's tough to take a first bite into. Imposing as the track may seem, its 7 minutes of emotional fluctuation and church-organ swells digest quite easily washed down with the heartfelt positivity that each verse overflows with: Chance's with double-time exultation, Noname's with hushed conviction.

Hurtle toward the close of an arudous year, "Finish Line" blasting through your earbuds loudly enough to block out any distractions.

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." - 2 Timothy 4:7