Well I’ve been doing these album lists since about 2005. Since I left college where I was music director at WRPI, it has been harder and harder to find what the best new music is for the year – I’ll end up going back to old bands or finding albums from previous years that I hadn’t listened to yet.\u00a0It seems that I only listened to 10-15 albums that actually came out in 2015 this year.\u00a0That said, here is a rough ranking of the 11 notable albums that I did get to listen to:<\/p>\n
Sufjan Stevens – “Carrie & Lowell”<\/p>\n
Son Lux – “Bones”<\/p>\n
The Velvet Teen – “All is Illusory”<\/p>\n
Battles – “La Di Da Di”<\/p>\n
The Helio Sequence – S\/T<\/p>\n
Big Boi & Phantogram – “Big Grams”<\/p>\n
Chvrches – “Every Open Eye”<\/p>\n
Beach House – “Depression Cherry” (Haven’t given their second 2015 album “Thank Your Lucky Stars” a fair listen yet)<\/p>\n
Braids – “Deep In the Iris”<\/p>\n
Heather Woods Broderick – “Glider”<\/p>\n
Mew – “+ -”<\/p>\n
I listened to a few others (Tame Impala, Purity Ring, Jamie XX etc), but these were the ones I probably spent more time with. Streaming environments have made it harder and harder for me to track some of the new stuff\u00a0I’ve tried out. Streaming also makes it easier to say “Nah…not right now” when an album isn’t really clicking with me and then I don’t end up returning to it. So much variety to explore, but easier to do it in a shallow way instead of trying an album 8 times before giving up on it – but that would be what we call a personal problem, now wouldn’t it?<\/p>\n
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Well I’ve been doing these album lists since about 2005. Since I left college where I was music director at WRPI, it has been harder and harder to find what the best new music is for the year – I’ll end up going back to old bands or finding albums from previous years that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[57,58,59],"class_list":["post-1395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-2","tag-top-10","tag-top-10-albums","tag-top-albums"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1396,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions\/1396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blairneal.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}