Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness [2015]

Holter has released high quality music in the past, with songs like the hauntingly bleak and string filled “World” being a highlight off of her last LP, Loud City Song, which was released in 2013. However, with Have You In My Wilderness, the singer/songwriter seems to have taken it up another level. Holter’s latest record features great string arrangements, graceful piano playing and a tasteful use of just the right amount of echo on the primary and background vocals.

Versis - Copæsthetic [2015]

L.A. rapper Versis debuted with iLLCANDESCENT, an excellent album that showed a maturity and confidence far beyond his young age. He skillfully rhymed over airy atmospheric boom-bap production that had tasteful jazzy samples. Five years later, he returned with the brief and effective twenty minutes of Copæsthetic. 

Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra - Into Forever [2015]

Halsall takes his interesting brand of harp filled, Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders influenced jazz compositions and goes vocal on 5 out of the 11 tracks with the help of Josephine Oniyama and Bryony Jarman-Pinto, who sings on the last track. Oniyama is quite a formidable vocalist, with a soulful style that works great with the spiritual jazz that Halsall and the Gondwana Orchestra bring - "Badder Weather" is a moving performance. Vocal jazz is, an unexpected switch from Halsall, as all his past albums are instrumental, but it is done well. On Into Forever,  The long improvisation filled tracks are mostly gone, in favor of focused, relatively short statements; some of which could even be characterized as interludes ("Dawn Horizon", "Cushendun"), with the longest track clocking in at only 6 minutes and 22 seconds.

FKA Twigs - M3LL155X [2015]

What a pleasant surprise. FKA Twigs has to be one of the most interesting pop artists to get (relatively) famous in the past few years. Despite the fact that I didn't even like the record on the first listen, LP1, which was the first project I heard by her, ended up being one of my favorite albums of last year. I then went back and checked out her past EPs and was equally impressed. There is just something very unique about her off-kilter, at times very experimental production style, which somehow meshes greatly with her beautiful vocals that causes me to frequently keep her projects in my rotation.

Björk - Vulnicura [2015]

It is a little bit ironic for an artist like Björk that her return to form, which this album surely is, would be an album like Vulnicura. This level of quality was not expected. Björk is an incredible artist, but unlike Vulnicura, her past two albums have missed the mark. Volta was inconsistent, containing stunning songs like “Wanderlust” and “Vertabrae by Vertabrae” but at the same time containing songs with questionable production such as “Innocence” or “Declare Independence”. Next came Biophilia, which was easily her worst project to date, with a concept that ultimately proved to be a lot more interesting than the final musical execution of it. Moving on, the irony here is that Vulnicura has two aspects that were not present in any past Björk releases. The first being that, as many have pointed out, this album is by far the most personal, revealing, and lyrically literal album Björk has ever put out. This is not to suggest that everything she says on this album is literal, but it is very direct, especially during the first half. There are many lyrical metaphors and similes of course, but gone is the science of Biophilia or the supernatural stories of things like “Isobel”. Here we find Björk singing about her relationship and eventual break up with Matthew Barney, demanding “emotional respect” (“Stonemilker”), questioning if “he will come out of this loving me” (“Lionsong”) and wondering if there is anywhere to “pay respects for the death” of her family (“Family”).