Best Of 2016 (So Far) - Pt. 2

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11. Hélène Grimaud - Water Grimaud is a chance-taking pianist who has mainly applied her iconoclastic POV to basic classical repertoire. But Water is something else entirely, an eclectic collection of works spanning the centuries, from Berio and Takemitsu to Janacek and Liszt. She proves herself the master of all she attempts, playing the spaces between the notes as required by Takemitsu and Fauré, or showing great command of filling all the spaces with notes as Liszt demands. To pull it all together, Grimaud collaborated with atmospheric composer Nitin Sawhny to create brief electro-acoustic interludes, which are beautiful little sketches in sound. This is my favorite kind of classical piano album, one which makes you hear old pieces anew, and it's been go-to morning music on many a day. Invite it into your life.

12. Anthony Cheung - Dystemporal In a perfect world, a sparkling collection of six compositions by Cheung, brilliantly performed by Talea Ensemble and Ensemble Intercontemporain, would be a major event beyond the confines of my own mind. No matter - the music speaks for itself and it is entrancing post-Boulez stuff, with uncannily perfect orchestration and a stylish melodicism that should welcome any listener. The title piece has a hint of menace and makes me think of a circus, slowed down and grown slightly threatening. Running The (Full) Gamut is a cogent piano solo (beautifully played by the composer) that is an ideal introduction to Cheung's strong sense of structure and proportion. Start there if you want to ease your way into Cheung's world and make it part of your own. Save the date of November 11th for the record release concert at National Sawdust. Maybe then Dystemporal will become the event it deserves to be.

13. Anderson Paak - Malibu I gotta tell you - I thought Dr. Dre's Compton was horrible, with even young guns like Paak being drawn into Dre's stodgy and smug conception. So I admit not having high hopes for Malibu, even though his prior album, Venice, had shown great promise. But no worries - on the sprawling Malibu Paak comes on strong as the missing link between Marvin Gaye and Kendrick Lamar, with a little Flying Lotus in there for good measure. This is lush and luxuriant R&B with a hip hop edge, up to the minute but sounding classic all the same. Right from the first cut you feel like you're in good hands. All the guests, from BJ The Chicago Kid to Rapsody to Talib Kweli, are well-integrated, leaving no doubt as to who is in charge. Room In Here is the coziest slow jam in many a year - even The Game sounds ready to cuddle - and, lord knows, we can always use more opportunities to get close.

14. TV Girl - Who Really Cares How do I love thee, TV Girl? Let me count the ways, with your hip hop beats, bittersweet samples and melodies, and your conversational, psychologically acute lyrics, it's hard to get enough! Is it a formula? Sure, like your relationship with your best friend is a formula. And it works just as well. 

15. Skylark - Crossing Over An album of contemporary choral music about death? Let's just say this is an unlikely triumph. 

16. Wire - Nocturnal Koreans A friend of mine who is a least as big a Wire fan as I am didn't even want to listen to this because of that wacky title. My skepticism was more based on the fact that their last album was a bit of a snooze. Neither issue should concern you: this brief eight song blast finds the post-punk legends at the top of their game. Ironically, these are all songs that were left off the last album, which main songwriter Colin Newman now admits was too "respectful" of the band. Based on these songs, each one a sleek gem with unexpected touches, the more disrespect the better. Damned good for a band in its fourth act - long may they reign

17. Kendrick Lamar - untitled unmastered Like the Wire album, these are all cuts that didn't fit on Lamar's last album, 2015's To Pimp A Butterfly. While I can see how they didn't fit the narrative construct of that titanic album, they are still a stunning tribute to Lamar's creative fecundity. Over expansively funky tracks he tries on a few new guises here, such as the love-man of the opening cut, or the retro-didacticism of untitled 03 05.28.13: "What did the Indian say?" It's like Reading Rainbow in some alternate universe  - and I doubt anyone but Lamar could get away with it in 2016. I'm on the edge of my seat, wondering where he'll go next. 

18. Laura Metcalf - First Day The other great cello record this year. 

19. Rupert Boyd - Fantasias 2016 seems to have more than its share of "Calgon take me away" moments and this delightful travelogue works better than bath salts. 

20. Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo That so many people think West is a relentless jerk is one of the artistic crimes of our age. I don't pay attention to his antics - what matters it what's on the records. Granted, Pablo had a more difficult and public birth than most albums (remember when it was going to be called Swish?), and one that would have crushed the life out of most artistic endeavors. But West powered through and got the music off his hard drive - although he's famously been tinkering with it since it came out, an impulse to which any artist can relate. 

Based on the original18 track version I have (there are now two versions on Spotify!), Pablo is his most fragmented album yet, with many songs under the three-minute mark or taking hairpin turns halfway through (I could listen to the spooky 50 second coda to FML for a lot longer). Even so, there are some "tent-pole" songs that keep the album from collapsing, starting with Ultralight Beam, the gorgeous opening cut, which embraces Kirk Franklin and Chance The Rapper in equal measure, while providing an operating principle: "You can never go too far when you can't come back home again."

He then proceeds to test that theory, dishing out some nasty, purposefully provocative stuff. Taylor Swift fans know what I'm talking about - but even Famous has a cutting edge backing track ("Swizz told me to let the beat rock" - good advice). Other standouts are the bittersweet Real Friends, the classic single No More Parties In LA (with a fiery Kendrick Lamar feature), and Fade, a haunting exploration of dying love via early 80's house. That nostalgic touch is a telling sign, as this is the first album where West seems to be looking back, as if trying to trace his path and figure out how it all got so crazy. 

Don't get me wrong - this is hardly a perfect album; there are clunky choruses, punch lines that land like concrete, and other misguided foibles. But there's something beautiful about the way West just lets it all hang out there, the good, the bad, and the nutty. There's the wonderfully tossed off a capella I Love Kanye, for example - which is probably not what you think it is. And one of my favorite moments is at the end of the reflective 30 Hours, where he's just vibing out to the smooth groove provided by Andre 3000 and Karriem Riggins - "This the bonus track...all my favorite albums got, like, bonus joints like this..." Then he gets a phone call - and takes it! "Yo, Gabe, I'm just doing an ad lib track right now, what's up?" Guy's got guts. 

So in the end, Pablo is minor masterpiece of audio collage, with enough moments of transgression, regression, and aggression to slot Kanye West - in my mind, at least - near Houellbecq, Burroughs, and even Huysmans. Not really a pop record, but one with pop celebrity as a subject - and one released into the Hadron Collider of one of the globe's most fanatical pop audiences. Can't fault Kanye for cracking a little under that kind of pressure. Kendrick Lamar would probably say he's gonna be alright and I'm inclined to agree.

Sample my Top 20 with this handy playlist and keep up with everything else I've been listening to here.

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Best Of 2016 (So far) - Pt. 2

Skylark's Liminal Journey

The world of contemporary classical music, like all music, is full of niches. But it may not get more niche than an album of recent choral music around the theme of "the dream state at the end of life." But that is indeed what the vocal ensemble Skylark has delivered with Crossing Over, their new release on Sono Luminus. Having recently watched a great friend succumb to pancreatic cancer, I was actually completely uninterested, even resistant, to listening to anything that purported to describe what he had gone through. I also wasn't sure that anything other than tuneless primal screaming could express how I felt about the situation. 

But listen I did and found that I had been taking Skylark's concept a bit too literally. Crossing Over is, in fact, a superbly sung and brilliantly sequenced album that makes you think about death about as much as listening to Mozart's Requiem makes you think about death. It's in there, for sure, but despite the booklet's heavy handed subtitles (Denial, My time has come, etc.) there need be no utility to the collection. Overall, it is a meditative and elevating listening experience, with the rich, warm recording seeming to surround you with the perfectly balanced voices of the ensemble.

The composers chosen by Skylark's leader Matthew Guard range from those firmly established in the 20th century canon, like John Tavener and William Schuman, to younger musicians like Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daniel Elder. It's Elder's Elegy that opens the album with a beautiful evocation of Taps emerging from a cloud of voices. By Elder's hand the overly familiar melody is imbued with a new gravity that may surprise you. 

Tavener is of course the composer Paul McCartney picked to lend a little weight to the releases on The Beatles' Apple Label, which put out his The Whale in 1970. Featured here is Butterfly Dreams from 2003, a short eight-part piece that explores a variety of moods, even touching on the primal scream in No. 6. The Butterfly: My Most Horrifying Nightmare. This is a small but important part of Tavener's legacy and we owe a debt of gratitude to Skylark for this definitive rendering of a rarely performed piece. 

Heyr bú oss himnum á, Thorvaldsdottir's setting of an Icelandic psalm with the key line "We cannot make a joyful song unless we are moved by love," is somber but shot through with shafts of light. I wasn't looking for further proof of her versatility but I'm glad to have it nonetheless. The longest work on Crossing Over is the world-premiere recording of Robert Vuichard's Heliocentric Meditation, which uses text from John Donne's Meditation XVII ("ask not for whom the bell tolls..."). It has some of Donne's solidity to it's structure and covers a variety of emotions from sorrow to raging against the dying of the light. It may never be performed by a glee club, as have some of Vuichard's other compositions, but it is a valuable addition to the contemporary choral catalog, which goes for the album as a whole.

Don't be scared off by the concept - give Crossing Over a chance. If you love the sound of the human voice you will find it a deeply rewarding journey.

Another recent release from Sono Luminus is not quite so satisfying. Everyone knows that a joke that must be explained is not a joke at all and there is a lot of explaining going on in the liner notes to Serious Business by the Spektral Quartet. The idea is to "look at humor" from different musical angles but the results are not always something you want to hear more than once. Many, Many Cadences by Sky Macklay opens the album and drives its point home with a repetition that seems unnecessary rather than clever. David Remnick's The Ancestral Mousetrap has the virtuoso instrumentalists singing in addition to playing, which might amuse in concert but not in my living room.

Hack by Chris Fisher-Lochhead closes the album with many, many (22) short "transcriptions" of comedians, from Lenny Bruce to Tig Notaro. It may be that you had to be there but these just seem like unfocused fragments. There's nothing terribly wrong with it, musically speaking, but there's not enough to engage me either. 

However, there is one saving grace on Serious Business, and that is the Spektral's absolutely masterful performance of Haydn's String Quartet Opus 33, No. 2 in E-flat major, "The Joke." I'm usually the one saying "Do we really need another recording of this?" when it comes to pieces from the classical era but in this case the answer is resounding YES. The recording is pure perfection and the quartet never oversells Haydn's melodies, with playing that reflects the elegance of the period so exactly that listening feels like time travel. The famous tease of the multiple endings still kills, too. Humor that stands the test of 200-plus years? Now, that's serious business.