Jess Casebeer’s Top 10 Pacific Northwest Albums of 2015
10. Pure Bathing Culture
Pray for Rain
Partisan Records
In an era where your band will be sold as “indie” if you can manage to sound like a soulless, flatlining Killers or MGMT, and throw some car-commercial “woah-oh”s over your choruses in the hopes that your tyrannical major label won’t take you out back and put both barrels into your drained, integrity-devoid face, it’s refreshing to see bands like Portland duo Pure Bathing Culture breathing life into a declining style of pop and rock.
Pray for Rain is a pop album whose instrumental presence is driven by guitars and rudimentary drum machines. It isn’t a style of music that’s particularly game-changing or life-affirming if you’ve heard bands like Vampire Weekend or Craft Spells, but Pure Bathing Culture excel on this album on the heels of their songwriting chops.
The songs on this album are bouncy, they’re extremely well-produced, and are the sort of naturally catchy songs that will lodge themselves in your mind for the rest of the day without cheap whistling melodies or repetitive lyrics. Songs like “She Shakes” and the title track are great summer-fall anthems, and are only made better by the great vocals of singer Sarah Versprille. Check it out. There are a lot of great moments.
9. Emancipator
Seven Seas
Loci Records
It’s only been a few years since Emancipator’s previous record, Dusk to Dawn, but it feels like it’s been at least twice as long. Seven Seas was a hotly anticipated record for electronic music fans, and with close to an hour of new, great material, it’s easy to say that it lived up to the hype.
The most noticeable difference between Seven Seas and Emancipator’s previous output is that a couple tracks on here feature prominent vocal guests, one of which comes from Madelyn Grant of “Sun Models” fame. Despite that addition, a better recording, and a couple tracks on here that ride pretty clear trap music-influenced beats, though, Seven Seas feels like Emancipator as usual.
Not that’s an inherently bad thing, however. Seven Seas is a collection of impeccably-produced, chilled-out, moody, easygoing downtempo music even if it may feel a tad familar. It’s an album that’s up there with Soon It Will Be Cold Enough in its “instant classic” appeal.
8. Friendly Chemist
Touch of Jupiter
1080p
Vancouver-based record label 1080p has easily been one of the most meteoric collectives of 2015. Though originally I saw the sort of postmodern house and techno aesthetic most of their artists run with as being a sort of gimmicky selling point, the more I listened to my favorite 1080p release of the year, Friendly Chemist’s Touch of Jupiter, the more I saw their approach as being sort of a necessity in a world at large that refuses to see electronic music as anything more than generic plucky $1000 Omnisphere soft-synths and press-play producers and DJs telling people to jump to 128 plain Vengeance kicks per minute.
Touch of Jupiter is a record of sharp, creative, infectious dance music that takes elements of 90s acid house, ambient techno, IDM, as well as a bit of minimal techno, and presents them all in a context best suited for a dark, humid venue full of people politely nodding to the music. Everything from the use of old synthesizers to the primitive sequencing of the music to the simplistic, groovy beats feels authentically retro, without feeling like a rehash. The album diverts away from this formula temporarily with the ambient composition “March of the Bog Lily (Celestial Mix),” which offers up more variety on this album and helps sell its engaging quality.
Every one of the six tracks on Touch of Jupiter is good, and it’s a must-listen for any fans of the old- and new-school of house and techno music.