BY MERT ENEY (LAW/IV)
mert.eney@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Rhye: Blood
When Rhye released their first album, “Woman,” it became a certain kind of cult classic among the not-so-tightly-knit independent music community. Songs like “Open” and “The Fall” seemed to be almost omnipresent in every context, not so much as theatrical attention-grabbers but rather as landscapes that existed just outside the conceivable reality. An album radiant with exuberant erotic energy, the follow-up “Blood” comes, after a five-year hiatus, to a similar ground. While Rhye in this album discover no alien territory and risk little to achieve the usual atmospheric quality of their music, this is still an excellent album filled with spaciously oxygenic love songs.
Ty Segall: Freedom’s Goblin
The incredibly eclectic rock outfit Ty Segall’s latest album feels like a prospectus for his tirelessly created sonic universes – a testament to a diligent career bursting with hard experimentation and boundary pushing. Deriving influences from sources that vary from a household pet to Mother Nature, Segall sculpts from guitar riffs a deliberately complex soundscape that is anarchic and beautifully romantic.
Tune-Yards: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life
The uncategorizable Merrill Garbus’s musical project Tune-Yards deliver their conceptually ambitious fourth record, confrontational to a point of absolute chaotic outburst. It feels at once like a pop record with an extreme experimental edge and a political record of unconceivable shamanic power. Garbus repeats “I’m only human” again and again in the lead single “Heart Attack” to remind us, probably, that behind all the dramatic instrumentals of the album, there lies flesh and bone eager to understand the ways in which we interact with (and fail to understand) each other.
Porches: The House
Aaron Maine, under the moniker Porches, returned early this year with his second full-length LP, titled “The House,” a continuation of sorts from his debut. This time a little less heavy on the synthesizers and a bit more lenient with an autotune device, Maine has created an ostensibly self-indulgent, dreamy landscape that exists in no conceivable time frame – not belonging to the past, and certainly not of the future. “Find Me” and “W Longing” are standouts of the album.
SiR: November
TDA’s newly converted, very own SiR’s first album from the label radiates with the kind of light one would expect from an already-established musical outfit – a fully realized neo-soul album containing tinges of subterranean R&B. A definitive record of our time, it resonates deeply with the millennial experience. The velvety soundscape completely transforms the room and begs to be jammed to. An impressive release from the game-changers of hip-hop/rap/R&B.
First Aid Kit: Ruins
After two successful indie folk albums, the Söderberg sisters return for their fourth album, “Ruins,” immersive with a similar yet distinctly different trajectory from their signature sound. While it is a hit-or-miss kind of album (dependent on the listener), it really does continue to generate the kind of memoirist folk music the Swedish duo is known for.