John Luther AdamsThe Wind in High Places (Cold Blue)
John CarpenterJohn Carpenter’s Lost Themes (Sacred Bones)
Leather Corduroys, aka Save Money rappers Joey Purple and Kami de Chukwu, include a skit on their debut full-length, Season, that explains how you can make your own pair of leather corduroys with polyurethane, “adhesive,” and 50 dried banana peels. I imagine that pulling off such an outfit also takes a degree of finesse bordering on the magical—but Joey and Kami have it. Throughout Season they thread together patois flows, sweet soul singing, and madman screams atop genre-blurring instrumentals. The nasty punk stomp of “Developers” sounds like a low-bit-rate tribute to Suicide; the first half of “RMS/Launch” is basically Kanye’s quasi-industrial “Black Skinhead” stripped down to a playful skeleton; and “Lucile” rides a looped a cappella of the word “Lucy” that’s equal parts romantic and terrifying. I hope more rappers take risks like this. —Leor Galil
Alasdair RobertsAlasdair Roberts (Drag City)
Americans are more cynical now than they were 20 years ago, and Carrie Brownstein makes a living on Portlandia mocking the same urban culture she helped invent. But No Cities to Love, Sleater-Kinney‘s first album since 2005’s The Woods, is hardly a cynical affair. Announced in October 2014 via a seven-inch of a new song slipped in with a retrospective Sleater-Kinney vinyl box set, No Cities to Love grapples with the frustration of wanting to change the world only to find the world changing without you (and in whatever direction it pleases). Instead of delivering the feminist screeds of old, the post-riot-grrrl three-piece hammers out a tune called “No Anthems.” Instead of preaching staunch anticorporatism, Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss advocate self-acceptance, even if that means dialing in to the status quo (they’ve got kids to feed, after all). In the 90s, Sleater-Kinney had wild hopes for a better world; in 2015, they’re striving to survive in this one. And if that means betraying their former ideals, it also means holding tighter to their loved ones. The band may have narrowed their scope, but they’ve opened their arms that much wider. —Sasha Geffen
