Sound Obsession

In alphabetical order by artist name.  Top Ten for 2020 coming soon! Hum:   Inlet   (Earth Analog - 6/23/20) Kairon; IRSE!:   Polysomn   (Svart - 9/11/20)   Khruangbin:   Mordechai   (Dead Oceans - 6/26/20)   Killer Be Killed:   Reluctant Hero   (Nuclear Blast - 11/20/20)   Gabe Lee:   Honky Tonk Hell   (Torrez Music - 3/13/20)   Mako:   Oeuvre   (Metalheadz - 4/6/20)   Rattlesnake Milk:   Rattlesnake Milk   (Feels ...

Brent Cobb, Rock & Roll Hotel, Washington DC - 9/18/19 Black Pumas, U Street Music Hall, 9/12/19 Black Pumas, U Street Music Hall, 9/12/19 Black Pumas, U Street Music Hall, 9/12/19 Tame Impala, The Anthem, Washington DC - 10/24/19 Tame Impala, The Anthem, Washington DC - 10/24/19 Tame Impala, The Anthem, Washington DC - 10/24/19 Chris Stapleton, Margo Price, Marcus King, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia MD - 10/11/19 Chris Stapleton, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia MD - 10/11/19 Chris Stapleton, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia MD - 10/11/19 Ward Davis, Pearl Street Warehouse, Washington DC - 10/9/19 Charles Wesley Godwin, Pearl Street Warehouse, Washington DC - 10/9/19 Torche, The Black Cat, Washington DC - 7/31/19 Jim Kweskin, Colony, Woodstock NY - 7/5/19

2015 was an exceptional year for music.  Here are my top-ten favorite albums of 2015, and check out my ten runners-up and honorable mentions .  Hey, better late than never.  Enjoy. . . . 1. Ghost: Meliora (8.5/10) Meliora is Ghost's third LP, released in late summer of 2015. The title is a Latin adjective meaning "better" and so it is that the album continues an upward trajectory for the Swedish occult-metal band, adding to their mock-ecclesiastical mythos. Ghost's breakout debut Opus Eponymous mined a spooky mediaeval aesthetic exemplified by a traditional proto-metal sound, while their playful sophomore album Infetissumam (previously reviewed here ) skewed baroque, incorporating disparate elements like disco, surf-rock, and choral music. By contrast, Meliora is the band's take on 20th century modernity and futurism (its cover references Fritz Lang's 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis ) . Accordingly, on Meliora , the band's musical palette...

Tame Impala Date:  June 6, 2015 Venue:  Echostage, Washington, DC It's pretty fun, and increasingly rare, to get on board early with a promising new rock band and watch them rise from relative obscurity to international super-stardom in the short span of five years.  I'm talking about psychedelic rockers Tame Impala, all the way from Perth, Australia.  I fell hard for this band when I downloaded their debut album, Innerspeaker , on a whim in the summer of 2010 (my curiosity initially piqued by a sweet album cover that reflected the woozy lava-lamp sound inside) and caught them live with a small crowd of early converts at the divey Black Cat just down the street from my apartment.  I saw them again six months later with a much larger crowd at the same venue, then two years on at a sold out gig at the 1,200 capacity 9:30 Club with the release of their sophomore album Lonerism .  This past weekend, just a couple months ahead of their third album release C...