Musts in Music – August 2015

Destroyer – Poison Season

For all the protests Vancouver based singer-songwriter Dan Bejar has been making in recent interviews regarding his new-found fame and success, he pulls another sleeve over us yet again with his latest LP under the Destroyer project — Poison Season.

After the stylistic shift he made on his last full-length album Kaputt (2011), his brand of verbose poetry-based art rock continues, while leaving behind Kaputt's old school instrumentation for a more modern, refined cadence.

Poison Season is dry, punchy, and driven skillfully by Bejar's hushed, reserved vocals and juxtaposing eccentricity. While the album has its issues, namely a few confused thematic detours and interludes, a second near-perfect release in succession will only see the Destroyer moniker's star rise, however much he may cry and resist.

Recommended: Times Square

Chelsea Wolfe –  Abyss

Californian singer-songwriter and guitarist Chelsea Wolfe has always been a grand curator of dark sounds. Ranging from folk, doom, noise, industrial, to even darkwave, her personal darkness and voice manages to keep some nearly opposing rock sounds from being incohesive.

In other words, her talents lend to strong, diverse records chock full of melodic rock dispositions. If her last two releases, Apokalypsis (2011) and Pain Is Beauty (2013), was Chelsea Wolfe at her melodic sixth, then this new album Abyss is her unveiling, at the seventh layer of hell.

Grim walls of raw distortions, brooding guitars, drums, and shoegaze electronics with Wolfe's vocals piercing through these walls create the heaviest, most eclectic version of herself we've heard thus far. Dark, sonically focused, and truly devastating, Abyss remains aptly titled.

Recommended: After the Fall

FKA twigs – M3LL155X

After a stellar debut full-length album – last year's LP1 – British singer-songwriter, dancer, producer Tahliah Barnett or FKA twigs, formerly known as just twigs, takes another stab at our susceptible souls with a surprise EP titled M3LL155X (pronounce Mellissa).

Conceptually developed further from her last release, twigs does manage to take some appreciable sonic risks on this five-track affair. Reinforced enormously by co-producer Jordan "Boots" Asher, twigs lines every track with her signature erotic digital fuzz, crafts 19 minutes of anxiously sexual, scathing proclamations of progressive feminist ideals, while never once falling on platitudes.

While others in electronic and hip hop music this year have chosen to mine the past to pull together their magnum opuses, twigs manages to do something that no one else in 2015 has done until now: make music distinctly futuristic both in artistic direction and in sound.

Recommended: M3LL155X

Dr. Dre – Compton: A Soundtrack

Compton, CA legend Andre Young, AKA Dr. Dre (PhD), graces us one last time with a full length release 16 years after his last LP 2001, released in 1999. Titled Compton: A Soundtrack, this album is not to be confused with the official motion picture soundtrack for last month's N.W.A biopic STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, although it is definitively inspired at least in part by Dre's involvement as a producer on said film.

Compton is a real, full album, an hour long with 16 tracks, boasting stronger feature performances than most other hip hop albums out this year. The reason being, Dre writes actual bars with the artists he chooses to work with as opposed to having them simply spit random nonsense at a mic and go home. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, Dre brought us Ice Cube, Eazy E, Snoop Dogg, The D.O.C., Kendrick Lamar, The Game, and the real Slim Shady himself.

For 16 years his fans have been waiting for another dose of the doctor's pioneered g-funk sound. So interestingly enough, Dre chooses to leave it mostly behind on Compton, going for a more contemporary soundscape while reserving a few traditional cuts for his fans. Thematically it is more a soundtrack of Dr. Dre's supernaturally successful career, than a soundtrack of Compton the city.

This record proves to be a solid outing and a mostly satisfying farewell to one of hip hop's greatest producers of all time, making sure once and for all you can never act like you forgot about Dre.

Recommended: Get Apple Music

What did you guys think of these albums? Any other releases from this August you feel are absolute must-listens? Leave a comment after the jump!