#5: Wax Idols – “American Tragic”

Writing all these year-end posts inevitably makes me confront the reasons I like all these albums over others. The word I find myself wanting to use in virtually every post — especially now, near the top — is “complete.” My favorite albums feel like they’re accomplishing exactly what the artist intended and are a fully realized vision (I’ve been using “vision” a lot, too).

American Tragic is an album that feels very complete to me. The band is mostly a one-woman show, with Hether Fortune doing everything but the drums, and the album is powered entirely by her sensibilities, her songwriting, and her charisma. A new-found emphasis on production gives American Tragic its crystalline gothic rock sound, while Fortune channels the feelings of a recent divorce into lyrics that are often about the intersection of love and pain. The way all these elements complement each other makes American Tragic one of the most compelling rock albums of the year.

Despite the heartbreak that went into the album, American Tragic remains remarkably nuanced, avoiding the kind of self-pity and blaming we’ve come to expect from the post-breakup album. Fortune touches on loneliness and grief, but her performance has a steely resolve, a refusal to let any of those feelings define who she is.

Fortune is very different from most rock front-people, and her personality and her refusal to conform to expectations is what makes this album consistently exciting. She can also really write a hook, and American Tragic has some surprisingly poppy moments, like “Lonely You” and “Severely Yours.” Those two songs, in different ways, explain how sometimes love can hurt.

#6: Carly Rae Jepsen – “Emotion”

A lot of recent pop doesn’t feel like it was made for people who care about music. The songs are just tools to enhance the artist’s multimedia brand, which is about gifs, videos, thinkpieces, awards show moments, etc. Emotion is a pop album for people who actually like music, who appreciate the craft of a catchy chorus and the feelings that a well-made pop song can create. At its center is Carly Rae Jepsen, who delivers a performance that can win over even the crankiest pop music cynic.

Jepsen reinvents herself on this album by consciously zigging when everyone else is zagging. With the focus of everyone on branding and trying to be current, Jepsen embraces the music of the past and puts the focus on the songs rather than herself. This could make Emotion feel like a cheap 80s nostalgia exercise, but it never does, because Jepsen’s warmth and enthusiasm are so endearing — this is an artist making the music she has always wanted to make, the type of timeless pop she grew up listening to.

Despite its nostalgic sound and the large number of personnel she worked with on the album, Emotion always feels like a distinct Carly Rae Jepsen vision. It dodges the focus-grouped feeling of other pop albums, which have the obvious singles and then a bunch of filler, and instead feels like a complete album. Jepsen reportedly wrote 250 songs for Emotion before narrowing them down, which might be why it often sounds like a cohesive greatest hits compilation.

That element of craft is what I keep coming back to with Emotion — it’s the result of an artist given the chance to make the album she always wanted by putting in the proper amount of work, time, and care. And Jepsen’s enthusiasm for performing this music is infectious, which gives the album its humble, sincere quality that stands out so much compared to other pop.

#7: Cold Beat – “Into the Air”

Cold Beat’s debut album, Over Me, was one of my favorites of last year, and the Hannah Lew project wasted no time following it up with Into the Air, which improves on the first by expanding and refining the group’s sound. While Over Me sometimes felt repetitive, every song on Into the Air feels different from the next, and the album tells a cohesive story as it progresses and the sounds change.

I get really geeky about album sequencing sometimes, and I got especially into the sequencing on Into the Air. The early songs on the album are more in line with what I expected after Over Me, with relatively straight-forward new-wave rock like “Broken Lines.” But about halfway through, the music starts to change, starting with “Cracks” which adds synths to the mix, and then the electronic instrumental “Clouds” that segues into the final part of the album, where “Spirals” and “Ashes” continue down that electronic path.

The way the album is sequenced, there is a feeling of ascending “Into the Air,” among the “Clouds,” and ending up in the ominously pretty blue sky portrayed on the album cover. This is reinforced by lyrical motifs about ashes and dust, like a wind is blowing you away into the sky. While ascending into the sky is typically considered positive, like going to heaven, on Into the Air the technology has an icy, creepy vibe to it that makes it more like OK Computer. “Cracks” in particular feels frantic and paranoid, and it’s the track that starts the upward ascension of the rest of the album.

I don’t know if the band intended any of what I just wrote, but part of what makes Into the Air so replayable — beyond the quality songwriting — is that Lew’s lyrics lend themselves to interpretation and don’t have a specific, obvious meaning. Yet there is still a story being told on the album, a sense that all the tracks are tied together and going down the same path. Where exactly that path goes is up to the listener to decide.