Pile
You're Better Than This

I am ashamed to have not yet spoken about this American album for an American audience. But by now we all know that musical borders no longer exist, especially in the two Anglophone fronts: UK & US. So we can find Brit-gaze bands coming from Texas or surf-grunge bands emerging from the rainiest and most central part of England; in short, it seems that musical patriotism has vanished into thin air, or at least, that's what they want us to believe.

The Pile, along with the whole nu-post-hc scene, are bubbling with excitement within the United States. It is no coincidence that generally among the best albums of recent years, we find La Dispute, Touché Amoré, Pianos Become The Teeth, The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die and many others for the more core and emo scene, Two Inch Astronaut, Grass Is Green, Ovlov for the math-grunge, while Perfect Pussy, Protmartyr, White Lung stay more on punk-core lines, Ought, Posse and Parquet Courts have tried to caress more pop tinges, an amazing array of albums, INCREDIBLE!

This year is no exception, although I'm not entirely satisfied: Joanna Gruesome and Speedy Ortiz have vaguely disappointed me, probably with more listens they will grow on me, Title Fight, Turnover, Sorority Noise, and Citizen have made some excellent and good albums, Metz have evolved, Hop Along have moved beyond freak folk and Krill have kept up with math-pop. What did Pile do and add? They took Fugazi and made them dirty and clean, they stayed true to their American roots without making the folk tinges that emerge at the right moments trivial (in Mr. Fish tell me if you hear a passage from a De André song!), stops and turns, abrupt restarts, bumpy roads scattered with surprises, this is the Pile album, one of the absolute albums of 2015.

America in its marrow lives and manages to have its own identity, while the English have exploded after the rave revolution and are still wandering in search of an identity, scattered around the world like dragon balls.