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76. This Is All Yours - alt-J (2014)

Alternative

Upon first listening to alt-J circa their debut album “An Awesome Wave” in 2012, it would have seemed like a long shot to predict the success they’d have throughout the rest of the decade. This album, which sounded beyond quirky at the time, remains their most radio-ready and easily their most accessible to date, by a pretty hefty margin. 2014’s This Is All Yours takes all of the idiosyncrasies that should have made alt-J’s hit debut album patently unmarketable and doubles down on them, abandoning any inkling of mainstream aspirations and instead delving headlong into a lush and vibrant fantasy world, defiantly outside the bounds of commercial viability.

The album functions largely as a soundtrack to a journey into the fictional land of Nara, a place which, in an alternate universe might be called Narnia. The track “Nara” even mentions Aslan, the lion deity of Narnia. The second of two successive intro tracks “Arrival in Nara” finds a female character being dragged into the ocean and drowning, only to awaken later smiling, having been transported to Nara. The album details her experiences there and her discovery of a novel variety of pure love.

Alt-J’s wiley signature sound first introduced on “An Awesome Wave” is all grown up here as they fully realize the extent of the weirdness they’re capable of and emphatically embrace it. Predictably, the two “least alt-J” songs on the album, “Every Other Freckle” and “Left Hand Free” became the lead singles. They’re great songs, even if they feel decidedly out of place within the context of the rest of the album, which seems not to notice their presence. You could hardly blame someone for hating “This is All Yours”, which quite deliberately avoids the palette of passive listeners and the pop-hungry public. But, if for no other reason, the purity of expression and individuality the album delivers is worthy of appreciation.

*image; cover art for the album This Is All Yours by the artist alt-J