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Kyle Bobby Dunn & The Infinite Sadness
I am fairly certain that this triple album is a lock for the most aptly named release of the year, as it is both unrelentingly melancholy and seemingly infinite (it clocks in at over two hours).  It is also excellent, as Dunn is one of the most reliably great ambient/minimalist drone artists.  While there is admittedly a somewhat exasperating interchangeability to these 19 songs, the sameness and epic length of The Infinite Sadness mostly work in Dunn's favor, as being sucked into an endless, dreamy loop can be quite a pleasant and mesmerizing experience in its own right.
For a triple-album, Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness is remarkably easy to summarize, as it truly is a prolonged variation on a very simple and constrained motif: billowing, gently undulating swells of blurred quasi-orchestral sounds.  The closest kindred spirit is unquestionably Stars of the Lid, as the two artists share both a pastoral bent and a palette of primarily string- and brass-like textures.  In some important ways, however, Dunn has chosen a different path, opting for floating bittersweet reveries rather than compositions with overtly apparent arcs.  Dunn's songs certainly shift and evolve in their own way, but in more of a smoke- or cloud-like drift than in a clear path towards a destination.
As with most art, the beauty of Dunn's work lies in the execution, as these pieces tend to unfold in a way that feels like something organic and alive, yet also vaguely unreal and hallucinatory.  Kyle is also a genius at subtlety, a trait that is perhaps best embodied in the album's centerpiece "Rue de Guy-Mathieu," as Dunn's two melodic threads seamlessly interweave to create fleeting complex harmonies and dissonances.  That piece also features the buried hiss of cars driving along rainy streets, adding a welcome sense of place and mystery to an already blearily evocative atmosphere.  "Rue de Guy-Mathieu" also highlights another notable aspect of Dunn's work: this album is best experienced LOUD, as that is the ideal way to become fully absorbed and appreciate Kyle's many small-scale intricacies.
While I certainly prefer the pieces with darker, more complicated moods like "Rue de Guy-Mathieu" and "Saison Triste on Lac of Baies," there truly is not a weak piece in the bunch and Infinite Sadness is a certainly strong candidate for Dunn's best album.  I do have some issues with it, however, even if they are highly subjective.  For one, Dunn is a bit too pastoral and texturally monochromatic for me to fully embrace–I prefer some buried sharp edges in my drone.  Secondly, Dunn seems like a darkly funny and complicated guy, as this album is apparently the fruit of a long period of "reflecting heavily on the gorgeous feet of a certain French woman and binging on strong beers and cheese."  While the lengthy, semi-narrative song titles certainly allude to restlessness, romantic despair, black humor, and (of course) foot fetishism, very little of that comes through in the actual music and I wish it did (though I suppose a triple LP epic of melancholy drone is itself a monument to obsessiveness and long hours spent alone).  In any case, Kyle set out to make the album that he wanted to make, not the album that I wanted him to make, so my minor kvetching is completely my own: with Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness, Dunn has crafted a near-flawless tour de force of Kyle Bobby Dunn music.
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