2014 wasn’t the year punk exploded or that grunge broke into the mainstream. It’s hard to imagine we’ll ever distill an entire year down in that way ever again. Yet it was memorable for many other reasons. We latched on. We turned down, but for what? Because we were happy. Amen, aaaaaaa-men. Haters were gonna hate, hate, hate, hate anyway.
We were all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. Between “Anaconda,” “Booty” and even Mastodon’s “The Motherload,” it was the best year in music for rear ends since Sir Mix-A-Lot made his emphatic declaration that he enjoys a juicy double.
After hearing more than 200 albums this year, here are my 25 favorites from 2014:
25. Kairon, IRSE!
Ujubasajuba
Self-released | Shoegaze | Bandcamp
Strange Journey, Volume Three
Bad Taste | Southern hip-hop | Spotify
Alvvays
Polyvinyl | Sunshine pop | Spotify
Transgender Dysphoria Blues
Total Treble | Pop punk | Spotify
Familiars
Anti | Dream pop | Spotify
Clearing the Path to Ascend
Neurot | Doom metal | Spotify
Too Bright
Matador | Art pop | Spotify
Avantgarde | Atmospheric black metal | Spotify
Animism
Six Shooter | Throat singing | CBC Music
You’re Dead!
Warp | Wonky, nu-jazz | Spotify
Ruins
Kranky | Ambient | Spotify
My Favourite Faded Fantasy
Warner Bros. | Chamber folk | Spotify
LP1
Young Turks | Alternative R&B | Spotify
Manipulator
Drag City | Psychedelic rock | YouTube
Piñata
Madlib Invazion | Gangsta rap | Spotify
Are We There
Jagjaguwar | Indie folk | Spotify
Jersey girl Sharon Van Etten doesn’t write happy, poppy love songs. “Break my legs so I won’t walk to you, cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you,” Van Etten sings on “Your Love Is Killing Me,” one of many songs on Are We There documenting the end of a relationship. Van Etten wears her broken heart on her sleeve and her disarming voice makes her vulnerability blow past the listeners’ defenses. On her fourth album, she’s refined her craft, making declarations such as the one from “Your Love Is Killing Me” land with a proficiency others can only hope to match. After 2010’s Epic and 2012’s Tramp, it’s tempting to think Van Etten may just be this good — and to entertain the delightful possibility that she still hasn’t made her best record.
It’s Album Time
Olsen | Nu-disco | Spotify
In 2014, there’s lilttle reason Norwegian musician Todd Terje’s genre of preference nu-disco, which bends house back toward the ’70s should generate one of the year’s most solid efforts. It’s Album Time owes a debt to last year’s Grammy-winning Daft Punk slab Random Access Memories for opening that window, but Terje needs few favors when it comes to crafting songs. He moves fluidly between the irresistible dance of “Strandbar” to the album’s centerpiece, “Johnny and Mary,” which flies in former Roxy Music vocalist Bryan Ferry to deepen its spectral reflection. That's a surprising grasp of tone from a debut effort. Liking It's Album Time also comes caked in seven layers of irony. Future generations may appreciate It’s Album Time without it, but in 2014, that helps fuel its popularity. Regardless, Terje's craft kind be denied.
Our Love
Merge | Deep house | Spotify
Canada’s Caribou crafted Our Love more than a decade into his career and it shows the wisdom that comes to a songwriter with age, the ability and urge to obscure meanings and lose the listener in the labyrinth. Everything slides by with a melancholy sheen. Caribou puts up his defenses, an echo effect leaving his vocals swimming in the stream, giving the sense we can only see them from land and watch them float by. That leaves Caribou with an air of mystery, giving listeners multiple ways to approach his songs and the turns they take, which is another strength of Our Love. While Caribou digs deep, he still makes Our Love enjoyable, keeping the beats from slinking into repetition and dullness.
Syro
Warp | Acid techno | Spotify
The mid-2010s are the right time for Richard James, the brains behind the name Aphex Twin, to emerge from hibernation. With the rise in all varieties of electronic dance music, it only makes sense for a man who helped pave the way for so many of them to make his return. But Syro doesn’t land in the top 10 simply because it reminds us of the turn of the millennium, raves and X. Aphex Twin works more like a classical composer on Syro, giving movements and sections to “XMAS_EVET10 (Thanaton3 Mix)” as it stretches past the 10-minute mark. Bleeps, bloops and little snippets of sound dot the record, as “Syro u473t8+e (Piezoluminescence Mix)” is he serious with these track titles? shows all of them gasping for expression. He didn’t need to put a blimp in the air to announce his return, but Syro doesn’t take any half-measures.
St. Vincent
Loma Vista | Art rock | Spotify
Annie Clark sits atop a throne on the cover of St. Vincent as the high goddess of rock. That’s no accident 2014 was the year Clark reigned supreme. With her fried silver hair, Clark played "Saturday Night Live," assumed the role of Kurt Cobain for a few songs during Nirvana’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and, if you saw her live show this year, you could feel that sense that this was her moment. Clark captured the zeitgeist with the likes of “Digital Witness,” a hit that showed swagger and confidence while also making a statement about social media. But the most powerful moment and the one that shows Clark knows her power comes in the closing minutes of “Huey Newton,” when she sheds the song’s woozy synth line for high-octane shredding against a veil of ghosty backing vocals. Clark’s craft has always been difficult to classify, but whatever it is, it’s hard to imagine her doing it any better than St. Vincent.
Run the Jewels 2
Mass Appeal | Hardcore hip-hop | Spotify
“The jewel runners, top tag team for two summers,” raps Killer Mike on the opening track of Run the Jewels 2 and it’s hard to argue with him. For the second straight year, the Atlanta/Brooklyn duo released an album for free, with the newest slab puffing up the things that made the debut great humor, honesty and brutal beats from El-P. The pair digs into deeper emotional territory on RTJ2, with Mike reflecting on his days selling cocaine, but he’s also able to pivot and deliver some of the record's silliest moments. This is a duo that has a cat-inspired remix of this album in the works, after all. Mike speaking out about the shooting death of Michael Brown helped raise the group’s profile, but this record would’ve risen above the competition on its own.
Benji
Caldo Verde | Contemporary folk | Spotify
Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek made headlines this year as a curmudgeonly reprobate, shooting his mouth off about The War on Drugs at a festival, then pushing the “feud” into the red by recording a song about it and asking the band to perform it with him. All of the sensationalism around that obscured the fact that Benji is one of the year’s best albums precisely because it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Kozelek sings in his tempered, mumbly tone, confessing everything from the deaths of relatives to losing his virginity to catching up with Ben Gibbard at a show in Berkeley by The Postal Service. Although the song structures should be familiar to anyone who’s heard Kozelek before, his piercing reflection, out into the world and into himself, has never yielded results this confessional and honest.
Encarnado
Self-released | Vanguarda Paulista | Official site
More than 20 years into her singing career, Juçara Marçal of São Paolo, Brazil, issued her first solo record, Encarnado ("Incarnate"). Marçal doubles down with frequent collaborator Kiko Dinucci as well as Rodrigo Campos to cut a record unlike few others in 2014, mixing samba and Latin sounds with the math rock of the likes of American groups such as Slint or Minus the Bear. Dinucci and Campos fire volleys of jagged rhythms and dissonance back and forth as Marçal emotes above. Death, revenge and pain hang over Encarnado in its lyrical themes (as far as Google Translate says, anyway). It’s easy to overlook the fact that the album is devoid of percussion. Encarnado is a bold reminder of the way great music can transcend language barriers and international borders.
To Be Kind
Young God | Experimental rock | Spotify
Name another group that closed shop only to come back years later and make better and more important records than it did the first time around. That’s the feat Swans has achieved with To Be Kind, which continues the boundary pushing the group did with 2012’s The Seer. They’ve only gotten better at it, but they’ve stayed verbose one of To Be Kind’s 10 tracks stretches more than 34 minutes. At two hours, To Be Kind is not for the faint of heart or someone just looking to turn on a record and dance. It’s an immersive, demanding experience, which is a good way to describe most Swans albums. But Michael Gira and company only seem to age like wine, which is a gift few in the music industry seem to have.
Black Messiah
RCA | Neo-soul | Spotify
There’s no hyperbole in saying Black Messiah was one of the most-anticipated albums since humans started anticipating albums. Not long after Virginia’s D’Angelo cut a neo-soul masterpiece, 2000’s Voodoo, a nasty slice of sweaty, grimy late-night soul, he vanished for nearly 15 years.
Drugs, trouble with the law and a perfectionist streak pushed the project formerly known as James River further down the road until it may never happen.
Yet when Black Messiah came, it appeared at the right moment.
D’Angelo needed this record to come out in 2014, not to wait until next spring. It was an explosive year for social politics feminism stepped toward the mainstream thanks to the likes of Emma Watson, Taylor Swift and Anita Sarkeesian. We talked about privacy after hackers unleashed a cascade of stolen photos of celebrity women in undress.
But the issue that got D’Angelo off the bench was that our post-racial society isn’t quite as harmonious as we’d like to think. The Ferguson, Missouri, shooting death of African-American teenager Michael Brown and the grand jury decision not to charge white police officer Darren Wilson were what sparked D’Angelo to end his long silence and, within weeks, Black Messiah appeared.
Protests raged across the nation in response to the decision not to charge Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo, the white officer who was not indicted in the death of African-American Eric Garner. D’Angelo chose to make voice heard in the best way he knew how.
Black Messiah was that statement. “All we wanted was a chance to talk / ‘Stead we only got outlined in chalk,” D’Angelo sings on “The Charade,” the record’s most politically charged effort.
It’s hard not to look on “1000 Deaths” as an allegory, seeing a soldier’s hesitance to march into the war as symbolic of the fight raging in the streets during the past month.
Despite Black Messiah’s connection to the time in which it was released, it feels timeless, too, thanks, in part, to the neo-soul genre in which it plies itself. The record reads as a modern day Marvin Gaye effort, combining the socially conscious while also celebrating sexuality, as the explicit “Sugah Daddy” demonstrates.
No album is worth waiting nearly 15 years, but it’s hard to imagine D’Angelo picking his spot to finally reappear much better than he did with Black Messiah.
2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008
Banner turntable photo by Michelle Hawkins-Thiel