Technical Sidenote: The past few years, I have been including embedded Spotify tracks, one from each album, but Spotify is increasingly become more and more difficult to just straight up play, so I am doing miniaturized Youtube windows for each embedded track. What this means: If you are reading this on your computer, it means nothing, the tracks will play fine, you may read and listen. If you are reading this on your phone, it means that the tracks will play (which I couldn't say for Spotify or Soundcloud) but it may popup as a new window, and if you minimize it, it will stop playing. This is a pain in the ass, but it is actually the best situation I could figure out for the mobile view, and really the only one that didn't glitch up my page. Get computers!
Easton Alert - I am going to post what Easton is doing throughout various times as I am writing this.
My buddy Andrew gave me a poster for 2014's Riot Fest in Humboldt Park, and I put it above my toilet, so every time I am going pee, or if I am brushing my teeth, I see the complete list of all the bands that were at Riot Fest, and every once in a while, I will just randomly download some music from a band that I have never heard of from the poster. This has yielded results of varying success, but the best gem I have gotten from that process was this album by Michigan post-hardcore band, La Dispute. Singer Jordan Dreyer's singing technique fluctuates between sing-speaking and screaming but consistently his lyrics are telling a story. A story of a tornado setting down in Hudsonville, or of a man falling through the ice of a lake and the thoughts that cross his mind as a fights to get out. Beautiful and violent all at once.
Favorite Song: Hudsonville, MI 1956
This year is the closest I have ever gotten to liking country music since I was belting out Friends in Low Places on the high school bus. But still, I hate country music, and the closest thing that I can even get to it is this Swedish Indie Folk duo (and maybe Angel Olsen, but we'll get to her later). The Söderberg sisters sing beautifully and powerfully over their guitar and keyboard, but also over the lushness of a 13 part orchestra. Spilling out sad tales of heartbreak on the road, and the listlessness of wanting to bail and be a waitress for the night. It's very pretty, and helped me get through some boring lulls of autumn.
Favorite Song: Cedar Lane
Easton Alert: Sleeping on his cardboard cube.
I pretty much use Wikipedia exclusively when I am trying to look up information for an album that I want to download, such as specifics of song names, years things were released, stuff like that. There's enough nerds out there that music pages usually are pretty accurate. But sometimes a band isn't famous enough for anyone to have created a page and then I usually wonder, "Where did I even hear of this band from?" and I reach no conclusion. Sometimes when I am at work, I will read about something that I want to listen to, and I save it in a draft email in my gmail account, and then when I get home later I download it, which results in me often not knowing where I even heard of a band. Naomi Punk is an example of both of these situations. The entire albums melts together like one long churning guitar riff, with breakdowns interspersed throughout, vocals muttered and uttered grimily over it all. And then there are a couple of tracks that are just guitar and drums churning over and over the same handful of notes, leading you into the next iteration of the same thing. This sounds tiresome, and it would be if the trick they were pulling over and over wasn't so entertaining to listen to. It's simplicity highlights every note from every instrument perfectly. I love noise.
Favorite Song: Television Man
This British four-piece makes catchy indie pop, with tinges of dream pop and shoegaze (my personal favorite two musical sub-genres to mix together). Now I realize that last sentence was pretty hipster douchey. And I apologize for that. But in this instance, it is a pretty good descriptor of what I am trying to say. The songs alternate between slow-paced and fast-paced, but luckily they achieve the same amount of musical success in both. There's not much else to say beyond, I love beautiful female vocals, and this album's covered in 'em. Also, this is a great album to listen to while showering, good for sing alongs.
Favorite Song: Tephra
Third great album in a row from The Horrors. Primary Colours was a classic, Skying was kind of depressing but I loved it at a depressing time in my life, so I was pretty much on board with all that biz. Luminous, on the other hand, is much more upbeat, I could definitely see lots of people dressed in black, wearing eyeliner dancing to this music, possibly they may have taken acid, but that's their secret, not yours. All ten tracks are solid on this album, with seven of them exceeding five minutes in playing time, The Horrors really know how to make a good dance track, with lots of little guitar break downs, and cray cray synths. The kind of music that goth kids that listen to Animal Collective would make, like if Animal Collective settled down a little bit.
Favorite Song: In and Out of Sight
These dudes are definitely my favorite Scottish band (sorry Franz Ferdinand). Slightly proggy, indie rock, lots of accents and stuff. When their last album came out I was working at the zoo and listening to it all the time while I was raking leaves and digging holes and that kind of stuff, and the whole time I was listening to that album, I'd always think, I love all these extended guitar solos and distant vocals, but I bet this could be better. And they went ahead, and they made it better. Unravelling is superior to it's predecessor in every way, the production is clearer, the guitars are all up in your grill, the pace changes are effective. Just a good, solid rock and roll album.
Favorite Song: Night Terror
I have to admit that female punk groups have a certain charm with me that doesn't quite translate with male punk bands. This fourth album from the Atlanta trio is pretty superior as far as punk records go. Every chorus is a shout along between the ladies in the band and the music is hypnotic at parts. Also, I'm pretty sure that Suck my Shirt is probably the best or worst album title of the year. You decide.
Favorite Song: Smother
Easton Alert: Cleaning himself by the radiator
My other slight glance in the direction of country this year, Angel Olsen's album took the indie world by force. Topping numerous best of lists at the end of the year, this album definitely has become the standard for music snobs to use as a gauge of how much you know. Well, guess what music snobs, I'm bout to outsnob you, I started listening to this album in February, way before any of you nerds had even started geeking out with each other about it. And I don't think it's the best album of the year, in fact, I think it's the 19th best album of the year. So take that! This indie folk masterpiece is definitely worth listening, intimate and inviting, Olsen's voice is almost a croon at times, and is the centerpiece of the album. Sometimes, these summaries don't really have anything to do with the album.
Favorite Song: High and Wild
After recording Interpol's previous eponymous album, bassist Carlos D bailed out, and Interpol became a trio. So what effect did this have on the band's music creation? Pretty much none, El Pintor is definitely the best of the post-Antics Interpol albums, but anyone thinking that Interpol was going to reinvent the wheel will be disappointed. The two main stylistic contributors continue to be Daniel Kessler's guitar and Paul Banks' vocals, the former melodic and simple, the latter fluctuating between a high yell and a deep whisper. If you like Interpol, you'll like this album.
Favorite Song: Twice as Hard (plus the video is all slow motion boxing)
The newest album from this San Francisco band is a trippy, sheen of dream poppy, psychedelic guitar jams and freak outs. The album consists of seven tracks, but the final four are just one long suite, each one feeding into the other. The vocals seem to be coming at you from inside a giant shell, so all you have to do is just close your eyes and let it wash over you and feel the meandering guitar wind its way around you, and basically then you can just forget about all of your worries and listen to some music, and maybe the world will be a little bit of a better place for this 37 minutes. It'll feel really nice. You'll tell people of your experience.
Favorite Song: Anon (Part II)
Oh, Com Truise, how I love you! You take crazy eighties sounds and mix them together into a wonderful jumble of beautiful dance music. I feel like all of Com Truise's music is covered in some kind of neon powder, and with every note that plinks and plunks around, some of the dust floats up into the air and then people that are dressed in colorful spandex with white headbands run through the dust, and everyone cheers all around and drinks champagne. I saw Com Truise at Lincoln Hall, and he was straight up rocking the teal turtleneck and gold chain, like a boss. This is some good music to listen to when you are playing video games also, it fits right in with pretty much every game.
Favorite Song: Wasat
Liars is a weird band. I am willing to admit that. But they also make the most original music I have ever heard. They use all kinds of weird noises and run them through synthesizers, and run them backwards and then put a thick old beat behind all the craziness going on, and then you find yourself stomp dancing in a room filled with smoke and craziness. Their previous album was my favorite album of 2012, so Mess had quite the shoes to fill, but where WIXIW was subdued, Mess is a bit more branching, going in more exuberant directions than the previous album. Still getting good results though, even when the anonymous scary voice starts the album saying "Take my pants off, use my socks, smell my socks, eat my face off." Obviously things get pretty crazy.
Favorite Song: Pro Anti Anti
Little Dragon is the main component to one of my favorite Gorillaz songs, "Empire Ants" and so I gave this album a spin, and it was well worth it. Full of synths and dance beats but soft thumping beats. Little Dragon is almost trip hop at some points, but always manage to sound a little more full than your typical trip hop unit does. Also Klapp Klapp is one of the best songs to come out this year, and the video is super awesome. Check it out.
Favorite Song: Klapp Klapp
13) A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Sea When Absent
A bit earlier, I mentioned that I love dream pop and that I love shoegaze, and you'll find me camped out, making snacks at whatever junction the two may meet. While Fear of Men met the two together and ended up with a product that definitely resonated as Indie Rock, the combination of the genres for A Sunny Day in Glasgow comes out in a less crowded area, more along the lines of shoegaze (think My Bloody Valentine, if you could actually hear all of the instruments): the guitar pedals in and out over the consistent bassline, but then at some point in every song, the guitar goes bonkers and hits up some super fast pace as the song reaches its crescendo. The vocals are the most beautiful port in the storm of this album, but due to its dense nature, and meandering style, every time I listen to it, I like it for different reasons. I can honestly say that I still don't think I have reached the level of appreciation for this album that I will reach in the future, but I would recommend it if you are getting tired of the same ole indie scene.
Favorite Song: In Love with Useless (The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of Passing)
El-P and Killer Mike can do no wrong. This album is the sound of two performers perfectly in sync, their verses bounce off each other with complete harmony, both bringing the same level of intensity. Every song on this album sounds like an anthem to the disenfranchised, with El and Mike standing outside inciting riots. Not to mention how amazing El-P is at producing; this album is just as lovely as his solo venture Cancer4Cure. This is really the only rap album that resonated with me at all this year, but it sure is a doozy. And while most songs are about injustices in the USA, they also made the dirtiest song I have ever heard in Love Again (Akinyele Back), with the first two verses spit by El and Mike, and then the final verse by guest Gangsta Boo, giving us a female version of the sexual explicitness of the track. It's just great. Also, they performed on Conan and it was great: Run The Jewels on Conan
Favorite Song: Oh My Darling Don't Cry
I am not usually a big fan of male singer-songwriters (except Sufjan! Much love, Sufjan!), however!!!! this album by Seattle artist Damien Jurado is just lovely. Jurado's voice is soft over the acoustic guitar at times, but then at others he howls like an injured man yelling for help in a forest, and then also the thump of bass following in the background: Indie Folk at it's finest. A bunch of the songs on this album are named Silver Person, example: Silver Donna, Silver Timothy, Silver Malcolm. Also, there are a bunch of semi-psychedelic freakouts throughout the biz, it's prime.
Favorite Song: Silver Timothy
Les Sins is a side project pseudonym for Chaz Bundick aka Toro Y Moi. Bundick has stated that Les Sins is his "dance" side project, so its basically just Toro Y Moi, but with no vocals, which is not a bad thing. All of Toro Y Moi's albums have been dance albums, and Les Sins is basically an avenue for him to lean a little more towards the clubs and indulge his love of busting a move. While Bundick's voice is mostly absent from the album, there are plenty of vocal samples floating throughout, with some nods to J Dilla's production style. With this album, and the previous three Toro Y Moi albums, Bundick hasn't missed a beat once, growing with each production, and never disappointing.
Favorite Song: Can't pick one, they are all good, I am just going to randomly pick a song to link to down there, because I do not have the ability to make this one tiny decision.
Thom Yorke, makes music I like. Pretty much everything that he releases, whether it be with Radiohead, Atoms for Peace, or simply under his own name, I generally love it, and I've got it all on my iTunes. Except for The Bends, I don't know why, I just don't like that album. Tomorrow's Modern Boxes is a little bit of a muted version of Radiohead, which is pretty much in line with every side project of Yorke's career. The first three tracks are downbeat, and then The Mother Lode picks up the pace a bit, just in time to really slow down for Truth Ray, five minutes of minimal electronica with Yorke lamenting slowly throughout. This is followed by instrumental There Is No Ice (For My Drink), which is a really great track. All in all, this is a really good album to listen to while your reading: it allows me to concentrate.
Favorite Song: The Mother Lode
Easton Alert: Sleeping in a box from Christmas
My favorite hardcore (post-hardcore?) album of the year. The debut LP from the Syracuse band is only twenty three minutes long, but it is packed with more than the running time's share of power and energy. Singer Meredith Graves screams her way through the raucous guitars and the reverb and the feedback and the punishing drums in eight tiny little treasures of noise rock blasting through your headphones. I always have this album on my phone because if the train is especially loud, I can always turn this on and it will drown out all the train sound and highway noise, and I can just lean back and feel my hearing get a tiny bit worse.
Favorite Song: Bells
This five track EP is longer than Perfect Pussy's entire album. The collaboration between DJ duo Royksopp and singer/perfect human Robyn is like one long duet between robots. Robyn's voice is the only non-distorted part of the entire album, but it pulsates and moves along at such a crazy pace. The first song Monument is slow and grows and grows until you get to the manic energy of Sayit, where Robyn literally duets with something along the lines of a Speak and Spell. This is followed up by the poppiest track on the disc, Do It Again, but as is often the case with Robyn, it's the best kind of pop. Then comes the electro-ballad Every Little Thing You Do. Every track on this EP is perfect.
Favorite Song: Sayit
The debut album (hence the title) from Norwegian DJ Todd Terje is some delightful space opera disco. Like it would be the music that would be playing if you were in a disco, doing some blow with a hot blonde in the bathroom stall, and then you go outside to have a cigarette and while you are in the alley you realize that the disco is on a space ship and you are actually orbiting Saturn, and while you register that, you go back inside, do some more blow, find that blonde and then start dancing. Yeah, that's exactly what this album is like. And then after the night is over, you go outside and see the space ship has an artificial beach and you look at the rings floating through the sky as you drink a Pina Colada in the sand.
Favorite Song: Inspector Norse
After Wye Oak's last album, Jenn Wasner decided she didn't want to play guitar anymore, something that would seem like a shock since that album was so guitar driven. Now she plays the bass, and Andy Stack play drums with one hand and keyboard with the other and the new product definitely sounds different from their previous work, but the new sound is more like new wave and it is pretty great. The keyboards accentuate Wasner's voice better than the guitar and drums of the previous album. The last album sounded like a thunderstorm, this album sounds like the sunny morning after the storm, with the puddles slowly shrinking and everyone has their head up and are looking forward to their day. Also, their first single The Tower is my favorite video of the year (possible tie with Turn Down for What)
Favorite Song: The Tower
Easton Alert: Hiding in between the shower curtain and the wall of the tub
The first album released under Albarn's actual name, rather than as Gorillaz or as a part of Blur, Everyday Robots is mostly a sullen undertaking. Where each Gorillaz album was a different approach to keyboard driven dance music, this solo venture is almost exclusively slow piano music, except for the part every song where keyboards explode in your face. The production by Albarn and Richard Russell is really what makes this album so lovely. Albarn's voice is full of earnest angst and the music floats around every thing he sings. The first few songs sound like a man slowly making his way through life, before the outlier of happiness that is Mr Tembo springs through, and then we get led into the second half of the disc with a short instrumental called Parakeet, that sounds like a wind up toy playing with a computer. Everyday Robots fluctuates so quickly between the soft acoustic guitar of The History of a Cheating Heart to the British Gospel Eno-featured Heavy Seas of Love. It's great. Just listen to it.
Favorite Song: Hostiles is my favorite, but I'm gonna put the video for Everyday Robots because Hostiles is kind of a bummer song and the video for Robots is cool.
First Aphex Twin album in about a decade, but it is a tour de force. I tend to find Aphex Twin albums ranging between mostly good (The first Ambient album, Richard D. James album) to completely unlistenable (second Ambient album), but this is actually my favorite Aphex Twin album to date. Drum and bass all the way, with glitches and bumps throughout, it is definitely Aphex Twin's most accessible music to date. But I guess when you take a thirteen year break in between releases, you must have a good backlog of material to cherry pick from. It's hard to describe this album with words, it's maybe like if a computer and a robot were having a discussion but instead of using words, they were using simple beats and sampling them over each other in a looped conversational pattern, so that each new input into the conversation layered over the last part which continued to play. Oh, and one of the songs kind of sounds like the music from the Vegas level in Sonic the Hedgehog.
Favorite Song: Circlont6a
Aphex Twin -CIRCLONT6A [syrobonkus mix] from Source on Vimeo.
I have listened to this album so much this past year that I just spent the last half hour listening to it and resetting the Equalizer settings on my iTunes. And now that shit sounds tight! Anyway, I love, love, love this album. It sounds like a bunch of chicks, smoking cigarettes in a small round room, playing music, and just destroying people, like other people just being turned into the ashes in the ashtray. That doesn't really make sense, but it paints a picture. The self titled album expands on every area explored on The Fool, Warpaint's prior release. The bass and drums lead every song, if the song is slow, the bass and drum are going at a slog, barely keeping up, if the song is upbeat, the drums are leading the way. On the majority of the tracks, the vocals are sung by multiple members of the band at the same time, giving all the songs an air of the playground at school. I enjoy the many soft break down dance beats lingering through each song. So good, almost the best album of the year. Almost.....
Favorite Song: Hi
The album starts with a three minute beat turned into a guitar solo. It then follows that with another hour of amazing dance music. The baby of former LCD Soundsystemer Nancy Whang, and John MacLean, this album is packed full of bumping dance beats, five of the tracks have running times longer than six minutes. To be perfectly honest, I love every single thing about this album. No matter where I am: If I'm at home, on the bus, walking in the snow, I always start dancing when I listen to this album. In fact, I am dancing right now as I am writing this, it makes it hard to type. Whang sings in a flat fashion, sounding like one of the Robert Palmer dancers finally stepping to the Mic. I mean Palmer's dead, so it seems like it's finally time for those girls to make their move. While definitely based in modern danceclubs, the entire album sounds like it was created for the mid-eighties, all synths and keyboard. Every song is a beautiful gem that I will forever treasure.
Favorite Song: Here I Am
And there you have it: Jeremy's Favorite Albums of the Year. I hope you enjoyed this article, maybe listened to a song or two. Honestly, I will just be happy if anyone even makes it through this whole thing to read this last paragraph. Long Live Don Draper.
