Top 10 of ’14
Goodness gracious, what a year for music. As the editor of the arts section, here is my inevitable year-end list, featuring some of the most enjoyable, innovative, and important records of 2014. I’d like to stress two things; that these are in no particular order, and that I’d like to stress important in the sense of creative offering and social relevancy. For a year like 2014, where “awareness” seems to be the recurring theme, these albums all work, to some degree, as a sort of time capsule of the year’s ideologically-charged mainstream narrative.
St. Vincent – St Vincent
With one the most enthralling LPs and live concert experiences of the year, St. Vincent (Annie Clark) is, essentially, on top of the world. In her fourth album, St. Vincent, Annie Clark intervenes with high-art and pop in a truly 21st century manner – the electric guitar, always a kind of monolith in rock/pop music, is given a breath of new life as an instrument with fresh implications of engaging the organic with the synthetic.
Sun Ra and his Arkestra – In the Orbit of Ra
For the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer/poet/astral philosopher Sun Ra, this LP set, compiled by Arkestra reedman Marshall Allen, is hardly an exhaustive curating of Ra’s massive catalog, but it deftly works to paint a compelling portrait of his challenging, freewheeling music and political/philosophical urgency.
Flying Lotus – You’re Dead!
A thrilling meditation on death, jazz, and hip-hop, Flying Lotus’ fourth LP gets weird with its furious jazz passages, ethereal beats, and underlying afterlife narrative. Blending the organic with the synthetic, like St. Vincent mentioned before, is becoming increasingly difficult to do with revelance, and FlyLo strikes a brilliant harmony with You’re Dead.
Swans – To Be Kind
To Be Kind is more of a physical experience than anything, at least if listened to properly (i.e., painfully loud). In its two-hour-plus runtime, a thick, ubiquitous air of dread underlies the group’s bone-crushing percussives, and sweeping, visceral guitar-scapes. Its cohesive realization invites the listener to share in the record’s pitch-black, intangible suffering. While certainly not for everyone, Michael Gira and co. offer an album that is undeniably, one of the most rewarding and challenging listening experiences of the year.
FKA twigs – LP1
It’s difficult to discuss the music of FKA twigs (Tahliah Barnett) without discussing the challenging politics of sexuality present in her work. LP1 immerses an audience the way a great dancer would; a powerful, acrobatic sexuality permeates the album in its dense, engrossing production and gorgeous lyrical delivery. An importantly postmodern sense of self is established here, and it demands your attention.
Freddie Gibbs and Madlib – Piñata
Freddie Gibbs has clearly seen some shit. In what would initially seem like a mismatch, what with Madlib’s tendency towards the left-field, and Gibbs’ intensely visual braggadocio, Piñata operates like if the film Dolemite was cut on wax instead of film, drenched in 70s funk samples and visceral crime storytelling that make for one of the most cohesively realized hip-hop albums of the year.
Isaiah Rashad – Cilvia Demo
This not-quite full-length album by Isaiah Rashad proves, if anything, that Rashad can keep up with his fellow TDE heavyweights. However, the dream-like, meditative qualities of Cilvia Demo show a special grasp of hip-hop’s more cerebral side, punctuated with depression and 20-something anxieties. That’s not to say it’s entirely bleak – it seems that Rashad is well aware that he is a young man, and that things can, and will, change for the better.
Ought – More Than Any Other Day
This first album by Montreal post-punk outfit is in the same vein of punk as Television, Talking Heads, etc. – a sound marked by angular, intelligent guitar work and provoking, agitated lyrics permeates the album. Although none of them are actually from Montreal, it’s interesting to note how the group came together during Quebec’s Maple Spring in 2012, adding a sort of layer of “outside-looking-in” that makes sense of the group’s agitation and anarchic urgency.
Tinariwen – Emmaar
Nomads by both political and geographic necessity, this group of Malian Tuareg musicians seems to be in a consistently liminal zone of appropriating their desert culture for Western audiences while remaining true to their cultural identity. Fortunately, Emmaar is at once an incredible world music album, characterized by earthy polyrhythmic percussion and rich guitars, that emulate the sweltering desert heat but do not devalue the music for a novel spectacle of nomadism. This is as real as it gets.
Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2
Hard-hitting, relevant, and rightfully pissed-off, Killer Mike and El-P’s second outing as Run the Jewels continues the brash (but accurate) social commentary of its predecessor, and turns it up a few notches. More clear-cut in its goals and its production, Run the Jewels 2 is a powerful statement from the unlikely hip-hop duo, especially after the events and subsequent narrative of the Ferguson, MO case.