Brandon’s Favorite Music of 2014

I love December for a number of reasons. Here in Florida, it isn’t cold, so I love the dichotomy of seeing fake snowmen in the yard while wearing shorts and flip flops. I love Christmas music. I love buying a bottle of apple cider from the grocery store and then only pour myself one glass and then forgetting about the bottle for two months in the fridge. But most of all, I love December because it means I get to reflect on my favorite music of the year and create a “Best of the year list.” I put a lot of thought into this each year because it becomes a benchmark that I can use in the future to chart my evolving tastes. I do these for my own benefit, because frankly, I assume nobody is actually going to listen to any of these based on my recommendation, but I can assure you that if you do, you will certainly find something new to enjoy.
So here we go. Two lists. My favorite 4 EPs of the year and my Top Ten albums of the year.

 

Top 4 EPs of 2014

4) Saint Pepsi – Gin City

This EP falls somewhere between danceable pop, disco, and R&B. Each track is awesome and a difficult to describe combination of styles. Saint Pepsi has been one of my “artists to watch” this year because everything he’s put out has been A+ in my book.

 

3) Royksopp & Robyn – Do It Again

Coming in like a set of Top 40 bangers from an alternate reality, Royksopp & Robyn fused their sounds to great effect here. Sure, it’s poppy in places (see: Do It Again), but there’s a lot of weird, bold stuff going on here.

Check out the opening track, Monument, a nearly 10 minute epic ode to life, death and creating a legacy, featuring both ambient soundscapes and a sax solo. Because why not?

I didn’t expect to like this release. I haven’t really gotten into much else by either of these artists, but together, they made one of the most compelling small batch of songs I heard in 2014.

 

2) MSNRA – Nocturnal

Gainesville’s MSNRA brought it this year. I’ve seen this hip-hop group a few times and every time, I’m entranced by their chilled out vibes. The MCs in this group actually have something life affirming to say, which is always a big plus in my book when I’m listening to rap. This EP is my favorite local music release of 2014 and I can’t wait for them to release a full-length album.

 

1) Shy Girls – Timeshare

This is kind of cheating because this EP came out in late 2013, but I didn’t hear it until early 2014, so I’m going to bend the rules this one time because this release is GREAT. Shy Girls is straight up R&B. Sexy, provocative and beautiful. If you dug Rhye’s debut album like I did, you need to listen to this RIGHT NOW. Every track on here is a single but it also works as a cohesive listening experience when taken as a whole. In 2013 I learned to love R&B and I’m glad I did because it prepared me for Timeshare.

 

Top 10 Albums of 2014

This year it was a challenge to slim this  list down to just 10 albums. Normally I do a Top 20, but I figured I’d trim the fat this year and look at what 10 albums I think I’ll listen to the most 5 or 10 years from now. Unfortunately, that means bands like the sparse dub of Greg Gives Peter Space, or the intricate and epic Death Vessel, the smooth-as-silk Glass Animals or the always reliable Roots didn’t make the cut. As always, there was so much good music in 2014!

 

10) Beck – Morning Phase

When Beck announced that he was releasing a follow-up to his 2002 album Sea Change, I was ecstatic. Sea Change is my favorite Beck record. Morning Phase was this follow up record. I was not disappointed. This is a lush, downbeat Sunday morning record that makes me feel wistful every time I put it on.

 

9) Tycho – Awake

Awake is the only instrumental album on this list, but man is it a great one. This record is aptly named because when I listen to it, I imagine the sun is just breaking over the horizon and I’m witnessing a beautiful sunrise.

 

8) Jenny Lewis – The Voyager

Jenny Lewis is one of the most under-rated songwriters in pop music today. Her lyrics are, as always, searing and razor sharp while seemingly sweet. Musically, she’s fun and catchy. This was my album of the summer and I look forward to listening to it for summers to come.

 

7) First Aid Kit – Stay Gold

First Aid Kit was a band that I had consistently ignored year after year because I felt that their music was trying too hard to be a pretty modern folk group. At this point, I don’t even know what that means and I realize how pretentious that opinion was. I heard the song Silver Lining off of Stay Gold and I thought “Whoa! Where did this band come from?” This album isn’t that far off from First Aid Kit’s previous records, but it has sharper teeth, if the metaphor carries. This record is the kind of folk-rock that is equally perfect for sitting around the campfire or taking a long road trip.

 

6) Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings – Give The People What They Want

Go listen to the song Retreat. Seriously. Just go listen to it. I can’t say anything about Sharon Jones or this album that aren’t summarized in that 3 and a half minute instant classic.

 

5) Kishi Bashi – Lighght

I love baroque pop. Exhibit A: Sufjan. Exhibit B: Kishi Bashi. Kishi Bashi’s music is unceasingly uplifting, transcendent and fun. This record is full of violin flourishes and Phillip Glassian compositional touches, but at its core, it is an album of sweet songs that express the joy of being alive. I can’t listen to this album without smiling.

 

4) Caribou – Our Love

Oh man. Our Love. This record is dancy and heavy and has a way of getting under your skin in the best way possible. I love that there are so many nuanced textures to what is, at face value, a fairly straightforward electronic dance record. I can’t stop listening to this album and I’ve never had that effect from a Caribou record before.

 

3) Hundred Waters – The Moon Rang Like A Bell

Although I don’t think they’d call themselves a Gainesville band anymore, as they now live in L.A., Hundred Waters is one of 352’s biggest musical success stories in recent years, and they deserve it. This avant-pop group specializes in a blend of folk and electronic music, wherein you are just as likely to hear a flute solo as a synth breakdown, although this album is heavier on the electronics than their 2012 debut. Their music is ethereal and gorgeous, and I can’t overstate my love for singer Nicole Miglis’ voice. This is not an album designed for passive listening as there are so many working parts that don’t reveal themselves unless you’re paying attention. It has been fun watching their meteoric rise from obscurity and I look forward to seeing where they go next.

 

2) Ty Segall – Manipulator

Manipulator was easily my biggest surprise of 2014, and my love of this album is well-documented. I tend to find Ty Segall’s records full of great, rough and raw rock concepts, but I never really get into them because they all feel so slapdash and unrefined. Manipulator shows what Segall is capable of when he takes his time. I think this record has a place in the pantheon of great psychedelic and glam rock records with those of Syd Barrett and David Bowie. In all honesty, I don’t tend to like guitar-heavy rock, but this album is so good it overcame that personal preference. If you’ve ever liked a rock album from the late-60’s or 70’s, you need to listen to this as soon as possible.

 

1) Sisyphus – Sisyphus

Surprise! Not really a surprise. You know me. Anything Sufjan Stevens related will top any list I make. As with Ty Segall, I’ve written about this album at length. It’s a weird one, this collaboration between a deadpan oddball rapper, a composer of beautifully dark dreamlike music, and Sufjan, whose pedigree includes traditional American folk, intricately composed electronic freakouts and ten Christmas albums. Look, I’m not saying this album is perfect, but it is extremely ambitious and very strange while staying immensely engaging. Either you’ll love it or you’ll hate it. I love it.

 

Sisyphus // Sisyphus

Sisyphus is a collaboration between the orchestral and highly literate indie-folk songwriter Sufjan Stevens, the up-and-coming electronic and beats artist/producer Son Lux, and the rapper Serengeti. Their 2014, self-titled album is my favorite new album of the year so far.

Full Disclosure: This was written by a huge fan of Sufjan’s work. I’m moderately aware of Son Lux’s output (I loved his 2013 record Lanterns), and I know almost nothing about Serengeti’s work outside of his collaborations with this group. So keep in mind, my frame of reference going into this is “how is Sisyphus going to fit into the Sufjan canon?”

In 2012, these three artists released an EP under the moniker S/S/S called “Beak & Claw.” It came and went without much fuss, barely making a splash outside of the world of the hardcore fans of each of the individual artists involved. Overall, the EP is a mixed bag that relies heavily on the odd lyrical prowess of Serengeti. His rap style took me a long time to get used to. On the EP, he maintains a flat, inflectionless tone while dropping strange character studies and I, for one, had never heard anything like it. Admittedly, I was in it for Sufjan, and tracks like Museum Day gave me my “fix” because he was featured prominently on the choruses. And then there’s the weird, but ultimately charming, song about going to prom with the Octomom, a reference that already dates the song.

Overall the EP didn’t do it for me. I liked it, but something about the effort always left me unsatisfied. So when a collaborative album was announced under the name Sisyphus, I was unsure what to think. However, the first single Calm It Down assured me that, while this would be unlike anything I’ve heard from Sufjan or Son Lux, it would be an incredibly interesting and, likely, moving experience. Calm It Down is the sort of song that takes the listener on a journey. It starts as a thumping list of reasons to chill your actions out, but shifts about halfway into a semi-ethereal back-and-forth that typifies the sort of conversation that you have with yourself in your most vulnerable moments. There’s that voice that says, “I cause all of my problems” (“Mine is the pressure, mine is the pain”) versus the voice of reason (“you need to calm it down”).

There’s plenty of truly beautiful moments on this album. Take Me, I Won’t Be Afraid and Hardly Hanging On are fairly straightforward electronic ballads. If you like Sufjan Steven’s music, you owe it to yourself to listen to these three songs at the very least. They are highlights that could have been dropped right into the middle of Age of Adz.

Sisyphus “Take Me” (NSFW) from Ryan Dickie on Vimeo.

Something about the delivery that Serengeti employs on the Sisyphus record works much better than it did on S/S/S. There’s an intensity that he brings that lends the album an urgency that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. When he’s not rapping about the typical things rappers go on about on tracks like Booty Call, he shares personal and intimate slices of life like the dysfunctional family narrative described in Dishes In The Sink.

And then there are the weirder cuts like Alcohol and the aforementioned Booty Call. (When the tracklist dropped, I was stunned that there would be a Sufjan album with a track called Booty Call on it.) Almost 100% at odds with the more vulnerable, personal moments sprinkled through the record are these beats and lines that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Kanye West track (“Let me get a condom, put it on my Mazda”), but that’s part of the appeal of this record. The collaboration between the three of these artists covers so much conceptual and musical territory that you literally cannot tell what you’re going to hear next.

For the most part, the record sounds like the halfway point between Son Lux’s most recent album Lanterns and Sufjan’s album Age of Adz. The production on the record is insanely well done. There’s this cavalcade of ideas, but every beat, every electronic flourish, feels like it’s where it needs to be at any given moment. Ultimately, this album represents the work of three artists who do not have much in common throwing idea after idea against a wall and seeing what sticks. It occasionally feels like a tug-of-war, but the three artists’ styles meld together incredibly well on this record. It is almost impossible to say where one member’s influence ends and another’s begins. And even though it isn’t a perfect record, I consider this album to be an overall success because of how solid the collaboration is.

The thing about Sisyphus is that, even if it doesn’t sound like your “cup of tea,” I implore you to give it one listen-through. I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like it. There is no doubt in my mind that you’ll be truly engaged by something that this mixed bag has to offer.

Highlights: Calm It Down, Rhythm Of Devotion, Take Me, I Won’t Be Afraid

-Brandon Telg-