Pazz & Jop 2014

I voted in Pazz & Jop this year! As a former student of the old polls I took it pretty seriously, and in particular did my best to vote for actual singles, whatever that means anymore. (Sort of like Raymond Carver, I kept asking, “Are These Actual Singles?”) I was certain that “25 Bucks,” released as a single in April, would make a big splash in the singles poll, but was quite wrong.

Village Voice also published one of the comments I sent them, about Perfume Genius, and I immediately wanted to retract it, as I played it back in my head and worried that I’d misrepresented a personal definition of the word “powerful,” or that I might seem to be telling Mike Hadreas what kind of artist he should be or mocking the people who responded in a major way to Too Bright, etc., but looking back it’s not so bad.

Here’s another one I sent, unprinted, referencing an album I was happy to see ended up with a few votes (it might’ve been my #11), including from Das Racist superfan Xgau.

As usual rappers were the only musicians routinely criticized for not offering solutions to the problems they addressed and the ones they didn’t, in a year when even Kool A.D., known for associative wordplay and prone to confessing that he “ain’t got shit to say,” had a moment on his excellent Word O.K., when he sees people starving on the street, asks, “What can one man do?” and answers, “I don’t know, probably a lot,” that was already 50% closer to a solution, to food in someone’s stomach, than anything I heard outside of rap music.

Right? But Craig Jenkins’s protest playlist probably got the point across better.

The heading for the poll’s main site refers to it as “The Last Word on the Year in Music.” It’s also the first word, obviously, as no other group waited long enough to include Black Messiah (by D'Angelo & THE VANGUARD), which was released 11 days before voting closed and got the top spot (Oscar voters really have no excuse when it comes to late releases).

I like to see such evidence of responsive (opposite of responsible: the album is undeniable) consensus, but even more than that it’s the breadth of the poll that reinforces why music writing, above all other arts writing, continues to appeal to me. Once again, a list of nearly 2,000 albums only begins to suggest the meaningful interactions a person could’ve had with music last year. That’s appropriate, and amazing. Often I feel like any movie’s context has settled long before I’ve had a chance to see it, but it’s very easy to be the only person writing about an album.

Thus, in what I hope to make an annual tradition, a list of albums I enjoyed last year that received no votes in the poll. I’m not suggesting we, or anyone, failed, quite the opposite actually.

• Sleeping Bag, Deep Sleep
• The Fresh & Onlys, House of Spirits
• La Sera, Hour of the Dawn
• Maximo Park, Too Much Information
• Death Vessel, Island Intervals
• Busdriver, Perfect Hair
• Mykki Blanco, Gay Dog Food
• Martin Carr, The Breaks
• She Sir, Go Guitars
• Should, The Great Pretend
• Busman’s Holiday, A Long Goodbye
• Slowness, How to Keep from Falling Off a Mountain
• Tink, Winter’s Diary 2
• The Hidden Cameras, Age
• Jeremy Jay, Abandoned Apartments
• PS I Love You, For Those Who Stay
• School of Language, Old Fears
• De La Soul, Smell the DA.I.S.Y.
• The Primitives, Spin-O-Rama
• Ex Cops, Daggers
• Terry Malts, Insides EP
• The Mary Onettes, Portico: EP
• Swet Shop Boys, Swet Shop EP

Language

Be proud: I’ve been peppered with little reminders lately that I live in a straight world. The most recent example: I told some of our co-op students today that I grappled with learning French last year and found it really difficult. This was met with a pretty predictable response: “You just need to find a French girlfriend!” And I laughed it off, I said something like, “Haha, well, hey!” I need to do more. I’m a proud gay man and I don’t want to be afraid to share the fact that I’m in a relationship with a wonderful guy, especially somewhere like the office where I feel comfortable and safe. Taking this small step for myself is going to make a tiny impact on the world around me and will help to make other gay men safer and more comfortable too, I hope. Small steps.

I appreciate it. Reading Jamieson’s goals for the new year, I’m reminded that as a gay white cis male (often cast as N. America’s lone politically ascendant minority of the 2010s), I too still live a double life and feel this most strongly as a linguistic burden. I work at a public school, and while on one level I’ve never felt so comfortable and safe at a workplace, I guess I really don’t feel comfortable and safe, because almost daily I find myself readjusting my language to avoid using the words “my boyfriend” (of six years! and a close friend for a decade! and intertwined with my life in such basic ways–money, transportation, meals, free time–that to not mention him must make me appear as some kind of phantom, with no physical existence in the outside world). And I feel I’m betraying him much more than I’m betraying myself. Even outside of work I’ve never found a way to use the words casually, so every time someone asks me if I have a girlfriend and I simply say “no” and change the subject, I burrow a little deeper inside myself. If gay men become talented writers, I sometimes feel it’s partly thanks to the constant syntactical work demanded by our deflections every time we leave home, and to the particular kind of interiority and introspective nature this creates. Aside: I’ve tended to prefer Perfume Genius when he’s challenging the kinds of sounds and sentiments that the listener typically equates with power, but maybe right now I need “Queen” more than I need “Take Me Home,” if you know what I mean.

My Brother

To say that he was gay or homosexual was something he said about himself; to say that he was an auntie-man was something people said about him. She understood him better when he was the person people said something about, not when he was the person who said something about himself.

— Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (p. 147)


I read this book over a year ago and just remembered having copied down these lines. The book, a record of what Kincaid remembers, knows, thinks, believes and wonders about her subject, and always explicit about the thought process responsible for her words, makes me think that if everyone wrote and spoke like this, the unprecedented clarity of conversations would slowly erode all pathologies. So too when she writes of “the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect” (p. 162).

When approached with the momentum of the page her best lines create an empathy so sudden and sharp that it can’t help but fade a degree upon closer scrutiny. The writing, dissociated from time and consciousness, breaks down into clauses and punctuation. Where did she go? But all that’s needed is one more steady pass through the text, to return to the moment that startled me the first time.

Mission Accomplished

It’s been lovely, blogging here under the glow of a bank drive-thru in Helena, Montana for the past 6.5 years, but I feel it’s time to move on. Follow me to my spot at Tumblr, which will likely pass through a bunch of different names until I hit upon the right one but which will be permanently located at geoffreyess.tumblr.com.

I’m not saying I absolutely won’t post here again, but until I do, consider this an archive of my early to mid to late 20s. All rights unreserved, all wrongs unreversed.

It’s VI: Rhythm Nation 2014

Favorite albums, 2014


[1] Neneh Cherry, Blank Project

Cherry handles such a wealth of lived experience on her new album and binds it to such ineluctable words (poetic: “slow like some reruns on a mother’s TV”; plain: “until one day she reached her hand inside her coat”) and spontaneous, super-cool sounds that I imagined Blank Project as the default album of the year for anyone who didn’t dig Yeezus or anyone who did and wanted to hear its abrasions transformed in the hands of a different human and artist. Album of the year for everyone, that is. It’s the only one that sounds like it’s being made as you’re listening to it (mentioned elsewhere), which I don’t mean as any kind of aesthetic imperative but as praise of the way Blank Project, aptly named, leaves evidence of the empty file that preceded it in full and constant view, so that what’s heard is an exact record of the creative work that went into its making. Slight mis-timings abound in the music, each one a major thrill.

[2] Owen Pallett, In Conflict

Someone called it landmark queer rock, a more fitting categorization than I could have come up with, and so, if you didn’t already know, queer introspection has a fucking massive sound. Working with a core band that doesn’t underplay Pallett’s ornate arrangements but still finds a way to make them come off as severe, the maestro ends up with a work so specific and communicative that every sound and word doubles as ink on paper.

[3] D’Angelo & The Vanguard, Black Messiah

I haven’t tended to the lyrics yet so the primary tone, even on “1000 Deaths,” is still joyous, a vibrating so mighty that the heart becomes an overworked filter awaiting the burst. When “Ain’t That Easy” wheels away in its opening moments only to return with a smack and a rough chorus of voices feeling out their harmony, it’s probably the earliest promise a masterpiece ever made. Last year Deerhunter’s “Monomania” elicited from me a response along the lines of “remember when rock songs were weird” and Black Messiah does something similar, so I pricked the word “weird” and figure it’s just a way to describe an artist beyond the veil who trusts that his fluency in old, illimitable musical gesture, spoken in noise-song, will translate in a popular way. This does.

p.s. Good job, we mostly avoided talking about Black Messiah in the selfish way we usually do when graced with so-called genius or with an album that arrives all of a sudden and/or after a long wait: words like “finally,” as if great artists are indebted to us and their works aren’t work; words like “embarrasses everyone else,” as if artists are interchangeable and anyone could’ve made it if they had the right priorities.

[4] Wye Oak, Shriek

Like last year’s Pet Shop Boys album there’s one big nod toward the electric guitar on Shriek. This time it’s in the squealing that introduces and hovers on the edges of “Paradise,” a reminder that the album is built on top of a history of distortion and feedback, not over to the side. No mere reinvention, Shriek finds a great band continuing to be great in a somewhat different way. “Glory” and “Sick Talk” in particular add up to the year’s most momentous ten-minute block of music, the former featuring a wild breakdown and Jenn Wasner channeling the vocal dexterity of Elizabeth Fraser, and the latter concealing the band’s biggest moment since “Please Concrete,” around 2:15 when the song’s itchiest motif resurfaces.

[5] Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Piñata

Came for Madlib, stayed for Gibbs, although technically the opposite is true, since I used to walk around with Gibbs’ Cold Day in Hell but never knew Madlib from Adam, always arriving at the kind of inner vision and flight of which he’s king via Warp Records, not Stones Throw. But the experience of listening to Piñata is, without fail, that of being seduced by the beats and samples, then being thankful that the music isn’t left as an empty vessel for my memories and wandering and self-reflection, i.e. my mental illness, but is generously filled up by a great MC with lots of stories. The world’s a chaotic place; noted, that without its final few minutes of extraneous chatter, the album would end with Mac Miller saying “O’Doyle rules.”

[6] Foxes In Fiction, Ontario Gothic

32 minutes that proceed at a pace so slow and assured and with a hush so monumental that I can’t believe I’ve ever before heard music played at this tempo and volume, or at least not since Sigur Rós’s Ágætis byrjun, which only comes to mind because of the way I remember listening to it underneath a blue night light as a teenager. The way songs lock together, one with two and four with five, sounds like creative windfall but is more likely a map of toil and transcendence, awaiting travelers.

[7] Shabazz Palaces, Lese Majesty

Reviews made it sound difficult but there was no other album this year I enjoyed so immediately, certain proof of the music’s deep pleasures, not my acuity. The most blissful mystery megamix since A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s Ashes Grammar, with scrapings and echoes from 8,000 sources ruptured by an immense clarity, as prescient, in ways as currently unknowable, as the sound and message of Kraftwerk in their time (sorry, I retrieved Computer World from back home this year and love it more than ever before). I didn’t know how much I wanted a Shabazz Palaces album with as many tracks as Wowee Zowee; gosh I was dumb.

[8] A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Sea When Absent

Speaking of A Sunny Day In Glasgow, formerly a hazily masterminded masterpiece-creation machine, it reemerged as a six-piece rock group this year, elevated Breeders-style by the knowledge that they exist in a tradition as musically rich as any other.

[9] Run The Jewels, Run The Jewels 2

Starting with rhetorical marauding and humor (the “field of dicks” line has not yet failed to make me laugh) before getting to the heart of the matter e.g. crazy sex talk, the whole thing has a “how to listen” precision, toughened by idiosyncrasy, that would’ve helped me out a lot back when I wasn’t listening to rap music. I still slightly prefer R.A.P. Music, mainly because I get a bit anxious when music is so well-dressed for the present and isn’t at least 50% historical, but for once I’m happy to go with consensus and say RTJ2 is what 2014 sounded like.

[10] Devon Williams, Gilding The Lily

I don’t have much to add that I didn’t cover here. Williams is a great songwriter with a big imagination and I still think Prince should make that invitation.


*“this year” = 2014, “last year” = 2013

Meanwhile

Kool A.D. and Del tha Funkee Homosapien put out some free stuff, in the form of astoundingly fun and self-reflexive albums that I was certain would be in the top ten back in summer, Azealia Banks and Morrissey trumped public perception with musical muscle, YG and Schoolboy Q narrated two of the year’s best-sounding albums and/or My Krazy Life and Oxymoron narrated two of the year’s best rappers, Allo Darlin’, Tennis, Real Estate, The Fresh & Onlys, Nothing, Alvvays, and The Twilight Sad made beautiful records right in my comfort zone, Tori Amos and Beck returned to me from the 90s, undiminished, Perfume Genius and EMA seized the moment (again), Against Me! made a terrific rock album, and Sun Kil Moon made that seeming-masterpiece that at some point I stopped playing.

Regret

I got a new computer in December and went wild on Spotify, trying to catch up on everything I’d missed, but I didn’t really enjoy any of it and now I wish I’d just bought Big K.R.I.T.’s album and given it more attention than streaming allows, because he always crafts and sequences his albums with a care that seems incompatible with his productivity, and I’ve yet to praise that in more than drips and drabs. Also, his apparent M83 fixation continues unabated. I’m not sure why I’m completely unable to engage with music from the cloud, but the problem calls for a practical solution, not analysis.

“I like everything”

This year’s Slate music club, which I kept reading despite an occasional “isn’t culture fun?” tone that I resent, talked about “hybrid sensibilities” as some kind of new phenomenon and as a necessarily performative pose. So while I hardly like everything, and what I do like only represents a small, U.S.-centric view of culture, I just want to point out that my hybrid sensibility, if I choose to call it that, came from reading magazines like SPIN as a kid, and later from reading Roger Ebert, who challenged my teenage self to stop being so dumb and closed off. In my earliest memories I was naturally interested in everything simply because it existed and had placed itself at my feet. This strikes me as a frame of mind always worth getting back to, and a normal human response that technology might have the power to corrupt or enhance but definitely didn’t create.

Macromix 14

Track/ Rank

1/ 20 Perfume Genius, “I Decline”
2/ 19 Real Estate, “Crime”
3/ 18 Sun Kil Moon, “I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”
4/ 17 The Fresh & Onlys, “Who Let The Devil”
5/ 16 EMA, “When She Comes”
6/ 15 Tori Amos, “Promise”
7/ 14 Death Vessel, “Ejecta”
8/ 13 Tennis, “Timothy”
9/ 12 Allo Darlin’, “Bright Eyes”
10/ 11 Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar, “Never Catch Me”
11/ 10 Merchandise, “True Monument”
12/ 9 Young Thug & Bloody Jay, “4 Eva Bloody”
13/ 8 Martin Carr, “The Santa Fe Skyway”
14/ 7 La Sera, “Losing to the Dark”
15/ 6 Kendrick Lamar, “i”
16/ 5 A Sunny Day In Glasgow, “In Love With Useless”
17/ 4 Alvvays, “The Agency Group”
18/ 3 Foxes In Fiction, “Shadow’s Song”
19/ 2 Withered Hand, “Horseshoe”
20/ 1 D’Angelo & The Vanguard, “Another Life”


That comes to a little over 80 minutes, so there won’t be a CD this year. But I’ve still listed songs in ascending order, because (1) there is a Mixcloud playlist, and (2) there could be a cassette. Any takers?

It was a very good year. Read more at Big Takeover. With a list like this one it must look like I’m asking every song to break my heart. Not so, but sometimes it happens that way.

To figure out my Pazz & Jop singles ballot just replace “Another Life” with a certain song from 2013 and condense the rest according to whether or not they were released as singles, preview tracks, videos, etc.

Some other great songs, whose parent albums I feel confident I’ll be able to recognize momentarily, were called “Spit Three Times,” “Sick Talk,” “Bomb,” “Early,” “In Conflict,” “Motion Sickness,” and “Flowers.” How’s that for associative poetry?

Angel Olsen’s “Lights Out” and St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness” a.k.a. “Once in a Timeline” were halfway to being my favorite songs this year, but the former was exactly one minute too long and both lost a little momentum every time they recycled the big moment.

Some other songs I loved were Busman’s Holiday’s “Child Actor,” ILoveMakonnen’s “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday,” Against Me!’s “Transgender Dysphoria Blues,” Marianne Faithfull’s “Sparrows Will Sing,” Morrissey’s “Staircase at the University,” Dum Dum Girls’ “Lost Boys and Girls Club,” La Roux’s “Sexotheque,” Nothing’s “Endlessly,” Sleeping Bag’s “Hush,” The History of Apple Pie’s “Keep Wondering,” Shamir’s “On the Regular,” Kishi Bashi’s “Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!” and every song from Terry Malts’ Insides EP and, as far as I can tell right now, Azealia Banks’ Broke With Expensive Taste.

List(ening journal)

Being a collection of music-related lists I haven’t gotten around to posting at Big Takeover as the year draws to a close.


Ten more albums for last minute end-of-year consideration

1. D’Angelo & The Vanguard – Black Messiah
The most encouraging message ever delivered in musical form in December, probably.

2. Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty
Deepens the pleasures of Black Up to an almost absolute degree.

3. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead
A full-length showcase for the Kendrick Lamar-featuring track, ’til I can get my head around FlyLo’s speed and technics.

4. Lykke Li – I Never Learn
A voice often frozen in former registers that don’t always work for the new songs, but otherwise Lykke Li knows exactly where to take her sound, starting with the opener’s bed of reverb-heavy acoustic guitar.

5. Alvvays – Alvvays
Haven’t felt so friendly toward a band since Bettie Serveert.

6. Carsick Cars – 3
Only sounds noticeably like Sonic Youth once, but you’d have to go back to classic Sonic Youth albums to find rock music as inexhaustible as this. Clearly these guys are young and/or don’t take the exhaustion of a form for granted.

7. The New Mendicants – Into the Lime
Having Norman Blake and Joe Pernice in the same band is a great thing for its own sake, and better when you realize the pairing is part of a deliberate attempt to craft the best 1965 Beatles pastiche of the current century. Songs sound like “I’m Looking Through You,” or like they could be sequenced immediately before or after it.

8. Marianne Faithfull – Give My Love to London
I’ve spent most of my time with “Sparrows Will Sing,” a squealing, rumbling beauty, with Faithfull surprisingly confident in the future. “I have no doubt they will figure it out someday,” she sings, probably telling herself a lie… but I get it, the belief in human potential.

9. Young Thug & Bloody Jay – Black Portland
Sing it, guys.

10. ILoveMakonnen – I Love Makonnen
I can do without the rest but “Tuesday” reminds me of The Rosebuds so I’ll be keeping it around.




Before & After Shows

Some albums of 2014 that I’ve only mentioned in live reviews of their respective performers. First heard immediately after the show, in most cases (a new trend).

1. Tori Amos – Unrepentant Geraldines
A deluge of new ideas, but calm and orderly in their presentation: “Her self-production is as uncluttered as modern space can be.” Or: “as only modern space can be.” Paul McCartney might’ve liked to record “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with whatever tools Amos used for “Giant’s Rolling Pin.” The winner for me is “Promise,” which has mother and daughter, both with very different notions, perhaps generational, of how a person should sing (like Perfume Genius, the daughter believes that ‘b’ is a fricative), come together for one of the most sublime melodies of the mother’s career.

2. Busman’s Holiday – A Long Goodbye
Similarly uncluttered, but made a little messy with the fever of performance. The songs, almost painfully sweet, warrant such fever.

3. Echo & The Bunnymen – Meteorites
The choruses are mostly one- or two-note iterations of the songs’ titles plus filler syllables (“Holy Moses, yeah yeah yeah, Holy Moses, why why why”) and that doesn’t exactly suggest a creative spark, but in every other way the sound of this record suits them perfectly in their fourth decade.

4. Foxes in Fiction – Ontario Gothic
A masterpiece probably. Check back for my albums of the year.

5. The Fresh & Onlys – House of Spirits
After many listens I was still putting it on and expecting a terrific noise to leap out the speakers after the intro of “Home is Where,” as if I hadn’t been tilting my head just right the previous time. It never arrived, and yet a kind of contained madness prevails, in the melodies, vocals and arrangements.

6. Guided by Voices – Motivational Jumpsuit
I could pick some favorite songs and try to anchor this as a distinct entry among their recent LPs, but that would be a pointless exercise in my aesthetic preferences, whereas the effect of the GBV reunion blitz has been cumulative, physically restorative, a series of 40-minute doses for a long-depleted listener. See below.

7. Kishi Bashi – Lighght
A man of so many talents that album programming can’t possibly be among them. And yet this album basically holds together, if only as a survey of his most dizzying recent accomplishments.

8. La Roux – Trouble in Paradise
Excellent tunes, a bit flat on the disc, needing the right sound system (First Ave) or visual aid (pink, yellow and blue lights, or the performer rendered iconic) to become a dynamic method of emotional exchange.

9. Perfume Genius – Too Bright
I’d intended to continue chronicling my experiences with Perfume Genius albums but wasn’t quite sure what to say about this one. People keep talking about the way Too Bright “destroys any lingering perceptions of weakness or frailty,” etc., a reaction I would’ve found more encouraging if it had greeted his previous album, Put Your Back N 2 It. The new listener craves empowerment. Bending the oppressors to our hushed ways would suit me better. But when I drown out the conversation there’s clearly a lot that I love here, in particular the somewhat uncertain overall design. A transitional album from a transitional figure, and thus complete in its incompleteness.

10. Pure X – Angel
A weird blend, further blended and made immune to analysis by the recording process.

11. Ty Segall – Manipulator
I’ve been on the verge of loving Ty Segall for the past couple years but the affected, emotion-canceling vocals are an obstacle I can no longer ignore. Everyone currently making this kind of music does it that way, so I’m not complaining nor expecting a change, just counting myself out until a different kind of energy or texture calls me back, as it did on Hair.

12. St. Vincent – St. Vincent
A St. Vincent first, the songs never really go beyond what they first seem to be, which didn’t matter during their spectacular live presentation but keeps letting me down gently on record. Makes sense though, that an artist would present her least porous work while taking the throne.

13. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
Song-oriented ASDIG takes some getting used to, but this is still packed to bursting with outlandish eruptions and juxtapositions, and great.

14. Tennis – Ritual in Repeat
Hold on, maybe they do keep getting better. Is there a song on here that doesn’t build to an irresistible peak? No. The music’s for everyone, even as Alaina Moore’s best lines court an audience that can hopefully keep her writing for years. “She works hard, does it all without complaining.” — “Even bad girls can do good things.” — “I knew all the love songs.”

15. Tune-Yards – Nikki Nack
I still feel comfortable leaving it to other people to praise them, but just barely this time.

16. Wussy – Attica!
I want to love them the way I love Yo La Tengo but a sustained interest eludes me. Still, an inescapably great band in any objective sense.

17. Wye Oak – Shriek
Their best one yet.




The Ten Best Albums of … 1994

I spent about five minutes on this and am pretty happy with the outcome, so won’t spend too much time worrying about what I’ve accidentally left out. Please imagine I found room for Blowout Comb.

1. Guided By Voices – Bee Thousand
2. Hole – Live Through This
3. The Notorious B.I.G. – Ready To Die
4. Global Communication – 76:14
5. Massive Attack – Protection
6. Sugar – File Under: Easy Listening
7. Blur – Parklife
8. Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
9. Kristin Hersh – Hips and Makers
10. East River Pipe – Shining Hours in a Can




Heapo: also a place I would shop.


Alternative Top Ten

The best stuff I heard for the first time and/or started seriously listening to in 2014, regardless of original release date. The stacks of used CDs have been piling up, composed mostly of 90s hip-hop (to choose just one: Mecca & The Soul Brother) and art rock miscellanea (remember Disco Inferno, Basehead, and Cranes? Ned Raggett does.), and will surrender only a few of their treasures, below.

1. Aaliyah – Aaliyah
My stunted appreciation of contemporary R&B probably owes a lot to never having heard this album. As lucid and visionary in its sound design as Kraftwerk’s Computer World, it’s a NEW POSITION, albeit one in which I’m still laid out in bed, from which to consider my life and the lives beyond the walls.

2. Barbara Manning – One Perfect Green Blanket, 1212 | S.F. Seals – Nowhere, Truth Walks in Sleepy Shadows
The greatest of all untapped 90s indie rock discographies. A woman who bolsters her albums with so many cover songs can obviously play anything, and does.

3. The Pretty Things – S.F. Sorrow
The other album on this list that begins with “S.F. Sorrow is Born,” continuing to an even more astounding variety of sounds.

4. J Dilla – Donuts | Broadcast – Tender Buttons
Defining albums from my first year of college, except I never heard them until long after their creators had died. Still, at this late date, enough to remind me that we had it as good as the freshmen of ten years prior with their Endtroducing and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

5. The Isley Brothers – 3+3 | Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound
A fruitful, peer-approved trip to the record store, enabling me to push the play button, at last, on songs that have been in the air my whole life, and others that never would have been if Numero Group hadn’t intervened to teach me about my city.

6. The Bats – Daddy’s Highway | Tall Dwarfs – Hello Cruel World
Guilt listening that ended up being for the right reasons, reaffirming the notion that New Zealand rock is always either perfect guitar pop or something totally unquantifiable, often drumless.

7. Missy Elliott – Supa Dupa Fly, Under Construction
Supa Dupa Fly seemed to be playing every time I cut my hair this year, Under Construction every time I was more than usually forgiving of, even in love with, my city.

8. Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat The Factory, Class Clown Spots A UFO
Not only do I not have synaesthesia, I’m tempted to say none have it less than me. But thanks to properties like melody and texture (the latter of which I intend in a purely aural sense; I’ve never imagined I could touch a sound), I still get endless sensory delight from music. GBV, in their most recent incarnation and unbeknownst to me, were dishing out the Properties with an immediacy and generosity that now makes the world of their heirs look comparatively barren, in their renewed absence.

9. Burial – Kindred, Street Halo, Truant, Rival Dealer
I downloaded the last few years of Burial singles and EPs all at once, and these 11 songs and 105 minutes are still a bottomless well months later. Taken together, one great monument to longing.

10. Cornershop – Woman’s Gotta Have It
I’d always meant to venture forward from When I Was Born for the 7th Time but never knew that venturing backward would yield such immediate results. I remembered the melody of “Jullandar Shere,” but not the sustained intensity. Its two parts comprise nearly 20 minutes of the album, but it’s still not nearly enough. I could listen forever.



Shows, 2014

I went to about 50 shows this year (the most ever, simply because I’ve never been in Minneapolis for such a large percentage of the year) and feel like I can justify, for the time, a list of the best live sets I saw. I’ve tried to be very selective, and if you knew which artists I’ve neglected to mention you’d be quite astonished. Here are five acts (originating in the current century) that excited me, another five acts (originating in the last century) that made me feel lucky, and one local act that was a great joy on two separate occasions.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Allo Darlin’
The Fresh & Onlys
Real Estate
Weekend

De La Soul
The Replacements
Buzzcocks
Slowdive
Tori Amos

Kitten Forever (opening for MEN in January and Waxahatchee in April)



Slumberland

Ranking the eight LP/EP releases of 2014 from my favorite label.

1. Devon Williams – Gilding the Lily
2. Allo Darlin’ – We Come from the Same Place
3. Terry Malts – Insides EP
4. Withered Hand – New Gods
5. The Proper Ornaments – Wooden Head
6. Literature – Chorus
7. Tony Molina – Dissed & Dismissed
8. Gold-Bears – Dalliance