*** Reaper's Favorite Albums of 2014 ***
 

I'm really late with the list this year guys. Sorry about that. I've had a massive cold and I've been unable to concentrate on things, so writing these lil write-ups was much more difficult than normal. If anything here doesn't make sense you can blame it on the illness.

As always, this is a list of my personal favorite albums of the year. It's not meant to be an objective "best-of" list, because while I listen to hundreds of new albums each year I still fall far short of listening to enough to feel comfortable making an objective claim. As always, my general preferences for hip-hop & heavy metal mean that you probably won't see your favorite punk album or twee indie rock album. Probably. Hopefully you'll find some albums you will come to dig through this list.

I'll be posting the write-ups & youtube embeds throughout the evening. The main list will be updated here in the OP.

30. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead!
29. Jason Feathers – De Oro
28. Mike Mictlan - Hella Frreal
27. Glass Animals – Zaba
26. Robert Plant (& the Sensational Space Shifters) – Lullaby…and the Ceaseless Roar
25. Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel
24. Mr. Twin Sister – Mr. Twin Sister
23. Ces Cru – Codename: Ego Stripper
22. D’Angelo (and the Vanguard) – Black Messiah
21. Angeleena Presley – American Middle Class
20. Panopticon – Roads to the North
19. Taake – Stridens Hus
18. Devin Townsend – Sky Blue (Z2 disc 1)
17. Alcest – Shelter
16. tUnE-yArDs – Nikki Nack
15. Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
14. TV on the Radio – Seeds
13. Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere
12. Behemoth – The Satanist
11. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Hypnotic Eye
10. Freddie Gibs & Madlib – Pinata
09. Opeth – Pale Communion
08. G-Side – GzIIGodz
07. Death Grips – the powers that b, pt. 1: ****as on the Moon
06. Sturgill Simpson – Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
05. Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires – Dereconstruction
04. Killer Mike & El-P – Run the Jewels 2
03. St. Vincent – St. Vincent
02. Sun Kil Moon – Benji
01. Swans – To Be Kind

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30. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead!


The concept for this album is to try to sound like the experience of what happens after you die. The immediate…whatever spiritual thing that happens. This is a strange free-jazz album with tinges of hip-hop that luxuriates in the mystery of that most universal of human experiences. It’s fun, mostly. At times scary. Perhaps a little bit optimistic about our spiritual fate. It’s trippy, mostly. It’s hard to talk about individual tracks here, as it’s a pretty seamless album, but “Never Catch Me” (with a guest vocals from Kendrick Lamar) has the best, most uplifting music video of this year. If you do anything from this list, click on this music video.

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29. Jason Feathers – De Oro


This album didn’t get many favorable reviews, but I dug it. It’s a pop-rap project from Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Ryan Olsen (Gayngs), and Astronautalis about a gritty rapper from the Flora-Bama. This weird little side project is very similar to the movie Spring Breakers in vibe. The Pitchfork review especially detested this album for its lyrical content, and I agree to an extent. There’s no reason why this bordering-on-appropriation examination into the absurdities & quiet dignity of deep south rap as filtered through some alternate universe (which the Flora-Bama kind of IS) needs to exist. But it does and, hey, apart from the first two heavy-handed tracks I really dig the songs. They sound strange & menacing & campy-fun all at the same time. “Courtyard Marriot” sounds SO cool to me: it simultaneously revels in urban Southern movie soundtrack cliché while also “making the stone stony again” somehow, drawing attention to the South’s unexpected and expected strangenesses at the same time. “Sacred Math” is a lovely, quiet track built around an almost arrhythmic narrative of the main character’s history of spring break memories. Maybe I’m just an Astronautalis apologist, but this album is lots of fun to me.

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28. Mike Mictlan – Hella Frreal


Doomtree’s Mike Mictlan, long one of my favorite wordplay artists in all of rap, delivers a marked improvement upon his too-strange prior solo release. Hella Frreal sees Mictlan trying to carve out a space for achieving two possibly divergent goals: present an entirely unique artistic vision while also paving the way for a new Hispanic-American hip-hop. Tracks like “Mid-West-Coast” and “Benicio del Torso” are steeped in tales of how a young Chicano kid in Minneapolis finds their identity in and around underground hip-hop culture. The tension between paying homage to what raised you while also blazing one’s own path is palpable here. One of my favorite tracks of the year is album closer “Clapp’D,” Mictlan’s admitted attempt at creating a monster POS-like banger.

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27. Glass Animals – Zaba


Most people look to smooth R&B for sexytime music. It’s obvious why. But one of the sexiest songs in recent years, for me, was Miguel’s “Adorn.” It had sultry sexytime vocals mixed with little electronic tics and layered synthesizers and an overall quirky rhythm. That combination is what feels to be the basis of this album from British duo Glass Animals. Sexy little FKA Twigs style rhythms abound here. But while that much-heralded FKA Twigs album left me cold, I appreciate Glass Animals for their more conventional cacophonous builds and accessible vocal lines. This album is like if Alt-J were interested in making love to partners they respect rather than just penetrating them with broomsticks.

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26. Robert Plant (& the Sensational Space Shifters) – Lullaby…and the Ceaseless Roar


Did you realize that Robert Plant’s voice is still awesome? Would you listen to a new Robert Plant album full of quieter, melancholic songs like Zepplin’s “Bron-y-aur Stomp” and “Rain Song?” Well, listen to this. On this album, Plant is exploring some British folk song structures and instrumentation and (apart from the U2-sounding lead single, “Rainbow”) it yields pretty awesome results. “Little Maggie” is a flurry of string instruments & reeds meeting modern, hip-hop influenced percussion and held together with vintage Plant vocals. “Somebody There” is like a small vial of nostalgia. Other tracks clash (in an interesting way!) with their modern production techniques. These songs feel old in so many good ways, but there’s an interesting mechanical vibe running throughout the album that calls to mind the inevitable change that all societies go through that turns music into “old folk music” and turns industrial towns into ghost towns.

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25. Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel


These guys are a progressive metal band from Australia and they are BONKERS. There’s 12-string bass and electric violin all over the place. Growled vocals & clean singing & that juxtaposition happening over, like flamenco sections. It’s almost intimidating complex music. I don’t really like the sound of either vocalist in this band, but the songs are so interesting to me that I look the other way. This is a classic Barry album: a difficult metal record that is constantly surprising. There’s one or two of these on every year-end albums list I make.

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24. Mr. Twin Sister – Mr. Twin Sister


This album sounds to me like driving on the interstate during a very cloudy evening with some fog and the light from the tall light poles refracting everywhere and no one else is on the road and you’re maybe going somewhere you’re excited about. Wait until the 1:45 mark of opening song “Sensitive” and see if you can’t feel that fog in your mind. It’s like…disco for loners. Disco bass and almost-danceable keyboard lines but there’s no one around to dance with and that’s fine because you’re not a dancer anyway. I think I’m revealing a lot about myself right now. “Rude Boy” is the musical equivalent of Michelle Phieffer in Scarface snorting up cocaine solely for the routine of it all. The best song is “In the House of Yes,” which embraces the disco thing to such an exuberant fullness. The second half of this album is more dreary, but oh what a first half.

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23. Ces Cru – Codename: Ego Stripper


Honestly? Run the Jewels 2 wasn’t the best demonstration of pure rap skill by a hip-hop duo this year. This album by Kansas City’s Ces Cru is (RTJ 2 is the better album however, see below). Godemis & Ubiquitous can rap rings, circles, ovals, hoops, and any ol’ shape around most any rappers anywhere. This album has plenty of that virtuosity, but it also has Ces Cru limiting themselves, working within slower structures, pushing themselves through restraint. It doesn’t result in the best work of their career, but I didn’t find a better album this year in terms of rappers finding new creativity through self-imposed artistic constraints. The few tracks about partying don’t really fit in with the mid-tempo brooders here, but maybe the album needs those lighter moments. What I do know is that this album was on heavy rotation in late summer when I needed a blistering rap fix.

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22. D’Angelo (and the Vanguard) – Black Messiah


What I really like about D’Angelo’s new album – his first since 2000’s Voodoo a whopping 14 years ago -- is that it is so different from his earlier work, which never really landed with me. This album is rooted in old-school jazz funk. It’s not especially innovative; Prince has explored similar territory in recent albums that no one gave nearly as much internet attention to as this one. But aside from a few tracks, I really appreciate the level of craft here. Don’t listen to this on laptop speakers; it’s a disservice to yourself and to the album. Listen to this with good headphones on. There’s so many little sonic details that add creativity and richness to otherwise straightforward funkers like “1000 Deaths” or “Sugah Daddy.” The intricacies you find around the margins of the beat on “Really Love” and “Betray My Heart” give those songs so much more emotional power. The closing track and album standout “Another Life” is the uplifting gospel-jazz number that somehow feels like a minorly-hopeful way to close the books on the pain of 2014 and move towards a new year with renewed purpose. This is the album of the moment for a lot of people and for once I get it.

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21. Angaleena Presley – American Middle Class


Angaleena Presley & her cute Kentucky twang has long played back seat to her Pistol Annies partner, Miranda Lambert. Lambert is a superstar while Presley has been making her bones in songwriting. But with this solo album, Presley proves that she’s in that upper echelon of women in country who write their own songs, right up there with Brandy Clark and Kacey Musgraves. American Middle Class is, well, about that. These songs have so much truth behind them, so much attention for small detail about normal lives. I loved Musgraves’ 2013 modern classic, Same Trailer Different Park, which I could say the same about, but Presley’s album is less…biting? acidic? than Musgraves’. Presley is more interested in straightforward truth. “All I Ever Wanted” is as honest a confessional as you’ll get out of Nashville these days, un-gussied with defense mechanism irony like so many [good] songs by her peers are. “Grocery Store” is a testament to small thoughts that feel big during the quotidian slog of the day. But maybe I’m overstating the seriousness of the album; Presley does use that fun-ironic distancing technique to good effect on “Pain Pills” and “Knocked Up,” whose subjects you can probably guess. This is a balanced, engaging listen all the way through. Country radio is really terrible these days and albums like this are such a vital antidote to that radio format.

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20. Panopticon – Roads to the North

Panopticon’s last album, Kentucky, attempted to tell the story of that state through black metal. Musically, it utilized bluegrass instrumentation & incorporated black metal into that. It was utterly unique and certainly captivating. This new album still uses banjo as part of its black metal flavor, but the overall effect is less overtly conceptual. The vibe is that of a complex, modern black metal album that just happens to have bluegrass influence. It’s more cohesive is what I think I’m getting at. The production is intentionally pretty low-fi, which doesn’t do much for the album IMO. But apart from that this is a frequently beautiful, unique artistic vision. I don’t need to write much more than “there’s banjo in this black metal album” for you to click the Youtube link, do I?

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19. Taake – Stridens Hus


For as much as I like complex, ambitious black metal there’s another side of the genre that is compelling to me: the part that is so pure & simple that it sounds a lot like early rock & roll. Carpathian Forest is a classic band in this vein: as much rockabilly in song structure as they are black metal. What I love about this album from stalwart black metal musician Taake is that is embraces that catchy simplicity of black metal’s rocking side. It uses repetition not in a droning, atmospheric way but in short simple bursts for the sake of pleasure. With a different guitar tone you can imagine tracks like “Kongsgaard Bestaar” being played by dudes in Guns n Roses garb. But it’s when that rock drive is used to prop up true black metal that I reach for the repeat button on iTunes. “Gamle Norig” and other songs here are some of the most immediate & accessible black metal tunes since Mgla’s 2012 gem, With Hearts Towards None. If you think you don’t like black metal because it’s too weird or slow, check that song out.

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18. Devin Townsend – Sky Blue (Z2 disc 1)


Devin Townsend, much to the chagrin of his longtime Strapping Young Lad fans, has been experimenting in recent years with trying to find a sort of Pop Metal sound. 2009’s Addicted saw Devin try to find a pop sensibility in industrial rock, which led to 2012’s Epicloud, a release of metalish songs with MONSTER hooks. This album, Sky Blue, is the best distillation of Devin’s pop metal yet. What helps is the large amount of female vocals; this album has as much singing from Anneke van Giersbergen (maybe my favorite female singer on Earth) as it does Devin. The guitar leads sound The Scorpions as filtered through an episode of Doctor Who. The trademark Devin wall of sound is like dense dark matter/spaceship/you see where I’m going with this. Sometimes this album is like what British pop-rock would have evolved into out of the 80’s if hip-hop never happened (especially on “Silent Militia” which sounds like a Ministry song with a chorus lifted from “You Spin Me Round”), but other songs are inspired directly by today’s pop music; “Sky Blue” lifts its chorus from Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin in Love” (yes, Devin invented Usher Metal on this album). I don’t think he’s perfected the ideal mix of metal/hard rock feel with pop structure yet. But this is pretty close.

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17. Alcest – Shelter


Alcest’s previous two albums each were top 10 favorites for me. His blend of black metal and shoegaze just hit me in all of my beauty centers. This new album by Alcest is less successful because he has totally dropped the black metal influence. It’s gone. Shelter is a shoegaze album through & through. But while the album got mixed reviews from shoegaze fans, who critique the album of being too derivative of Slowdive, I am not a big shoegaze fan. I don’t have a deep knowledge of the genre. So all I hear is the same shoegaze aspects of the Alcest sound with a simpler, heavy rock drive instead of a black metal drive. This album sounds like an eagle flying though the air instead of a bat. The bat swoop was much better, but this is still plenty nice if you liked the swoop in the first place. That is a terrible metaphor, isn’t it. I’ll try again: this is a glossy, endearingly pretty album that sounds like you’re drinking sunshine and eagle feathers. Dang. I can’t get my mind off of birds as I listen to this. Not every track is as standout as “Opale,” “La nuit marche avec moi,” or “L’eveil des muses” are, and I chalk that up to Alcest removing that black metal juxtaposition from the formula. Still, this is one of the better pick-me-up albums I listened to this year.

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16. tUnE-yArDs – Nikki Nack


I dunno, I liked the previous tune-yard’s album – especially its use of sound loops and African rhythms – but I was also turned off by its inane lyrics and a sense of Dirty Projectors worship running throughout the album. With Nikki Nack however, I think Merril Garbus has truly found HER sound. Killer pop songs like “Find a New Way” and “Water Fountain” take danceable rhythm structures and layer ever-expressive vocal lines on top in a way that evokes a pan-African sensibility but sounds individualized enough to avoid pesky appropriation concerns. The lyrics aren’t nonsense here either: there’s some sadness here and some anger at superficiality in her life. “Real Thing” gains some muscle for how personal Garbus’ vocal delivery is. These tracks can run together a little but because of how thoroughly each one is built off of pan-African percussion, but that’s a minor quibble. Go revel in this pop album’s strangeness. Go revel in the strangeness of the insane music video for “Water Fountain” that I linked to.

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15. Todd Terje – It’s Album Time


Speaking of pop, it was a down year for pop music, at least for me, at least for albums. There were a couple of Taylor Swift songs that I dug and the Robyn/Royksopp EP was pretty nice, but very few catchy-music projects made me press the repeat button time & time again. This album did. I listened to this out of total ignorance of who Todd Terje is and today I still barely know anything about him. Look at that cover art! I expected some ironic lounge singing record or something but what I got was some of the catchiest & most satisfying synth-pop in recent years. Only one track has vocals on it, so when I say that there’s a narrative of a down-on-his-luck lounge singer that’s only implied by mood. Every track here pulls its own weight, from the way that “Delorean Dynamite” sounds like you’re doing 90 on the interstate right through a Buick commercial filmed in the 80’s, to “Alfonso Muskedunder”’s vibes of Roger Moore’s James Bond chasing down the Pink Panther on some island somewhere.

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14. TV on the Radio – Seeds


This is not the TVotR that any of us were expecting. I was expecting sad or brooding, considering the death of bassist Gerard Smith. At the very least I was expecting that trademark brass & bounce funk from America’s best rock band. Instead, and this isn’t a bad thing, we’ve got a pop-rock album that sees the band trying out simpler song structures & relatively simple electronic music techniques. This album is really catchy & demonstrates once again that TV on the Radio are masters of songcraft. I say this because these tracks are somewhat subtly complex. Take “Could You” for example: this song sounds like a long-lost Beatles track but the band slowly adds more & more fuzz and horns and backing vocal tracks ‘til the song transcends its simple skeleton. The track “Careful You” is one of my absolute favorite songs the band has ever done, throbbing & pulsating & amplifying. I’ve heard criticism that this album’s use of electronic instrumentation is amateur-level stuff, and I agree to some extent. There is little innovation to speak of here. But what made it connect with me was listening to the track “Lazerray,” which is the best Ramones song that the Ramones never recorded. That track’s punk simplicity made me think of, well, punk simplicity – how punk bands have never let a lack of virtuosity stop them from making music. Lead single “Happy Idiot” is so so catchy because of one of these “punk simple” moments of electronic instrumentation: a little staggered sample of a small crowd cheering prods up the chorus. That sample, just a sound, is the real hook of the song somehow. “Careful You” utilizes a simple synth swell on the chorus that they shift the pitch of sometimes – literally them just pressing one button but that one button affects the entire feel of the chorus. There are a few tracks on this album that don’t land with me, but the ones that do – Quartz, Careful You, Could You, Happy Idiot, Ride, Lazerray, Seeds – are some of my very favorite tracks this year. TVotR haven’t lost a step, they’re just growing.

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13. Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere


It’s strange when your 13th favorite album of the year is also one of your most disappointing albums of the year. See, Agalloch is my favorite band in the world. Their last three albums – in 2002, 2006, & 2012 – were each my #1 favorite albums of those years. This album, while certainly a strong metal release, doesn’t live up to that standard. Whereas in their previous albums Agalloch focused on one aspect of their complicated sound to emphasize (blackened Doom metal or the intersection of folk & post-rock or straight-up post-rock or black metal), this album sees the band trying to fully synthesize all those focal points into one cohesive vision. The problem is that in doing so the band sounds a tiny bit derivative of their earlier work. The song structures here are familiar. It’s a complacent-sounding album from the band. Now, with all that negativity said, here’s why you can ignore all that and enjoy this frequently-breathtaking album for what it is: the album’s structure is elliptical, which mirrors the lyrical concepts; it has a smart, patient pace; “The Astral Dialogue” and “Dark Matter Gods” are ferocious songs & new Agalloch live staples; “Pleateau of the Ages,” the album’s soaring climax, is one of the best Agalloch songs ever (its only flaw being that it literally hits some of the same notes as the climax of their previous album, Marrow of the Spirit). This album is probably better than my disappointment is allowing myself to see. If you haven’t spent time with Agalloch before then you’ll probably be blown away.

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12. Behemoth – The Satanist


Often when people have near-death experiences or when they successfully fight off a potentially fatal disease, they come out of the experience with a renewed or newfound faith. They attribute a spiritual reason for their recovery. Nergal, the frontman of blackened death metal stalwarts Behemoth, had one of those experiences. He nearly died from leukemia recently. So it’s very, very telling that the first Behemoth album since that experience is titled The Satanist. It’s a bombastic blasphemy; a proud rejection of Christianity or any kind of positive spiritual belief system outside of Satanism. And because Satanism is just a provocative, trolling humanism, Behemoth’s message with this album is a defiant “**** you” to any “God has a plan” thinking. Believe in yourself and your ability to change the world or believe in nothing at all. I’m not endorsing that belief system, necessarily; I’m not saying I agree with Nergal. I’m saying that that defiance permeates these tracks. It amplifies all of the darkness. It infuses into the crushing guitar tone. It reverberates around the surprising symphonic sections. This album sounds like WAR. And it might just be the most confident, singular vision that Behemoth has ever put out.

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11. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Hypnotic Eye


This is actually one of the Heartbreakers’ strongest albums. We don’t often like to think of bands who qualify for AARP status as putting out important work that measures up to their early careers, but Petty & Co. are doing so here. Hypnotic Eye takes the blues lessons they learned from their previous album, marries them to a 60’s rock sensibility, and turns up the snarl. This is an angry album. It’s cynical, but in an older-and-wiser way as opposed to the youthful cynicism of Petty’s first two albums. But that snarled delivery of Petty’s is satisfying no matter the cause. “American Dream Plan B” says what most all Millennial are thinking as they fill out a job application they know is going to lead to nowhere. “Power Drunk” & “Burnt Out Town” cast shade on government abuse big & small. But it’s not all angry – “Red River” is some Florida swamp, True Detective mystic shit, and “Fault Lines” is the most dynamic Petty songs in terms of rhythm section I’ve ever heard. This album is consistently strong top to bottom, arguably his best album since “Into the Great Wide Open,” and is a deserving choice for Petty’s first Billboard #1 album (seriously, THIS one is only his first #1 album).

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10. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Pinata


I’ve always appreciated Freddie Gibbs, but his beats haven’t been super interesting in the past. And then came his collaboration with Madlib. Gibbs thrives over Madlib’s warm samples here. This album is track after track of Gibbs sitting in the pocket and riding these beats like a champion show horse. You never knew how versatile Gibbs’ flows were, how effortlessly he can glide over anything. Listen to Gibbs live inside of the snare drum in “Shitsville” or pull out double-time on “High” or ape ST 2 Lettaz flow a bit on “Harold’s” or etc. This is straight-up excellent narrative hip-hop. Some highest order rapping right here.

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09. Opeth – Pale Communion


This is the album that Heritage, Opeth’s previous release, wanted to be. Like that album, Pale Communion is a thoroughgoing 70’s prog rock project. Unlike that album, Opeth figured out here how to compensate in their song structures for the lack of death metal instrumentation. This is a heavy album, insofar as you can consider organ sounds to be brooding & dark. The only negative thing I have to say about this album is that it is straight 70’s prog that’s perhaps too reliant on winking, nudge-nudge, “did you catch that?” homage cleverness. It offers nothing new at all. But if you like 70s prog rock & more modern guitar sounds, then you’ll like this. Mikael Akerfeldt gives the strongest clean singing performance of his career with strong, catchy vocal lines. The rhythm section is classic Opeth genius. The keyboards & organs are gorgeous. And the song structures are pretty tight.

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08. G-Side – GzIIGodz

(the Youtube embed here is a music video for every track on the album. It's cool. Skip around if you want to)

G-Side BACK. This perpetually underrated Alabama rap duo split up a couple of years ago after frustration with the larger hip-hop industry not paying enough attention to them. Or rather, not giving them their share of success while also biting their style. I’ve written a lot about this duo’s greatness in my 2011 list. I was very excited about this album and it didn’t disappoint, though it did surprise. The Block Beattaz production feels like a throwback on this album rather than the years-ahead-of-its-time feel of iSLAND. Not that it is looking backward, but that it is using the past as a tool. Like on “1 Thing”, which sounds early 90s like something that would play on the set of In Living Color or something. Or “2004”, which plays with the idea of a Kanye-style soul music sample (without the pitch-shifted vocal sample). ST 2 Lettaz is predictably great, and Picasso Finessin (formerly Yung Clova) hasn’t lost a step from 2011. Lyrically, the duo is still rapping about the common man but this is an album with less optimism than before; there’s more talk of having to go back to the trap because following their artistic dreams has been risky financially. That’s real shit. This album is real shit, from the best producers in hip-hop. If you like rap you can’t miss this album. I have a feeling this album might sound ahead of its time even a couple years from now.

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07. Death Grips – the powers that b, pt. 1: ****as on the Moon


I’m cheating a bit by counting this as an album; it’s supposed to be the first half of a double album which the now-maybe-split-up band hasn’t given us the 2nd half of yet. But I’m counting it because I think this is the 2nd best release of a band whose every album has landed on a year-end list of mine. It’s Death Grips’ catchiest release since The Money Store while also returning to some of the colder, harsher, more frenetic electronic sounds of ex-Military. The signature instrumental aspect of this album is that every single song is built around vocal samples of Bjork. The album sounds like a depressing trip to a very cheerful Japanese shopping mall. Look, at this point you either get Death Grips or you don’t. This album isn’t going to change your mind about a band as weird as Death Grips, because this is perhaps Death Grips at their weirdest. The songs shift violently & abruptly & most have a spine built on a repeated vocal sample (everyone loves Run the Jewels’ “Close Your Eyes and Count to ****” for its Zach de la Rocha vocal sample-based beat…well this album is like a whole bunch of that track). This album will sound like trolling to some of you. To me, I see worthwhile experimentation into the limits of hip-hop instrumentation.

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06. Sturgill Simpson – Metamodern Sounds in Country Music


Sturgill Simpson brings a level-headed, drug-addled approach to everyday life that someone like Jamey Johnson might if the Nashville machine would let him on this modern country classic. Look at breakout track “Turtles All the Way Down,” an extended bad drug trip filtered through Merle Haggard that ends up being a stoner’s meditation on the cosmological problem of infinite regress. Yes, this album sort of lives up to its pretentious title. It’s Simpson’s lyrical ingenuity that makes songs like “Voices” or “Living the Dream” feel like new country music standards rather than derivative works. Simpson works within the tradition on this album while somehow managing to make the whole genre sound fresh to ears that have become jaded by the atrocious modern country radio format. It’s an album that feels real because it can’t decide between the casual pessimism of those two aforementioned tracks or the belief in love as expressed by “Turtles All the Way Down” or “The Promise,” whose huge last chorus is the triumphant vocal climax of the album.

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05. Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires – Dereconstructed


I really liked the songs on the Glory Fires’ last album, A Bomb in Gilead, but that album didn’t make my year-end favorites list because I hated the production. It sounded too clean. It stripped the noise and fury away from Lee Bains’ live set. And oh what noise & fury that is; Bains III & the Glory Fires are unequivocally one of the best live acts in rock music today. Part of what makes Dereconstructed so great is that it sounds like a Glory Fires show. It’s loud, full of energy & reverb & distortion. It’s the dirty south, sludging out of a Gibson SG after last call on the Strip in Tuscaloosa. This is their first release on Sub Pop records, and it is a must listen if the words “as mush country as it is punk” titillate you in any way. The other part of what makes this album so great is its lyrical focus. I’d refer you to a wonderful article on the album (http://bittersoutherner.com/lee-bain...reconstructed/) but to me what this album speaks of is the experience of living & growing up in the modern South: how to still be proud of it while owning up to its failures. It’s an important vision for a left-wing American South. It sounds & feels like the good people that I spent my time with living in Alabama for 4 years: the people making their communities a better place every day, the people rejecting old politics of systemic oppression, the people who band together to make a home a home. THIS is southern rock, mother****er.

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04. Killer Mike & El-P – Run the Jewels 2


This album, the sequel to my 5th favorite album of last year, has been tabbed by many publications as THE best album of 2014. I’m not quite that moved, but I get it: no other hip-hop album this year is this topical while also showcasing this level of technical rap ability. To recap: Run the Jewels is the duo of Killer Mike & El-P. Their first effort as RTJ was about bombastic rap ability. The album was a largely cartoonish collection of hyperboasts & megaflows. I loved it. There was a small moment on that album that suggested that RTJ could be something even more – a bit of outward-looking social consciousness on the track “DDFH.” On RTJ2, Killer Mike & El-P take that moment & make it their focus. This album, while not quite the technical showcase as its predecessor, feels like it is taking to task every bullshit politician, police chief, prosecutor, President, Pope, and god out there for the systems of violence & oppression that people face. The track “Early” stands out in the Mike Brown, et al. era for addressing the quotidian fear of police violence felt by many in the black community, and not shying away from the white community’s reaction to that violence. “Love Again” drips with raunch, and stands out for acknowledging, with a Gangsta Boo verse, that women have a right to be at the dirty rap table just as much as men do. This album feels very “now” and if for some reason you’ve managed to avoid it so far you should remedy that.

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03. St. Vincent – St. Vincent


A fittingly self-titled album, as Annie Clark synthesizes many aspects of her St. Vincent sound here. Strange melodies like choral music from another planet jut up against her trademark weird as Hell guitar licks. She can totally shred, but her playing sounds effortless & composed rather than most guitar virtuosos with their strained solo faces and vibes of extemporaneous effort. Like the main lick anchoring the heavy “Bring Me Your Loves” – it’s some fretboard & whammy bar wizardry that she plays like a robot who has mastered the instrument. Maybe she IS; I dunno. That song also demonstrates this album’s central catchiness. There’s a pop vein running though this whole album. Whereas some of the song’s on her previous album, Strange Mercy, kept you at a distance with their structures, Clark embraces more traditional structures here while not losing any weirdness in the instrumentation. Her recent collaborative work with David Byrne is evident in this kind of pop sensibility, perhaps most in lead single “Birth In Reverse,” which is an oddball, horn-driven earworm about social media dissatisfaction. By the time final track “Severed Crossed Fingers,” a song that vintage David Bowie could be proud of, ends you are ready to play the album again immediately. It’s instantly accessible and contains enough nuance to hold up over a whole lot of repeated listens.

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02. Sun Kil Moon – Benji


I’m not usually one for rock music whose primary draw is its lyrics. It takes something pretty incredible for me to not be bored by a lyrics-driven album with simple, rote song structures. Benji is that something pretty incredible. Sun Kil Moon, or rather Mark Kozelek, has achieved something here that I’ve never before heard in music: he’s set an essay collection to music. Before I can really explain I need you to listen to the album’s first track, the soul-pummeling “Carissa.” The song is about Kozelek flying home to Ohio to attend the funeral of a distant cousin who died in an accident when a aerosol can blew up while she was burning trash, and how he only met her once or twice but he’s really affected by this death, and how he knows he can use his songwriting talents to memorialize her. None of that sounds on-the-nose because, I mean you’ll see when you click the Youtube link, this is not verse-chorus-verse stuff here. There is a chorus, presented twice over 7 minutes. The rest of the song is a first-person narrative of feelings & thoughts. Kozelek doesn’t care about making the narrative tight; he’s just expressing himself through selfish thoughts and small details. Kozelk’s lyrics are like this on every track of the album. Forget about rhyming or consistent meter. The only reason these tracks are proper songs & not literature read over acoustic guitar is because Kozelek sings his words with juuuuuuuuuuust enough attention to repetitive melody that the barest suggestion of a song structure forms in our minds. Most reviewers mention that these songs have a “diary” feel to them, but they only say that because that don’t know what a proper essay is; these are essays through & through: from the experience of going with his dad to visit a family friend who is about to go to prison for the rest of his life because he mercy killed his hospitalized wife & his pistol jammed when he went to kill himself (“Jim Wise”), to an essay about the nature of melancholy and why he’s been inclined towards it since childhood (“I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”), to an album closing braided essay about how middle age is affecting his art, the minutiae of eating crab cakes in a bar with “sports bar shit” all over the walls, and the thin line between professional respect & jealousy (“Ben’s My Friend”). I haven’t been emotionally affected by a lyrics-driven album like this in I don’t know how long. This is raw, open, sincere, selfish, grasping, hopeful, universal music like all the best personal essays are.

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01. Swans – To Be Kind


Only a truly impressive instrumental performance could prevent that Sun Kil Moon album from being my favorite album of the year. Swans’ latest 2 hour monster, To Be Kind, is that performance. This is truly awe-inspiring. I loved their last album The Seer for its fearsome, expansive textures. It was bewildering & intense & one of the best (though hardest to listen to) albums of the past decade. This new album doesn’t lose any of that intensity, any of those expansive textures. But what it adds is serious groove. There’s a groove and a fierce drive to these songs that makes them catchier than The Seer material. This is an album that defies words in many ways, or at least it takes a certain amount of specific words – think an entire Cormac McCarthy album – to properly communicate how this album sounds, how it makes you feel. It really does sound like you’re out on the prairie and all of the bad things in the world are about to descend on you. Michael Gira takes repetitive bass & drums on many of these tracks & adds layers of repetitive sound on top: a cacophony of instruments including lap steel guitar, bells, viola, wind chimes, horns, backing vocals, synthesizers, layers & layers of percussion, and of course Gira’s intense lead vocals that are sometimes plainly spoken and sometimes yelled like a beast would yell. There’s no moment in 2014 music more unnerving than Gira singing “I’m just a little boy” only to be met immediately with a Greek chorus of humiliating laughter. There’s perhaps no more imposing study in the power of repetition and slow build than the album’s centerpiece 35 minute long song, “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture” which builds for 14 minutes like the whole planet is going to collapse and THAT is only a lead-in to a chanting tribute to the Haitian revolutionary who led the successful & violent slave rebellion on that island; those powerful 35 minutes are accidentally topical – they make me think about the kind of violence that might be necessary to actually get some justice out of an American police state that violently oppresses African Americans. Ultimately, the way you feel when you listen to these tracks is going to be very individualized. It’s like if a haunted house were also a contemporary abstract art gallery: there’s room in these sparse lyrics and in these gargantuan songs for your subconscious to run amok. This is an intimidating undertaking to listen, but it carries my fullest recommendation.

What did you guys listen to this year?

NewChief, pass the bourbon to me & chime in here.

I've been looking forward to your list all year, because I found it, personally, to be a strange year in music. Like you said, not lots of pop stuff that I loved. More metal that I liked than usual. There was nothing that really stayed in constant rotation for me, but I had a few that I listened to a lot that you didn't include and some areas where we coincide.

I tried to post last night, but I was on my phone and suffering technical issues, so this will be with a cup of coffee instead of bourbon.

So here are my random thoughts:

First of all, I'm glad to see that Swans made your best of the year list. That was mine as well. I think it suffered a lot, in critic eyes, from from the success of the Seer as well as dropping early in the year. Still, I'm not sure that there was another album that had the impact on me as this one (and that's saying something with my love for RTJ2).

I didn't put RTJ2 up top, either. I loved the album. I really did. However, the hype leading up to it was absolutely incredible for me. The videos. The Meow the Jewels kickstarter. The huge essays detailing the friendship of Mike and Jaime. I was more in love with these guys before the album dropped than I've ever been with any other artists. As such, it was nigh impossible for the album to not slightly disappoint. It's probably around 2 or 3 on my best of list, so it didn't disappoint much.

I was also happy to see Panopticon on your list. I loved Kentucky, but didn't even realize that they'd (technically he?) had released another album until it started showing up on all the end of lists. Anyway, I liked this one quite a bit as well.

The TVOTR album is the first one of theirs that my wife has said, "Who is this?" when grabbed her phone and quickly added it to her Spotify playlist. That has to be significant in some way because I've tried to hook her on them with every album they've released to no avail. This one stuck, though.

I STILL haven't gotten to listen to the D'Angelo album with headphones, but I've listened to it like 6 times on our portable bluetooth speaker. It's funny that you say it needs headphones, though, because that's exactly what I said to someone else online when discussing the album. There's just a lot of fuzzed out stuff and layers in the production that I think will sound better on headphones.


Now for the omissions:
Water Liars Water Liars: Probably my favorite band in the world right now. Justin is from my area. They've been playing in small venues here a long time. They're literate as hell, and they make music that really just appeals to my southern upbringing.

Hiss Golden Messenger Lateness of Dancers: one of my friends is probably the biggest Sturgill Simpson fan boy I know. Like, he's obsessed with him and wants to start doing DMT at 40 basically because Sturgill does. For me, Hiss Golden Messenger does everything that Sturgill Simpson doesn't. They're not really analagous bands, but if I've got to put a "country" type band for 2014 on my list, then I'm going with these guys.

YOB: Clearing the Path to Ascension. This was the year of Doom for me. Pallbearer. YOB. SunnO))). Earth. Damn it was a good year in Doom. Despite my Arkansas love for Pallbearer. YOB's album was the best of the bunch, imo.

Giant Squid. Minoans. I probably shouldn't be able to include this, because I didn't even discover it until Stereogum released their best of metal list. But damn. I like this album a lot. You know I like my "metal" mixed with some other genres. And this album keeps me interested from start to finish.

Atlas. Real Estate. Yes. It's a throwback. It's probably not even their best album. Damn if I didn't listen to it a lot on road trips, though.

Pharaohe Monch: PTSD. I listened to this concept album quite a bit after it first dropped. There are some clunkers on here, but I found the whole album to be his most accessible and enjoyable offering from his catalog.

YG: My Crazy Life. I probably listened to this rap album more than any other. That's in large part because my rap listening often happens at the gym, and this album suits my needs for "gym music" more than any other. Still, I loved this.

Finally: Y no War on Drugs? (just kidding. Outside of the first couple of tracks, I didn't love it as much as everyone else seemed to, either.)

I don't think I gave the Hiss Golden Messenger album enough spins. I liked it fine enough, but it might have been a bigger grower on me if I'd have given it the chance to.

I'm glad we're on a similar page re: War on Drugs. That album was not the revelation to me that it apparently is to so many people.

I actually never listened to the YG album in full. I dunno why I never made time for a full spin.

The YOB and Pallbearer albums landed in that 31-35 ranking for me just off the list. If I were ranking "best" albums they might have made it, but I'm generally going to play faster paced metal more because I lurve riffs.

If you listened to every song and album that came out this year you STILL could not make an objective claim.

It's not a personal failing either. Quality of art is always, in some measure, subjective.

Nice work, Reaper.

The 5 best things I heard in 2014.

5. Gas Chamber - Hemorrhaging Light
- 7 note hardcore from Buffalo that breaks the mold of same ol same ol hardcore.

4. Sammath - Godless Arrogance
- At the minimum, 95% of Black Metal makes me chuckle, then there's this.

3. Fistula - Vermin Prolificus
- Long running, drugged out, sludge from the Midwest paired up with the best DIY label in the game made for the best sounding record I heard all year. Looking back, "Pig Funeral" was an uncomfortable premonition in 2014.

2. PLF - Ultimate Whirlwind of Incineration
- PLF could write an acoustic K-pop album and it would still be the best metal album of the year. Dave Callier is why metal will always be my one love.

1. Water Torture - Pillbox
- Dual bass and drum noiseviolence also from Buffalo. This is a game changer as their style mostly lends to an under 10 minutes 7", but they've glued their songs together with ominous noise parts to create the best full length I heard this year.

EPs and Honorable Mentions:
Nomads - s/t 7" - cop hating crust from LA
Cave State - s/t 7" - the best powerviolence 7" of 2014
Antichrist Demoncore - s/t 12" - "I hope that Dorner's ghost comes back to seek revenge". Best lyric of 2014
Sixbrewbantha - new 12" - this could possibly be the best grindcore release of 2014, but it doesn't officially drop until 12/31.

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I didn't expect the Sun Kil Moon and Swans albums to be your 1/2; but I can't argue with it.

I haven't given 'To Be Kind' a fair enough number of listens; I'll get on that. I was kind of frightened to listen to this album after 'The Seer'. Their music hurts my brain.

Yessssss, I always love checking out your recommendations.

I agree with you. Professional critics have a "more" objective viewpoint that they write from but that isn't full objectivity of course.

To Be Kind isn't "accessible" but it is more accessible than The Seer. I think that power groove in many of To Be Kind's tracks makes it more listenable than The Seer.

I think it IS slightly more accessible in that it does have a certain amount of groove to the songs that hold them together. The songs might be even more disturbing or offputting as a result, but they gave me a little more to hold onto and encouraged me to return to the album time and again.

The Seer was a few listens then put it away for me, despite understanding that it was awesome.

I'd listened to Benji a couple of times. I was planning on returning to it in the last month or so of the year. Then SKM's whole beef with War on Drugs became such a distraction from that album that I just totally wrote it off. I need to go back and listen to it some more, but I'm just kind of done with Kozelek at this point. I'm finding he and Morrissey to be equally insufferable twats.

I'm fine with Kozelek being a miserably serious live performer cuz his asshole schtick is hilarious to me. He's become the Steve Spurrier of indie/folk rock and that's totally endearing to me.

I'm absolutely more irritated by the onslaught of handwringing articles and tweets from sanctimonious music critics about Kozelek than I am Kozelek's surliness itself.

That Koz just KEPT trolling them is what annoyed me. Yes, that the bloggers kept taking the troll bait was equally annoying, but that Koz just kept going.. and kept going after WoD when they clearly wanted no part of some feud is what annoyed me. At a certain point, it really started to feel like bullying to me.

Now, I think that Koz was completely doing it just for kicks and to keep his name in the hype cycle, but that the "feud" was so one-sided made it feel a little icky after a bit.

I have a theory that Kozelek didn't like all the extremely positive attention the music press was giving him after releasing Benji so he sabotaged his own hype. He seems like a guy who'd be like "You're just NOW getting around to praising me this much? I've been putting out albums for 20 years. **** you."

That's very possible. He's a damned middle-aged curmudgeon. The dissonance between a guy who can write some of the most sensitive, gut wrenching soul searching lyrics also penning "the war on drugs can suck my dick" is pretty entertaining and surely points to something meaningful.

By the way, and I'm sure you listened to this already, but did you listen to Sivyj Yar From the Dead Villages' Darkness?

The Gum best of Metal list turned me on to it when they said that "Distant Haze was Arising" was the best metal song of 2014. I confess that the song does hit me on a lot of different levels.

I haven't heard of it until now, probably because I'm not in the habit of reading metal reviews on the big sites. Looking at the Stereogum metal list, I'm reminded of what's always been neat about the metal scene to me: there's SO MUCH small label stuff that individual recommendations carry a lot more weight than with most other genres. That track was very nice, if a little familar. I'll listen to the whole album.

I see that Stereogum put the new Blut Aus Nord album at #1. Truthfully, when I was ranking my albums I put that one at #28. But I thought I was writing up too many metal albums as is, and wanted to highlight a bit more diversity.

Yeah. That metal list is like an indie metal list (a lot of metal fans I showed it to said they recognized like 3 bands in the list). It's cool though that in a small genre that much breadth and depth exists.

I think AC/DC "Rock or Bust" should be on your list.

I actually think their run of albums from 2000 - 2014 is some of their best material, right behind the Bon Scott years.

Your list is very well put together. I appreciate it and enjoy it. Thanks especially for taking the time to include all of the material.

I'd remove Agalloch and Opeth. Releases were forgettable.
I'd add Dark Fortress, The Contortionist and Pallbearer (seriously) in there.
Ne Obliviscaris should be higher, IMO.

And I love Alcest

You liked Pallbearer's album better than YOB's in the doom category?

Oh! I remember another album that I had on my best of the year that didn't appear here:

This Will Destroy You, Another Language.

So tough!
I wore both of them out.. I'd probably give Pallbearer the edge.

edit: I agree about "year of Doom" -- some great ones this year; Electric Wizard, Sun O)))

Great release. Had The Contortionist not blown it out of the water with Language, Skyharbor would take the progressive metal/djent throne.
I'm glad the singer has gone back to Tesseract -- i missed his harsh vocals.

The Contortionist

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There were some good Post-Rock albums released this year too.
This Will Destroy You, Helios, and Lowercase Noises -- all fantastic releases

Your post reminded me how much I liked the Lantlos album.

ahhh yes, The Contortionist would have been #5 on my list. Forgot about it.

Dan going back to Tesseract is going to be awesome.
He is my vocal instructor. =)

Best singer in rock/metal today imo.

Are you me?
I was listening to Melting Sun driving back from Arkansas yesterday.

Have you listened to Logic- Under Pressure or JColes new album yet?

Did you listen to Open Mike Eagle's Dark Comedy? That was one of my favorite hip hop albums of the year

I should also add "Nothing More".

There are a couple of lame songs on the album, but production quality in itself is fantastic.

I loved PTSD and agree with this assessment.

J Cole's album was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. I don't like it, really. But I don't dislike it, which is a huge step up in how I usually view Cole.

Logic's album is very good in a certain sense. But it's also just Kendrick worship to such an extreme point that it kind of pisses me off. I was craving originality every time I listened to that Logic album.

No, I didn't. I think I will now.

I would just like to peak my head in to say that while I am not much of a music person, I am in awe of the depth of Reaper's knowledge of the art form.

Reaper knows metal better than I know my dick.

LMAO Thats exactly how I felt about the two. I really like Logics album, but yeah, all it is is a repackaged GKMC.

Couple of other rap and hip hop albums that I liked pretty well:

Wara from the NBHD, Kidnapped: I'd slept on this album, then I saw it on the Bitter Southerner's best of Southern Music 2014 list (great blog by the way). Jazzy, disconnected beats. Since we're making GKMC comparisons... this is kind of a southern version.
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PRhyme, PRhyme: I'd also slept on this one until I saw it in a list. DJ Premier with Royce Da 5'9". It's old school east coast hip hop. Nothing original or inventive, but it's damned good. Lots of nice cameos as well.
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clipping, CLPPING: Not sure that I like this whole album. It's a little bit of Death Grips a little bit of Flatbush Zombies. Noisy and disconcerting. It's a little unsettling. The track "Body & Blood" is pretty impressive, though.

Video is NSFW:

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Reaper, thanks for the Ces Cru recommendation. I've been listening to that album non stop since you posted it up. Really good.

CLPPNG was a very pleasant surprise for me. While I could appreciate what they were doing last year with their Midcity mixtape it wasn't really the type of thing I could come back to again and again. CLPPNG on the other hand is a lot more accessible while still retaining their sound. Its gotten a lot of play at the gym for me since it came out.

Been jamming the **** out of some Sturgill Simpson the last couple of days.

My Revised List of albums I enjoyed this year, in no particular order:

Dream the Electric Sleep - Heretics
††† (Crosses) – ††† (Crosses)
Lesser Key – Lesser Key
Nothing More – Nothing More
Opeth – Pale Communion
The Contortionist – Language
Skyharbor - Guiding Lights
Machine Head – Bloodstone & Diamonds
Pink Floyd – The Endless River
Rishloo - Living as Ghosts with Buildings as Teeth
Silence is a Virus - Imperial


Albums I still want to visit or revisit.

He Is Legend – Heavy Fruit
Death From Above 1979 – The Physical World
Wovenwar – Wovenwar
The Atlas Moth – The Old Believer
Pallbearer – Foundations of Burden
Chevelle – La Gárgola
Animals as Leaders – The Joy of Motion
St. Vincent – St. Vincent
Cynic – Kindly Bent to Free Us
Devin Townsend Project – Z²

Gotta say, im pretty disappointed in the list this year. I come into this thread every year and am able to walk away with some new material to listen to, which is really nice since im not into the music scene at all.

This year.....im hard pressed to find something i like and have to force myself to find the positives in some of these selections.

I do like this one though.

Try some recommendations from other posters in this thread too.

BTW - what were some albums in years past that you discovered through my annual list? I can try to recommend things based on that.

Maybe i was a little harsh, i went back through it again and did like the stuff from Killer Mike...I found that Jason Feathers track you posted interesting as well as the tracks from Alcest and TV On the Radio, though Killer Mike and the track posted by NewChief will likely be the only ones that i'll sample the entire album.

In the past, i really liked that first Death Grips album, Killer Mike, Red Fang, Ces Crue (The new one just isn't doing it for me)......Fidlar? Not sure if i discovered them through you or not....a few more but those are the main ones that come to mind.

You'd probably know more than anyone, but im REALLY looking for something that sounds like this:

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I tried more of Shawn James' stuff, but none of the rest of his work that i found sounded like THAT track.

That Pallbearer is legit.

Me too!

Only albums I have are High Top Mountain and Metamodern sounds in Country Music.

I liked the first single, but never found the time to go grab the album.
One of these days.

How does 'To be kind' stack up against 'White Light'?