#eoty 2014

[allastud]

Best of 2014 Part 2. Top EP's

Here are my favourite EP's of 2014. There wont be any blurbs for these like my album list, just a list. Enjoy!

1. Bad Rabbits - Dusted

2. Antarctigo Vespucci - Soulmate Stuff

3. Switchfoot - The Edge Of The Earth

4. Four Year Strong - Go Down In History

5. Andy Mineo - Never Land

6. Antarctigo Vespucci - I'm So Teathered

7. Something You Whisper - From The Other Side

8. Sucré - Loner

9. iLoveMakonnen - iLoveMakonnen

10. Hearts Like Lions - These Hands

[gggoblin]

long list of things i listened to in 2014 (in no real order)

top albums

fka twigs - lp1

future islands - singles

sd laika - that's harakiri

wreck and reference - want

the body - i shall die here

glass animals - zaba

the bug - angels & devils

young fathers - dead

gazelle twin - unflesh

bloom - hydraulics

ssaliva - pantani

dj paypal - drake edits

the range - panasonic

full of hell/merzbow - full of hell & merzbow

joyce manor - never hungover again

we were promised jetpacks - unravelling

dawn golden - still life

ryan hemsworth - alone for the first time

deptford goth - songs

comeback kid - die knowing

copeland - ixora

timber timbre - hot dreams

cyril hahn - voices

spc eco - the art of pop

planning for burial - desideratum

insiden - above us

millie & andrea - drop the vowels

lil ugly mane - the weeping worm

andy stott - faith in strangers

kitty - impatiens

giraffage - giraffage remixes the-dream

caribou - our love

jerome lol - deleted/fool

pharmakon - bestial burden

tv girl - french exit

have a nice life - the unnatural world

rl grime - void

puce mary - persona

lorn - certain limbs

nordvargr - revolution

mr. dream - ultimate in luxury

blonde redhead - barragan

somaticae - parcugis

tapage - copepod

buraka som sistema - buraka

future - honest

bolder - hostile environment

dream koala - earth.home.destroyed.

dreamcrusher - antipop

actress - ghettoville

other albums i really loved

death grips - niggas on the moon

koenraad ecker - ill fares the land

craft spells - nausea

dj dog dick - kcid god '97

princess nokia - metallic butterfly

dj dodger stadium - friend of mine

photay - photay

the noisettes - the murmur igloo

tobacco - ultima II massage

hanz - reducer

wife - what's between

kayo dot - coffins on io

boots - winterspringsummerfall

sisyphus - sisyphus

dye - cocktail citron

evian christ - waterfall

rustie - green language

young thug - 1017 thug 2

how to dress well - what is this heart?

gem club - in roses

mac demarco - salad days

shlohmo & jeremih - no more

yameneko - pixel wave embrace

grouper - ruins

yelle - completement fou

tinashe - aquarius

mapei - hey hey

schoolboy q - oxymoron

azealia banks - broke with expensive taste

alex g - dsu

prawn/joie de vivre - split

sbtrkt - wonder where we land

arca - xen

salva - peacemaker

royksopp - the inevitable end

brighter death now - with promises of death

dreamcrusher - haine

bear in heaven - time is over one day old

pregnant women - the bagel town diaries

groundislava - feel the heat

genocide organ - archive IV

bad kisser - bate kush

mndsgn - yawn zen

drop - vasundhara

astr - varsity

pictureplane - the alien body mixtape

swans - to be kind

clark - clark

trust - joyland

dutch e germ - in.rak.dust

htrk - psychic 9-5 club

2 chainz - freebase

dalhous - will to be well

james blake - 200 press

other cool albums

spooky black - leaving

para one - club

ricky eat acid - three love songs

arrange - their bodies in a fog

hoover party - make drones not drones

ed thomas - outlaws 

ic3peak - substances

pulshar - blood & mathematics

the drums - encyclopedia

lemonade - minus tide

you blew it! - keep doing what you're doing

shamir - northtown

thestand4rd - thestand4rd

skrillex - recess

la dispute - the rooms of the house

absolut - punk survival

brave bird - t-minus grand gesture

raury - indigo child

jc and the nobodies - ish

the fresh & onlys - house of spirits

favorite mixes

pharmakon fader mix

kingdom live @ fade to mind/night slugs at verboten

tcts fader mix

kerridge crack mix

lotic - damsel in distress

clark fader mix

ktng. mix 4 amdiscs

$1000 wallet lonely cloud mix 4 amdiscs

rl grime halloween mix

bloom functions of the now mix

how to dress well - you and i are the same

pc music x DISown radio

na upfront mix

visionist fader mix 

cerith - a trace, a flood

*major shout out to all the good stuff i forgot/didn't feel like mentioning/meant to listen to but never did*

[radiofreeblog]

60 Albums I Loved in 2014 (Pt. 1)

Honorable Mentions here.

#31-60:

31. Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso 32. Perfume Genius - Too Bright 33. Scott Walker + Sunn O))) - Soused 34. The Roots - …And Then They Shoot Your Cousin 35. Ian William Craig - A Turn of Breath 36. Lydia Loveless - Somewhere Else 37. Mitski - Bury Me at Makeout Creek 38. Timber Timbre - Hot Dreams 39. Ty Segall - Manipulator 40. Manchester Orchestra - Cope/Hope* 41. Amen Dunes - Love 42. TV on the Radio - Seeds 43. Strand of Oaks - Heal 44. Warpaint - Warpaint 45. Wild Beasts - Present Tense 46. Tweedy - Sukierae 47. RX Bandits - Gemini, Her Majesty 48. New Madrid - Sunswimmer 49. Ben Howard - I Forget Where We Were 50. Foxes in Fiction - Ontario Gothic 51. Snowmine - Dialects 52. Shakey Graves - And the War Came 53. Arca - Xen 54. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - Atomos 55. Roadkill Ghost Choir - In Tongues 56. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Wig Out at Jagbags 57. Phox - Phox 58. Jenny Gillespie - Chamma 59. Hey Rosetta! - Second Sight 60. Shabazz Palaces - Lese Majesty

*More of a love/hate relationship. I could talk to you about it for quite a while.

[radiofreeblog]

Some Albums I Really Liked in 2014

Throughout the next few days, I'll be posting my EOTY list and accompanying writing re: music I loved this year. For now,

Some Albums I Really Liked in 2014 (in no discernible order):

Actress - Ghettoville United Nations - The Next Four Years Damien Jurado - Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son Alex G - DSU Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues Andy Stott - Faith in Strangers Martyn - The Air Between Words Leon Vynehall - Music for the Uninvited Caribou - Our Love Empire! Empire! I Was a Lonely Estate - You Willl Eventually Be Forgotten Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy Frazey Ford - Indian Ocean Steve Gunn - Way Out Weather Justin Townes Earle - Single Mothers Kiasmos - Kiasmos David Bazan + Passenger String Quartet - Volume 1 Every Time I Die - From Parts Unknown Nick Mulvey - First Mind Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music Sharon Van Etten - Are We There 

Fear of Men - Loom

[radiofreeblog]

My Year in Reading, 2014

More so than the films I watch or the music I listen to, the books I read are the catalysts for my thoughts on the world around me. When I am doing my deepest thinking – and my deepest feeling – about the people I interact with, about the things I as a person do and think, about the basic, reoccurring problems of humanity, I come at these with the thoughts and emotions aroused by and found within the books I read. Never has this been more apparent to me than this year: the year in which I completed a trying student teaching experience, graduated from college, separated from most of my friends as I moved back home, endured a long summer of attacking a small number of job prospects (and coming up with an even smaller number of offers), and – finally – began work as a full-time teacher.

From the beginning of the year to now, I have gone from having no time for reading to having what feels like quite a good deal of time for reading.  Indeed, although I am no longer reading at the rate of a book or two a week, as I was at Berry, I feel like I am now reading more than ever. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m no longer consumed with the stresses of classes or that I’m able to read whatever I want to – not, notably, what a professor has assigned (as good as those assignments admittedly were). Perhaps. I’m sure that has something to do with it. However, I think the reason I’m feeling far better about the quantity and the quality of my reading is that I no longer have to do it.

Reading has become, for the first time in a long time, something almost wholly optional. Sure, I may reread the occasional book or story for my classes (i.e. the classes I’m teaching), but – for the most part – reading a book has become entirely my choice. As such, I have branched out in my reading this year: becoming a frequent reader and follower of small presses, booksellers, and literary critics and following my burgeoning interests in translated literature and lesser-known contemporary writers. Doing so has made me feel part of a larger, always-ongoing literary conversation I could never have in Ringgold or Chattanooga, as well as led me to a number of great writers, new and old. All of this has led me to feel increasingly more grateful for what literature can do and, all in all, to feel way more actual pleasure in reading than I have before. When it comes to books and reading, it has been a good year.

So, yes, “what literature can do”: that is one of the primary themes of the one book that took up most of my reading time January to April: The Goldfinch. While it – or, more specifically, others’ reactions to it – certainly caused a number of think-pieces and debate in literary circles, The Goldfinch was for me a simple reminder of what a good story can do. Was The Goldfinch bloated and its thematic/aesthetic conclusions not worth the time investment? Probably, yeah. But I can’t say I minded. Instead The Goldfinch, in all its drawn-out glory, became a familiar companion over the months it took to complete. Whenever I was overcome with the stresses of student teaching, I looked forward to getting back to it and relished being able to sink into its world, to interact with its characters, whenever possible, even if I  did have certain critical qualms about that world and those characters. Like the few albums I was listening to obsessively at the time*, The Goldfinch was, simply, a relief. I am still thankful for that, and I remember it fondly.

Being left with an abundance of free time in late April, I threw myself into reading all that I had eyed with interest in those first months of the year (helped oh so much by the inter-library loan program at Berry). I read, among others, the wrenchingly beautiful Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor; Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief**; Leslie Jamison’s striking, moving, and memorable essay collection, The Empathy Exams; and Bennett Sims’ DFW-esque take on the zombie genre, A Questionable Shape. All afforded their own pleasures, but I must confess that Jamison’s collection is the one book that has stayed with me the most these past seven months, becoming one of the few books this year that I’ve pushed on friends and recommended passionately to anyone who will listen.

In the summer, I read giants like Cervantes and Beckett for the first time, enjoying Don Quxote  and Waiting for Godot. I explored short stories: Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and Lydia Davis’s Break It Down, filled with perfectly formed sentences that packed more emotion than some writers arouse in a whole novel; Tolstoy’s Selected Short Stories (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky), all of which are as incredible as you have heard; and Kyle Minor’s shockingly great Praying Drunk. Seriously. You need to read Praying Drunk. Six months later, I still think about this collection and certain stories, such as “In A Distant Country,” which has perhaps become one of my all-time favorite short stories. If you’re like me, you’ll rush through Praying Drunk so quickly – because it’s so good – that you’ll simply have to go back and read it again a few months later and then again sometime after that.

I ended my summer by discovering a book that, no “perhaps” about it, became an automatic all-time favorite: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. In the span of this slim novel, Robinson captures a stunning amount of life. Told in the form of letters written by an aging preacher to his young son, Gilead is one of the most emotionally affecting books I’ve read, with Robinson offering a portrait of life and Christianity that feels Real and True. Robinson’s sentences embody grace – religious and otherwise – in a way no other writer I’ve read has. Gilead is light but deep, simple but complex: paradoxical, yes, but true to life.

I’ve gone through the latter part of the year with a flurry of great books, each one of which I could write an entire post about. There was Emily St. John Mandel’s terrific Station Eleven (reviewed here), which has become my other go-to recommendation along with The Empathy Exams. There was Herman Melville’s Pierre, a book that lived up to its reputation as batshit-insane (and which is better than its reputation as a curiosity suggests). There was Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper, also one of the more unusual books I’ve ever read but that has guaranteed I’ll follow whatever Zink writes from here on out. Truly, Zink is the wittiest and most unique voice I’ve encountered among the many new writers I’ve read this past year. Finally, there was David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Homer’s The Iliad, and Mathias Enard’s Zone. Reading these three in succession made for a small project of sorts, as both Zone and Mistress related back to The Iliad in several subtle and obvious ways. Reading these three throughout the later months of 2014, in conjunction with so many terrible events around the world and in the U.S., forced me to reflect on the several problems these issues raised: how we deal with loss, our propensity and desire for violence, our propensity and desire for violence’s debilitating effects on culture and our personal psyches, the rareness and value of human kindness.

I’ll end my year by finishing a reread of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I started, along with Katie, back in May. I first read IJ in 2011 during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. It was life-changing, introducing me to a voice that would influence my own writing for years to come; that would shape my thoughts on literature and its purpose; that would, in so many small ways, make me into a better, more empathetic person. Coming back to it after three years of college in which I had grown as both a reader and a person felt right. I suppose – although it is hard to definitively state this, given the number of books I’ve read this year – that it has been the most rewarding reading experience I’ve had in 2014. There were, of course, the numerous little details can only be noted and understood once you’ve passed through the book once already. I was also able to pick up on the nuances of structure – of smaller sections and of the book as a whole. Most of all, though, I was able to connect even more with how effectively DFW can address the complexities and paradoxes of life: the pain of experience, the truth of banal, sentimental aphorisms, the grace that can be found in simple human kindness. My favorite section of the book details what one learns from spending time “around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House.” Wallace notes, among many other things, “that sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt … that there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness … that there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels … that God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.” These ideas, to me, are the main themes of Infinite Jest. While much has been made, and rightly so, of Infinite Jest’s place at the end of the post-modern canon (or, also, at the start of the post-post-modern canon) and of Wallace’s investigation of irony, Infinite Jest is above all, for me, a moralistic book, one that has as much in common with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as it does with Pynchon and DeLillo. Wallace is struggling with questions of how a person should be, of how to interact with other persons in a world that shies away from naked sincerity and that is inundated with technology, of what it means to live a good life, of what it means to be a good person. By the end of the novel, one comes away from with a clear idea of what DFW’s answers are to those questions, answers that have resonated and will continue to resonate deeply with me. What makes them ring capital-T True, though, is the way in which he gets there, prompted by a question posed at the very beginning: “So yo then man what’s your story?” 

Footnotes:

*Future Islands’ Singles, Weatherbox’s Flying in All Directions, The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream, The Hold Steady’s Teeth Dreams.

**Which ended up reading, Every Day is for the Thief did, like a dry run at the excellence found in his follow-up, Open City.

*** I’ll take this space to note that I don’t entirely agree with my review of Station Eleven from August. While I expressed disappointment at the time that the book did not live up to the incredible images that it sets up, I no longer feel that way. If anything, Mandel’s deft melding of genre fiction and literary aims has only increased in stature in my mind since finishing it. Station Eleven became the sort of book that, on later reflection, seemed easier to produce than it actually was. In other words, Mandel wrote a book so well that I underrated just how well she wrote it. Its complexities and craft have become increasingly evident as I think back on its characters, story, and structure (oh, how I love the structure of Station Eleven). 

[suffocatethehalo]

EOTY List 2014

In more detail.

01. Single Mothers - Negative Qualities

Highly anticipated this album since they started posting lyric bits online years ago, and probably my most listened to record in years. First band I've reached out to, to book for a show. (*insert following brag stories*) Drew's lyrics and delivery, since the Wild Party EP, always resonated with me. 

02. United Nations - The Next Four Years

One of the most enveloping concept albums you'll ever indulge in, satirically, lyrically, and through physical format. Destroys the idea of critiquing society and subcultures, and consciously starts with examination of the self/individual. 

03. Pianos Become the Teeth - Keep You

Inspiring effort to convey the same amount of emotion this time around without screaming. 

04. Gillian Carter - Songs For Splits

I will never not rock the fuck out to this release.

05. Tycho - Awake

Otherworldly.

06. No Devotion - 12" Single Releases

Filling the void that the end of Lostprophets and Thursday left us with comes some of the catchiest, brooding brit pop / post-punk and Geoff's best vocal delivery to date. 

07. Ex-Breathers - ExBx

The aesthetics of this release just reek of some bizarre mix-up of Fugazi and Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers, and I'm hooked. 

08. The Menzingers - Rented World

The valiant effort to follow up the flawless On the Impossible Past, and they just don't write a bad song.

09. Disco Doom - Numerals

All of the best characteristics of Built to Spill in one place.

10. The Hotelier - Home, Like Noplace Is There

Imagine discovering (sigh) an "emo revival" band that could sing on pitch and could write with solid narrative and engaging song structure.

11. Whirr / Nothing Split

Being fully aware of the fact that both bands released full lengths this year, this is the best material either one of these bands have released.

12. Two Inch Astronaut - Foulbrood

Probably my favorite riffage (see: "Part of Your Scene") from this year. Their transition into more melancholic, mid-tempo,  open songwriting.

13. Seahaven - Reverie Lagoon: Music For Escapism Only

There are a number of tracks that keep the album from flowing as cohesively as it could (see: Highway Blues, Solar Eclipse). If those didn't exist, this album easily would have found its way into my top ten. The reverb-drenched songwriting and newly added string sections make it the highlight of their entire discography.

14. The Effects - Cassette Single Releases

Devin Ocampo's (Faraquet, Medications, Beauty Pill, Deathfix) new project. One of the most underrated songwriters and musicians of the Dischord family and in general. Very angular leads with cohesive song structure. Hopefully these tracks eventually find their way onto an LP.

15. Ages - Rest Your Head

A Mayfly Record band, and one that I was lucky enough to see and help book earlier this year. Melodic punk/alt-rock that actually doesn't come across as insincere and cliche. 

16. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else

Kind of the same situation with The Menzingers record, where they released a game changer [Attack On Memory] and fell under the burden of trying to follow it up. I grew used to watching them reinvent themselves and progress with each record, but they decided to stay in the same groove this time around. Still a very solid, destructive, and relevant record for me.

17. La Dispute - Rooms of the House

Wildlife was a post-hardcore staple and one of the only records that I think upheld the integrity of the new generation of the genre. Overall concept for Rooms of the House is strong and showcases Jordan's most accessible (for the better) delivery thus far. However, the lyrics aren't as powerful on a situational basis. The album houses some of their best musicianship and themes in small bursts, but the majority of the songs outside of that aren't calling for anyone's attention.

18. Prawn - Kingfisher 

Hopeful nostalgia, produced by Greg from Moving Mountains, so expect soundscapes for days.

19. Poster - Brandt

Indie dream pop boys from Lakeland. Solid, catchy, and some of the best tones from front to back.

20. D'angelo and the Vanguard - Black Messiah

The dissonance and musicianship on this record, along with its cultural relevancy/platform, makes the fourteen year gap between records worth the wait. 

Most Anticipated 2015:

Refused

Glassjaw

Brand New

Modest Mouse - Strangers to Ourselves

Beauty Pill

No Devotion

Radiohead

Death Cab For Cutie

Title Fight - Hyperview

If Slowdive releases a record this year, that'd probably be top 3.