Personally and professionally, 2014 was a great year, but it was impossible to ignore the world at large. Racial injustice; the continued erosion of women’s rights; cyber warfare; religious extremism; even messiness on a local political scale. Naturally, I sought solace in music, but I’m getting less comfortable with music-as-escapism. Intentionally or not, social awareness found its way into my favorite albums. Raising consciousness became the call-to-arms for artists as dynamic as D’Angelo and Shabazz Palaces. Elsewhere, there was Angel Olsen’s simmering intensity: “I wish I had the voice of everything / To scream the animals to scream the earth / To scream the stars out of the universe / To scream it all back into nothingness / To scream the feeling til there’s nothing left.” Or Tamara Lindeman (aka The Weather Station) teasing out the details of a human relationship with a novelist’s eye for detail. Or the whomping, sashaying fuck-off of Perfume Genius’ “Queen.” Artistry of every shape and size felt revolutionary in a year filled with so much ugliness.
Perhaps not coincidentally, George Packer’s The Unwinding occupied my thoughts for most of the year. He details “the inner history” of contemporary America, tracing the unraveling of social institutions like locally-owned businesses, public schools, and the middle class through impressionistic journalism and character sketches. His themes and arguments repeatedly bobbed to the surface in 2014: a headline, a tweet, a song lyric, all pointing to the Unwinding.
Unwittingly, the War On Drugs provided a soundtrack to these ideas. Lost In The Dream points towards an emotional malaise, but it’s also hard not to add a word to that title: Lost In The (American) Dream. Amidst the smeared sonics and repetitive beats are the ghosts of a shared past. The vague, impressionistic lyrics only add to the resonance: I’m a bit run down here at the moment. You’ve been on the street, talkin’ ‘bout the war with me. Will you be here, suffering? I bet against the company again, been trying to redefine. Like an ocean in between the waves.
I found incredible solace in a two-year-old song by an artist I’ve completely taken for granted. Nick Cave’s “Jubilee Street” stabbed its way into my life via 20,000 Days On Earth, one of my favorite films of the year. It loosely documents Cave’s incredible life, drawing together theatre, psychoanalysis, punk rock, the avant-garde, and live performance into a messy, beautiful whole. “Jubilee Street” explodes at the end, the chorus a mantra for this or any year: I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, look at me now.
My Favorite Albums Of 2014
16. Sylvan Esso // Sylvan Esso
Shape-shifting electro-pop with a melancholy heart, but aimed at the feet as well as the heart.
15. Magna Carda // Van Geaux
Hip-hop with an aesthete’s eye for rhymes and flows, drawing in everything from classical guitar to some Chuck Close shit. Megz Kelli is the best rapper in town, capable of tearing down the Throne one moment and gleefully dancing around Dougie Do’s concoctions the next.
14. Mike Cooper // Trout Steel
Reissue of a 1970 masterpiece from this British madman, whose bio rakishly asserts he turned down an offer to join the Rolling Stones. No limelight meant he was able to follow his muse wherever it went, from blues to folk to jazz and beyond.
13. Rodrigo Amarante // Cavalo
Former Strokes/Devendra Banhart footnote makes good on his globe-trotting life and puts together a sigh of a record, anchored in Brazilian folk and psych (and sung in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French).
12. Viet Cong // Cassette
Jagged, nocturnal art-punk that gets more unhinged as the EP goes along before exploding in a mushroom cloud at the end.
11. Roger Sellers // Primitives
Austin electro-wizard spins shimmering, meditative pop songs from loops and “primitive” drum bashing. Don’t sleep on his live show.
10. Tweedy // Sukierae
Needs an editor, but Jeff Tweedy proved the detractors wrong by teaming up with his proves once again he’s one of the best guitarists around.
9. Caribou // Our Love
Wobbly, warm electro from the king of emotional dance music. On “Can’t Do Without You,” Dan Snaith turns a Marvin Gaye sample into a declaration of love that’s funny, sad, crazy, and beautiful, all at once.
8. Angel Olsen // Burn Your Fire For No Witness
High art as catharsis—sometimes explosive; sometimes molten.
7. Mac DeMarco // Salad Days
For album number two, the sad clown takes the spotlight for a cycle of bummed-out warped-pop. “Chamber Of Reflection” might make you laugh at first glance, but the synths and voice are icily real.
6. Bradford Cox // Teenage (Soundtrack)
Brian Eno on a home-recorded budget. The Deerhunter/Atlas Sound mastermind finds the melancholia at the heart of teenagers, thereby perfecting this beautiful film about the rise of youth culture.
5. Shabazz Palaces // Lese Majesty
From a future’s past platoon
Brought forth in rhymes
From secret memories of way better times
When we was raisin’ high
Couldn’t sell us none of this shit
You could back us against that wall
But you’d hear that click, another clip
I’m asking, Where did it go?
What happened to my folks?
All our beauty bought by empty corp
Loving what you don't
I can’t understand it
Why we ain't hold sway
And place ourselves behind
All these things we paved the way
4. The Weather Station // What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know
Waking up on a friend’s couch to walking hand-in-hand towards a shared future, all in under twenty minutes. The EP is grounded by Tamara Lindeman’s Bill Callahan-like simplicity, but with an anxiousness that matches the subject matter.
3. Spoon // They Want My Soul
Rock’s saviors return with a fully-stocked arsenal and some of the best songs of their career. Power-pop brushes shoulders with Dr. Dre’s toolkit and Bowie’s shape-shifting. The scalps of street preachers, post-sermon socialites, educated folk singers, and yes, Jonathan Fisk all sit on Britt Daniel’s belt.
2. D’Angelo & the Vanguard // Black Messiah
Angry, sexy, strange, and sublime, D’Angelo transcends his albatross and holds up a mirror to our time. Both forward-thinking and reverent, with strains of Prince, Sly, Marvin, Jimi, Erykah, Andre, and Big Boi swimming in the murkiness.
1. The War On Drugs // Lost In The Dream
An interior album that nonetheless unfolded on a big stage. The band’s narcotized echoes of Dylan and Petty seem apt in this lost moment, the drums hitting a ceaseless beat while Adam Granduciel looks for room in the dark, in between the changes.
…Plus Some Individual Songs That I Liked A Lot This Year
Kate Tempest // Marshall Law
Not quite hip-hop, not quite poetry, more like a short story, Tempest turns her withering gaze on everyday bullshit: made-up personas, awkward flirting, copious drugs, decadent fabrics and desolate lighting.
Perfume Genius // Queen
Three chords, the truth, and a whomp.
Kendrick Lamar // i
Over a boisterous Isley Brothers sample, the greatest rapper alive finds power in loving yourself in an ugly world.
The Notwist // Kong
Breezy krautrock from this veteran German band, nonetheless capturing the panic of rising water.
Sharon Van Etten // Every Time The Sun Comes Up
Van Etten burns the barn down one more time with this smeared ballad, spitting out words with both venom and weariness.
RF Shannon // How The Moon Knew The Night
Slow-burning psych-country unfolding at a Texan crawl, a lifetime of triple-digit summers melting through the speakers.
Thurston Moore // The Best Day
The alternative fountainhead dials into a potent riff and truly sinks his melodic teeth in.
Eno & Hyde // Dbf
The second 2014 collaboration between Brian Eno and Underworld’s Karl Hyde yields some genre-bending Afrobeat, including the impossible-to-contain “Dbf.”
Hiss Golden Messenger // Brother, Do You Know The Road?
This one-off single finds the North Carolinians uniting country and soul, the sacred and the profane over a loping beat. Hypnotic and moving.
Big Search // Role Reversal
This was an early summer sleeper for me, perfectly paired with endless days/haze. The bucolic bridge comes on like a fever dream, only to fall back into Big Search’s sunny melancholy.
Shellac // Dude Incredible
Rock’s noted curmudgeon returned with more opinions, but he also put his music where his mouth is for this sludgy, Neil-Young-in-leather opus.
St. Vincent // Regret
To quote Lindsay Zoladz, “Clark's freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier.”
Ex Hex // Don’t Wanna Lose
Nuggets mainstay “Psychotic Reaction” gets turned into a modern power-pop anthem with Mary Timony as your sly tour guide.
Sleaford Mods // Tied Up In Nottz
Two forty-something British dudes taking their rock back to the bare essentials: a drum beat and speaking truth to power. They take Britain to task over injustices of all kind. They’re already being heralded as prophets in a cubicle near you.
Lauryn Hill // Black Rage (Sketch)
Sung in her living room with her kids in the background, Hill forcefully indicts centuries of strife and oppression, all set to the melody of “My Favorite Things.” Absolutely chilling.
Run The Jewels // Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) [ft. Zach De La Rocha]
Killer Mike and El-P are the conscience and the bullhorn, a balled fist and an inviting hand.
The Weather Station // What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know
On heavy rotation as of late: the Weather Station's lovely EP What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know. It's the moniker for Canada's Tamara Lindeman, and she's mostly alone on this thing, save for some light drums, pedal steel, and acoustic guitar. It comes as no surprise that she's an avowed Bill Callahan fan. She shares his love of hushed intimacy and simplicity, setting up the listener for lyrical daggers at every turn. The EP cycles from the narrator's loneliness to an impending wedding; in just six songs, Lindeman nails the tiny anxieties that pop up during a relationship. Quiet, but heavy.
"'Err,' it translates into 'making a mistake,' right? But that root is also present in other words that mean 'to wander.' For example, when you 'run errands,' you don’t 'run mistakes.' In Portuguese, errante is 'the vagabond. And so there’s something interesting there: The impulse to go beyond, to go towards the unknown, is human. We want to know what is on the other side." // Rodrigo Amarante on the Dinner Party Download, blowing my mind.
I got Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for my eighteenth birthday, and I first used it to soundtrack the most mundane of civic duties: driving downtown to renew my driver’s license. But it ended up being a perfect companion. The music was as tangled as Dallas’ highways, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City as alien as downtown’s brutalism.
In Sam Jones’ fantastic I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, YHF is presented as art triumphing over commercialism, but not without very human consequences. Drummer Ken Coomer was unceremoniously dropped from the band, and Jay Bennett got pushed out after the stressful mixing of the record; Bennett and Tweedy never publicly repaired their relationship before the former died of a drug overdose in 2009. Warner wouldn’t release the record, so Wilco streamed the whole thing on their website before being picked up by a subsidiary of Warner a few months later. It’s the stuff of novels; the backstory threatened to overshadow the music itself.
“All the clouds of power pop are worn inside out to show the silver lining,” author Michael Chabon writes about Big Star. On YHF, those clouds and silver linings are in a precarious balance. Sometimes, the record feels like the ultimate power pop album: bright guitars and harmonies, yes, but laced with crushing sadness, that potent power pop recipe. It’s always reaching, yet forever stumbling over a discordant tape loop or dark thought. “Pot Kettle Black” climbs higher and higher and higher in its coda, only to fade into the penitent “Poor Places.” I’m not going outside—cue the numbers station.
Miscommunication lies at the heart, but a poignant line always shines through the gloom. “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is all crossed-wires—American aquarium drinkers, Bible-black pre-dawns—before the hammer of the title falls. The record is psychedelic in the truest sense of the word. Sensory perceptions are stretched and distorted beyond recognition, each melancholic passage soothed with a euphoric burst of color. Tweedy isn’t above subverting his own subversion, sneaking in a nostalgic look at his St. Louis days (“Heavy Metal Drummer”) and as simple a declaration of love as you can get (“I’m The Man Who Loves You”).
My favorite trick on the record is the subtle fading in and out in the middle of a song, like the signal on some cosmic radio station. It’s done on “Ashes Of American Flags,” “Pot Kettle Black,” and “Poor Places,” and the album begins with the acoustic guitar slowly coming into focus amidst electronic whirring. Your brain takes awhile to catch on, and in the meantime, you’re left floating above it all. We’re all looking for some sort of transcendence in our lives, be it through religion, love, art, music. Wilco offers a thought: “You’ve got to learn how to die / If you wanna wanna be alive.”
Our first destination on the Wilcomobile is a little band with an Elvis-inspired name that would prove a fruitful training ground for our heroes.
Uncle Tupelo have the odd distinction of being somewhat overpraised in certain circles (alt-country, which they kinda sorta invented) and undervalued in other circles (everywhere else). Jeff Tweedy formed the band with Jay Farrar and Mike Heidorn in 1987 in Belleville, Illinois, a town buried deep within in the Midwest but existentially tied to the Mississippi River. Birthed on the tail end of the American indie rock boom of the ‘80s, Uncle Tupelo played loud and fast like their cooler cousins Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, the Minutemen, et al. But Farrar and Tweedy kept the decidedly uncool twang of their youth in the mix; covers of the Carter Family, Louvin Brothers, and Creedence all popped up in their setlists.
Tupelo’s 1990 debut, No Depression, laid all the cards on the table: while the start-stop rhythms paid a debt to hardcore, the guitars, melodies, and harmonies tipped their hats to the honky-tonk jukebox. The record’s urgency helped launch a short-lived musical movement; No Depression became the standard-bearer, both as a magazine and as a somewhat ironic call-to-arms for Gen Xers (suburban ennui was a much more relatable interpretation than a hardscrabble tale of economic tribulation).
From the beginning, Tupelo’s twin poles seemed diametrically opposed. Farrar identified with the grim loners of a few generations before, a Dorthea Lange photo dressed in flannel. Tweedy, on the other hand, wore his heart on his sleeve, the plucky upstart bassist with a budding songwriting itch. Where Farrar could be obtuse and distant, Tweedy’s Tupelo songs have a shaggy-dog beauty to them; the lyrics can be cringe-worthy, but it’s his youthful fire that carries them through.
“Gun” was the turning point. Tweedy’s early contributions to Uncle Tupelo are scruffy and fun, but “Gun” is revelatory, a song for teenagers to scream along to for years to come. Even Tweedy knew it was special, yelling “I nailed it. I finally nailed it” at a party soon after putting pen to paper. Power pop, punk, country, anger, sadness, light, dark—each salvo explodes on impact.
Uncle Tupelo broke up barely three years later, undone by two songwriters who’d outgrown each other. “I walked to my car, and I see Jay and Jeff,” drummer Ken Coomer remembers in Learning How To Die. “I watched Jay walk by Jeff and Jay just give him a nod, like ‘See ya.’ Jeff is an emotional guy; he probably wanted to at least hug the guy. But that’s how it ended. With a nod.”
Hi, I’m Art Levy. I’m a radio host and producer, writer, musician, and I love dad rock. I am not a dad, but I hope to be one someday, and thus, the circle will be complete. This week, we’ll talk about the dad-rockingest of dad rockers, Wilco.
Next week we’ll turn to Chicago alt-rockers Wilco, currently celebrating their 20th year as a band.
Guest writer for the week is Art Levy. Art is a producer/host at KUTX 98.9 FM, the NPR Music affiliate in Austin, TX and writes about music on his website.
Spoon has long had a preoccupation with souls--"Merchants of Soul"; "Rhthm & Soul"; "Black tar in summer / Do a job on your soul"--fitting, given the soul's ephemeral nature mirroring the band's music. There's often a deep, dark longing hiding in the middle of Spoon's best songs, which tend to refract soul (the music form) through a post-modern lens. The soul is continuously ripped apart by a jagged guitar line or a merciless drum thwack.
On album number eight, they sought to make something soulful that still sounded great pumping out of car stereos, and they succeeded wildly. Britt Daniel and Jim Eno have long been modern music's preeminent tinkerers, skewing a sound by a few degrees so that it's recognizable, but off--arty and big tent at the same time. Opener "Rent I Pay" is a case-in-point: it quotes "I Love Rock And Roll," but blasted through a slashed speaker. The band intuitively understands how to make seemingly over-mined minerals--power-pop, punk, funk, R&B--sparkle again with a dramatic flourish. Old associations get swept away with a perfect chord, guitar tone, or even a single tambourine hit. “A lot of times, an interesting thing to do is to take out the first thing you recorded and see where it goes from there," Eno says, succinctly laying out Spoon's careful architecture.
While "Rent I Pay" and "Do You" are some of the best-crafted singles of the band's two-decade career, that old darkness pulls at the heart of the record, making for some harrowing moments of both pain and beauty. The distorted psychodrama of "Knock Knock Knock," followed by the oddly-maximalist electro of "Outlier" makes for an utterly lonely center ("Oh, what happened to you kid?" a grizzled Daniel sings on the latter). "Inside Out" flips the script, turning a Dr. Dre-inspired beat into a spotlight for one of Daniel's best vocal performances. Time is turned inside out, soundtracked by harp glissandos.
Spoon sits at an odd angle in the scene, critically-acclaimed but somewhat taken for granted. They're a detail-oriented band at a time when details are becoming increasingly out-of-fashion; it's only when you zoom out that their career becomes dazzling. On the album's title track, Daniel singles out all the various thieves trying to get a hold of his soul: card sharks, palm readers, educated folk singers, even the old specter of Jonathan Fisk. These feel random and obtuse, but there's a paranoid logic: hold onto your soul, for it's the only thing that can keep the light in a dark world. Spoon are the survivors, standing up for humanity in all its messy glory.
Summer months = Bibio time. The British producer (aka Stephen Wilkinson) has a way of making joyous-yet-sad soundscapes that naturally sync up with the dying hours of summer sunsets. While he's stretched out considerably on subsequent albums (including his mixtape-like masterpiece Ambivalence Avenue), his 2004 debut Fi is essential too. Here he takes his first tentative dips into the kind of pastoral electronica that his friends Boards of Canada first concocted nearly a decade before. Acoustic arpeggios, hazy synths, and found sounds unfold on decaying analog recording equipment, making for background music that's nonetheless gripping and emotional. This record breathes.
Download:
Bibio // Looking Through The Facets Of A Plastic Jewel
Austin's Genuine Leather started out two years ago crafting hazy, lo-fi sketches that never seemed to stick around long. Now comes album number two, deceptively titled Losers, and the band is taking their songwriting by the scruff of the neck. The music snaps into focus, carried forth by an obvious love of power-pop and incisive hooks. Things still get plenty spacey, but simplicity is the key. "It doesn't matter what you say / It only matters how you feel" goes the opener "The Viper"--soulfulness set to a blast-it-out-your-windows beat.
The second serving of Country Funk (via Light In The Attic) doesn't pick up where the last one left off so much as dig a little deeper into the made-up genre. Co-producer Zach Cowie first started collecting these gems as a DJ and hip-hop enthusiast, entranced by the bridge between funky, closely-recorded drum breaks and old-fashioned picking.
This time around, Country Funk puts some focus on the weirder detours made by some of country's biggest stars: Townes Van Zandt's bizarre, Morricone-esque psych wallop "Hunger Child Blues"; Dolly Parton getting down on "Getting Happy"; Kenny Rogers' (yes, that Kenny Rogers) lascivious "Tulsa Turnaround"; Willie's progressive country call-to-arms "Shotgun Willie." Doug Dillard and former Byrd Gene Clark even bring a stunning soulfulness to the Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down" that does the rare feat of reshading the original.
The lesser-known artists don't fare as well on Vol. II, but that's a minor quibble considering the overall good-times vibe. Across the country, a diverse group of artists both old and new were remixing various strains of American music, all in relative isolation from one another. Taking a macro view, this seems like a fruitful byproduct of the era's cultural permissiveness--longhairs and rednecks, black and white finding a new way forward.
Speaking with Cowie for KUTX in Austin, he mentioned how he merely wanted to create a party record, something to put on and be enjoyed by a group of friends with a few beers. More than that, Vol. II is a wonderful historical oddity that proves the used bins aren't quite used up yet. And if you want a party? Willis Alan Ramsey's 1972 masterpiece "Northeast Texas Women" brings the roof down at the very end.
Hiss Golden Messenger is ready for its closeup. M.C. Taylor's various incarnations of the North Carolina outfit over the years have veered from no-fi folk-blues heartbleed to late-night chooglin' to country-pop. On September 9th, HGM will release its Merge debut, Lateness Of Dancers, and the first taste of "Saturday's Song" finds Taylor easing into some soulful new duds. Sin and salvation, Saturday night to Sunday morning.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Little Joy's one-and-only effort exists in some alternate universe where the Strokes traded in their leather jackets for board shorts and sunscreen. Drummer Fab Moretti teamed up with singer Rodrigo Amarante and keyboardist Binki Shapiro, and the three cooked up a set of songs that added some Brazilian samba to the Strokes' jagged post-punk. Little Joy came in 2008, smack in the middle of the Strokes' hiatus, and from the title down to the simple songs, you can hear Moretti getting back to basics. It's a perfect little summer record, punctuated by the poly-rhythmic swoon of "No One's Better Sake."
