Albums I Listened To in 2014

Owen Pallett, In Conflict. ▶

“In Conflict”. “The Riverbed”. “On a Path”.

I think Owen Pallett is one of those musicians who hits a stride and then just can do no wrong for like a decade or so, and In Conflict finds him in the middle of that stride. His musical inventory has grown from the looped violin and chamber strings of his earlier albums to more fully incorporate acoustic drums and the electronic and synth flourishes he started employing on Heartland.

Pallett’s voice, never the kind to dominate a track, still doesn’t, but it’s stronger than ever, easily centering the driving, intense “The Riverbed” (shot through with electric guitar, surely his loudest song) and making “The world will forget any good you have done” sound like a rallying cry. But more often, especially before the first of his two “→” interludes, it’s gentle like on “The Passions,” where it floats over strings that drift from abstract tone clusters (as if half-remembered or just obscured by a haze of propriety) to chords that momentarily surround the lyrics and then dissipate again.

Speaking of the lyrics: Pallett got some buzz in 2014 for a series of essays in which he analyzed some big recent pop hits using the tools of classical music theory, and that blending of the “high” and “low”-brow continues to be a big part of the appeal of his lyrics too. So you have one of my favorite stanzas of the year, where a philosophical rumination on fame and immortality in the title track pivots abruptly into a crude, cheeky come-on. You have “The Secret Seven”’s blunt rejection of the It Gets Better mantra in its chorus softened by Pallett’s singing of (apparently) his actual phone number and a probaby facetious request that the listener call him if they can’t reach their mother. And you have an album that announces its commitment to ambiguity, internal struggle and in-between-ness by having an esoteric gender-neutral pronoun as its fifth word.

I don’t have any moments that I’d call standouts from this album because the whole thing’s so consistently solid. It’s affecting, playful, catchy work from a musician at the top of his game, and the quality also makes it delightful how voluble he is about his creative process and motivating themes. Like its predecessor Heartland, In Conflict is an album that can grab you immediately and work as background music but also reward any closer inspection you care to undertake.

Swans, To Be Kind. ▶

“Oxygen”. “A Little God In My Hands”.

I can’t write about this album without sounding hyperbolic, so if you haven’t heard it you have to just trust that I’m not exaggerating when I say things like “To Be Kind grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go for two hours” or “To Be Kind is a rollercoaster ride where every car is a steamroller with spikes on it” or the like. Let’s say: if you have something distressing on your mind and you would like to blast it out of there as efficiently as possible, you could do worse than spending a couple hours with To Be Kind at high volume.

This album has few of the characteristics that usually define my year-end favorites. Its lyrics are “mantric” if you’re feeling generous, “perfunctory” if not, and probably something like “asinine” if you’re not into it. It has some of what could be called hooks, but its approach to melody ranges from indifferent to hostile, to say nothing of its total disregard for conciseness. In light of that, I guess the easiest way to describe its appeal to me is to say that it is one hundred percent unself-conscious and uninhibited, which inspires a certain vicarious delight in a person like me who is completely the opposite. Is it weird of me to have a secret desire to perform the seventeen-minute “She Loves Us!” at karaoke and have everyone in the room clear out in disgust at its two minutes of wordless gibbering so that Michael Gira and I can shout “YOUR NAME IS FUCK” at the top of our lungs and then follow it up with another nine “FUCK”s in a row without everyone, like, judging us about it? Is it weird that that song is supposed to be about sexual abandon but I suspect the force that makes me want to “sing” along to it is impotent rage? Or is it just weird that I think it’s germane to admit that in an album review?

To Be Kind isn’t just two hours of sixty-year-old Michael Gira bellowing inscrutable obscenities. The musicianship—tight enough for a groove like the one in “A Little God In My Hands” but loose enough that when it spills over into cacophony after the first verse you feel it might do so again at any moment—makes those obscenities feel justified. The stamina exemplified by the two solid minutes of pummelling that Swans delivers at the beginning of the thirty-plus-minute “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture” makes them feel earned. Put it all together and this album, which on paper seems self-indulgent and gratuitous in the extreme, never feels that way when you’re listening to it.

After being underwhelmed by Swans’s (superficially quite similar) last effort The Seer, I was really surprised at how much I liked To Be Kind and how often I still manage to make time to listen to it front to back. It’s not the kind of album you cherry pick songs from (with the possible exception of the blistering “Oxygen” or the blaring single “A Little God in My Hands”). It demands a commitment and your full attention but it earns both in spades: when the final onslaught of the title track subsides I feel raw, hypersensitive, scrubbed clean as if by purifying fire.

Jenny Hval and Susanna, Meshes of Voice. ▶

“Black Lake”. “O Sun O Medusa // A Mirror In My Mouth”. Medley (live)

Jenny Hval’s 2011 album Viscera was one of my favorites that year, but Meshes of Voice tops it even as it reprises some of its material. Viscera’s black lake reappears here: lyrically in the first and last proper songs, and sonically in the form of floods of distortion, feedback and static that either suffuse the vocals or drown them out entirely. Too much of this would be unlistenable (or perhaps just part of a genre whose charms haven’t made themselves known to me yet), but Meshes deftly balances the noise with its prettily melodic sections in a way that enriches both.

Over these alternately skeletal and miasmic backing tracks—this was apparently a live performance, which I didn’t realize until I heard a cough from an audience member when my listen count was in the double digits—the lyrics take a handful of themes and stretch them thin: honey dew, Medusa, milk, the body. The “Mirror in My Mouth” of track 6 seems to me to loosely describe the album’s structure, with “I Have a Darkness” as the suffocating centerpiece across which the aforementioned themes reflect. Basically: the first and last songs describe the lake; “I Have a Darkness” is the lake.

Conventional descriptions of this album’s sound don’t seem to do it justice. Some of the melodies could be described as catchy, I guess, but they cling like honey dew rather than in the parasitic way usually associated with the term “earworm”. The vocals are uniformly strong and complement each other as well as the title suggests: Susanna Wallumrød has the more “traditional” voice, mellow and warm compared to the sometimes piercing reediness of Jenny Hval’s vocals, and she usually sings over piano where Hval favors guitar. Besides the noisy sections I described in my first paragraph, the instrumentation deviates only rarely (and thrillingly) from those two timbres. There’s an organ of some kind on “Honey Dew”, a splash of drums on “A Sudden Swing”, and the piano takes on a bit of a barroom sound on “Medusa”, but overall Meshes sticks to a pretty consistent sound.

But the real appeal of this album for me is that it seems full of mysteries—mirrors and depths, skin and bones, water and milk—but reveals a little more of itself every time I listen. It’s lovely to skim along its surface and peer into its black depths, but there’s enough lake there to submerge myself completely and never reach the bottom.

Zammuto, Anchor. ▶

“Great Equator”. “IO”.

Anchor is a graceful album, cohesive and melodic, surprisingly sedate for the impression it leaves on me. Its production is a front to back triumph—particularly the crispy drums—supplementing an emotional and stylistic arc that culminates in what’s for my money the most affecting couple of minutes of melancholy of the year.

This album is a sonic delight, and the links in this paragraph will take you to blog entries where you can not only hear the songs but read about how they were made; as an occasional music-making hobbyist myself I find Nick Zammuto’s skill in production hugely daunting and impressive. Here are a few of my favorite moments on Anchor that he coaxes out of his equipment and his apparently hugely talented collaborators: Those huge synth bass hits behind the verse and the twitchy blips in the interlude of “Great Equator.” The tightly reined cacophony that starts and finishes “Hegemony.” Those claps in “Electric Ant” and the unstoppable rubbery basslines of “IO” and “Need Some Sun”. The so, so perfectly maudlin strings that buoy the falsetto in “Your Time”’s bridge to even further heights of pathos.

I think my only quibble with this album is that “Stop Counting” drags a little bit for me, but that’s not enough to keep it from being one of my favorites this year. It’s gorgeous, enigmatic but not unapproachable, and it packs a great deal of fun and sonic inventiveness into a tidy 40 minutes.

Adult Jazz, Gist Is. ▶

“Hum”. “Am Gone”.

I admit, I found out about this album by reading about it on another year-end list. The advantages of having no deadline of one’s own, I guess: I can dawdle till February before finishing my list and poach albums from all the people with editors breathing down their necks. Anyway, the poachee in question was coke machine glow, which used to be my favorite music review site back when they reviewed more than three albums per month, and albums like this one are why.

Gist Is is such a hot-and-cold piece of work, like it wants to keep you at arm’s length but also pull you in for a hug and can’t make up its mind. This is apparent from the very first word of the very first song, after a warm but metallic hum leads us toward Harry Burgess’s vocals. They too are round and smooth but almost unsettlingly so: a bit unearthly, maybe, but expressing a very human fear: “The police are gonna wound me / the minister will heal me / but I think he’ll do it equally violently.”

That striking first line is also one of the most complete thoughts in an album otherwise packed with what often seems like a tangle of lyrical scraps: parenthetical asides, sentence fragments, scat singing, even outright gibberish (that’s nontheless faithfully transcribed in the liner notes). So when you get something that sounds like a statement of intent—like when the already-spare instrumentation steps aside about halfway through album centerpiece “Spook”—you sit up and take notice. “I write these songs to trick God / and I do not take it lightly” is a line I find delightful enough on its own, but in context on “Spook” it gives me a frisson. And then “Spook” spirals up into one of Gist Is’s most anthemic choruses, and when it ends it’s followed by the tribal thump and incoherent ululation of “Idiot Mantra”. It’s a hell of a transition.

I’m focusing on moments from Gist Is that tickle me, but the album is almost just a collection of moments. Its nine, mostly longish songs tend to be of the “song suite” variety, which has been one of my favorite formats since the Fiery Furnaces made it a way of life on Blueberry Boat. But the instrumentals aren’t overstuffed like the Furnaces’: there’s a pretty minimal rotation of drums, guitar and bass with a dusting of trombone and synth. The sparsity of the arrangements ensures you can always make out each instrument and keeps Gist Is sonically cohesive, but never boring, as it hops from idea to idea. The melodies are compelling and hooky as the dickens and Harry Burgess has a powerful and acrobatic voice. This is a splendid album.

Runners Up

These are albums I liked a lot but didn’t quite love: maybe they had some lyrics that made me wince; maybe they were impressive but too frontloaded or uneven, with too many songs that didn’t quite hit for me; maybe they were striking but too “out there” for me to really say I loved them.

Artists Doing What They Do

This section includes some artists who basically seem to have a Thing They Do at this point and released albums showcasing them Doing That Thing, generally very proficiently and enjoyably but in a way that tends not to be super exciting once you’re “used to” it.

Disappointments

Albums I was looking forward to that were letdowns when they actually dropped.

Dribs and Drabs

• Against Me!, Transgender Dysphoria Blues: The title track is outstanding, as is “Fuckmylife666” which also has the best name of the year, and all in all this is a fascinating heart-on-sleeve document from a perspective we don’t get a lot of. But it’s also too straightforward to reward a lot of repeat listens.
• Andy Stott, Faith in Strangers: Not sure what to write about this one. Good, moody background music but really hard for me to pin down. The distorted four-note riff in “Violence” is what sticks out to me as the most effective moment, a mix between the airiness of “On Oath” and the pummeling of “Damage.”
• Carla Bozulich, Boy: Challenging and off-putting in a way that did indeed put me off rather than drawing me in. Favorite track “Gonna Stop Killing”, which is also probably one of the most straightforward in melody and construction, though “One Hard Man” is another good, more aggressive way in.
• Death Grips, niggas on the moon: Also falls under “Artists Doing What They Do.” Death Grips is just… I don’t know. Singular. Too aggressive and unconventional for me with not enough handholds to get me to come back to it.
• Grouper, Ruins: Maybe it’s because I didn’t make enough of an effort to grok the lyrics (which, to be fair, are extremely hard to make out without looking them up), but this quiet, slow piano album did nothing for me. The most striking moment was the beep of a microwave.
• Ian William Craig, A Turn of Breath: This is a pleasant, airy listen that works great for me as background music, but it’s not something that compels my interest. It might actually be one of my favorite things in this list of detritus, but I really don’t know how to write about it and it doesn’t make me feel much. It’s just good ambience; it sounds broken but optimistic without being sappy about it.
• K. Flay, Life As A Dog: K. Flay, you’re just no fun anymore, and your songs about your love life sound like you’re still in high school. I’m just really not feeling this album.
• Lizzo, LIZZOBANGERS: Opener “Lizzie Borden” is a nice shot across the bow and this is indeed an energetic, banger-heavy album (with the exception of the draggy “Go”), but too many of the hooks here fall flat for me, too much of the rapping muddled like the jumble at the beginning of “Pants vs. Dress” or the overreaching in the bridge of “Hot Dish”. “Faded” might be a highlight, a B.O.B.-flavored, two-minute blast of attitude.
• Marissa Nadler, July: Much the same category as Ruins, above, but with a little more presence and more decipherable lyrics. Not assertive or distinctive enough to grab me though.
• My Brightest Diamond, This Is My Hand: A weird album with definite highs and lows for me. Shara Worden’s voice is powerful but a little too mannered, I feel, to pull off something rambunctious like opener “Pressure,” though it’s certainly an ambitious start. “Lover Killer” is the closest she’s come to her sinister, magnetic turn as the forest queen on the Decemberists’ Hazards of Love, which is great, as is the slow burn of “I Am Not the Bad Guy”. Unfortunately the album kind of takes a plunge into downtempo shapelessness after that. I like “So Easy” but it’s a mild standout amongst a morass of slow tracks with no hooks.
• Nocando, Jimmy the Burnout: A pretty fun, stylistically diverse album, with a touch of pop (“Break Even”) and a touch of trap (“Grown Man Work”) and a bombastic, charismatic, experienced frontman. Unfortunately his dexterity is wasted on slow, boring tracks like “Too Much to Ask”, “3rd World Hustle” and “Zero Hour”.
• Olga Bell, Krai: Good background music since I don’t understand the lyrics, which are in Russian. Weirdly self-contradictory: it’s very dense with instruments, atonal riffs and layered vocals, but feels somehow insubstantial, perhaps because of how it flits from idea to idea or how the melodies just don’t really stick.
• Shabazz Palaces, Lese Majesty: OK, I admit it, I don’t get these guys. I find this album totally impenetrable, from the lyrics that don’t make sense to the production that almost completely eschews hooks (the sole exception being “#CAKE”). Does this reward repeated listens? I don’t know, but it’s gotta draw me in somehow, and it just doesn’t.
• Sun Kil Moon, Benji: I kept reading things about how bold and brave an album this is for its plainspoken lyrics that wear their heart on their sleeve in this age of corrosive irony and cynicism, and I can kind see that, but “artless” has two meanings and I think they both apply here. Benji seems to me to be all surface, like reading someone’s journal: this is what happened, this is how I feel about it, continue for like six fucking minutes, the end. Ultimately, the problem is that I don’t understand what I’d get out of listening to any of these songs a second time that I didn’t get in the first pass.
• Trophy Scars, Holy Vacants: Okay, no. I’m sorry, but I can’t deal with this guy’s voice. It’s okay, I guess, when he’s not doing this awful strangled-growl thing, but he does that for like 80% of the album. Nope.
• Tycho, Awake: Background music. Pleasant and wholly unremarkable.