My 10 favourite albums of 2014

If there's one thing that's characterised 2014 for me, it's the realisation of how streaming affects my engagement with music. How much I get out of listening to music is only partly down to what I'm listening to – the rest is determined by the mood I'm in, what device I'm using to listen on, what kind of day I'm having, and what I'm doing at the time. Working in an office during the week, a lot of my music listening has been pretty passive, streaming stuff on Spotify while I do other things. My favourite albums have largely been those that really grabbed me while they were on in the background, so I had to save them for later to listen with focused attention, either on headphones during my commute or blasted in the car.

2014 has also been the year in which I've made a concerted effort to pay for more music. Streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud are an incredible discovery tool, but it’s easy to forget that you can further support an artist you love by purchasing a download or CD via Bandcamp or at a bricks ’n’ mortar record store – if you can find one...

10. Morgan Delt – Morgan Delt (Trouble In Mind)
Although this album invites plenty of comparisons with classic psychedelic rock from the '60s and '70s, Morgan Delt doesn't remind me of any artist specifically, nor does it overemphasise any obvious production tricks to signify the psychedelic experience without actually embodying it. This magnificently warped half-hour is so deftly executed and full of memorable songs that it's almost too much. It wobbles and surges and oozes between your brain-fingers like chocolate. This is music to subject your consciousness to, and goosebumps are bound to follow.

9. Eiko Ishibashi – Car and Freezer (Drag City)
The only reason I've even heard of Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi is because this album prominently features the multi-talented Jim O'Rourke, one of my musical heroes, plus it's just been released on Drag City. With vocals in both Japanese and English (not that it's necessary to follow the words to appreciate its beauty), Car and Freezer is a lovely album of feather-light jazz-pop that will surely sate any O'Rourke enthusiasts waiting for a follow-up to The Visitor, or fans of bands such as The Sea and Cake. And if you like this, its predecessor, Imitation of Life, is superb too.

8. Richard Dawson – Nothing Important (Weird World) 
I have an old friend to thank for introducing me to the wonders of Richard Dawson. Lyrics are more likely to turn me off a record than draw me to it, but in the case of Nothing Important's two vocal tracks, these are some of the funniest sung lines I've ever heard. Pair them with Dawson's overdriven acoustic guitar and it's truly something special – and the perfect antidote to over-earnest singer-songwriters. His guitar playing may be chaotic and astringent, but this whole album is infused with a warmth and humour that's infectious.

7. Fennesz – Bécs (Editions Mego)
While most fans of Fennesz's music favour the seminal Endless Summer, I'll go out on a limb and assert that Bécs is his best album, containing his single best piece, the staggering 'Liminality'. From just a guitar and a laptop, Fennesz constructs mighty edifices of shimmering sound, from the gentle and reassuring to the terrifyingly dense and imposing. Unlike Ben Frost's A U R O R A, which was thrilling on first exposure and quickly palled, Bécs has an approachability and melodic nous that rewards repeat listens.

6. Owen Pallett – In Conflict (Domino)
In Conflict's appeal is immediate, its beauty obvious, but its motivations and through-lines feel like they’re just around the corner, dissolving into air or ducking into the shadows as you move thuggishly towards them. Pallett is a master at this stuff: melodies move in delicate arcs, lovingly coloured with brass and strings, his soft, supple voice reaching and harmonising with itself. Tracks flow together like water and the arrangements feel like natural, billowing things – part of the songs’ DNA rather than a later addition to make the music sound more epic and emotive. Rapturous stuff.

5. Daniel Lanois – Flesh and Machine (Anti)
Although perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno (yay) and U2 (boo), Daniel Lanois is a stunningly effective musician and producer in his own right, and this new instrumental collection plays to his strengths (dense overdubbing, hands-on mixing techniques, fearless sound manipulation). Veering from chaotic processed jams with drummer Brian Blade ('The End') to utterly gorgeous solo pedal steel ('Aquatic'), Flesh and Machine is a sensuous, immersive experience, abrim with kaleidoscopic textures.

4. Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (Polyvinyl) 
The 10 songs on Deerhoof album number 12, recorded in guitarist Ed Rodriguez's basement, were originally intended as demos, but the band wisely decided to develop the rehearsal room recordings into final songs. If you've seen Deerhoof live, you'll know that their kinetic energy and instrumental interplay are a large part of their magic. The immediacy of these performances demonstrates that this approach has paid off dividends. This is easily among Deerhoof's best, and after the crushing disappointment of their last two full-lengths, a wonderful surprise.

3. Ian William Craig – A Turn of Breath (Recital)
Despite sharing three tracks with his wonderful 2013 album A Forgetting Place, I can forgive Ian William Craig because A Turn of Breath is the perfection of his art thus far. With just his voice, old reel-to-reel tape machines and some occasional guitar, Craig conjures forth an awe-inspiring, heavenly sound, akin to angels singing through a broken radio. Listening to this transcendent album feels like witnessing something crushingly beautiful in the process of falling apart forever. Thankfully we can listen to that process again and again.

2. Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams (Arts & Crafts)
Their name may be clunky, but Timber Timbre's music is masterfully conceived and executed. On the cover of Hot Dreams, we see the twin icons of Western material success, the car and the house, in a palm tree-lined street in (perhaps) the Hollywood Hills. Yet against the bleached-white sky, these parched husks take on a tragic dimension. Therein lies the key theme of this record: promises of glamour and happiness glow like neon in a strip club, yet behind this facade is a loneliness and despondency that threatens to erupt into violence.

1. Adult Jazz – Gist Is (Spare Thought)
This debut album by Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz is such a thing of rare beauty, that to try and parse its singular appeal feels overwhelming and unnecessary. Overwhelming in the sense that there's so much wonderful stuff going on here that it's difficult to know where to begin. Writing about the music feels redundant, in the sense that it feels meaningless next to the experience of actually listening to it. All I can really say is listen to this album, because it's deliriously beautiful, inspiring and addictive. When I first discovered it, I listened to it on repeat for two weeks straight. 


Also recommended:
Amen Dunes – Love (Sacred Bones)
Bohren und der Club of Gore – Piano Nights (PIAS)
Children Of The Stones – The Stars and the Silence (Saint Marie)
Christina Vantzou – No. 2 (Kranky)
Flying Lotus – You're Dead! (Warp)
Locust – After the Rain (Editions Mego)
Peter Escott – The Long O (Bedroom Suck)
Protomartyr – Under Color of Official Right (Hardly Art)
Steve Gunn – Way Out Weather (Paradise of Bachelors)
Tape – Casino (Hapna)

Thom Yorke – Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

Thom Yorke's new solo album has arrived at an opportune moment for me. I'm in the midst of re-listening to all my favourite Radiohead albums, prompted by the news that the band are back in the studio working on the follow-up to The King of Limbs. I've even gone back to Atoms For Peace's disappointing Amok in search of Yorke-related goodness. Surely I'm primed to lap up this new surprise release? 

Before I even heard any of the music, the first thing Yorke got right is the pricing. I'll happily pay $6 for the digital download of an album by an artist I like, even without hearing any pre-release singles. (I'm less enamoured with the BitTorrent process, but that's an aside.) As far as the music's concerned, although there are some worthwhile tracks, mostly found in the first half, the album is bogged down by the limitations of Yorke's solo musical explorations: glitchy beats and bloops, plus Yorke's inimitable whine, trapped like a ghost in the machine. 

Single and opener 'A Brain In A Bottle' is probably the most fully realised song, counterbalancing ominous bass throb and eerie synth melodies with shuffling beats and Yorke's vulnerable, periodically echoed voice. However, it's immediately followed by the less-than-inspired 'Guess Again!', where the insistently crunchy rhythm really grates over its run-time.

For me, the one true stunner on this album is track 3, 'Interference', perhaps because it's not cluttered with Yorke's busy beatwork. In under three minutes, he runs a warm bath of electric piano and synth tones, then breathes his lonely vocal through the steam. It's followed by the very different but equally strong 'The Mother Lode' (note the correct spelling of 'mother lode', Mastodon). Even though I instinctively wince at the bass bounce and Burial-esque drum sounds of this lengthy upbeat workout, there's no denying it's catchy.

In contrast, 'Truth Ray' is almost sublimely dreary, its excruciatingly foot-dragging tempo made even more leaden by Yorke's moan of "Oh my god, oh my god". It's almost unbearable, but that's probably the intended effect. Boxes' longest track, 'There Is No Ice (For My Drink)', is punctuated by irritating high tom hits and vocal manipulations, richocheting around with very little direction before seguing into the piano and tape warble of 'Pink Section'. Patience is rewarded by the plaintive finale, 'Nose Grows Some', which oozes with ethereal atmosphere.

What's most frustrating about this release is the feeling that the songs are underdeveloped. Sounds are mostly looped then left to run for the duration of each track, with little to no variation or manipulation. When you place this music next to something like Syro by Yorke's beloved Aphex Twin, it sounds especially crude. Nevertheless, as with most of the music Yorke produces, there's a definite something that draws me back repeatedly. The aesthetic may not be especially original or groundbreaking – or even consistently effective – but there's no doubting that his morose songcraft can prove hypnotic.  

Circulatory System – Mosaics Within Mosaics

When Circulatory System's second album Signal Morning finally arrived in 2009, there was no way it could live up to the expectations I had built up during the eight-year wait for a follow-up to their self-titled debut, which is easily one of my favourite albums of all time. (I gave it another listen yesterday, and it still sounds absolutely incredible.) Where Circulatory System was rich, vivid and immaculately realised, Signal Morning felt scrappy and cobbled together, blasted through with fuzz and battered by the attack of twin drum kits. Although intermittently brilliant, Signal Morning was a massive disappointment compared to their debut.

With a comparatively short wait of five years since Signal Morning, it's great to have a new Circulatory System album. However, Mosaics Within Mosaics essentially comprises an hour of Will Cullen Hart's home demos later embellished by his bandmates. It sounds lo-fi, minimal and underdeveloped compared to their earlier work, including that of Hart's previous band Olivia Tremor Control. (The two tracks shared by the band prior to the album's release – 'If You Think About It Now' and 'Stars and Molecules' – are probably the most full-sounding, comparable to some of the songs on Signal Morning.)

When the bigger picture is taken into account – Hart's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis several years ago, and the tragic death of his OTC songwriting partner Bill Doss – the frail, forlorn sound of Mosaics Within Mosaics begins to make sense. While there were plenty of sad, reflective songs on Circulatory System, they were also densely orchestrated and swirling, the melancholy counterbalanced by impossibly kaleidoscopic multitracking. Here, with most songs left relatively naked, the eerie atmosphere of Hart's songwriting sounds incredibly fragile. I find it hard to discern whether this effect is intentional, or that the band has simply done the best they can with Hart's home recordings without dampening the feel of the original off-the-cuff performances.

As a result of the consistently skeletal nature of these song fragments, the overall sound of the album certainly feels considered, its tonal palette muted and washed out. And, with repeat listens, certain chord changes or melodies snag on my brain, harking back to previous Circulatory System tracks. However, it feels more like a starting point than a finished work of art; a sketch rather than an oil painting. Opener 'Physical Mirage/Visible Magic' is typical in this regard, its scuffed groove barely hanging around long enough for the listener to enjoy before the song dissolves and heads in another direction. Contrarily, the pieces that feel the most satisfying are the intermediary sound sketches ('Mosaics', akin to the 'Animation' pieces on OTC's Black Foliage). At four-and-a-half minutes, 'Mosaic #1' is by far the longest track here, its sustained drone deep enough to lose yourself in. Later in the album, 'Mosaic #4' has an almost industrial feel to it, an uneasy ambience that really pricks up my ears.

In a rare recent interview, Hart likened his creative process to that of Frank Zappa, who recorded obsessively and cobbled together albums from recordings that may have spanned years – decades, even. If Mosaics Within Mosaics comprises songs recorded years apart, the band has done an excellent job of constructing a flowing suite out of Hart's home experiments. Even then, it still feels frustratingly unfinished. If this can be attributed to exhaustion arising from Hart's multiple sclerosis, that's sad but inevitable. If it's an aesthetic decision, that's sad, too, but far less tragic – it just means Circulatory System are moving in a direction that holds less interest for me. Who knows? Signal Morning certainly took plenty of listens to appreciate, so maybe this one will come into focus down the track. For now, its ramshackle nature is proving too loose and distant to fully engage me.

Owen Pallett – In Conflict

Although it's not much to look at, the cover of Owen Pallett's new album In Conflict is a telling reflection of the music's beguiling appeal. The four columns of text contain the lyrics from the songs on the first half of the album, but a cancerous blob of ink obscures a good portion of the words. Everything may be laid out in black and white, but part of it is deliberately obscured, frustrating any attempts to apprehend 'the big picture' and grasp its full meaning. Perhaps as a result, In Conflict holds me rapt. Its appeal is immediate, its beauty obvious, but its motivations and through-lines feel like they're just around the corner, dissolving into air or ducking into the shadows as you move thuggishly towards them.
 
Such a response feels appropriate when the music is this shamelessly sophisticated, this swooningly gorgeous. Having never heard Pallett before, I have no idea if this is his usual MO, but initial spins of In Conflict make it abundantly clear he's a master at this stuff: melodies move in delicate arcs, lovingly coloured with brass and strings, his soft, supple voice reaching and harmonising with itself. Tracks flow together like water and the arrangements feel like natural, billowing things – part of the songs' DNA rather than a later addition to make the music sound more epic and emotive.

From opener 'I Am Not Afraid' through to awesome single 'The Riverbed', I simply can't fault this record. That's about 40 minutes of beautiful, orchestral pop music, with 'The Secret Seven' and 'Chorale' its delirious apex. If I was nitpicking, I'd say that after the heady rush of 'The Riverbed', the final three tracks feel like too much – the wafer-thin mints that bust the gut after a hearty, satisfying meal. Ultimately, though, this is music that leaves me clawing for superlatives and eager to experience more of Pallett's music.

Spoon – 'Rent I Pay'

Spoon are fundamentally a rock'n'roll band. Generally, I can't stand rock'n'roll's boozy good-time glow, its recycling of songwriting tropes, its leaning on bluesy riffs and classic rock posturing. So why do I love Spoon so much?

They tread a fine line, that's for sure, between cutting loose and holding back. In their new single 'Rent I Pay', the chorus gets a bit cringeingly pub-rock – the line "That's what my brother would say", doubled by the backing vocals, being the prime culprit – but there's that Spoon rhythmic jag to the song that not only keeps it afloat, but renders it pretty damned crankable. 'Cos prime Spoon is, if nothing else, all about tense, meticulously produced momentum and hip-snapping swagger. Everything locks in and charges on, dragging you behind it, panting.

'Rent I Pay' isn't doing anything particularly unique in Spoon's discography, but the production hand of Dave Fridmann nudges all the instruments into the red, giving the whole song an overdriven glow that suits Spoon down to the ground, especially as this is one of their songs where Britt Daniel's voice (The Best Voice in Rock'n'Roll Bar None TM) is at its limits, controlled but straining into its golden, throaty glory.

Spoon are a rare beast – a singles band and an albums band. Their new album They Want My Soul (due on Loma Vista in August) is eagerly awaited by my earholes. This will do nicely for now.

Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

Aside from the fact they have one of the clunkiest band names I've ever heard, plus an affinity for groaningly bad puns (see Creep On Creepin' On and 'This Low Commotion'), Timber Timbre's music is masterfully conceived and executed. On the cover of their fifth album, Hot Dreams, we see the twin icons of Western material success, the car and the house, in a palm tree-lined street in (perhaps) the Hollywood Hills. Yet against the bleached-white sky, these parched husks take on a tragic dimension. Therein lies the key theme of this record: promises of glamour and happiness glow like neon in a strip club, yet behind this facade is a loneliness and despondency that threatens to erupt into violence.

The way in which vocalist/guitarist Taylor Kirk and multi-instrumentalist Simon Trottier juxtapose the elegant with the ominous is spectacularly satisfying. Production nerds can geek out on the gorgeous sounds found throughout – the wonderfully precise and crisp rhythm section; the chewed-tape warble on the guitars and keyboards; Colin Stetson's deliciously greasy saxophone lines. But it's the consistently strong songwriting and sustained mood that bring you back time and again.

The first half of the album, from hypnotic opener 'Beat The Drum Slowly' through to instrumental 'Resurrection Drive Part II', is absolutely flawless. Although Hot Dreams is far from aping Portishead's sound, the wonderfully noir 'Curtains?!' and 'Resurrection Drive Part II' are strongly reminiscent of the seminal Bristol band's self-titled second album.

Though the second half of the album is less immediately gratifying, partly due to the ongoing downbeat vibe, it certainly develops with repeat listens. 'Grand Canyon' sounds like a knowing update of 'Rhinestone Cowboy', its swagger undermined by existential dread, while 'Run From Me' puts a murderous twist on its Elvis-indebted execution with Kirk's sinister lyrics: "Run from me darling / Run my good wife / Run from me darling / You'd better run for your life". The way in which Kirk's ambiguous words subtly undercut the luxuriance of the music, preventing it from slipping into pastiche, is another of Hot Dreams' more enviable qualities. 

If you fall under the spell of this record it's tempting to seek out live versions of the songs on YouTube, but to see Taylor Kirk sweating his way through a performance, looking strangely like Bond villain Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever, is to break the spell. Though there's something eerily pristine about the production on Hot Dreams, it's part of what makes this album so mesmerising. Passing these songs through the rigorous filter of the studio has rendered them phantasmagorical; sublime. It's a work of art.

Charles-Eric Charrier – Petite Soeur

I think I missed the boat on this one. There was a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was listening to Petite Soeur on the train and I started weeping to '8 Minutes'. At the point where the guitar feedback burns through like too-bright sunlight, it was too much for me. After minute-upon-minute of those insistent, tumbling drums, that slovenly bass, the uneasy tinkling of the piano, the feedback felt like it was saving everything by killing it stone-dead. Sweet euthanasia.

I let that moment get away from me, and now, after a dozen or so listens to this album, I still appreciate it, but it doesn't move me quite as much as it did, because I know exactly what's going to happen. Don't get me wrong: something interesting/moving happens in each of these six long instrumentals, led by pianist/bassist Charrier. But if I'd have pulled my finger out and written this review that day – well, I'd have been waxing rhapsodic, I can tell you.

If you're into instrumental rock or Necks-esque jazz, you'll definitely get something out of this release. It's patient in its execution, adroitly played throughout, and, if it catches you at the right/wrong moment, exquisitely moving.