Friday, November 28, 2014


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The best albums of 2014

Join us each day as we reveal the Guardian music critics’ favourite albums of 2014. Today we take you right up to the final countdown with 20-11
• Nominate your album of the year in the form at the bottom of the article, for our readers’ choice list
Albums of the year 2014 : Angel Olsen, Taylor Swift, Wild Beasts and Mac DeMarco
 Albums of the year 2014 : Angel Olsen, Taylor Swift, Wild Beasts and Mac DeMarco Photograph: Guardian

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336
  1. Mac DeMarcoSalad Days
  2. Taylor Swift1989
  3. Kate TempestEverybody Down
  4. Future IslandsSingles
  5. Angel OlsenBurn Your Fire For No Witness
  6. Wild BeastsPresent Tense
  7. Young FathersDead
  8. Jenny LewisThe Voyager
  9. Jhene AikoSouled Out
  10. Owen PallettIn Conflict
  11. RatkingSo It Goes
  12. MerchandiseAfter the End
  13. Hurray for the Riff RaffSmall Town Heroes
  14. BanksGoddess
  15. ActressGhettoville
  16. TinasheAquarius
  17. KindnessOtherness
  18. Damon AlbarnEveryday Robots
  19. Ariel PinkPom Pom
  20. East India YouthTotal Strife Forever
  21. Leonard CohenPopular Problems
  22. Shabazz PalacesLese Majesty
  23. Scott Walker and Sunn 0)))Soused
  24. Jamie TCarry on the Grudge
  25. Peggy SeegerEverything Changes
  26. Ex HexRips
  27. Freddie Gibbs & MadlibPiñata
  28. Toumani Diabaté and Sidiki DiabatéToumani & Sidiki
  29. Sharon Van EttenAre We There
  30. TrickyAdrian Thaws
What we said: “DeMarco is incredibly adept at distilling an unlikely selection of influences into something that’s idiosyncratic without being gratingly quirky. On Salad Days, you can hear both the wide-eyed romanticism of Jonathan Richman – he’s big on handing out common-sense relationship advice – and the skewed oddness that ensued when Arthur Russell attempted to write straightforward pop music, but DeMarco is clearly most passionately in love with Walls and Bridges-era John Lennon.”
What we said: “The really striking thing about 1989 is how completely Taylor Swift dominates the album. As a songwriter, Swift has a keen grasp both of her audience and of pop history. She avoids the usual hollow platitudes about self-empowerment and meaningless aspirational guff about the VIP area in the club in favour of Springsteenesque narratives of escape and the kind of doomed romantic fatalism in which 60s girl groups dealt.”
What we said: “The obvious reference point is the Streets’ second album, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, although Dan Carey’s unsteadying beats leave no room for Mike Skinner’s trademark way with a chorus. Tempest shines, though, through her use of language, which illuminates the subject matter – from boardroom drug deals to vacuous parties where “everybody … has got a hyphenated second name” – to dazzling effect.”
What we said: “Beginning with Seasons (Waiting on You) – a song that already feels like a modern classic in the wake of their Letterman performance – the band whip through chintzy 80s R&B synths and buffed-up AOR guitars with such vigour it feels as if it were their last shot at the big time (considering they formed in 2006 and just got signed to 4AD, perhaps it is). Swaggering sonics aside, it’s very hard to see past the visceral vocals of Samuel T Herring.”
What we said: “There is a lot of heartbreak on Burn Your Fire For No Witness, as well as a lot of pleasing anachronism; a lot of hard-won resignation and what you might call stern vulnerability, a quality that Olsen shares with Joni Mitchellwithout sounding at all like Mitchell. Her soprano can be a delicate and ghostly thing ... but Olsen’s quaver holds your gaze, using her vibrato for effect, not whining or crumbling.”
What we said: “Wild Beasts revel in their idiosyncrasies; you can hear it in the duelling vocals and choral layers, the words that shouldn’t fit, the tunes that veer off in unexpected directions. What’s new here is that they have tempered and honed those flourishes. It’s modest in its experiments, never forgoing an accessible ear for the sake of being difficult.”
What we said: “You could compare Young Fathers’ globalised, magpie borrowing to that of MIA, but their music feels far less frenetic and contrived, less concerned with proving a point. For an album that throws an awful lot of eclectic influences at the listener over the course of 34 minutes, Dead feels remarkably unforced and organic.”
What we said: “The Voyager’s finely wrought sketches of mortality and infidelity sound like the product of months of painstaking polishing. The former Rilo Kileysinger is eminently skilled at turning the detritus of relationships into relatable lyrics, caustically writing about ageing, her biological clock and watching an ex-boyfriend move on with undue haste.”
What we said: “The R&B pendulum has been swinging back towards women. Jhené Aiko, FKA Twigs and Kelela have different influences and approaches, but what they share is a love of R&B at its most forward-looking and futuristic, the sort that was prevalent between the mid 90s and the mid-noughties, when Timbaland, the Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins were in their heyday.”
What we said: “Owen Pallett is equally comfortable in the worlds of baroque pop and classical. His fourth album emphasises his fluidity, its complex arrangements and Pallett’s choirboy voice placing him somewhere between Arthur Russell and a less hysterical Rufus Wainwright.”
What we said: “The New York collective have created a dirty, aggressive, but creatively fecund form of hip-hop that’s steeped in their city’s musical legacy, but still heading in a new direction. Unrelenting and abrasive it may be, but So It Goes turns a new page in New York hip-hop.”
What we said: “After the End is not just an enjoyable record in its own right, but one that feels like a significant step in Merchandise’s journey. You’re left excited about where they might go next, with a real sense that they could improve with age. After the End may only occasionally hit the band’s lofty targets – but sometimes just seeing someone strive can be a thrill in itself.”
What we said: “As the album plays, with barely changing acoustic instrumentation, doo wop and early R&B start to make their presence felt. You might call it a postmodern take on 20th-century American music, but it’s so warm and welcoming that it never feels like an exercise in technique or a mere demonstration of knowledge.”
What we said: “When Banks breathes over Lil Silva, Shlohmo and Sohn’s understated synths and basslines on singles Goddess, Brain and Waiting Game, the internet hype humming around her makes sense. She lays her emotions bare, at times almost embarrassingly so, sounding raw and vengeful.”
What we said: “This fourth album takes inspiration from society’s outcasts – drug addicts, the homeless – although the dystopian vibe does brighten towards the climax, when Darren Cunningham adds soulful vocal samples to his palette of ambient, industrial, techno, avant-electronica, glitch, minimalism and pretty much any other genre he feels like taking apart.”
What we said: “This debut from Zimbabwean-American actor/singer Tinashe Kachingwe will undoubtedly be compared to R&B minimalists like Mila J andJhené Aiko, but her antecedents stretch further back. Janet Jackson’s seductive 1990s incarnation and Aaliyah’s futuristic soul are obvious influences, and while Aquarius doesn’t hit those heights, it sets Tinashe up as a potentially major artist for 2015.”
What we said: “This really is a beautifully crafted album, its sincere homages to Jam & Lewis’s crisp R&B or Womack & Womack’s swish club soul transformed by a distinctly English kind of longing. Adam Bainbridge remains a slightly aloof presence throughout, but zesty vocal cameos from Kelela, Robyn, Tawiah and Ghanaian rapper M.anifest save Otherness from slipping into tasteful self-indulgence.”
What we said: “Beautiful, but subtle, cloudy and elusive, Everyday Robots certainly isn’t the album it’s purported to be. You come out of the other side not much the wiser about the man behind it. Never mind: the music is good enough that a lack of revelation doesn’t really seem to matter while Everyday Robots is playing. Whoever Damon Albarn is, he’s extremely good at what he does.”
What we said: “There is substance here, and many styles. The highly moving Picture Me Gone finds Pink in powerful sentimental form. Like Brian Wilson trapped in a tar pit, Pink sings about a dad bequeathing his digital history to his child. However, if this is Pink’s big-push album, in which he becomes the 21st century’s Wayne Coyne, it’s not working. Pink has melody to burn, but the unevenness of Pom Pom is a stumbling block.”
What we said: “East India Youth’s William Doyle is an artist of two halves. On the one hand he’s an emotional electronic songsmith: think a James Blake you don’t want to grab by the scruff of the neck and pack off to national service. On the other, he’s an inventive composer who can turn his hand to Harold Buddesque soundscapes one minute (Total Strife Forever I-IV) and surprisingly banging techno such as Hinterland the next.”
What we said: “An artist who 10 years ago could make finishing an album seem like a tough call now makes it sound effortless. Nothing here feels laboured: he can deliver songs as beautifully wrought as Samson in New Orleans – a depiction of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina – with a gorgeous understatement that only magnifies its impact: ‘And we who cried for mercy from the bottom of the pit/Was our prayer so damn unworthy that the sun rejected it?’”
What we said: “Lese Majesty is a noticeably less forbidding album in practice than it looks on paper. There are certainly moments when it feels like a bunch of weird words and noises thrown together to no real cumulative effect ... but more often, Lese Majesty lures you into its skewed, wildly inventive world.”
What we said: “Soused is surprisingly melodic, Sunn O))) provide a menacing but rich backdrop to Walker’s distinctive baritone. The sound palette may have changed, but Walker’s lyrics address familiar themes: totalitarian states; humankind’s brutality; and the movies.”
What we said: “As a lyricist, Treays is very good on the weirdness and uncertainty of your late 20s: the shifts in friendships, the galling moment when you realise you’re an adult, whether or not you feel like one. There’s something really affecting and realistic about the way Carry on the Grudge lurches from expansive thoughtfulness to the adolescent he-nicked-my-bird mewling of Peter.”
What we said: “This album is a revelation. Throughout her lengthy career, Peggy Seeger has proved that she is a thoughtful songwriter with an easygoing voice that offsets her often angry lyrics, but here she explores new, pained and personal territory, and does so with delicacy and soul. Listening to her relaxed, often acrobatic vocals, it’s hard to believe she’s 79. And she is still willing to experiment.”
What we said: “Ex Hex make some of the most endlessly repeat-listenable should-be-hits of recent years. From the hurtling clang of Beast; to How You Got That Girl’s gleaming, twirling chorus; to New Kid, with its whiplashing pickslides and turbo-booster solo – these songs will be echoing in your ears long after Rips’ lean, mean 35 mins are over, and very welcome they will be there, too.”
What we said: “Freddie Gibbs is a grizzled street rapper with a voice that sounds uncannily like Tupac Shakur’s. Madlib is a producer with a long-established reputation for raiding recorded obscurities for loops with a discernible quirk. It’s an odd couple, but what they share is a fetishisation of independence, a determination not to (to coin an old phrase) ‘sell out’.”
What we said: “On their debut album of kora duets, the pair of them can be heard driving the music on with attacking, rhythmic playing and flurries of rapid-fire improvisation. It’s a virtuoso, and mostly upbeat collaboration, but the best track is the one new composition, Lampedusa, a gently exquisite lament for African migrants who died trying to reach Europe.”
What we said: “The lyrics on Sharon Van Etten’s fourth album don’t always make for easy listening. “He can break me, with one hand,” she falsettos during one chorus, whereas Your Love Is Killing Me features broken legs, cut tongues and burned skin. As with her 2012 breakthrough album Tramp, these revelations feel intimate and shocking, and gain further power when Van Etten appears to fall back under her lover’s spell.”
What we said: “From opener Sun Down, you’re transported to Tricky’s world. It’s dark, seductive and filled with songs that are linked via his inventive production and bleak worldview. Sonically, it ranges from avant garde soundscapes (My Palestine Girl) to low-slung soul (Silly Games) and reveals an artist who’s still capable of surprising, disturbing and revelling in his own idiosyncracies.”
Which album has topped your own list this year? Tell us in the form below, and we’ll round up your picks in a readers’ choice list.
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