It's pretty common these days for music journalists and bloggers to be post their lists of 'best' music long before the year is out. I don't have a problem with this, but sometimes I get the feeling that lists are often rushed out before their authors have time to properly digest the music released in a given year. A related issue relates to the value of these lists in the first place. Since most people acknowledge that music appreciation is a strictly subjective phenomenon, varying not only from person to person, but also from moment to moment, why should we even try to rank music, an exercise that seems to presuppose some kind of objective or scientific process? For these reasons, I'm going to dispense with list-making, and discuss some favourite and otherwise interesting releases and re-releases from 2014...
Re-releases > new releases
Subjectively speaking, 2014 wasn't a good year in music for me. A lot of the best new music I encountered wasn't new at all. Take Bernard Szajner's wonderful Visions Of Dune discussed in my previous blog post - originally released in 1979, even if few people appeared to notice at the time. Another pair of re-released gems came from the mysterious figure going by the moniker of Lewis Baloue, also known as Randall A. Wulff. Despite some ridiculously 80s kitsch cover art, L'Amour (1983) and Romantic Times (1985) play like true lost masterpieces - as if Nick Drake was resurrected in the 80s and got into synth sounds in a big (minimalist) way. A lot has been written about Lewis in the music media, who seemingly surfaced somewhere in Canada without any interest in benefiting from the proceeds of his new found cult success. Anyway, back to the point: L'Amour and Romantic Times were as good as anything else new I heard in 2014.
New releases: subjective > 'objective' rankings
So what of the proper new releases? Despite a smaller pool of albums to listen to, around December time I tried to rank my favourites in a rather convoluted fashion. I listened to them all carefully on decent equipment, giving a score out of 5 to each track on each record, and creating other categories to which numerical ratings could be attached, averaged and ranked in a spreadsheet. It was only after this admittedly rather anal exercise that I realised how pointless it all had been. Yes, it was interesting to see what the result was, but I soon started to come up with ways to create different results - this or that rank wasn't quite right and so on. I was making it too complex, and not allowing for the possibility that the same album could affect me differently on different occasions. At the same time, the albums I was comparing were so different that objectively ranking them according to consistent criteria proved to be impossible. As a new convert to BestEverAlbums.com, I'm still not against the idea of listing my favourite records - just the tradition of end-of-year music lists that comes with the implication of objectivity.
Some albums I liked from 2014
Ditching the lists then, and having enough time to properly digest the music I purchased from last year, I'm going to discuss some records that I liked from 2014 - as simple as that. First up, and blending nicely with the reissue theme, is Linda Perhacs' The Soul Of All Natural Things.
Until 2014, Linda Perhacs was a singer-songwriter known largely for her one and only (but excellent) 1970 album, Parallelograms. While it is fair to say that Parallelograms fits the mould of classic records not truly appreciated by wider audiences until long after their original releases, The Soul Of All Natural Things attempts to translate the hippy vibe of her debut for a contemporary audience. The end result - aided by collaborations with the likes of Julia Holter - is a beautiful record that sits well alongside its predecessor despite the 44 year gap. This release is appropriately titled, having a magical and spiritual quality, perhaps being most apparent on tracks like 'River Of God' and 'When Things Are True Again'.
Next up, and something rather different, is Bécs by Fennesz. Christian Fennesz has been making gauzy ambient electronica since the 1990s, and Bécs in particular drew a lot of comparisons to his definitive and most accessible 2001 release, Endless Summer.
Bécs fully lives up to challenge of its 2001 spiritual predecessor. Although the summer vibe is missing here, Bécs retains the emotional warmth of Endless Summer, while ditching the more detached soundscapes of Fennesz's previous full release, Black Sea. The result is a more contemplative feeling record, with tracks like 'Static Kings' and 'Liminality' building nicely to the title track's jagged crescendo.
Sticking with the loose electronic theme, another record that's stuck with me well into 2015 is Flying Lotus's You're Dead!, a record that came with a lot more critical fanfare than the others that I've discussed so far.
The fusion of jazz, electronica, hip-hop, post-rock, and star collaborators (including Snoop Dogg, Thundercat and Kendrick Lamar) might sound like an impossible mix if you've never heard Flying Lotus before. What's more astounding is that this album is one of a long line of successive innovative and strangely coherent records from the artist. What makes this one stand-out from his previous records is the overarching theme. This is a concept album about death, complete with thoughtful street philosophy and plenty of humour to boot. Looking for a stand-out track, many people have rightly singled out 'Never Catch Me' (featuring Kendrick Lamar), but as a long-standing fan of Chicago post-rockers Tortoise, my favourite is the understated and perhaps aptly titled 'Turtles', one of the shorter bridge numbers on this record.
In conclusion...
Well, that's it. I didn't anticipate writing about only three new albums when I started this post, but it's nice to do something outside the tried and tested formula of regular end-of-year lists. This isn't to say I only liked three albums, far from it - just that these three were the only ones that truly clicked with me, perhaps in a more subjective way than my attempt to produce a proper ranked list. It would be an interesting experiment if other media outlets adopted a similar approach come December...
