It's the triumphant return of Guest List Week! Every day from now until I run out of lists, we'll take a look at 2014 through the eyes of people who are not me. (My list, if you missed it, is here). I'm lucky that my friends have such uniformly exquisite taste in music.
Kicking off Guest List Week Three, it's Carl Anderson! Carl's 2013 Guest List is here, his 2014 Guest List is below.
Kicking off Guest List Week Three, it's Carl Anderson! Carl's 2013 Guest List is here, his 2014 Guest List is below.
(1) Alvvays – “Archie, Marry Me”
This could be the college rock track
of the decade, if college rock was still a thing, which it isn’t because everyone
in this band is younger than college rock itself. I love them for carrying forward the banner of
write-it-record-it-release-it albums, and for doing it so well. Lyrics with just the right amount of pretense
to crush it once in a while: “So honey take me by the hand and we can sign some
papers. Forget the invitations, floral arrangements, and breadmaker.” The first time I heard that I knew I was
hooked.
(2) Colony House – “Silhouettes”
As much as I like bands who take the necessity of low
budget recording and somehow turn it into a virtue, I’m in awe of the sound
these guys achieved. I guess it
shows what you can do if you grow up in a musical household learning to play on
incredible instruments (their dad is a Christian music star). And never listening to anything that suggests
a need to improve on the music of the 50s?
I bet they know some of the most talented engineers in Nashville. This makes me wish everybody recorded
there.
(3) MisterWives – “Reflections”
A perfect match of Mandy Lee’s
on-the-edge-of-crazy delivery with a narrative of being
on-the-edge-of-crazy. Right from the
opening: “You didn't close the door/Left a crack open, I couldn't ignore
the/Faint possibility/Of having hope in this insanity that/We still could be.”
(4) Parquet Courts – “Black and
White”
These guys put out a lot of music
and spend a lot of time trying be the reincarnation of the Velvet
Underground. This track strikes 70s gold
(in the VU sense).
(5) Cathedrals – “Harlem”
Every San Francisco band with
ambition takes a similar arc: we’re on bandcamp, we got a record deal, Hype
Machine loves us, and now we only play here at music festivals. These two kids did the whole thing in like
six months. Listening to this, you can
hear how they did it.
(6) Generationals – “Black Lemon”
Generationals is back on stride,
consistently writing pop songs that you swear you heard in commercials even in
the rare case that you really didn’t. Just
don’t go see them live.
(7) Zola Jesus – “Dangerous Days”
Don’t know much about this except
that it is possible to enjoy it for months without feeling any need to find out
who Zola Jesus is. It’s that kind of
thing, the music you want in the background all the time.
(8) Lake Street Dive – “You Go
Down Smooth”
If you didn’t hear this in 2014,
you must have been living in a cave. At
the bottom of the ocean. And dead. Basically, you were Osama Bin Laden. Easier to respect than to love, you can
forget how good their new songs are.
(9) Emma Blackery – “Perfect”
Emma Blackery is not the music
industry. She’s just a musician, which
is pretty much synonymous with being a victim of the music industry. She is also a YouTuber. That means her day job is posting her
thoughts and then coping with torrents of bile that flood back at her. She is fighting the good fight, and we should
pay more attention to people like her and less to the extremely boring people
who are the music industry.
(10) Grimes, Blood Diamonds –
“Go”
I aspire not to care what the
Internet says, but when the Internet says trite and stupid things about a new
song I like, I probably listen to the song more. That happened here.
(11) Röyksopp – “Something in my
Heart”
Röyksopp takes over the charts.
There will never be a more Röyksoppian hit than this.
(12) St. Vincent – “Birth in
Reverse”
This year’s CD from St. Vincent
broke through for me. The earlier stuff
was just over the line of trying too hard to be different, and I’m kind of over
that. This is just on the right side of
the line.
(13) Bilderbuch – “Maschin”
Here’s this year’s most
anticipated Austrian electro-prog rock single, and it is also the best. I know you are thinking: I did not know that. And
also: because why would I care? Bear with me.
One cool thing about listening to euro music is that some concepts that
would be instantly fatal here are viable there.
In Vienna, everyone listens to electronica and apparently there’s a lot
of respect for progressive rock, so combining the two doesn’t seem like a bad
idea. No label in the U.S. would buy
studio time for this, but it works.
(14) Clap Your Hands Say Yeah –
“Coming Down”
Apparently Clap Your Hands Say
Yeah is now just Alec Ounsworth and
everyone else is a replacement. What a huge improvement.
(15) Knox Hamilton – “Work It
Out”
This track is my bandcamp find of
the year. Although the sound hints at Sweden, the video suggests something a
little different. It just goes to show, anyone you meet could be spending
weekends playing synth and xylophone in an indie band.
(16) Bleached – “For the Feel”
Girls who like the Ramones, there
can never be enough. This sounds like a
Santa Monica bar. Or rather a movie
version thereof. If you could really
expect to hear this in a Santa Monica bar, I would move there.
(17) Broods – “L.A.F”
I only heard this CD recently. I'm not sure this is the best track on the album
but so far it is my favorite.
(18) Lykke Li – “Heart of Steel”
Lykki Li the contrarian. She made a long playing record. There really is no single. The whole is better than any particular
track. I picked this one to represent
because it comes near the end, and we are nearing the end of this list.
(19) Foxygen – “How Can You
Really”
I was listening to this
when I read that Guardians of the
Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 reached number one on the Billboard album chart. It made me think that if these guys could
find a way to try on a whole album’s worth of material, they could be number
one too.
(20) Nick Mulvey – “Fever to the
Form”
A
singer and his acoustic guitar make a natural final entry. Happy new year, everybody.
Typically excellent year-end list from Carl. The range of the choices is amazing. Thanks for putting it together.
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