ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2014

@ rev: Mr Twin Sister

Thanks JF!

I've had more critics and normal people say they "finally " "get" Swift with this album.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 29, 2015 4:53 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't understand how they didn't already with RED, which is way way better and more revealing of her aesthetic/personality/insecurities etc, imo, but i guess i can see that

happy abt d'angelo

flopson, StV is a legitimately talented guitarist--must see her live to appreciate her chops

― Indexed, Thursday, January 29, 2015 1:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hoping for the covers album Cold Shot: StV Does SRV

RED was definitely my "in" for Swifty, and I had big hopes for 1989 (and they initially seemed to be fulfilled), but it wasn't long before I stopped listening to it at all.

don't understand how they didn't already with RED, which is way way better and more revealing of her aesthetic/personality/insecurities etc, imo, but i guess i can see that

― indie fuxxor albums i have secretly spotified (slothroprhymes

I prefer 1989 like most of the boards knows, but I suspect Swift's reached such popular mass that the former skeptics have started to soften -- like people who hate rock finally getting the Beatles in '65 after realizing they weren't going away.

and gay marriage

xxp same here, more or less. i listen to certain songs on 1989 regularly (style, out of the woods, blank space, new romantics) but since the week it came out i've listened all the way through like...twice.

red coincided with the absolute worst time for her public image - the whole gyllenhaal/styles relationship drama and "we are never getting back together" (although self-parody) fed into the worst perceptions of her being a clingy maneater. "i knew you were trouble" felt just as big as any of the recent singles but it felt a lot harder to sell tswift credibly to ppl than it does it now.

(the most impressive thing about 1989 is she's sold a fairly standard break-up album as being a 1980s influenced soundtrack to being single in nyc).

read that as "being single in NSync."

So basically it's Girls: the album? Yikes.

it's more looking

Eyvind Kang - Alastor: The Book Of Angels vol.21
Tinariwen - Emmaar
Head High - Megatrap
Terrence Parker - Life On The Back 9
Jennifer Castle - Pink City
Gangsta Boo & Beatking - Underground Cassette Tape Music
Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band - Intensity Ghost
Curren$y - The Drive In Theatre
Edward - Into A Better Future

My expectations are always way off on this poll, but I thought at least one of these would place or maybe even a few! Gangsta Boo would have been a shoe in if not for her 2 strong releases. Although I thought most of them were massively odds against to place after 60.

The use of the world "functional" in fgti's description is, I think, key. No one gets too sneerily dismissive about purely functional dance music. Everyone accepts Music for Airports. But the suggestion that this year's sacrifical indie album is simply a noise interval well-crafted to suit certain environments is supposed to arrive as a knockout punch. A great deal more music is functionally ambient than is often supposed, and ambient music is as worthy as any other sort, imo. It seems that The War on Drugs construct a sonic environment that many find especially appealing, welcoming, chill or whatever.

Agree with this, but the caveat might be that indie's trend towards pure functionalism is in many senses self-denying - it is part of indie's narrative that it is never purely functional, it's always (to use nabisco's formulation) a twisting or making-strange of available archetypes. And I think that if an album of "purely functional dance music" was considered album of the year by music critic consensus a lot of people would be very sneerily dismissive (albeit more on RYM than on ILM), most people would conclude that such an album does not deserve to be album of the year without something more going on.

So I think that in a lot of ways the consensus support for The War On Drugs is actually the best demonstration of the kind of critical double-standard that still remains in the wider world of music crit and fandom: we don't ask for demonstrations of something beyond competence from indie because the assumption of that "something more" is already built into our understanding of the genre as a whole.

Here's the imgur album with all the covers, btw: http://imgur.com/a/rU6gz#0

Depends whether Fisher Price version of Eddie and the Cruisers is supposed to be (a) competent (b) something more

johnny fever you still planning to do a 2000-2014 tracks/albums poll in the summer?

Yeah, penciling it in for August/September-ish.

Tim I like that, and I would submit that the "something more" or twisting/making-strange quality of "indie" has slowly disappeared, not just from the music itself (see Alfred's comment about "boring roots rock" above), but from the genre/concept as a whole - it's no longer oppositional, it's the norm, so what used to be a funhouse mirror reflection of the dominant culture now comes across as navel-gazing or water-treading as opposed to twisted or strange.

lets do it now xp

just start reveling the results itt

obv we will all have competing definitions of what is just competent/functional and what is the ~twist~ and I'm not denying that TWOD are distinctive, more that at a very broad social dialogue about music level an album of equivalent "something more"-ness in any almost other genre would really struggle to build that level of consensus support (Rolling Stone love of U2 etc. aside).

The use of the world "functional" in fgti's description is, I think, key. No one gets too sneerily dismissive about purely functional dance music. Everyone accepts Music for Airports. But the suggestion that this year's sacrifical indie album is simply a noise interval well-crafted to suit certain environments is supposed to arrive as a knockout punch. A great deal more music is functionally ambient than is often supposed, and ambient music is as worthy as any other sort, imo. It seems that The War on Drugs construct a sonic environment that many find especially appealing, welcoming, chill or whatever.

Agree with this, but the caveat might be that indie's trend towards pure functionalism is in many senses self-denying - it is part of indie's narrative that it is never purely functional, it's always (to use nabisco's formulation) a twisting or making-strange of available archetypes. And I think that if an album of "purely functional dance music" was considered album of the year by music critic consensus a lot of people would be very sneerily dismissive (albeit more on RYM than on ILM), most people would conclude that such an album does not deserve to be album of the year without something more going on.

So I think that in a lot of ways the consensus support for The War On Drugs is actually the best demonstration of the kind of critical double-standard that still remains in the wider world of music crit and fandom: we don't ask for demonstrations of something beyond competence from indie because the assumption of that "something more" is already built into our understanding of the genre as a whole.

― Tim F, Thursday, January 29, 2015 4:55 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

once again glad it's not my job to care about this kind of stuff
record is nice imo

and honestly i think it is unique in its own way (vile being a close comparison obviously but they are so interconnected it's hard to separate, i personally rate vile higher), it's weird to me as someone who engages in a lot of rock music to hear people writing this off as "generic" indie because i don't consider this trad indie at all, and honestly i put it more in the classic rock zone than indie anyway

definitely

Depends whether Fisher Price version of Eddie and the Cruisers is supposed to be (a) competent (b) something more

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 29, 2015 4:57 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree, there's no elements of rock 'n roll (in the 50s sense) in this as there are in eddie in the cruisers, it has elements of springsteen but not the elements that connected springsteen to the 50s or spector

haha it's great how we're arguing about conventional the purported influences can be

*about HOW

I guess the point I was trying to make is that what was once considered "indie" is now almost literally classic rock

WOD being exhibit A in this transformation

everywhere ya go
kids wanna rock

yep

A+ display name btw

ty :)

i wonder to what extent availability on spotify played into the results? it seems like a very high % of these albums were easily accessible (obv taylor swift a big exception)

In the 80s/90s "indie" to me meant the self-denial of the guitar-bass-drums lineup, only they couldn't get on the redio.

^ er radio. The biggest distinguishing mark was cheap production and guy-next-door vocals.

+ i've noticed the fact that she writes the songs herself seems to have become a big bonus point in her favour to regular ppl.

Except that the fact that she shares writing credits on most of 1989's tracks is a reason for people like Sady Doyle to keep dismissing her.

(Actually, this tweet prob more relevant to that point.)

i wonder to what extent availability on spotify played into the results? it seems like a very high % of these albums were easily accessible (obv taylor swift a big exception)

If people had to PAY for an album they sure as hell were gonna vote for it!

I pay for access to about a gazillion albums each month

1989 def would have made my top gazillion

How much of the Taylor narrative is really based around "writes all her own songs"? She hasn't exactly been reclusive about the fact that she did this album with Martin and Antonoff. I also recall reading a very lengthy and frank post from Imogen Heap as to how they came up with "Clean".

there's a weird "one drop" rule when pop stars' songwriting ability is being questioned where if any collaborator did anything, they did everything.

one weird drop rule to determine songwriting credits

Change some names and words around and that Bjork quote applies:

I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I’m saying to you now helps women, I’m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. (Matmos’) Drew (Daniel) is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.

the 'narrative' of her being a songwriter meant more when she was a full-on country artist and people who write all their stuff and get nothing from the Nashville song factory are a relatively small minority. to say nothing of the fact that most people who become stars in their teens don't start out with all self-written material.

...it is part of indie's narrative that it is never purely functional, it's always (to use nabisco's formulation) a twisting or making-strange of available archetypes...

So I think that in a lot of ways the consensus support for The War On Drugs is actually the best demonstration of the kind of critical double-standard that still remains in the wider world of music crit and fandom: we don't ask for demonstrations of something beyond competence from indie because the assumption of that "something more" is already built into our understanding of the genre as a whole.

― Tim F, Thursday, January 29, 2015 2:55 PM (16 minutes ago)

I'm not sure how crucial a role this kind of thinking plays when it comes to the critical success of acts like The War on Drugs, The New Pornographers and Spoon. As sleeve suggests, while assumptions about indie's inherent and elevated otherness may residually attach to the genre, they're nowhere near so dominant as they were in the 80s and 90s. Besides, fans of practically every musical genre promulgate self-validating specialness narratives of this or that sort. Metalheads nurse a sense of defiant alienation far more profound than any found in indie. Dance partisans valorize electronic music's (by now surely vestigial) futurist cred. Rap fans champion street-level authenticity. If you spend a lot of time dwelling in any genre, you'll likely find some way to pat yourself on the back for doing so, and will also come to wholeheartedly adore music that those with no taste for the genre view as merely "competent" or "functional".

A lot of the acrimony in the polls towards War on Drugs has less to do with the WoD album per se, or even the genre, and more to do w the frustration where Iit seemed like 17 out of the first 20 lists on the Year End Critics thread tagged as album of the year a project that could charitably be described as "white hipster channels VH1" when it seems that even withim the genre ppl like St Vincent and FKA Twigs were doing things more formally interesting and having to settle for second- or third-best or a/e

None of this has to do w people who acyually enjoy Lost in a Dream

ok, that makes sense. having a really hard time wrapping my head around the idea that WoD and FKA twigs share a genre tho.

why is "formally" interesting or genre breaking all of a sudden applied to WoD when ILX likes tons of stuff from other genres that sticks within genre convention and formulas

They don't share a genre just a demographic

It's a stick to be used to beat things in genres one doesn't like.

xpost