Our staff count down the best records of 2014 — from the heavy to the hallowed and everything in between.
10. TINARIWEN — Emmaar
Even though the songs are sung in their native tongue, Tinariwen’s epic desert blues transcends barriers of language and culture. It helps that the Malian band’s brand of rock — a label that does little justice to Tinariwen’s diverse and often spiritual aesthetic, but feels more appropriate than any other term in Western music criticism — bursts with flourishes of familiarity, from Hendrix to Dylan. Emmaar feels like a bridge between worlds, a fact best exemplified by its opening gambit ‘Toumast Tincha’, a riff-filled odyssey that’s equal parts intriguing and recognizable, grooving and introspective. Emmaar is the perfect soundtrack to journeys unknown. — Matthew Tomich
9. VOYAGER — V
Excellent songs and production. These guys have finally found a sound that bridges the melodic and the heavy. Pop structures and anthems that deserve to shouted along too at massive European festivals. — Scott Bishop
8. SUN KIL MOON — Benji
Though Mark Kozelek’s year has been marked by petty feuds and pettier insult songs, he was also responsible for one of the most moving and honest records of the year in Benji, an ode to the minutiae of contemporary life that spans from San Francisco to Ohio to Newtown and back. There’s as much darkness as there is light in Benji, though it’s more poignant moments are the most heart-wrenching like opening track ‘Carissa’, where Kozelek uses his guitar and voice to make sense of the accidental death of his cousin in and give her life poetry. Rarely does an album feel like it’s being written and played right in front of you, the stories unfolding in real time as Kozelek seemingly finds the words as he goes to narrate the lives of those around him. Worth countless repeat listens. — Matthew Tomich
7. TOMBS — Savage Gold
Post-metal with more than a dash of black, Savage Gold is dissonant, haunting, extreme – and one of the surprise releases of the year. See also their excellent cover of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. — Scott Williams
6. SHELLAC — Dude Incredible
Dude Incredible simply gets the job done. Clocking in at just over half an hour, the record is Shellac stripped of anything that might be considered superfluous, leaving less a record and more a precise, surgical airstrike. From the prowling bass of ‘Riding Bikes’ to the snarl of ‘All the Surveyors’, Dude Incredible manages to pack real menace into an austere half hour. Nothing is overused and nothing is overdone (both in terms of songwriting or production), a fact that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Shellac and Albini’s form. — Jack Midalia
5. ICEAGE — Plowing into the Field of Love
Plowing Into The Field of Love is everything people love about Iceage and a whole lot more. The songs still wallow the in same bleak mirth Iceage bathe in, but the dense, nihilistic moods are now littered with the sounds of folk and an undeniable country swagger, which might sound odd to some fans but by damn you wouldn’t have it any other way. This whole album is like a punch in the guts, but it’s the sort of punch you’re grateful for, the one where once you’ve managed to start taking in oxygen again and you reach out and gladly ask for another. It’s bold, aggressive, mangled and so perfectly enjoyable, an example of a band leering ten feet above their contemporaries. — Jack Payet
4. SWANS — To Be Kind
Michael Gira is a without a doubt the scariest human being on the planet. Swans at their loudest and heaviest are a terrifying beast, but it’s the quiet moments of To Be Kind in which Gira seems to be at his sneering, menacing worst. Boasting more than a hint of the industrialism of Einstürzende Neubauten, this is a record I would regularly put on as background music, only to find I’d that I’d either stopped whatever I was doing and that an hour had passed in the blink of the eye. There are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours. Additional mention of the cover art, which is either the best or the worst album artwork of 2014. — Jack Midalia
3. THE DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT — Z2
Devin has to be admired, not just for the great music on this album but for the projects he takes on in general, the majority of which are born from his bizarre and brilliant mind. Z2 is a double album (condensed down from 50 songs originally), the first part being a typical DTP “pop metal” album taking elements from Epicloud and Addicted, though it feels more mature. The second half is a War of the Worlds-style rock opera featuring the return of Ziltoid (Devin’s alter ego, a coffee-loving alien hell bent on world domination) similar in musical style to the first Ziltoid album but with a bigger scope and budget. The Ziltoid tale will also be taken to the musical theatre stage next year at the Royal Albert Hall for a show that sold out within weeks. — Scott Williams
2. ELECTRIC WIZARD — Time to Die
It took me a while to come around to Time to Die, especially since vocalist Jus Oborn sounds like he’s singing down the corridor, but it’s the heavy/slow DOOMY riff fest that you want and desire from The Wizard. — Scott Bishop
1. YOB — Clearing the Path to Ascend
YOB’s Clearing the Path to Ascend was virtually undisputed amongst aficionados of independent heavy music as one of the best albums of the year. Crowned by a song bound for a timeless regard in the world of heavy music, ‘Marrow’, the rest of the album gradually emerges from the blinding supernova of the closer across multiple listens to burn slowly into the mind as one of the most outstanding albums made in heavy metal history. Scheidt can make it seem as though drawing upon an utterly deadly riff is as easy as breathing for him, and is quite happy to let you have it methodically and relentlessly over a period of time where other bands would have played twenty different ones. This is doom deep in a trance. YOB is meditative. YOB is introspective, and deeply moving in its sincerity. On this record, YOB is godlike. — The Black Captain
Check back over the next two weeks as we reveal our individual writers’ top 10 records of 2014.
Making this list was pretty tough. While 2012 was a decent year for music, I really feel like I didn’t listen to a huge number of great albums. Whether that says more about the music itself or my listening habits is certainly up for debate, but it feels like 2012 was year of great songs but fell short of 2011 in terms of LPs. The obvious interesting point in this list is the Perthness of it. The fact that four of my top 10 hail from Perth is a bit weird, but it’s my list…
10. Perth — Babes, Water, Waves First up, let’s deal with the name. Calling your band “Perth” is one of those things that is simultaneously brilliant (because it’s hilarious) and infuriating (because I didn’t think of it first). So there’s that.
As for the actual music, Perth emerged “from the same tree that bore the fruit of Apricot Rail”, and have assembled a record that effortlessly splits the difference between post-rock, psych and electronica. Something that could sound clumsy and directionless in the wrong hands has been handled perfectly here. The fact that such a feat has been achieved on Perth’s debut record is amazing.
9. Flying Lotus — Until the Quiet Comes When I was compiling this list of top albums for 2012, I had the nagging sense that I’d forgotten something obvious. It wasn’t until another Life Is Noise writer sent me their list that I realised what it was: I’d forgotten about Flying Lotus. Thankfully, I’m the editor of this blog, so I’m retrospectively adding FlyLo and maintaining some semblance of credibility.
Featuring some very fine guest performances (Erykah Badu, Thom Yorke, Thundercat), Until the Quiet Comes pushes into more down-tempo territory while attempting to fulfill its conceptual idea of being “a collage of mystical states, dreams, sleep and lullabies”. The record probably isn’t going to blow anyone’s brains out like previous FlyLo creations (at least immediately), but it’s still a damn impressive piece of work.
8. Actress — R.I.P. Actress, aka Darren Cunningham, has created a beautiful piece of work in R.I.P.. If I hadn’t already vastly exceeded my annual quota of words like “shimmering” and “stunning”, I’d bring them out in industrial quantities for this release. Bringing to mind the genius of Oneohtrix. R.I.P. is an immensely alienating record that somehow doesn’t leave you cold. Rag on Pitchfork all you like, but the description of the listening experience as “like seeing the city you live in from a plane: You can’t reach out and touch it but you’re comforted by how manageable and well-planned it all looks” is pretty much the perfect summary of R.I.P..
7. Drowning Horse — Drowning Horse Every time I try to see these guys live, fate intervenes and something happens to stop me. It’s pretty clear that this is the work of some sort of supernatural force/being/whatever, but what I haven’t been able to figure out is if this God is trying to fuck me over or add years to my life by sparing me this doom-laden sludgy onslaught.
So as one of the few people in the world to hear this record before seeing the band live, I’m in a position to give a review free from live-show-induced expectations. Unfortunately, I’m going to use this fresh perspective to gush in the same boring way that everyone else that has willingly subjected themselves to this record. To put it simply: it’s HEAVY (in a way that makes you realise how much people misuse that term) and it’s fucking brilliant.
6. smRts — Have Friends And Visit Them At Night I love everything about this record. I love the way it is simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking, I love that you can listen to it drunk, hungover, happy or sad, I love the cover, I love the title.
While the traditional smRts sound is largely intact on this record, there’s enough boundary-pushing to keep interest. Genre-wise it’s still “world music dying at the hands of garage rock”, but there’s definitely an added aggression to Have Friends and Visit Them At Night, something that seems to have translated to the band now being approximately 32% scarier live.
All in all, a great record from a great band.
5. Tame Impala — Lonerism I decide to put this record in my top 10 and then fucking NME call it the best album of 2012. Whatever. A broken clock is right twice a day (unless it’s a digital clock — then it is probably just wrong all the time). Anyway, point being that both this band and this record have received a lot of hype lately and you can either whinge about the fact that now you’re probably going to have to brave a doucheload of douches if you ever want to see a Tame Impala concert again, or you can be happy that a thoroughly brilliant record is getting the praise it deserves and that for once someone from Perth gets money for making good music. Personally, I choose to do both.
4. Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! “Oh hey guys, you know what we really need — more fucking exclamation marks! More intensity.”
So yeah, I understand why some people are a little bit down on this release. I get that to some people it’s retreading old ground, that’s it’s not really boundary-pushing stuff.
Here’s the counter-argument:
3. Neil Young — Psychedelic Pill Here’s an interesting question — what makes some musicians say “fuck it, I’m done with creating new music, I’m just going to spend the rest of my life touring and living off my previous output, appearing on shitty reality TV shows and gouging baby boomers”? On the other hand, what makes some musicians say “fuck it, I’m going to make a record that starts with a 29 minute song, I’m going to create something that can make you weep and smile and sing along to and make you so goddamn happy/sad just to be alive and that is instantly recognisable but isn’t stale at all.” The answer to these questions is “the degree to which said musician is Neil Young”.
Psychedelic Pill is up there with the Young’s best work which, when your LP discography numbers in the dozens, is pretty impressive. It’s the best thing he’s put out since Dead Man, at any rate. The lyrics are hit and miss, but that’s not really anything new or anything to get too worked up about (but seriously Neil, please don’t sing about the audio fidelity of digital compression technology). If anyone else pushing 70 sung “gonna get me a hip hop haircut”, I would piss my pants laughing. When Neil Young does it, however, I can either take it as brilliantly ironic or just plain endearing. The guitar work, at any rate, is first fucking class NY brilliance. Oh, those Crazy Horse guys aren’t bad either.
2. Clark — Iradelphic There’s 1000 adjectives that could be thrown this record’s way. “Accomplished”, “ambitious”, or even (no doubt to Clark’s consternation, “intelligent”). However the defining feature of Iradelphic is its “realness”. The best dance music often plays on the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, and on Iradelphic, Clark serves up diverse range of tracks that are held together by the use of a seemingly endless amount of obscure instruments, not to mention smart production and one hell of an eye for detail.
When we interviewed him earlier this year, Clark voiced his displeasure at the term IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), stating “I don’t really feel like an electronic artist — I just feel like a craftsman that makes music with whatever he can, and when people put the tag “intelligent” on it, I feel like it’s kind of sneering at all the people who enjoy music that doesn’t wear its cleverness on its sleeve, and for that alone it should be mocked.” On Iradelphic, Clark gives an excellent example of the way in which truly intelligent music doesn’t make this feature its only selling point. Iradelphic is a subtle, understated gem.
– Jack Midalia
1. Mt Eerie — Clear Moon Mt Eerie’s Clear Moon reminds me a lot of In The Airplane Over The Sea. Not so much in terms of sound (although they’re not completely dissimilar in parts), but more in the sense that both records will/should gain that crazy level of cult status based on their ability to connect so directly to the listener, even if the reasons for that connection aren’t immediate.
Something of an exploration of the gap (or lack thereof) between civilisation and nature, Clear Moon kicks off with the staggeringly great “Through The Trees pt. 2?, a song that (despite its ironic misnomer) fits so well as an opening track in that it assures the first-time listener that this is going to be a great record. The grandeur of the following track, “the Place Lives” gives the first taste of just how ambitious Clear Moon really is.
In their glowing review of Clear Moon, Tiny Mix Tapes discussed the problem of writing about the record, stating “you’re confronted with the problem of writing about music that seems to demand nothing less than silence.” It might not be enough for a music writer to merely state that Clear Moon is a brilliantly fascinating work, but in this case I’m simply going to have to do just that.
Now that 2012 is nearly over, it’s time to cast our eye back and look at some of our favourite records of the year (a week earlier this time round to give you an extra seven days to post narky comments before the Maya apocalypse kills us all).
10. Ty Segall – Twins Album number three for Ty Segall for 2012 sees this Bay Area Californian longhair outstrip his contemporaries from around the way.
Why Twins and much of Ty’s work functions, in fact RULES, is that beautiful balance of crunch, noise, feedback, distortion, sneering vocals and downright guitar muscle on one side of the scales and then the Beatles-esque melody, solid rhythm, tasty backups and harmonies, and hooks aplenty on the other.
It soothes the beasty and the beauty — it makes you want to dance and scream, and fuck, and get out in the fields and dance and tear the world apart. For me it is a little like a cross between Matthew Sweet and Jay Retard or The Beatles and The Stooges. It is all about the balance with this record. It has enough grit to make you feel something and enough pop to sing along. If it veered either way just a couple of degrees Twins wouldn’t be half the record.
Album highlights:
– The almost Who inspired mod anthem The Hill
– The stomping pop hook fest of Would you Be My Love
– And the opener Thank God For the Sinners – with a snarling overdriven chorus and twin lead breaks — the perfect soundtrack for destroying any commandment
– Handglams – resplendent with riffage Jimmy Page would be proud of and a Plant like falsetto to boot.
– Any track – man this is killer.
The whole neo-psych thing has really been over done but don’t worry, Mr Segall dabbles in it, but this record has a dirty garage side that – a lo fi grounding – that helps it to steer clear of the generic masses. This could easily have been my number one album of the year. I just cannot stop listening to it. Maybe I never will.
– Dave Cutbush
9. Fiona Apple — The Idler Wheel…
Rolling Stone, as if to underline their women problems, didn’t manage to get through a three-and-a-half star review of this record without using the word ‘kooky.’ Fiona Apple is not ‘kooky.’ Kooky is Zooey Deschanel reading off a script with a ukulele in hand, or a dude wearing green tights to do the groceries. It’s like calling Bill Callahan a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll with a completely straight face. The Idler Wheel is not kooky. It is teeth alternately bared, gritted and ground down against each other. Melodies unfurl over 24 bar phrases like an argument with yr-self, arrangements defy worrying about dynamics to instead form entire worlds around Apple’s jittery but laser-focused thoughts. There’s nothing wasted, and the thrills come often and easy, whether the howls in “Regret” or the moment where “Valentine” trips over its feet at the moment it arrives at an exclamation mark. These songs are as inventive as they are dense– I’m still as excited by them as the first time I heard them– and as weird as hell. This is her at the very height of her ambition and depth, and there isn’t a songwriter to touch her when she’s in this kind of form. Kooky, hey.
– Alex Griffin
8. Clark — Iradelphic
There’s 1000 adjectives that could be thrown this record’s way. “Accomplished”, “ambitious”, or even (no doubt to Clark’s consternation, “intelligent”). However the defining feature of Iradelphic is its “realness”. The best dance music often plays on the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, and on Iradelphic, Clark serves up diverse range of tracks that are held together by the use of a seemingly endless amount of obscure instruments, not to mention smart production and one hell of an eye for detail.
When we interviewed him earlier this year, Clark voiced his displeasure at the term IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), stating “I don’t really feel like an electronic artist — I just feel like a craftsman that makes music with whatever he can, and when people put the tag “intelligent” on it, I feel like it’s kind of sneering at all the people who enjoy music that doesn’t wear its cleverness on its sleeve, and for that alone it should be mocked.” On Iradelphic, Clark gives an excellent example of the way in which truly intelligent music doesn’t make this feature its only selling point. Iradelphic is a subtle, understated gem.
– Jack Midalia
7. Julia Holter — Ekstasis Now, I’ve already raved about this at length once this year, and I guess there isn’t a lot left for me to say. Sorta hyperbolic but you know what I mean. Right now, I’m hungover as h-e-double hockey sticks at ten to one on a Monday morning, typing quietly so I don’t wake my brother and hoping my friends got to bed okay and aren’t feeling as sick and drunk as I am, but I have enough sense to know that there hasn’t been another record that has meant as much as Ekstasis this year; an iceberg of unrippling, certain beauty, a distant island of calm at the center of everything. These songs unfurl along a blooming kinda logic of their own that is as comforting as it is alien, crystallized into shape as incontrovertibly as a stalactite or, I dunno, a field. They just sing out from being. Thematically, Ekstasis is the point where personal mythology meets that of Euripedes, Woolf etc. and this is exactly where it can nestle in your life– too big and weighty to ever seem irrelevant or trivial, but small enough to fit anywhere you need it to.
– Alex Griffin
6. High On Fire — De Vermis Mysteriis
Recorded by Converge’s Kurt Ballou – High on Fire’s De Vermis Mysteriis is a totally complete album of power, depth, and the regular High on Fire riff-a– rama.
Matt Pike from the band sees this new record as a concept album of sorts:
“I got this idea about Jesus Christ and the Immaculate Conception: What if Jesus had a twin who died at birth to give Jesus his life? And then what if the twin became a time traveller right then? He lives his life only going forward until he finds this scroll from an ancient Chinese alchemist who derived a serum out of the black lotus—which is actually in Robert E. Howard’s ‘Conan’ stories—and then he starts travelling back in time. He can see the past through his ancestors’ eyes, but his enemies can kill him if they kill the ancestor that he’s seeing through at the time. Basically, he keeps waking up in other people’s bodies at bad times. It’s kinda like that old TV show Quantum Leap. Kurt actually pointed that out to me after I told him the idea. But whatever—time travel is a killer concept.”
Whatever crazy ideas Pike is on about, album number six from the Oakland California trio seems to be the work of a band that has always showed much potential and some great ideas but has never really fulfilled their amazing potential.
High on Fire finally have it all together. De Vermis Mysteriis is heavy, dark, adrenaline firing and most of all this time, very much cohesive.
Personal highlights are the Sabbathesque sludgefest of “Madness of an Architect” and the jackhammer bludgeoning of the Motorhead inspired “Spirtual Rights”.
With High on Fire in such career best form it doesn’t matter whether Matt Pike is a crazy time traveller or just heading back to the future, just as long as he and his High on Fire team keep the pedal to the metal.
– Dave Cutbush
5. Drowning Horse — Drowning Horse Punishing, Brutal, Dark, Heavy, Way Too Loud. Seeing Drowning Horse live is much more than seeing a band. It is akin to going into battle and not some Desert Storm era shit. I am talking fighting on foot against massive angry blood soaked behemoths and thousands of them. How should I equip myself? Do I need earplugs? Should I wear a full foam body suit… or perhaps some armour.
Forget about talking to your friends at Drowning Horse gigs. You may become good at sign or perhaps lip reading. You may have actually lost the ability to use any synapse such is the battering your brains is getting. But really you are either fully immersed in the monstrous noise soup or you may as well fuck off. Ok point taken – Drowning Horse are ridiculously good live. It is their kingdom – they rule it. Touring bands watch them and comment – “hey man this shit is dope” or “where the fuck are these guys from?” Generally touring acts could not give one fuck about local supports.
Everyone, love them or hate them has an opinion on Drowning Horse. So – the point is Drowning Horse are a live beast. This begs the question, how the hell are they going to put that power and all that mammoth noise and sludge and doom into a recording?
Well they have and the have as well as almost anyone in 2012. They enlisted the man who has heard more distortion and noise than virtually all of the world’s population – Dr Alien Smith. Al has done a great job with this record – as he usually does. It is not lo fi but it isn’t clean or fancy. The two big slabs of black wax sound real – a quality recording with a fetching gatefold facade. It is heavy but you can hear everything. It captures the raw beauty of the band. Yes – there is a real beauty and strength about these long tracks (one on each side of the double LP). It is dark, it is foreboding – it could almost be evil but you find a real majesty in Drowning Horse. A slow grinding power and finesse – this is a band with experience and intelligence.
They are Drowning Horse and their self-titled debut sees them at the top of their game. But somehow this is more than a mere game. It is like ancient warriors, professional soldiers plying their methodical trade — a slow, cumbersome dark trade of death.
– Dave Cutbush
4. Tame Impala — Lonerism Remember Grimes being a thing? I just recalled it. Long year, hey. Basically, her music confronted us with the vision (pun) of music that felt as though it was transparently a product of a mind primarily shaped and influenced by the internet. It seemed to exist purely of signifiers stacked upon each other, data and information assembled into sound masquerading as songwriting. Even her uncanny valley appearance (equal parts K-pop and, I dunno, Lolita) struck with the eerie suggestion of something that was pure aesthetics, a tumblr’d collage of appearances. Like a Frankie magazine with synths. Elevator music for festivals.
Lonerism sits on the other end of the spectrum, a pre-Y2K style grappling with what the self is without reference to much of anything else. Where Clare Boucher seeks and takes everything that fascinates her and produces a lean, polyglot bricolage of whatever ticks her clock and still feels representative of what Grimes is, Tame Impala comes from burrowing as far into Kevin Parker as possible. Heck, most of the pre-release chatter from the band was talking about how the record was fundamentally shaped by how Parker let keyboards into his head. Keyboards.
Ultimately, it comes as a kind of proof and reminder of the virtues of turning off, tuning out and following your own trip from within, rather than without– that you don’t arrive at anything worthwhile by just sticking your head of the window. The idea that these songs of introspection, doubt and loneliness that are going to be played to thousands of kids at festivals packed like sardines pretty much everywhere over the next year or two feels pretty ridiculous, but hey– the trick is that no one really gets this album apart from the guy/s who made it. It’s of them, not for us, but it’s too gorgeous not for us to adopt it. We might think we get it, but we’ll all just about ourselves instead, probably.
– Alex Griffin
3. Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
From the guys who brought you that one quote in that crappy Judd Apatow film and being jealous about French Festivals comes: A COMPLETE SURPRISE! While I had, like many lonely men, consoled myself with copious bootlegs of Canadians being angry at foreign governments (featuring strings), I never imagined that the final product would sound so immense, so properly grandiose and so very vital to 2012 as it does in this package. The approach is the same (Canadians are still being angry at foreign governments, crescendos galore, featuring strings), the payoff is the same (extreme emotionalism, possible contemplation of the universe and universal problems) but what the goddamned hell, I’m not seventeen anymore, I should be over this shit: I’ve changed, and this is what’s changed my approach to appreciating Godspeed, because through all those faux-punk Zion records, and Efirm getting too comfortable making records for his kids, Godspeed remained essentially removed and confusing, and in the current climate, these are qualities that make enduring music.
There are also three exclamation points in the title: get fucked!
– Axel Carrington
2. Actress — R.I.P. Alright. Weigh up boredom. Make a pancake. Do you make a pancake? Music is boring. Should not cut my own hair. Skin is getting yellow. Pretty rough spoken word in a park about weed is following me around. Did not dig. Can’t judge weed by weed smokers though. That is unfair. Can’t judge guitars by the dudes who work in guitar stores, after all. When you do anything with a computer, you’re acting. You’re there, I’m here. Very far. A computer is less a bridge than a bubble, after all– you can see anything and everything through it, but you never cross over to anything. Actress gets this. This is why you only listen to R.I.P. alone. The only death that is happening here is happening between people. Listen to “Ascending”- it never arrives anywhere. Once it starts, it is permanently there. Like death, I guess?
– Alex Griffin
1. Mount Eerie — Clear Moon Mt Eerie’s Clear Moon reminds me a lot of In The Airplane Over The Sea. Not so much in terms of sound (although they’re not completely dissimilar in parts), but more in the sense that both records will/should gain that crazy level of cult status based on their ability to connect so directly to the listener, even if the reasons for that connection aren’t immediate.
Something of an exploration of the gap (or lack thereof) between civilisation and nature, Clear Moon kicks off with the staggeringly great “Through The Trees pt. 2?, a song that (despite its ironic misnomer) fits so well as an opening track in that it assures the first-time listener that this is going to be a great record. The grandeur of the following track, “the Place Lives” gives the first taste of just how ambitious Clear Moon really is.
In their glowing review of Clear Moon, Tiny Mix Tapes discussed the problem of writing about the record, stating “you’re confronted with the problem of writing about music that seems to demand nothing less than silence.” It might not be enough for a music writer to merely state that Clear Moon is a brilliantly fascinating work, but in this case I’m simply going to have to do just that.
Even though the songs are sung in their native tongue, Tinariwen’s epic desert blues transcends barriers of language and culture. It helps that the Malian band’s brand of rock — a label that does little justice to Tinariwen’s diverse and often spiritual aesthetic, but feels more appropriate than any other term in Western music criticism — bursts with flourishes of familiarity, from Hendrix to Dylan. Emmaar feels like a bridge between worlds, a fact best exemplified by its opening gambit ‘Toumast Tincha’, a riff-filled odyssey that’s equal parts intriguing and recognizable, grooving and introspective. Emmaar is the perfect soundtrack to journeys unknown. — Matthew Tomich
Excellent songs and production. These guys have finally found a sound that bridges the melodic and the heavy. Pop structures and anthems that deserve to shouted along too at massive European festivals. — Scott Bishop
Though Mark Kozelek’s year has been marked by petty feuds and pettier insult songs, he was also responsible for one of the most moving and honest records of the year in Benji, an ode to the minutiae of contemporary life that spans from San Francisco to Ohio to Newtown and back. There’s as much darkness as there is light in Benji, though it’s more poignant moments are the most heart-wrenching like opening track ‘Carissa’, where Kozelek uses his guitar and voice to make sense of the accidental death of his cousin in and give her life poetry. Rarely does an album feel like it’s being written and played right in front of you, the stories unfolding in real time as Kozelek seemingly finds the words as he goes to narrate the lives of those around him. Worth countless repeat listens. — Matthew Tomich
Post-metal with more than a dash of black, Savage Gold is dissonant, haunting, extreme – and one of the surprise releases of the year. See also their excellent cover of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. — Scott Williams
Dude Incredible simply gets the job done. Clocking in at just over half an hour, the record is Shellac stripped of anything that might be considered superfluous, leaving less a record and more a precise, surgical airstrike. From the prowling bass of ‘Riding Bikes’ to the snarl of ‘All the Surveyors’, Dude Incredible manages to pack real menace into an austere half hour. Nothing is overused and nothing is overdone (both in terms of songwriting or production), a fact that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Shellac and Albini’s form. — Jack Midalia
Plowing Into The Field of Love is everything people love about Iceage and a whole lot more. The songs still wallow the in same bleak mirth Iceage bathe in, but the dense, nihilistic moods are now littered with the sounds of folk and an undeniable country swagger, which might sound odd to some fans but by damn you wouldn’t have it any other way. This whole album is like a punch in the guts, but it’s the sort of punch you’re grateful for, the one where once you’ve managed to start taking in oxygen again and you reach out and gladly ask for another. It’s bold, aggressive, mangled and so perfectly enjoyable, an example of a band leering ten feet above their contemporaries. — Jack Payet
Michael Gira is a without a doubt the scariest human being on the planet. Swans at their loudest and heaviest are a terrifying beast, but it’s the quiet moments of To Be Kind in which Gira seems to be at his sneering, menacing worst. Boasting more than a hint of the industrialism of Einstürzende Neubauten, this is a record I would regularly put on as background music, only to find I’d that I’d either stopped whatever I was doing and that an hour had passed in the blink of the eye. There are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours. Additional mention of the cover art, which is either the best or the worst album artwork of 2014. — Jack Midalia
Devin has to be admired, not just for the great music on this album but for the projects he takes on in general, the majority of which are born from his bizarre and brilliant mind. Z2 is a double album (condensed down from 50 songs originally), the first part being a typical DTP “pop metal” album taking elements from Epicloud and Addicted, though it feels more mature. The second half is a War of the Worlds-style rock opera featuring the return of Ziltoid (Devin’s alter ego, a coffee-loving alien hell bent on world domination) similar in musical style to the first Ziltoid album but with a bigger scope and budget. The Ziltoid tale will also be taken to the musical theatre stage next year at the Royal Albert Hall for a show that sold out within weeks. — Scott Williams
It took me a while to come around to Time to Die, especially since vocalist Jus Oborn sounds like he’s singing down the corridor, but it’s the heavy/slow DOOMY riff fest that you want and desire from The Wizard. — Scott Bishop
YOB’s Clearing the Path to Ascend was virtually undisputed amongst aficionados of independent heavy music as one of the best albums of the year. Crowned by a song bound for a timeless regard in the world of heavy music, ‘Marrow’, the rest of the album gradually emerges from the blinding supernova of the closer across multiple listens to burn slowly into the mind as one of the most outstanding albums made in heavy metal history. Scheidt can make it seem as though drawing upon an utterly deadly riff is as easy as breathing for him, and is quite happy to let you have it methodically and relentlessly over a period of time where other bands would have played twenty different ones. This is doom deep in a trance. YOB is meditative. YOB is introspective, and deeply moving in its sincerity. On this record, YOB is godlike. — The Black Captain
