As sure as (Kell) Knight follows (Kath) Day, the month of December must have a wrap up of the year, be it politics, wars, disaster, or really important things like football, television and music. And Wind Back Wednesday is a stickler for traditions, as you can tell from the ornaments dangling from any available surface and the Christmas lights in the shape of a Fender Rhodes across the front of the house.
So, let’s turn our minds to a time when the world was much simpler, prettier and absolutely not pickled in its own juices. Let’s go back to when a country star was two albums into a transformation into a pop star (would it last?), a saint was turning odd again, a man with a pun name was building on glass, and someone was resurrecting Countdown (but without the amateur hour tribute). Let’s go back to the best albums of 2014, and find out who were the two local and not-so-local stars who defined, and devoured it all.
But remember, we’ve only visiting; you cannot stay there, no matter how much you want to.
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ANY YEAR WHEN ON a list of best albums the Spotify-baiting, globe-bestriding Taylor Swift is sharing space with the (let’s face it, for most people) obscure experimental hip hop duo, Shabbazz Palaces, and the hirsute Chet Faker’s electronic soul nudges up to the twin koras of father and son masters, Toumani and Sidiki Diabate, is both an odd year and a good year.
And, a diverse year. For while it's true that there was some common ground across the 20 albums selected here by Fairfax critics and journalists (a touch of 1980s electronic sound, in all its varieties, principally), it would be a very interesting household indeed that would comfortably house all of these recordings.
But then again, if there's anything we've learned in the past decade of upheaval in the music industry it's that dividing listeners, or artists, by some arbitrary categories is a waste of time. Put it this way, the retro keyboard of Total Control and HTRK and the dirty rock squall of Hits and Courtney Barnett’s more nuanced spin on the same modes, were all made by people born after those sounds were first thought of as cool.
The one-time country singer, Swift, made her second and most unashamed pop record, one that shared bright-eyed melodic DNA with Australian DJ/producers Flight Facilities who borrowed Kylie Minogue for one track but otherwise rode on their own love of sugared tunes over beats. It wasn't a big step from there to Todd Terje’s very easy-to-move-to mix of cocktail hour and midnight hour.
Slow down those beats and you find yourself inhabiting a more complex R&B in FKA twigs and Wild Beasts on the way to the harder textures of Neneh Cherry and Total Control. Put some guitars into that mix and maybe you’ll understand how St Vincent’s art leanings and Black Keys’ blues roots aren’t that far away.
Even if you went back, like in the discovery of a new/old live recordings of John Coltrane and a power trio led by Keith Jarrett, or forward, to the understated landscapes of The Acid and the even more understated interiors of Laura Jean, you are never that far away from the blends underneath the images created by producer/rapper Joelistics.
It’s that kind of odd world. A good world so far. And this year a corner of that world, not just in Australia but Turkey, Poland, the UK and large parts of western Europe, has been in love with one album that didn’t have a marketing push, just a quality push. That would be the Shortlist album of the year, Chet Faker’s Built On Glass.
(Best albums of 2014 from the votes of: Andrew Drever, Bernard Zuel, Kate Hennessy, George Palathingal, Anthony Carew, Judith Whelan, Sean Rabin, Louise Rugendyke, Martin Boulton, Jessie Cunniffe, Craig Mathieson, Samuel J Fell, Paris Pompor, John Shand, Patrick Emery)
THE LIST
Total Control – Typical System
Chet Faker – Built On Glass
FKA twigs – LP1
Toumani Diabate & Sidiki Diabate – Toumani & Sidiki
Taylor Swift - 1989
HTRK – Psychic 9-5 Club
Neneh Cherry – Blank Project
Courtney Barnett – The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas
Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden/Paul Motian – Hamburg ‘72
Laura Jean – Laura Jean
Black Keys – Turn Blue
Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
St Vincent – St Vincent
Wild Beasts – Wild Beasts
Flight Facilities – Down To Earth
The Acid - Liminal
Joelistics – Blue Volume
Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty
John Coltrane – The Offering
Hits – Hikikomori
THE EXPLANATION
Total Control – Typical System
On 2011’s Henge Beat, Total Control bristled with punkish energy, but their new album is significantly more: dynamic, elegant, magisterial. Throughout the album the five-piece combine post-punk vigour and 1980s British keyboard pop to fashion their own compelling sound.
Chet Faker – Built On Glass
At all times though it is a sound which exposes as much as it covers, a headphones album of the best kind but also a personal album of the most interesting kind. Nick Murphy/Chet Faker writes songs you want to explore and he produces sounds that give you no end of areas to investigate. It’s a potent combination for a terrific album.
FKA twigs – LP1
[Her] modus operandi is to let distant explosions work their way down to you eventually but never to push out hard at all. You could say rather than go the full, or even semi-Beyonce of hips and thrusts and struts, she inhabits the territory Beyonce began to assay on her most recent record: shadows and echoes and lust and hurt.
Toumani Diabate & Sidiki Diabate – Toumani & Sidiki
With Toumani panned to the left of the stereo image and Sidiki the right, you can hear subtle differences in sound and style, the father leaning towards mellifluous understatement and the son to dazzling flourishes. Anyone who has ever loved the kora should hear these exquisite duets. If there are angels and they rustle their wings, it may well sound like this.
Taylor Swift - 1989
Swift never gets lost in the beat – she bounces off it, chanting lyrics with the monotonal moxie of a gum-chewing downtown girl. She hasn’t just left country behind, Swift has also avoided pop’s current touchstones.
HTRK – Psychic 9-5 Club
Psychic 9-5 Club is a ghostly reflection of immaculate 1980s pop productions such as Sade’s Diamond Life. Forget easy listening, this is uneasy listening. The record grapples with love, giving the term an emotional clarity as it represents both self-esteem and a desire for connections with others.
Neneh Cherry – Blank Project
She boils down inspirations from her whole career on this electronic, partly industrial, starkly personal album, recorded in just five days with producer Four Tet. This is Cherry at her fierce best, the slow-burn rage and eventual hyena screams welded to uncompromising rhythms and drones.
Courtney Barnett – The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas
A Sea Of Split Peas has the feeling of something hazy, a little out of focus in the way of a late night-turning-into-early-morning conversation. And it is the conversation that really settles matters. Barnett's lyrics weave stories that feel almost hyper-real, precise in detail even as they are blurred by a sense of the wildly conceived.
Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden/Paul Motian – Hamburg ‘72
In addition to piano Jarrett plays percussion, flute and, most importantly, his growling, half-vocalised soprano saxophone. Motian routinely opts for the least expected option, opening the music up in ways that made him such a pivotal figure until his death in 2011. Haden, meanwhile, is the rock upon which the group is built – although lava flow may be a more apt metaphor, given his warmth and capacity bend to any musical mould.
Laura Jean – Laura Jean
Retreating from the more prominent guitar sound of its predecessor, Laura Jean takes Laura Englert to her earlier folkish storytelling but with added layers of sound that are incremental in their affect on your ears. Almost conversational at times, like her deceptively potent lyrics, Englert’s singing is shorn of affectations sonic or stylistic, and any specific historical period.
Black Keys – Turn Blue
The Black Keys’ eighth album begins with some guitar which wouldn’t have embarrassed Duane Allman, entering after an almost glistening organ and synth bed. It is with the next two tracks, In Time and Turn Blue, that we begin to see the rest of the plan. Falsetto vocals, a shuffling groove and a tempo in the first, bubbling-under rhythm and airy voices in the second situate the band in a smoky mid-point between modern R&B and late ‘60s soul with the emphasis on feel not push
Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
The production across 12 tracks is scintillating, while the breadth of territory often surprising. From clever cocktail kitsch and soundtracks fit for inspectors Clouseau or Gadget, to throbbing sci-fi anthems that threaten – and deliver – the all-important big bang, innovation and creativity sidesteps pastiche. Still, there’s something decidedly French, utterly cosmic, certainly chromatic, strangely 80s and rather adult about the whole affair.
St Vincent – St Vincent
Her beguiling songs, her creative and adventurous guitar playing and not insignificantly, her own oddness ... all of those things, including the intellectual rather than emotional-driven crafting of tracks, are in evidence on this sometimes wildly varied album which contains jumpy 80s synth pop, almost metal levels of heaviness in the guitars and keyboards, not to mention slightly disturbing choral backing vocals, and what might in different, less lyrically imaginative, company be windswept ballads for some high concept Hollywood drama.
Wild Beasts – Wild Beasts
Two voices - one low, one higher - play emotional games with you in Wild Beasts. It’s tense, yes, but also sometimes simmering with anger, sometimes needing touch and at times losing itself somewhat in the pull of desire. Present Tense spreads from cool electronic funk and delicate atmospheric moments to pushy modern R&B and some not modern at all dramatic pop.
Flight Facilities – Down To Earth
Flight Facilities’ beats are punchier, the grooves more machined and their atmospheric spoken word samples more reminiscent of ‘90s trip-hop, but in catchiest tune Hold Me Down they resurrect 1985 Countdown stars so authentically that the sexy sax and snaking bass runs conjure flashbacks to white guitars worn half mast on svelte male torsos.
The Acid - Liminal
You could call Liminal some kind of minimalist dance music or maybe muted electronica. Mostly it pulses rather than pushes, murmurs rather than exalts but it isn’t mere background fare from the trans-national trio of Steve Nalepa, Adam Freeland and Australian Ry X.
Joelistics – Blue Volume
Like Blur’s Damon Albarn, Joelistics skilfully links disparate styles, with the edgy guitar buzz of Connect matched by the dreamy hip-hop of Care Anymore, and he matches scything social critique to personal reminiscence while only rarely becoming a lecturer instead of remaining a rapper. The energy on Blue Volume flows outwards
Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty
Lese Majesty is hip hop unlike any other: so earthy you can almost taste the sidewalk, yet erected with layers of ingenuity so complex it’s hard to keep your feet on the ground. Lyrically the narration is obtuse and disjointed, working with the sounds of words as much as their meaning, though still delivering more than enough soulful choruses to offer a way inside.
John Coltrane – The Offering
Witnesses of his 1960s concerts speak in awe of experiencing something between shell-shock and religious revelation. The Offering is an extraordinary double album, brimming with the profundities of a man who continues to tower over the art of improvisation, across the idioms and probably the centuries.
Hits - Hikikomori
Suddenly these sharp, punchy tracks are buried deep into your brain, with the twin guitar attack of Tamara Dawn Bell and Stacey Coleman shovelling the way for nearly 50 dirty, glorious minutes. And Hits is quite possibly the best rock'n'roll band in the world and most awesome live rock'n'roll experience going around.
LOCAL ARTIST OF THE YEAR
Whether it was in a tent at Splendour In The Grass, on Late Night With David Letterman, or in one of the hundreds of rooms she played in clubs, pubs and theatres across Australia and then the world, Courtney Barnett left big impressions in 2014.
The intensity of her performances, sometimes solo but at her best when backed by Bones Sloane and Dave Mundie in a band which could crunch but never overwhelm the material, was something to behold. There was rock, from grunge and garage, a smattering of country and a kind of very Australian blues that was more about the city than the dirt tracks.
Then when you looked a bit deeper were lyrics which didn’t just tell stories but wove lives out of images and phrases that were blunt but felt spot on.
And all this before her debut album has even surfaced, though the collection of EPs, A Sea Of Split Peas, became a genuine calling card everywhere and the record and the shows had the UK and American music press salivating.
The scary thing is 2014 may have been Courtney Barnett’s year but it is only a beginning.
INTERNATIONAL ARTIST OF THE YEAR
Taylor Swift didn’t suddenly turn into a pop star this year, her 2012 album Red set up that transition from sweetheart of the (pop country) rodeo. But with first the exuberant, bouncy and irresistible earworm Shake It Off and then the sparser R&B-meets-electronic feel of Blank Space – not to mention their, respectively, shiny dancing and golfclub-swinging filmclips – Swift made it clear she had moved on and it was our job to catch up. Which is what proper pop stars do.
Pairing up with several of the Swedish songwriters who know their way around the kind of hooks that devour radio playlists, Swift may have traded in some individuality for ubiquitousness but she put herself at the centre of any music discussion, much as Beyonce had done a year earlier with her own partial reinvention.
Combine those things with a savvy media presence, the odd bout with streaming services and pals and feuds played out in the social pages and if you went through 2014 not noticing Taylor Swift you were more dead than a Medicare co-payment bill.
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