Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Top 10 Vinyl Releases of 2014

Here it is. No muss, no fuss... my top 10 vinyl releases of the year. This was really damn difficult to keep to 10 so instead of just going with my gut from 1 to 10, I tried to be diverse, (almost to a fault). I felt it was important though because this blog is beholden to no genre so I must keep the horizons broad. I will freely admit, of the 3 components of this blog, music, (mostly of the underground variety), is what I keep up with most. I'm still doing a lot of catch up with comics and who knows what year a beer was originally released in? Not me, and that's why I'm only doing my top 10 albums. Anyway. Here we go... in no particular order...



Indian - From All Purity
Relapse Records

This record came out early in the year and stuck with me all the way through. From All Purity is more terrifying and uglier than most other things I've ever heard. It's like slow meticulous torture in all the best ways, (I'm not really sure what those ways are). This album makes my special lady leave the room, (so I mostly listen to it when she's not around), that's how disgusting the sounds on this album are. I don't want to spend too much time here because I already did a review of it but if you didn't check it out when I reviewed it before... now you should because it made the Top 10.




Wovenhand - Refractory Obdurate
Deathwish Inc

David Eugene Edwards is a bit of a chameleon musically and every Wovenhand record spotlights that fact a little more than the last. There is always a base of the Goth-Americana thing he started with 16 Horsepower, but from there the musical ripples spread from the shores of traditional folk to the rocky coasts of shoegaze all the way to the cliff face of punk. Refractory Obdurate is the most diverse record he's put out yet. It has pieces that are surprisingly heavy without ever pushing away his audience. With Sanford Parker manning the knobs, the largeness of sound and the underlying heaviness should be expected. Pulling most all of his lyrical content from the hellfire and brimstone parts of the bible will also tend to add an air of darkness to any song. I actually think that this would make a great starting point for anyone to get into Wovenhand. This record will give you the breadth of his influences and if you go backwards from here you will get into the depth of these different influences. 




Sweet Apple - The Golden Age of Glitter
TeePee Records

This is the absolute best pop-rock record I've heard since The Exploding Hearts released Guitar Romanic in 2003.  Not that I'm huge into poppy rock bands but this is an absolute gem. With a title like The Golden Age of Glitter you probably will not be surprised to hear that there is a good amount T-Rex and Cheap Trick influence on this album. The songs range from quiet acoustic ballads to up beat arena numbers and they do both equally well. The diversity, (along with the song craft), is really what sets the album apart from other pop rock type releases. I mean the standard jangly four chord thing has become more than tiresome at this point so to have a band really take pride in writing songs that are artful and simultaneously able to be enjoyed by pretty much any type of person is a huge win for modern music in my opinion.




Greenleaf - Trails and Passes
Small Stone Records

I love the retro-rock thing going on right now. Graveyard, Witchcraft, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Orchid along with the countless others that range from heavy blues to occult-proto-metal to psychedelic garage rock, there are sounds that are being dug up and reworked for a more modern audience that appreciates what rockers were doing in the late 60's and early 70's. Greenleaf's Trails and Passes comes out at the front of that pack for me this year. With it's faster tempos and dreamy atmospheres, Greenleaf have created a surprisingly lean and mean rock-n-roll record. I gushed about this album earlier in the year and I still mean all of it. This record has just the right mix of force and love to be an easy classic for any and all rockers for years to come.




Inter Arma - The Cavern
Relapse Records

A 45 minute song may not be best presented on vinyl due to the time restraints and the need to flip a record. Granted it's where a piece of symphonic sludge like The Cavern was always going to be presented but one song that lasts over 20 minutes is automatically going to be split in twain. Heavy music does seem to be going in this direction but as any of us who own Dopesmoker on vinyl know, putting these massive tracks on wax isn't always the best thing for the song, even if it does sound the best. Songs that are the length of albums and albums that contain songs that are almost completely strung together and meant to be listened to as a whole are more and more becoming the norm rather than the musings of a few daring weirdos. Inter Arma go far enough above and beyond here to show that they're not jumping on a band wagon. They bring in a string section, guest vocals from Dorthia Cottrell of Windhand and enough twists and turns to spin your head around more than a few times. This is a very cinematic sort of album. Not only do you feel like the music is moving you through a story but the atmosphere is such that you can't help but conjure images in your minds eye as you listen. This year was filled with great metal that kind of defies even metal subgenres, (Atlas Moth - The Old Believer, Pallbearer - Foundations of Burden, Plebian Grandstand - Lowgazers to name a few), Inter Arma comes out on top of this category for me because they do it in a beautifully produced single statement that not only showcases they're sound but also shows how silly the innumerable genre's in metal have become. It's all coming from the same metal DNA so let's embrace the inability of convention to hold down great heavy music.




Chimera Records

I thought this record would be on this list when I reviewed it earlier in the year and here it is. Despite the large amount of psychedelic type sounds on this list, GOASTT is the poppiest of those psychedelic sounds. Soulful boy/girl vocal harmonies, a range of different instruments and dynamics that go from foot stomper riffs to quiet close your eyes and drift along clean chords, there is a great range of things going on throughout Midnight Sun and that's what keeps me going back. Wearing his father's influence a little more on his sleeve musically while distancing himself from his actual name, Sean Lennon is really starting to develop his skills and flesh out his ideas more than ever before.




Aphex Twin - Syro
Warp Records

There are very few electronic artists I would actually consider musicians but Richard D. James is at the top of the list. This isn't your standard "gorilla twins, thump thump" (anyone get the reference), electronic music, this is is like traveling through space and time in a glass tube. Each song is constantly changing and evolving and mutating and transforming. The melodic parts are what tend to draw rock fans to Aphex Twin's music but the atonal bits of weirdness are just as integral here. Rhythmic clicks and whirrs create frameworks for the melody and give it something to bounce off of and break it open. I guess the point I'm making with all this flowery language is that over the six sides of this album you will never get bored. You will continually hear different nuances than you heard the last time and some of the starts and stops will still take you by surprise. Perhaps the simplest way for me to explain Syro is an electronic music kaleidoscope.




Yob - Clearing the Path to Ascend
Neurot Recordings / Relapse Records

There are very few bands that are as good at doom as Yob. With nothing more than guitar, bass, drums and vocals they will lift you to the heights of heaven and drag you deep into the guts of hell and whichever direction you're headed, the ride will be breathtaking. Four songs on four sides is an epic feat of songwriting. 11:21 is the shortest running time on the album but all the songs still sound incredibly lean. There are elements of drone but the guitar sounds are so lush and melodic that you need to let them wash over you and sink in. The distortion is thick but not fuzzy or gnawing it's just a powerful and heavy tone. When the quieter clean parts take hold there are elements of flanger and reverb that keep the ethereal feel going rather than ever thinning out. Lead singer/guitarist Mike Scheidt's voice is just as varied and powerful. The high register clean singing, forceful shouts and near deathly growls seem to blend even better here than they ever have. This is a absolute must own for anyone into heavy music. Clearing the Path to Ascend is a clinic on doom songwriting and tone.




The Budos Band - Burnt Offering
Daptone Records

If you don't know the Budos Band, they play funk. Old-school, tighter-than-hell, party funk; like Superfly if it was less guitar-centric and more based on horns. It turns out they are also fans of proto-metal bands like Blue Cheer, Pentagram, and Black Sabbath. For Burnt Offering they decided to meld the two styles mixing the riff oriented guitar of stoner rock and the blasting horns and hopping rhythm section of funk. Now I will admit that they could have played up the fuzz guitar a little more and possibly made the whole album a little meaner sounding but as far as I know this is pretty uncharted territory. What they did end up with a middle eastern, (almost Om-like), tone in the horns and a Pentagram riff structure like the first songs off of the First Daze Here compilation. Besides the super interesting collision of styles the band is probably the best group of musicians in the business. None of them overplay, ever, they all know their roles. It's exciting to hear musicians with this much talent play with the restraint necessary to highlight a song rather than their own playing while still having the balls to blend 2 seemingly incongruous genres such as stoner rock and funk.




Boris - Noise
Sargent House

I love Boris. I love their early stuff, I love their collaborations, I love their new stuff, I love it all. Noise shows Boris again basically doing whatever the hell they feel like. There is drone and pop and metal and punk and shoegaze and post-rock all on this album. I'm not even talking influence, I'm talking about the fact that they do songs on this 2XLP that are completely different genres from one another with out batting an eye. Somehow the consistencies in the tone of their instruments carries the songs into one another and allow listeners to not be completely spooked by the transformation in styles. The overall shoegazey fog that flows in and out through the album also smooths out the rough edges between tracks and ideas. The fearless nature of Boris and their almost compulsive need to remain mercurial has brought them into my top 10 this year.