Earbuddy's Best Albums of 2014: 100–41

Three of the four dropped out of their first semester of college to go home to Chicago and re-form the band, and the second album doubled the length of Sunken. Sixteen songs, recorded with Colin Croom and R. Andrew Humphrey and mixed by Doug Boehm, who co-produced Christopher Owens’s A New Testament the same year.

Joseph D’Agostino wrote it about the death of his friend and collaborator Benjamin High, and the title, by the band’s account, means losing Ben and also missing a time when music meant everything to you and your friends. John Agnello produced it, and “Jackson” opens it.

The Los Angeles trio’s Sub Pop debut sets Daveed Diggs’s breakneck rapping against noise made by William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. “Get Up” uses an alarm clock for a beat, the record finds room for a version of John Cage’s “Williams Mix”, and the fourth side of the vinyl holds 100 locked grooves.

Recorded live in 2013 at La Chapelle in Belgium, ‘Ardennes-ish’ as the sleeve puts it, and the Jicks’ first album since Mirror Traffic. Malkmus listed its inspirations as Cologne, Can and Gas, Flipper, Pete Townshend, Pavement, the NBA, home life in the 2010s and ‘indie guys trying to sound Memphis’.

Most of it was cut in one week at RAK in London, seven songs in five days with Smith singing live with the band, strings added at Angel a week later and the whole stretch to mastering done in about three weeks, by Steve Fitzmaurice’s account. “Stay With Me” is mostly the demo. Cautious, and built for the voice.

Amelia Meath, who sang in the near a cappella folk trio Mountain Man, and Nick Sanborn of Megafaun wrote, recorded and mixed the debut themselves at what the sleeve calls the Posi-Vibes House. Stereogum made it Album of the Week, and “Coffee” borrows from “Hanky Panky”, the Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich song.

With members spread between Philadelphia, New York and Sydney, the story went that they never shared a room, and Ben Daniels calls that overplayed. He emailed demos, they met in Philadelphia to record with Jeff Zeigler, then went home and kept working. Kickstarter paid for it, and Pitchfork gave it Best New Music.

Produced by the band with Craig Silvey, with Paul Epworth sharing the writing of “Falling Star”. The first song heard from it, “I See You”, runs about seven and a half minutes, and Pitchfork found the album to be Skying with faster tempos, a rock band dabbling in club sounds. The dabbling is the best part.

Dee Dee Penny strained her voice into nodes on tour and left the Los Angeles sessions with Richard Gottehrer and Sune Rose Wagner holding studio tracks and demo vocals. She finished it herself at home in New York, a place she nicknamed the Coven, on 12-hour days. Ten songs in 30 minutes, with Wagner on bass, drums and synth programming.

Recorded in 2013 at Avast! in Seattle with Randall Dunn, who produced and mixed it, and a band that included Eyvind Kang on strings and arrangements, Steve Moore of Earth on piano and synths, Phil Wandscher on electric guitar and Jason Kardong on pedal steel. Nadler wrote all eleven songs and plays acoustic and twelve-string guitar.

The Brooklyn trio recorded, produced and engineered it in their own studio, with Chris Coady mixing and Jon Natchez adding euphonium, tuba and saxophones. Peter Silberman said he was trying to understand attachment, to memories and to ideas of who we are, and that there is no escaping yourself. It is dedicated to ‘our family, loosely-defined’.

The first album without Carlos Dengler, with Paul Banks playing bass on an Interpol record for the first time, and a title, Spanish for the painter, that is an anagram of the band’s name. They produced it themselves, drums and bass at Electric Lady and the rest at Atomic Sound, with Alan Moulder mixing.

SBTRKT produced, arranged and mixed it himself and dedicated it to the memory of his brother Daniel. Sampha sings on four tracks, the title song among them; Caroline Polachek, Ezra Koenig, Jessie Ware, Raury and Denai Moore take one each, and A$AP Ferg shares the closing “Voices in My Head” with Warpaint.

Alex Giannascoli finished it in the spring of 2014 as a 21-year-old English major at Temple, living in a nine-person house in South Philadelphia and writing term papers on John Updike and the history of the word ‘nice’. The title stands for Dream State University, and Orchid Tapes pressed its first 125 copies on green vinyl.

M.C. Taylor recorded it in a tin-roofed barn outside Hillsborough, North Carolina, in the autumn of 2013, with Phil and Brad Cook of Megafaun, William Tyler and his co-producer Scott Hirsch, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man on harmonies. The title comes from a Eudora Welty story; Merge called it a record about self-discovery.

Jane Penny, David Carriere and Riley Fleck wrote, recorded and produced it themselves over about a year in Arbutus Records’ Montreal studio, and Jacob Portrait mixed it. The label called the sound ‘a raw punk take on AM studio pop’, the title is a line from “Way to Be Loved”, and Gorilla vs. Bear ranked it fourth of 2014.

The Leeds band introduced themselves in 2013 with a furious open letter to their peers, then made the debut with Matt Peel at Cottage Road, and Bob Ludwig mastered it. Pitchfork heard Killing Joke’s drive and Cure-like guitars, songs about heroin addicts and soulless youth, and picked “Possessed” as the best of them.

The band took three years after the death of their bassist Gerard Smith in 2011, then brought about 65 sketches to Dave Sitek’s home studio in Los Angeles, where, Tunde Adebimpe said, nobody was on the clock. Sitek produced and mixed it, “Happy Idiot” was the first single, and Julian Gross of Liars made the cover.

MJ recorded and mixed it at his Suburban Home studio in Leeds, which doubles as the band’s base, under what he called insane pressure not to make Pearl Mystic Part 2. It came out more minimal and, in his words, ‘less down in the dumps’, and its numbered interludes carry on from the debut’s, as a joke.

After the guitar-heavy Civilian, Jenn Wasner found so much ‘weird baggage’ attached to the instrument that she set it aside and played bass, while Andy Stack drums with one arm and plays keyboard with the other. Nicolas Vernhes co-produced it at Rare Book Room, and the title track runs a New Zealand dawn chorus through delay.

His major-label debut on Top Dawg and Interscope takes its title, he said, from his past selling OxyContin, and his young daughter guides the listener through its skits. Kendrick Lamar is on “Collard Greens”, Tyler, the Creator and Kurupt on “The Purge”, and the seven-minute “Prescription / Oxymoron” is the centre of it.

Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland started out calling themselves only J and T, and toured with three more players to work what they called the line between electronic and live. They wrote, played and produced the debut themselves, David Wrench mixed it, and it made the 2014 Mercury shortlist alongside East India Youth and Young Fathers.

The masked collective say they come from Korpilombolo, in Sweden’s far north, and have also said they made that story up. The goat, they explained, is the sacrificial animal: give up your own cravings for the good of the collective. Funk, krautrock, Afrobeat and desert psych all feed into it, with a sample of Floyd Red Crow Westerman.

By their label’s account, Temples recorded everything at home, in the box room of James Bagshaw’s end-terrace house in Kettering, aiming for Jack Nitzsche production on a DIY budget. Bagshaw produced the debut himself, he and Tom Walmsley split the lyrics, Claudius Mittendorfer mixed most of it, and “Shelter Song”, their first recording, opens it.

Joseph Mount recorded it with Ash Workman at Toe Rag in London, straight to a 1970 eight-track tape machine, with Anna Prior’s drums caught on four microphones and a single track, and then sequenced the album on tape. Mount wrote and produced it and plays much of it himself; Airelle Besson arranged the horns.

Jeff Tweedy played everything except the drums, which went to his 18-year-old son Spencer, and kept many of his iPhone demos as the basic tracks, so the phone is credited as an instrument. Twenty songs over 72 minutes, and “I’ll Sing It” includes a cassette demo from the Being There years.

Elly Jackson came off the first album’s tour unable to sing falsetto, a muscle tension traced to performance anxiety, and parted with Ben Langmaid in 2012 over where the record should go. She produced it with Ian Sherwin: nine songs in 42 minutes, Chilly Gonzales on piano, and “Tropical Chancer” built on Grace Jones’s “My Jamaican Guy”.

Johanna and Klara Söderberg flew back to Omaha to make it with Mike Mogis at ARC Studios, this time with a string section, flute and clarinet, Mogis on pedal steel and Nate Walcott on piano. The title comes from Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and it was released through Columbia.

Steve Albini, Bob Weston and Todd Trainer recorded it a bit at a time over several years at Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago, and had the vinyl mastered entirely in the analogue domain at Abbey Road. Nine songs in 33 minutes, the lyrics of “Gary” by T-Bone Slim, and, as the label pointed out, no comma in the title.

Paul Savage produced, recorded and mixed it at Castle of Doom in Glasgow. Stuart Braithwaite said they put synthesis on the guitars and used no drum machines, while listening to more horror scores after their Les Revenants soundtrack, and “Repelish” has a friend reading an old Christian script about backmasking on “Stairway to Heaven”.

Alynda Segarra, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican who came to Woody Guthrie by way of Bikini Kill and learned the trade in New Orleans street bands, arranges and produces these songs. “The Body Electric” turns the murder ballad against itself, and “The New SF Bay Blues” rewrites Jesse Fuller’s song as one about a worn-out touring van.

The title comes from The Simpsons, where Milhouse is promised a tryst at Makeout Creek after a fake faith healing. Mitski, a recent SUNY Purchase graduate living in Brooklyn, put it out on Double Double Whammy in November, and on “Townie” she asks for a love that falls like a body from a balcony.

Justin Kennedy’s Los Angeles trio made its third album with Adam Lasus at Fireproof Recording and put it out on its own label, three years after The Last Place. “World’s End” and “Crushed Like the Car” were out long before the rest. Ten songs credited to all three members, and the slower ones go furthest.

Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham Hastings had been making music together since their early teens, and their debut album won the 2014 Mercury Prize over far better-known names. The Guardian heard Massive Attack’s spirit in 34 minutes that draw on Massaquoi’s and Bankole’s African heritage, with electronic bagpipes on “No Way”.

The Syracuse band’s debut came less than a year after their first demo cassette: eight songs in 23 minutes, recorded by their keyboardist Shaun Sutkus, with no credits on the glitter-printed sleeve. Meredith Graves’s words are hard to make out, Fact noted, and the red flecks in the limited white vinyl come from a vial of her blood.

The first record this line-up wrote from the ground up, with Stella Mozgawa on drums, produced with Flood in Los Angeles and London. Emily Kokal said she plays guitar on maybe two songs and keys on the rest, out of a love of rap and R&B with drum machines; Nigel Godrich mixed “Love Is to Die”.

Released two days after his 80th birthday: nine songs written with Patrick Leonard, who produced them, recorded and mixed by Jesse String, and dedicated to his teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who died that year. “Almost Like the Blues” went out first. An old man in no hurry, and in complete command of his voice and his lines.

Angus Andrew described an ‘instinctual and confident’ process, the exact opposite of making WIXIW. He and Aaron Hemphill wrote and recorded it at their own No Gold Studios, Julian Gross designed the cover, and it ends on its two longest tracks, the nine-minute “Perpetual Village” and “Left Speaker Blown”.

The Tampa band held out for 18 months while nearly every label tried to sign them, then went to 4AD and, as Carson Cox put it, started ‘a new band with basically the same name’. Cox and David Vassalotti split the songwriting, Gareth Jones mixed it, and “Little Killer” borrows from a Toshio Matsumoto short film.

Ten songs in 22 minutes, produced again by Jesse Gander. Mish Way takes on body image in “Snake Jaw”, and “I Believe You”, partly inspired by Cherie Currie’s account of being raped, is about a friend confiding that she was assaulted. The record came with an open letter in which Way said she had over-exposed herself.

Tom Krell wrote all of it and wanted to be, in his words, ‘pop, but not populist’, aiming for No. 1 on Billboard on his own terms. Pitchfork heard a philosophy student writing about love as pop’s cure-all, from the cynical disco of “Repeat Pleasure” to the Purple Rain-sized coda of “Words I Don’t Remember”.

Her debut album took two years, against about a month for each of her mixtapes, which she had made alone in her room, deciding everything herself. Here she executive-produced a crowd, from DJ Mustard on “2 On” to Boi-1da, Stargate, Dev Hynes and Evian Christ, and produced the short interludes that hold it together herself.

Twelve songs in 33 minutes, some of them years old: “Overcoming Me” dates from 2008. Owens produced it with Doug Boehm and explained the title as a joke with a point, ‘every new album is a new testament’. “Stephen”, a hymn for the brother who died before Owens was born, is the reason it sits this high.

Jason Williamson speed-talks over Andrew Fearn’s bare backing tracks, built from cheap keyboard presets, fourteen times in 40 minutes. The Guardian put it at No. 10 of 2014, noting songs about pound shops and getting something for nothing, and compared their stage act, Fearn pressing a button on a laptop and drinking beer, to Brent and Keenan.

Dave Cobb produced and engineered it and plays classical guitar, with Laur Joamets on lead and slide. The title nods to Ray Charles by way of the poet Seth Abramson, the liner notes thank Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and “Turtles All the Way Down” runs through Jesus, Buddha and reptile aliens to decide that love saved his life.

Fourteen songs in 34 minutes from the Detroit band, recorded by Bill Skibbe at Key Club, with Greg Ahee adding a Prophet 5 to his guitar and a zine of Joe Casey’s lyrics inside the LP. On “Want Remover” Casey imagines a cheap gadget that removes desire; a world with one, he said, would look ‘kind of like ours’.

Arca’s debut album came out of six months of improvised recording, made, she said, in states she didn’t fully control. It is named after an alter ego, Xen, neither male nor female, and Jesse Kanda, her housemate and closest collaborator for a decade, made the portraits of Xen for the booklet upstairs while she worked in the studio below.

Merrill Garbus went to Haiti in 2013 to work on it, and the Haitian master drummer Daniel Brevil plays on three tracks. She brought in co-producers too, John Hill on “Water Fountain” and Malay on two songs, while Roomful of Teeth sing on the opener, “Find a New Way”, and Nate Brenner holds down the bass.

The songs grew out of Tim Showalter’s marriage falling apart while he was away on an endless tour. He recorded them in Akron with Ben Vehorn and had John Congleton mix them. J Mascis plays guitar on “Goshen ’97”, about teenage years spent singing Smashing Pumpkins into a mirror, and “JM” is seven minutes for Jason Molina.

Erika M. Anderson made it in her basement studio in Portland with Leif Shackelford, with two books in mind, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Herta Müller’s Nadirs. She called it a punk record with a lot of analog synths. “Satellites” opens on harsh noise, and “3Jane” is about the shock of going from obscurity to a presence on the internet.

Mary Timony’s new trio, with Betsy Wright and Laura Harris, recorded it with Mitch Easter at the Fidelitorium in April 2014 and produced it with Jonah Takagi. Twelve songs in 35 minutes, two of them by Wright. Pitchfork made it Best New Music, heard Tom Petty and the Runaways, and found most of the songs aimed at disappointing dudes.

Their first album since Together in 2010, with Neko Case and Dan Bejar both back alongside A.C. Newman. Newman called it ‘a celebration record’, made at a point when, after periods of difficulty, nothing in his life was dragging him down. Thirteen songs in 43 minutes, from the title track to “You Tell Me Where”, and a Polaris shortlist.

His first solo studio album, made by handing Richard Russell 60-odd songs and letting him choose. Russell picked “Mr Tembo”, written for an orphaned baby elephant in Tanzania, and a Pentecostal church choir sings on it. Natasha Khan is the ghostly echo on “The Selfish Giant”, Brian Eno sings on the closer, and the Mercury shortlisted it.

William Doyle named the project after the DLR station by his Docklands flat, which his flatmates called the East India Youth Hostel, and wrote and recorded much of the debut there. Four instrumentals called “Total Strife Forever” run through it, and the third, he said, was where he saw the thread. It made the Mercury shortlist.

Elias Bender Rønnenfelt wrote most of it holed up in a borrowed Berlin flat, with Werner Herzog films and Ernst Jünger’s novellas for company, and the Copenhagen band filled it out with piano, mandolin, viola and trumpet. Pitchfork heard country-rock and Irish drinking songs in the punk, and “Against the Moon” was written at night on an old pump organ.

Walker sent Sunn O))) wordless synthesizer demos that plotted almost exactly what they should play, and the band brought its whole wall of amplifiers to London. The drones fill the gaps between phrases that Walker usually left silent, across five tracks and 49 minutes. He nearly called it Ronronner, French for purr, and “Herod 2014” retells a massacre of infants.

Li called it the last part of a trilogy about a woman in her twenties searching for love and for herself. After the biggest breakup of her life she left Sweden for Los Angeles and spent two and a half years writing it, then made her ‘power ballads for the broken’ with Björn Yttling, bringing in Greg Kurstin for “Gunshot”.

Molly Rankin, whose late father co-founded the Rankin Family, made the debut with Chad VanGaalen at his Calgary studio, chosen for his work on Women’s Public Strain. It was VanGaalen who told them to stop recording under her name; the Vs went in to avoid a sanitary-towel brand. Nine songs, and a Polaris shortlist the following summer.

Hayden Thorpe, Tom Fleming, Chris Talbot and Ben Little took almost a full year off the road for it, longer than for any record before. They wrote it in London and recorded it at Konk and at the Distillery in Bath with Leo Abrahams and Lexxx, and Domino traced its sound to the electronics of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ought came together in a shared Montreal apartment in 2012 and played in the streets during that spring’s student strike, which, by their label’s account, shaped what the band became. The debut took a week to record and mix at Hotel2Tango, and its title song gets excited about grocery shopping and choosing between 2% and whole milk.