Silicon Valleywood

Best of 2014: Music February 1, 2015

I’m awfully late posting my “best of,” so I’ll get right to it. More or less in order, the following were my favorite new releases of 2014:

• D’Angelo “Black Messiah” – smooooove
• Wovenhand “Refractory Obdurate” – my favorite quasi-Christian rocker is still full of fire and brimstone
• St. Vincent “St. Vincent” – doesn’t sound like anything else, esp. when she plays guitar
• The Choir of Gonvill & Caius College, Cambridge “In Praise of St. Columba” – if Celtic monks didn’t sound like this, they should have
• Sturgill Simpson “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music” – ignore the title: he’s got some Hank Williams in him
• TV on the Radio “Seeds” – my obligatory “catchy, quirky alterna-pop” for this year
• Run the Jewels “Run the Jewels 2” – actually makes some political points
• Prince’s twin releases: “Art Official Age” and “Plectrumelectrum” (with 3rdeyegirl) – he’ll always be the best funk rocker
• Robert Plant “Lullaby…and the Ceaseless Roar” – obligatory “old geezer who hasn’t lost it”

There were 3 or 4 good singles on the Pixie’s two EPs, Lucinda Williams’ double album was about one-album’s worth of solid, and everybody should listen to “Primus and the Chocolate Factory” at least once.

I bought 29 albums or EPs — 7 from the back catalog. That’s about the same as in 2013, and half of what I bought before streaming caught on. I don’t think I’m the industry’s worst nightmare, i.e., a former heavy-album buyer who switches over to $10/month. No, that would be the never-buyers who get all their music from YouTube. Mark Mulligan is right: though $10/month is a fabulous deal for fans,we’re going to need another price point before it’s mainstream. And Aram Sinnreich seems to have been on to something back in the Jupiter days: it took mobile streaming to take adoption beyond the niche aficionados.

Pals who work in and around the industry and I agreed it was pretty mediocre year. When I look back at what I liked best over the last few years, I’m struck by the relative lack of sure-to-be-standards. I won’t fall back on the “no unifying cross-audience genre” argument, nor the idea that YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify have killed the album. (Singles are the native format for popular music; albums were an unnatural phenomenon of the ’70s.)

I’ll just say that, compared with the last 5 years, I didn’t hear any breakthroughs in my favorite genre to match Parquet Courts, Japandroids, Titus Andronicus, Surfer Blood, Black Keys, or Savages. “RTJ2” is no “Yeezus,” “1989” can’t touch “Pure Heroine” or “Bangerz,” The War on Drugs is a poor man’s The National, and please, FKA twigs vs. M.I.A? no comparison.