Album List Blurbs:

Vampire Weekend--Modern Vampires of the City.

When all of the discussions of capitalism and the city are about spectacle (Great Gatsby) or Burlesque (Spring Breakers) or satire (Bling Ring) or apologetics (Republicans); one about loss and ennui, taking up all of the best things that James Murphy ever had to offer is necessary. It is solemn and pious, but those are virtures.

Kanye--Yeezus

I hate its misogyny, I cringe at its homophobia, I worry about its racism--all of that needs to be said, but that he could chart a record that sounds this ugly is only half of his audacity. The other half, is how he interleaves all of that ugliness into genuine desires for political change. I don’t know if I hate him, but he never bores me. Plus, it’s only 40 minutes long.

Janelle Monae--Electric Lady.

A queer feminist reclaiming of an Afro-future, with much more hope than the apocalyptic future presented on the previous, equally brilliant Archnoid.

Montanna Roberts--Coin Coin Two

As a practicing Christian, who practices liturgics, and occasionally preaches, there is a conversation on how hymns are used. Priests can be authoritarian, and quite snobbish, and so there is much dismissive about popular favourites. In a keening, often difficult, always prophetic discussion on the nature of African American speech and music, Roberts makes an optimistic argument about a people’s faith. That she ends with the often lambasted hymn about walking with Christ in the garden, and  that she earns that sentiment, was this year’s spiritual highlight.

Miley--Bangerz

For a year that finally proved that Disco won--the song for the after party, and for someone whose godmother is Dolly, she channels Stevie less self consciously than anyone who tries to hard has (Ryan Murphy, I’m looking at you).

Earl The Sweatshirt--Doris.

His narcohaze flow, and the angular beats, sound like wind through a deserted street corner. It might be the most self aware album of the year--in the art of making music, and the failures of making lives.

Teagan and Sara--Heart Throb

The lesbian folk singer in the late 1970s, released a song called I Love Women, that worked the middle of a venn diagram of the first wave of liberation music, somewhere, between Olivia Records and Casablanca. Folk disco never really took off, but everytime I hear this, i think of the possiblities, and how much sense it made that the folk singers took this left hand turn somewhere north of Xanadu. (sorry, wrong Olivia)

Lorde--Pure Heroine:

I wasn’t convinced until Ann Powers on NPR placed it in conversation with Smells Like Teen Spirit, and  then the loneliness made sense.

MIA Mantangi:

The politics are dumb, and she isn’t any more naive, but ignore the words, and how the flowing of intellectual capital stiffens and she builds, further, wider, stranger. The excitement of the thing, is spending more than an hour for the thing to collapse, and how it never does.

Daft Punk--Random Access Memory:

For proving that Analog might matter still, for the rise of a disco paradise the Garage never imagined, for working new and historical, but not being nostalgic, for the cult of Giorgia Moroderer, who I will never not pay homage to, for hearing it in and out of deps, from car windows, in the mall, in night clubs, in clinic waiting rooms--how it stalked me from Edmonton to Toronto to Gaspe to Montreal, through the summer, not relenting past winter.

Singles:

Luke Bryan--Crash My Party

What might be the most controversial album on the list--his voice is calm, authoritative, and seductive. His surety, and his commitment to pleasure remixes what American music might mean.  

Titicia--Don’t Touch Me

A gorgeous, open, and polyrhythmic masterpiece of erotic longing, breezes through without losing a consummate vocalists skill.

Yoko Ono--Bad Dancer:

She doesn’t gloat when she notes she has been playing the Avant as Pop game for longer than most of her collaborators have been alive, she just invites them to a studio and lets them groove. The most open thing I have heard, in a fairly open year.

Blurred Lines--Robin Thicke.

It has the best chorus of the year. Pharell completely changed his game, which might be the third or fourth time he has done that. The falsetto is so un-natural (and the song is about the problems of nature) , and is used so well. It might be dumb, but it is hyper aware about being dumb, and that is one of the secrets of  the come on song. It’s hot. I don’t want to hug him. I want to fuck him. Or more importantly, I want him to fuck me. In an age of song, then response song, the pleasure filled, archly ironic remix by New Zealand Law Students bring pop this year to a full circle.

Carrie Underwood--Two Black Cadilliacs:

Domestic melodrama at its finest, the story song could be something straight out of Sirk, with the heavy formalism. That it manages to have a chorus so monstrous, thunder sounds, and keening guitars, that it becomes so formalist, and is not operatic or ironic, is a testement to Underwood’s  consummate skill.

Brigett Everett--What I Gotta Do

I got most of my music off of Youtube this year, and this cabaret icon, without an album but with a live show at Joe’s pub, is the gender queering soul anthem to the nature of what one can and what one cannot get on a New York Street Corner. Made even better by the fact that she might be the best belter since Mama Cass (and don’t lie to me, you can imagine Cass singing What I gotta do to get a dick in my mouth” )

Sissy Nobby--Loopy

A hedge maze of quotes and refutations, becomes the anti-eminem on the way to making the best bounce track of the year.

Laura Mvula--Green Garden

The percussion, including handclaps, are so summer, and so peppery, just a refreshing roll across the tops of Mvula’s gorgeous voice.

Kelly Rowlands--Dirty Laundry

All of those Spector produced artists, trying to work out what they feel, against the power of bad men, and monolithic producers--Rowland is one of those tell-alls, but with an autonomy. By making a record to dispute the records, she provides the best testimony that Beyonce, like all sorts of geniuses, might have been monstrous. The production is so spare, it makes this, and other revelations (domestic violence) even more stark in relief

Mapie--Don’t Wait:

Even over crappy laptop speakers, how this production doubles up, splits, and doubles again, like a slightly paranoid five line skink, is a masterpiece, made even more complex by a voice that roars towards the oceanic. If this is the future of Swedish pop, their future is long assured.

Angel Haze--Echelon

Such an angry dis track, so delightfully specific in its rhetoric, so well constructed in its pure hate, she enters the boys club almost to fuck shit up.

Ciara--Overdose

The overdose as love metaphor seems so overdone, so played out, but how Ciara sings Doctor, how she pops that middle c, and how she ends up sliding around a track that just plays at being taut, suggests a possible new way forward for pop vocals.

Best Coast I Don;t Know How

Messed up, roughed up, torn apart harmonies, stitched up, and made up into a perfect Frankenstein’s monster, but more Califonia, and less arctic moors.