Amplifying the music, books, movies and journalism that matter.
Life is complicated and busy. Did you notice? Keeping up with the music, movies and books that fed your youthful imagination and conversations is harder than ever, but even more important. Here's the good news: there's never been more great new stuff. The challenge is to find it.
So here are my highly opinionated views on sounds, sights and words that will help you keep it fresh and real, and links to the veins where the richest motherlodes can be found.
Ten reasons to turn it up even louder. Each one is a gem.
Courtney Barnett,Avant Gardener - Is she on acid or Ritalin?
Lake Street Drive, You Go Down Smooth- Big horns, big hook, big-voiced woman. Heaven.
Ray LaMontagne, Airwaves - The trippiest song of 2014 gave me an urge to tie-dye something.
Damon Albarn, Lonely Press Play - The guy from Blur and Gorillas gets all existential on us.
Temples, Shelter Song- Was there a track on Rubber Soul that I missed?
Mark Ronson,Uptown Funk - "Don't believe me, just watch."
Usher, Good Kisser- Soooooo smooth.
Jaime XX, All Under One Roof Raving - ...if the rave in question were in Trinidad. Headphones, please.
Jenny Lewis, She's Not Me - A little bit Petty, a little bit chamber pop. All Jenny.
Curtis Harding, Heaven's On the Other Side - This is what Mayer Hawthorne really wants to sound like.
Honorable mentions:
Chet Faker, Talk Is Cheap
Prince, This Could Be Us
SBTRKT, New Dorp, New York
Mary J. Blige, Therapy
Pablo Nutini, Let Me Down Easy
The War On Drugs, Red Eyes
Can it really be that it's time for this list again? I'm so ready.
But before we start, a word. This list has never had the pretense of naming THE best musical achievements of the year gone by. As if. My ambitions are much humbler -- to share the music that most surprised, sustained and inspired me. Hope you'll find something here to brighten your new year.
10. Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe
This late 2013 release rocked my 2014 world with its post-millennial take on Michael Jackson and Prince. You're thinking, "Gotta get me some of that!" Yes, you do. Thirty year-old Dev Hynes has a vast musical imagination and gets your feet moving, too, as his "You're Not Good Enough," makes immediately clear.
9. Caribou, Our Love
Dan Snaith makes dance music you can listen to. That's the beauty of the best electro-soul, putting traditional soul vocals through a Cusinart, cutting and looping them over an insistent pulse straight from Kraftwerk. "Can't Do Without You," can make you sweaty about obsessive love even if you never get out of your chair.
8. Various Artist, Link of Chain - Songwriters' Tribute to Chris Smither
Link of Chain is the best kind of tribute album, illuminating Smither's songs and sending you straight to the rough, authentic originals. Alas, there are no youtube versions to persuade you. But a $.99 iTune investment in Dave Alvin's version of "Link of Chain" will pay back better than Apple stock. Here is Smither doing it himself; Alvin, believe me, tops this.
7. How to Dress Well, What Is This Heart
Imagine if "Off the Wall" had come out in 2014, produced by Bon Iver in the wintery style of his "For Emma." That's the parallel universe feel of "What Is This Heart," a hypnotic, underproduced stew of modern electro R&B. If I were a teenager with "Precious Love" on my headphones in 2014, I would never have left my room.
6. Various Artists, Begin Again
This one will cost me some indie cred but, damn, I am such a sucker for this kind of pop music. On screen in "Begin Again," Keira Knightley and Adam Levine break up and then make sweeter music apart. She is breathily understated in that Lisa Loeb sort of way and his falsetto soars in that Adam Levine kind of way. "No One Else Like You" is the Levine song that sets the drama in motion.
5. Grouper, Ruins
Brian Eno's ambient genre-defining Music for Airports still wows me 35 years after its release. From the sounds of Ruins, it cast the same spell on Liz Harris. There are moments on "Lighthouse" so beautiful that you forget to breathe.
4. The Delines, Colfax
Making alt-country art out of heartbreak and hard times isn't easy. Country radio shows you every day how quickly it turns to parody or pop. But Delines frontman Wily Vlautin, a songwriting heir to Jimmy Webb, Merle Haggard and Lyle Lovett, proves just how good feeling bad can sound. "The Oil Rigs At Night," deserves to be a classic.
3. Spoon, They Want My Soul
For months now, I have not tired of the whip-smart, tight-as-a-drum sound of this disk. This is the Austin, Texas band at the height of their form, with a taut, angular sound that could have amused and animated a dorm room crowd in any of the last four decades. "Do You" never gets old.
2. Real Estate, Atlas
My all day sound for 2014 came from these dream-pop heirs to the late, lamented Luna. Atlas can fill a room with buttery sunshine, even as the lyrics spin a melancholy spell. And best of all? They're from New Jersey. The magic of Atlas starts with "Had to Hear":
1. Beck, Morning Phase
Sometimes revisiting the scene of your triumphs plays brilliantly, as Beck proves here by reworking the musical vein of his 2002 classic Sea Change. Using the same musicians, minor key melodies, and mood, he creates a new -- and I use the word advisedly -- masterpiece.
Start New Year's Day with "Blue Moon" and the road ahead will seem full of promise.
Still to come, top singles of 2014. Stay right there.
Wikipedia won't tell you what was important to me about 1967. To be sure, like the rest of the country, I was waking up to a world saturated by the Vietnam war, racial conflict and cultural foment. The landscape of my actual life may have been Enfield Junior High School -- where I was an eighth grader -- but was really happening to me was this music. It shaped my values, aspirations, politics and taste for the next 45 years.
As a 20 year old, I was baffled by why Big Band songs from three decades earlier still cast a spell for my Dad. Now I know: the songs that usher you into adolescence stay with you forever.
The Rascals, Groovin' - Perfectly captured the feeling of the world that I so wanted to grow up and become a part of.
The Temptations, I'm Losing You - No more the sweet soul music of "My Girl," this was the Temps on the road to psychedelic soul. The intro is mad.
Donovan, Sunshine Superman - What was going on here? At 13, I was just beginning to get it.
James & Bobby Purify, I'm Your Puppet - A gem from Muscle Shoals, this one was for the sensitive soul man.
The Hollies, Bus Stop - I sang made-up lyrics to this song for years.
The Left Bank, Walk Away Renee - The musical essence of eighth grade melancholy.
The Supremes, Love Is Like an Itchin' in My Heart - The ladies, the Funk Brothers and Holland Dozier Holland never sounded so good.
Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth - The sound of things falling apart, worrying and enticing at the same time.
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, More Love - Played rarely on the radio, but I wore it out on a boardwalk jukebox in Avalon.
The Standells, Dirty Water - A regional rock hit with a dangerous, bad boy hook as memorable as "Satisfaction."
I'm a sucker for a sad song with a pedal steel guitar. That's what got me hooked on Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris back in the day, or more recently on Neko Case and Shelby Lynn. I know that songs about being dirt poor, broken-hearted or on the run don't offer much uplift. But when they are delivered as sharply and authentically as on The Delines's Colfax, with melodies that recallJimmy Webb's "Witchita Lineman," you know you're witnessing alt-country art being fashioned from unhappiness.
The power of Colfax comes from the collaboration of novelist Willy Vlautin (whose other band Richmond Fontaine backs here) and vocalist Amy Boone, who inhabits his lyrics about strong women in desperate straits. "The Oil Rigs at Night," which opens as the singer prepares to leave her husband, makes you stop dead in your tracks:
Golden light from the oil rigs at night
I can see them off the coast
Twenty three more days he'll be away
it'll be a week before he even knows
We've been friends since we were little kids
But any spark blew out if it ever did exist.
And then there's the title track, about a woman who goes searching up and down "Colfax Avenue" for her younger brother, a PTSD-shattered veteran:
I know, I know: "Thanks, Jack, for this complete, total downer." But recall the irresistible tug of Jackson Brown's The Pretender, written in the aftermath of his first wife's suicide and take a chance on Colfax. Like Browne's best, it has a beauty that heals.
BTW, take a minute to remember Glen Campbell and his career-making performance of the aforementioned "Witchita Lineman," as he now struggles with Alzheimer's. Godspeed, Glen.
Even though we know the refined pleasures of a deep, dark Belgian chocolate truffle, sometimes we go right for the Snickers bar: rich, gooey, and full of sugar, just like these tracks that I find irresistible right now.
Echosmith, "Cool Kids" - I swore this was a new Suzanne Vega single. Then I remembered what decade it was.
Pitbull, "Fireball" - What, you thought I didn't know about this?
Caitlin Crosby, "Just Another Day" - Swampy guitar opening, girl group chorus. I have it on repeat.
Nico & Vinz, "In Your Arms" - This one has a light, fluffy center. Wait, ew, somebody took a bite out and put it back.
Mary J. Blige, "Therapy" - Kicking the other divas to the curb.
My first introduction to Luna, was their 1994 release Bewitched, played in nearly endless rotation on WXPN that year. Droning like some lost, less-thrashy version of the Velvet Underground, their
influences were crystal clear even without Sterling Morrison sitting in. For me, it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship and I followed them through the end of the CD era until they wrapped up in 2006. The VU always had a sweeter, pop side (think "Who Loves the Sun?"), and no one captured that essence better than Luna.
I was just starting to miss Luna when along comes Real Estate, their New Jersey heirs. On their last disc Days (a 2011 "Best" for me), their debt to Luna wasn't entirely clear, but their latest, Atlas, plays like a set of lost tracks from the "Bewitched" sessions, with an extra dose of the Ventures and Bob Welch-era Fleetwood Mac. Chiming guitars, metronomic drumming and reverb-muffled vocals -- it's perfect.
No one would have ever called Luna (never mind the Velvets) by the current label "dream pop," but that's what Real Estate gets tagged with. Don't let it put you off; this is lo-fi pop at its very best. See if you aren't hooked by "Talking Backwards":
Taut and nervous, cynical and defiant, They Want My Soul is one of the sharpest sounds of the year. Straight outa Texas, Spoon makes music that for me recalls the smart, angry young men of the British New Wave: Costello, Lowe, Jackson and Sumner (a.k.a. Sting). They and their bands covered a lot of territory, with politics, pain and posturing prominent topics. Their music was rarely the gentle place you went for sodden consolation. Spoon serves up the same jangled energy, the same refusal to mope. This is music about taking action.
On this their eighth album, they are working with some big ideas: who owns our essence? This from the title track "They Want My Soul":
Card sharks and street preachers want my soul
All the sellers and palm readers want my soul
Post sermon socialites
Park enchanters and skin tights
All they want's my soul
Or on "Do You", where the question is what we're looking for:
Do you want to get understood?
Do you want one thing or are you looking for sainthood?
Do you run when it's just getting good?
Or do you, do you, do you, do you...
This is music about how we meet the world when we are young. Some of us need a good long drink of it to recall the taste. It may burn a little going down, but it will warm you up.
