Best of 2014 Part Five : 10-6

10. A Sunny Day In Glasgow - Sea When Absent

2014 marked the 30th anniversary of Cocteau Twins' 'Treasure' LP and JAMC's 'Upside Down' single, perhaps the two most pivotal releases in the history of echo-laden indie rock - I'm avoiding the term shoegaze as it wouldn't even entered media vernacular until the dawn of the 1990s which goes to show that this kind of sound has existed in the periphery of British music for much longer than we've been able to adequately describe it. Scotland's DIY indie scene has played a particularly vital role in nurturing the more introverted talents of British guitar music and it's only fitting that Yanks A Sunny Day In Glasgow have chosen to ply their nu-gaze trade under a mantle referencing the music's heartlands, although it should be made clear that 'A Sea When Absent' is no mere tribute to their forefathers. The band come at you from all angles from the word go, flooding your senses with wave upon wave of blissed out reverb and vocal loops that pile up on each other to leave you spinning through space like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Imagine being on an island assailed by several separate tides at the same time and you're somewhere close. One of my friends claimed a few years back to have reached a moment of clarity at Glastonbury which led to him taking all the drugs he'd brought along for the weekend as one giant pharmaceutical cocktail and I imagine the state of sensory refreshment he reached as a result felt something like this sounds. It's not that this sort of thing hasn't been attempted before, it's more that it hasn't been pulled off with quite this much aplomb - Sunny Day build up gargantuan frescos over six or seven minute tracks that take you through a spectrum of gorgeous headstates to leave you giddy and flushed with ecstasy upon completion. 'A Sea When Absent' delighted and confused more than any other trip that landed in 2014 and deserves to be lauded as the next step forward in the canon of dreamy guitar music. 

Check out : 'Bye Bye Big Ocean', total submersion into deep and fascinating waters.


9. Pallbearer - Foundations Of Burden

The long and winding road linking modern Metal to its roots in old Blues has taken in numerous thrilling stylistic offshoots but sooner or later things will fall back into that familiar groove of heavy guitar licks and lingering melancholy. Ever since Sabbath's leaden dirge rock first belched out of the industrial midlands as an antidote to the flower power era this sort of music has been around to soundtrack the darker side of the human psyche, the one that recognises sadness and aggression and voluntarily elects to swim deeply in such waters rather than ignoring them in the hope they'll disappear. The riffs and drumbeats are what piques your interest but what keeps you around is the gothic melodrama within the music, the downward tug of elements opening up chasms beneath your feet as you fall flailing into the void. Pallbearer's position at the front of Doom's current regiment owes a great deal to their harnessing of this flailing sensation, a lucid descent into madness that echoes throughout their gargantuan second album to stunning effect. 'Foundations Of Burden' is the work of a young band sounding like it has decades of hopeless toil behind it, grimly accepting its own fate but taking some pleasure from ruminating on the view as the world falls down around it. Each of the six tracks on show here is a mission to the very heart of their futile universe, the music built not around sense-battering savagery but rather a drawn out examination of Metal's dreamier elements, guitars wailing and vocals booming forth like vibrations from beneath the Earth's crust. This is a journey you can't afford to miss - don't even think of it as a Metal record, consider it more a deeper study into the thunderous riff rock doing the rounds right now in the indie press, a more complete package unadulterated by the pull of mainstream radio and free to really revel in the doomy magnificence of heavy guitar music. 'Foundations Of Burden' was deservedly on a number of best of 2014 lists and once again the hype is truly justified - this was the year's most epic release by some distance.

Check out : 'Vanished' - after 11 and a half minutes of this you'll have forgotten what day it is.


8. Aphex Twin - Syro

The somewhat predictable appearance of 'Syro' on virtually every best of 2014 list out there leads us to one of two possible conclusions. One : music journalists are a bunch of complacent thirty-somethings longing for their youth and thus guaranteed to latch onto anything rekindling the vibe of 1990s electronic music regardless of its quality, babbling endlessly about how the new stuff from dance music's veterans towers above the output of younger competitors whilst witlessly losing the objectivity that allowed them to appreciate such artists when they originally surfaced in the music's formative era. Or Two : it's just really fucking good. To justify my own choice let's just say that there have been other comeback records from electronic artists who were part of the original rave era that have passed me by completely - I'm not gonna name names in order to keep these posts positive but let's just say providing the soundtrack to beanbag philosophy sessions back in 1994 doesn't necessarily mean you can still cut it in the crowded landscape of electronic music two decades later. The reason 'Syro' connected with such a wide audience is that it succeeded in changing whilst staying the same, maintaining Richard James' trademark metallic clang yet factoring in a feeling of steadier, almost calmer logic to it. Aphex used to delight in pranging you with unsettling noise blasts and demonic samples and whilst you still feel he could whip out his bag of bad trip tricks at any moment there's less of a pressing need to do so, his inclination to fuck with your head tempered by a growing fondness for more playful journeys across the bleep spectrum. The dude's a father these days and you can kind of imagine his offspring contributing to the mix here, individual elements and effects thrown in almost as if they'd been picked out by an enthusiastic infant trawling through dad's sound library. The Aphex insignia is still clearly present on every note here, his distinctive electronic blorps and squiggles bubbling to the surface of each thrilling composition like the primo cuts from his earlier material to bring the stylistic freeform bliss of the rave era to life without resorting to common nostalgia or retro fetishism. There's nothing as direct as 'Donkey Rhubarb', nothing as clanging as 'Ventolin', nothing as bizarre as 'Windowlicker' and nothing as weightless as his Selected Ambient Works stuff but 'Syro' succeeds in evoking everything in between for one seamless rush of fascinating electronica and its dwarfing of 2014's competition is merely a by product of his deft execution and mastery of his art. 

Check out : 's950tx16wasr10', like being chased around by a swarm of cartoon insects.


7. Kele - Trick

The British indie boom of the mid noughties is far enough behind us now for the music to sound genuinely old fashioned, those angular guitar lines and overblown regional accents prompting modern day reactions similar to those elicited from Beavis and Butthead when faced with the worst aspects of 80s MTV excess. Those years have gone by quickly for those of us who remember them yet are still fresh enough in memory for their sonic characteristics to prompt adverse reactions - none of us need reminding how much younger and slimmer we were when the first Editors LP came out and seeing the audiences that turn out for the surviving bands of that era only reminds us of our own mortality. It's a harsh environment for the skinny-jeaned stars of yesteryear and navigating your way through a new decade can prove tricky - you might have been the coolest thing since sliced bread back in 2005 but knowing where to fit in ten years down the line requires a sensitivity that only the most savvy protagonists possess. The jury's still out on whether Bloc Party fit into this bracket, their fourth LP from a couple of years back leaving many questions unanswered over their future direction but frontman Kele Okereke has more than one trick up his sleeve and this second solo offering saw him move into cooler, more danceable territory without a brittle guitar lick or hi-hat tickle in sight. 'Trick' comes along four years after his 2010 debut which made a decent attempt at assimilating the electronic sounds of the time yet struggled to really stand out from the pack - this time however he's found his own style, namely the joyous House music of the late 80s which he channels perfectly over ten flawless slabs of modern day electronica. Whilst the era has already been strip-mined to saturation by the nerdier end of UK indie, few of the bespectacled Cambridge graduates using its vocabulary can actually feel their way around a Soul record but Kele succeeds in tapping into the music's heart by going at it as a vocalist rather than as producer, stepping to stage front to preach the gospel like House's greatest mic threats (think Ten City's Byron Stingily, Inner City's Paris Red or even Adeva in places). Bloc Party's riff-based charge often masked Kele's own vocal ability but here he's free to shine and every track here is a euphoric rush of love, hope and positivity from a man who sounds like he's really enjoying himself. The lyrics tackle loneliness, confidence and the dating game with the optimistic sincerity of a 30-something gay bloke navigating his way through modern life (Kele only really nailed his colours to the mast a couple of years back) and the reflective moments are complemented perfectly by some joyous anthems to the pleasures of fly by night romance, his touch steady enough to bring the story to life in vivid detail without it ever seeming gratuitous. This was the record I put on this year to cheer myself up, positivity just beaming out from every track as the record lights up the room with each spin. Bloc Party may be back, they may not but on this evidence I don't even care any more - Kele's got his groove back and 'Trick' shows him firing on all cylinders as the new decade progresses. His best years are surely still to come.

Check out : 'Like We Used To', a loved-up thumper that wouldn't sound out of place on Dance Energy.


6. Warpaint - s/t

We're halfway through the decade already - HALFWAY!! - so  it seems like a lifetime since Warpaint's debut landed back in late 2010 in the midst of the chill wave phenomenon. Looking at the other bands who surfaced around the same time it's difficult to imagine them unleashing a record that'd really get you excited now but the anticipation that built up prior to  the release of Warpaint's long-awaited second salvo in January hinted that they might just be the band to break the mould all over again. Media led efforts to cram the band into some sort of musical pigeonhole dictated by their gender, political bias or compositional style missed the point - here was a band who were off in a field of their own, locked into a four part unit orbiting undiscovered galaxies and beaming back in the results to planet Earth for the rest of us to pick apart and scrutinise. Their second LP sees them sharper and more focussed than their blissed out debut, their ideas taking on 3 dimensional form and coming out of the speakers to interact with you like never before - there's a discernible humanity to their music that's missing in many of their more plastic peers and with the possible exception of Foals they're perhaps the only guitar band right now capable of mobilising the indie press in these unforgiving times. Listening to them is hypnotic but only in the sense that their evolution is spellbinding in itself, a captivating trawl through rhythmic subdivisions and shimmering guitar effects that remains firmly rooted to indie rock yet seem confident enough to pull it out of the dark ages and into the bright future that lies ahead. Trying to ape their sound would be nigh on impossible as there's not one single element to home in on, the mix taking you somewhere new precisely because you can't quite pinpoint where the charm stems from - they're pushed forward by a thousand individual ingredients that are laid out just right to cushion the fall and roll you through swathes of lucid atmospherics like you're on the comedown from the best high of your life. They're at their best when they're away from stage front, the album's quieter passages bringing out the intricacies of between the lines emotional states, those fleeting moments when you don't really know whether to laugh or cry - you might not get all of it on first listen or even fifteenth listen but you know you'll keep coming back regardless as newer elements are shaken from the ocean floor with each spin. And when they really connect they're stronger and more forthright than even before, the swirling groove fleshing out new anthemic cuts like 'Disco/Very', 'Keep It Healthy' and 'Love Is To Die' to carry the torch forward from where they left it with 'Undertow' and 'Billie Holliday' a few years back. As I said before there is still nobody out there like them but that's not the point - individuality will only thrill you for so long but true depth of vision will keep you coming round time after time for a fresh look and 'Warpaint' suggests that these gals are in it for a journey that promises to remain consistently rewarding for years to come.

Check out : the bumper 'Disco/Very - Keep It Healthy' promo vid for a good place to start.