Editor’s Note: Below are Vanyaland staff writer Daniel Brockman’s picks for the ten best songs of 2014. For his annual essay on the Year in Pop, click here. For a streamable playlist of his Top 10, click here.
10. Antemasque, “I Got No Remorse” [from Antemasque]
The Mars Volta and At The Drive-In before them were bands that definitely went so far up their own ass at some point in their respective careers that it was hard for them to see how insanely they’d warped their own internal dramas into unlistenable tuneage. I’ll always stick up for the Volta project if for no reason than its dogged insistence on flying the flag for that loneliest of genres, ’70s prog; but that said, it is so invigorating to hear Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez playing music that rocks this hard without spinning off its axis into forty genres in forty seconds per their usual impatience with static riffs. Without the Dali-esque dripping dreams that typically float Bixler-Zavala’s vocal flights into Bjork-land, he proves himself to be a powerful rock frontman able to focus Rodriguez-Lopez’s tight riffage into furious rock pummeling, always a beautiful thing; this jam really made every other rock tune I heard this year sound lazy and pointless.
9. James Newton Howard ft. Jennifer Lawrence, “The Hanging Tree” [from The Hunger Games: Mockinjay. Pt. 1 OST]
No, the revolution will not be televised, and no, you will be kept subsumed with all sorts of distractions and diversions to make you forget the things that should make you want to take to the streets and burn the place down; but every once in a while, there is a little glitch in the system, where the men and the machine let slip a little piece of actual radicalism, and it finds its way into the bloodstream of the popular culture. Anyway, put up your three finger salute and home no one catches you on satellite.
8. The Horrors, “Jealous Sun” [from Luminance]
There are a million bands skinny enough to fit in the jeans of a band like The Horrors, and I’m sure a large percentage of those million bands have enough interesting effects pedals to bullshit their MBV-wave to the bank of at least a decent number of shoegaze newbies. But the thing about The Horrors is that they take it all the way, with lilting songcraft and a heart of oblivion at the vortex of all of their best tunes. There are plenty of people making trippy fuzzed-out music, but no one can really make a song that melts the walls as gorgeously as Faris Badwan and Co.
7. Beyoncé, “7/11” [from Beyoncé [Platinum Edition]]
Queen Bey may be a golden god in the pantheon of pop immortals, but let it be known that she is more-than-occasionally a tricksy one, filling her hit singles with pithy tell-offs and sassy brags. “Mad cause I’m so fresh/Fresher than you” may come off as a bizarre way for a billionaire to communicate with her audience, but then again, this is how dance crazes are created, son. It’s a tossed-off goof with a video made for two cents on a GoPro, but really that plays to Bey-Bey’s strength as a ‘tude monster so much more than the arch postures and statements that have made her the unknowable Sphinx of modern pop music.
6. Pharmakon, “Body Betrays Itself” [from Bestial Burden]
Most noise is bullshit; it is the rare exception to find an artist who uses music as it was never intended to sound in a way that is filled with legitimate artistic expression. Margaret Chardiet a/k/a Pharmakon is one of those rare exceptions, and on her sophomore longplayer she exorcises the demons of a recent real-life cyst-removing medical experience to produce a musical song-cycle of torment and body-hatred to rival a Cronenberg film. “Body Betrays Itself” has the funeral march klang of the best Slayer tunes, but right when a metal song would switch to a polka-beat tornado, Chardiet keeps it going, with inhuman wails and grinding pulses prolonging the agony gloriously.
5. Black Bananas, “Give It To Me” [from Electric Brick Wall]
In the sweepstakes of late-’80s underground indie icons still kicking around in the second decade of the 21st century, I would dare say that no one is currently killing it like ex-Royal Trux-er Jennifer Herrema. While everyone else from that era is stuck debating their Spotify royalties or half-heartedly touring their 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition reissues, Herrema, first with post-Royal Trux band RTX and now two albums in with Black Bananas, has reinvented herself as an insanely relevant modern songwriter. This year’s sophomore Bananas record managed to be both antiseptic enough to rule the dancefloor and scuzzy enough to pass out to in the comfort of your own chinese-food-takeout-box littered TV room. “Give It To Me” shows Herrema resuscitating ’80s DC go-go bounce, mixing it with, I dunno, an M83-like synth-wastoid head-dunk, resulting in yet another disorientating anthem to dancefloor hedonistic lusciousness. The most bong-ripped dance record of the year, just like 2012’s Rad Times Xpress IV.
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4. Charli XCX, “Break The Rules” [from Sucker]
The funny thing about Charli XCX is the way that her best songs effortlessly mix her two favorite musical obsessions, ’90s girl power and ’00s electro-clash, creating a new type of pop sass that makes so many of the much-more-platinum pros sound like losers in comparison. Or to put it another way: it’s clear that Charli put as much planning and calculation into this track as, say, Taylor Swift did in her pop experiment 1989 album, but somehow Charli’s insane enthusiasm and unfaked cool make the whole thing so much more effective. Plus any song that pronounces “dancing shoes” like “dawn-sing shoes” is an automatic win. I know I’ve been saying it for a few years now, but I think next year might actually be Charli’s year.
3. Mica Levi, “Lips To Void” [from Under The Skin OST]
This album, even removed from the upsetting film that it soundtracks, is filled with gnawing chirping atrocity, making familiar lilts sound alien and insidious, like listening to hard to an EKG and starting to hear demons in the mitochondria. The sustained tones recall Gyorgy Ligeti at his most avant-garde, the percussion is like a medieval Japanese funeral, and the vicious melody echoes like a screen door creaking in your cerebral cortex, forever. Truth be told, I listened to this record more than any other “normal” album this year; it is easily the best psychedelic album I’ve heard in a long long time.
2. Lana Del Rey, “Once Upon A Dream” [from Maleficent OST]
Let’s be clear: for female artists nowadays, there really isn’t much of an alternative to crafting a persona. Lizzy Grant spent years and years attempting to get a foothold in the music world as herself, but once she put on the mask of LDR, she joined the ranks of, oh, every single female artist of note in the last decade or two in finding success through the alchemy of becoming someone else through song. Her sophomore outing, this year’s Ultraviolence, was a next-level prank aimed squarely at the cognoscenti of the music world, attempting to get a reaction by any means necessary by filling her Sinatra-soaked ballads with Scarface-quoting trollbait about fucking her way to the top. This track, however, a throwaway Disney gimme, shows where her true strength lies: interpretation of the standards. The truth is that nobody wants new songs, we merely want the Musical-Industrial Complex to find new people to sing the standards. This breathy re-do of the classic Sleeping Beauty theme, then, would most definitely win Idol’s Disney-themed episode if I was the judge, dog.
1. Myrkur, “Nattens Barn” [from Myrkur EP]
In a time when things continue to break down into a miasma of over-complexity, like a sandcastle built too intricately to stand for more than a second, it’s always a breath of fresh air to find anything that represents an authentic stab at some kind of expression of purity. Danish model and musician Amalie Bruun is attempting something tricky: putting on outrageous airs as a one-woman anonymous black metal band while also digging down to the essence of the genre, playing to its strengths whilst attempting to remove all of the bullshit like a malignant tumor. Most metal nowadays requires a user’s manual worth of explanation for what one is getting into: this record’s use of bloody cleavers on the cover and unintelligible blastbeats throughout is a progression from so-and-sos typical tropes, or this band’s twenty minute long snoozefest, played by burly dudes with long beards and tattoos stepping on boutique effects pedals, is an important step in the evolution of such-and-such drone fascination blah-blah. Bruun’s Myrkur, meanwhile, manages to make heavy music that relates to actual reality: to forests and streams, to cities and motorways, to times when you want a blood-curdling scream to rip up your spine, to times when you hear angels in the air signifying the harmony within the chaos.
Follow Daniel Brockman on Twitter @thebizhaslanded