40 albums from 2014 (ranked, written about, etc.) – part 1 of 4
fitz and the tantrums, bastille, vance joy, and more!
2014 was a much simpler time in music. i assume. i guess i don’t actually know that, because i didn’t know what was going on at the time. i was in my senior year of college and contributing reviews on what were evidently extremely niche albums for a website which, to my knowledge, nobody ever read. otherwise, outside of what i heard on alt-rock radio in my friend’s car (and it feels like i am just too close to looove you WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB), i had my head in the sand—i think i was still vaguely anti-pitchfork and therefore opposed to learning what death grips was, while even the reasonably well-known artists i did like were complete mysteries to me because my social media usage barely extended beyond keeping up with friends on facebook.
reading back through everything i wrote for this list, these seem like two key points of introduction for what follows: one being that the albums i selected feel a bit feral in a way i kind of miss within music writing (albums i genuinely have no clue how i learned about; albums by bands i probably should’ve given up listening to by that point, though i’m glad i didn’t), the second being that i make constant reference to the fact that i yearn for an era before i knew way too much about artists’ personal lives due to them having funny twitter accounts or whatever. it’s a rare treat, now, to go to a show and be like, “damn, so that’s what these guys look like.”
admittedly the list is a bit back-loaded with records i covered for that blog nobody read, or for a local publication that exploited me for free labor then tried manipulating me into not quitting, and front-loaded with recency-biased picks from heavier bands (and even a few p4k-approved names). unlike the list i put together ranking albums from 2004 earlier this year, i wanted this to feel less subjected to nostalgia, despite allowing nostalgia to guide my hand on most of the blurbs. i think that can be a very important factor in one’s appreciation of media, and it can be hard to silence the voice of your present-day self that’s aware of how stupid something actually might be.
as with most of what i post on here, i imagine this list scans as fairly navel-gazy, but my hope is that at least one title on here makes you go, “oh shit, yeah, i remember that” with a twinge of fondness and even an openness to revisiting it. most of these albums didn’t inspire 10-year anniversary retrospectives or re-releases or even unavoidable social media posts from their creators, which makes me feel a certain responsibility to put this list together—to be like, “hey, i listened to this, it was cool and still kind of is!”
ok, anyway, here are the 40 best albums of 2014, in my opinion, from the perspective of it being 2024.
40. the faint, doom abuse in our current era of bands resurfacing with second albums 20-some years after their debuts, the return of the faint after a six-year hiatus in 2014 seems pretty unremarkable. but considering that doom abuse felt like a significant rebound from the strangely forgettable fasciination (not to mention the fact that it led to my first-ever interview—i studied this album like it was a final exam), i had plenty to be excited about with what at the time felt like a lost chapter between the electroclash of danse macabre (see: “unseen hand,” a loose remake of “agenda suicide”) and the punkier wet from birth (guess i’ll cite “scapegoat” here, which also oddly sounds like andrew WK). listening now i can still appreciate the way this music feels designed to counterbalance the normal-people-having-a-good-time electronic sounds indie rock had devolved into in the early 2010s with the faint’s anti-capitalist lyricism leaving plenty of buffer between UO-core synth music, though it also sounds noticeably more like a band losing touch with the scene it’s long been aligned with as it dives headfirst into unabashed devo homage—even as the record gets darker and weirder in its back half. ironically they sound best on the closer, which instead takes their freak-electronic proteges icky blossoms as a jumping off point.
39. the library is on fire, halcyon & surrounding areas for someone who’s never really bothered to dive too deep into the discographies of dinosaur jr. or the folk implosion or GBV or anyone the library is on fire was proudly ripping off, their debut album from 2010 hit me like a ton of bricks and has continued to be received as such blunt force every time i’ve revisited it since then. they certainly lost some steam with this follow-up as they seemed to be (air quotes) trying to find their own sound or whatever, rather than repackaging slacked-out grunge to better appeal to my perfect little ears. but in retrospect i can appreciate their sticking it out within in-turns maximalist and minimalist lo-fi rock as all their blog-fodder peers went pop or otherwise commercial-indie. while it never reaches the riff-and-wail peaks of “magic bumrush hearts,” the opener feels like a shoegaze-paced worlds apart–era trail of dead demo; and while nothing touches the eerie quiet of “i miss you so much, it hurts so bad,” “smoke signals” seems to affirm that they don’t take the slow songs too seriously. this album aged like a 1970s book cover that reeks of basement. with the exception of the song called “hey snowflake.” that’s aged more like a concerning tweet from 2009 by someone who’s now suddenly very famous.
38. the casket girls, true love kills the fairy tale when i was researching this album for a review i wrote a decade ago i assumed i’d hear about this band again after reading that the album’s producer ryan graveface walked in on the band’s twin sisters during their writing process as one of them was sobbing while stream-of-consciousness-ing the album’s lyrics as if speaking in tongues while her sister jotted it all down (they denied any recollection of this). given that projects like the garden and venus twins have come to my attention in the interim, that “twins being weirdly in tune with each other” gimmick feels a bit less original now, while the music itself feels less unique as i’ve come to be better acquainted with graveface’s band black moth super rainbow and their ability to reach over the freak-shit divide into the indie-rock blog trough. what remains interesting, though, is casket girls’ ability to translate that somnambulant writing process to the album’s lurching, never-changing pace. with graveface producing (and longtime david bazan collaborator TW walsh drumming, for some reason), it feels like a very similar palette to eating us despite giving off a completely different energy—one that has at least a little in common with beach house and the small community of southern-gothic electronic artists infiltrating saddle creek with guidance from the faint.
37. various, boring ecstasy: the bedroom pop of orchid tapes at the beginning of the pandemic i DIY’d a franchise-mode NBA game with nothing but a random number generator, a spreadsheet, and a level of patience i strive to recover, which began in the early 1990s and worked up to the present as kendall gill and laphonso ellis proceeded to dominate the league instead of MJ and lebron. it’s been a similar experience watching “bedroom pop” become the new “indie rock” in the sense of its unlikely ascent to the point that it’s outlived its very definition, as some of the scene’s oddest figures such as alex g have been slingshotted to stardom while most of their peers faded out of the picture. this comp does a good job of succinctly defining that corner of the genre as it stood in 2014, when the term applied to reverb-swallowed solo-songwriter compositions and reheated chillwave that sounded like it was never intended to be heard by more than a dozen people rather than something created under the assumption that a full PR team would be ensuring it would be spun as the artist’s “most vulnerable release yet.” the alex g and foxes in fiction tracks here are kind of lacking, in my opinion, but the cuts from artists i’ve never really even followed up on—four visions, home alone—deeply immerse you into the type of string-lit bedroom you really only ever see in photos reblogged thousands of times on tumblr.
36. lvl up, hoodwink’d sort of like how ben gibbard managed to bridge the gulf i may have projected between indie and emo in 2004, lvl up felt like one of those nomadic bands that was as comfortable opening for island-vibes blog-era acts like wavves or real estate (they could’ve been the soda and an order of fries to girls’ pizza and a bottle of wine) as they were playing to emo crowds in an era when power-pop and post-hardcore infiltrated that scene. with a wolf parade and a half’s worth of unique-sounding vocalists trading off on their brief songs, their first two albums certainly betrayed the fact that the band would eventually break up into a number of solo projects ranging in aesthetic from americana to doom-metal. i’m not sure if there’s any consensus that hoodwink’d is the best of their three records, but it’s the one i got to know lvl up’s wholly original formula through, which jumps back and forth between the rallying grunge riffs of spook houses and guitar parts that sound as colorful as indie-rock album covers looked in 2014. while one of those types of songs appeals to me much more than the other, this LP will always stand out as an early bandcamp discovery from a time before i really had any context for the labels or bands i’d find on there. or, more importantly, their social media presences.
35. ricky eat acid, three love songs i don’t know which fact is more surprising to me: that i apparently reviewed a great number of the albums i’m including on this list or that the stuff i was writing a literal decade ago was mostly pretty coherent. of everything i wrote, my review for this album was the most disconcerting—not because i bared my entire ass when it comes to my lack of knowledge about ambient music (pretty sure i only covered this due to a recent interest in teen suicide (band, not concept)) but because the 800 words i spilled on it all betray just how much time i used to be able to commit to listening to and processing the music i’d write about. rather than discussing sonic reference points or tossing around useless adjectives (well, there’s at least one “ethereal” in there), i’m walking through the album track by track and matter-of-factly stating what i’m seeing in my mind’s eye based on what i’m hearing and what the poetic track titles elicit for me. on the one hand i feel like i didn’t have the patience then to dive into grouper or any disintegrating loops, but on the other it seems like i could’ve experienced that music much more deeply in 2014. anyway, i’m curious to hear what everyone else thinks are the three love songs among the 12 included here.
34. thou, heathen i may have grown up a monogamously PBS kid, but i later had cartoon network to thank for nearly every important musical discovery i made between, like, 2012 and 2018. “eyehatethou” was one of the many tracks from an adult swim singles series that led me down a rabbit hole which i’m still exploring today, with this particular voyage first bringing me to heathen and its nearly comic pacing of impossibly thick dirges that fill you up like chili with little more than a handful of brief noodling palate cleansers to space them out. at 75 minutes it’s a lot to consume (the monotony doesn’t help—songs like “feral faun” maintain the same snail’s pace across their 10-minute runtimes until they somehow get slower, then slooower, then sloooower), though ironically it also needs to be heard all the way through to be fully appreciated. in 2024 it can be hard to compare the quality of thou’s earliest material to their current output (exact same riffs, completely different speed), but i think the progression from summit to umbilical has been fairly linear as they’ve figured out how to trim the fat. an important part of that has been learning to repackage the same emotional peaks without requiring the listener to slog through endless sludgy riffs to get there.
33. kairon;IRSE!, ujubasajuba this sounds like such a small complaint in light of literally every other issue plaguing the music industry in 2024, but a band like kairon;IRSE! makes me miss the level of insanity i’d feel when i’d discover a trippy freak-psych/-prog opus by a finnish band whose name appears to be an assortment of letters and punctuation resulting from a cat being tossed onto a keyboard, and whose previous album fused together two offhand lines of dialogue from napoleon dynamite, and who originally released the album with an illustration of a monster drinking kool-aid on the cover for some reason. it’s both comforting and disappointing to know that a decade later i surely would’ve discovered this band anyway—whether through RYM users naturally hoisting an album with nearly a dozen genre tags that include “progressive rock” and “space rock revival” to the top of the charts like new yorkers crowd-surfing an anonymous spider-man, or through the fact that a quarter of the band went on to co-found oranssi pazuzu and release one of my favorite avant-garde metal albums of the 2020s—but it certainly feels like a net negative that i have to be subjected to a press photo and band bio now while getting lost in the abstract, hell-of-a-drug riffage at the tail end of the 10-minute “swarm” while streaming it on spotify.
32. tigers jaw, charmer remember daytrotter sessions? those free-to-download EPs recorded by blog-friendly bands at the titular studio that existed in some uncanny space between raw live material and dressed-up studio versions, which briefly became my sole means of discovering new music when mp3 blogs all went under? i’m reminded of this era when i listen to charmer, the last tigers jaw album with adam mcilwee in the band and also, for some reason, the only tigers jaw album i’ve ever heard. something about an established pop-punk band’s setup prominently featuring light keyboards and acoustic guitar on what mostly sound like slowed-down versions of what they’d come to be known for makes it feel like these are stand-in instruments for something heavier that they couldn’t fit in the tour van. yet there’s as much charm to some of these songs as there is to the fuller yet equally hi-fi tracks like “distress signal,” to say nothing of the wildcards like the spaghetti-western “i envy your apathy.” as someone who’s openly enamored with everything mcilwee does, my agenda here may be transparent, but i wish we had full-album versions of each of the different directions these songs take. kind of like how we basically have three different versions of “cool” released by three different mcilwee projects.
31. chad vangaalen, shrink dust get you a man who can do both (produce public strain and casually open his evil-jack-johnson solo album with a chillingly minimal breakup song that’s fairly graphic, even beyond its body-horror title lyric). i’ve now listened to seven of this man’s solo albums and with each one i feel like i know him less—as far back as 2011 i was scandalized that he was the type of person who would name his album closer “shave my pussy,” while listening to its predecessor it was evidently lost on me that this was ever meant to be skateboarding music. in a sense, then, shrink dust was more of the same, albeit with a darker energy. by track two, his sound has opened up to recall a more heavily reverberated iteration of the walkmen backed by what’s very nearly a hip-hop drum beat as vangaalen warbles paranoias and insecurities. from there things take a much more laidback turn toward CVG’s most comfortable mode (noodle-armed neil young) on inter-dimensional revenge fantasies, oddly straight (and occasionally very cosmic) C&W laments, and brill-invoking ballads that i’m almost certain everyone who freaked out about cindy lee this year has not heard. when he sings refrains like “i’m a monster” you can never quite tell whether it’s on some yo gabba gabba shit or of legitimate concern.