ENDELIG ER DEN HERE :D:D:D:
10. St. Vincent - St. Vincent
(30 point)
St. Vincent continues
Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative
guitarists, though she's never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled
style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature
tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock,
two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark's freak-outs are tidy,
modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le
Corbusier.
9. Fossils - Flesh Hammer
(31 point, 1 førsteplads)
Flesh Hammer er
et kærkomment los i løgene, når man tænker på hvor mange middelmådige
metervarer og tomme kalorier, der florerer ude i æteren, og de fleste
ville nok have godt af at få renset ud i øregangene af nærværende
kødhammer.
8. Caribou - Our Love
(32 point)
Our Love certainly
is not an upending of an avant garde, nor is it immediate/in your face
pop punching through stalled structures, instead it's a quietly
pondering, still expressive voice in the head.
7. Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witness
(35 point)
John Congleton produced
Burn Your Fire for No Witness,
a record full of songs that took shape in Asheville, N.C., last summer.
Olsen is working with a new band, including Josh Jaeger on drums and
bass player Stewart Bronaugh. With Congleton's help, the trio found ways
to make these songs calm and combustible. I've been living with this
music for a few months, and it's become my friend, my comfort; it shakes
me, saddens me and lifts me.
6. Mac DeMarco - Salad Days
(42 point)
DeMarco
is hardly the first artist in recent years to bear the mark of an
infatuation with My Bloody Valentine, but rather than going for
straightforward distortion-laden pastiche, he applies their
pitch-bending sound to music that sounds nothing like them: the
country-rock meander of Goodbye Weekend, the synthpop of Chamber of
Reflection. The result is deeply odd, where most music influenced by My
Bloody Valentine is deeply predictable. It sounds warped in the
old-fashioned, album-left-out-in-the-sun sense: both are charming songs,
but the music keeps slipping queasily out of focus.
5. Future Islands - Singles
(45 point)
Pick
any song, like the achingly pretty "Seasons (Waiting on You)" or the
understated "Light House" or the after-hours Roxy Music-inspired "Like
the Moon," and it'll be the kind of song that will stop people in their
tracks in a crowded bar, the kind that you play over and over when you
run across it streaming on a website, the kind that you tell all your
friends about. A whole album of songs like that feels like a dream come
true. It's real, though, and the vocals, the songs, the music, and the
production work together to make Singles a one-of-a-kind experience
that's nearly perfect.
4. The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
(48 point)
In this way,
Lost in the Dream is the War on Drugs'
Daydream Nation or
Disintegration;
lengthy distillations of similar themes result in wildly different
threads of song, all connecting again in the end. It's a near flawless
collection of dreamy vibes, shifting moods, and movement, and stands
easily as Granduciel's finest hour so far.
3. Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
(49 point, 1 førsteplads)
Are We There,
en af de der langsomme plader, der kræver lytterens fulde opmærksomhed,
ellers kan det sgu være lige meget. Det her er soul som i et blik lige
ind i en anden persons sjæl. Det er både foruroligende og vederkvægende,
og det bliver bedre og bedre for hver gennemspilning. Nå ja, og så er
den også virkelig flot produceret.
2. Conor Oberst - Upside Down Mountain
(52 point)
There’s
been small hints of criticism floating around reviews of the record,
suggesting that Conor Oberst was at his best back when he seemed urgent,
when he seemed heartbroken. To believe that is to completely lack
understanding of change and development. If Oberst was still yelping
into microphones about how his ex-girlfriend gave him a lock of her hair
and that meant they’d never break up and now she’s banging some dude
and he’s really sad, Oberst would not be a good musician. To continue to
entertain your fans and to continue to entertain yourself, a musician
needs to believe in the music they’re playing.
Upside Down Mountain is
the perfect album to come from a recently married musician who has been
in the industry for 20 years and has played a role in the creation of
hundreds of songs. Maybe, finally, it’s time we give Oberst the credit
he’s always deserved.
Upside Down Mountain is all a fan could have asked for.
1. Sun Kil Moon - Benji
(87 point, 2 førstepladser)
If you spend enough time with the new Sun Kil Moon album
Benji,
there is every chance that you will end up crying sooner or later. The
first time I misted up to the album, it was during a relatively
innocuous moment. “I Love My Dad” is one of the jauntier songs on an
album full of haunted, death-obsessed songs, but it’s still the one that
did it to me. And it did it to me because of the moment where Mark
Kozelek (the man who is Sun Kil Moon; it’s not a band) sings, “When I
was five, I came home crying from kindergarten cause they sat me next to
an albino / My dad said, ’Son, everyone’s different, you gotta love ’em
all equally’ / He said, ’You gotta love all people — pink, red, black,
or brown’ / Then just after dinner, he played me the album They Only
Come Out At Night by Edgar Winter.” I heard that album a few times
before it occurred to me that Winter, the ’70s rock shredder, was
albino, and that playing the album was Kozelek’s dad’s clumsy attempt to
demonstrate that all people have worth. I cried because this is such a
deeply human, fumbling, potentially embarrassing attempt to show your
kid a massively important truth. I cried because I’m the same way; if
either of my kids ever does the same thing, I’ll probably play them the
album Shadows On The Sun by Brother Ali. I also cried because Kozelek
sings elsewhere in the song that his father would beat the shit out of
him when he was a kid but that the two of them have made peace with it
over the years. Benji is full of complicated moments like that: Scenes
where tragedy and dumb, inhospitable human behavior and familial love
and childhood memory all intersect. It’s an impossibly rich and
beautifully written album that drips with loss and regret and love. And
after listening to it constantly for a month or two, I feel like I’m
only beginning to appreciate it.
