If you believe everything you read, then any given year in music was either the most overflowing bounty of sweet manna or the sorriest, soggiest bunch of dreck imaginable. Personally, given the sheer amount and insane diversity of music available each and every day, I think it’s more likely that you get out what you put in. To argue over whether this year was better than that year is to attempt to quantify something ineffable. And anyway, why let the tyranny of the calendar delimit your lived experience?
But of course, here we are, with me about to tell you how I reckoned the finest albums of this past circuit of our peculiar orb. From black and death to doom and trad and plentiful weirdness of all stripes, for me this year was notable for its dogged resistance to any sort of narrative. Was it the year of young whippersnappers tearing the roof off the joint with their desperate enthusiasm? Or was it the year of the hoary old guard reclaiming their ground and showing the pissant pretenders exactly how it’s done? The answer is: both, and neither, and more.
All thanks, as ever, to you for reading. Without readers, a writer is little more than a crank with a bullhorn shouting at a hole in the dirt. Thanks to my friends and colleagues here at Last Rites and Invisible Oranges for putting up with my maudlin inanity and constantly inspiring me to write better, and smarter, and more broadly. And (most shameless of shameless plugs) thanks, too, to Michael Nelson at Stereogum for letting me write countless thousands of words about Nick Cave way back at the start of the year.
But most of all, thanks to the musicians for making their terrible noises; I may not get paid for writing about this stuff, but you know what? Most of them don’t get paid for making the damn stuff. So, if you find something in this list or any other list that wafts a warm breeze past your tender parts, then do what you can to support this mongrel music and the goddamned people who make it. Buy a record; go to a show; tell your friends about your latest Bandcamp find; hell, you could even find a kid at your local Guitar Center – not the one blazing through “Eruption” while trying desperately to look nonchalant, but another one, maybe trying to sit somewhere she won’t draw attention, plucking and strumming an un-amped guitar, chasing a note or phrase or melody that she found somewhere in her head. Find that kid, and give her $5 and a note that says “For your first demo tape.”
This whole damn life is only what we make of it, and as my seventh favorite non-metal album of the year (see below) has it, “love’s the only thing that ever saved my life.” So, brothers and sisters – get busy loving.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
20. Gridlink – Longhena
• No, I’m not sure exactly how they do it either; I just know Longhena is one of the most perfect grind albums outside of the catalogs of Nasum and Assuck.
19. Vanhelgd – Relics of Sulphur Salvation
• Incantation and Dead Congregation both put out killer albums in 2014; Relics of Sulphur Salvation is better.
18. Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III: Saturnian Poetry
• Vindsval ditches his Evil Spock goatee and heads back to the nightside eclipse with this frantically beautiful album.
17. Have a Nice Life – The Unnatural World
• Bleak, harrowing, and nihilistic, all while being one of the smoothest, most pleasant listening experiences of the year. An inexplicable triumph.
16. Panopticon – Roads to the North
• Though parting with coal country for melodeath terrain, Panopticon remains the most vital voice in American black metal.
15. Stilla – Ensamhetens Andar
• Brilliant second album from these unheralded Swedes proudly keeping alive the subtly bizarre progressive black metal of Kvist. Best art-to-music match of 2014.
14. Lotus Thief – Rervm
• A bit like early ’90s alt-rock and 4AD dreaminess spun through a blender with sparse passages of black and doom. Featuring Botanist‘s Otrebor, Rervm is almost impossible to describe, but so simple to swoon over.
13. Sanctuary – The Year the Sun Died
• An absolutely astonishing return to form after 25 years away. Neverwho?
12. Abigor – Leytmotif Luzifer
• Less experimental than their last few, Leytmotif Luzifer is flesh-rending worship music of the highest order.
11. Artificial Brain – Labyrinth Constellation
• Tech-death for people who hate tech-death, Labyrinth Constellation leavens its gut-level punishment with eerie melodicism and cunning songwriting that has enough respect for both Demilich and Gorguts to not copy either.
TOP TEN:
10. KHTHONIIK CERVIIKS – HEPTAEDRONE
No, I don’t have any idea what a Khthoniik Cerviiks is, either, and although this has been technically called a demo, it’s well over 40 minutes long and I’ve got it on snazzy, highly professional LP from the fine fiends at Iron Bonehead. Point being, don’t waste any of your precious time worrying about such trivialities. Heptaedrone is mean and wants you to know it, but there’s considerable sophistication at play – these songs riff like hyperspeed razor-wire, but they twist and turn with both impressive internal logic and reckless disregard for the listener’s neck. If there’s a painful, Katharsis-shaped hole in your life, or if you fancy finding out what Revenge by way of early Voivod might sound like, then this is your new caveman crush.
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9. BATTLEROAR – BLOOD OF LEGENDS
Blood of Legends is magic, plain and simple. In pulling in elements of traditional metal at its most grandiose (in the tradition of Manilla Road or Manowar), lumbering but clean modern doom (a la Argus), the spry vitality of power metal, and a distinctly melancholy folk sensibility, Greece’s Battleroar has provided a stirring meditation on power, glory, history, and loss. Like the funeral oration of Thucydides’s Pericles, Battleroar summons the spirits of the fallen to point the way ahead.
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8. DARKEST ERA – SEVERANCE
This glorious second album from Northern Ireland’s Darkest Era is denser and more somber than the first, but the rain-lashed atmosphere suits these darkly passionate anthems perfectly. From black metal tremolos to delicate acoustics and from classic heavy metal bombast to plaintive, searching guitar leads, Severance embraces a widescreen scope that belies the unity of its vision. And through it all, the human voice is triumphant, with Darkest Era’s singer Krum sounding every bit like a barrel-chested fury. Severance is music to draw up inside you, to live and to breathe by.
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7. PRIMORDIAL – WHERE GREATER MEN HAVE FALLEN
Primordial‘s latest album packs all the drama and poetics one might expect, all while wrapped in the heaviest sound the band has ever had. Where Greater Men Have Fallen is as sturdily true to form as ever, but “The Seed of Tyrants” sounds like a wiser band revisiting the blackened spleen of Imrama, while Alan Averil’s time with the trad-leaning supergroup Twilight of the Gods seems to have filtered back to Primordial, as “Ghosts of the Charnel House” rides a mammoth trad-doom riff to glory, each downbeat a titanic hammer-strike. Primordial: still the best thing to come out of Ireland since James Joyce and Thin Lizzy.
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6. SAOR – AURA
In the wake of Scotland’s failed bid for independence in this past summer’s indyref vote, the piercing, keening beauty of Saor‘s Aura takes on an added note of lamentation. The drumming throughout – courtesy of Panopticon‘s Austin Lunn – is a matchless display of how to treat percussion as a co-lead instrument, but the real draw of the album is the way that Andy Marshall takes these relatively simple motifs and magnifies them into something breathtakingly universal.
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5. MENACE RUINE – VENUS ARMATA
Menace Ruine is not of this world. To fall in love with Venus Armata is to enter a parallel dimension where texture replaces form and the incantatory yearning of Genevieve Beaulieu’s voice is the mass around which all else gravitates. As always, the Menace Ruine sound moves from ‘Nico falling down a mine shaft with misfiring machines’ to ‘shimmering waves of harsh noise arrayed in beguilingly lovely melodies’, but on Venus Armata this Quebecois duo’s craft is sharper than ever. The closing title track peals an elegy for a dying universe; nothing else in music sounds like Menace Ruine.
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4. NASHEIM – SOLENS VEMOD
Nasheim‘s Erik Grahn is hardly out to win any awards for prolificacy. With only a handful of songs released over the past eleven years of the project’s existence, debut full-length Solens Vemod was nevertheless burdened with high expectations. Happily, these four songs not only exceed those expectations, but they explode them straight into the goddamned stratosphere. Solens Vemod shimmers with the glittering darkness of early Blut Aus Nord, but its utterly contemporary, uniquely atmospheric black metal is without peer or parallel. Spellbinding.
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3. PALLBEARER – FOUNDATIONS OF BURDEN
It’s hard to think of many second albums in recent years that have been as freighted with expectation as Pallbearer‘s Foundations of Burden. Thankfully, as I’m sure you, your grandparents, and your mail carrier have all heard by now, not only does Foundations of Burden surpass the already mighty Sorrow & Extinction, but it does so with such surety and grace that the latter seems tentative in comparison. Bolstered by a flawless production from Billy Anderson, Foundations of Burden‘s six songs elevate Pallbearer fully to the doom pantheon for which they always seemed destined.
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2. MORBUS CHRON – SWEVEN
Morbus Chron‘s damn-near miraculous second album Sweven paints a liminal world, somewhere between sleep and wake, dream and nightmare. The atmosphere throughout Sweven is gossamer soft, mysterious, and yet so alluring that it sometimes feels like a home you once visited but cannot place. In its steadfast worship of the riff, Sweven is still devoutly a death metal album, but death metal stretched and filtered through the same dusky lavender that suffused In Solitude‘s Sister. Morbus Chron’s greatest achievement, however, is the fluidity of the songwriting throughout. Sweven slides frictionlessly from one moment to the next, each measure casting a quavering light on what’s to come, like exploring a grand old mansion fallen into disrepair with a flickering torch. Step inside and seek the ghosts we used to be.
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1. GIANT SQUID – MINOANS
History is a funny thing. That the voices of the past speak at all depends entirely on someone listening; that they are understood depends on the midwifery of intercessors. In that sense, you can think of Giant Squid‘s Minoans as an act of sorrowful, richly sympathetic interpretation. I’ve already spent more than my fair share of words reviewing the album, so here I can be brief: No album this year has made me more unspeakably sad and more immeasurably happy. We should be so lucky that our future intercessors give so generously of themselves to make us live again.
TEN SPLITS/EPS/COMPILATIONS WORTH YOUR TIME
Blut Aus Nord & P.H.O.B.O.S. – Triunity
Jumalhamara – Songless Shores
Owl – Into the Absolute
Vassafor & Sinistrous Diabolous – Split
Mournful Congregation – Concrescence of the Sophia
Binah – A Triad of Plagues
Black Twilight Circle – Tlitic Tlapoyauk
Progenie Terrestre Pura – Asteroidi
Diskord – Oscillations
The Knife – Shaken-Up Versions
Árstíðir Lífsins – Þættir úr sogu norðrs
TOP 25 NON-METAL ALBUMS
25. Nothing – Guilty of Everything
24. Zola Jesus – Taiga
23. Ambrose Akinmusire – The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint
22. Grouper – Ruins
21. Thee Silver Mt. Zion – Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light Over Everything
20. Flying Lotus – You’re Dead!
19. Esben & the Witch – A New Nature
18. Sharon Van Etten – Are We There
17. Anathema – Distant Satellites
16. The Soft Pink Truth – Why Do The Heathen Rage?
15. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Pinata
14. tUnE-yArDs – Nikki Nack
13. Musk Ox – Woodfall
12. Kassem Mosse – Workshop 19
11. The New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers
10. WIFE – What’s Between
9. Todd Terje – It’s Album Time
8. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2
7. Sturgill Simpson – Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
6. Tanya Tagaq – Animism
5. Brownout Presents: Brown Sabbath
4. Aphex Twin – Syro
3. Swans – To Be Kind
2. Perturbator – Dangerous Days
1. Kelis – Food
