2014 Sidebars: The Best of the Rest and Others That Should Be Mentioned

Now that the best albums of 2014 have been discussed, here are a few sidebars to wrap up the album coverage and maybe answer some of the “but where was [some artist I think is great]?” questions.

Sidebar One: Yay!
Four other albums I liked (alphabetically)

Lake Street Dive — Bad Self-Portraits
A new discovery in 2014, thanks to a performance at Newport Folk Festival that I casually wandered by, then stuck around for, thoroughly impressed. (Mavis Staples’ surprise participation might have helped.) Is it rock? Is it blues? Is it jazz? Is it pop? Haven’t quite figured it out, but I keep listening to the album.

Spoon — They Want My Soul
This is the album that’s been praised as demonstrating Spoon’s return to top, tight form. I’ve always liked — but never been able to love — the band, though. I know, a bannable offense in indie rock listener circles. “Do Ya” will nevertheless be stuck in my head for the next several months. Or forever, maybe.

Sun Kil Moon — Benji
Another artist I saw at Newport this year (after being vaguely familiar with him since the college radio DJ days). This album is so ruthlessly morbid that he almost seems to take a weird delight in just how sad it is. Raw, plain-spoken lyrics, delivered calmly over sparse acoustic instruments. It’s hard to listen to but really compelling.

Tweedy — Sukierae
This placement is, perhaps, unfair. A complex, 20-song, somewhat quiet album deserved a lot more attentive listening. Not at work and not driving, when the vast majority of music-listening took place this year. So far, so good with these songs. I just ran out of time to get to know them this year.

Sidebar Two: Confusion
Four critically acclaimed albums that I don’t quite get (yet?). Check back in a year?

FKA twigs — LP1
Everyone’s top pick this year, basically. Intriguing, but all the repetition and tiny voice feel grating for now. This has been described as a challenging. I’m still challenged, I guess.

Future Islands — Singles
An artist description somewhere said that their performance of “Seasons (Waiting on You)” left David Letterman “dazzled and speechless.” Really? It’s fun and dance-y — and not bad — but as the albums go on, all the songs sound pretty similar.

St. Vincent — St. Vincent
Artists I am perpetually trying to love and be amazed by, because I feel like I should be and it’s shameful that I’m… just not: #1: Radiohead. #2: (Probably) St. Vincent. (Seriously, what am I missing?) Maybe the trick is to see a live show sometime.

Taylor Swift — 1989. This is the year she went from “mainstream favorite” to also appearing on the most hipster-y hipster lists that ever hipstered, because is just that universal. Still feel neutral at best. I do like the satire of “Blank Space.” And her clothes.

Sidebar Three: ??
Four albums I felt compelled to like based on previous artist enjoyment history but couldn’t love yet. Check back in a year?

Delta Spirit — Into the Wide
Change is hard. Delta Spirit’s shift from a rootsy classic rock sound to something heavier and slicker wasn’t sudden (elements were already creeping in on previous albums, including the 2012 song “Tear It Up,” one of my favorites). But on Into the Wide, the transition moves forward even more boldly, and it certainly requires some adjustment. The songs seem busy and crowded, with no space between the notes or the layers. It’s a very New York sound that almost reminds me a bit of those 2004-ish slightly-dancey-but-dark-indie-rock (technical term) college radio bands (ya know, like Interpol, Antics-era), with more urgency and even less dancing. The overall effect is stressful and muddy, but might come around to this one.

The New Basement Tapes — Lost on the River
This should have been such an exciting album for a Bob Dylan fan to devour. An all-star group of musicians, under the direction of T-Bone Burnett, creates music based on recently unearthed Dylan lyrics and records an album. Cool, right? But something still doesn’t feel quite right about this album. It’s Bob Dylan songs… but it’s not? Maybe I just like his songs when they’re 100% his. Even covers (with the exception of The Byrds Play Dylan, and when performed by The Band, for obvious reasons) sometimes seem wrong, so this is even more of a stretch. The songs sound perfectly fine, but fail to feel special. Even lag a little at times.

Old 97’s — Most Messed Up
I really dig this band. The recipe of twisted, sad lyrics over dance-worthy punk-country music is a winner. I’ve seen Rhett Miller perform at City Winery like 80,000 times. And even in a dude’s garage in the Hudson Valley this year. More on that later. But this album somehow feels too loose and too forced at the same time. (“We can still be wild! Wild! Wild!”) The same thought sequence happened during every listen. First few songs: This is fantastic. So much energy. Why have I not been enthusiastic? Middle section: Oh. Hmm. The songs are all sounding a little similar. End: It’s not bad music. It’s probably great fun live. Just somehow not grabbing me as much as some of their other albums. It received nearly universally positive acclaim, but I was relieved to find that there is, at least, an Amazon commenter who feels almost exactly the same as I do.

Neil Young — Storytone
Poor Neil Young. I love him (spoiler alert: he performed one of the best shows I saw this year) and actually kinda like several songs on the album in their solo versions. But even as a fan of big, silly orchestral arrangements, I have to admit that the full-band versions on Storytone are more than a little too much. Full-on Disney-fication. “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” is very… curious. Despite wholeheartedly agreeing with his anti-fracking, pro-environment stance and loving that a high-profile artist is using his music to speak out about it, I cringed at the literal, predictable, oddly contrived-sounding lyrics. This is a terrible thing to say about an artist who’s in your top five artists of all time (and, you know, generally accepted as a legend), but the song sounds like a Sesame Street segment.

Next up: Concert Highlights 2014: Everyone’s a Winner!