Top 12 Albums of 2014: Sondre Lerche — Please

Seeing old favorites reappear on these lists is satisfying. I’ve been a Sondre Lerche fan since 2003 and, naturally, have liked some albums more than others. This one required quite a few listens to acclimate to — let alone like — but eventually I realized that it’s potentially his best work yet.

These are agitated, active songs. They thump around in bass drums, fling themselves at distorted electric guitar breaks, get stuck in echoing loops, and drag themselves through distortion. The first several listens were unsettling and annoying. “Get rid of these weird electronic bits!”

But these effects aren’t unprecedented — they’ve long been a part of the live shows. And this time, the album versions are probably supposed to be a little bit messy. Even so, underneath the shaky percussive explosions are meticulously crafted, catchy pop songs, complete with the swooping melodies and trademark twists and turns. Despite being the infamous “divorce record,” Please is the opposite of wallowing. With dance beats and occasionally sly lyrics, it’s even more fun than before.

p.s. “Sentimentalist” is probably my second favorite song of the year. Might have applied a little too much metaphorical analysis to it one day and gotten way, way off-track, but its sound truly captures its mood and theme: The whole song is wrapped in a subtle dreamlike auditory blurriness, as if the narrator is underwater. He tries to swim against the current and fight the forces pulling him back to the past but keeps getting dragged in and swept away in a nostalgia that’s beautiful, confusing and dangerous.

The chorus asks “don’t you know me, my love?” over and over as if grabbing for something certain in this weird underwater world, which hosts the previously familiar in a terrifyingly distorted new way. Full static (equaling the final ruin of the relationship) eventually creeps in, but so gradually that you almost don’t realize it until it’s enveloped the entire song. Relationship metaphor alert again!

Without missing a beat, the next song, “Lucifer,” begins with a moment of decisive spoken-word clarity: “Sentimentalist” was the last incidence of falling backward into complicated nostalgia. Now it’s time to move forward and burn things. (We won’t even get into the water/fire thing, because that’s quite enough English-majoring for today.)

Note 1: This Top 12 list is not ranked. It’s generally a good idea to have 2014 coverage be published in 2014. Before Christmas, even. If I had to rank these, we wouldn’t be done until next August.

Note 2: More on the “Put Your Money Where Your Typing Is” selection methodology here. Short version: These are the 12 albums I bought on CD/vinyl/both this year.