1. Lorde, Pure Heroine (Universal)
I’m fairly certain I would not have surmised my most listened to album of the year would have been written and recorded by a 16-year-old girl from New Zealand. I guess it proves I’m not utterly dead inside that I can still be this taken aback. Pure Heroine is an accidental master stroke. Lorde is a typical teen with typical teenage insecurities, but she has an atypical way of expressing herself that just happens to take the form of top shelf pop. I’m pretty sure she set out to mimic Lana Del Rey, but she ended up creating a sound unlike anything else on the radio. Lorde is trying to be a poet. She’s trying to sound sophisticated. She’s trying to conjure a dark romanticism. The thing is she pulls it all off with very little to be embarrassed about. (I'm 100% certain I would want anything I created at age 16 to be burned forever). Pure Heroine is a staggeringly accomplished pop record: Big, catchy choruses are underpinned with attention-grabbing starkness and wildly unorthodox beats. It’s down-tempo-electro-pop to be sure, but it’s truly every-day-hummably infectious. “Royals” stands out like a sore thumb on the radio, but its appeal extends beyond the masses into the hierarchy of the critical elite, even as clueless arbiters of nonsense try to argue its latent racist overtones. It is the single of the year.
2. Kanye West, Yeezus (DefJam)
I am embarrassed for and annoyed by Kanye West as much as the next guy. It pains me to think how white I am for this being the only hip hop album in my list, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t mark it down. I listened to Yeezus more times than I care to count. The disconnect between West’s persona in interviews and his recorded output is confusing, at a minimum. He comes off like a complete bozo in public, whose blind ambition almost elicits pity. It’s so laughable. But, on record, he’s an absolute genius. Yeezus is dark, scary, confrontational and a complete mass of contradictions, but it’s a record you will want to blast out of your car stereo. Rick Rubin tore the production down to its absolute minimum mere days before it was due for printing. It sounds next level. Jabs of synths, mutated vocal effects and tribal rhythms are all interspersed with scattershot samples, but the star here is West’s lyrics. Yes, they’re extraordinarily misogynistic, but at the same time, shards of brilliance lessen the blow with insightfully pointed rage. West is an angry man, and Yeezus is the musical catharsis he needed.
3. My Bloody Valentine, m b v (self-released)
Much to my brother’s chagrin, I brought My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless on cassette to listen to on the way to school just about every day my junior year. He was too young to understand how fucking mind-bendingly awesome those waves of noise were. And still are. My Bloody Valentine leveled the playing field with that record, setting the bar for an entire movement of music and spawning a generation’s worth of copycats. I wouldn’t have wanted to follow it up either. So, when word hit that IT FINALLY HAPPENED, I scrambled to order my copy. When I listened to it, I was initially disappointed. I was mostly disappointed to discover that I was accustomed to all the soundscapes that had once shocked me so. Changing music forever is a once in a lifetime gift. So, MBV picks up the very next day. It doesn’t surpass Loveless; nor does it try to. It can’t. But it is a gloriously soul-crushing record all the same--it just takes longer to ingest. Guitarist Kevin Shields hasn’t added any new elements to the mix. It’s more of the same. But more of that same is clearly better than most.
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING
