TOP 100 TRACKS OF 2014: Pt. III: #80 - 71
80. PARTYNEXTDOOR – “Recognize (Feat. Drake)”
This is the year I break a promise to myself. I always said that I would never give Drake the honour of making it on one of my year-end lists, yet somehow the wily Canadian managed to sneak his way on to it this year (albeit as a featured artist). I’m not proud of myself, but if it’s any consolation his presence doesn’t make much of a difference. He neither detracts nor adds to the song, which is compliment coming from me. That’s all I’m going to say about that though, cause my hate is doing exactly what hate does, focusing on the very person I want to ignore, and therefore only adding to his relevance.
PARTYNEXTDOOR is like Drake’s cooler younger brother. He tries half as hard but is twice as cool. He’s another new age, future-oriented R&B artist that has fully embraced the dark underworld of production. His voice balances on the precipice between digital and human. It’s fully coated in synthetic effects, drenched in echoing reverb and dripping in auto-tune, yet it somehow manages to retain that human visage. The emotion and braggadocio is unmistakable, even as it slowly swims its way through the murky synths and viscid percussion. It’s something akin to Dystopian Pop, existing in a world where the gratuitously produced is even smudged and menacing. In other words, it’s the future of Pop music, because if 2014 managed to teach me anything it’s that within the next couple of years all of Pop music will begin to conform to this self-imposed destruction. As technology allows us to make music increasingly perfect, the only option is to add our own imperfections. The goal will become how intentionally marred you can make perfection, adding another seemingly contradictory standard to the Post-Modern world.
79. Parkay Quarts – “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth”
Parkay Quarts is Parquet Courts in all of their homophonic glory. It’s not so much an alter ego, as it is a change of emphasis. It’s the subtle difference between how one conducts themselves when around acquaintances, and how one behaves amongst their closest friends. The essential “you” is the same, but you chose to focus on and display different aspects of yourself more prominently. They have the same clever songwriting and effortless swagger that’s cloaked in nonchalance, but the makeup and method has changed. It’s a change partly brought on by life, with one member completing a degree in mathematics, and another starting a family, but it’s also a change that’s defined by method.
All 12 tracks of Content Nausea were recorded, mixed and mastered on a four-track tape machine in less than two weeks. A feat that makes the album function like some sort of lackadaisical tribute to the warm and slightly faded days of yesteryear. On this track in particular they summon something akin to the spirit of Lou Reed, creating a throwback epic dedicated to the common man. Swaddled in the warm reverb of slow, haphazard strumming, a rolling organ, and lazy percussion, it’s a song incubated in lassitude, almost to the point of apathy. However, it’s buoyed throughout by the clever storytelling that stubbornly plods along before finally unraveling in a bursting explosion of swirling abandonment. In other words, it’s refined boredom at its finest.
78. Francis Lung – “A Selfish Man”
This song was one of those pleasant surprises that somehow managed to sneak its way into my ears (and heart) over the past year. It’s a sparse and minimalistic jam that perfectly utilizes all of its open space. It’s almost as if its floating along through the expansive rafters of an old worn-out church. The brittle guitar-picking and the gentle hop-skip of the shaking and pounding percussion bounce back and forth from stone to wood, resonating and disappearing as they mix together with the warmth of the vocals. What emerges blurs the line between feeling and sound. It’s the haunting awareness of the open space that lingers over you at any given time in an empty room, or the smothering lack of existence that permeates the fluorescent halls of a desolate library during the wee hours of the morning, resulting in an overwhelming silence that exaggerates sound, only to swallow it up completely. The interplay between silence and sound, existence and emptiness, is a fitting environment for a song that highlights the tenuous, fleeting and evanescent qualities of romance.
77. Gosh Pith – “Waves”
Detroit has been producing a lot of good music lately, which probably has a direct correlation to the lack of jobs its been producing. Everybody is just unemployed and making music, or maybe the cost of living is just actually manageable so people have extra time to be creative. Whatever it is, I’m a fan.
Gosh Pith is one of these creative acts to recently emerge out of the now defunct Motor City. The duo meshes the synthetic with the human, like two different bodies of water violently meeting. Each torrential flow lumbers and rolls forward, contorting their surroundings, until they both finally meet, crashing and splashing into one another. The resulting crescendo is fitting given the name. Waves of expanding synths, echoing vocals, bursting guitars and stuttering machine-induced percussion build up off of one another, destroying and recreating themselves, before finally assimilating and settling down.
76. kuma – “Beneath The Flowers”
This right here is the future of music. In an Information Age defined by insatiable hunger, humanity’s ability to focus on and appreciate something while it gradually unfolds is rapidly eroding. We prefer scratching the surface of everything, rather than absorbing something slowly. Everything is increasingly immediate and all of it is shared and connected. We’re not full cyborgs yet, but we might as well be with our constant and immediate connection to the unifying human network that is the Internet.
But despite what your grandfather might say, none of this is inherently bad it’s just different. However, it was only a matter of time before our music began to reflect our mindset. It makes sense that these minds, which are increasingly catered to think in such a fashion, would also begin to create in a similar way. You can see it in the rise of electronic music and the ubiquitous use of samples. It’s the piecing together of various impulses, contorting and combining them in order to create a new whole, where the definitions of “originality” and “new” itself are blurred and questioned. It’s a whole that floods the senses, never lingering in one area for too long before switching to a new area of inspiration in an effort to always stay one step ahead of the pacing mind’s short attention span. It’s exciting stuff because it’s virtually endless, and when it’s done well it can help redefine music. On this jam, kuma gazes into his crystal ball and creates something that truly sounds ahead of its time. The calm undercurrents full of reverb, the glitched vocal samples, the cascading synths, the skipping and driving percussion, and the distortedly chopped and screwed vocals each borrow a little from everything in order to collectively project into the future of Pop. The result is a style and a vibe that I believe will only continue to grow in popularity, and rightfully so.
This song had me at its title. It’s so simple, yet so open to interpretation. It blurs the line between the real world and the digital one (I know I sound like a broken record, but I wasn’t lying when I said 2014 was a very future-oriented year for music). Url’s are what the Internet is composed of. Simply put, the unique living organisms, or conscience of the web. Yet a url is simply a gateway to information, a location for data. Humans in their own way are the url’s of the real world, a.k.a. irl. We are singular entities, full one-of-a-kind data, collected from a unique combination of experiences and dna, which collectively merge to form what we call a conscience.
As he’s matured and evolved as an artist, Cities’ unique brand of Noise Rap has moved on from simply fetishizing violence and the Dark Lord (a.k.a. Satan), to tackle the philosophical concepts that have basically plagued mankind for its entire existence. Cities’ whole album Come To Life deals predominantly with the existential crisis of Post-Modernism. It’s a concept album dedicated to the daily struggle of the modern man/woman to keep their “humanity” in a world that’s becoming increasingly digitized. It’s a very poignant topic, and one Cities takes on masterfully through both his lyricism and production (he produced 8 of the 15 tracks, including this one). The soulful samples on this track deftly skip around, full of choppy glitches that accentuate this universal feeling of dysphoria. Meanwhile Cities barks his spastic flow, spewing short bursts of strangely deep internal musings such as “do you realize? / realize you recognize / come to life but nigga do you know what’s good” and “so work a 9 to 5 / a nigga trying to ride for them nine lives you work for / nine lives you work for / take that for immortal / that I’ve never been no normal”. I think its safe to say that both Cities Aviv and his music are far from normalcy, and I thank him for that.
74. Cumeo Project – “No Youth Flowers (Feat. Ubin)”
It’s said that the majority of Icelander’s still believe in little invisible elves. Sure, the “modern enlightened fool” might mock them for it, but its kind of a case of the pot calling the kettle black, because I assure you the majority of people who roll their eyes at such beliefs probably still have faith in invisible angels. To each their own though, because despite the wonders of science we’ll never know everything, so believe what you want (just so long as those beliefs don’t infringe upon others’ basic human rights of course), but I digress.
This song makes you want to believe in little elves. As it begins with the each gentle string pluck cascading down upon one another you can imagine a light summer mizzle pouring down on an Icelandic field. Each drop coating the bucolic landscape, wetting various shades and hues of the green canvas that’s peppered with exotic bursts of floral colour. As the droplets begin to fall off of the foliage they create vibrations, a summoning rhythm for the elves that hide within. It’s the start of a ritual based upon nature’s symphony, an interactive dance of sorts through puddles, mud and shrubbery, full of fluid twirls and gesticulations. They all become one with the landscape, gaining an in-depth and euphoric understanding of their place in the rhythm of the world around them. As it comes to an end, rays of sunlight shine through the grayness, hitting each descending droplet, causing them to glow like millions of tiny stars falling towards the earth. When the last gasp of each little supernova strikes the ground and explodes, the elves are nowhere to be seen, having disappeared back into their surroundings like the water slowly fading into soil.
73. Chromatics – “At Your Door (8-track version)”
This jam is drenched in female seduction. That sort of vibe that sounds like its making its way to your ears through layers of hazy cigarette smoke in a dimly lit room. It’s a song that’s pining for tenderness and affection, grasping at the invisible tendrils of a love that’s fallen apart. The gentle keystrokes set an underlying mood of subdued hopelessness, while the shrill synths inject momentary bursts of hope amidst the disaffection. It’s haunting stuff, and the perfect representation of that last breath before one finally concedes defeat.
72. Viet Cong – “Continental Shelf”
Viet Cong are like a rebirth of Wolf Parade. A comparison that’s the utmost of compliments coming from a guy who adored the latter throughout all of high school. There really must be something in the water up in Canada, because Matt Flegel’s voice possesses the same mystical frailty of Spencer Krug’s. It’s a voice that somehow sounds right at home amidst the swirling distortion and swelling heaps of reverb as it floats along perfectly unperturbed over the sludge beneath it. Below it lays a stormy and chaotic onslaught, yet the layers of lo-fi manage to avoid obscurity thanks to the buoying effect of the rolling rhythm and soaring guitar bursts. It’s a jam that’s chock-full of dissonance, but it’s a dissonance that strangely resonates.
71. Gidge – “Growth”
Gidge is a Swedish duo that clearly appreciates the subtleties of a marathon over the simplicity of a sprint. It’s an art that takes mindfulness and skill, but most importantly restraint. It’s easy to shit out an idea in a of couple minutes, filling every dull moment with noise and exhausting your creativity in the process. However, realizing that silence can play just as important of a role as noise, and then utilizing that silence, takes a degree of brilliance and self-control. It’s the age-old dilemma of the carrot versus the stick, the difference between forcing something and waiting for it to come to you. As this Chill-step masterpiece unfolds you can just imagine it flowing naturally, like the spring thaw making its way into a slow stream that begins labouring its way through debris, naturally contouring both the land and itself in the process. There are bubbles of echoing vocals, splashes of light percussion, the swirling click-clack of colliding debris, but through it all the low reverb of the synths flows on. It’s almost like the duo put the song into motion and then went along for the ride, letting it naturally evolve with each passing moment. They could have easily forced a watershed, an inundating crescendo of satisfaction, but there’s something even more brilliant in the seemingly anti-climatic frustration of it drying up unspent.
