TOP 100 TRACKS OF 2014: Pt. IX: # 20 - 11

20. American Wrestlers – “I Can Do No Wrong”

This is one of those classic Summer jams, a song that just feels as if it’s infused with sunshine, radiating beams of light from every note and syllable it produces. It’s a tonic of sorts, a song that’s right at home amidst long, warm nights and meandering drives down the coast, an invoker of good spirits that’s somehow able to conjure up brightness even when you find yourself in the darkest of moods. It shows the power of the mind over the body, defying space and time to function as an audio-driven transporter, teleporting the listener’s soul to the warm embrace of every bliss-filled moment they’ve ever experienced. It’s a holistic remedy. A result that transcends the sum of its parts, creating a vibe that nearly makes one a believer in the teleological process. It goes beyond understanding in that sense, almost like American Wrestlers have tapped into the genetic memory, expanding past the individual to hone into some basic formula for happiness that has been passed down and accumulated in the building blocks of every human being to ever exist. They found the “God Particle”, or at least the only one the truly matters, and its arrived as humbly as all the saviors and prophets of the past, a simple and unassuming concoction that stirs and compels the soul to new heights from within the bounds of this mortal coil.

19. The Magic Gang – “She Won’t Ghost”

Passion and the unknown, its the dual impetus which drives the human soul, inside and outside forces combining to fill an individual with an unparalleled zest for life. When something is then able to combine the two, you’re presented with an enigmatic pulsar of warmth that unceasingly draws and wraps the soul into the gravity of its all-encompassing embrace. Nothing represents the elusive and celestial magnetism of this combination as much as love. One has to only look at art, the visual representation of the human soul, and notice how much of it throughout history has been dedicated to this mystical and pervasive draw. It’s staggering. The sheer amount of focus would lead one to believe that it is no longer possible to speak of the subject in this day and age without sounding spent and derivative, but The Magic Gang is here to prove that notion otherwise. They’ve somehow found a way to make the lingering and pervasive taint of heartbreak sound fresh, simplifying it into a simple yet apt phrase that strangely resonates.

“She Won’t Ghost” – it’s a notion experienced by anyone whom has ever felt the painful sear of a relationship cut short. It’s the anthem for all who have been left in their own mind, locked and alone, helpless to escape from the poltergeist of their memories and the inexorable emotions they conjure up. She lingers there, much to your chagrin, present even when gone, haunting your thoughts, coming out at night, constantly sneaking up and surprising you. All you want to do is escape to the temporary sanctuary of dreams, but reality floods your senses, holding you captive while the hours dwindle away. There’s no easy solution. It’s like the pulsar you once called home has suddenly gone super nova, forcefully propelling you from its warm embrace, sending you flailing and spinning head over heals into the cold and ever-increasing abyss of nothingness, and all the while there she is surrounding you with fragments and pieces of herself, a constant reminder of what was lost. The passing of time will bring stability to the helter-skelter, and the churning of emotions will grow inert, but we live in the present, the only place that is actually “real”, and thinking about the future, in all of its elusive nonexistence, is never much of a comfort. Luckily there are plenty of other stars out there to wrap you up in their warm embrace, billions upon billions to be exact.

18. TV Girl – “Lovers Rock”

TV Girl is and will forever be the band version of my spirit animal. They just get me. It’s like I telepathically wrote the songs, or better yet, like somebody went into my brain, gathered all of my repressed sentiments, thoughts and witticisms, and then breathed life into everything I wish I was capable of writing, except without any of my inhibitions or reservations against being a completely honest and utter asshole. Maybe that was a little harsh, more like a smug prick, but the type of smug prick that people still like because they’re redeemed by the fact that they’re actually funny and clever. That’s probably why I love and relate to them so much, they’re like my inner id, saying everything I wish I could say, only rather than being vindictive and harsh about it, they still manage to come across as coy and playful. It’s quite the feat. But enough about that, because no matter how much I may wish it, I am not TV Girl, and no matter how much I relate to them, their songs did not stem from my mind.

However, the universal quality of their music is undeniable. They’re like the quintessential poets of our generation. Somehow able to embody all of the emotions and experiences that every one of us encounters on a daily basis, and then display them in such a way that is both unassuming and endearing. They tell the tale of modern adolescent love. The love that isn’t really love, or at least the love that’s rarely labeled love. It’s a self-conscious love, or maybe just a selfish love. It’s a love that’s firmly placed in the present, the moment, a love that’s free of commitment. It’s mostly a confusing love, a love that may not really be love at all, or maybe it’s just a new type of love all together. It’s a “love like a cigarette”, burning bright for a time, momentarily providing a deep and suffusing sensation of bliss, before quickly fizzling out, entirely and utterly used up, with only its after effects lingering behind to damage and leave you with nothing but a longing for more. It’s an action entirely void of any thought of the future, the ultimate example of the short term outweighing the long term, pleasurable but empty.

17. Mac DeMarco – “Let My Baby Stay”

Mac DeMarco is another minstrel of the common man. He’s an artist that wears his heart on his sleeve, but its not a noxious or overbearing heart, it’s a malleable heart, one that finds a way to shape and contort itself till it fits perfectly within your own. He meets the listener halfway, providing a canvas, an outline or a template of sorts that they can then fill in with their own experiences. It’s like a universal key to the heart, a transposition of emotion that all the best artists invite. For instance, this song was originally written for his girlfriend, who like him, is Canadian but living in New York. Her visa was on the verge of expiration and she was running the risk of getting deported. This song emerged as a direct result of that incident. So at its most base level it’s a supplication directed toward the government, yet at the same time, it functions as a bare and simple plea of love, a vulnerable acknowledgment of dependency, a tender and emotional ode that resonates with anyone who has ever found themselves reliant upon the presence of another. However, this resonance isn’t only limited to the lyrical content, but extends beyond that to the delivery. He presents songs in such a way that there’s no pretense, no conjuring of a personality, no contrived distance constructed between him and his audience. It’s simple, raw, and honest stuff, almost like you’re lounging in a hazy, smoke-filled room as the afternoon sun’s warm aura soaks the walls, staring up at the ceiling while Mac sits in the corner haphazardly propped up against the wall, lazily strumming and singing away. You can tell that this is what he was meant to do. It’s as natural and unassuming as breathing, and listening to it comes just as easy.

16. Sisyphus – “Calm It Down”

Sisyphus is like a dream that has come to life. It’s a reality that stands in direct defiance to all the parents across America who have raised children under such mantras as “You can’t always get what you want” or “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”. It shouldn’t be possible, three amazingly skillful and genre-defying artists collaborating for an entire album’s worth of material. It’s the type of stuff just doesn’t happen in real life. Their existence defies the repressive tendencies of existence, like they somehow broke the laws of artistic physics. It’s a reality that should only be relegated to the world of fiction and wishes, to the distant reaches of fantastical reverie. Yet here they are, and here we are digging into our cake with reckless abandonment like giddy, toothless children on our very first birthday. It’s a taste of utopia, the type of stuff that makes you believe in a benevolent and omniscient being (that has a great taste in music) who is out there somewhere distantly pulling the strings of life. I mean come on, Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux, and Serengeti all on one album? My mortal mind probably wouldn’t even be able to come up with a better combination of artists if it was given the opportunity, and that’s saying something.

This song is like a therapeutic dance session, like if you could buy psychiatry on tape. Now I know that that sounds incredibly boring, but I assure you this jam is anything but that. It’s actually more like anger management à la music, the ultimate guide to self-help. Any time you find yourself in a bad mood, the type where a slowly simmering loathing is churning deep down inside of you, or simply when you’re feeling down on yourself, go ahead and turn this song on and allow it to send your body into a fit of cathartic dance, a hypnotized sort of groove, with narration that walks you through the steps of decompression. It’s like a tonic for human pessimism, an elixir for all the pervasive negative qualities and feelings that find a way to sneak into our daily lives, and it’s a highly effective one at that. But how could a remedy that involves the rolling and driving, yet ethereal and spaced-out production of Son Lux, mixed with the playfully haphazard flow of Serengeti, and the fragile beauty of Sufjan’s voice not be? That was a rhetorical question. So don’t hurt yourself trying to conjure up an answer, because there isn’t one, just listen, enjoy, and calm it down.

15. Jessica Pratt – “Back, Baby”

This is the soundtrack for heartbreak cinema. It’s that soft, warm, and blurry recall of long gone vistas, mental pictures passing through the mind, replaying one by one, frame by frame, while you lay on your bed staring blankly at the ceiling, transfixed in the paralysis of reverie. You can’t go back, but the memories go forward. Always palpable, always bubbling to the surface, transfixing your conscious mind, haunting and taunting it with their inescapable and unattainable distance. Jessica Pratt’s voice highlights this distance and elusiveness perfectly. It’s a powerful whisper that reckons back to previous eras, a tenuous tendril of emotion weaving its way deep into your mind and plucking the heartstrings with same fervor that she plucks the guitar strings.

14. Leon Bridges – “Coming Home”

Leon Bridges is another artist that exists within the hazy and warm aura of the past. It’s as if Sam Cook transported to the 21st century, untainted by the modern scene, and ready to fill the void of intimacy that has been left by the recent digital inundation of music. He produces music that blends Gospel and Soul, music that sways and hops as if it’s slow dancing its way through your ears. It’s a sound that resonates with the human soul, a sound that makes you want to grab a lover and hold them tight while watching a golden sunset. It’s spooning music, innocent almost. Music that recognizes the inherent beauty of the moment, of connection, music that sees the beauty in holding hands, in brief touches, and long eye contact. It’s music that recognizes intimacy as a languid and delicate walk down an ever-expanding road, not a short sprint to an empty dead end. It represents something that the modern era has lost. A simpler time, when connection happened face to face, not behind the walls of an LCD screen, and it’s this value that keeps it from seeming anachronistic. It’s something humanity longs for, something still inherently built into our very souls half a century later. A telltale sign that technology has progressed faster than humanity has evolved. Something akin to watching a drunken teenager stumble around like a complete and utter mess. They’re not yet emotionally stable enough to navigate said realm, and the result is a damaging and embarrassing dissonance. Leon Bridges serves as a reminder that the past, while gone, will never lose its value.

13. Mick Jenkins – “Healer (Feat. Jean Deaux) (Prod. by Dream Koala & OnGaud)”

Mick Jenkins is another emcee within the cadre of young artists that is here to resurrect the soul of the genre. It’s Hip-Hop that’s in tune with society, but more importantly, it’s Hip-Hop that’s in tune with itself. In other words, it’s existential Hip-Hop, a branch of the genre that starts with an honest understanding of the self, and then progresses outward toward society. It’s Hip-Hop that resonates with the common man, because it speaks of personal experiences that anyone can relate to, getting beyond the material guise of the world and into the metaphysical. Now don’t get me wrong, the class-driven society that we live in necessitates Hip-Hop that speaks for the marginalized and voiceless, music that recognizes materialism, the lack of common decency, the deep desire for more and the means of achieving such desires, as well as the fulfillment and joy of having attained it. However, the capitalistic hijacking of modern Hip-Hop has removed the content of such desires, and left behind a hollow shell that only praises the emptiness of the end result. It’s a damaging message; a perversion of the genre’s original intent, and in such light, the only way to regain its original power is through a totally new approach. Jenkins is pioneering that approach, or at least doing it in such a way that it resonates and inspires. Rather than shirking away from emotions, he recognizes emotions as a fundamental part of humanity, as a key to understanding not only yourself, but the world around you. The result is an innate realness and honesty, complete with a soulful flow and accompanying lyricism that sets him miles apart from the majority of his contemporaries. You feel like your seeing the real Mick Jenkins, not some contrived machismo, but an earnest young man that’s navigating his way through not only life, but also himself, just like the rest of us.

12. Modern Vices – “Cheap Style”

There’s something strangely attractive about the disheveled (I’ve always personally adhered to an appearance/style that I like to call elegantly disheveled). It’s almost like the dirt, grit, and imperfections resonate with the soul. The imperfect beings that we are see and recognize the authenticity of imperfect creations, we relate to them and immediately form an almost visceral connection. This is especially true in music, or at least that’s how it has always been for myself. Pardon me if I’m projecting here, but there’s just something special about the allure of Lo-fi recordings, their stripped and bare bones production innocently laid out before you, incubated in blankets of warm fuzz and punctuated with biting feedback. It’s the unabashed beauty of a fellow human being spilling their soul in rough-hewn chunks of spastic and raw emotion, epileptic percussion, schizophrenic guitars that span the spectrum, churning and soaring, loose and always on the brink of discordance, but somehow keeping their shit together. It’s a genre that at its core is a “Cheap Style”, that rare mix where practicality mingles with aesthetic. An exposed soul, unfettered emotion, a burst of condensed humanity, an ode inspired by life, scrawled down in one moment and recorded in the next, with no time for second-guessing, inhibitions or censorship, perfect despite its imperfections.

11. Sun Kil Moon – “Ben’s My Friend”

A Brief Prologue: Before I start, I feel the need to state that I was actually at The Postal Service concert that inspired this song (do I get any “cool points”?). I was sitting in the back (like Mark Kozelek a.k.a. Sun Kil Moon), but like the back back, the proletariat seats that are actually more like benches due to the lack of any back rests, because I, like Mark Kozelek, am not rich. However, even though I didn’t see Mark, I feel like we’ve shared a common experience, or at least shared a similar vantage point, since the show obviously did not invoke the same emotions for me that it did for him. This superficial feeling of a shared experience is what initially attracted me to this song, but ever since then, as I’ve spent more time with it, I’ve fallen deeply in love. I just hope I wasn’t one of the “drunk heads staring at their cells”. If anything I think I was high, but I digress.

This song is a beautiful, raw, and honest journey into the soul of a man. It’s a front row seat to a mid-life crisis, like gazing at the struggle of someone who is grappling with Father Time, fighting a losing battle, weighed down by the realization that they’re powerless to change their past. Life unfolded in its stubborn way, sweeping you up in its pull, your path was carved out ahead of you with no choice but to follow it, each past event shaping you, as you in turn shaped future events, the damning notion of nature versus nurture, the never ending existential dilemma of the chicken and the egg. It’s a song that stares back upon this path, overgrown and patchy in the fog of memory, tainted by subjectivity, but more or less visible. It’s an observation that inevitably leads to the present, suddenly causing the protagonist to critically reflect upon the surroundings they had previously only mindlessly drifted through. The ever present now gets illuminated with a sharpened clarity, casting light upon and exposing all of its glaring faults, temporarily producing an ugliness that overshadows its inherent beauty. However, in time your eyes adjust, the silver lining of optimism appears and you learn to find meaning in the previously meaningless. You recognize all that you do have, and more importantly, you recognize that your path has not yet expired.

This honest approach toward self-reflection is something that Mark Kozelek excels at. He’s a songwriter that’s gifted with the ability to expose life and humanity at its starkest, and do it in such a way that is both simple yet compelling. He shares his own experiences and observations, and uses them as a vehicle to reach, merge and resonate with the listener’s own experiences and observations. It’s an embodiment of the human spirit, complete with all its beauty and ugliness. It’s a forthright attitude that he’s always possessed in his music, with the passing of years only sharpening the lens, rather than dulling it. The wave of time, always moving faster than the span of an individual life, is destined to outpace and antiquate the mortal soul. This concept of aging, and the experience that emerges with it, seems to inevitably take men and contort and compact them into defiantly dense and uninhibited individuals, and Mark is the paragon artistic example of this figure. He doesn’t hold any punches or give any fucks. He speaks his mind about the world around him, no matter whom it may affect or expose, himself included. It’s truly refreshing, because you know your getting down to the most real, base, and visceral layer, an unguarded window into the human soul. It may not always be an opinion you agree with, or even an experience that you can relate to, but you can respect the mind and character that it came from, and relate to the emotions it produced. It’s a self-reflection that’s universal, and it’s a truly beautiful thing.