TOP 100 TRACKS OF 2014: Pt. VII: # 40 - 31

I promise this list will get finished sometime before 2016.

40. Yoni Wolf – “Close to Me”

By now you should all already know about the glowing feelings I harbour toward Yoni Wolf, so I’ll keep it concise, and save each of you the discomfort of having to sit through another of my effusive and protracted soliloquies. So here it goes, Yoni is truly something else, and my world is a better place because of him. Alright, now that I got that off my chest, anybody have a towel? Because I’m about to spew forth some pretension. I’ve had this jam on my iPod since before I got my Macbook (circa 2009), however it was only officially released this past year on a cover tape that Yoni silently dropped via Bandcamp *adjusts thick rimmed glasses*. I got it back when the Internet was the Wild West, the Golden Age, when blogs could just post songs for direct download, and there were no virtual constables out there incessantly patrolling the series of tubes that is the World Wide Web. It was a great era. One I’ll probably tell my grandchildren about while staring blankly off into the distance with an ever-so-slight twinkle in my eyes.

Anyway, if you haven’t guessed already, this song is a cover of one of The Cure’s classic jams. However, whereas the original was lighthearted and vivacious, with a bouncing bass, sporadic claps, and even a brass section, Yoni’s is like it’s introverted doppelganger. Yoni takes the song and makes it his own. He gives the lyrics a more suitable and darker atmosphere, one that sort of skulks in the shadows, coming across more as a desperate plea, or even a whispering confession that’s on the precipice of an existential breakdown. It’s full of earnestness, and a desire that spills over into utter desperation. It’s a raw passion that’s stunted by timidity. Like he gave up before he even tried, a shell of a human being, devoid of self-confidence and shackled by doubt. It makes you look at the entire song in a new light, because within this new soundscape the lyrics actually mean something, coming to life rather than getting obscured by the counterintuitive vivacity. You see a broken soul desperately grasping for their sanity, depression and remorse ascending amidst a love that’s been lost, or was never even found to begin with.

39. Ariel Pink – “Picture Me Gone”

Ariel Pink is not an artist that you’d expect to get sentimental, or even approach any sort of lyrical depth that could ever even mistakenly be labeled deep. He usually sticks to the realm of fantasy, having made a career off of psychedelic whimsy, the proverbial mad scientist behind a diverse catalogue of deformed, ludicrous and outrageous jams. Its phantasmagoric stuff, songs that manage to stretch the imagination, while simultaneously remaining infectious and endearing. It’s the prolific exploration of the mind on drugs, like one of those grainy “educational” videos from the 1970’s, full of shoddy propaganda and hyperbolic animation that takes the viewer inside of the human mind in an effort to dissuade the youth from becoming hippies. Only instead of discouraging the youth, it inspires them to go out and vociferously imbibe in every drug within arms reach, because in the end, nobody wants to be a square.

This jam takes a step back from that high life, skipping the next fix in order to steep within the realm of sobriety. Almost like it’s an ode to the come down, and the crushing reality in which all of the vagrant anxieties come rushing in to haunt the building after the endorphins have vacated the vicinity. It’s a confrontation of one’s fears, a concession of sorts. The undeniable looming visage of something you’ve previously resisted. Selling out to the modern world, compromising long-held values out of necessity. It’s feeling the digital world’s stranglehold on everything. It’s a separation from life, the replacement of the biological by the digital. Losing humanity to gain convenience. Losing the connection of physicality to gain the ease and comfort of immediacy. Always losing, but being told you’re gaining, but gaining what? Does progress really equate technology? It’s the familiar refrain of progress urging us onward with no concrete barometer of meaning. A whole world caught up in a wave of modernism never stopping to wonder why. Swept up in our own momentum until there’s no hope of escape. A feeling of displacement, a fear of uselessness, of being an anachronism, or a Luddite, drowned and suffocated in a sea of wires, chips, hardware, and broadband. A longing for the past, but the past is just that, and no amount of conservatism will ever bring it back. We’ve taken the plunge, drank the Kool-aid per say, and this jam is the depressing realization, and eventual acceptance, that the familiarity we pine for is an unattainable ideal that’s long gone, that ship has sailed, and there’s nowhere else for us to go now but forward.

38. Hannah Diamond – “Pink and Blue”

We’ve been talking about 2014 for 62 songs so far, so it was bound to happen sooner or later. Hannah Diamond is the first artist from the venerable and recondite PC Music to grace this list with her presence. Now depending on what circles you flock in, PC Music is either a name that’s far too familiar to you, or a name that you’ve never heard of before. And if you have heard of it before, its either something you unabashedly love or vehemently hate, or better yet, something you either get or don’t *readjusts thick rimmed glasses with the smug and self-satisfied smile of a pretentious little dipshit*. For those of you who have been blessed and/or cursed enough to have not yet heard of PC Music, it was a pretty big deal in certain circles this past year, therefore, I feel the need to attempt to explain the entity that is PC Music, and as an extension, the artists behind it.

PC Music is a record label based in London, the epitome of what happens when you gather a group of intellectual, pop culture connoisseur, art school graduates aka douche bags (JK) together. Actually that’s all conjecture, because not really much is known about the label and its affiliates. However, what is known is that PC Music is something special. It’s a unique combination of anachronisms that somehow project their way into the future. An aesthetic all of its own, an amalgamation of K-Pop, J-Pop, Contemporary American Pop, 90’s Pop, R&B, and various sub-genres of Euro Bubble Gum Pop. It’s satire that’s catchy and loveable. It’s so ironic that it’s post-ironic. Basically, its what you get when you put Pop music on steroids, its Popzilla, the Megazord of Pop, Alex Popriguez or Lance Popstrong. It’s like rushing headlong into the future while only staring into the rearview mirror. Its uber Pop, Pop that’s so poppy its shed its human soul, like a robot that wants to be human so bad that it mimics human emotions in extremis, until they’re so perfect and exaggerated that despite their accuracy, they still end up coming off as derivative, kitschy, fake and plastic. And for better or worse, this is where the current trajectory of modern Pop music is taking us. There’s a tinge to it, or a taint, something that makes its overwhelming sincerity seem insincere. Its strange and awkward, yet at the same time catchy and endearing. But most importantly, in a musical world that’s more often than not about blending in and latching on to something successful and copying it in order to ride its coattails to success, PC music stands out. Even though they’re most certainly making a commentary on contemporary culture, ironically, living within that culture you can’t help but enjoy what they produce, but it’s the awareness of our own vacuous culture, and thus this commentary, that somehow makes it even more enjoyable. It’s like being in on a joke, while also being the butt of said joke. So meta, yet so enjoyable.

Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t like everything they do. In fact, a lot of it is incredibly annoying, but there are a handful of songs that I think are brilliant, with this being one of them. As far as I know, Hannah Diamond is a woman. However, on top of being Pop connoisseurs, PC music is also known for blurring the lines of gender. For male artists who take on female names and manipulate their vocals to resemble those of the fairer sex, or for live shows where male artists dress in drag, or hired actors pose as said artists on stage. It’s a world of subterfuge and secrecy, a world of commentary, a world outside the realm of cultural normalcy, as fake and contrived as the flawless plastic-sheen of their songs. Nothing can be taken at face value. The basic principles of human interaction are tossed aside, and you’re left with a new tabula rasa, a world where assumptions mean nothing, gender is fluid, and truth is malleable. This is the world where Hannah Diamond exists. It’s the world where she innocently and nonchalantly sings about the travails of the heart, and in doing so transcends the world of artifice in order to produce something that is anything but that, contributing to yet another of the endless contradictions that make up the essence of PC Music. It’s like reading the journal of twelve-year-old girl, or a recently animated robot. It’s pure, raw, and unadulterated honesty, untainted by the corruption and disappointment of reality and the emotion experience and dissonance that comes with it. There’s no filter between emotion and speech, almost like the mind with all its memories and doubts has been removed from the equation. I think that’s how it’s able to strangely resonate. It finds that primal feeling of love, that pink and tender fetal portion of the heart that existed inside of all of us before eventually getting calloused over by the continuous onslaught of regret and disappointment that comes with maturity. Sure it’s sincerity wrapped in artificiality, a kitschy pastiche, but maybe it’s these inherent contradictions that makes it so endearing. After all, Humanity in and of itself is more often than not just one big, giant, glaring contradiction.

37. Spoon – “Do You”

The first time I heard this song I was making my way through Utah, sitting in the backseat staring at the transient world around me. I was a traveler passing through a personal frontier, floating along a lonesome road where the black asphalt cut its way through a sea of windblown fields that eventually lapped against the surrounding majesty of the red-faced bluffs. Rain was gently kissing the windows, with each individual droplet making it’s retrogressive dance, streaking along, leaving a piece of itself behind to obscure my view before eventually being blown away to stay amongst the landscape we were fleeing with each speeding wheel rotation. The deficiencies of human mind were just on the verge of turning the repetition of the surrounding beauty into monotony, and then this jam came on. It was my savior, the perfect narrator for the moment. Invigorating life into all around it, giving the visual stimuli an auditory counterpart. Our movement came to life. The glass disappeared, and I was no longer removed, no longer separated from my environment, but one with it. I fell in love with this song, and haven’t fallen out of love since.

It’s a wonderful thing when bands that are maybe a step or two out of their prime are still able to produce solid material. It’s a feat that is able to simultaneously restore your faith in both music and humanity. To be honest, I had written Spoon off. They had subconsciously gotten moved to that ever-growing list of bands that slowly fade away into the sunset with the passing of each mediocre release, and if I had been left to my own devices, I probably would have never even have listened to this album. Yet, fate works in a mysterious way, and here it is prominently placed on this list. This is a song that perfectly and simply encapsulates the convoluted struggle of modern love. That tenuous state of non-relationship, the slow demise of a potential love that was never fully realized, spurned by a fear of commitment and a lack of fortitude. It’s being in love with the right person at the wrong time, and the back and forth that ensues from prematurely trying to pull away from that bond. It’s an anthem for the fickle heart, and the accompanying indecision that ultimately severs the connection.

**I would just like to voice by overall disappointment in having to endorse Urban Outfitters through my use of the above video. Know that ruffianbandwidth is embedding this video in protest, and under a sense of duress. I do not support the culture crushing juggernaut that is Urban Outfitters, but Spoon left me no choice.

36. Perfect Pussy – “Interference Fits”

Angst is a very real thing. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the watershed of reality and idealism. It’s that period of adolescence where you honestly look at the world around you and despise everything that you see. A society based upon power, greed, corruption and fear, a system perpetuated by itself due to the apathy and selfishness of the human race. You wonder why. Why does nothing change? You want to change it. You want to matter, you want your life to matter, and you want something better. Then you get thrust into the world, forced to be a part of it, no longer able to inspect and observe it from your book-laden ivory tower. Out amongst the masses you must survive. Survive by any means necessary. You must conform, become part of the world you hate so much, play by its rules, reap its rewards and suffer its punishments. You grow jaded, corrupted by its pervasive haze. You lose faith. You sacrifice ideals for survival, and every day that hope, that faith in a different future, a better future, slowly fades away, slipping outside of your grasp until its nothing but a distant memory. This jam is the spastic struggle to resist that fate. To beat back the world with closed fists, to shout, scream, and claw with tooth and nail against the constricting forces of a complacent reality. It’s vehement denial in the face of adversity, a proclamation that “I am part of you, but I am not, and will not, become you!” But reality makes it hard, so, so hard.

35. Angel Olsen – “Stars”

The entire genesis of life, existence as we know it, can be traced back to the tiny milky white orbs of light we see slowly swimming through the sea of endless black oblivion over our heads every night. It’s an epiphanic moment, a realization that our ancestors weren’t exactly mistaken when they stared up at the stars, so distant and mythical, and labeled them gods. Gods in their purest sense give life. They create a chain of reality that can trace itself back to every individual moment since it’s very first inception. Molecules, atoms, electrons that only exist in you because they were first emancipated in a giant blaze of glory from the depths of a distant god, its symbolic last breath, a gasping super nova, breathing life into those for millennia to come. It gives us a connection to everything, a shared existence, and a shared voice. It’s a connection that’s felt, a feeling deep inside that has caused humanity to always strive for something greater, to invent gods, to be a part of something bigger and find a place within a world that constantly keeps us wrapped up within its embrace. Every interaction and experience enforces our place in this tapestry of existence, a new thread that’s weaving in and out of a pattern that can never be distinctly viewed at large. We know it’s around us, yet despite all our knowledge, all our science and understanding, it’s safe to say that we will never fully comprehend our place within it all.

It can be frustrating at times. We want so bad to feel it all, to speak for it all, to be one with everything. Every waking moment our senses interact with it, yet the senses are so primitive, so limited, always keeping us at arms length from truly experiencing reality as it presents itself. Instead it’s filtered through taste, touch, sight, smell, and sound - the ever-elusive mind meld taunting us, resigning humanity to centuries of work, discovery, and progress, individual human life just a blip within the grand scheme. Each interaction and experience, good and bad, collectively brings us closer, shapes, develops, and tempers us, but it never seems like enough. Is anything else actually real though? Without proof, without experiencing it, how can any of us say otherwise? All we know is what we experience and interact with, so it must be enough. Maybe life is only meant for living, with each of our individual threads working towards the beautiful masterpiece that was first set into motion by the heavens above.

34. GFOTY – “Bobby”

GFOTY, or Girlfriend of the Year, is another artist within the cadre of enigmatic brilliance being born out of the mysterious PC Music conglomerate. She (He?) has that same penchant for garishly plastic Pop. It’s shiny, innocent, and addictive stuff, something like a robot dressed up in human skin trying to understand emotion. It’s a song that explores heartbreak and jealousy, yet each sparkling line sounds removed, like its being filtered through algorithms, contrived, derivative, trying entirely too hard to submerge itself within the sea of human emotion, but it emerges unaffected, the residue only beading off, never truly seeping down into the pores and invigorating the soul. Words come out but they’re just that, hollow with no impetus, empty of anything other then vowels, consonants, and syllables. It’s entirely superficial, yet somehow it’s able to resonate, and for that it’s brilliant. It’s a commentary on human superficiality, a species that ostensibly strives for honesty and connection, but constantly conjures up masks and disguises, always choosing to hide behind convenience. It’s a view into where music is headed, and where were going as a species. After all, art reflects life, and with the rising tide of the overly produced digital world were slowly drowning out our humanity. We recognize words and meaning, but we lack emotion. We lack experience and connection, always filtering the moment through the remote luminescent glow of LCD screens. Maybe we’ve had it wrong this whole time, and it’s not robots who want to be human, but us who want to be robots.

33. What Moon Things – “Squirrel Girl”

If one could personify rainstorms, turning their exuberant, raw, energetic and cascading outbursts into a song, it would sound and feel something akin to this. This jam has a power to it, a resonance where it hits the ears in thick relentless sheets of sound, soaking them in a barrage of unabated emotion. It’s a full on onslaught of energy, with a driving downpour of percussion and heavy gales of rhythm guitar complemented by ascending squalls of lead. Amidst the bedlam of it all, riding and cutting through the haphazard aerial currents, are the raw vocals, simultaneously soaring and muddled, beaten and battered, but resilient. Together they combine to create a chaotic hurricane of sound that leaves the listener soaked and disheveled, tossed and turned, yet eagerly and stubbornly standing amidst the maelstrom, exuberant, arms spread wide, screaming and cursing the heavens, challenging them for more. It’s a spiritual experience, a moment of divine revelation that emerges out of upheaval, from seeing yourself dwarfed by a power outside of your control. It’s the classic refrain of trials and tribulations leading to self-exploration, an excavation toward a deeper awareness and a new sense of courage, an appreciation for existence that can only be born out of witnessing your own fragility. It’s powerful stuff, something like early Modest Mouse, but with more balls, which is never a bad thing.

32. Perfume Genius – “My Body”

Perfume Genius made one of the most brilliant albums of 2014. It’s an album that rejects conformity, or better yet, embraces itself, and it does so in a chaotic and powerful way. It’s a gay album, but it isn’t limited by that, instead it uses it as the starting point, a place to reach out and embrace all forms of self-expression that find themselves stubbornly and continually oppressed by an archaic society. This jam starts off in a brooding fashion, with a deep and resonant bass that plods its way along, expressing a sort of simmering turmoil between acceptance and rejection. When the agitation eventually grows to be too much, the existential cauldron of emotion boils over into a churning outpouring of chaotic upheaval. It’s like the floodgates have burst wide open, the learned manners and tyrannically enforced behavioral norms have been smashed aside, and were left with an unchecked inundation of raw unadulterated anger and honesty. It’s a torrential spilling of the self, without any sort of pretense or propriety left to disguise its true nature, with the damaged soul of the oppressed shining brightly for all to see. Yet despite this brief moment of personal liberation, there’s no lasting power, no grand epiphany or final solution. In the end it remains right where it started, tainted and restrained, futilely weighed down and constricted by the oppressive norms of society’s overarching filth.

31. Stanley Brinks and The Wave Pictures – “Orange Juice”

If I were a sitcom, this jam would be my theme song. It has the ability to effortlessly explain my existence in one simple chorus. There’s no longer any need for religion or any sort of spiritualism, astrology is pointless, self-help is shit, and self-love is just psychopathic narcissism dressed up as empowerment.* It’s sunny nihilism. It’s an acceptance of life, a commitment to celebrate existence no matter the circumstances or the meaning. It’s the ability to constantly greet reality with a big stupid grin on your face, dancing through the ups and downs of life with a pocket full of vices, floating along every which way the wind blows, shrugging off whatever troubles constantly try to weigh you down. It’s a song for the common man in all of his flawed glory. If life is for the living, might as well live it fully, but not too fully, just enough to survive without imploding. After all, we’re all just dying anyway, speeding it up a little may not be an entirely bad thing, especially if it makes you happy in the process. It’s recognizing your limits, picking your vices, and keeping them checked. Living a balanced life of debauchery, enjoying life without overtly endangering said life.

**DISCLAIMER: This is semi-facetious. The more or less privileged and blessed nature of my general existence allows me to say hyperbolic things such as this.