Lykke Li’s third takes quite a lengthy time to really fully appreciate- for the first 5 or 10 or 1000 listens it sounds drab and uninspired, with Li merely moping around in a sad mood after a massive relationship breakup. Eventually though- like the very best parasitic worms- it burrows under your skin and you start to appreciate just what an exemplary example the album is of the sheer sumptious beauty of the pain of heartbreak. Nom nom nom, yes let me feed on your misery! Li’s talent for incorporating such dense and sumptuous soundscapes finds a perfect home here, and while it probably still is her weakest album, considering the quality of her first two releases there’s absolutely no shame in that. Points lost for the remix of No Rest for Wicked containing A$AP Rocky’s assertion that Lykke Li is a ‘Pretty motherfucker from the North Pole’- first of all Li’s from Sweden, second she’s not simply ‘pretty’ she’s absolutely divine– how dare you!

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Lykke Li holds her heart tight after it’s been violently shattered into a thousand pieces.

‘Ouch’ she says to her boyfriend ‘Very ouch’

That’s where your heart is right?

2/5

Ah, Azealia Banks, remember her? Course you do! She had that brilliant and brilliantly profane song 212, remember? Think that was some time in the 90s, pretty sure I remember her playing it on TFI Friday. Banks is a brilliant example of how not to best seize your moment- if she had actually released this debut closer to when the emergence of 212 (which is here and still sounds absolutely brilliant despite how many times you’ve heard it) briefly made her the hottest new artist on the scene then this really might have been something. As it is Azealia got sidetracked somewhat through arguing with her record company, arguing with other celebrities on twitter, arguing with her management, arguing with her bin men for no longer collecting every Wednesday, arguing with the Royal Mail for so not knocking on the door before they left that card. Rarely outside Cargill and Smithfield Foods has quite so much beef been produced from one source- hell if I release this into the stratosphere she’ll be coming after me. Standing back from it though, Azealia Banks could have never really become that big- her music’s far too weird and fragmentary to ever really be mass-market, there’s nothing here you can honestly imagine being a hit, and I mean that in absolutely the best way possible. The fact that some of these tracks date from as far back as 1923 means the album’s predictably a bit all over the place and lacks real cohesion, and Azealia makes far too many dips into strangely prosaic electro pop which suits her about as well as a Christian hymn dedicated to chastity. If she concentrates on the kind of out of the box weirdness that influenced her decision to include a bonkers cover of Ariel Pink’s Nude Beach A Go-Go then she will become a great yet.

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Pretty brilliant, and you have to assume she bought the ballet shoes off Super Hands to make sure she recieved the Squarepusher CD and the wrap of speed

4/5

As far as I can remember, Beck invented irony back in the 90s and he has since spent the latter part of his career deeply ashamed of it all and releasing meloncholic acoustic album after melancholic acoustic album furiously overcompensating for what he believes to be his past transgressions. ‘Morning Phase’ is frequently absolutely gorgeous, a release that desperately treats ‘Sea Change’ as a career highlight that he must always attempt to furiously replicate, but you can’t help but yearn for the times when he would regularly confront conventions and break down walls between genres, each release not just challenging himself but challenging people’s ideas and expectations of what pop/indie music could be. Sure, he obviously regrets the ‘With the plastic eyeballs/Spray-paint the vegetables/Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose’ nonsense lyrics of his earlier career, but does replacing it with the kind of oblique vagueness scattered across ‘Morning Phase’ really invest his music with any more of a sense of legitimacy?

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Beck’s disembodied head floats the Earth forever cursed to solemnly regret that Prince pastiche album he once did

2/5

This album is so gorgeous that I’m currently following it down the street calling it a stuck-up bitch for not responding to my catcalls. ‘Familiars’ is simply deeply enbued with a beuatiful and rich river of wonderful music that sounds like the most especially delightful parts of Spritualized’s ‘Let It Come Down’. The songs themselves are not particularly sad per se, instead merely undercut with a pronounced feeling of sadness, much like James Corden. Although unlike Corden- whose sadness is horrifically cutting and eating away at his very insides- ‘Familiars’ finds wonderful beauty in its own melancholy. It certainly has a BIG sound without ever feeling overwrought, though perhaps it’s an album best enjoyed in small bursts to avoid all of its crescendos and repeated tricks possibly becoming too much to take on. I didn’t even mention how good Darby Cicci’s voice is did I?

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This is one of those psychological tests right? I mean, I know that some people are going to say it’s two people hugging, but all I can see is a shot of someone bending over and presenting their bottom to the camera. Look, that’s the anus right there. Right?

Where are you going? Come back!

3/5

Ok, let the hated commence. Lana Del Rey is subjected to a ridiculous amount of bilious animosity for reasons I can’t quite fathom. The pathetically softy liberal in me wonders if she’d be the victim of such loathing if she weren’t an attractive woman- girls can’t be talented, probably only where she is because she shagged the right people (an idea satirised by Del Rey herself in Fucked My Way to the Top), Billy Corgan’s probably writing the songs, all about ethics in video game journalism etc etc. People’s main complaint about Lana is that she has the shocking temerity to not be exactly the same as she portrays herself in her songs. This is an affront to music’s longheld authenticity- Nick Cave really did kill Kylie Minogue with a rock, Prince of course really does do 23 positions in a one night stand, and of course Johnny Cash really did shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.* Can’t we instead applaud Del Rey’s commitment to a character? Isn’t that wonderful artifice part of what makes pop music so brilliant? Rather than avoiding obvious self-parody, Lana instead revels in her lyrical standards and throws herself completely into the conceit- every other second, there’s a bourbon or a bad boy or a gun, she’s continually taking little red dresses off or putting them on. ‘Ultraviolence’ is a wonderfully lush sounding record more uniformally better and certainly more consistant than her debut, though the highs aren’t quite as high.

*thanks to Alexis Petradis for that Cash analogy, I couldn’t better it

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Yep, there she is

1/5

When I first mentioned to my editor that I was going to include what is essentially a live album in this year’s list he threw a bit of a shit-fit, he was passionately against the idea and said it was a shameful disregard for the rules. It actually got pretty nasty quite quickly and I had to beat him to death with his own Filofax. Horrific scenes. Nick Cave would have appreciated it actually. So here it is, and it truly is magnificant. ‘Push the Sky Away’ was perhaps Nick Cave’s most subtle work and stilll now near 22 months after its release its full power is still being slowly picked over and appreciated. Perhaps some of the songs work even better in the claustrophobic setting of the KCRW (which of course stands for Kicking Children Rules, What?) studio. Cave’s underrated and perhaps unexpected sense of humour is often present, and the fact that the Bad Seeds have consistently been the greatest live band of the last decade is always a majestic achievement worth presenting.

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Nick Cave looks at his watch and sighs.

‘Fuck’s sake’ he mutters to himself under his breath ‘I clearly said seven, it’s already quarter past’

3/5

Ha! And you thought Fucked Up were difficult to Google! Try searching for this band on your work’s computer! Actually, don’t- I searched for their Twitter account and… saw… things… ‘Say Yes to Love’ is a fantastically abrasive and wonderfully succinct album (8 tracks, 23 minutes, do records really need to be any longer?) that sounds like the most insane chaos you can imagine yet it’s expertly controlled. It seems almost like every instrument is each a playing a different song and trying its absolute hardest to make the case for their’s being the central theme. Meredith Graves lyrics are so overwhelmed by the racous noise the band are making that they’re often ineligible, only occasionally on songs like Interference Fits do they break through and you can better appreciate their snide and caustic brilliance (‘And then my friends began to fall in love/First with themselves and then with each other/I met my despair at midday light/And it was amazing, and I almost cried’). Wonderful.

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A logo! I do love it when a band takes the time to create a logo, we could be looking at the next Van Halen here, or even better if Perfect Pussy were introduced as one of the newest Avengers (I’ll let you decide what their power would be). I’m off to get it tattooed.

4/5

There have been few less expected aural pleasures this year than Cherry’s fourth (fourth?! Lazy cow…) solo record and first since way back in 1996. Neneh Cherry’s an often overlooked influence on modern pop, not just the assured mashing of genres in her music, but her whole ‘B-girl goes to art school’ astethic that can be seen these days all over modern female pop stars from Iggy Azalea to Lorde to Robyn (who guests here on possible album highlight Out of the Black). It seems these days that everyone wants to be like Neneh Cherry. Well, everyone apart from Cherry herself, who instead releases an album of brilliantly abbrasive and deeply challenging minimalist electronica. As Cherry’s voice simply falls into feral cries of ecstacy in album closer Everything it’s almost as if the achievement of creating such a brilliant work has pushed Cherry into orgasmic joy.

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Oh dear, Neneh heard my mention of Iggy Azalea and thought she might give her a listen to check out the competition. Horrified and brow-beaten, she covers her ears in sadness…

3/5

I’m willing to forgive Evan Ingersoll’s sloppy spelling as this is his debut and I think it’s only around the 3/4^th album that you’re really allowed to pull people up over their spelling of the motherland. And of course despite Chuck coming from the US, England still is the motherland, as I refuse to recognise the 1776 declaration of independance, much like 76% Americans in a poll I conducted/completely made up. Come on USA, you’ve had your little teenage strop, come back now, you’ve made your point. ‘Convertables’ is a brilliantly assured record that, while it contains next to nothing you’ve not heard before, contains fantastic hip hop songs built on killer rhythms. Anti-amputee anthem Legs especially sounds like a particularly brilliant Big Boi cut.

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Chuck Inglish walks past his own record cover and spots a friend he knows the other side of the glass so pushes his face up against it attempting to catch his eye through the title

‘Paul! Paul! Paul! He can’t see me.. PAAAAAUUUL!’

3/5

It’s practically impossible to think of a rapper more respected by both critics and his peers than Common, but despite the universal appreciation already guaranteed the Chicagan’s (Chicagian? Chigagunian?) tenth (!) album doesn’t see him resting on his lawrels. The title is almost a satirical take on what you’re likely to expect from Common’s ultra-serious brand of hip-hop- you won’t be finding your party bangers about sweat dripping from your balls here- but it seems to be presented with lack of irony. But of course why would anyone be smiling?? Any naive ideas about the election of an African American president (‘And to think, me and the president we from the same place’) making life for a black person in America any easier have been disproved time and time again, and the situation in Ferguson this year shows that relations between races are far from 21^st century ideals. ‘Nobody’s Smiling’ manages to never quite collapse under the weight of its own self-importance, although the songs themselves aren’t quite as marvelous as Common’s best, it’s still an uncompromisingly brilliant effort.

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Common has just caught you playing Candy Crush while his favourite orater makes an inspiring civil rights speech and he is not impressed with your lack of respect. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ALBUM!

4/5