Alvvays
The right attitude can mean a lot for an emerging artist treading down a well-traveled path. That’s something Alvvays has in spades. What makes the Toronto-based quintet stand out are the intangibles. It has an authentic vibe to its girl-group indie pop that comes from an intuitive knack for creating eminently catchy songs that have more to do with touch and feel than innovation. At their best on their self-titled debut, Alvvays evokes the immediacy and resourcefulness of underground touchstones like Heavenly and the Aislers Set, making the most of getting down to the basics of songcraft and sentimentality.
Thanks to their uncannily wistful melodies and Molly Rankin’s wry, yearning coo, Alvvays tackle the subgenre’s coming-of-age conventions with warm reverence as well as an individual perspective that’s already earned it an identity distinctly their own. Case in point: their ode to the fear of commitment, “Archie, Marry Me”, is not just a performance garnering Alvvays prime rookie-of-the-year consideration, but it’s also its precocious entry in the twee-pop hall of fame. In Alvvays’ hands, nostalgic indie rock has been as forward-looking as anything else in 2014. – Arnold Pan
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Angel Olsen
Before this year, Angel Olsen languished in obscurity, written off as a Patsy Cline sound-alike novelty. But with the release of this year’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, she realized her potential as an artist, crafting an immaculately balanced record that splits between pitch-perfect classic country ballads like “Iota”, Leonard Cohen-esque folk epics like “White Fire”, and guns-out rockers like “High & Wild”. The help of a larger indie label like Jagjaguwar gave Olsen the production quality and variety of backing musicians to truly expand her sound in a direction unlike any other artist out there today. – Logan Austin
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Archibald Slim
Atlanta hip-hop is so overwhelmingly, prolifically creative these days that comparisons to New York’s early scenes aren’t all that crazy. With his debut mixtape, He’s Drunk!, Archibald Slim has added himself to the list of ATL visionaries who are gleefully kicking the genre off its moorings (Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan, Migos, Raury, PeeWee Longway, etc.). As the most well-rounded emcee in the Awful Records crew – a loose collective of friends who seemingly record each other on whims and end up turning SoundCloud into a drug for the rest of us – Archie is able to explore the poisonous sociology of the poverty-stricken without ever losing his cool, strolling through the neon smoke of producer Keith Charles Spacebar’s beats like he’s of them, not on them. Conversely, this approach makes the raw outrage of the lyrics even harder to ignore — like that room in your house that’s always chilly, no matter how warm the heart is. – Joe Sweeney
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Banks
With a major nomination from BBC Sound of 2013, Banks shaped up to be one of the highlights of 2014 due to her eclectic mixture of R&B, electronic, trip-hop, and dream pop. With a critically lauded album in 2014, Goddess Banks fused these genres and delivered a solid release. With songs that range from perfect balladry (“Brain”) to amazing simplicity (“Stick”), Banks’ debut is definitely a great one. And although critics thought it was rather similar to her contemporaries (Jessie Ware, FKA Twigs, Kelela), Banks truly carved out a niche of her own: electronic-influenced R&B that balances its way between the Weeknd and Aaliyah. – Devone Jones
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Battle Trance
A saxophone quartet that use only tenor saxophones on paper does not sound like a great idea. Great pieces of saxophone music, such as Philip Glass‘ Saxophone Quartet, derive their melodic and rhythmic complexity in large part due to the differences in pitch of the various kinds of saxophone. However, Battle Trance — the quartet organized by Travis Laplante — have created an album-length composition with Palace of Wind that reveals just how much sound and power can be wrought out of a tenor saxophone. Laplante, joined by Matthew Nelson, Jeremy Viner, and Patrick Breiner, gives a performance with such gusto that one will have to continually remind herself that the sounds on this LP are only being made by four instruments.
At times, such as the turbulent section in the piece’s first movement, these men sound as if they’ve just opened the gates of hell and let all of its fury roar out of their saxophones. This music truly lives up to its title; at just over 40 minutes, Battle Trance sculpt a palace of wind and sound, taking (and sometimes forcing) the listener through an audiovisual feast, a tour de force of avant-garde classical music. The press materials for Palace of Wind claim that Laplante created Battle Trance after “literally awoke with the crystal clear vision that he needed to start an ensemble” with the three gentlemen he brought on for this project. What mysterious force of the universe led Laplante to think this? The world might never know. But one spin of Palace of Wind will make it clear that this project was indeed destined, for music this innovative and stunning doesn’t happen randomly. – Brice Ezell
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Clipping
Clipping isn’t as new as us; most listeners didn’t hear about it until CLPPNG, its first big-house record, hit the shelves this summer. Yet the rap group is still in its formative stages, and 2014 was a new beginning for it. The year introduced a new and innovative angle to their formerly abrasive take on hip-hop. To clipping., accessibility is as volatile a tool as any other, because it means more will get in line to hear the protests.
Songs like “Summertime” are immediately appreciable but offer sizable depth as well. Clipping. is just now getting noticed because it’s just now started to approach its music from the listener’s perspective. If music is a form of communication, a message sent from one party to another to be deciphered by the listener, then clipping. is a purveyor of an exceedingly exact memo: not all is how it appears. There are innumerable paradoxes in the world, and we’ll need to keep our eyes peeled in order to catch onto them. Clipping. knows this because it’s been on the other end of the line this whole time, heeding the narratives of their choice of hip-hop artists in order to arm its own armada. – Jacob Royal
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Doug Seegers
Doug Seegers doesn’t just sing about the hobo life; he has lived it for four decades, squatting in abandoned buildings in Manhattan, sleeping under bridges in Austin and Nashville, hopping trains to another town where the promise of pocket change dropped into his guitar case seemed better. Seegers harkens back to the classic country of old while establishing his own unique voice and vision. When Seegers howls, mimicking a train whistle in “Gotta Catch That Train”, he evokes the blue yodels of Jimmie Rodgers.
One can hear echoes of Porter Wagoner in “Pour Me”, where the singer sits forlornly at the bar while his ex sways across the dance floor with her new beau, “Lucky him, lovely her, pour me.” A less nuanced songwriter would probably reach for the “lucky-lovely-lonely” progression (those Nashville Music Machine songwriters are suckers for alliteration). Still, Seegers’ choice of the simple, brilliant pun amplifies both his narrator’s state of mind and his means of coping. That’s smart songwriting, and from start to finish, this is one of the best country releases you will hear this year. – Ed Whitelock