Year-End Critics' Polls 2014

keep the meme alive: Pippa's Arse

That's just British people arguing about Americans doing impressions of British people though

does like an oasis or stone roses fan forum count as americans doing bad impressions of brits? I mean I know that's a different #level but still

Offering a new target for your derision:

Telegraph: Best 50 albums of 2014

50 One Direction - Four
49 Bombay Bicyle Club - So Long, See You Tomorrow
48 George Ezra - Wanted On Voyage
47 Lily Allen - Sheezus
46 Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witness
45 Tom Hickox - War, Peace & Diplomacy
44 Sia - 1000 Forms of Fear
43 First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
42 Pharrell - Williams Girl
41 Coldplay - Ghost Stories
40 Simone Felice - Strangers
39 Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
38 Manic Street Preachers - Futurology
37 Rumer - Into Colour
36 Alt-J - This Is All Yours
35 Neneh Cherry - Blank Project
34 King Creosote - From Scotland With Love
33 Sam Smith - In the Lonely Hour
32 Teleman- Breakfast
31 Jessie Ware - Tough Love
30 Bryan Ferry - Avonmore
29 Jenny Lewis - Voyager
28 ?
27 Caribou - Our Love
26 Mary J Blige - The London Sessions
25 Kate Tempest - Everybody Down
24 Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots
23 La Roux - Trouble in Paradise
22 Robert Plant - Lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar
21 Lia Ices - Ices
20 Paolo Nutini - Caustic Love
19 Lucinda Williams- Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone
18 Prince Art - Official Age
17 FKA Twigs - LP1
16 St Vincent - St Vincent
15 Royal Blood - Royal Blood
14 U2 - Songs of Innocence
13 Hozier - Hozier
12 Beck - Morning Phase
11 The Black Keys - Turn Blue
10 Future Islands - Singles
09 The War On Drugs - Lost In The Dream
08 Elbow - The Take Off and Landing of Everything
07 Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy
06 Jamie T - Carry the Grudge
05 Taylor Swift - 1989
04 Jack White - Lazaretto
03 Prince and 3rdeyegirl - Plectrumelectrum
02 Leonard Cohen - Popular Problems
01 Ed Sheeran - X

Lots not great about that but you can't hate a list that has WoD at 9 and Prince at 3

they couldn't award just any album position no. 28

that 3rdeyegirl record is garbage so yeah i can

Prince Art at number 18 is a bold choice for a debut

lol uhhh is the ed sheeran album decent?

it has its supporters here, i found it very uneven if tolerable

is it just me or are the early return indie/pop mags disregarding hip hop even more than usual this year?

Prince! Lol Pharrell's Girl. Well, it is a fairly accurate picture of what's regarded in the mainstream pop world, with exceptions like Leonard Cohen. I'm can't get into Cohen's recent albums, but I did go see him with a friend a couple years ago, and he was pretty magnificent. He was a singin, dancin' machine for nearly four (4) hours, with only like a 10 minute break! We can only dream of having that kind of energy in our 70s.

xpost: yes

Sorry about a couple of misplaced hyphens in that Telegraph list. Shouldn't try to parse lists before caffeine kicks in.

oh don't mind me.

^^^^i was agreeing with you my bad if it seemed unclear

no, sorry - I meant don't mind my - pedantic hyphen call out

but yeah, not much hip hop anywhere to be seen here.

These lists are giving my dysentery

Not much hip-hop anywhere, but at the same time everyone seems to agree it was a lousy year for hip-hop albums, right? I'd rather them make the lists they believe to be correct than elevate a rap album for looks. (Not saying they shouldn't / couldn't have dug deeper into hip-hop.)

yeah, i don't agree with "it was a lousy year for hip hop"

i have several hip-hop albums i like, but everywhere I look ppl are saying it was a good year for songs, terrible for albums.

i dunno maybe i'm looking in the wrong places - and again, i don't necessarily agree - but i think i saw that discussion happening on ilm

also, you left off the word "albums"!

I'm a believer that unless you're a specialist in a musicological field (and likely not even then!), you're not in a good position to levy blanket judgment across an entire field of achievement. It's just too subjective unless you chop it up regionally (was it a bad year for New York-based hip hop artists?), stylistically (was it a good year for technical rap?) or financially (how were sales in Q4?).
A quick flip thru my best of for the year folder suggests at least twenty to thirty albums and at least a hundred singles that I consider hip hop and that I really enjoyed. Is that a bad year? It's not a bad year for me.

I'm gonna gank Spottie's hip hop playlists on Spotify (one for quality and for quantity) and post them here... I could easily take all of 2015 exploring this stuff alone!
http://open.spotify.com/user/theshipment/playlist/3vHZAnvl134kijHL5Z0roN
http://open.spotify.com/user/theshipment/playlist/2Hkan09bsPFtNN39CsAyki

xpost nope, not a bad year. just saying, maybe the lack of hip-hop on these indie/pop mag lists reflects the general consensus, that's all. i generalized too much in my initial post.

i get where you're coming from. I guess if there's less hip hop in the indie/pop world's end tally i might suggest that 2014 was a year where those worlds started to diverge more radically than in the past.

like pitbull, pharrell, iggy, juicy j and em were all absolutely at peak popularity and represented half of the year's #1 pop singles but, with the arguable exception of iggy, none of them really represent contemporary hip hop

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Shabazz Palaces, Ratking and Young Fathers all in the Guardian top 40 so far with surely Run The Jewels to come, so that's not too bad for a newspaper list (whether you think those are the right records or not).

if you went by lists then it might suggest that its a weak year for lots of genres whether it be indie centric lists or the guardian or ilx eoy polls. They have never covered everything. You cant base the state of any music on these lists. They are snapshots of a small amount of voters.

the current top 25 R&B/hip hop list features a plethora of young breakthrough artists that i think a casual listener of rap (which i'm gonna strawman the average indie/pop type being) just won't be familiar with: bobby shmurda, i love makonnen, rae sremmurd, young thug, rich homie quan, dej loaf

i dunno, i think if the average indie/pop type being is on the internet, shmurda, thugger and rhq are pretty inescapable

i was gonna ask what "credible" rap album the big big outlets were gonna put in their top 10s this year, a la Kanye whenever he releases something or Kendrick in 2012 because I just don't see it being YG or Gibbs (or this particular Shabazz album, tbh) and then I remembered Run the Jewels. that solves everything.

I feel like one or both of the vince staples releases could make some lists (coldchain 2 and hell can wait)

In my top 30 there's maybe 3-5 rap albums that were solid or close to it, but none of them are consensus picks, and that MIGHT be the issue in 2014 - few consensus picks, even though critics have their favorites.

I'm thinking Kanye will either drop on Dec 25 or wait until next year. Nicki may wait too.

I think I wi spontaneously explode if ye drops on xmas day

*will

For real though anyone voting for that not-bad-not-great Jack White album isn't going to great lengths to disguise their fundamental disconnection from current music.

most popular rap sucks, most crit rap isnt that popular

Feel like Run The Jewels is a decent chance for a top 10 placing on the more indie oriented sites lists. If not top 5.

most popular rap sucks, most crit rap isnt that popular

Just like most genres then. They all seem to thrive without crossover success too

who the hell knows what we'll think about anything in 20 years!

I do think this is kind of an interesting exercise. If you look back at, say, Xgau's top 10 in, say, 1982 - or top 20, even - you can quibble at the rankings, but I don't think any of the records are bad, per se, and a couple of them have long been justifiably branded for the ages masterpieces. Then again, we've had several decades to get used to them or canonize them. I do wonder what, from this year, say, that future music nerds will deem worth digging up in several years. Will kids in 2034 be writing essays about U2's overlooked distributed for free masterpiece that no one ranked at the end of the year? Will they talk about Taylor Swift's "1989" the same way we talk about "Tusk?" Remind me to set my alarm for 20 years so that I don't sleep through the poll roll-outs.

they will almost certainly be talking about Taylor, idk if they'll be comparing 1989 to tusk or any other fleetwood album tho. I highly doubt of all the U2 albums that could last 20 or even 30+ more years, songs of innocence is gonna be the one

Those were just random examples. U2 will be talked about, at least in passing. Taylor, dunno. But again, just random examples.

Recently there was a discussion of SPIN's 1991 poll. They may have posted it on their site. There was a conspicuous absence of Slint - Spiderland, MBV - Loveless and Talk Talk - Laughing Stalk. The stature of the first two have grown for sure, with Slint having a couple of successful sold out reunion tours and box set reissue, and My Bloody Valentine can be considered a classic, but not necessarily in the mainstream. 23 years later I still have no idea if more people know about late period Talk Talk, probably more in the UK. Genre classics like The Obsessed - Lunar Womb (Trouble's Manic Frustration still seems ignored), Melvins - Bullhead, The Jesus Lizard - Goat (not so much Halo of Flies), Monster Magnet - Spine of God and Coroner - Mental Vortex are well regarded within those circles, but I don't know that you could say that "people are talking about them." So it doesn't really matter to me whether anyone will be talking about Taylor Swift or not.

nor should it, necessarily. I remain continuously flummoxed, mostly in a good way, by what has stood the test of time and what hasn't.

Heed the words of Sammy Hagar: time will tell whether we pass the test of time.

For real though anyone voting for that not-bad-not-great Jack White album isn't going to great lengths to disguise their fundamental disconnection from current music.

― Matt DC, Sunday, November 30, 2014 5:46 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

23 years later I still have no idea if more people know about late period Talk Talk, probably more in the UK.

― Fastnbulbous, Sunday, November 30, 2014 11:33 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"probably"

Well, history is written by the winners, right? One of the better points made in Amanda Ps excellent book (if you haven't read it) Do Not Sell at any Price is that the only reason Robert Johnson became the template for so much British blues-rock is because his stuff was the best reissued and circulated. But Johnson was by no means the most popular or originally best distributed blues act.

From the metal poll thread though its not really a question about metal per se, just one of the examples along with hip hop. I'm sure there's other genres that it applies to.

I'm somewhat surprised the Mastodon album hasn't featured in non-metal EOY lists like the last one. It's good enough and got good reviews inmost places.
Maybe metal isn't as in fashion as it was the past 5 years? Noticed a lack of metal and hip-hop this year in lists.

Has critical coverage started getting narrower?

― Cosmic Slop,

mastodon's two late-aughts albums both ended up on multiple general albums lists with high rankings in several instances. skye was #3 in bloody time magazine!! and those are definitely full-stop metal albums.

flash forward to 2012 - the latest converge album was #1 on most metal/hard rock only lists and got me, before that point not a huge metal/hardcore guy aside from occasional mastodon dalliances - deep in love with that band and exploring a lot of really hard shit I wouldn't have previously explored. but it got little to no love from many general albums lists. and then the next year deafheaven is adored by tons of people who aren't traditionally into metal. it's impossible to predict

― hanley ramirez ordering a pizza (slothroprhymes),

so has critical coverage started getting narrower?