Culturedarm's Albums of the Year 2014

Album of the Year

Jolie Holland – Wine Dark Sea

After the tightly drawn compositions of 2011’s Pint of Blood, Wine Dark Sea finds Jolie Holland no less composed, but its pieces rumble, scuzzy and searing, in wave upon wave with her voice cohering at the centre. Songs shift seamlessly between the genres of blues, jazz, folk, and soul. There’s thick feedback played through multiple guitars; reverberating piano; cello which lifts a couple of songs at their most apposite moments, notably in concert with Holland’s violin as it steps and strides forth on ‘First Sign of Spring’; burly bass; and percussion which swells in time, all coming together to forge richly atmospheric, slowly forming, modulating, moving shapes of noise, the bobbing of cork and broad vessels on the sonar.

Holland sounds like she’s having fun, wrapping her voice around words, but more she sounds supremely confident, which is a confidence hard won by an artist performing at the peak of her powers. Nobody else could deliver a song like ‘I Thought It Was the Moon’, reminiscent of ‘Catalpa Waltz’ from her debut, as Jolie patiently navigates the words as she navigates a space, at once carefully recalled and celestially suggestive. She is generous too: just as her interpretation of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’ marked the culmination of Pint of Blood, so here the take on Joe Tex’s ‘The Love You Save’ proves one of Wine Dark Sea‘s centrepieces. Clarinet comes to the fore on ‘All My Love’, a distorted R&B number; echoing, clip-clopping percussion underlies ‘Out on the Wine Dark Sea’; and if the album has any single highlight, it comes on ‘Saint Dymphna’, a summoning of the saint, as Jolie holds and delivers, ‘What do you mean by that? / Do you mean to break my heart? / Do you mean to break my heart in two?’.

Runners-Up

Olga Bell – Krai

The word ‘krai’ – whose etymological connection to the name ‘Ukraine’ remains a matter of nationalistic dispute – once referred to the frontier regions of the Russian Empire. While Russia’s nine krais are today administered in much the same way as its oblasts, Olga Bell’s second long-play calls equally upon a neglected historical past and an unexplored cultural present. Scoring her compositions for cello, harp, electric guitar, bass, pitched drums, and mallet percussion, and pitch-shifting her vocals so that her pieces surge and uncoil in a profusion of voices, Bell draws from the syncopated rhythms of Asian and Russian folk song, foregrounding these in relation to the course of twentieth century avant-garde and electronic music. From the sustained liturgical wail which introduces ‘Krasnodar Krai’, Krai is a process of exposition through creation.

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Grouper – Ruins

Barring the final track ‘Made of Air’ – which was recorded in 2004, and rumbles to life before submerging itself as a coda to the album – the set of songs which comprise Ruins were recorded on a portable 4-track during a residency in Portugal in 2011. Liz Harris has depicted a several-mile hike to the beach, undertaken daily during her stay in Aljezur, and has described the resulting songs as ‘A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love’. Frogs whir, on the margins of the remote tribal beat of the opening track ‘Made of Metal’, and again in the midst of ‘Lighthouse’, with its gently looping piano. Thunder and rainfall surge and then peter out on ‘Holding’. Harris’ voice, tender and plaintive, occasionally pulls away from the keys, straining and marvelling in the separation as on ‘Call Across Rooms’, before reconciling and merging wordlessly with the music.

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How To Dress Well – What Is This Heart?

Three albums into his career, Tom Krell has moved on from intense moments of introspection, of interior pain and self affirmation, to a multifaceted exploration of the ways we live and love together. Coupling for Krell is profoundly complicated, made up of all the passion and love by which we encompass one another, neither satiating our desires nor susceptible to our controlling impulses. His palette here is more extensive than ever, with throbbing industrial and lush orchestral sounds offset by sparse guitars, bells, and electronics, passages of pure R&B, and staggered movements through the structures of popular songs.

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Rich Gang – Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1

Released at opposite ends of 2013, 1017 Thug and I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In established Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan as the most distinctive and engaging of emergent rappers. After collaborating on the hit single ‘Lifestyle’ in June, at the end of September the duo released this mixtape, fully realised and hefty at twenty songs and more than eighty minutes. Rich Homie Quan’s languid way with words distinguishes his gruff voice from those of his peers, but given the way he stays in the pocket of the beat, it would have been easy for Quan to provide a constant base for Young Thug’s livewire vocal variations. Instead – supported by production from the likes of London on da Track and Dun Deal – the two artists take on a diversity of roles, and frequently shine when complementing rather than contrasting with one another, as on the standout ‘Tell Em (Lies)’. Young Thug’s turn on ‘Givenchy’ may be the vocal of the year: drawing out his lines, interjecting and rapping in staccato, through sexual designations and declarations of devotion he crackles to a climax in a performance of delicate ferocity.