Our Best of 2014 albums lists (organized by genre) kick off today with our staff picks for the 20 best of pop and rock music this year. We're beginning with albums 20 to 11 today; you'll have to wait until Monday December 8 for 10 through 1.
(UPDATE: You can now see albums 10 through 1.)
Click next to read through the albums one by one, or use the list below to skip ahead to your favourites.
Top 20 Pop & Rock Albums of 2014, 20-11:
To see more of our Year-End Top Tens, head over to our Best of 2014 section.
20. Perfect Pussy
Say Yes to Love
(Captured Tracks)
Perfect Pussy frontwoman Meredith Graves' mix of personally and politically fuelled lyrics may be shrouded in a wall of feedback, but they form the passageway to understanding the sheer force and undeniable impact of the group's debut. Stretching the boundaries of hardcore and post-punk, the passion of Say Yes to Love is expressed via a searing aural assault that is both visceral and challenging at times. While the band's chaotic energy and jarring cacophony run rampant on its debut, the group's fierce, 15-minute-long live shows have been equally important in defining the Syracuse, NY five-piece's wider impact since the release of Say Yes to Love.
Using their noisy, feedback-drenched guitars, barrage of drums and Graves' frenetic energy, Perfect Pussy are a precision attack. While the band may drown themselves in a sludgy coat of noise, Graves' emotional urgency becomes a rallying cry as a wall of sonic mayhem hits. (Anthony Augustine)
19. Against Me!
Transgender Dysphoria Blues
(Total Treble)
When Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman to Rolling Stone in 2012, her friends and fans alike gained newfound insight into the many references to her struggles with dysphoria hidden throughout her songs. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the musical conclusion these lost pieces have been leading to, a scream of frustration and anger that has been bubbling under the surface of Grace's songs since the earliest days of Against Me!, finally released with an urgent rush of punk fury.
The record is as raw and unrestricted as the lyrics, boiling down the band's musical formula to its purest components, and contains some of the finest and most purposeful Against Me! songs since 2005's Searching For a Former Clarity. From the flag-waving anthem "True Trans Soul Rebel" to the introspective "Paralytic States" to the record's fiery closer, "Black Me Out," Grace holds nothing back and proves that she is entering a new era for Against Me!, bravely relinquishing the ghosts that haunted her previous songs with each step forward. (Peter Sanfilippo)
18. Spoon
They Want My Soul
(Loma Vista)
Twenty years and eight LPs later, Spoon have proven themselves to be one of the most consistently sublime rock acts in recent memory, and They Want My Soul is just another fantastic notch in their belt. Instead of staying complacent with their prior sonic success, their latest album finds them exploring new textural ground without losing their way with experimentation.
There's hardly a track on the record that doesn't feature a new sound for the band — drum pads, flutes, barbershop-style backup vocals, whistling, classical Spanish guitar, harp — yet the barroom swagger of the troupe remains. Even when trying their hand at synth-washed psychedelia, as on "Inside Out," they make it sound effortless and immersive.
Even with all these new tricks up their sleeves, they're still the same old underdogs fighting tooth and nail for what they believe in, with their ethos distilled into the impeccably anthemic title track. Spoon still have their soul — and, if this album's any indication, they've got lots of it. (Matt Bobkin)
17. Real Estate
Atlas
(Domino)
You have three or four striped sweaters. Most people would say they are identical. But you know one of them just feels like it fits best, is softest, makes you like yourself little bit more when you look in the mirror. Real Estate sound the way your favourite sweater feels. On Atlas, the band manage to create a sound that's infectious and immediately pleasing to the ear, somehow old despite being new.
Atlas is their cloudy day album, with a shrouded heart at its centre, full of questions and doubts. Martin Courtney and Matt Mondanile perform as the Morrissey and Marr of shoreline suburbs, capturing Instagram-ready moments of soft-focus angst (without all the Oscar Wilde verbiage) set to shimmering guitar lines. It's simple music, so smooth and liquid that, while engaging, is adaptable to any listening occasion. Despite being so incredibly catchy, the music works almost like an anti-earworm, creating a mood before evaporating from memory the moment the album ends, like a dream. But then you'll want to hit play and listen to it all over again. Even though you have three or four other albums that sound similar, this one just feels the best. (Eric Hill)
16. Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire For No Witness
(Jagjaguwar)
At this year's SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX, one of the most anticipated debuts was Missouri-born Angel Olsen, who packed the early crowd into the front pews of a 175-year-old church. A more appropriate venue couldn't have been chosen for the singer-songwriter and guitarist; her second album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, evokes a Southern preacher's sermon, an arresting collection of scorched earth love songs and well-crafted folk ballads about loss and redemption.
Working with producer John Congleton, Olsen's evocative, warbling voice is still centre stage on songs like "Forgiven/Forgotten" and "High And Wild," which crackle with a newfound electricity and feature kick drums that feel like a punt to the heart. While her tone never rises above a conversational murmur on the appropriately titled "Unfucktheworld" and sombre closing number "Windows," there's nothing hushed about the Hank Williams-referencing mid-tempo "Hi-Five," on which Olsen asks "Are you lonely too?" before exclaiming "High five!"
Rarely has solitude sounded so utterly triumphant. (Max Mertens)
15. Beck
Morning Phase
(Capitol)
To draw similarities between Morning Phase and 2002's Sea Change is extremely tempting, which is why so many have rolled out the correlation and then proceeded to judge the former solely in relation to the latter. Unfortunately, it's a lazy observation and one that's only got surface truth. Dig just a little bit deeper and you begin to see how different the two releases really are.
While Sea Change was a sorrowful up-yours to anyone who thought Beck couldn't record a straight-faced album, Morning Phase bears the mark of a matured man, one who no longer needs to make a statement out of a no-frills record and is simply able to let it breathe and exist on its own.
It's also decidedly more uplifting, with every swipe and pluck steeped in warm honey and left to take form in the glow of a picturesque sunrise. Album highlight "Unforgiven" on its own would probably be a good enough reason to consider Morning Phase one of 2014's greats, as its billowing backdrop lifts Beck's voice (quite possibly his most impressive vocal display to date) to new heights; it's the definition of bittersweet. (Daryl Keating)
14. How to Dress Well
"What is This Heart?"
(Weird World Record Co.)
While Tom Krell's How to Dress Well project has always been concerned first and foremost with expressing intense universal emotions, he's often mirrored the complexity of love and life by deconstructing pop formulas and submerging the results in layers of reverb. But while the R&B/pop line toed by his most accessible record yet might sound like a potent genre meeting point destined for Top 40, "What is This Heart?" refuses to reduce those complexities to big, simplified anthems. Though the album's production often goes for broke, especially on tracks like "Face Again" and "Childhood Faith in Love (Everything Must Change, Everything Must Stay the Same)," Krell's voice balances passion with a palpable, gentle curiosity that suggests it's here to start a dialogue rather than tell it like it is.
"What is This Heart?" is the kind of special album that's hard to find in 2014: big enough to envelope listeners, yet intimate enough that it feels like Krell's talking just to you. If that seems a conundrum, it's because love is, too; "What is This Heart?" is a question with no easy answer. (Stephen Carlick)
13. Cloud Nothings
Here and Nowhere Else
(Carpark)
Cloud Nothing's 2012 album Attack on Memory presented a thrilling contradiction: a lo-fi pop band wanting to become a band capable of loud, searing and dissonant guitar rock, and yet unable to leave their infatuation with pop behind. It worked; Attack on Memory turned the 180 degrees Dylan Baldi and his band were capable of. Two years later, with Here and Nowhere Else, they've only upped the distortion.
Here and Nowhere Else is similar to its predecessor in that it's a collection of loud, angry guitar rock, but further listening reveals a Cloud Nothings that have grown comfortable with the idea of reconciling their two extreme natures. Penultimate track "Pattern Walks" is the closest resemblance you'll find here to Attack on Memory highlight "Wasted Days," but it changes things up by ending in an explosion of sparkling guitar sounds that sounds more hopeful than nihilistic. Lead single "I'm Not Part of Me" is a fantastic example of Baldi's pop instincts at play, merging hooks and dissonance into a package that sounds worthy of being called their finest song to date. Here and Nowhere Else is ultimately an album that works best because it leaves certain contradictions unresolved — for the time being. (Jibril Yassin)
12. Sun Kil Moon
Benji
(Caldo Verde)
It's hard to talk about Mark Kozelek in 2014 without mentioning the cantankerous elephant in the room. Although Kozelek's candid opinions on the state of "hillbillies" and beer-commercial rock divided the public into two camps — those who found Kozelek kinda humorous and those who found him to be a "total douche" — pretty much everyone can agree on one thing: Benji is an album like no other. Starting with 2012's Among the Leaves, Kozelek began to abandon the "moon-in-June" musings of his earlier lyrics, focusing instead on unfiltered thoughts and almost-verbatim recollections of his experiences with life, heartbreak, malaise, death and Ben Gibbard.
After listening to Kozelek sing, in such direct but striking terms, of his second cousin and uncle (who both died in separate aerosol can-related accidents) or the Sandy Hook School shootings, it feels almost antithetical to move on to the flowery parables of acts like Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver. Like a Von Trier or Pasolini film, Benji is art at its heaviest, delivered by a man who has spent the past 12 months making one thing crystal clear: he doesn't give a flying fuck what you think of him. (Daniel Sylvester)
11. Ought
More Than Any Other Day
(Constellation)
Having formed in the wake of the 2012 Quebec student protests, it's easy to analogize the youthful rebellion on the streets of Montreal with the raw energy and anxiety conveyed by Ought's music. It's also easy to run off a list of other musicians that have had an obvious impact on the band's sound: from the strangled vocals of the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano to the jaunty art-rock of the Talking Heads to the much-copied loud-quiet-loud structure of a Pixies tune, there's no shortage of sonic comparisons.
And yet, More Than Any Other Day is far more refreshing and vibrant than it is derivative. Baby-faced frontman Tim Beeler delivers vocals with such urgency and angst that he demands the listener's attention, while the rest of the band manage to bring each song out of slow, sparse tension into explosions of melodic noise. Inaugural listens may leave charmed impressions of one-liners about an existential crisis in the milk aisle of the supermarket ("Today More Than Any Other Day"), but as you sink deeper into the eight-song set, there's a lot more bubbling under the surface. (Sarah Murphy)
Look for pop and rock albums 10-1 on Monday, December 8.
(UPDATE: You can now see albums 10 through 1.)
Click next to read through the albums one by one, or use the list below to skip ahead to your favourites.
Top 20 Pop & Rock Albums of 2014, 20-11:
- 11. Ought - More Than Any Other Day
- 12. Sun Kil Moon - Benji
- 13. Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else
- 14. How to Dress Well - "What is This Heart?"
- 15. Beck - Morning Phase
- 16. Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire For No Witness
- 17. Real Estate - Atlas
- 18. Spoon - They Want My Soul
- 19. Against Me! - Transgender Dysphoria Blues
- 20. Perfect Pussy - Say Yes to Love
To see more of our Year-End Top Tens, head over to our Best of 2014 section.
20. Perfect Pussy
Say Yes to Love
(Captured Tracks)
Perfect Pussy frontwoman Meredith Graves' mix of personally and politically fuelled lyrics may be shrouded in a wall of feedback, but they form the passageway to understanding the sheer force and undeniable impact of the group's debut. Stretching the boundaries of hardcore and post-punk, the passion of Say Yes to Love is expressed via a searing aural assault that is both visceral and challenging at times. While the band's chaotic energy and jarring cacophony run rampant on its debut, the group's fierce, 15-minute-long live shows have been equally important in defining the Syracuse, NY five-piece's wider impact since the release of Say Yes to Love.
Using their noisy, feedback-drenched guitars, barrage of drums and Graves' frenetic energy, Perfect Pussy are a precision attack. While the band may drown themselves in a sludgy coat of noise, Graves' emotional urgency becomes a rallying cry as a wall of sonic mayhem hits. (Anthony Augustine)
19. Against Me!
Transgender Dysphoria Blues
(Total Treble)
When Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman to Rolling Stone in 2012, her friends and fans alike gained newfound insight into the many references to her struggles with dysphoria hidden throughout her songs. Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the musical conclusion these lost pieces have been leading to, a scream of frustration and anger that has been bubbling under the surface of Grace's songs since the earliest days of Against Me!, finally released with an urgent rush of punk fury.
The record is as raw and unrestricted as the lyrics, boiling down the band's musical formula to its purest components, and contains some of the finest and most purposeful Against Me! songs since 2005's Searching For a Former Clarity. From the flag-waving anthem "True Trans Soul Rebel" to the introspective "Paralytic States" to the record's fiery closer, "Black Me Out," Grace holds nothing back and proves that she is entering a new era for Against Me!, bravely relinquishing the ghosts that haunted her previous songs with each step forward. (Peter Sanfilippo)
18. Spoon
They Want My Soul
(Loma Vista)
Twenty years and eight LPs later, Spoon have proven themselves to be one of the most consistently sublime rock acts in recent memory, and They Want My Soul is just another fantastic notch in their belt. Instead of staying complacent with their prior sonic success, their latest album finds them exploring new textural ground without losing their way with experimentation.
There's hardly a track on the record that doesn't feature a new sound for the band — drum pads, flutes, barbershop-style backup vocals, whistling, classical Spanish guitar, harp — yet the barroom swagger of the troupe remains. Even when trying their hand at synth-washed psychedelia, as on "Inside Out," they make it sound effortless and immersive.
Even with all these new tricks up their sleeves, they're still the same old underdogs fighting tooth and nail for what they believe in, with their ethos distilled into the impeccably anthemic title track. Spoon still have their soul — and, if this album's any indication, they've got lots of it. (Matt Bobkin)
17. Real Estate
Atlas
(Domino)
You have three or four striped sweaters. Most people would say they are identical. But you know one of them just feels like it fits best, is softest, makes you like yourself little bit more when you look in the mirror. Real Estate sound the way your favourite sweater feels. On Atlas, the band manage to create a sound that's infectious and immediately pleasing to the ear, somehow old despite being new.
Atlas is their cloudy day album, with a shrouded heart at its centre, full of questions and doubts. Martin Courtney and Matt Mondanile perform as the Morrissey and Marr of shoreline suburbs, capturing Instagram-ready moments of soft-focus angst (without all the Oscar Wilde verbiage) set to shimmering guitar lines. It's simple music, so smooth and liquid that, while engaging, is adaptable to any listening occasion. Despite being so incredibly catchy, the music works almost like an anti-earworm, creating a mood before evaporating from memory the moment the album ends, like a dream. But then you'll want to hit play and listen to it all over again. Even though you have three or four other albums that sound similar, this one just feels the best. (Eric Hill)
16. Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire For No Witness
(Jagjaguwar)
At this year's SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX, one of the most anticipated debuts was Missouri-born Angel Olsen, who packed the early crowd into the front pews of a 175-year-old church. A more appropriate venue couldn't have been chosen for the singer-songwriter and guitarist; her second album, Burn Your Fire For No Witness, evokes a Southern preacher's sermon, an arresting collection of scorched earth love songs and well-crafted folk ballads about loss and redemption.
Working with producer John Congleton, Olsen's evocative, warbling voice is still centre stage on songs like "Forgiven/Forgotten" and "High And Wild," which crackle with a newfound electricity and feature kick drums that feel like a punt to the heart. While her tone never rises above a conversational murmur on the appropriately titled "Unfucktheworld" and sombre closing number "Windows," there's nothing hushed about the Hank Williams-referencing mid-tempo "Hi-Five," on which Olsen asks "Are you lonely too?" before exclaiming "High five!"
Rarely has solitude sounded so utterly triumphant. (Max Mertens)
15. Beck
Morning Phase
(Capitol)
To draw similarities between Morning Phase and 2002's Sea Change is extremely tempting, which is why so many have rolled out the correlation and then proceeded to judge the former solely in relation to the latter. Unfortunately, it's a lazy observation and one that's only got surface truth. Dig just a little bit deeper and you begin to see how different the two releases really are.
While Sea Change was a sorrowful up-yours to anyone who thought Beck couldn't record a straight-faced album, Morning Phase bears the mark of a matured man, one who no longer needs to make a statement out of a no-frills record and is simply able to let it breathe and exist on its own.
It's also decidedly more uplifting, with every swipe and pluck steeped in warm honey and left to take form in the glow of a picturesque sunrise. Album highlight "Unforgiven" on its own would probably be a good enough reason to consider Morning Phase one of 2014's greats, as its billowing backdrop lifts Beck's voice (quite possibly his most impressive vocal display to date) to new heights; it's the definition of bittersweet. (Daryl Keating)
14. How to Dress Well
"What is This Heart?"
(Weird World Record Co.)
While Tom Krell's How to Dress Well project has always been concerned first and foremost with expressing intense universal emotions, he's often mirrored the complexity of love and life by deconstructing pop formulas and submerging the results in layers of reverb. But while the R&B/pop line toed by his most accessible record yet might sound like a potent genre meeting point destined for Top 40, "What is This Heart?" refuses to reduce those complexities to big, simplified anthems. Though the album's production often goes for broke, especially on tracks like "Face Again" and "Childhood Faith in Love (Everything Must Change, Everything Must Stay the Same)," Krell's voice balances passion with a palpable, gentle curiosity that suggests it's here to start a dialogue rather than tell it like it is.
"What is This Heart?" is the kind of special album that's hard to find in 2014: big enough to envelope listeners, yet intimate enough that it feels like Krell's talking just to you. If that seems a conundrum, it's because love is, too; "What is This Heart?" is a question with no easy answer. (Stephen Carlick)
13. Cloud Nothings
Here and Nowhere Else
(Carpark)
Cloud Nothing's 2012 album Attack on Memory presented a thrilling contradiction: a lo-fi pop band wanting to become a band capable of loud, searing and dissonant guitar rock, and yet unable to leave their infatuation with pop behind. It worked; Attack on Memory turned the 180 degrees Dylan Baldi and his band were capable of. Two years later, with Here and Nowhere Else, they've only upped the distortion.
Here and Nowhere Else is similar to its predecessor in that it's a collection of loud, angry guitar rock, but further listening reveals a Cloud Nothings that have grown comfortable with the idea of reconciling their two extreme natures. Penultimate track "Pattern Walks" is the closest resemblance you'll find here to Attack on Memory highlight "Wasted Days," but it changes things up by ending in an explosion of sparkling guitar sounds that sounds more hopeful than nihilistic. Lead single "I'm Not Part of Me" is a fantastic example of Baldi's pop instincts at play, merging hooks and dissonance into a package that sounds worthy of being called their finest song to date. Here and Nowhere Else is ultimately an album that works best because it leaves certain contradictions unresolved — for the time being. (Jibril Yassin)
12. Sun Kil Moon
Benji
(Caldo Verde)
It's hard to talk about Mark Kozelek in 2014 without mentioning the cantankerous elephant in the room. Although Kozelek's candid opinions on the state of "hillbillies" and beer-commercial rock divided the public into two camps — those who found Kozelek kinda humorous and those who found him to be a "total douche" — pretty much everyone can agree on one thing: Benji is an album like no other. Starting with 2012's Among the Leaves, Kozelek began to abandon the "moon-in-June" musings of his earlier lyrics, focusing instead on unfiltered thoughts and almost-verbatim recollections of his experiences with life, heartbreak, malaise, death and Ben Gibbard.
After listening to Kozelek sing, in such direct but striking terms, of his second cousin and uncle (who both died in separate aerosol can-related accidents) or the Sandy Hook School shootings, it feels almost antithetical to move on to the flowery parables of acts like Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver. Like a Von Trier or Pasolini film, Benji is art at its heaviest, delivered by a man who has spent the past 12 months making one thing crystal clear: he doesn't give a flying fuck what you think of him. (Daniel Sylvester)
11. Ought
More Than Any Other Day
(Constellation)
Having formed in the wake of the 2012 Quebec student protests, it's easy to analogize the youthful rebellion on the streets of Montreal with the raw energy and anxiety conveyed by Ought's music. It's also easy to run off a list of other musicians that have had an obvious impact on the band's sound: from the strangled vocals of the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano to the jaunty art-rock of the Talking Heads to the much-copied loud-quiet-loud structure of a Pixies tune, there's no shortage of sonic comparisons.
And yet, More Than Any Other Day is far more refreshing and vibrant than it is derivative. Baby-faced frontman Tim Beeler delivers vocals with such urgency and angst that he demands the listener's attention, while the rest of the band manage to bring each song out of slow, sparse tension into explosions of melodic noise. Inaugural listens may leave charmed impressions of one-liners about an existential crisis in the milk aisle of the supermarket ("Today More Than Any Other Day"), but as you sink deeper into the eight-song set, there's a lot more bubbling under the surface. (Sarah Murphy)
Look for pop and rock albums 10-1 on Monday, December 8.