I came across this list on Pitchfork a few weeks ago of their top 100 albums from the last 5 years. As usual with Pitchfork, I didn’t recognise a great swathe of the albums featured, although I was surprised to see quite a few of the albums I have enjoyed a lot over the last few years come up. And that got me thinking about what music has had the biggest impact on my tastes recently. Especially when I consider these 5 years have covered probably the most important in my life so far, namely the last two years of school and the whole of my university days.
So here’s my own personal list of my favourite albums from 2010 to 2014. These aren’t necessarily in the order that I would consider them all the best, but they’re more in order of which ones I have enjoyed the most, or which have dominated my interests the most significantly. I’m sure I’ve probably forgotten several. Nevertheless, the list was supposed to be about 15, but whilst I was writing it out, more and more suggestions kept coming up until I finally had to limit the list to 25. Sorry about this being so long. Plus if anyone ever does read this and have any suggestions of things they think I might enjoy, please let me know! I’ve found my taste is sadly limited and I’m sure I’m missing out on lots of amazing things.
25. Haim – Days Are Gone
A trio of sisters who have probably gone from playing guitar covers in their garage as kids to creating an album of super catchy throwback pop-rock. It’s really endearing, adding a fresh quirk and energy to the sort of girl power rock of Pat Benatar and The Pretenders.
Top tracks: Don’t Save Me; The Wire; If I Could Change Your Mind
24. Bon Iver – Bon Iver
Listening to this album seems to create images in my head of vast landscapes of fields and dense forests with early sunlight breaking through the trees. Justin Vernon’s work does come across as being the sort of music that would have been conceived alone, playing a guitar in the forest. But this self-titled record has a little more of an edge to it, experimentations with instruments and arrangements to make some songs which can be genuinely gorgeous. Vernon’s emotive falsetto is sometimes hard to understand, and lyrics are often vague, but I get the sense of this being about a need for losing oneself at times, and an awareness of how you fit within the places around you.
Top tracks: Holocene; Michiant; Towers
23. Mac DeMarco – Salad Days
I was pretty fucking delighted when I discovered Mac DeMarco last year. His distinctly low-fi jangle rock have these laid back, drunken guitar melodies and mellow vibes that always leave me in a goofy chilled out state. I listened to this and 2012’s 2 almost interchangeably and I couldn’t decide which I should pick for this list, but I think Salad Days just pips it. More personal, it has DeMarco considering his relationship with his longterm girlfriend, and worrying about getting old, before remembering that he’s 23 and in no place to be concerning himself with such quandaries. But it’s still infectiously listenable, catchy and a lot of fun. I think his videos and interviews neatly sum up his chain-smoking slacker appeal, with his offbeat style and delightfully perverse humour.
Top tracks: Goodbye Weekend; Passing Out Pieces; Chamber of Reflection
22. Arctic Monkeys – AM
Frankly I find Alex Turner’s style choices come across like he’s trying too hard sometimes (maybe I do just miss the band when they were awkward teenagers like I was). You can’t say their same about their last album, which proudly boasts of its hip-hop and classic rock influences but still comes across as effortlessly new and simply cool. It’s a world away from the messy Sheffield nights out of Whatever People Say I Am… yet is still brimming with Turner’s sense of wit and clever lyrics.
Top tracks: Arabella; R U Mine?; Do I Wanna Know?
21. Disclosure – Settle
I don’t give a shit whether this album really is true house music, like I’ve seen in plenty of arguments online. Settle stands out amongst all the swathes of dance-pop you hear in clubs for its sheer ability to combine textured production with some serious pop hooks. The great thing about Settle is that it’s a proper album of great tracks, not just some hit singles and some filler. There’s a surprising and satisfying variety, from the glitchy preaching of ‘When a Fire Starts to Burn’, to the uptempo sensuality of ‘White Noise’.
Top tracks: White Noise; Confess to Me; When a Fire Starts to Burn
20. Jon Hopkins – Immunity
The art of the album as album – this record is something that really can only be best appreciated by listening to it as a whole. I saw reviews describing this as electro, IDM (intelligent dance music) and ambient. Immunity takes its time to create vast symphonies of organic atmospheric sound, a lot of which is actually taken from natural sounds and objects, then distorted to create unheard sounds. This approach of experimentation is reflected in the album cover of a microscopic image of coloured crystals.
Top tracks: Open Eye Signal; Collider; Sun Harmonics
19. Janelle Monae – The ArchAndroid
A wildly ambitious double album by the all-round flawless superlady. Taking inspiration from the Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, it loosely tells a tale of a time travelling android called Cindi Mayweather. Its essence though is a potent mixture of styles, combining among other things, indie R&B, psychedelic pop rock, Prince/Michael Jackson-era funk, and cyberpunk. It sounds extreme. In some ways it is – it’s too long and the second half is over excessive. But so many songs are genuinely great, hugely listenable and clever pop hits that are just so charismatic and irresistible.
Top tracks: Tightrope; Cold War; Locked Inside
18. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do
I wasn’t very familiar with Fiona Apple before hearing this record, though finding out more about some of the obstacles she’s faced help make a tiny bit more sense of this challenging but compelling collection. Frequently sparse, with raw and minimal elements that are so thoughtfully arranged to give this a sound which can only really be described as powerful. Plus her songwriting is soooo good – lyrics that just flow sensually and turns of phrase that I find delightful whenever I hear them (“The rib is the shell, the heart is the yolk, and I just made a meal for us both to choke on” is one of my faves). This is the sort of album that deserves your full attention, and I blame a lack of effort on my part for it being fairly lower on this list.
Top tracks: Hot Knife; Werewolf; Daredevil
17. Björk – Biophilia
Björk’s quest of combining pop with the avant garde really came to fruition with the immensely ambitious, imaginative and challenging Biophilia. It’s a concept album which explores our relations with one another through the massive expanse of nature and the construction of the universe, for example ‘Mutual Core’ using the image of tectonic plates drifting, merging and parting. From the creation of new instruments to a tie-in interactive app, the scope of this album was pretty massive and could’ve overwhelmed the music itself, but thankfully they proved to be some of her warmest and most successful in years, full of moments that can’t help but make you swoon.
Top tracks: Cosmogony, Moon, Virus
16. Poliça – Give You the Ghost
Now this is how you use autotune properly! Not to cover up bad singing, but here as Channy Leanagh uses it to create distortion, helping produce songs which build an impressive atmosphere and a sense of disconcertion. With drumlines honed in with military precision, sweet layers of minor key synths and a fascinating blend of funky bass, this album is a unique listen that improves after several listens.
Top tracks: Lay Your Cards Out; Dark Star; Wandering Star
15. Grimes – Visions
This was my first listen to any of Claire Boucher’s work and you can’t help but immediately get drawn into it. If it’s the bite of the heavy electro dream pop hooks, or the almost childlike waifish voice that holds it all together and sings powerful lyrical songs about reclaiming her body and an array of fantastic hallucinations, it’s all fabulously direct. A little too long perhaps, but there’s no doubting the intent and the intelligence and singularity of this album.
Top tracks: Oblivion; Genesis; Be a Body
14. The Weeknd – House of Balloons
The first of Canadian artist Abel Tasfaye’s trilogy of self-released mixtapes, House of Balloons is a collection of downtempo alternative R&B tracks infused with a trip-hop and ambient electronic vibe. Packed full of samples, Tasfaye sings in this anxious-sounding falsetto that belies the album’s theme of the pleasures and downsides of partying, drug taking and anonymous sex. There’s an impressive sense of the nocturnal mood, with lyrics dripping with raw sexual desire and existential dread. It’s heavy but incredibly engrossing, and feels freshest here before he dragged the theme on for two more mixtapes.
Top tracks: Wicked Games; The Morning; House of Balloons – Glass Table Girls
13. First Aid Kit – The Lion’s Roar
I wasn’t aware of the popularity of country music in Sweden but it seems for some Swedes it does rate as highly as their love of heavy metal and electronica. This album by sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg is more indie-country, but comes highly inspired by classic American folk and country, including their dedication to singer songwriter Emmylou Harris. What definitely characterises The Lion’s Roar though is their absolutely gorgeous vocal harmonies, and indeed their crisp and powerful voices individually.
Top tracks: Blue, Emmylou, To a Poet
12. St. Vincent – St. Vincent
Annie Clarke has described her self-titled fourth album as being “a party record you could play at a funeral”. It finds her in a much more exuberant and outlandish mood than her last work, but still retaining much of her eccentric fascination with the macabre. Packed full of innovative guitar freakouts and pinprick synths but never to the point of excess, St. Vincent is a diatribe about, amongst other things, the oversaturation of media and screens in modern life and the sense of disconcertion and actual disconnection that creates.
Top tracks: Bring Me Your Loves; Digital Witness; Rattlesnake
11. Metronomy – The English Riviera
A highly appealing and breezy pop-rock record inspired by seaside towns on the Devonshire coastline, here reimagined as glamorous hotspots equivalent to the likes of Monte Carlo. The laidback tone, low-key instrumentals and mellow vocals may come across as a little superficial, especially in the dreamy visions it evokes of sundrenched romances. Indeed the album does lack a little bite, but I don’t see why everything has to cover dark and heavy themes. The English Riviera is highly polished and effortlessly chilled, it’s the restraint and lack of complication that helps makes these tracks so catchy and charismatic.
Top tracks: The Look; The Bay; Everything Goes My Way
10. Grizzly Bear – Shields
Definitely the band’s most sophisticated album yet – it’s exquisitely crafted, full of little details and layers that become clearer after you listen a couple of times. It comes across to me as being quite melancholy, with some fairly abstract lyrics giving the album a genuine emotional core. You can really tell this was a collaborative album by the four members and the whole album has this texture which I’d love to hear on a proper vinyl record.
Top tracks: A Simple Answer; Yet Again; Sleeping Ute
9. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
The soundscapes and feelings and tales the band manage to evoke on The Suburbs are just so great. The remarkable lyrics detail for me their teenage memories of being stuck in small towns, contending with boredom yet tinged with an almost overwhelming sense of tension, of unknowingness about their fears of the future, the beyond, as well as dreams of escape. It’s still an incredibly warm album with a feeling of play and nostalgia.
Top tracks: Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains); Ready to Start; Deep Blue
8. Melody’s Echo Chamber – Melody’s Echo Chamber
This one’s really grown on me the last year or so. A hugely impressive debut from the French singer Melody Prochet, the album is a psychedelic dream pop that finds inspiration in its fantastic production through contrasts. Playful pop melodies are infused with fuzzy guitar blasts, and Prochet’s soft floaty vocals drifts between it all, singing songs of yearning and heartbreak. It’s all pretty otherworldly, building dreams upon dreams to make something that you can get genuinely lost in.
Top tracks: Some Time Alone, Alone; I Follow You; Endless Shore
7. tUnE yArDs – W H O K I L L
Within the first minute of opening track ‘My Country’, you just know you’re listening to something just so singular and so refreshingly bold. Insanely playful with a seriously exciting approach, based mostly in tribal-style percussion, bass and Meryl Garbus’s distinctive vocals all looped over one another; any sound can become music. Each track is distinct, and actually covers some serious stuff, from her disturbed reaction to the prevalence of violence on the streets and police brutality, to the vast inequalities between genders and classes, and attitudes to her own body (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…”). It’s super appealing and danceable, and a complete joy.
Top tracks: Bizness; Gangsta; My Country
6. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
Polly Jean Harvey’s latest, an understated folk-infused collection of war poems is really remarkable in its breadth but also in its intimacy. Inspired by WW1 poetry but drawing from the imagery and accounts from Afghanistan, Let England Shakes is striking in its compositions and storytelling. At its core, the album takes a quiet but bitter study of English history, how so much of it is driven by bloodshed and how so many events are the result of our seemingly innate appetite for violence.
Top tracks: The Words That Maketh Murder; In the Dark Places; England
5. Jessie Ware – Devotion
Sometimes I’m surprised just how much I adore this collection of R&B and soul-infused love songs by south-Londoner Ware. The whole thing feels both current and timeless, with some sleek production that makes every track sound like the aural equivalent of reclining on a bed draped in velvet or any other luxurious sexy activity. It all comes down to Ware’s silky smooth voice, which helps create songs that, unlike many dance and pop songs lately, doesn’t have to try hard or make a lot of noise to grab your attention and hold it. Elegant and impeccably styled, Ware’s genuine insights into the various sensations of love, lust and desire is excellent stuff.
Top tracks: 110% (If You’re Never Gonna Move); Running; Wildest Moments
4. Dirty Projectors – Swing Lo Magellan
Frontman Dave Longstreth has always been a lover of big ideas, which he had explored the last few years with a set of disparate concept albums which I’ve got to admit I’ve found mostly impenetrable. The Projectors’ latest album however strips this for a more focused and more personal set of tracks which still retain their erratic sense of experimentation. Songs switch easily between the playful and frenetic (‘Offspring Are Blank’, ‘Unto Caesar’) to some deceptively simple acoustic ballads (‘Impregnable Question’, ‘Swing Lo Magellan’), though all tracks feature Longstreth’s exploration for deeper meaning. Add in some ample usage of Amber Coffman and Olga Bell’s gorgeous vocal harmonies and you’ve got a genuinely exciting album which I’ve enjoyed many, many times.
Top tracks: Impregnable Question; About to Die; Offspring Are Blank
3. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Any glimpses of Annie Clarke’s quirks and eccentricities are only hinted at here in her pivotal third album, but when they are, you certainly know it. Her most insular album, it found her looking in at herself during a period of self-imposed isolation. Though relatively low-key and understated, the whole album throbs with this razor sharp tension between control and chaos. Relatively precise and mannered art pop songs (‘Cruel’, ‘Northern Lights’) suddenly erupt with tortured guitar shreds, often in place of Clarke’s own repressed emotional vocals which only really hint lyrically at the pressures she’s feeling. Like the suffocation on the album cover, tracks study Clarke’s dissatisfaction with societal norms (e.g. monogamy in ‘Chloe in the Afternoon’) and her place outside them (“You’re like a party I heard through a wall”). Complex, fascinating and super-cool, I’ve always found Strange Mercy to be one of those albums that can have a vice-like grip on me.
Top tracks: Cruel; Northern Lights; Dilettante
2. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles II
This is one of those albums I could happily listen to all day (and indeed I have). The sounds, the layers and the timbre are just so rich and dense and full of surprises and originality, I find myself composing whole music videos and scenes in my head when I listen to it. Rough and glitchy dance-punk characterised by abrasive noise-driven rave rhythms and Alice Glass’s shrieking vocals, before switching to softer, even delicate, electro-dream pop, and in many cases all within the same track, it’s bipolar and extremely polarising. ‘Empathy’ gets me closing my eyes and imagining dream rave scenes, while ‘Doe Deer’ just feels like making you want to kick a fucking door in. Full of energy, endlessly inventive and still fresh after 5 years.
Top tracks: Baptism; Empathy; Celestica
1. Tame Impala – Lonerism
Usually I find the albums I come to like the best are ones that had to grow on me in time and ones I often didn’t appreciate at first. But there are those odd times when you listen to something and you know instantly how fantastic it is, and for me this is one of them. With practically every part recorded solely by frontman Kevin Parker, it’s fitting that Lonerism is an album with explores introspection and feelings of isolation and loneliness. Yet Parker also spoke about his interest in making cheesy pop songs, but here infused with a potent psychedelic-electronic bluesy rock mixture that’s at once forward looking but drawing from 60s/70s era sonics (Parker’s John Lennon-esque vocals can’t help bringing up such comparisons). From the insta-iconic hard blues guitar riff of ‘Elephant’ to ‘Apocalypse Dreams’ with its poppy piano rhythms and vibrant vocals blurred with some lush synths and heavy guitars, Lonerism is always a surprising listen, something I feel is tinged with a sense of discovery every time I listen to it.
Top tracks: Elephant; Apocalypse Dreams; Mind Mischief
Extra mentions: Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi; Foals – Total Life Forever; Alt-J – An Awesome Wave; Chemical Brothers – Further; Sleigh Bells – Treats; Django Django – Django Django; LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening; FKA twigs – LP1; Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes; The Kills – Blood Pressures; Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; Savages – Silence Yourself; Queens of the Stone Age – Like Clockwork; Little Dragon – Ritual Union; The War on Drugs – Lost in the Dream; SBTRKT – SBTRKT; Manic Street Preachers – Rewind the Film; La Roux – Trouble in Paradise; Aphex Twin – Syro
Musings from a Darkened Room 