Top Albums of 2014 (me)

Year end lists are a fun rite of passage for the Internet age.  I swear there are millions of them out there by now, and after seeing Rolling Stone put its top 40 out in the magazine, I thought I'd take a swing at a top ten as well.

While Wikipedia's information is going to be suspect (for example, Miranda Lambert's album is missing from the list of 2014 albums), it is what I have available to easily see what was released in 2014.  Of note:

• Who out there knew that the Presidents of the United States of America were still releasing albums?  Not me!  They put out two this year.
• There is a band called I Killed the Prom Queen.  Of course there is.
• Sebastian Bach, Winger, and Tesla all put out new albums this year.  WTF?!?  Who buys that crap?  And someone said Rock and Roll was dead!

2014 has been a good year.  I have listened to a freaking TON of music this year.  I actually think it has made me more discerning, but it also has made it significantly harder to recall what I listened to and what I thought.  When I was in high school and could only afford 1 or 2 CDs a month, I really knew those CDs.  But now that I can hear a million different things at any given time, I just don't get that same deep level of digging in to music, unless it is so good that I keep going back to it again and again.  These ten albums listed here seem like albums I will keep around.

Anyway, my top ten.  I ran through Wikipedia's list of albums released this year and listed out the ones that I had heard.  From those, I started comparing them to each other to see which one I would rather hear forever.  Kind of the like way Flickchart does their movie rankings - compare one to the other and see which one wins.  I'm still not entirely satisfied that the order of these is right, but I feel pretty good that these ten belong in my top ten in some order.

1. First Aid Kit – Stay Gold
2. Beck – Morning Phase
3. Weezer – Everything Will Be Alright in the End
4. Spanish Gold – Spanish Gold
5. Hozier – Hozier
6. U2 – Songs of Innocence
7. Gary Clark Jr. – Live
8. Spoon – They Want My Soul
9. St. Vincent – St. Vincent
10. Foo Fighters – Sonic Highways

Interesting that I ended up being pretty chilled up there in my top two, and that no rap made my list at all.  Stay Gold is such a beautiful thing.  Feels classic while new.  Longing and gentle and effective to change my mood, which is an amazing thing in music.  I don't think Morning Phase was as good as Beck's Sea Change, but its still an excellent album.  I think I've talked enough about the rest of those, but this was a good year for music.

The albums that just missed the cut are TV on the Radio’s Seeds, Real Estate’s Atlas, Run the Jewels’ Run the Jewels 2, Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, and Coldplay’s Ghost Stories.

Honorable mentions: Temples’ Sun Structures, Jack White’s Lazaretto, YG's My Krazy Life, Benjamin Booker’s Benjamin Booker, Death from Above 1979’s The Physical World, New Pornographers' Brill Bruisers, Old 97’s Most Messed Up, Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron, Maroon 5’s V (I know, weird, but that Levine guy knows how to make serious pop hooks), and I’d like to say Black Key’s Turn Blue, but since I haven’t heard the whole album, I can’t include it above.

I hope that 2015 will be just as strong, and that I can keep up with talking about this stuff over the year.  Happy New Year!