Sorry.
It's nearly the end of two thousand and fourteen (FUCK) and I thought about writing another top 20 records of the year list.
And then I remembered that I didn't actually finish last year's.
So here's the top 5:
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5. Haxan Cloak - Excavation
4. Julia Holter - Loud City Song
3. The Knife - Shaking the Habitual
2. Tim Hecker - Virgins
1. Oneohtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven
Daniel Lopatin keeps delivering, and on R Plus Seven there’s a real sense of him trying to do something more consciously important and high-concept than previous releases. The album is more cohesive – texturally – and more overt in its groping towards grandiose sentiment in a strange and disorientating digital environment.
The album
features Lopatin’s definitive jittery structure that applies on both the macro
and micro scale; clipped, repetitious vocal samples that dart about the mix are
woven into a fabric that never quite settles in one place. A consistent mood is
achieved from extremely fragmented components – the mark of excellent abstract
art of any stripe – and our listening experience is one of almost constant
tension and surprise.
Inside World, for example, prods at us with really
strange synthetic vocal ‘ahs’ that seem to meander and peter out, before a
sumptuous string line, backed by lush digital hiss, bleeds in and – just as
we’ve adjusted to its relative calm – gives way to another series of bubbling,
stop-start samples. The experience borders on frustration, but it keeps the ear
focused and re-contextualises every little thing we hear into a singular
revelatory moment.
The aesthetic
is akin to James Ferraro’s Far Side
Virtual in its hyper-digital glossy sheen but the irony is stripped away to
reveal some genuinely beautiful moments of euphoria, melancholy and sensuality.
Zebra threatens to burst into a
hands-in-the-air house track at any moment but becomes subsumed in a cascading
barrage of synth layers and, once again, tantalisingly rejects the economy of
set-up and pay-off for a more complex and jarring arrangement that revels in
the diverse qualities of synthetic sounds.
There’s a
conscious religiosity/spirituality in the effects that Lopatin utilises –
uplifting choral vocals, hypnotic church organ pieces – and this feels entirely
appropriate for the strange magic at work in this album. Lopatin has allowed
the music to cover extraordinarily wide ground in its aural symbolism and,
therefore, unlocked a sense of infinite complexity, primitive humanity and
revelatory wonder in the journey through brief flashes of experience and
sustained, elegiac, hymnal passages.
In utilising
a truly odd combination of new-age meditation sounds, commercial muzak gloss,
synthesised baroque horns, religious harmonics and jazzy erotica, Lopatin has
possibly created something of a definitive album that plays on the still unknown nature of the relationship
between ultra-consumerism, hyper-connectivity, spirituality, nature and
humanity.
----------------------------------------------------
I had only written the review for Oneohtrix Point Never's deserved winner, so there it is. I won't bother writing about the others; I ain't gonna waffle on about records that are a whole year old now. We've moved on. Andy Murray won.
Look ahead to a shimmering future with hundreds more end-of-year lists and global tragedies.
Who will it be this year?
Kanye?
Tay Tay?
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