Favorite Albums
2014
2014 was a calendar year for SYFFAL.
AAAAAAAAAAAND YEAH IT WAS A CALENDAR YEAR FOR EVERYONE BRO, THAT'S WHAT CALENDARS DO, THEY TRACK THE DAYS OF THE YEAR BRO.
Nah, frealdo, 2014 was a dope year for the SYFFALs. I mean, lots of weird shit happened. For example:
Tim decided over the summer that he was done full time SYFFALing, to focus more on not SYFFALing. This means he gave his keys to the SYFFAL executive bathroom over to Tom. So now it's myself (Joel) and Tom who lead this group of music misfits in our constant fondling and fellating of all things balls ass and jesus balls.
Tom's chin won Best New Artist at the VMAs and is now working on its second paleo cook book.
Brando discovered he's actually a fucking pirate and loves pho like it's nobody's business.
Johnny spread his wings and is now dancing three nights a week at Danglin' Willies on the diagonal highway in Niwot, Colorado.
Emp found seven new ways to say "trill" and we didn't even know about it until Urban Dictionary called and asked to knight the muthafucker for such amazing wordplayz. I managed to legalize beekeeping in the small city outside Chicago where I am current whipping boy for the uneducated and angry.
And we welcomed a new writer from the Pacific Northwest, Ralph, to our coven of musical hyperfandom. Ralph is seventeen and works at Hot Topic, but only bumps indie hip hop and mainstream R&B and he's really really into high fat, high protein diet shits. Which is good for Tom's chin.
Here's our individual favorite albums from 2014, they are not supposed to be yours bro. If some of these are also yours, awesome. If they are not, Fuckin' balls bro, have a listen and maybe geek out like we did this year. If anyone tells you their list is better than yours, kindly remind them after kicking them in the fucking throat, no one cares what they like, because they are polyunsaturated Fuckballs.
What did we miss here bros? TELL US ON THE SOCIALS SO WE CAN GO TO BED WITHOUT A SENSE OF IMPENDING "ah Fuck, I missed a new Everclear album?!?!?!".
We love yous. Thanks for reading us fuckers's bropinions on the awesome balls.
Joel Frieders
10. Escape To New York - A Long Time Between Monsters: This shorty album was on repeat on two different vacations this summer, one included quiet time on a boat. This is my boat album. It sounds both adolescent and mature, but the playfulness with which they demonstrate their maturity is what makes this an addicting listen.
9. Run The Jewels - RTJ2: I remember this came out and I had a day off and I had to mow the lawn. I SPRINTED to drop off my kids, SPRINTED to the gym, then SPRINTED home to mow with my big ass headphones on. I MOWED THE shit OUT OF THAT LAWN. And I have been ever since. BEST. ENERGY. EVER. ALWAYS.
8. Bombay Bicycle Club - So Long, See You Tomorrow: I never knew how much whimsy I could handle until I sat on this album for about a month straight. I consider this album a relative I like getting extremely fucking baked with.
7. Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds In Country Music: I slept on this album pretty fucking hard, but when it finally hit me I was all over this like a spilled shot of Jim Beam on a Nashville bar floor.
6. Caribou - Our Love: I love individual songs on this album much more than the whole thing, but I did spend a shitload of time with this album and I would like it to continue to be best friends with my loins.
5. This Patch of Sky - S/T: I spent a great deal of my commutes to and from work listening to this album and I really have no idea how I got to work/home because I don't remember any of it. Stunning from front (dat cello tho) to back (that beard bro), This Patch of Sky are the sons I never had, but I'm proud to stand on the shoulders of giants alongside them as they continue melting faces and undergarments the world over. Post rock? More like BROst rock, amirite?
4. Ben Howard - I Forget Where We Were: So much sad in so much powerful apprehension. This album convinced me I needed Ben Howard in my life, but it also told me it was okay to cry, as long as I cried with an accent.
3. Germany Germany - Reconnect: This album is the best electronic album of 2014, hands up in the air. The guitar work on this shit makes me FURIOUS in that it's absolutely perfect and a complete demonstration of how to make your energy become audible through fucking speakers to the ears of strangers. I lust for this album after three drinks.
2. Angus & Julia Stone - Self Titled: This was the album I didn't want to love because Julia's voice bugged the Fuck out of me. But Angus? BRO, DAT ANGUS. Angus carries this shit so hard that even my kids call this the "music with the boy and the girl" because all they can see is the album cover on my phone when it plays. We love this album. Hard.
1. Death From Above 1979 - The Physical World: THERE IS NOTHING ELSE THIS COMPLETELY BALLS AWESOME FROM 2014 THAT I CARE TO REMEMBER. ALL I WANT TO DO IS LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM NON-STOP AND THEN FLIP FIATS AND PRIUSES AND shit. BEST. ALBUM. OF. YEAR.
Tom Doz
10. Strand Of Oaks - Heal: Dude, this album is unpredictable and all over the place like Joel's lazy eye when he's doing cartwheels on his front lawn. At first it bothered me, but now I look at it like chapters in a graphic novel with a lot of hot chicks and hermits.
9. Spoon - They Want My Soul: Best Spoon album since Gimmie Friction. Don't really need to say anything more. You probably know about this album....lets move on....
8. Kishi Bashi - Lightght: Kishi Bashi is the whole packaged smashed into tight black denim jeans. He kills the tender songs. He kills the dancey songs. He kills the delightfully strange songs. He kills creativity. And he KILLS it live.
7. Perfume Genius - Too Bright: This album is more in your face that Hadreas' previous albums, but it also has those moments of vulnerability that I love. shit, he can be so melodic and it just brings out all my feelz.
6. Phantogram - Voices: Okay, even though half of the songs on Voices were from an EP released last year I had to include this album. Their dense sound is up on a pedestal that is shared only with M83.
5. Small Wonder - Wendy: This snuck up behind me like Johnny with a lubed up thumb for the bum. It came came out in January, but I didn't listen until the end of November and my infatuation has not yet faded.
4. James Vincent Mc Morrow - Post Tropical: Goddamn this asshole is as fragile as the wine glasses that keep breaking in my dishwarsher. Sure I could hand wash them, but it's not as fun without the suspense at the end of the cycle. Post Tropical is kinda like that; the fragility excites me.
3. Is It Rain In My Face - The Framer: If you haven't heard this album I can guarantee that you haven't heard anything quite like it. shit is like electronic and folk at the same time. It sounds broken. It sounds beautiful. It sounds like Layne Staley impersonating Neil Young passing a kidney stone.
2. Wildcat! Wildcat! - No Moon At All: It's weird...I don't necessarily crave this album, but when it's on I say to myself every time: THIS ALBUM IS fucking BALLZTASTIC. There are no breaks in greatness....you're on the edge of your seat for the entirety of it's girth. Wildcat! Wildcat!, you wanna go steady with me? Can I wear your letterman's jacket?
1. The War On Drugs - Lost In A Dream: Lost In A Dream got the most plays on my man pod this year. I liked it at first listen, loved it 5 listens later and now I want to slip into a full body condom, pretend they are my Frank Drebin and jump on to the bed with them in my arms.
Tim Baker
10. Greasy Hearts - Self Titled: Greasy Hearts came to me courtesy of SYFFAL/TIM favorites The Mad Doctors, and they are a delicious slice oftall-boy-with-the-pull-tab-rock-n-roll. It is the best album of 2014 to get drunk to while walking the streets and singing at the top of your lungs. Kudos to these assholes for making me thirsty for Rock.
9. Shirt - Rap: Shirt was a revelation for me. Dude had all the charm and sass that I expect from my Queens. NYC MCs with the added element of complete and total outsider integrity that made me smile in my shorts.
8. Michael Christmas - Is This Art?: Michael Christmas was the breath of fresh air that has been missing from rap for me. The dude from out of nowhere (or in this case Boston) who has the funniest lines, the smoothest flow, and the most unique outlook of all the 2014 rappers, sans one (see my number 1).
7. Armand Hammer - Furtive Movements: The perfect righteous anger that originally pulled me into hip hop in the first place, only repackaged and modernized. Billy Woods and Elucid are the embodiment of what I love and expect from hip hop. Thanks fellers.
6. New Coke - Duct Tape Your Mouth: This is the most romantic album of the year. Hands down. Seriously, what is more romantic than 3 songs about murdering the person who is breaking up your family? NOT A fucking THING BRO!
5. Run The Jewels - RTJ2: Kudos to El and Mike for building on and topping a classic. Pure hard as Fuck rap for people who want their hard as Fuck rap to not sound like Jedi Mind Tricks.
4. BadBadNotGood - III: This is probably the album I have listened to most this year, partially because it is fucking amazing and sensual, and partially because I don't have to worry about curses when the kids are around. Perfect instrumental sensh sessions.
3. Ben Enalo - Windows with Light: Disclaimer, Ben is my friend. In fact he lives upstairs. He is a fucking genius. I didn't even know he was a musician until a year or two in. He told me he made songs, and I listened expecting to cringe. Boy was I fucking off. Ben is amazing. Windows with Light is the most perfectly lived in dream I have ever experienced.
2. D'Angelo and The Vanguard - Black Messiah: If I am being honest, I am still hashing out my feelings on Black Messiah, but with every listen it gets better. I am starting to think it might be better than Voodoo because of how cohesively great it is. Voodoo was great, but I always had to start it 4 songs in for it to feel like I wanted it to. Black Messiah, I can just put it on and melt into my Eames chair like a boss.
1. Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy: Mike is the best rapper alive. Hands fucking down. Dark Comedy is his musical flag being planted. No album came close to Dark Comedy in both genre pushing and genre perfect and no album felt more like the person who made it. No airs. no fronting, pure Mike Eagle and that my friends is the best kind of Mike Eagle.
Brandon Backhaus
10. Bike for Three! - So Much Forever: I honestly completely forgot about this record until looking back over everything and remembering how much I liked it when it came out. Best part of year end lists.
9. WL - Hold: I’m a dude that has high highs and low lows, brobros. This one got me through some of the sads. “You’re Not Really Here” in particular.
8. Gardens and Villa - Dunes: This was less an album I loved, and more the soundtrack to a particular moment during the last year that I hope the remember forever. Though I do love the album.
7. The Growlers - Chinese Fountain: And the award for my biggest slept on record goes to. I’m so lame for somehow just breezing over this. The beach goth is real.
6. The Budos Band - Burnt Offering: I couldn’t pick a song as this hasn’t left my car playlist since the day I included it and has been the soundtrack to many a freestyle over the last few months. Thems the fucking breaks!
5. Run the Jewels - RTJ2: This fucking albums is so ridiculous I couldn’t even think of anything original to say outside of holy fucking face melt, bros. Still can’t. Nobody gets away with the blatant shit El and Mike are onto. Except them.
4. Francisco the Man - Loose Ends: Loose Ends is the horizon because the horizon is where the soaring highs and the deepest lows decide everything is going to be OK.
3. Milo - A Toothpaste Suburb: Subverting the subversives in a way that hadn’t sunk in for me ’til recently.
2. Young Fathers - Dead: Early this year, Dead dominated my listening preferences like Suicide Girls dominate my masturbation preferences.
1. Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy: This was the year of Mike: The Mike Eagle show featuring comedians, freestyles, and performances to the release of this record to bromancing Hannibal Burress to European tours to his Secret Skin Podcast and back to Culver City.
Ralph Perez
10. Sage Francis - Copper Gone: I had to break my rule, and make a last minute change to my list with this one. I fucking LOVE THIS ALBUM. I bought two copies guys! From "Vonnegut Busy" and its life lesson mantra's, to "ID Thieves" and its take no prisoners call outs, and the seasonal depression theme song "Make'em Purr". Sage knows how to make life records (no pun intended), right when I need them most in my life.
9. Ill Clinton - Ambap: I don't normally keep beat tapes in regular rotation, with few exceptions, and Ill Clinton's AMBAP is one of those said exceptions. The tape has become my personal backing music for my work week. Even when its not on, I can hear "Loods" in the back of my head, or is it the LOODS fucking with my head? Either way.
8. Seez Mics - Cruel Fuel: This tape snuck its way into my regular rotation, and dug its seezy little heals in hard. From "M.O.M", to "Never Apologize To Your Rapist", Seez rapped his ass off with magical hooks and some guy making most of the music with his mouth Biz.
7. Busdriver - Perfect Hair: Hellfyre Club dominated like a predator drone team on a mission, and Driver was the Tom Cruise of the Top Gun squad. If volleyball in cut off jean shorts was still a thing, "Colonize the Moon", and "Upsweep" would be blasting loud, but its "Ego Death" that would set the scene for flipping the bird to any fucker trying to occupy their airspace.
6. Rob Sonic - Alice In Thunderdome: Jesus guys, Rob Sonic almost lost me on his hating of "House Guest", but thankfully I saw past his flaws, and looked at those huge balls he raps off on his latest. "GORF", "Kill Joy" and "Rock Paper Scissors" are all Jonah Hill & Brad Pitt guys. So moneyballs!
5. Uncommon Nasa - New York Telephone: I really fucking love this album guys. Not nearly as much as Nasa loves the Pacers, or New Balance, but I fucking LOVED IT. "This Bodega's Trying To Kill Me" with Elucid, or "574s", or "Desperate Times (Crushed)", all these tracks come on, and I get 'Punch a baby' excited. Perfected Prog Rap, even if he loves SOA, I still Fuck with him.
4. Clipping. - CLPPNG: Sometimes you hear an album, and you are astonished so much so, that you don't tell anyone about it for weeks. This album came out, and knocked me on my ass so hard. I mean Daveed NEVER EVER raps in first person at all. The entire record is a story! "Body & Blood" is one of the sickest songs, and is menacing, and intimidating with out all of the screaming and yelling that Death Grips does to drive it home.
3. Milo - A Toothpaste Suburb: I love Milo. I love this album. I want to live in his neighborhood and get coffee and bagels, and dissect our favorite verses from Inner City Griots. "Just Us" is powerful, and honest, and makes me glad I've not had to experience such loss, because it seems gut-wrenching. If I ever do, this album will guide me through it.
2. Schoolboy Q - Oxymoron: Q is the love child of Ice Cube and Ol'Dirty Bastard. He's all Piss, Vinegar, and wit. If there is another artist who wrote a harder album, with better hooks that eat their way into your inner monologue, tell me. "Break the Bank", and "Man Of The Year" are things classics are made of.
1. Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy: This album is perfect. From beginning to end, front to back, asshole to peehole. It has humor , smarts, crazy lines within lines, and it is one of the best things I've heard in probably 10 years from anyone. "Qualifiers", "Informations", "A History Of Modern Dance", and "Doug Stamper", are songs that never leave my psyche. OME for President.
Johnny Symmes
10. Taylor Swift - 1989: Some really solid bangers on this. Sneaks in off the strength of Shake It Off and Blank Space.
9. RiFF RAFF - Neon iCon: This was a highly anticipated album in my opinion. It determined whether RiFF RAFF was a meme or a rapper. Well he answered the call and put together a surprisingly solid album. Eat shit haters.
8. Andrea Dawn - Doll: Came across this great album by Andrea Dawn and put the album review up on SYFFAL. Total sleeper. This whole thing just plucked at my heart strings at just the right time. Go check it out.
7. Air Dubai - Be Calm: Another highly anticipated record for me. When it finally dropped it did not disappoint. Chalked full of classics. I Fucks with AD heavy.
6. My Body Sings Electric - Part I The Night Ends: These bros always put out great music. They take their time and put out a solid product that never let's me down.
5. Phantogram - Voices: This one caught me off guard because it's some Del and Tom shit but I checked it out and ended up listening to it until I cut the sleeves off my hoodie and gauged a hole in my chin.
4. Run the Jewels - RTJ2: What can I say? RTJ. Fuck. Again. Straight kilt it. KILT IT. I hope they never stop.
3. PHOX - PHOX: This band is smashing their way through the scene and getting bigger by the second. They deserve it because this album is really beautiful. I put this on any weekend and just float around the house like a Disney princess.
2. ScHoolboy Q - Oxymoron: When this dropped I was bumping it in a rental car for a weekend. It stayed in rotation heavy for the whole year. Anything that keeps my attention that long is worthy of a top three spot on this list.
1. Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy: Mike Eagle will not fail. I was amped when this vinyl showed up on my doorstep and it has barely left the deck since. I'm in love with this album. I would.
Employee
10. Field Medic - P E G A S U S T H O T Z: P E G A S U S T H O T Z is a transient sortie into the wilderness as ideated by the idiosyncratic troubadour from San Francisco Field Medic. Like acid and the trek to the parking lot following a Phish show: nothing makes sense. Frankly, I prefer an incoherent, jaggy, pulpy painting to a pristine Piet Mondrian be it Monday or Friday. "Gypsy Dead Girl", the EP's opener, is a wailing, winsome window to the world in which this wizardly weirdo whirls; Field Medic mewls about the mystical, the modern, and the mainstream. It's like he's infusing his lamented wanderer with a fresh formaldehyde Ferris wheel. Field Medic's forward-thinking yet furtive P E G A S U S T H O T Z is a pleasant pointer finger pointing in the right direction.
9. Steel Tipped Dove - Nothing Touches The Ground Here: Hovering above heads that hurl hypocritical hi-hats like apocryphal apples Nothing Touches The Ground Here high-fives furtive ferociousness and frolics in the foyer of foundation shifting. Composing a craterous cacophony that crashes and crushes Steel Tipped Dove soars in the sunlight spreading his rapturous aplomb. Nothing Touches The Ground Here houses a resplendent remix rodeo of Bats for Lashes "L"; it's a stroke of zany, heartfelt hand-clapping that is Herculean in magnitude. A tribute to stand the test of timidity, tenacity, and treachery, it's an antidote for all that is anodyne and commands consideration as an instant classic. Steel Tipped Dove's debonair wing-flexing pushes Nothing Touches The Ground Here beyond the breaking point.
8. The Ivy Hums - Drafts: "Drafts" is a demure, dense, drifting, devastating-to-dilettantes daydream. Buttressed by the boggy bounce of the Botulism Brothers aka Morbidly-O-Beats and MJC, Hannah Mickunas matriculates misery, mirth, and melancholy. Clocking in at under a quarter-of-an-hour Drafts does delightful deeds and dances in decidedly dreary dropkicks. "Small White Feather" sounds like a song ripped from the guts of a submerged seagull's AM stomach radio; the poem that pleasantly and profoundly plays the part of polarity. Drafts is this dour dynastic's doorbell-ring and their artful, thoughtful, considerate detonation depicts destiny, defeat, dynamism, and down-to-the-dirt, dread-disseminating drums. "You are the Small...White Feather...that I have become...I have no home to turn to...Now I know...where...where I am from." Indeed.
7. Seez Mics - Cruel Fuel: Cruel Fuel crept up on me like a cleft-handed cutie pie and smacked its way to one of the year's most pioneering, unusual, and invigorating indie Rap album. Seez Mics is a mercurial master of ceremony whose probity he himself is probing, poking, and prodding through plentiful puns playing with macabre metaphors. "Human Farm" is definitively my jolly, jarring jam: "I want to see that smile of yours, Two legs bad, Let's get down on all fours, We Are Animals, Who learned to keep score." The melange induces pure merriment hearing Seez Mics make mincemeat of society's pedantic, paranoid Penetration Police. Earnestly, eerily, enigmatically, eagerly attacking anachronistic angles, Seez Mics stands head-and-shoulders above the ducks doused in dandruff.
6. N8 NOFACE - DOLOTAPE: Sex, Disco, & Cocaine swathed deceptively in sensually psychotic, aurally-Atari'd-out, apocalyptic arias. DOLOTAPE lays bare Lycra-clad Lotharios by peeling back Pop's mawkish layers of imitation cologne, caked-on foundation, and synthetically-stentorian manicured fingernails. Timlaska aka SYFFAL ELDER SCROLLZ aka Timothy Baker limned N8 NOFACE as "the lovechild of They Might Be Giants, Kid Frost, and Prince: I'm convinced he is correct as DOLOTAPE is a drum machine enveloped in a bundle of lit dynamite sticks. Giovanni Marks aka Subtitle slays his raucous, reverberating remix of N8 NOFACE's wonderfully-wild "Want 2." DOLOTAPE is what it's like to wake up from a bad dream in a cold sweat only to realize you've awakened in another anachronistic hallucination and you can hear someone walking down the hallway wearing lingerie while they lustfully swing a platinum machetti with such precision you can taste the consciousness.
5. clipping. - CLPPNG: This tornado-of-a-ternion turned in what is surely the starkest, most startling scorcher in Hip Hop this year. Daveed Diggs dances inside of dutifully designed vignettes; vivisecting visages of vapid verses and replacing them with automatic-fire, nail-biting novellas. Each discordant yarn unraveling frantically like they were each isotopes from the future. Diggs' pulverizing plinth on his quantum quests consists of William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes; production panthers bearing a crushingly conjectural credo. "CLPPNG" continues in the West Coast's ambitious arc of unleashing alien and influential Hip Hop that doesn't bother bending the continuum; it patently shatters it so that the shards shred all suckers and sycophants.
4. Savage Sister - Huge Moves: "Huge Moves" is not technically an LP as it is a 7" record, but its fullness and scope is stunning and searing for what it achieves in a fleeting frame of time. Its eponymous lead song is like the hulking, fearless, flawless face of Yosemite's El Capitan being sheered away with a Queen Ann butter knife attached to a phalanx of glowing car batteries. Chloe Lundgren's voice is unsurpassed and has grown into, frankly, the most critical, exciting siren currently amplified in the arena; not only does it command and demand attention, even in the face of Michael Tenzer's striking, seething , synthesizer effrontery, but it blazes a palpable despondency which unequivocally incinerates all the remaining pieces of your already-broken heart. Dream Pop from a dream.
3. Jefre-Cantu-Ledesma - Songs of Forgiveness: Though ranked third I've returned to "Songs of Forgiveness" in a greater quantity than any other album I listed. An apex of ambiance; a dozen decaying flowers; majestic CGI-sprawling skyscrapers crumbling; melting Facebook Polaroids; makeup brushes next to dramatically-extinguished cigarettes; an elderly woman's realized life leaving her physical soma behind in the luminosity of a valence window; a picture of someone you loved in a lifetime that feels like it never belonged to you; a fraught simper disintegrating to reveal another deteriorated facade constructed of platitudes; rings on fingers that are crossed when eyes are shut; and truly, phenomenally visual.
2. ScHoolboy Q - Oxymoron: A tour de force by any conceivable calculation; running the gamut from gallivanting in his glory on the proud, pumping paean "Hell of A Night" to barrel's and bottle's bottom in his Goliath, grinding confessional "Prescription/Oxymoron." A Swami Sweating Swag, ScHoolboy Q carves a colossal crease into California's fabled conurbation of Los Angeles. Not only does he bang out his bona fides, but he burnishes it by basking in a basket of boiling, bilious beats and luring one of Kurupt's superlative studio shots from the Living West Coast Legend. Oxymoron's mosaic is menacing and momumental; Q's pedigree is potent and placed alongside the day's prosaic Pop penchant, it is a rebuke of Ronnie Gardocki-screaming-at-Vic Mackey proportions. Instead of embracing the emblematic, lethargic, lithium-disguised-as-lightning-in-a-bottle major label boilerplate ScHoolboy Q oxygenated an opus that is sympathetic, psychotic, SWAG'd-The-Fuck-Out, and insanely ingenuous.
1. BSBD - GLACIERS//MELTED: Time is wholly measured and each second is accounted for so when the oeuvre's hourglass is turned on its head, it's bound to turn you on yours. "GLACIERS//MELTED" is a clotted, cloudy, curious, cryptic, cacophonous creation curated confidently outside of the cosmos' confines. Bearing a run time buzzing assuredly towards ninety minutes, it never once falters or lends itself to tedium; each convocation's catalyst and climax coincide at the crest of world-weary waves, instead vacillating in a viscid vortex. Child Actor's scathing sincerity, Lotte Kestner's sparkling softness, JMSN's somber screams, and Terra Lopez's saccharine solemnity support BSBD by filling out the role of an ensemble cast from the uppermost of echelons. BSBD exists and excels in an ecology that is exclusively their ethereal provenance. For those reasons, "GLACIERS//MELTED" is the Best Album Of 2014.