Lists – Page 2 – Communiqué

Glasses’ Top Albums of 2015

by Sam Robinson

Does anybody listen to music anymore? Or do we just kind of pretend to have listened to the latest high-concept journalism-bait records and quote bot-generated thinkpieces about them to impress our friends who have also only pretended to listen to the albums in question. Last year I tried listening to music, and only came up with ten items to fill my listicle’s distended sac. So I gave up on that. Below are six albums I heard about in passing from cool people in 2015 – I hope you get invited to some killer New Year’s parties to quote these reviews at.

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6. Black Wing – …Is Doomed

From the ashes of Dan Barrett’s (Have a Nice Life, Giles Corey, Married), failed Drive-inspired synthpop project, Dan Barrett and the Cruisers, comes a bombastic, pop tinged electronic romp through the mind of one of the most exciting musicians working in shoegaze today. The effects driven guitars may be gone from this record, but there is no absence of emotional soundscapes in their wake. Heavily processed synth drum kits scintillate across the soundstage and vocal tracks dip into hyper-compressed clipping collages that can best be described as aural car wrecks. This might not be a strictly shoegaze record, but Barrett’s pedigree still manages to shine through.

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5 Riffs That Humans Wrote

Good day, readers. Inspired by fellow DJ Nick Myers’ late-night accusation that “all the good riffs have been written,” I give to you 5 examples of perfect riffage that will hopefully inspire the guitarists in all of us to turn up the ol’ Peavey and make something beautiful.

While this list is far from comprehensive (and totally ignores guitar solos, a totally different concept that I hope to address in a future post), I hope that it provides a good sampling of riffs for your heads to bang to.

A note: Two of these groups are playing shows in Philadelphia tonight, and if you have Facebook and a nose for guitars and basements, I bet you can find them.

1. Sleep – Holy Mountain

The lonely, droopy guitar line at the 4 minute mark is my jam. Last heard on John Sinclair’s show “Cosmic Debris.”

2. Painted Ship – And She Said Yes

Painted Ship were a legendary garage punk band from Vancouver. Active from 1965-68, they put out several dynamite 45s. 1966’s “And She Said Yes” was a ripping B-side. No bassist and a hollering lead singer is clearly the way to do things.

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Rock Bottom Radio’s top albums of 2014

Rock Bottom Radio is Shannen Gaffney. She is WKDU’s PR director and will host two radio programs beginning January 2015.

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Nick Manna’s Top Albums of 2014

*Radiator Hospital live in NY at Glasslands; Photo courtesy of BrooklynVegan*

Nick Manna will host a weekly program called Roadrunner beginning January 2015. Here are his favorite albums of the year from bottom to top:

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Dr. Plotkin’s Majikal List X-Perience: Top albums of 2014 and more

2014 was an excellent year in music and I couldn’t just write about all my favorite albums this year or I would end up talking forever. Instead, I broke this post down into five expositions on my favorite albums and short blurbs about some other ones. Finally, I couldn’t just sit back and not mention some of the great albums I’ve been digging on this year just because they didn’t come out in the last 12 months, so I threw a final couple of sentences at the page hoping they’d stick.

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9 albums, 7 singles, 5 shows, 3 mixes & 1 Man of the Year – Chris B’s Best of 2014

These were my favorite albums of 2014. I only picked 9 because they looked cool on a grid.

I made an end of year list that doesn’t suck. In terms of methodology, I started by choosing 9 albums because the covers looked cool on a grid. There was also a ton of good shit outside of albums, so then I created the other categories and capped the entries in those categories by descending odd numbers (9-7-5-3-1).

Critical reviews & ratings are arbitrary (see: Pitchfork), but rankings are arbitrary as fuck, so for each category I put all the entries in alphabetical order.

TOP 9 ALBUMS OF 2014:

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The Most Slept-on Records of 2014

by Glasses // @NiceTryBill

It’s Christmas time for the Western world: the time for folks with way too much white privilege to go out drinking in the streets while families go out and fill their voids with vapid consumerism. This is also the time for year-end lists, where savvy music listeners seek out top album countdowns that most fit their already set tastes in hopes of some vague form of reinforcement. In response to forgettable sad boys with guitars singing about marijuana cigarettes and aimless feelings, here is a brief list of the top 10 records that you slept on in 2014:

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