Top 10 Albums of 2014

And once more with the lists. Picking my top 10 this year was actually really hard, because there was a lot of great music this year. Pretty much all of my favorite artists put out new music, some after having made us wait nearly a decade, others having made us wait even more than a decade (sorry D'Angelo, your album will have to wait until next year's list). I always pick my favorite albums and then listen to them over and over slowly changing the order until I've got my top 10. Usually the long list will be max 20 albums, but this year it made it up to like 30. It was a good year. So it actually takes me longer to order my top 10 than to pick it. But anyway, now it's picked and ordered and here it is for you.

It's a pretty good mix of new music by old favorites and debut acts. There's 3 debut albums on here, which I love to see. So without further ado, I'll count it down.

Warpaint
Warpaint




Little Dragon
Nabuma Rubberband




St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Half the City




Leif Vollebekk
North Americana




Sharon Van Etten
Are We There




alt-J
This Is All Yours




St. Vincent
St. Vincent




My Brightest Diamond
This Is My Hand




Adult Jazz
Gist Is




Sylvan Esso
Sylvan Esso




So there you have it.

And for those of you who are interested, here's that long list I put together. After the top 10 it's only somewhat in order. I get focused on the top 15 or so once I think I've got my top 10 to make sure I got it right, so everything after gets moved around some but not so much. But they're all great albums.

Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
Adult Jazz - Gist Is
My Brightest Diamond - This Is My Hand
St. Vincent - St. Vincent
alt-J - This Is All Yours
Sharon Van Etten - Are We There
Leif Vollebekk - North Americana
St. Paul & The Broken Bones - Half The City
Little Dragon - Nabuma Rubberband
Warpaint - Warpaint
First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
Strand of Oaks - HEAL
Phantogram - Voices
Banks - Goddess
Wild Beasts - Present Tense
Kishi Bashi - Lighght
Chet Faker - Built on Glass
Saintseneca - Dark Arc
Hozier - Hozier
James Vincent McMorrow - Post Tropical
SOHN - Tremors
Fanfarlo - Let's Go Extinct
Cymbals - The Age of Fracture
Lo-Fang - Blue Film
Caribou - Our Love
Temples - Sun Structure
Damien Rice - My Favorite Faded Fantasy
Bear's Den - Islands
The War on Drugs - Lost In The Dream
SOS - SOS
Tycho - Awake

And the Spotify playlist of all of that is here:

So enjoy, and see you next year!

Favorite songs of 2014

It's time for the annual superlatives (which generally also means it's not story time). I've been seeing other people put theirs out, which I always love because it usually helps me find great new music that I missed this year, but it seems as though I did a pretty good job of keeping on top of music this year, so that's good.

Anyway, now it's my turn. I've never done a top 10 songs before, and I was thinking of doing it, and then it just turned into a big playlist of all the songs I loved this year. So I made a Spotify playlist out of them all and now it's here for you. Some are actually from 2013 or even earlier (like Pompeii, by Bear's Den), but I felt it was ok to include them if they were released on an album in 2014.

There are some songs which I do consider to be the best, and those would be the first 9 tracks sandwiched in between the Alt-J songs. Plus there's the Kacy Hill song Experience which unfortunately is not on Spotify, but luckily is on Soundcloud. So that rounds out my top 10 songs for the year. But they are not in any particular order. That would be way too difficult. Everything after Hunger of the Pine is just kind of there in a random jumble, but it's all wonderful. So please enjoy. Special shout out to Banks, who has 3 songs on there, which should be the most of any artist. Also special shout out to Bonobo who never ceases to amaze me. He put out my favorite album last year (The North Borders) and my favorite song (Cirrus), and then released a 3 song EP this year from which the title track (Flashlight) made it into the top 10 songs. Impressive man.




I should have my top 10 albums in the next few days. Unfortunately I do have to put those into a specific order, so that's gonna take me a bit of extra time, but it's almost done.

Nick Hakim

Aside from one quick post just to remind myself of something in the future, it's been 4 months since I've been here. I kept meaning to come write something, but things were busy and there was so much going on and it would have taken me forever to write it all, so I just didn't. It also didn't help that I moved to China, where just about every website you could possibly want to use is blocked, including my blog. I have a VPN to access it all, it just makes it much more annoying to write. I also got into the habit of writing at work to kill time when I was in Germany, and I have had no time to kill since I moved to China. Things have been crazy. Actually, I'm still quite busy, but it's calmed down a lot and I'm exhausted today so am purposely trying to procrastinate for the first time in 4 months. Thus, here we are.

Like I said, it would take a very, very long time to write everything that happened in the last 4 months, because the last 4 months have been very eventful. So as I've done before, here's the quick rundown, in chronological order:

1. Leave Germany and spend a week in Singapore getting packed up
2. Move to Shanghai
3. Find an apartment
4. Find many problems with said apartment and initiate arguments with the landlord to get them fixed, which he still refuses to do and which still continue. Hopefully lawyers will not be involved soon.
5. Spend a week at home while I process my new China visa.
6. Go to South America with my sister for a month. Visit Lima, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Puno/Lake Titicaca, La Paz, Salar de Uyuni/Bolivian Altiplano, San Pedro de Atacama, Santiago, Puerto Montt, Punta Arenas, Puerto Natales, El Chalten, Glaciar Perito Moreno, Torres del Paine, Ushuaia and Buenos Aires. Good food, pretty places, lots of spanish, lots of dogs, good trip.
7. Come back to China and run a massive trade show

And here we are. Pretty much each of these could be a blog post (or multiple blog posts) in and of themselves, but I'll spare you that.

Let's suffice it to say that I am very happy to be living in Shanghai, I'm still working on making friends and building a community but it's going well, I'm very glad the trade show is over, I'm no longer bored at work all the time, and South America was a wonderful experience which in a way rekindled my passion for travel and served to melt away a lot of stress and frustration that had been building over the last couple of years. So generally speaking, life is quite good.

I did drop the ball a bit on keeping up with new music, though. I've still done an alright job, except while I was traveling, but what bit I have done has been somewhat disappointing. The first 2/3 of this year were great for music, but recently I've been in a kind of rut with finding new music I love. It's going to last a bit longer, too, because I'm busy deciding my Top 10 albums this year, which will hopefully be my next blog post next week or something. However, the lack of amazing new music did change recently with Kacy Hill, and now also with Nick Hakim.

Nick Hakim is a DC native who makes wonderful soul music. He's got 2 EPs out, and I'm gonna go ahead and put him on my 2015 watch list in the hopes that he might be putting out a full album. My favorite song by him is probably Cold, off of his Where Will We Go, Pt. 1 EP.




There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I could listen to it over and over. And I have. It's been very helpful in filling a small part of the void left by D'angelo 13 years ago after he released Voodoo and disappeared.

I actually heard is second EP first, which coincidentally has the same name as his first EP, except with a 2 instead of a 1 at the end. I really liked it, but I wasn't sold on it until I listened a few times. And once I started listening to it on my iPod with headphones I realized how good it actually was, and slowly fell in love with Lift Me Up, the closing track.




He actually does a lot of this lo-fi soul stuff, which took getting used to but now I love. And I love how this song builds. So simple, but so good.

Anyway, that's it for me for now. The goal is to post twice more this month, once with my Top 10 which is nearly finished, and once with some artists to watch for 2015. I'll for sure at least do that first one. We'll see from there.