Best Of The Rest Of 14: Extended Play

The rise of vinyl proves that the death of the album has been greatly exaggerated. There are also those collections that are longer than a single and shorter than an LP, called EP's (for extended play). Whether released on plastic or digitally, EP's are still a great way for emerging bands to showcase more than a couple of songs or for established artists to keep up with demand with some bonus tracks or explore new territory. Here are the short-form albums that were part of what made 2014 a great year for music. I've also included a few one-offs, those occasional cases where one song was all you needed from a particular artist.

The Darcys - Hymn For A Missing Girl: When the Toronto quartet released this 21 minute epic on Record Store Day last year, I thought it signaled a promising new direction for the band. Taking all their love of darkness and inexorable drive into a long through-composed piece without losing any of their toughness, Hymn is a cinematic experience of a kind only hinted at in their three excellent albums (one a death-defying full-album cover of Steely Dan's Aja). 

Alas, it was not to be. The Darcys Hymn is also their epitaph as they announced their dissolution late last year. And it's a piece of music that will haunt you, from the ethereal choral beginning through the techno-ambient middle, which ends in a sonic smash cut to silence. From there, it builds back up, gaining speed and fury like a corroded TGV gaining traction on icy rails (Snowpiercer, anyone?), before heading into a long elegiac finale. It's simply great and I look forward to observing as generations to come discover the brief but potent catalog of The Darcys. 

Jason Couse (vocals, guitars, keys) and Wes Marskell (drums) are planning to continue working together, with an eye to translating their musical mastery into a more commercial enterprise. I wish them every success and have a feeling that whatever they end up doing it will be interesting. 

Isadora - Predators EP: I've often named them among Brooklyn's finest and this EP, consisting of three new songs and two from their debut, does a great job of consolidating their strengths. Come On Back, which I sang for a week after hearing it live for the first time, is one of the great songs of the year (cool video, too), featuring both a catchy chorus and visceral crunch. The song is undeniable and saw them start to get some well-deserved radio play. Their new management might have had something to do with that, as well. Whatever it is, momentum is building so catch a hold now. See them rule the stage at Mercury Lounge on January 21 - you'll thank me later. Album in 2015? We can only hope.

Moses Sumney - Mid-City Island: Sumney has a beautiful voice and a warm spirit, as evidenced by the five songs and sketches on this debut. There's some jazzy balladry here and some sun-kissed psych-folk, all adding up to a soaring and singular sonic vision. It all feels very dewy and fresh and I think we'll be hearing much more from Sumney in the future.

DeSoto - Sense Of Space: Matthew Silberman, an excellent sax player and composer, does more than blow his horn on this quirky and soulful musical adventure. I could go on about it at length - in fact I already did. The rest is up to you.

Seth Graham - Goop: Graham has been hoeing several rows in the underground scene for the last few years, running a label, creating album art, and releasing music. As expected, Goop is a bit of a mess, but in a very smart and colorful way. There is a sense of direction and editing to these atmospheric tracks which keeps you listening. One of the tracks is called This Is Just A Tape, a bit of self-deprecation that is likely a protective feint - Graham is talented and ambitious. Follow his winding path starting here.

Pere Ubu - Golden Surf II: This legendary band, with origins in the smog-filled halcyon of 1976 Cleveland, has been quietly resurgent in the last couple of years. David Thomas & Co. have drawn renewed creativity partly by embracing their dark side. This EP is a concentrated blast of their unsettling transmissions and is all the more effective due to that concision. If you want more they also released a full-length in 2014.

The GOASTT - Long Gone: Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl have been performing Syd Barrett's Long Gone in concert for a while now, helping the song to a more fully realized state than its author was capable of at the time. Fortunately they found time to put Long Gone on tape for posterity - and our listening pleasure. I'd like to think Barrett would feel vindicated. He knew it was a great song! The EP also features two songs that would have fit nicely on the wonderful Midnight Sun album.

Ex Hex - "Hot and Cold" b/w "Waterfall" & "Everywhere": Mary Timoney's work with Helium is one of the great lost edifices of the 90's. I even had to stick up for their smeared, off-kilter art-punk back then, endeavoring to enjoy a show at the Knitting Factory as my wife and my friend tried to convince me I shouldn't. Ex Hex has Timoney and a hand-picked cohort bashing through short, sharp songs in a much more straight-ahead vein than Helium. The album, Rips, has been getting a lot of love but all I really need are these three songs, a quick blast of power-trio fun. If I listen to more, it just starts to seem like a retreat.

Epic 45 - Monument: Specializing in ambient folk-based song-scapes, Epic 45 have an expert hand at combining electronic textures and live instruments, bringing to life a certain melancholy that feels universal and deeply personal at the same time. David Sylvian's Gone To Earth may or may not be a touchstone for them, but certainly fans of that landmark album will find a lot to like here. Then work your way back to Weathering, one of my Top Ten albums from 2012.

Singles

Of the ubiquitous songs that were unavoidable during the year, Pharrell's Happy was probably the most fun, delivering pop uplift on a cushion of his trademark chords, which are always just slightly unexpected. While it was so slight that it seemed to vanish as you listened to it, at least it didn't have the machine-tooled calculation of so much of the Top 40.

While Pharrell is behind one of the best dance songs in history (Hot In Herre, but of course), Happy's bounce wouldn't get me on the floor. That task would be left to Jungle's Busy Earnin', which had an insinuating groove and a martial tightness that made it irresistible. Yes, it was 90's enough that I half-expected to see Caron Wheeler and Jazzie B in the video, but who cares? As long as we're asking questions, who needed a whole album of diminishing returns? Not me.

Finally, I keep up with Memphis Industries mainly to keep up with the Brewis brothers who are always churning out something interesting, whether under the Field Music moniker or School of Language. This year, the latter formation released a pretty good album that felt a little rote and Peter Brewis put out an intriguing and arty collaboration with Peter Smith that is worth seeking out. But the one essential song that my email subscription delivered to me was an odd little gem called Cockeyed Rabbit Wrapped In Plastic, released under the name Slug, actually Ian Black, who used to play bass for Field Music. Every time it came up in a shuffle play, it had me scrabbling for my iPod so I could confirm exactly what it was before it disappeared again.

With patented prog-tastic drumming from Peter Brewis, this is a perfect construction of light vocals and heavy white funk. Cockeyed Rabbit is the sound of XTC (when they were Helium Boyz) meeting Bill Nelson (when he was Red Noise) and isn't that something you always knew you needed? It's up to you to make sure it doesn't become the great lost track of 2014.



Still To Come: The final rehash of last year will be Out Of The Past, featuring reissues and other older sounds.

Bandcamp Bump: Debby Schwartz, Eddie Dixon, Etc.

It remains to be seen if Bandcamp will save the music business, but one thing is certain: there's a whole lot of music to be found there. It has a lower bar to entry than iTunes or Spotify, giving up and comers an opportunity to make their stuff available for streaming and download. They've also recently added "fan accounts" as a way to build community on the platform. Signing up gives listeners a chance to follow artists and other fans to keep up with what's going on and share information. They also have an app, which lets you listen to anything you've bought on all your devices and discover new music through a customized feed. That low bar to entry does mean that you have to wade through a lot of lo-fi, derivative and frankly amateur stuff to find the gems, but they are there to be found.

Last year, I touted the quirky pleasures of Historian and the rock classicism of Journalism - yes I did make a crack about underused graduate degrees - and I still return to both of them. The latter's latest is not on Bandcamp, but easy to track down on Soundcloud, another bottomless well of sounds. Isadora's EP - a Top 20 record from 2013 - is still available to download for $7 along with their stunning new track, Come On Back. [Correction: Journalism's 1324 EP Recently popped up on Bandcamp]

Finding the good music on Bandcamp isn't always easy. Fortunately, there are guides like Lizzie Plaugic, who picks a few of her discoveries and shares them every Thursday via Letters From Bandcamp on the CMJ site. While I've found a few things thanks to her digging (like the naive charms of Palmz) I'm going to share a couple of my own favorites that came to me via quite different methods.

Debby Schwartz is an old college friend of mine who is a music lifer. She's best known for her time in The Aquanettas, an all-female power-pop band that disbanded in 1995 after some rough treatment from the industry - an old story, except they were on an indie label. Talk about bad luck. Their 1990 album, Love With The Proper Stranger, has aged well - give it a spin on Spotify. So when I heard from Debbie that she had a new EP out, Satan You Brought Me Down, I headed immediately to Bandcamp to check it out.

Debby's contralto has grown deeper and richer in the intervening years but retains that little quaver of vulnerability that makes it so easy to connect with her singing. Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar and working a seam of Americana that is slightly hypnotic and emotionally resonant, she's come up with five winning songs here. Hypnotic turns to haunting on All To Become Somebody, thanks to Pat Gubler's expert work on the hurdy gurdy and a melody that seems as old as time itself. Both the EP and upcoming album were produced by former Voidoid Ivan Julian with a sensitivity to Debbie's voice and live yet dimensional sound. Flashing back to seeing The Aquanettas at Brooklyn Woodstock, I never could have imagined that Debby would be making her strongest music 30 years later. Believe it.

People are coming out of the woodwork at an increasing rate to see if AnEarful will feature their music. Eddie Dixon is one such person and I was glad he did, especially after a couple of listens to what turned out to be his fourth album. Yes, he's been around awhile - besides his own music, Dixon has lent his multi-instrumental talents to a wide variety of music, from Ralph "Soul" Jackson to rapper Serengeti.
Bump Key takes you on a tour through some fractured Americana, with echoes of Wilco, Tom Waits and Michael Chapman. More Bugs Than Birds and In The Morning When It's Late are standouts but the capper is closing track, You Are Not A War. With a groove that gets under your skin and some louche cabaret piano, this song sticks with you. Dixon's dry voice and wry sensibility anchor the project and the production is well thought out but feels organic. Dixon is on to something - climb aboard.

Now, pardon me while I check out Eddie's three other albums - on Bandcamp, of course.

Ambition: Not A Four-Letter Word

Sometimes it seems that ambition is a dirty word, a way to damn with faint praise and an acknowledgment that an artist's ideas have exceeded his or her talent. Four recent albums, all among the best of the year, put the lie to that construct.

Jonathan Wilson - Fanfare His last album, Gentle Spirit, was my dark horse (George Harrison reference purely intentional) of 2011, spotted by chance on a crowd-sourced Spotify playlist started by the late, lamented Word magazine and taking a firm place in my top ten. Gentle Spirit was located at a Laurel Canyon intersection of Pink Floyd and Gram Parsons and featured Wilson's virtuosic guitar accompanied by his warm tenor and a band consisting mainly of himself. I played Gentle Spirit for many people and nearly everyone who heard it had their eyes closed and their head nodding by the third track, if not before - he brings the bliss.

Those with mainstream tastes and a tolerance for ham-handed lyrics probably know Wilson as the producer of Dawes, but his studio skills have been better employed by Father John Misty on 2012's brilliant Fear Fun and Jenny O.'s wonderful Automechanic, released earlier in this year. Somewhere in the midst of working on those records as well as putting his hand in Roy Harper's Man & Myth and touring extensively, Wilson has found the time to put together Fanfare, a sprawling double-vinyl length affair that finds him working with some of the legends to whom his sound pays homage.

Even with the guests, there is no mistaking that this is Wilson's album. You gotta wonder what David Crosby and Graham Nash thought when he brought them to sing on Cecil Taylor (who's "on the White House lawn," apparently) after laying down tracks for guitars, bass, piano, Hammond organ, drums and percussion. I suppose they've seen it all by now and, after all, he did have to get someone else to play the flugelhorn! Just as on Gentle Spirit, however, all of this one-man-band stuff is no stunt, but is in service of Wilson's rich songs and the evocative sound he's after. If you didn't read the credits, you would assume each song was recorded by a group of simpatico virtuosos sitting in a circle and making beautiful music together.

Fanfare is definitely on a grander scale than Gentle Spirit, with episodic compositions that take the listener on dynamic journeys to inner space. He also adds a few new textures to his palette, as on Love To Love, which mingles sprightly Yoakam-esque country with Dylan and some dark, jazzy chords in a way that surprises even after the first hearing. Actually, there are several moments that astonish repeatedly: Benmont Tench's rhapsodic piano solo on Moses Pain, Wilson's hair-raising harmony vocals on Her Hair Is Growing Long, the expansive guitars of Dear Friend, the tough, funky breakdown in Lovestrong, among others. Speaking of tough, among the exploratory (OK, slightly hippy dippy) lyrics, Lovestrong features the wonderfully nasty line, "Coyote would chew off his own paw to get out of what you've tried to achieve, lady." I can hear that idiot wind blowing...

Mixing bitterness with optimism was also a specialty of the latter day edition of The Sopwith Camel, who were relics of sixties San Francisco (their hit was the regrettable Hello, Hello), when they reformed to record a second album in the early 70's. Wilson resurrects Fazon from that album here, perfecting their proto jazz-funk investigation into alternative housing ("Who's gonna live in all those cities underground?") with respect and depth. You don't have to move underground to enjoy Fanfare, just turn off the shuffle play and allow yourself to be transported. Wilson will be touring extensively in 2014 - get there.

The Darcys - Warring Speaking of ambition, how about attempting a full-album cover of the top-selling record by one of the most complex and technically assured bands of all time? That's exactly what Toronto band The Darcys did when they released their take on Steely Dan's Aja in early 2012. It was a complete success, mining the rich vein of darkness hidden in Becker and Fagen's slick studio funk. It was also a great introduction to The Darcys sound, which features Michael le Riche and Jason Couse's heavily treated guitars and keyboards, Dave Hurlow's stabbing, aggressive bass, and Wes Marskell's alternately busy and spacious drums. Couse is also the singer, often exploring his upper range to soar above the band's driving soundscapes.

Warring, their third record with the current line up, is the most complete expression of their art and ethos yet. No longer marred by the somewhat murky sound and slightly directionless songwriting that characterized the self-titled debut, The Darcys freely explore dub-infused space and unleash melodic and memorable choruses while delivering a set of songs filled with variety and dynamics. Couse's singing is more confident than ever and instead of Steely Dan's bleak LA tales, he draws on Cormac McCarthy's even bleaker Blood Meridian for lyrical inspiration.

The strongest cut may be the last, Lost Dogfights, which takes the tempo of a dead man walking, expressed mainly by Marskell's brick-hard drums. Hurlow's bass plays more space than notes, and a piano ostinato repeats like a recurrent nightmare that doesn't end when you wake up. There are also ghostly vocal harmonies and spidery guitar and synth, all adding up to a place of despairing beauty. Like McCarthy's gimlet-eyed vision of the west, it's a place you'll want to visit often.

Son Lux - Lanterns Ryan Lott, who releases music under the name Son Lux, seemed to come out of nowhere in 2008 when he released his debut, At War With Walls & Mazes. It was a fascinating song cycle that drew on his skills as a trained composer and on his love for contemporary production techniques as used in the realms of hip hop and electronic music. It was alternately thorny and contemplative and his passion for breaking barriers between genres - and people in general - came through loud and clear. It made a lot of top ten lists, including my own.

The follow up, recorded during a 28 day period as part of the RPM project, did not work for me at all. The elements were in place but the songs on We Are Rising seemed enervated, devoid of all forward motion. As much as I tried to like it, listening to it never ceased to be a chore. Now comes Lanterns, a rhapsodic collection that may be his best yet. The sonics are his most accomplished and innovative, with a joyful energy to many of the songs. Lost It To Trying and No Crimes are splashy and fun, the real "artpop" (sorry Gaga), while sparer tracks like Easy and Pyre seem to construct and deconstruct before your very ears.

While Son Lux occupies some of the same space as Dirty Projectors and Tuneyards, Lott deploys his talents with none of their arch condescension, a quality which makes listening to those critical darlings impossible for me. Nonetheless, fans of those bands and anyone who gets excited by the collision of compositional intelligence, production chops and savvy songwriting should let their musical universe be brightened by Lanterns.

Isadora - EP Since we're discussing artful and ambitious releases, allow me to introduce you to Isadora, whose debut came out near the beginning of the year. I discovered them when they were on the bill with Napoleon (who I discovered at the Mystical Weapons show earlier in 2013). Of course, I investigated Isadora before the show to see if I should plan to stay for their set. I knew within a minute or two of the first song, that I wouldn't want to miss them. While their debts (to Radiohead and The Beatles, among others) are clear, they have more than enough of their own personality to make their EP one of the most promising debuts of the year.

Over the course of the EP, they demonstrate a sure hand at crafting complex songs full of organic tempo changes and dynamic shifts in volume and tone. There's an experiential quality to their music, where by the end of each song you feel like you've been through something. This is even more apparent in concert, where they push the dynamics to the limit, but the crystal clear recording doesn't sacrifice the sense of spontaneity and interaction that helps their music achieve liftoff.

The five members of Isadora are all excellent musicians, with Nick Burleigh an important double threat on both guitar and violin, Joshua Rouah mainly playing atmospheric keyboards but also guitar on occasion, Ian Mellencamp melodic but not groove-averse on bass, and Jesse Bilotta knowing just when to ratchet up on the drums and when to lay back. Aaron Mendelsohn's vocals show a lot of range and flexibility, going from a reflective croon to a biting intensity as the song demands. Together, the music they make is incredibly satisfying. Get the EP now and keep an ear out for more from Isadora in the future.

Coming Next: But of course - The Best of 2013 and The Best of The Rest of 2013.