Wisdom for Debris, Eluvium
Ghost Trees is a blog with (apparently) 2 posts per year. Prolificacy has always been the specialty here.
I’ll cut the crap. Last year on my blog I wrote about lists. I still do not like them.
I was asked to contribute to Decoder Magazine’s end-of-year features again this year (Last year I wrote an ode to Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia. You can find the feature here: “More Yellow Birds and Lunch Box Blues“), which I did. And when my feature is posted, it will be clear that I again skirted the actual topic of commenting on a list for 2014. So here I go and post a list on my blog anyway. I don’t know. There is a sixteen-year-old in me still following through on some kind of silly tradition that I started.
| Rank | Artist | Album | Label |
| 1 | Swans | To Be Kind | Young God Records |
| 2 | Grouper | Ruins | Kranky |
| 3 | Eluvium | Wisdom For Debris | (self) |
| 4 | The War on Drugs | Lost in the Dream | Secretly Canadian |
| 5 | Have a Nice Life | The Unnatural World | Enemies List Home Recordings |
| 6 | Fennesz | Bécs | Touch |
| 7 | Dads | I’ll Be The Tornado | 6131 Records |
| 8 | Owls | Two | Polyvinyl |
| 9 | Maxwell August Croy and Sean McCann | I | Students of Decay |
| 10 | Horseback | Piedmont Apocrypha | Three Lobed Recordings |
| 11 | Fire! Orchestra | Enter! | Rune Grammofon |
| 12 | Adult Jazz | Gist Is | Spare Thought |
| 13 | Thee Silver Mount Zion | Hang On To Each Other | Constellation Records |
| 14 | Orcas | Yearling | Morr Music |
| 15 | Inventions | Inventions | Temporary Residence |
| 16 | Rivulets | I Remember Everything | Jellyfant Records |
| 17 | Christopher Willits | Opening | Ghostly International |
| 18 | Wolves of the Throne Room | Celestite | Artemesia Records |
| 19 | Alex Cobb | Marigold and Cable | Shelter Press |
| 20 | Sun Kil Moon | Benji | Caldo Verde |
That Swans record is a monster. For other people who have read my blog before, you might see some familiar faces like Owls, Horsback, Fire! Orchestra, Rivulets, Grouper, etc.
The year was an interesting one in listening to music for me. I got hooked on a lot more older stuff, and did a good deal of traveling with the day job and on vacation. This meant fewer times with a computer or plugged in, limiting my music carrying capacity to a few old apple products and somewhere in the range of twelve GB. Great new musical seductions – that War on Drugs one surprised me!
I’ll look forward to doing more writing for Decoder Magazine in 2015. And the other news for me is that I’m leaving Berlin to move back to San Francisco, so my music access points will change again, and I’m sure my list(?) next year will be quite different.
Adam
ghosttrees 