Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 12,760
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Slant's 25 best albums of 2014 - Lana #3
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25. Traumer - Takt
24. The Hold Steady - Teeth Dreams
23. Damien Jurado - Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son
22. Flying Lotus, You're Dead!
21. Drive-By Truckers - English Oceans
20. TV on the Radio - Seeds
19. Sun Kil Moon - Benji
18. Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal
17. Run the Jewels - RTJ2
16. Shabazz Palaces - Lese Majesty
15. First Aid Kit - Stay Gold
14. Alt-J - This Is All Yours
13. Sia - 1000 Forms of Fear
12. Sylvan Esso - Sylvan Esso
11. Aphex Twin - Syro
10. Royksopp and Robyn - Do It Again
9. Hozier - Hozier
8. Banks - Goddess
7. FKA Twigs - LP1
6. Jessie Ware - Tough Love
5. Mac DeMarco - Salad Days
4. The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
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3. Lana Del Rey, Ultraviolence. Suburban provocateur Lana Del Rey's second LP, Ultraviolence, is a kind of millennial noir, all gauzy damsels, bruised cheekbones, and Chevy Malibus. Pop has rarely been this sultry, or masochistic, for that matter. Del Rey, with her melodramatic, sneeringly false narratives, courts both loathing and desire, oscillating between demands for "money, power, and glory" and displays of naked vulnerability. After all, Del Rey reminds us, she's "pretty when [she cries]." Neither the coolness of her vocal timbre nor the malaise of her delivery can quite disguise the fact that she's a pop singer almost without peer in her generation, assisted by producer Dan Auerbach's dreamy minimalism and the ghosts of jazz and '70s pop. Del Rey chronicles the failure of a kind of American dream that only persists in sepia-toned commercials and Death of a Salesman productions. "I'm a bad girl/I'm a sad girl," she swoons on "Sad Girl," with all the self-conscious tragedy of Jay Gatsby staring across the bay at the green light on the end of Daisy's dock. Our nostalgia might be for a betrayal that never happened, but it still hurts. Caldwell
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2. Spoon, They Want My Soul. If Spoon's previous albums cast them as experimentalists rooted firmly in the rock milieu, They Want My Soul is where they twist their classicist and post-punk influences into something stranger and headier. Britt Daniel strikes his "sensitive tough guy" poses, alternately trying to incite street brawls ("Let's go get out in the street/Somebody's gotta") or falling desperately in love ("And if you say 'run,' I may run with you/I've got nothing else, I've got nowhere else") over Spoon's expanded textural vocabulary. Every noise is lovingly curated, whether it's the screeching string figures that lend tension to "Knock, Knock, Knock" or the uncharacteristically wooly keyboards of "Inside Out" and "Outliers." They Want My Soul is as complete a statement as Spoon has made, a testament to Britt Daniel's ability to compose Beatles-esque melodies while his band casts them in thrillingly unfamiliar soundscapes. Rainis
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1. St. Vincent, St. Vincent. On her fifth album, Annie Clark trains her focus on contemporary media culture, critiquing the vapid, self-indulgent aspects of social networking and the alienation and boredom that it produces. Whether singing about selfies or death, Clark probes the existential convergence between humans and their digital devices, as when she laments, "I'm entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones." The gorgeously laconic torch song "Prince Johnny" finds Clark imploring, over layered backing vocals and a discretely funky guitar lick, for someone "to make me a real girl," another nod toward the blurred lines between humans, animals, and machines that she explores throughout the album. Despite its thematic weight, St. Vincent wears its politics lightly, as Clark makes space for her trademark experiments with guitar effects and playful lines like "I prefer your love to Jesus." She's an auteur perfectly suited for the age we're living in: a heretic with her own sense of ethics, an eccentric with a conscience. Galvin
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http://www.slantmagazine.com/feature...ums-of-2014/P5
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When will the acclaim end? 
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