Outliers: 2014’s ‘Other’ Best Records

After all the votes were cast for our Critics Poll, we invited some of those critics to expound on the most unknown (or unlikely) entry in their Top 10 records of 2014. Here are their outliers, from AC/DC to L-Fresh the Lion.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

Joshua Manning

Tanned Christ Edifice EP (Independent)

Needless to say, when members of Making, Totally Unicorn and Narrow Lands get together to form a hardcore group with a name as good as Tanned Christ, people in the Sydney DIY scene are gonna get excited. Edifice completely justified that excitement. It’s raw, it’s brutal and, with five tracks averaging about a 1:20 each, it’s over before you can even try and reconcile what just occurred. Somehow, with each member recording separate tracks and passing them around via email, they have managed to capture on record the same energy that made them so devastatingly awesome at this year’s Camp A Low Hum.

Andrew P Street

Perch Creek Jumping on the Highwire (Vitamin)

They appear to have dropped the ‘Family Jug Band’ appellation these days, but hopefully this doesn’t indicate sibling-heavy country-folk quintet Perch Creek are planning a move away from the joyous ’20s-through-’40s influence that imbues Jumping on the Highwire. After all, these days writers enjoy too few opportunities to use descriptors like “rollicking,” “stomping” and “hootenanny” in contemporary music reviews, damn it.

Marcus Teague

Saul Jarvie Existential Eczema (Finger Wave)

Some artists make little worlds for themselves through design or myth or cool videos or lies. What I like about this record is it compels through none of that – its world comes from it being the product of one guy and his drive to pursue his ideas for his music and recording it, to an unusually high success rate. I don’t think he ever played a show, was on radio or did press or anything for this album of excellent (and kind of sophisticated) moody indie rock, and so completely did he realise it there’s really no need.

Annie Toller

Amateur Dance Keep It Up EP (Independent) and Talking About Yourself EP (October Records)

Melbourne’s Joseph Cookson produces fashion-conscious deep house tunes almost by the numbers. True to his milieu, Cookson’s visual shtick partakes of that splicing of streetwear and neon gothic popularised by teenage droogs in Nike sneakers, and he has a preoccupation with the textures and tones of classic club music. Each Amateur Dance track unfolds with softly padding toms and mournful synths, cushioning well-chosen snippets of confessional monologues. The characters Cookson presents spill their intimate fears and desires, or breathe warm reassurances into your earbuds. Amateur Dance might seem superficially hip, but in practice Cookson has a deft touch and a knack for wringing pathos from uniformity. As with last year’s breakout track ‘what i had 2 do’, the two Amateur Dance releases of 2014 have an emotional resonance that’s rare in Australian dance music.

Lachlan Kanoniuk

AC/DC Rock or Bust (Columbia)

Logic would dictate that Rock or Bust shouldn’t be a good album. Or hell, shouldn’t even exist, following the departure of Mal – arguably AC/DC’s most vital pillar – too crook to go on in the world’s greatest ever rock band, then an ensuing sideshow of nefarious concern for erstwhile drummer Phil Rudd, beginning with tardy arrival to the album’s recording sessions.

These would be weighty distractions for any band susceptible to the folly of narrative, terminal for most, yet here we are. Rock or Bust’s greatest success isn’t that it meets fettered expectations; circumstances would have forgiven a musical embarrassment, yet there are no weak links in the 11-song tracklist. It exceeds any reasonable barometer of quality, making a solid claim for the best AC/DC album post-Back in Black. Brian’s never sounded better, really, shades of old bluesman in his timbre, Angus Young is Angus Young, nephew Stevie deals riffs brute and nimble. Entropy and chaos, out there in the world, and within their ranks, and still the AC/DC monolith stands, resilient in its majesty, reliable as ever.

Jody Macgregor

Milwaukee Banks Rose Water EP (Independent)

It’s a good thing we’re allowed to vote for EPs, because my attention span was ruined by a misspent youth of comics, games and the Colonel’s Other Secret Herb. Milwaukee Banks probably had a similar experience, because they recorded an EP that’s gratifying even if you don’t have much time to listen before your brain flits off, and because it sounds like they were very high indeed. Between Tkay Maidza, Remi, L-Fresh the Lion and Milwaukee Banks, it was a good year for new Australian hip-hop, but if that sounds like a lot to dig into this EP is just six short tracks of blunted brilliance.

Jake Cleland

L-Fresh the Lion One (Independent)

A Sikh dude, deeply religious far as I can tell but that’s his biz, and lyrics of identification and confusion leap out, that ol’ duality: “Hope I can do what I can/Even though I don’t know who I am.” What elegance, seashell opened into iridescent wisdom, hmmmmm. Things being as they are, ISIS-not-ISIS flags flown out of chocolate shop windows and If You See Something, Say Something, what a laugh that is when everyone seems particularly blind, and they took the bins out of Flinders St Station – as one especially piggish cop tells me – “’cos of the terrorists,” L-FRESH seems particularly attuned to this attitude which not so long ago seemed prescribed to a post-9/11 doldrums of thought but which now seems more entrenched than ever – a truth folks with their noggins veiled in diverse ways have known forever, it never having faded since, what, times recently retold by white fellas in brownface in This Holiday Season’s Religious Blockbuster.

And in the midst of this racist culture war in which loonies of a particular shade get cast one way while paler faces tend to reflect not at all on the peoples from which they came, L-FRESH has the audacity to say “Power to the Peaceful,” curled fingers pointed skyward and outstretched rather than wound up for some reflexive back-dated pugilistic dividend on a lifetime of aggression. Roots in Bhangra bangers run crackling through the underground all the way to the streets of America still echoing with the stamping feet of black rebels and out blooms a new Yggrassil, Earth and Heaven entwined with the Human spirit and every sunlight dapple dancing like the stamping feet of a new rebellion, feeling that the current situation is somehow err, umm, ahh, insufficient.

“Keep walking.” Hmmmmm. ’Cos the only opposition to a fist in the face of humanity, or a gun for that matter, is peace, you see, kill ’em with kindness, creep ’em out with politeness. Really it’s the only radical option left and, alright, we’ve tried it before but in spite of all cynicism – and spiting cynicism is the point of the whole thing – One offers irresistible hope, such that I gotta wonder if maybe we carpetbombed certain segments of the population with this, hope might spread. Or maybe not, I dunno, maybe they’d drag it into their iTunes and after a few seconds turn up their snouts with a dismissive “Oh, it’s that rap music.” Good grief, but nevertheless that utopian glimmer is how One shines. Like, for 14 tracks, something so surreal might be possible.

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