The Eh List: Noisey Canada's Top Six Projects of 2014 - Slava Pastuk

Did you have a good year? Did you accomplish everything you set out to do, or did you fall short of meeting the goals you set at the start of the year? Do you even have goals? We at Noisey Canada have one main one, and it's to introduce our readers to the best Canadian music of the year. We've worked on this for the duration of 2014, and while we haven't covered everything amazing to come out of the great white North, we've certainly got to most of it. Part of the reason we're able to have such varied coverage on Noisey Canada is because of our dedicated and tireless team of freelancers. We decided to "reward" a few of our best writers by having them take time away from their busy holiday season to do more work!

We've had Juliette Jagger, Greg Bouchard, and Michael Rancic give us their six picks already.

Today, we asked Noisey Canada Editor Slava Pastuk about his Eh List.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t listen to Tanya Tagaq’s album until after her Polaris victory. I didn’t know what to expect from the throat-singer from Nunavut outside of what I had seen her do live the night she won the prize. It was a powerful performance, but would it translate smoothly when played through headphones? It did, and I was surprised by how well. When there was talk of Kanye West and Travis Scott recording an animal with nothing but wildlife roars, most of the rap internet laughed. But Tanya Tagaq’s Animism is a perfect example of how you can morph the most primal sounds a person can make into something that doesn’t just resemble music, but pushes its boundaries.

Alvvays made an album that sounds the same way it feels to watch Grease in HD on a huge TV in 2014. Watching the crisp and vivid details of a movie made in the late 70s about the early 50s is a mental trip through time, and in the same way Alvvays was a sonic journey through eras. It was composed by young adults who are dealing with the realization that life is hard and that you can’t achieve every dream you had as a child, and delivered in a an audio package that conjured images of beachfront jam sessions and campfires that roared in the darkness. It’s like a soundtrack to a movie whose name you can’t remember, but know deep down that you’ve seen before—and loved it.

4: Caribou — Our Love Dan Snaith is a genius. Literally, he had a PhD in mathematics and could likely recite Pi to the hundredth digit (it goes to show how little I personally know about math for that to be my most impressive example). What Dan Snaith is, in addition to a genius, is a musician. His album Our Love applies his mathematical aptitude to art, and sees him constructing the sort of EDM whose composition would likely create the golden ratio when the structure of it is plotted to graph paper. Caribou’s album sounds symmetrical, like it follows a perfect mathematical pattern that we aren’t smart enough to see. But more than that, it sounds pleasant and non-intrusive while still managing to be challenging enough for the songs to garner multiple plays.

The first PartyNextDoor project was so cohesive that numerous people I played it for thought it was only three songs long. It was the type of tape that made you believe in an artist, despite never hearing of their existence prior to pressing play. A lot of people who became fans of PartyNextDoor as a result of that tape came into PartyNextDoor Two with their standards set very high. After the first listen, it was easy to be underwhelmed. There was no musical flourish like the one on “Break From Toronto” and the Disclosure sample felt sloppier than the Miguel sample on the tape prior. These feeling of being underwhelmed went on for the first listen, and the second, and the fifth. But by the tenth time you listen to PartyNextDoor Two you seem to latch onto something. It’s like falling straight into a dream after your alarm wakes you up the first time. Suddenly, it just clicks. Since that click, the album hasn’t left my rotation. This is music to sleep to, wake up to, and carry you through the day.

The only thing I knew about Mac DeMarco prior to listening to Salad Days was that his previous album had been called 2 and that he had a penchant for live shows that could cause people long term mental trauma. When I was in Montreal, locals traded stories of Mac shoving things into his ass onstage the same way kids trade Pokemon cards. Surely—I assumed—a man known for these sorts of onstage antics would make music that was similarly deranged. That’s why I was surprised when I was greeted instead by smooth rock that wouldn’t sound out of place being played at a coffee shop. Regardless of how out-of-control Mac was made to sound in his stories, this album painted the picture of a man so composed and at ease, he had no trouble weaving tales that resemble the stories you tell when you’re having a beer in your friend’s garage over the sounds of the type of band that would likely practice in the same garage.

Listening to Daniel Caesar’s Praise Break isn’t something that you can just do anytime you feel like listening to good music. You can turn on “Pseudo” and vibe out to the melodies and guitar breaks, or listen to “Violet” and reminisce over someone you’ve lost, but to listen to the entirety of the album you need to prepare yourself mentally. Like watching your favourite movie for the trillionth time, you can put it on in the background while you do something else and still be able to keep up with the basics, but to truly experience it you need to devote yourself to it. The character is Daniel Caesar, a boy who’s not yet a man, though he’s being forced to deal with situations that require him to be. New people are introduced while others leave his life forever, and in the midst of learning how to deal with all of this change, he realizes he still needs to grow up, a task for which there is no instruction manual. Daniel looks to the past often, like when he covers and reworks James Vincent McMorrow “Cavalier” into the hair-raising “Chevalier”. But he’s also an artist who looks to the present and future for inspiration. He cites both Frank Ocean and PartyNextDoor as influences, and you can tell that he’s focused on creating projects that feel like they have three very distinct acts. With Praise Break those acts were enough to capture my attention for 2014.

@SlavaP