The 2014 Ho Media Awards

This list is more about posterity than about writing convincing arguments imploring you to try these albums. I'm already later than I'd planned and time isn't getting any freer, so it's time to spit it out and get on with everything else!

Of the albums worth mentioning from last year:

(Reflektor
The Takeoff and Landing of Everything
Bulletproof Picasso
Things Are Really Great Here...Sort Of
Slingshot to Heaven
Odludek
Embrace
Ghost Stories
Song Spells, No. 1: Cedarsmoke)

I have to hand it to Arcade Fire for Reflektor. Something that long could easily have become a bloated nightmare, but even listening to only one half or the other feels incomplete.  "Song Spells..." gets an honorable mention because it's one of those rare albums that actually captures a lot of the magic that made Sea Wolf's first album so good.

The best track of the year comes from Elbow. A two-parter, "Fly Boy Blue / Lunette" gives you a proper fill of biting Garvey-isms and then brings it down to some of his sweetest lyrics ever. Never gets saccharine and rocks a very early Elbow vibe:

Like the near-tie in the book category below, the near-winner for this was "Oh Whiskey" from Jimi Goodwin's first solo album to come out of the long hiatus from Doves, entitled Odludek.  The album version is a little better than this radio edit below, but it's still worth four and half minutes of your time and a click:

Some other really good ones include "Normal People" from Reflektor, "Didsbury Girl" from Odludek, "Another's Arms" from Coldplay's surprisingly minimal Ghost Stories, and "A Thief On My Island" from Embrace's self titled 2014 release (a very strong collection of songs).

I'm late to the Lord Huron party, but Lonesome Dreams would have to be the best album I heard from a new-to-me artist, bagging this band the coveted Discovery Artist of the Year award.

Of all of the books I read last year, and there are simply too many to count, let alone list, I enjoyed Esslemont's Assail the most.  Sanderson's Words of Radiance came in second by only the thinnest of margins. Elizabeth Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy was a massive disappointment, especially given its hype. Lynch's The Republic of Thieves was a fine return to form regardless of what you might read elsewhere (everyone was apparently expecting each of the seven books to be identical capers).  Emily St. John Mendel's Station Eleven was quite good, in a "beach reading" kind of way.

It's hard to say what website was most influential this past year.  YouTube seems like a copout, but it DID provide the best thing I've watched in years, plural:



Looking ahead, there's a lot to look forward to in 2015.  New music from Noel Gallagher, Jose Gonzalez, The Decemberists, Andrew Bird, Charlie Winston, Death Cab for Cutie, Adele, Black Rivers, Hey Marseilles, Snow Patrol, Tom McRae, and Tom Baxter have all either announced scheduled release dates or at least verbal guarantees that we'll see albums from them in 2015.  Neal Stevenson has a new book coming out in May and with any luck it will be better than his last, the dreadful REAMDE.  The premise sounds interesting, so I'm foolishly hopeful.  There's an outside chance that we'll see the concluding volume of the mixed-genre Psalms of Isaak, though it may slip into 2016's release calendar.

Here's to a 2015 that is far, far smoother than 2014!