By Spence Blazak HONORABLE MENTIONS
17. Adele-21
16. Foster the People- Torches
14. Drake-Take Care
13. Panda Bear-Tom Boy
12. The Cults-The Cults
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10. Taylor Swift- Speak Now: World Tour (I'm sorry, I had to)
-------I've spared you any nonsensical ramblings on my other picks, but I have a brief yarn I'd like to spin about my pick for album of the year. I had an epiphany a few weeks ago. One of those weird moments where everything is different from then on. No lie. I've told this story at 5 out of the last 7 parties I've been at. Please bear with me.
So, I was having an odd week. Nothing seemed to make much sense. I'd been reading the Tao, looking for some kind of explanation to…..I don't know, maybe life, the universe, and everything. Then one night, I was listening to Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" and realized that I didn't know what it meant much more than "a girl made him sad." I looked it up and couldn't believe how incredible it was. I felt like Robert Frost had come back from the dead to write a few more poems and these were….better than his old stuff. I kept looking up song lyrics one by one and getting floored by them.
A few days later, I found myself in the corner of Kappa Sigma frat house. I was on a couch, there were the guts of a dozen Dutches on the table, and my friend was learning how to make his own dubstep music. As the sounds and smells flooded the room, I saw everything in the world all at once. It was like in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the main guy flies through the fabric of the universe and all the colors change. I got my questions, answers, and a sense of perspective. It wasn't actually tangible, but just a weird…feeling of security. I won't go much more into it than that, or the first person to read this will have taken away by the "Funny Farm", but there you have it. Everything was everything, nothing was everything. The world just sucks, the world is beautiful, the world is. Life's meaning. I was riding on these ideas the next few days, and I was wondering if I was the only one who had one of these experiences and was cursed to keep these ideas to myself. Then I went back to Bon Iver and dissected "Holocene," and then read an interview about what it meant. Here is the interview:
JV: Yeah, yeah. Holocene. Holocene is a bar in Portland, Ore., but it's also the name of a geologic era, an epoch if you will. It's a good example of how the songs [on the album] are all meant to come together as this idea that places are times and people are places and times are... people? [Laughs.] They can all be different and the same at the same time. Most of our lives feel like these epochs. That's kind of what that song's about. "Once I knew I was not magnificent." Our lives feel like these epochs, but really we are dust in the wind. But I think there's a significance in that insignificance that I was trying to look at in that song.
That was it. Bon Iver saw things the same way I did. Now thats what I call a fucking album of the year.
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