Sensational albums came from all corners of the Milwaukee music scene this year, not just from veteran acts and popular mainstays but also from newcomers and outsiders alike. Once again, we’ve rounded up 15 of the albums that blew us away the most. Even more so than usual this year’s list is a near-even split between the old and the new, with debut releases representing about half of the entries. We’ll preface these picks with our usual disclaimer: This is in no way a comprehensive list of all the worthwhile Milwaukee records released this year. Plenty of great ones, including some personal favorites, didn’t make the cut, but the following 15 were so fully realized that there was no denying them the recognition.
Animals in Human Attire – Ourmegadawn
Some of the most exciting Milwaukee music from the last couple of years has come from acts affiliated with the Breadking Collective, a network of collaboration-minded Riverwest musicians. Animals in Human Attire’s latest record may be Breadking’s most colorful release yet, a plucky song cycle structured loosely like a video game, complete with fantastical characters, exotic locales and side quests. It’s an album in constant motion, hop-scotching from jittery indie-rock to slap-happy folk and back again, without ever losing its sense of infectious, wide-eyed wonder.
Bliss and Alice – Poetry Volume One - The Shit Talker Tape
With one nonchalant mixtape, Bliss and Alice has cemented his standing as one of the most—if not the most—gifted lyricists ever to grace the city’s rap scene. Inspired by the theatricality of spoken word and the mercurial prose of beat poetry, Bliss raps in endless webs of vivid, tangled internal rhyme. Of course, as anybody who has suffered a recent Eminem album can attest, hyper-technical wordplay alone doesn’t mean much if you don’t use it to say anything worthwhile, but Bliss backs up his panache with real substance. Nearly every track is a study of addiction and self-destruction, some darkly humorous, others just plain dark. “An assortment of small capsules rattling around my satchel lifted from pill cabinets,” he raps in one typically fiendish verse, “I know it’s a bad habit.”
Calamity Janes and the Fratney Street Band – Easier, Better
Calamity Janes and the Fratney Street Band strike a delicate balance on their debut album, not just between the sweet and sour sounds of bluegrass, but also between the old-timey, rural spirit of traditional roots music and the modern values and recording techniques of six young Milwaukee musicians. That’s a lot for any act to juggle, which is why so many big-city bands seem to turn bluegrass into a graceless shtick, but in the Janes’ hands these rustic banjos and caressing violins feel completely natural. Their affection for these sounds carries through every song.
Call Me Lightning – Human Hell
Call Me Lightning don’t just make albums. They make wild rock operas that play like punk adaptations of lost Kurt Vonnegut novels. The band has attracted frequent, self-invited comparisons to The Who, but if anything on rockers like “All Your Dreams Are Dead” and “Now We Have Begun,” singer Nathan Lilley seems not to be channeling Roger Daltrey so much as Charlton Heston at his most righteous, snarling at authority and spitting in the face of his oppressors. He’s the hero of this fantasy, and we the listeners are all the damn dirty apes.
Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound – Fine Rude Thing
“Let’s pretend that summer starts right now,” Paul Cebar implores early on his latest album, which either by coincidence or design arrived in January, smack dab in the middle of one of the nastiest winters in memory. In Cebar’s hands, though, the make-believe came easy. Fine Rude Thing’s worldly hodgepodge of sunny rock ’n’ roll, New Orleans funk, Memphis R&B, African grooves and Caribbean escapes took us to warmer places during a time when we badly needed to be anywhere but here.
Death Blues – Ensemble
Occasionally an album changes your notions of what music can sound like. That may read like empty hyperbole, but Ensemble, the second of two major works that veteran post-rock drummer Jon Mueller released with his Death Blues project this year, really is one of those albums, revealing surprising combinations of instruments, tones and tempos on every track. A collaboration with multi-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch, a film composer by trade, it’s the most eclectic and cinematic music of Mueller’s lengthy career. Dense with grandeur, mysticism and whimsy, these compositions are always in flux, always positioning themselves for their next big reveal.
Field Report – Marigolden
For being a singer-songwriter album at its core, Field Report’s sophomore record Marigolden features some truly showy production. It shimmers and pulses, casting its reflections at unexpected angels. It’s gorgeous. Of course, that’s not a complete departure for the band; Field Report’s self-titled debut was shaded with some unusual electronic textures, too. The real shift here is in Christopher Porterfield’s songwriting, which is even more big-picture oriented than before, tracking his experiences kicking the bottle and learning to appreciate sobriety. That’s the gist of the narrative, at least, though Porterfield’s songs are rarely that clear-cut. When he sings, “I miss you more than tongues miss pulled teeth” on the album’s parting number “Enchantment,” he could just as easily be referring to an old habit as an estranged lover.
GGOOLLDD – $TANDARD$
At just four songs, GGOOLLDD’s debut EP $TANDARD$ is the shortest release on this list by some distance, and it’s also the most of the moment, embracing the same slick, post-Passion Pit synth-pop as bands like Chvrches and Purity Ring. Don’t dismiss GGOOLLDD as empty trend chasers, though. They’re doing this music as well as anybody right now, with glistening electronics complementing the wounded-voiced Margaret Butler, who turns each of these four songs into a deeply personal emotional release. These songs are big and catchy enough to play at stadiums, yet Butler makes each feel as intimate as a diary entry.
IshDARR – The Better Life
Modesty isn’t in IshDARR’s playbook. The upstart Milwaukee rapper may be cocky, but he’s got the talent to back up his ego. Recorded shortly before he graduated high school, The Better Life injects fresh life into ’90s boom-bap and soulful jazz-rap with a showy flow reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar and early Lupe Fiasco. “I didn’t choose my talent,” IshDARR boasts, “God made me this raw.”
Space Raft – Space Raft
No local song made audiences want to throw their arm around a stranger and raise a pint more this year than “We’re Not Alone,” the giddy sing-along single from Space Raft’s self-titled debut. The rest of the record is infectiously joyous, too, an earnest throwback to the bright, glammy power-pop of ’70s acts like Big Star, Slade and The Only Ones. Who knew that in 2014 Milwaukee needed its own answer to Mott the Hoople?
Heidi Spencer and the Rare Birds – Things I Remember Golden
Milwaukee songwriter Heidi Spencer is blessed with a voice like cracked Waterford crystal, and on her latest album with her rootsy backing band the Rare Birds, she mines it for every last ounce of tragic beauty. Once again the Rare Birds serve as her support system, lending these sessions a loose, jammy vibe, and lifting the mood without undermining the fragile intimacy that makes Spencer’s music so alluring.
Sugar Stems – Only Come Out At Night
For a genre that seems so simple on paper, power-pop is remarkably difficult to pull off. Too sweet and the music becomes cloying; too gritty and the music loses its hooky charm. But the Sugar Stems’ take on the genre is never anything less than perfect on Only Come Out At Night, their latest album about teenage dreams and adult regrets. Each song opens with a bang, introduces its delirious hooks early, then takes a tidy bow. It’s clockwork, executed so expertly that it never feels like clockwork.
Sylvan Esso – Sylvan Esso
You could debate whether Sylvan Esso’s debut qualifies as a “Milwaukee” album, but producer Nick Sanborn logged so many years in the local music scene before relocating to North Carolina that the overwhelming response his latest project has received feels like a victory for his native city, too. Here his inventive electronics find a perfect foil in Mountain Man singer Amelia Meath, whose honeyed voice imbues them with just the right mix of daydreaminess and squirrely mischief. These pop songs were everywhere this year, and they deserved to be.
Twin Brother – Swallow The Anchor
For their sophomore album, Twin Brother looked beyond the folk and indie-rock influences of their promising self-titled debut to immerse themselves in the creature comforts of ’60s soul, softening their songs with warm violins and woozy, Memphis-style horns. This is a record best enjoyed late at night, in an overstuffed chair with a cozy pair of slippers and a very generous glass of bourbon.
Zhivago – Deep Versions
One of the great ironies of electronic music is that some of its catchiest, most extraverted works are created in isolation, often by a lone person hunched over a computer. Zhivago’s debut album Deep Versions was recorded during some particularly extreme stretches of seclusion, some of it in a remote cabin up north, yet the music is so merry and outgoing that it plays like a dance-floor social. This may be Zhivago’s first release, but you could mistake it for a singles collection the producer spent a career compiling.
