The Eh List: Noisey Canada's Top Six Projects of 2014 - Greg Bouchard

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! Each writer was tasked with choosing their own personal top six Canadian albums that were released in 2014 for their "Eh List," which we'll be releasing throughout the course of this week. On Friday, Noisey Canada will publish its Top 10 Canadian Albums Eh List.

Today, we asked Canadian music critic Greg Bouchard about his Eh List.

There are a lot of Big Labels you could give Unbuttoned if they weren't just so damn fun to listen to. You could call them "newest barons of neo-soul." You could say they're the "lamp lights of Toronto's incredible and notoriously underrated R&B scene." If you wanted to be a total asshole, you could call them "post-Drake." But what they really are is a pack of high school friends who whose comfort with each other translates into explosive creativity on record. Planes is one of the best crafted and emotionally hard-hitting albums of the year. As performers, Unbuttoned are both tight and theatrical, with Casey Manierka-Qualie and Kamilah Apong's voices working together to croon listeners into a beautiful new place. "Shy Cry" is a song that makes it sound like the world stopped for a minute, and "My Dealer" crawls along with a hook that will never get out from under your skin. If I do have to give them a big label, it's this: the Toronto band you need to see live right now.

Some artists write songs, while some basically bleed music. People like Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams, and Prince, who will pop out an album between breakfast and lunch, fall into the latter category. Eamon McGrath bleeds music, and everything he does is a reflection of his puck rock prairie upbringing. There's no truer or harding hitting artist singing about that world, and on Exile, he gains the confidence to take that world and use it say something about the middle Canadian condition. McGrath paints a world of frustrated youth, small town desperation, whiskey, and escaping on the highway. One of his best sogns to date, "Canadian Shield" plays like a kid running away from home but looking over his back, terrified that his past will catch up with him. McGrath one of the most brutally honest and rawest Canadian songwriters today, and if you're not paying attention, you need to.

Few artists can stretch a single note for ages and make it exciting like Sea Oleena can. Shallow holds your undivided attention the way a dream does, where nothing else seems to exist while it's happening, but as soon as you wake up, it's like it was never there. She is an impossible artist to replicate because so much of her sound comes from her own unique ability to hear nuances that the rest of us can't. Where most guitarists play a chord, Sea Oleena blows it up, turns off the lights, projects it on the wall, and turns it into an epic piece of cinema. "Shades of Golden" winds and winds around a two chord progression, hiding its compexity, while Shallow builds an entire world out of Sea Oleena's wispy voice. Shallow is a place, not an album, and sometimes you just need to be there.

The world needs Lydia Ainsworth. Her vast compositional background, honed as a student at NYU, brings a depth and subtlety to her music that is a sharp foil to so many DIY musicians who pick up a synth and fake it. Both she and her label, Arbutus Records, took a leap forward in working together: she stepped out of the ivory tower and brought cultural vitality to her work, and Arbutus stepped out of the smoke-filled loft and drank a stiff coffee. The results are astounding. Right From Real's eight tracks are layered, moody, and winding, taking one exciting turn after another and always working on a higher plane. The video for "Malachite," which puts a modern spin on the 70s dance style waacking, is the kind of knowing and well-conceived cultural nod that small budget/big concept music videos rarely pull off. Unlike her label mate Grimes, Ainsworth comes to the table with a plan instead of chaotically throwing images at the wall until they stick. Not that there's anything wrong with chaos, but in a year when Grimes scrapped a whole album at the last minute, the contrast is refreshing. Ainsworth is a vastly talented composer who sees the bigger picture and Right From Real only scratches the surface of her potential.

Rarely does an artist create such a vast world with such a minimal range of sounds as Loscil, the alias of electronic artist Scott Morgan, does on Sea Island. Album opener, "ahull," sees a couple vibraphone phrases repeating, morphing, and phase shifting until they create a complex polyrhythm. As the name implies, it sounds like waves hitting the hull of a boat as it moves forward through uncertain waters. The foggy shores of of Morgan's native BC sit in the background throughout Sea Island, and at times you can almost feel a cold, misty wind cut to your bones. Sea Island is a solitary listen, a perfect winter album, but also life affirming in its ability to create warmth with a tiny ray of light. With larger and larger crowds knocking down the gates at EDM festivals, Sea Island is a quiet but powerful reminder that there's much more to electronic music than a beat drop.

Before Flesh and Machine, Daniel Lanois was a world class producer who had also written a handful of killer songs, but now he has established himself as one of the most vital stand-alone artists working today. The trick is that he decided to write a fully instrumental album, placing him in the position of a sound artist, where he could apply the decades of wisdom he had gained from honing his craft. Unlike his 2005 instrumental album, Belladonna, Flesh and Machine has a certain punch and grit that makes it as exciting to listen to as it is innovative. Between those albums, Lanois immersed himself in dub music and gained a deep appreciation of hip-hop. The end result isn't genre voyeurism, but a masterful musician who has expanded his toolbox and is writing music unlike anything else out there. With Lanois—the production force behind pop juggernauts like U2 and Peter Gabriel—you also always know it'll be easy to listen to.

Follow Greg Bouchard on Twitter - @gregorybouchard