Camiele’s Top 25 Albums of 2014

5. Hawk House – A Handshake for the Brain

Ever since 2013’s A Little More Elbow Room I’ve been watching out for Hawk House. The British trio’s brilliant lyricism and the compositions therein are just phenomenal. A Handshake for the Brain gave fans some of their most powerful lyrics as they took us on a journey through the brain, featuring tours of the nervous system and medulla oblongata. Truly, if I were going to pick a hip-hop album as the perfect example of how to tell a story, I’d point to this one and tell anyone who wanted to learn how to construct a perfect narrative to listen to it on repeat nonstop for a month.

This group can literally do no wrong in my eyes. Every time one of their tracks comes on shuffle in iTunes, I have to automatically go back to the beginning of the album and listen to the whole thing from top to bottom. They’re just that incredible. Their music is smooth, their individual flow is massive, and their ability to intricately weave lyrics that compose perfect portraits of the struggle to survive through this human circus is enough to make you wish you could take a look inside their heads. Handshake for the Brain, indeed.

4. Kimbra – The Golden Echo

I don’t know what I can say about this album that I didn’t already cover in my review. Kimbra could possibly be my favorite vocalist in the last few years. Everything about The Golden Echo had me in hysterics. Much like her debut album, Vows, the follow-up was emotive, honest, and gave another peak into the mind of a very world-worn 24-year-old. Her ability to compose songs with a smirk and a snicker belies the powerful message in each track. Songs like Rescue Him and Waltz Me to the Grave are almost sinister in their dark stories of desperate love. But she soothes the ache with songs that paint love and the experiences of one’s life as something lovely and, dare I say, golden.

Goodness, just listening to Kimbra sing about love in high places in that quirky second soprano gives me goose bumps something terrible. She’s a paragon of vocal theatrics, but she stays the course, never overexaggerating her sound but giving it that extra something that separates her from every other vocalist out there. The Golden Echo was definitely the perfect vehicle to fully explore the expansiveness of her talent.