A dozen albums for 2014

2014 has been quite a confusing year musically, but at times it has been a very stimulating one too.

For a change I thought I would combine pop and classical and write about my top dozen albums of the year – beginning with my favourite compilation of 1970s West Coast Yacht rock. Now there's a sentence from a man newly in his 40s! Yet Too Slow To Disco is a great achievement from the How Do You Are? label, one that keeps the rhythm but chooses a blissful selection of pop that wouldn't be out of place in Ibiza. Songs like Brian Eliot's Time To Grow or Ned Doheny's Get It Up For Love charm and amuse in equal measure, with a high quality threshold the whole way through.

My other compilation of the year would be Greater Lengths – An All Saints Compilation, which served to remind me just what a fine catalogue the All Saints label sit on. Brian Eno, Jon Hassell and Djivan Gasparyan are just three of the names they can boast – but the crowning glory for this release was a disc’s worth of remixes, using electronic music talent as diverse as Peaking Lights, patten and Machinefabriek. It paid off handsomely.

Sébastien Tellier returned this year with another typically colourful album. L'Aventura found him in exuberant mood, with exotic orchestrations and rhythms unexpectedly proclaiming a dalliance with samba. This being Tellier there is always a sense of cheeky impudence close to the surface, and a lot of flirting through the headphones – and all are done to great effect, resulting in a winning, hot weather album.

Hot weather is not a great feature of the Scottish East Coast, but King Creosote found plenty of sunshine on his travelogue, From Scotland With Love - music to accompany a black and white film that could easily have been made with the country's tourist board. I'm surprised not more was made of this record in the run up to the vote on independence, but Kenny Anderson's love letter to all sides of his country is beautiful, poignant, funny and wonderfully direct. Not as moving as his Jon Hopkins collaboration, but equally life-affirming and colourful.

Much darker in colour was Product of Industry, a striking techno album from Mark E that looked at the wheels of industry through music, using analogue synths to recreate mechanical processes and production lines. There is the robotic precision of automated processes, but there are human elements too, and the claustrophobia of the shop floor is painted with a stark and striking beauty. Among the dirt and grime, a valuable gem is found.

Exploring much quieter and restful domain was the Vancouver producer Scott Morgan, better known as Loscil. I don’t think I know a single person who can make music stand so still and yet make it so captivating, but Morgan somehow manages to keep his music suspended in mid air with very little happening to it. The only solution is to listen, because on an album like Sea Island he conjures up such visions of natural beauty that it brings a tear to the listener’s eye with its intensity.

Now I'm not a massive Morrissey fan, it has to be said, but World Peace Is None Of Your Business - despite the fact it has now been deleted – stood out as Moz's best piece of work in a very long time. Istanbul, its lead single, was one of the most striking songs of the year, but throughout the album Morrissey seemed determined to present some very original instrumentation and highly unusual rhythms. Mozza at the rodeo? Stranger things have happened!

Fellow Mancunian contemporaries James returned with another opus in 2014. La petite mort took a while to give its charms away, but in the end it established itself as a poignant memorial to Tim Booth’s mother and one of his best friends. Perhaps because I was going through something similar at the time the resonance between the two was too vivid to resist, but Booth presented a dignified and at times jubilant look at their lives and his response to them. Sure, James can occasionally attempt a new style and be a bit like a musical equivalent of dad dancing – Curse, Curse was that to start with – but Walk Like You and Moving On made up for that comfortably.

One of the main reasons I review new CD albums is to make new discoveries like WIFE’s What’s Between. WIFE is James Kelly, former front man of Irish metallers Altar of Plagues. The guitars may be turned down several notches, but there is an exquisite tension at work on this album, and the songs become both deeply meaningful and strongly resilient. With beefy bass and beats subtly underpinning the structures, What's Between became a thing of great poise and beauty, with several genuine spine tingling moments as either Kelly’s vocals were multi tracked or the background electronics came through to the fore. A lasting triumph.

Another 'grower' was Luke Abbott's second album Wysing Sound. I never thought I’d say this about my home county, but Norfolk has become a bit of a hotbed of instrumental techno, and Luke Abbott is one of the leaders. For this album he was keen to veer more to the analogue side of things, and to make a 'through-composed' piece of work, rather like a one-movement symphony. It works handsomely, and Abbott creates some weird and wonderful sounds as the album first settles and then generates more movement and nervous energy. A compelling listen that built even on his impressive debut Holkham Drones.

My classical album of the year is easy to pick – it's Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin playing Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano. Back in January 2007 I was lucky enough to attend a Beethoven Day at the Wigmore Hall, where the duo played all these works live, and it was clear then that they had a special understanding of and enthusiasm for Beethoven's remarkable works. The five main sonatas span Beethoven's life, so the two published as Op.5 have a strong energy and youthful drive, the third – Op.69 and in Beethoven’s middle period – is impeccably structured and full of memorable themes, and the final two, Op.102 open the door to his late period with innovative designs and brief but incredibly concentrated exchanges. Isserlis and Levin capture all that and more, and though some might baulk at the coarse sound of Levin's fortepiano – of Beethoven's time – to me it only heightens the excitement and sense of originality at work. The performances are of an incredibly high standard, and Hyperion's package irresistible.

So that’s the classical album of the year – but my pop album of the year by some distance is Todd Terje's debut, It's Album Time. In a year where a lot of the news was unremittingly bleak it made so much difference to have an album of such positivity to fall back on. It's a great piece of work this, from the lead single Delorean Dynamite through the classic suave Bryan Ferry contribution that is Johnny & Mary to the absolute winners Oh Joy and Inspector Norse, the album's trump cards. Terje writes both with the assurance of someone who knows he can make you dance but also with a sense of the progressive, so that harmonies change unexpectedly and new riffs join the party. With that and such a positive outlook, It's Album Time made its play to be the best album of the year. In my book, at least!