Grammy Awards are over. Once again, pocket-sized, gold-plated phonographs have been bestowed in all the wrong places, and many are outraged (as if they couldn’t have known better).
The Grammys aren’t exactly renowned for picking the finest music anymore, but they still have one virtue: amidst all of the white-bread choices and commercial mugging, a few little-known wonders get to have a moment in the spotlight of mainstream media.
This year, one of those hidden gems actually won the prize they were up for, while a couple others were defeated by more broadly appealing choices.
Here’s a look at the more obscure artists that deserved their Grammy acknowledgement, and maybe more.
Snarky Puppy
One of the night’s best surprises came early, when these Brooklyn-based fusion jammers scored a win for Best R&B Performance, celebrating their version of Brenda Russell’s “Something,” featuring Lalah Hathaway.
The track is a mist of tender, scrupulous strings and keys, punctuated by Hathaway’s soulful vocals — which climax in a superhuman self-harmony that must be heard to be believed — all inflated by Robert Searight’s cymbal-nimble drumming.
Among the most talented musical groups working today in any genre, Snarky Puppy is a 40-plus piece band who have been making quiet stirs in the underground jazz, indie, and classical scenes for the last half-decade.
Snarky’s songbook is full of respectable, complex arrangements, but true to their latest distinction, the band’s real speciality is their live performances.
Having held many a 10 buck show at The Rex Hotel Jazz and Blues Bar in Toronto, the band typically plays for over an hour, disassembling their hits, such as “Thing of Gold,” into all-out, pseudo-impromptu instrumental eruptions.
The members’ skills are immaculate, and the group’s tunes are at once chaotically tangled and flawlessly calculated.
Despite their size, Snarky Puppy’s shows are an intimate affair, an open invitation to dance and sink into the ocean-deep rhythms.
James Blake
Slowly but surely becoming a modern icon of hipster music, James Blake is the holy mix of folky, Bon Iver-ish vocals and dubstep-esque electronica, managing to please both crowds in equal measure.
Blake’s loss this year in the Best New Artist category (to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis) was easily the show’s biggest snub, but it was nonetheless refreshing to see the typically conservative jurors recognize the synthy, moody beats of Overgrown, the artist’s sophomore effort.
At just 25, the London-born Blake surely has much more in his future. Though he has received particular accolades for his 2013 chart-making breakthrough “Retrograde” (which prophetically declares, “Suddenly I’m hit”), Blake’s best work to date is still his self-titled debut.
Anyone who missed out on the melancholic chords of “Unluck,” also one of the best, most tasteful uses of auto-tune in history, or his cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love,” owes it to themselves to check out the 2011 release.
Alabama Shakes
I’m actually not the biggest fan of Alabama Shakes’ studio output. Lead singer Brittany Howard has an admittedly impressive voice, which fuses the crackly windpipe of Jack White with the heartfelt contralto of Amy Winehouse, plus she shreds a pretty mean guitar. But all in all, Boys & Girls doesn’t stand up to replays quite as much as the others listed here.
Yet I, like any music aficionado, know a true Grammy disgrace when I see one. Alabama Shakes are as close to the funk-fed roots of rock and roll as any of this year’s nominees. Their loss in the Best Rock Performance category would have seemed like a brush-off against most competition. But to Imagine Dragons? The epitome of stale, threadbare alt-rock?
Alabama Shakes are blacksmiths, mining the past to weld the future. Hopefully, their spot this year amidst the company of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Queens of the Stone Age, and the aforementioned White will be a greater indicator of 2014’s Billboard charts than the category’s actual prizewinner.
Alabama Shakes return to the essence of live performance, finding in their rolling moans and bluesy loops a forgotten sense of electrification.
Dustin Dyer
Features Editor
