DMNW Staff Picks: The Best Albums of 2014

[authorbox authorid=”11″ title=”Glen Sears: Aly & Fila’s The Other Shore“]It wasn’t just The Other Shore, Aly & Fila’s third EP. 2014 was a great year for Trance. Markus Schulz released Scream 2, Andrew Rayel finally dropped his debut album Find Your Harmony, Gareth Emery launched Drive and spawned a mainstage masterpiece with U, and Protoculture carried the underground with Music Is More Than Mathematics. Trance took a welcome and much-needed step back toward its roots, but for all the chants of “Who’s Afraid of 138?!” we found ourselves thinking…just about everyone.

Thankfully, Aly & Fila brought the sound of Egypt to us with The Other Shore, an album that stays firmly planted at 136-140 BPM for every track but one. Tracks like Altitutde Compensation and Nubia are thankfully reminiscent of post-Oceanlab era Above & Beyond, while tracks like Eye 2 Eye, Full Throttle, and Along The Edge are world music-inspired cuts ripped right out of the vintage Armin playbook.

But where The Other Shore truly shines is in its high-tempo, minimal tracks. Tracks like the titular The Other Shore (feat. Aruna) and Shine (feat. Roxanne Emery) are vocal-driven, lighters-up tearjerkers that make you believe the whole album might have been written on dusty instruments in the smoke-filled back room of an opium den. Much of the album, like any truly great collection of music, could be played by one person on a piano. The Other Shore is an emotional cabaret, flooring the accelerator until the car hurls off a cliff, affording you a moment to see the world from air right before your stomach drops.

We’ve all gotten used to the modern House-inspired Trance sound. It has its festival charms, and a couple of the tracks on The Other Shore–like Never Let Me Go–flirt with that marriage. But The Other Shore isn’t about the history of Trance or the present of Trance as much as it is the future of the genre, inspired by the past. The Other Shore is at once new and familiar, like crossing a vast sea for the first time and finding yourself at home on the other side.