In his piece on his own top 10 albums of the year over at
Grantland, Steven Hyden made the important distinction between the notion of
best albums and of favorite albums. Trying to claim that your own list consists
of the best albums of the year (as I did last year) is inherently dishonest, since
no one has heard every album that came out in a given year, so every listener
or critic’s personal scope is too limited to declare unequivocally that
anything is the best. As such, Hyden appropriately labeled his article “My Top
10 Best (Favorite) Albums of 2013.” I’ve tried to take the same approach here.
Forcing myself to ignore the impact, buzz, controversy, or acclaim that albums
got this year and focusing just on the albums that I liked the most has really
helped me put this list together. I’m still constantly reordering the albums on
this list, and I’m sure I’ll regret almost everything about how I ranked these
the second I put them up (which begs the question of why I bothered ranking
them at all, but whatever). So before I keep changing my mind, without further
ado here are my top 32 albums of the year.
#32: Darkside - Psychic
Pink Floyd’s post-Roger
Waters output is fairly maligned by most fans. Who out there is really
standing up for The Division Bell
these days? Apparently guitarist Dave Harrington is. His guitar sound
seems explicitly influenced by David Gilmour’s style from the eighties
and early nineties, but Harrington works so much more effectively than
Gilmour did at the time by removing it from its original context, the
warmed-over prog of late period Pink Floyd, and into the realm of
downtempo ambient electronica courtesy of Nicolas Jaar. Their duo, in an
homage to Pink Floyd that I’m still not sure was conscious or not, is
named Darkside, and their debut Psychic’s
eleven minute opener “Golden Arrow” stands as the crowning achievement of
both young artists’ careers. As genre boundaries continue to fall away
and artists are finding value in even the most denigrated of sounds, the
members of Darkside have firmly established themselves as leaders of this
progression.
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#31: Willis Earl Beal - Nobody Knows
Willis Earl Beal’s mysterious South side bluesman crossed
with Tom Waits thing got him a very good debut album, Acousmatic Sorcery, and a reputation as one of the most
electrifying new live acts of last year, but it remained to be seen if he could
leverage that into a long term career. It seems my concerns were unfounded, as Nobody Knows is even more satisfying and
quite a bit less disjointed than his first record. Beal polished thing up a bit
for his second album, with “Coming Through,” the collaboration with Cat Power
serving as the high water mark for production value here, but that doesn’t
diminish what made him so appealing. The Tom Waits-circa Bone Machine influence is still present on songs like “Too Dry to
Cry,” and he still has several songs that sound like he’s sitting in a hot,
underfurnished room singing along to music picked up from a too distant radio
station.
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#30: Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin
A recent Pitchfork
review of Thee Oh Sees’ Single Collection
Volume 3 speaks of Thee Oh Sees diehards as if it’s the only band they’ll
ever need, with the band’s insanely prolific output standing as one of the
great achievements in modern garage rock. Even for people who aren’t die hard
fans, it’s easy to see why someone can get so wrapped up in their sound. Floating Coffin isn’t the band’s best
album—that would be last year’s Putrifiers
II—but it’s close. Sporting the freakiest cover of 2013, a sea of
sharp-toothed strawberry monsters, the album is another triumph for Thee Oh
Sees. Breakneck tunes like opener “I Come from the Mountain” rest comfortably
next to stomping psychedelic numbers like “Night Crawler.” This band works within
such a narrow style that it’s amazing that their output continues to be one of
the most consistently satisfying in rock. What’s wrong with a band basically
making the same album over and over again if it’s so damn good every time?
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#29: The Cyclist - Bones in Motion
Over the last few years, Stones Throw has branched out
considerably, forging alliances with the futuristic dub scientists of Duppy
Gun, the crate digging lo-fi electronic fiends of Minimal Wave, and the cassette-only
label Leaving Records. The latter has brought us a great debut compilation
along with winning albums by sunny psych singer-songwriter Salvia Plath and
interstellar beat maker Ras G. But Leaving Records’ greatest find has been the
Cyclist, whose debut tape Bones in Motion
is a work of lo-fi house that is the closest thing I’ve heard in 2013 to those
original minimal wave artists from three decades ago. It sounds like it was
made on the cheapest synths and drum machines the Cyclist could find, and it
was one of the best soundtracks for my many late night rides on old commuter
trains around Chicago.
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#28: King Krule - 6 Feet Beneath the Moon
King Krule’s 2012 single “Rock Bottom” is one of my
favorite songs of the last few years. For a young man who looks like he’s just
some punk kid, the pain in his remarkable voice and his songwriting was
immediately disarming. Nothing on 6 Feet
Beneath the Moon, Krule’s debut album, quite reaches the level of “Rock
Bottom,” but it’s an impressive record all the same. Consisting of songs he had
written over the last five or six years, with one dating back to when he was 12
years old, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon
somehow manages to pull together Smiths-indebted songwriting with jazz, blues,
lounge, and general portent. It’s not an ideal record for putting on in the
company of others, but if you’re willing to wallow for 53 minutes, it’s a great
choice.
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#27: Föllakzoid - II
The cover of Föllakzoid’s sophomore album, appropriately
titled II, is some kind of nebula or
pulsar or something. I’m not an astronomer. But it fits the Chilean band’s
sound well. They trade in space rock, but the embrace of chaos that marks so
many other bands of their ilk is replaced by steady motoric rhythms that are
heavily indebted to the Krautrock greats. The result is a perfect soundtrack
for a controlled, exploratory journey into the stars, with the horrifying
dangers of space kept at bay by the top-notch Chilean engineering of the craft.
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#26: Chelsea Light Moving - Chelsea Light Moving
The last two Sonic Youth records, 2006’s Rather Ripped and 2009’s The Eternal, were both pretty good, but
they both seemed to be lacking some of the noisy intensity of the band’s best
and formative work. In the wake of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s divorce and
the resulting breakup of Sonic Youth, Moore dove headfirst back into his ‘80s
post-punk roots with his new band Chelsea Light Moving. Not everything fully
works, but there isn’t a skippable track on the band’s self-titled debut, and
some of the songs (“Burroughs,” “Alighted,” “Groovy & Linda”) rank among
the best of Sonic Youth’s latter day output.
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#25: Thundercat - Apocalypse
Even if Thundercat couldn’t write a song to save his life,
Apocalypse would still be worth a
listen because holy shit can he play the bass. The album is a constant stream
of impossibly fluid, liquid basslines amid synths that could soundtrack the nightlife
on some distant planet. But Thundercat’s songwriting on Apocalypse is great and a noticeable improvement from his already
excellent first album. Songs like “Heartbreaks + Setbacks” and “Oh Sheit It’s
X” are among the best that R&B or neo-soul or future funk or whatever you
want to call it offered this year. Brainfeeder is one of the most forward
thinking labels on the planet right now, and Thundercat is one of the main
artists bolstering that reputation.
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#24: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away
Mick Harvey, who had been faithfully at Nick Cave’s side
since the pre-Bad Seeds, pre-Birthday Party band the Boys Next Door in the late
‘70s, left the Bad Seeds in 2009. The band’s first album without Harvey takes
on an appropriately understated and frequently morose tone as Cave moves beyond
the last original tie to his beginnings thirty-five years prior. Mostly driven
by multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’ recent obsession with looping
instruments, the music on Push the Sky
Away is both comforting and disjointed, like a pleasant dream that’s only a
left turn away from nightmare.
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#23: Power Trip - Manifest Decimation
I’ve been reading D.X. Ferris’s 33 1/3 book on Slayer’s
masterpiece Reign in Blood, and it’s
put me in the mood for thrash again. Like I said in my review of Power Trip’s Manifest Decimation from a few months
ago, I’ve always liked my metal considerably slower and doomier than thrash
offers, but every once in a while the relentless speed and intensity of thrash
is the only thing that feels right. While it seems unlikely that anything from
the thrash revival of the last five or so years will top classics like Reign in Blood, Master of Puppets, and Peace
Sells…But Who’s Buying?, out of the recent thrash records I’ve heard, Manifest Decimation comes the most
tantalizingly close. Over 35 intense minutes, Power Trip proves the continued
vitality of a subgenre that hasn’t been a dominant force in decades.
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#22: Body/Head - Coming Apart
While Thurston Moore channeled his younger punk self on
his first Chelsea Light Moving album, his ex-wife Kim Gordon opted for
smoothing much spookier on her first post-Sonic Youth project Body/Head. A
collaboration with avant-noise guitarist Bill Nace, Body/Head’s debut album Coming Apart is a textural exploration
between the two guitarists and their many effects pedals. This kind of thing
can often feel indulgent, but both are such masters at drawing compelling
sounds out of their instruments that adding drums or any other instruments into
the mix would feel superfluous. On top of the feedback-drenched guitar noise,
Gordon sing-speaks portentous lyrics in a tone that is both tuneless and
strangely bluesy. Coming Apart can be
a tough listen, but those willing to brave the noise will find a lot to dig
into here.
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#21: Earl Sweatshirt - Doris
Our expectations were too high for Earl Sweatshirt. His
debut album showcased a rapper too talented for his young age, and then he
disappeared for two years amid conflicting rumors of his fate and whereabouts.
An investigative Complex piece
revealed that he was at a Samoan reform school moving beyond the shock value juvenilia
of his early work. He returned being hailed by many as a savior of hip-hop (as
if hip-hop has ever needed to be saved), and his second album Doris disappointed for not living up to
absurd expectations. A few months of listening proved that while it wasn’t the
album that a lot of listeners wanted, it’s a low key, dusky affair that ably
shows that his talent for exciting lyricism and complex internal rhyming wasn’t
remotely diminished by his time away. He’s still growing as an artist, but Doris makes it clear that he deserves
the continued attention.
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