Top Albums of 2013: #32-21

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.

Review: Power Trip - Manifest Decimation

I don’t know much about thrash metal. I bought a copy of Master of Puppets in the fifth grade after a friend’s older brother turned me on to the record, but my thrash education stalled there. I eventually heard Reign in Blood for the first time more than ten years later, and I’ve heard Kill ‘Em All once or twice, but other than that I still haven’t made it through thrash 101. My metal tastes tend to run doomier or dronier, at least to the point where I don’t seek out new thrash records. Seeing the ghastly cover of Manifest Decimation, painted by Paolo “Madman” Girardi, compelled me to make an exception with Power Trip’s debut album.[1] Knowing that the record came out on Southern Lord, home of many of the best metal bands around right now, definitely helped pique my interest as well.

Power Trip does not disappoint. Throughout a lean thirty-five minutes, the Dallas band runs through the gamut of eighties thrash styles. This is admittedly a small gamut, but the band is able to make the most of a limited framework. Indeed, the best songs on Manifest Decimation are the ones that don’t deviate much from a thrash circa 1986 blueprint at all: speed; harsh, punky vocals; and shredding for shredding’s sake. Nearly every song here makes me feel like a Reagan-era maladjusted teenager in a suburban basement who’s just a little too angry for Black Flag.