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.
