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.

Honorable Mention: Willis Earl Beal - Acousmatic Sorcery

During the Great Depression, Alan Lomax began a decades long quest to record and document unheard American folk, blues, and other indigenous music.  His recording work made him arguably the most important folklorist in American history.  He died in 2002, and nearly ten years after, Willis Earl Beal has released an album that sounds like the work of someone Alan Lomax could have found in an old Depression-era shack in a forgotten corner of Chicago’s South Side.  Beal, who sounds considerably older and more weathered than he is, is obviously influenced by Tom Waits, but his music is much rougher and sparser than anything in Waits’ discography (yes, even Bone Machine).  The sound quality is comparable to the surviving recordings of Robert Johnson, all tape hiss and muddled sounds and audible recording errors (Beal recorded straight to a DAT machine).  Waits’ influence is most clearly heard on “Take Me Away” and “Evening’s Kiss,” where Beal leans toward the more grizzled end of his vocal range, but he’s also capable of an effective croon, as on “Monotony.”  The album's immediacy is its greatest quality; it feels like a completely unadulterated look into who Willis Earl Beal is as a person.

Willis Earl Beal - "Take Me Away"

Willis Earl Beal - "Evening's Kiss"