Best of 2013

So, we've made it to the end of another year.  For anyone who doesn't know how this works, this little exercise is something I've done with friends for the last 13 or so years to share the best music we heard over the past year.  It's actually incredibly, ridiculously simple, just list your top 10 or top 5 or top 17 albums of the year.  Don't worry if you've got Miley in your top 10, you're in a safe place here.  The idea is just to write about what albums you liked and why.  Trawling through other people's top 10 lists has always been a great way for me to discover new music.

2013 was actually loaded with albums that I was really excited about but, in the end, almost none of those made my end of the year list.  I couldn't wait for the Knife's Shaking the Habitual to hit and, while I love it, I wouldn't put it in my top 10 list.  Similarly, a new Arcade Fire and a new National album.  A new Nick Cave, a new Sin Fang, and, imminently, a new Tom Waits.  All of which are really great albums but, as I made my list, none of them actually cracked my top 10.  Part of that is due to my bias of grading a band's album against their last album which was a particularly difficult hurdle for Arcade Fire.  But the other way to look at it is that there were a lot of albums this year that completely blindsided me with how spectacular they were.  As I look at my list, there are only two albums (#2 and #5) that I would have predicted would be on this list at the beginning of the year.  Everything else was a pleasant surprise. 

So, that's my intro.  I'm really very interested to hear everyone else's list.  But, until then, here's mine:

Album that would have made this list if it wasn't released in 2011 - The Goat Rodeo Sessions - S/T

Strange to see a group tour on album that was released a year and a half ago, but I guess that's what happens when Yo-Yo Ma is part of the group.  This was, quite likely, the best concert I saw all year.  Up until the Goat Rodeo Sessions, my perception of classical musicians was one of someone who debated the pitch of an oboe on a recording of Prokofiev while smoking a cigarette out of a holder.  So it's really remarkable to see this group composed of the absolute top, top names in Americana music (many of whom played on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack): Edgar Meyer on bass, Chris Thile on mandolin, and Edgar Meyer on fiddle team up with Yo-Yo Ma, essentially the only classical cellist I can name.  Until now, I just assumed classical musicians were so.......boring.  Yet here, Yo-Yo Ma is experimenting, he's delighting in screwing up, he's enjoying listening to the other musicians.  It's really incredible.  But through it all, the skill of these guys is unparalleled. You very well may not come across a better cello, bass, fiddle, or mandolin player anywhere. And I love the realization that being a virtuoso on the cello in the field of "classical music" is no different than being a virtuoso on the mandolin in the field of traditional Americana.  You will not find four better people at playing stringed instruments than these four. The music, by and large, is traditional Americana albeit all original pieces except every now and then, they'll decide to take a Bach piece written for the harpsichord and adapt it to the mandolin.  It's the sort of thing that only "serious" musicians can do.

10.  The Suburbs - Si Sauvage

If I'm scoring this just on albums that I thought were the most solid front-to-back, I'd probably have to put the National's Trouble Will Find Me here.  But, I've always left room for albums that I thought were important for other reasons and this one certainly fits the bill.  First, it's a fucking new Suburbs album.  Which, bizarrely enough, came on the coattails of a number of states legalizing gay marriage which led to a solid 2 days of air time for Love is the Law.  Secondly, though, this was the first album that I ever funded on Kickstarter.  Since then, I've funded four more albums.  And this is something that I think is a well-overdue advancement.  Anything that lets bands circumvent labels and get their albums funded directly by their fans is a positive as far as I'm concerned.  Plus, I ended up with a really sweet pink vinyl LP signed by Chaz, Beej, and the rest of the band.  As far as the music goes, I love the fact that this is the same Suburbs that you would have had in the mid-80's.  Fun, happy, we're-all-glad-to-be-alive pop highlighted by Turn the Radio On and You've Got to Love Her

9. Pascal Pinon - Twosomeness

One consistent theme for me is that I've had a Scandinavian band in my top 10 for the last 7 years.  It's not my fault that Scandinavians do better and more interesting pop music than anyone else.  And here we go again.  This album actually won Best Icelandic Album of 2012 but, seeing as I never made it to Iceland in 2012 and the album wasn't released anywhere else until 2013, I think it's fair to include it on this list. I have a complete man-crush on another Icelandic artist, Sin Fang, who also had a new album out this year and it has to be said that it's a bit of an upset that his album hasn't actually made my list.  Sin Fang is on the Morr music label and did a mini-tour throughout Europe in support of his new album and, opening for him, was his label mate, Pascal Pinon.  That's how I discovered these guys.  Pascal Pinon are two sisters who craft these really lo-fi tunes with a ton of things going on in the background.  Almost every song on the album has the two sisters harmonizing while a range of synths and assorted electronic paraphernalia play in the background.  The result is haunting, surreal, beautiful.  Check out Bloom and Twosomeness.

8. Phosphorescent - Muchacho

Honestly, this album is on here almost exclusively for one song.  The best song of the year hands down, as far as I'm concerned, was Song for Zula.  This is one of those songs you hear at a certain point of your life that really gets to the heart of how you feel.  It's a relentlessly simple song: simple instrumentation, repetitive drum beat, etc. but the stark instrumentation combined with the near perfect lyrics are just heartbreaking.  It's a song about not becoming cynical, hard, jaded about love after a particularly cold and brutal break-up with lines like "See, honey, I am not some broken thing, I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee" and "Then I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing".  For my money, it's a near perfect song.  The rest of the album can't live up to Song for Zula but there's plenty of fuzzy guitars, jangly rhythms, and debauched lyrics like on Ride On/Right On.

7. Bells> - Solutions, Silence, or Affirmations

I can't figure out how to do the greater than or equals sign that is part of Bells>' name, but their website informs me that the symbol is silent.  So let's just call them Bells.  My punk rock proclivities throughout high school and college included an infatuation with the band Jawbox.  As luck would have it, I would then go to graduate school with the brother of the drummer from Jawbox (Zach Barocas).  Said brother was just about the most adept mathematician I've ever met.  So, it's only appropriate that Zach Barocas' latest project would be an intersection between punk, jazz, and math rock.  Drums, double guitars, and electric bass is all you get out of Bells.  It has the precision you might think of with a band like Boards of Canada (also a great album this year), but it's just got a harder edge reminiscent of the Bad Plus or even Ratatat.  Check out Brothers, Sisters and Promenade.

6. Devendra Banhart - Mala

I feel a little bit like this album has missed out on a lot of press simply because it came out in February/March.  This was the first album of the year that really caught my attention.  I couldn't get the hooks and the mix of funny, desperate, depressed lyrics in Never Seen Such Good Things Go So Wrong out of my head.  How great a line is "Love you're a strange fella" or "If we ever make sweet love again, I'm sure it'll be quite disgustin'".  The rest of the album jumps between his native Spanish and English but all of the songs dwell on the ridiculous yet intoxicating aspects of romance all done with a mix of folk, indie pop, and flamenco.  Check out also Mi Negrita.

5. My Bloody Valentine - MBV

Oh my god, how much I love this band.  This album would be on the list if, for no other reason, than to remind me of how great an album Loveless is.  Just like the Suburbs, 20+ years elapsed between Loveless and MBV, but you would never know it from listening to the album.  The driving guitars, the hazy vocals, the tension as they keep you on edge for the moment when they're going to make your ears bleed.  I wish I knew why it took them so long to release another album.  I just love the way songs like In Another Way and She Found Now are constructed.  There's this dreamy, woozy character to the guitars and the vocals that always ends up building and building and building to this crescendo of controlled chaos.  It is, in it's own right, beautiful. A lot of time spent in the car with this one this year.

4. Kanye West - Yeezus

It's gotta be on here.  This is such a ridiculous good album.  I never came around to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories but this is the "widely released" album that I really fell in love with this year.  I tend to prefer my hip hop humble.  You know, the De La Soul's or Digable Planets of the world.  But, screw it, every now and again I want my hip hop artists to come out with an album called Yeezus with songs like I am a God on it.  If you're going to check humility at the door, you may as well go all the way.  This is Kanye with really tight rhymes over an aggressive, aggressive backing track.  You won't find a better rockin' out song this year than Black Skinhead.  And the album is tight.  Barely 40 minutes long, the songs are heavy on the drums, the guitar, the screaming.  Kanye's delivery is intense, immediate, but varied enough to keep you on your toes.  It's one of the best produced hip hop albums ever.  It's almost enough to make you forgive Kanye's various lyrical slip ups - like the fact that the Romans had nothing to do with the Battle of 300.

3. Lucius - Wildewoman

Absolute late-comer here that I only discovered because my buddy Alex informed me that the two ladies in Lucius provided the studio vocals for the album at #1.  Both of them have amazing voices and they use them to produce such great harmonies.  Behind the two female leads, you've got a mix of slide guitar, percussion, and the occasional synth.  They also make liberal use of a personal favorite: hand claps.  They'll slide easily into songs that are real country-western (like Go Home) to Ronette style girl group choruses (like Turn it Around) to straight up indie pop (like on Don't Just Sit There).  In every case, though, it's the combined voices of Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe that make the songs.  I also do admit to loving bands that have a look.  Lucius has this sort of nerd chic matching outfit thing going on with the female lead singers wearing one set of matching outfits and the all-male backing band wearing a different set of matching outfits.  Yeah, I like that sort of thing.

2. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Vampire Weekend's debut album made my list a number of years back what with songs like Oxford Comma, Mansard Roof, and Walcott.  Then they dropped off my list for a while.  But this album....  It's got everything I love about Vampire Weekend:  Ezra being a little bit too cute with the lyrical word play (Ya Hey instead of Yahweh, Diane Young instead of Dying Young, lines like "But actually Oakland but not Alameda, your girl was in Berkeley with a Communist reader"), drum crashes, Caribbean rhythms, the whole nine yards.  But this album finally added a little bit of depth.  More than anything, the song Hudson is a total departure.  It's dark what with a militaristic drum roll and its requiem choruses over the top of Ezra's lyrics ("Hudson died on Hudson Bay, the water took his victim's name.").  The rest of the songs on here are solid, solid Vampire Weekend songs: songs like Step, Ya Hey, and Hannah Hunt.  But Hudson is the song that puts this over the top for me.

1. San Fermin - S/T

This probably isn't a surprise for those of you who have heard me gush about this album.  An incredible debut album from a bunch of 20-somethings out of Brooklyn.  There's something here for everyone.  If you like you're albums to stand as a whole, the album is meant to document the rises and falls of a young romantic relationship with both a female and male protagonist.  There are many points of the album, in fact, where I think I'm listening to Sufjan's Illinoise album in that it feels like a soundtrack to an unwritten play.  On the flip side, if you're into your singles there are some unbelievable standalone tracks on here.  It features the depth of sound and instrumentation that you might expect from Beirut with a female voice that sounds a little bit like the Dirty Projectors and a male voice that really reminds me of Matt Berninger from the National.  Sonsick, Methuselah, and Daedalus are all tracks worth checking out.  As an added bonus, San Fermin is one of those bands that is actually better live than they are recorded.  The recording was made with the ladies from Lucius but they've since been replaced with the impossibly powerful Rae Cassidy.  As good as the ladies from Lucius are, they can't match the sheer power Rae brings to the songs.  It's kind of overwhelming.  Blend that with the number of voices, the amount of instrumentation, it's all a little bit Arcade Fire.  But more of a down-home, humble kind of Arcade Fire.

So that's my list for 2013 done.  Let's hear from you!