ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: 24-11
It was no more than six weeks into this calendar year that we stepped back and assessed the long-players that had fallen into our laps so far. It was remarkable.
Across a range of styles and sounds, from monster, ultra-hyped big-hitters to immediate cult classics and slow burners, from engrossing UK techno full-lengths to feral blasts of nu-pigfuck grind, there were sparks going off across the board. While the previous year only a handful of records truly grabbed us and refused let go, this year we were inundated. No offence 2012, but 2013 had your pants down. So here we go, our much-pored-over list of a century of the best. Apologies for the few who dropped just outside, you were great too. And thanks and congratulations to the big 100, you are quite literally the best.
24. HIS ELECTRO BLUE VOICE
RUTHLESS SPERM
(Sub Pop)
SEABUG
An album made up entirely of songs with unattractive and duo-syllabic titles, collected under the promisingly freakish header of Ruthless Sperm, Italian trio His Electro Blue Voice snuck into 2013 as a secret ace in the Sub Pop pack. And with Ruthless Sperm’s engaging, addictive and galvanised realisation of 90s post-hardcore influences, this may be some of the most thrilling material the label has released in years. James Balmont
23. TROPIC OF CANCER
RESTLESS IDYLLS
(Blackest Ever Black)
HARDEST DAY
Tropic of Cancer’s relentlessly bleak full-length suffocated many a somber evening for us this year. Lured in with its beautiful, gothic yet lux artwork, this expansive album portrayed devotion and dread in one brutal, glossy veneer. With Camella Lobo’s unintelligible vocals and its monochromatic, gothic-new-wave-by-numbers it painted an incredibly morose picture that we couldn’t help settling down in, making our own. Anna Tehabsim
22. TIM HECKER
VIRGINS
(Kranky)
STAB VARIATION
On Virgins, Hecker exchanges spectrality and concealment for a shockingly clear, clean sound: rotted etchings of terror for the HD generation. Going into individual tracks, trying to pinpoint moments of specificity seems counterintuitive. It sounds like moonlight sontanas melted in the arctic sun. It feels like bathing in VHS footage of deep forests at dawn. Whatever. It requires complete and repeated consumption. Josh Baines
21. CHANCE THE RAPPER
ACID RAP
(Self Released)
A GOOD ASS INTRO
While Chief Keef and his teenage drill brigade have been mirroring the terrifying crime rate of ‘Chiraq‘ with a remorseless, nihilistic monoflow, 20-year-old Chancelor Bennett funneled the vivid, technicolour beauty of his experiments with LSD into this self-released mixtape which has been rightfully been categorised as a future classic. With his elastic, half-sung-half-rapped yelps, Chance put fun and warmth back into Chicago rap music. Davy Reed
20. Julia Holter
Loud City Song
(Domino Records)
Horns Surrounding Me
The point, three records in, at which Julia Holter dropped the chimerical haze for a sonic stance more resolutely human, if not necessarily more tangible, Loud City Song was perhaps not the stone cold classic anticipated by many after the heartbreaking Ekstasis, but was all the more interesting for it. Despite shifting her thematic focus away from mythology and classicism to city poetics and literary French courtesans, the record was still a mildly flummoxing delight—as if anyone really expected anything else. Thomas Howells
19. Parquet Courts
Light Up Gold
(What’s Your Rupture)
Careers In Combat
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a good time. If you think there is, you probably vote Tory and there’s a good chance you haven’t heard Light Up Gold. Parquet Courts upended 2013 with a cut of galloping garage jangle, underpinned by nuggets of pure stoner wisdom and Jonathan Richman-esque wit. With more than a couple of nods to the 1970s street punk sound of their native New York, the Courts’ astonishingly well rounded debut is smart dudes’ drinking music, straight up. Billy Black
18. Zomby
With Love
(4AD)
It’s Time
Like an architect examining the rubble of past genres, for With Love Zomby gathered fragments of jungle, garage and eskibeat grime to express the collective euphoria and rebellious thrill that dance music once provided in unlicensed warehouses and via pirate broadcasts. With an added touch of tender ambience, the masked enigma’s love letter felt sincere, and even the sounds of a ghostly rave MC roaring “It’s time to go fucking mental!” sounded strangely poignant. Davy Reed
17. James Holden
The Inheritors
(Border Community)
Blackpool Late Eighties
And why the fuck would a new James Holden album in 2013 not be interesting? Emerging seven years after the seminal The Idiots Are Winning, the sonic palette was arguably even more avant-garde, but, like his ever more confounding and soundscape-lead DJ sets, it was infinitely more interesting than more or less everyone operating around him. Outsider electronica at its most potent. Thomas Frost
16. Bill Callahan
Dream River
(Drag City)
Javelin Unlanding
Dare you to name us a better songwriter in the world right now than Bill Callahan. Dare you. Callahan’s late-40s period is as close to perfection as it comes; a tri-pronged reminder of the power of the LP. Dream River abounds in perfectly placed embellishments; lightly fingered Fender Rhodes, fluttering flutes, occasional psych-tinged restrained freakouts, jazzy guitar flourishes. Lyrically, as we’ve come to expect, he focuses his gaze on fragments of chronologies of chance, moments when all of humanity, our deepest fears and highest hopes, are found in the tiniest of things. Witness a modern master at work. Josh Baines
15. DARKSIDE
Psychic
(Matador / Other People)
Golden Arrow
The beauty in Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington’s DARKSIDE project lay in the interplay between Harrington’s effects riddled guitar and Jaar’s wonderful turns of pace. A wonderfully unpredictable listen and a further exploration of the electronic music world Jaar has inadvertently owned without ever laying claim to, Psychic was the sound of electronic improvisation between two musicians captured with unparalleled clarity. Thomas Frost
14. Danny Brown
Old
(Fool’s Gold)
Dip
Split into two halves, the first side of Danny Brown’s much-hyped album recalls his bleak experiences of coming up as a rapper on Detroit’s desolate streets, while the second is packed with sexually charged, MDMA-laced party bangers. It’s an obscenity ridden, but deeply human account of how Brown morphed into dentally impaired clown prince he is today. Old didn’t just confirm Brown as the most unique rapper on the planet, it proved he’s one of the smartest too. Davy Reed
13. Atoms For Peace
Amok
(XL)
Ingenue
Atoms For Peace – Thom Yorke’s electronically leaning supergroup – are the musical showboating equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters re-imagined as a bunch of forty-something, anhedonic white dudes forcibly holed up until they get jiggy with it and find ‘The Leftfield Sound of 2013’. Needless to say, TY and his glitterati of leftfield chums (Nigel Godrich, Flea, Joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco) found it. It’s called Amok and it’s a Kid A-era indebted, Chill-Pepper bass lickin’ wet dream. Joshua Nevett
12. The Knife
Shaking the Habitual
(Rabid)
A Tooth For An Eye
One of the most provocative projects of this year, the Swedish brother/sister duo embraced the avant-garde influences that have long been bubbling under the surface with Shaking the Habitual. Pre-empted by a series of media detailing their intent, including a video of the pair on swings in day-glo wigs, 11-minute drone tracks met alarming videos and baffling live accompaniment for a considered project aiming to deconstruct the increasing standardization and genderisation of our tastes … Your move, music industry. Anna Tehabsim
11. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Push The Sky Away
(Bad Seeds Ltd)
We No Who U R
From the muttering opening of We No Who U R to the enveloping ambience of the closing title-track, The Bad Seeds’ first album in five years proved there was life in the gnarled old dogs on the other side of Grinderman’s spittle-flecked garage. And with this collection of gradually unfurling memories of songs underlaying Cave at his most knowable – as man, father, human – Push The Sky Away planted the feet of one of history’s great rock bands resolutely into a new era. Geraint Davies
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