Monthly Archives: December 2013

Best Albums of 2013

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Another great year for new music with 370 tracks from 315 artists featured on In The Pharmacy during 2013. Unlike 2012, this was also a great year for albums. I gave at least a couple of hundred more than a passing spin and have around 50 that were in contention for the end of year list, but in the end the quality of the top 20 deserved singling them out and ranking them.

Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City1) Vampire Weekend  Modern Vampires of the City
Religion and mortality obsessed genre hopping tour de force. I loved their debut but found Contra lacking in good tunes. Not a bad album, just nothing to get excited about. The release online of ‘Step’ and ‘Dianne Young’, two very different but equally excellent songs was the first sign that their third album might be not just a return to form, but the best thing they’ve done. There is so much going on here, it’s amazing it doesn’t sound like a complete mess, but rather gets better on every listen.

2) Veronica Falls WaitingFor Something To Happen
Hints of psychedelia and a 60s sensibility amongst the indiepop jangle and harmonies.

3) Cults Static
Sixties girl groups, indiepop melodies, Motown inspired bass lines and beats meet modern production techniques. For me, this and Tame Impala are too sides of the same coin, Cults are the pop heads to their rock tails.

Torres Torres4) Torres Torres
Mackenzie Scott was only 22 when she wrote and recorded this stripped down, debut album, mainly just her and her (electric) guitar with bass, drums and cello used sparingly. Easily the most impressive debut of its type since PJ Harvey’s first album. This hasn’t been off my turntable since January and continues to reveal its gems.

5) The Dodos Carrier
Like their second and fourth albums (Visiter and No Color, respectively) this is an album that reveals its charms on repeated listening. Post-rock folk with a strong underpinning of excellent songwriting, much of it inspired by the untimely death of sometime second guitarist Christopher Reimer. The complex blend of what is mainly just percussion, guitar and vocals is what separates The Dodos from other minimalist duos – each element is as important as the others, and they create a tension and a balance that gets more beautiful the more intricate the interplay gets. There is also the judicious use of horns as on the wonderful ‘Substance’. Although there are a couple of tracks that feel like filler, the quality of the rest of the album is so high this album still ranks as one of my out and out favourites of 2013 and is one I am sure I will continue to visit over the years.

6) Okkervill River The Silver Gymnasium
A concept album about Will Sheff’s pre-teen years in small town New Hampshire in the 1980s. Some of his best songwriting and a wonderful sound that nods to that period beautifully without sounding too retro.

7) The National Trouble Will Find Me
Their most downbeat album and while not as flawless as High Violet, it’s another classic.

8) Arcade Fire Reflektor
I loved Funeral and The Suburbs but cared little for Neon Bible. This is like none of those albums, although it’s breadth and ambition has more in common with The Suburbs. Again, an album that reveals itself with repeated listens.

Rose Windows The Sun Dogs9) Rose WIndows Sun Dogs
Heavy blues, psychedelia and classic rock inform the debut from these pacific north westerners. They have people reaching for comparisons with Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and The Grateful Dead without actually sounding like any of them. Although they are the brainchild of guitarist Chris Cheveyo, Rose Window’s sound owes as much to frontwoman Rabia Shaheen Qazi and flautist Veronica Dye, the whole thing sounding like a gentler, more pastoral Black Mountain.

10) Neko Case The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight The More I Love You
Recorded after fighting depression, this is Neko’s best album, the songwriting consistently excellent, though if pushed for highlights I would suggest ‘Night Still Comes’, ‘Local Girls’ and ‘Where Did I Leave That Fire’.

11) The Besnard Lakes Until In Excess, Imperceptible
Gently hypnotic space rock meets dreampop with hints of Brian Wilson.

12) Parquet Courts Light Up Gold
Post-punk meets post-Pavement 90s indie rock makes for thoroughly engaging, off kilter classic.

Foxygen We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic 30013) Foxygen We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic
Indebted to pastoral psychedelia and the sort of strung out rock and roll made by Bowie, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones between ‘68- and ’71, this is a retro rocking beauty. If you like this, I’d also recommend Of Montreal’s much maligned, similarly indebted Lousy with Sylvianbriar.

14) Big Deal June Gloom
This is to the late-80s dreampop end of shoegaze what the Cults album is to sixties obsessed 80s indiepop. Boy/girl harmonies on the sweetest vocal melodies over fuzzed and effects heavy guitars.

15) Savages Silence Yourself
Swimming in the noisier and gothier, less agit funk end of post-punk, this is an incredibly energised guitar album, with its sonic roots in the bleak early 80s work of Siouxsie and The Banshees, Magazine and Southern Death Cult.

16) Daughter If You Leave
Of all the albums in my top 20, this is the one that appeals more for atmosphere and sonic dynamics rather than tunes per se. That’s not to say there aren’t some great songs on here (‘Winter’, ‘Human’, ‘Youth’, ‘Still’ for starters) but the magic is in the interplay of guitars, vocals and drums overlayed with Elena Tonra’s vocals.

Yo La Tengo Fade 17) Yo La Tengo Fade
Indebted to the fuzzy pop of the post-Cale Velvet Underground and the simple repetitive elements of Neu-style Krautock (motorik beats, simple guitar motifs), this is initially an understated work. But it reveals itself as a one of the band’s most beautiful and pleasing albums, eschewing their tendency for stretched out, zoned out jamming in favour of simple songwriting and restrained playing.

18) Kurt Vile Wakin On A Pretty Daze
Slacker rock genius follow up to Smoke Ring For My Halo. Recommended for fans of Neil Young’s ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’.

19) Atoms For Peace Amok
Was surprised this album didn’t feature more in end of year lists. Stronger in almost every measure than the last Radiohead album, King of Limbs.

20) Janelle Monae The Electric Lady
I could have given this final spot to one of about 20 other equally as good albums but chose this as it has the most ambition and, though it has a lot of filler in it’s 1 hour 8 minutes, there’s a brilliant 40 minute LP inside it. 70s sci-fi soul updated for the 21st Century.

Pitchfork: 2013 best year for new albums since the last three!

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Back in January I wrote a piece on whether we could glean information on the death of the album by analysing data from Pitchfork’s album reviews from the previous three years.

I thought it would be interesting to see if 2012 had been judged a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ year for albums by looking at the site that is most committed to the album format. Love them or hate them,  Pitchfork publishes 1200+ album albums every year, devoting 500-800 words to each and allocating a score out of 10 specific to one decimal place. Surely this would be the place to mark any trends downward or otherwise?

Although I wasn’t expecting to see a downward trend, I was surprised at the lack of variation. Having compiled, consumed and compared annual best of lists for 30 years, I’d assumed one would see the ebb and flow of quality releases reflected in the data. But there was none of that. The most striking thing about it was how each year looked much the same as any other. It was as if they had to recalibrate their critical faculties every January 1st to make sure no year was better or worse than another.

While I’m not suggesting that actually happens, I can’t help seeing this as something that only benefits Pitchfork – if new music is your bread and butter, you can’t afford to acknowledge a drop in quality, however temporary. It seems weird to be able to say with confidence that next year will be judged no better or worse for new music than any other. While it may be comforting to think there will be no drop in quality, it also rules out the possibility of an astonishingly great year for new albums.

But, based on those results, I felt confident making a couple of predictions about 2013 which proved correct (see below) and one punt which sadly I missed out on because that twat Kanye didn’t try hard enough!

Anyway, here are the key facts for 2013 and how they compare to the previous three years

  • Total: Pitchfork reviewed 1226 albums in 2013 – a similar number to 2012, 2011 and 2010.†
  • Average: As predicted: in 2013 the average (mean) score awarded to an album was 7.1 – the exact same as in 2012 and 2011 (7.0 in 2010).
  • Brilliant: Less than 1% of new albums in each of the last four years were awarded 9.0 or above.
  • Well Below Average: As predicted: almost exactly 25% of the albums in 2013 were awarded a score of 6.4 or less. ‡

Again, I can predict a similar scenario in 2014 – of just over 1200 albums yet to be released, 300 or so will be judged to be worth less than 6.5, the average will be 7.1 or very close and less than 12 new albums will score over 9.0. Pitchfork hasn’t given a new album a 10 in over three years, and it’s hard to see another one on the horizon but you have to feel they’ll give one out to someone/anyone next year just to take the pressure off themselves. I’m guessing It’ll either be a male bedroom producer from the UK or a female artist who is yet to release an album. Or at an outside chance some questionable post-metal band.

Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums critics’ list closely tallies with their highest rated albums of the year, but there are always a few albums that fall out of favour or are bumped higher up the list. If you want to know when the best time to release an album is or who were the winners and losers, read on.

  • Timing: For 2013 the best time of year to release an album was Oct, followed by May. Sixteen of the top 50 end of year albums were reviewed in those two months. For 2012 it was October and April (17 out of 50), for 2011 June and January (14 out of 50), for 2010 it was May and September (15 out of 50).
  • Grower:  M.I.A. ‘Matangi’ was the album judged to have improved the most this year, despite only being released last month and being awarded a lowly six-points-below-average 6.5 – it has leaped over an incredible 850 higher rated albums to secure the number 46 spot in the end of year review. Sky Ferreira ‘Nigh Time, My Time’ was the second highest mover.
  • Unlucky: Whereas Phosphorescent ‘Muchacho’ was judged to have aged poorly, finishing behind 24 albums that scored lower.
  • Permanence: Records by Burial, A$AP Rocky and Parquet Courts had the most staying power – the only releases reviewed in January to make it inside the top 20 at year end.
  • Waning Charms: Youth Lagoon ‘Wondrous Bughouse’ and The Field ‘Cupid’s Head’ were the biggest losers – scoring higher than 33 albums that did make the top 50 but failing to place.

†Pitchfork review five albums a day each weekday excluding American public holidays and none during the industry down time of the last 2-3 weeks of December when practically no new albums are released. Occasionally, individual albums in a box set will get individual scores, hence the slight disparity in each year’s review numbers.

‡ I call a score of <6.5 ‘The Everrett True mark of failure’ after the music critic who ranted about “a world full of music critics lazily and cravenly praising everything in their path … for if they don’t, their editors won’t run the review or feature or article. Look around you. It’s already happened. How many reviews graded below 6.5 stars do you think Pitchfork runs?” His opposition to what Pitchfork does having coloured his views of a an easily verifiable fact. i.e. even Pitchfork thinks that a quarter of the albums they review aren’t very good and are unafraid to say so, 25% in each of the last four years.