Turns out, despite promises to the contrary, this year's disclaimer is last year's disclaimer but then, you don't even have to scroll down the page to parse that: nope, there are still no annotations to the songs, that's two years in a row and my excuse is similarly, embarrassingly, boringly the same. But hey, at least there's a list of albums, which I didn't have last year and which I've never annotated and only recently ranked, and which demands a disclaimer all its own pertaining to how mutable said ranking is. That's out of how I listened to a lot of them late in the year and often casually at that. Without intending to, for instance, I ignored Yeesuz for months. I'm still listening to the bottom five now and I'm fighting the urge to shuffle the order. I stand by my love for all 13, though, as I do the others that didn't quite make the cut but I now feel should have (Nick Cave, Foxygen, Ariana Grande), and as I do, too, the 40 tracks (not singles, though some of them are) in the list that follows.
Both lists, incidentally, are dominated by one band. That's another significant alteration of the rules, the spilling over from one list to the next, which I disallowed from the get-go, and which, up until the first draft of this year's list, I stringently adhered to. The Monkeys' AM prowls familiar ground lyrically but the teenage kicks have been superseded by an after-party melancholia (more than half the songs are love songs) even as the music surges with libido and swagger. Bowie, in all his permutations, is its spiritual gunk, but fed through the urgent tropes of hip hop, although it's really not as simple as that. And as ardent a fan as I am, and as high as my hopes were, I never saw the record coming and certainly couldn’t ignore Knee Socks. The push and pull between the lyric’s romantic/sexual confusion/ frustration and the slinky guile of the music is really the perfect distillation of what may well be the record’s overriding theme: the yearning for intimacy against a backdrop of perpetual nightlife.
Having the Monkeys on my list is a no-brainer. If memory serves, I’ve had them on every list I’ve made. That’s another disclaimer for this year though. I lacked the time and energy, and really, the enthusiasm, for my usual modes of adventurism, relying entirely on a system not too far removed from the Similar Artist feature of music sites, which should account for the smattering of R&B inversions (Autre Ne Veut, Blood Orance, Inc) and girls with synths (Kate Boy, ChVrches). I also threw back a lot, literally. A larger chunk of last year's listening were old records I only recently stumbled onto for the first time, with this year's highlights being Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece, Bill Withers' +Justments, Townes Van Zandt's High LowAnd In Between and everything by Jedi Mind Tricks. But then again, save perhaps for PSY and Kanye and Beyonce and These New Puritans, nearly everything on this year’s list, and nearly everything I listened to, seemed, if not staunchly retro, then willfully derivative and referential. 2013 really was the year pop music threw back, too.
Bored Nothing's Shit For Brains wafts through like the ghost of a lost Alex Chilton single. Fitz and the Tantrums at last discarded their retro-soul preoccupations and full-hogged the mantle of this generation's Hall & Oates in terms of kitchen-sink pop gene-splicing. Ducktails and Pure Bathing Culture were channeling Prefab Sprout with enough acumen and eloquence to seal the year but then Prefab Sprout itself emerged seemingly out of nowhere, and with a spring in its step, too. God bless you, Paddy MacAloon. Ariana Grande was similarly referencing pre-Emancipation Mariah and matching her early slew of singles strength for strength, until Mariah herself threw back to the days when she had no street cred and pretty much didn't need any, and the ecstatic result is quite possibly her most joyous single since Dreamlover. And much as the laser-precise hubris of one coinage called Haim a mash-up of Fleetwood Mac and En Vogue, it was when they tapped instead into Long Run-era Eagles, right down to the bombastic drum figure that gave Heartache Tonight balls, that they had their catchiest, most sublime moment, which was also the second catchiest, most sublime, moment in all of last year's pop music. The first, of course, belonged to last year's queen of pop sleaze and who doesn't nearly deserve half the grief she's been getting from media wimps. For the record, and for my money, Bangerz was solid. But We Can't Stop, overt drug references and hedonistic will to power and all, is a stone classic. Hang in there, Miley. And no, that wasn't a Wrecking Ball pun.
1. Arctic Monkeys, AM
2. John Murry, THE GRACELESS AGE
3. These New Puritans, FIELD OF REEDS
4. Yo La Tengo, FADE
5. Beyonce, BEYONCE
6. Blood Orange, CUPID DELUXE
7. The National, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME
8. Ducktails, THE FLOWER LANE
9. Justin Timberlake, THE 20/20 EXPERIENCE
10. Mayer Hawthorne, WHERE DOES THIS DOOR GO?
11. Kanye West, YEESUZ
12. My Bloody Valentine, MBV
13. Fitz And The Tantrums, MORE THAN JUST A DREAM
1. Arctic Monkeys, Knee Socks
2. Suede, It Starts And Ends With You
3. PSY, Gentleman
4. John Murry, ¿No Te Da Ganas De Reir
5. Summer Camp, Pink Summer
6. Bored Nothing, Shit for Brains
7. Ducktails, Letter of Intent
8. Justin Timberlake, Blue Ocean Floor
9. Prefab Sprout, Billy
10. Phosphorescent, Ride On Right On
11. Miley Cyrus, We Can't Stop
12. ChVrches, Gun
13. The National, Don't Swallow The Cap
14. Beyonce, XO
15. Kanye West, Blood on the Leaves
16. Okkervil River, Pink Slips
17. Mariah Carey with Miguel, Beautiful
18. Fitz And The Tantrums, Fool's Gold
19. Rose Elinor Dougall, Strange Warnings
20. Daughter, Smother
21. Daft Punk, Giorgio By Moroder
22. Let's Buy Happiness, Run
23. Tegan And Sara, I Was A Fool
24. Pure Bathing Culture, Pendulum
25. Ariana Grande, Almost Is Never Enough
26. Haim, The Wire
27. Autre Ne Veut, World War
28. Mayer Hawthorne, Wine Glass Woman
29. Blood Orange, It Is What It Is
30. Majical Cloudz, Turns Turns Turns
31. Kate Boy, The Way You Are
32. Foxygen, No Destruction
33. AlunaGeorge, Best Be Believing
34. Yo La Tengo, Ohm
35. Savages, Shut Up
36. Pearl Jam, Sirens
37. These New Puritans, Fragment Two
38. Dawn Richards, 86
39. Matt Berry, Medicine
40. Inc.,Angel
Both lists, incidentally, are dominated by one band. That's another significant alteration of the rules, the spilling over from one list to the next, which I disallowed from the get-go, and which, up until the first draft of this year's list, I stringently adhered to. The Monkeys' AM prowls familiar ground lyrically but the teenage kicks have been superseded by an after-party melancholia (more than half the songs are love songs) even as the music surges with libido and swagger. Bowie, in all his permutations, is its spiritual gunk, but fed through the urgent tropes of hip hop, although it's really not as simple as that. And as ardent a fan as I am, and as high as my hopes were, I never saw the record coming and certainly couldn’t ignore Knee Socks. The push and pull between the lyric’s romantic/sexual confusion/ frustration and the slinky guile of the music is really the perfect distillation of what may well be the record’s overriding theme: the yearning for intimacy against a backdrop of perpetual nightlife.
Having the Monkeys on my list is a no-brainer. If memory serves, I’ve had them on every list I’ve made. That’s another disclaimer for this year though. I lacked the time and energy, and really, the enthusiasm, for my usual modes of adventurism, relying entirely on a system not too far removed from the Similar Artist feature of music sites, which should account for the smattering of R&B inversions (Autre Ne Veut, Blood Orance, Inc) and girls with synths (Kate Boy, ChVrches). I also threw back a lot, literally. A larger chunk of last year's listening were old records I only recently stumbled onto for the first time, with this year's highlights being Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece, Bill Withers' +Justments, Townes Van Zandt's High LowAnd In Between and everything by Jedi Mind Tricks. But then again, save perhaps for PSY and Kanye and Beyonce and These New Puritans, nearly everything on this year’s list, and nearly everything I listened to, seemed, if not staunchly retro, then willfully derivative and referential. 2013 really was the year pop music threw back, too.
Bored Nothing's Shit For Brains wafts through like the ghost of a lost Alex Chilton single. Fitz and the Tantrums at last discarded their retro-soul preoccupations and full-hogged the mantle of this generation's Hall & Oates in terms of kitchen-sink pop gene-splicing. Ducktails and Pure Bathing Culture were channeling Prefab Sprout with enough acumen and eloquence to seal the year but then Prefab Sprout itself emerged seemingly out of nowhere, and with a spring in its step, too. God bless you, Paddy MacAloon. Ariana Grande was similarly referencing pre-Emancipation Mariah and matching her early slew of singles strength for strength, until Mariah herself threw back to the days when she had no street cred and pretty much didn't need any, and the ecstatic result is quite possibly her most joyous single since Dreamlover. And much as the laser-precise hubris of one coinage called Haim a mash-up of Fleetwood Mac and En Vogue, it was when they tapped instead into Long Run-era Eagles, right down to the bombastic drum figure that gave Heartache Tonight balls, that they had their catchiest, most sublime moment, which was also the second catchiest, most sublime, moment in all of last year's pop music. The first, of course, belonged to last year's queen of pop sleaze and who doesn't nearly deserve half the grief she's been getting from media wimps. For the record, and for my money, Bangerz was solid. But We Can't Stop, overt drug references and hedonistic will to power and all, is a stone classic. Hang in there, Miley. And no, that wasn't a Wrecking Ball pun.
1. Arctic Monkeys, AM
2. John Murry, THE GRACELESS AGE
3. These New Puritans, FIELD OF REEDS
4. Yo La Tengo, FADE
5. Beyonce, BEYONCE
6. Blood Orange, CUPID DELUXE
7. The National, TROUBLE WILL FIND ME
8. Ducktails, THE FLOWER LANE
9. Justin Timberlake, THE 20/20 EXPERIENCE
10. Mayer Hawthorne, WHERE DOES THIS DOOR GO?
11. Kanye West, YEESUZ
12. My Bloody Valentine, MBV
13. Fitz And The Tantrums, MORE THAN JUST A DREAM
1. Arctic Monkeys, Knee Socks
2. Suede, It Starts And Ends With You
3. PSY, Gentleman
4. John Murry, ¿No Te Da Ganas De Reir
5. Summer Camp, Pink Summer
6. Bored Nothing, Shit for Brains
7. Ducktails, Letter of Intent
8. Justin Timberlake, Blue Ocean Floor
9. Prefab Sprout, Billy
10. Phosphorescent, Ride On Right On
11. Miley Cyrus, We Can't Stop
12. ChVrches, Gun
13. The National, Don't Swallow The Cap
14. Beyonce, XO
15. Kanye West, Blood on the Leaves
16. Okkervil River, Pink Slips
17. Mariah Carey with Miguel, Beautiful
18. Fitz And The Tantrums, Fool's Gold
19. Rose Elinor Dougall, Strange Warnings
20. Daughter, Smother
21. Daft Punk, Giorgio By Moroder
22. Let's Buy Happiness, Run
23. Tegan And Sara, I Was A Fool
24. Pure Bathing Culture, Pendulum
25. Ariana Grande, Almost Is Never Enough
26. Haim, The Wire
27. Autre Ne Veut, World War
28. Mayer Hawthorne, Wine Glass Woman
29. Blood Orange, It Is What It Is
30. Majical Cloudz, Turns Turns Turns
31. Kate Boy, The Way You Are
32. Foxygen, No Destruction
33. AlunaGeorge, Best Be Believing
34. Yo La Tengo, Ohm
35. Savages, Shut Up
36. Pearl Jam, Sirens
37. These New Puritans, Fragment Two
38. Dawn Richards, 86
39. Matt Berry, Medicine
40. Inc.,Angel
