Favorite Music of 2024

Not sure if anyone will read this now that I've quit Facebook and can't post there. But if you are reading it, hello! I don't have any preamble this year; hope you enjoy the list!

Favorite Albums:

1. Geordie Greep: The New Sound
An hour-long jazz-rock odyssey with showtune flourishes that is also a concept album featuring a bunch of satirical character portraits of awful men and their awful ideas about sex and women. This is either going to be very much your thing or it's going to be very much not your thing, and I guess this list tells you where I fall. No other record this year exhilarated me and repulsed me as much as this one. An oddly sad album, too, given the subject matter.

2. Charli xcx: BRAT
Glitchy, fuzzed-out club music reminiscent of Charli's work with PC Music back in the day, but for as experimental as that sounds on paper, it's also just an unrelenting parade of banger after banger. A great example of how pop lyrics can employ syntactical simplicity to find depths of emotion with more efficiency and power than more typically literary songsmiths.

3. Kim Gordon: The Collective
"Alt-rock legend talk-sings over trap beats for 40 minutes" was not a musical recipe I would have ever come up with, but the results speak for themselves. Probably the most successful rap-adjacent album a 71-year-old white woman is ever going to make, and the way that Gordon and producer Justin Raisen find credible continuity between Sonic-Youth-style experimentation and contemporary hip-hop is fun and interesting.

4. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score)
The final two tracks ("Challengers: Match Point" and "Compress / Repress") are obviously the best songs on here and the entire reason for listening to the score. The score knows it, too, because it spends a bunch of the preceding 30 minutes teasing little incomplete snippets of the finale until the pieces finally arrive in an orgiastic release. Kinda like the movie itself and its soon-to-be-legendary final scene (where "Match Point" plays, of course). Rarely has a score so fully encompassed the affect of its film in microcosm.

5. Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice
Every bit as good as Afrique Victime, maybe even better. Definitely more urgent. And as with all Mdou Moctar, the cherry on top of everything else is that it's pure guitar shredding the whole time.

6. Sea Urchin: Destroy!
Indie rock Meatloaf with a penchant for surreal, even at times psychotic flavors to its breakup songs. Plus, a surprisingly great cover of "Call Your Girlfriend" in the middle of it all.

7. Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us
A slight move back toward the familiar after the loose and jammy Father of the Bride, which for me means a more consistent record with fewer highs. But a Vampire Weekend album is still a Vampire Weekend album, and the tunes here are still infectious. The tempo jump in "Ice Cream Piano" alone is worth checking out the whole album.

8. Oranssi Pazuzu: Muuntautuja
I am very out of touch with the world of metal, but every once in a while, a metal release floats its way to my ears and I get hooked. That's what happened with this weird, sludgy, psychedelic metal album.

9. Nala Sinephro: Endlessness
We've gotten a little further into the ambient jazz wave that Sinephro helped codify with Space 1.8 back in 2021, and she's still one of the greats of this little corner of jazz. Immaculate textures. Not to mention the production and mixing by Nala herself, which are aces. One of the best headphone albums of the year.

10. Ches Smith: Laughing Ash
In the liner notes to this album, Smith sarcastically suggests that this album is "Bachman Turner Overdrive meets Last Exit-era Sonny Sharrock," and while his point is that he doesn't compose music to be a melange of influences, I gotta say that I don't think I could come up with a better way to describe this deeply odd, deeply arresting album. Oops. He also writes that it's okay to find this music funny, which is good, because I do think there's something very playful and even comedic about it, and I also don't think laughing at something has to be derogatory. The joy of invention is infectious and manifests itself as cathartic laughter, after all.

Great 2024 Songs Not On These Albums:

Adeem the Artist: "Night Sweats"—Adeem remarking that a murdered Palestinian child's "face is like my son's" is something that's never left me after I heard it the first time. I don't think I could ever say anything about this genocide that even approaches the power of that line. Oh my god, what have we done?

Bon Iver: "THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS"—Scratches a classic Bon Iver itch, only with Vernon singing at a non-falsetto register. The most I've liked a new Bon Iver track in quite some time.

Sabrina Carpenter: "Taste"—I didn't think I liked Sabrina Carpenter at first, but then "Espresso" broke down my defenses just in time for "Taste" to get me. Hooks on hooks.

Doechii & JT: "Alter Ego"—I don't know anything about Doechii, but I randomly heard this in a mix, and I quickly became addicted to a song that rhymes "vagina" and "designer" and sounds like M.I.A. covering Azealia Banks, or maybe the other way around.

Donato Dozzy: "Santa Cunegonda"—A hypnotizing techo groove. Probably not the most innovative thing out there, but I am but flesh.

Emergency Group: "Spirit Logic"—A great cosmic epic from a great fusion group. The effortless expansiveness that this group manages to evoke again and again remains intoxicating to me.

FATHER JOHN MISTY: "Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose"—I don't know if I heard a better distillation of the waking-nightmare feeling of being alive in 2024 than this track.

Floating Points: "Fast Forward"—Sam Shepherd continues to make some of the most exciting dance music out there. This rules. I would go to clubs more if this is the kind of thing they played.

Greg Foat: "Sea of Tranquility"—The delicious intersection of smooth jazz and spiritual jazz, with some ambient synths thrown in for extra flavor.

Fucked Up: "HOLD UP HALF THE SKY"—Fucked Up's limited-time-only album Who's Got the Time & A Half? is pretty solid overall, but this is the track on there that I found myself replaying most. An oddly addicting chat/groove.

Helena Hauff: "Punks in the Gym"—I hadn't checked in on Helena Hauff in a while, and when I do, lo and behold, her 12" from this year absolutely rules. This one's the clear standout, a throbbing, sinister banger that the liner notes accurately describe as "a volcanic dance where 303 earthquakes shake the ground before eruptions."

JPEGMAFIA: "either on or off the drugs"—The story surrounding JPEGMAFIA's album I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU was twofold: 1) he's incorporating rock elements, and 2) he's being uncharacteristically vulnerable. My favorite track off the record didn't do much of #1, but it had plenty of #2: a song that staggers between contemptuous swagger and self-loathing, culminating in a prayer that his children don't end up weak like him. May be the first song I've heard that samples an AI-generated song, too, which is something I don't know how I feel about.

Kendrick Lamar: "squabble up"—It was between this and "Meet the Grahams" for the Kendrick representation on this post (still need to spend more time with GNX as an album). Ultimately, I decided that it's a lot more fun to listen to the way he pronounces the "face / taste" rhyme than to six and a half minutes of a man being murdered in cold blood.

Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements: "We Waited for the Bears to Leave"—Lattimore's harp and McClements's accordion oscillate with each other into a 12-minute contemporary-classical crescendo. Very cool.

Kelly Lee Owens: "Dreamstate"—She's mostly just chanting the title of the song over an electropop pulse. I love that.

Chappell Roan: "Good Luck, Babe!"—Of the many, many Chappell Roan earworms that captivated everyone this year, this was the one that got its wormy hooks into me. That bridge is virtually Swiftian.

Shabaka feat. Floating Points & Laraaji: "I'll Do Whatever You Want"—Exactly the sum of its parts, and given the parts, that of course means it's great.

The Smile: "Zero Sum"—Had The Smile calmed down and released either a single album with only the best tracks from this year or two more sonically distinct albums, I probably would have found space for the band on the album list. Instead, in a crisis of indecision between their two very good 2024 albums, I decided to punt and simply include the best track from either album. Forever in my mind associated with some of the worst dancing by some of the worst people.

Patricia Taxxon: "Frat Claws"—I don't know a lot about furries or the music they make, but this is a terrific piece of indietronica. Good for the furries.

Xiu Xiu: "Piña, Coconut & Cherry"—People talked about the new Xiu Xiu record being their most accessible in years, and maybe it was, but the final track, which ended up being my favorite, feels like it could have come from the group's previous record, the abyss-black Ignore Grief. Dissonant strings, dissonant synths, and fuzzed out screaming turning what on paper seems like a love song into something that sounds apocalyptic. I guess that is now my preferred mode for the band.

Favorite Music of 2019

Insert my usual caveat that I didn't listen to nearly enough metal or rap. I also probably listened to a disproportionate amount of jazz, hence marking my full transition into "Dad."

As with last year, there wasn't really an album that stood out to me as my definitive "favorite" in 2019, and in fact, the top 5 are probably interchangeable as far as preference goes. For the albums I reviewed, I linked to the original reviews. It's most of them.

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't really have much of a preamble to this one. Hope you like the picks. Enter list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love
Hypnotic, beautiful, conceptual, yet immediate. I've been a Jenny Hval fan for a while, so it was probably just a matter of time before she topped one of these lists.

[Read original review]

2. Holly Herndon: PROTO
"There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing," Holly Herndon says in the liner notes to PROTO. "We stand in contrast to that." Clearly; PROTO is an album created in collaboration with Spawn—an A.I. created by Herndon and her colleagues. It's far from the cold experiment that genesis implies, though, and as Herndon's notes indicate, it's an oddly tender and even spiritual work. Herdon's notes go on to compare this album to the Appalachian church music she experienced growing up, which is both an appropriate and a radical comparison to make: if the capacity for worship and wonder is part of what makes us human, what does that say about Spawn?

3. Ariana Grande: thank u, next
One of the best pop songs of the decade births one of the best pop albums of the decade. No surprise.

[Read original review]

4. Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ancestral Recall
Scott has been one of the best, most forward-thinking jazz musicians out there for a while now, so when I say that Ancestral Recall is just more of the same, know that that's the highest praise.

[Read original review]

5. William Basinski: On Time Out of Time
Black hole space ambient drone—possibly the most exciting string of nouns I've ever written.

[Read original review]

6. Xiu Xiu: Girl with Basket of Fruit
Unless you're looking in danker corners than I am, Girl with Basket of Fruit is probably the weirdest album you'll hear all year. Keep on keeping on, Xiu Xiu.

[Read original review]

7. Thom Yorke: ANIMA
I've been a fan of pretty much all of Thom Yorke's solo output, so I didn't really connect to the "return to form" conversation a bunch of people were having around this album. But that doesn't mean it isn't still great, and it has that awesome Paul Thomas Anderson Netflix collaboration connected, too.

[Read original review]

8. Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride
Bloated and inconsistent, sure, but try telling that to me when that "Harmony Hall" piano hits.

[Read original review]

9. Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell!
If we're all still around in 2049 or whatever, people will probably think of this album (either that or "Old Town Road") when they think about 2019 music, or at least 2019 music culture. The disaffected despair, the meta games, the cutting, allusive lyrics, the brutal intimacy cloaked in a distancing persona—this just feels like what music in 2019 is all about. It's pretty sad. It's also pretty great.

[Read original review]

10. Elder Ones: From Untruth
Probably the more formally challenging album on this list—an off-kilter, dissonant 47 minutes of avant-garde world music/jazz. But if you can get on its wavelength, it's powerful, and Amirtha Kidambi's intensity is infectious.

[Read original review]






Great 2019 Songs Not On These Albums:

Bobby Krlic: "Fire Temple"—From the Midsommar score. If you've seen Midsommar, then you know what happens here, and oh man. If you haven't seen the movie, well, that's fine. It's still one of the most stunning pieces of music you'll hear all year.

Bruce Springsteen: "Hello Sunshine"—Bruce was pretty open about his struggles with depression on his autobiography a couple years back, and "Hello Sunshine" feels like an extension of that honesty. "You know I always liked that empty road," he sings, "No place to be and miles to go." Springsteen often sings in characters, but this is maybe about as personal as The Boss has ever gotten.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Now That I Found You"—An absolutely buoyant pop gem from CRJ. So you know, business as usual.

Cykada: "Third Eye Thunder"—Despite being ostensibly jazz, this is one of the proggiest tracks I heard all year. Cykada's self-titled album was #11 on my list, and it's another great record from the London jazz scene.

Don Campbell: "All Too Well"—Covering a song as personal and beloved as Taylor Swift's best song is a tall order, but Don Campbell manages it by turning it into a sort of emo anthem. Taylor Swift has always been a couple steps from being an emo artist herself, so it works great.

Flying Lotus: "Fire Is Coming" (feat. David Lynch)—About as freaky as you'd want a David Lynch collaboration to be.

HAIM: "Summer Girl"—If my pattern tracks, I'll be lukewarm on the next HAIM album when it comes out, even after being over-the-moon about its lead single. But whatever; I've worn this magical, warm, slinky little track out in the months since its release, and its Paul-Thomas-Anderson-directed music video is probably my favorite of the year.

Lil Nas X: "Old Town Road" (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)—Undeniable. The two biggest pop songs of the year were off-format oddities by internet weirdos, and this is pretty much the only thing about the wider world of 2019 that made me feel hope.

Margo Price: "Cocaine Cowboy" (live on Jimmy Kimmel Live!)—"Cocaine Cowboys" came off Margo Price's 2017 record All American Made, where it's a brisk little blues stomp. But when Price performed it live on Kimmel's show, it became a Rolling-Stones-esque jam, the "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" of country music, if you will, and the result is some of the best music of Price's career.

Matmos: "Silicone Gel Implant"—Experimental duo Matmos is known for high-concept playfulness, and their 2019 album Plastic Anniversary is no different, an entire record crafted from sound samples made with plastic. This is my favorite track off that record, the most danceable, fun few minutes on the album.

Octo Octa: "I Need You"—I first listened to this warm, spacious electronic track late at night in the hospital after my son was born, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the best place to hear it. Hasn't left me since.

Powder: "New Tribe"—I also heard this in the hospital after my son's birth. It's the polar opposite of "I Need You": animated by an ominous, machine-like drive. It's just as infectious, though.

Sharon Van Etten: "Comeback Kid"—Van Etten pivots from a folksy sad sack to an anthemic sad sack. I can dig it.

Taylor Swift: "Cruel Summer"—The best purely pop moment on Swift's new album. In fact, the best moment in general.

Wilco: "Love Is Everywhere (Beware)"—Typical Wilco lyrics of oblique paranoia in relief against bright folk music. This elder-statesman stage of Wilco's career is a lot more complex than people are willing to give it credit for, and this track is a great example of that. It also has that effervescent guitar refrain.

Mini Reviews for May 27-June 2, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Zardoz! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in a second one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!

Movies

Zardoz (1974) Reader Suggestion!
I love the idea that John Boorman's immediate response after the success of Deliverance was to rush off and make this tripped-out sex odyssey, The Holy Mountain by way of (anachronistically) The Man Who Fell to Earth by way of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Truly one of the most singular and bizarre movies to come out of that bananas window between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, when a lot of film sci-fi was stretching toward these sort of singular and bizarre statements already. Like a lot of that '70s sci-fi, Zardoz is a shaggy social satire bursting with ideas, striking imagery, and a ton of really off-beat costuming choices. Also like a lot of '70s sci-fi, it only barely hangs together on a plot level, and its reach exceeds its thematic grasp, especially toward its muddled conclusion. In some ways, its structure, where the first half is basically a character getting a tour of this weird future world and the second half is devoted to that character tearing that future world to shreds, feels more of a piece with Brave New World and other talkier socially conscious sci-fi novels of the mid-20th century than it does with '70s sci-fi cinema; in other ways, it bears exactly zero resemblance to anything, literary or cinematic. Not even the James Bond movies showed us this much sweaty Sean Connery skin. Thanks to whomever it was who recommended this movie to me, because that was something. Grade: B

Kaili Blues (路边野餐) (2015)
I was completely in the palm of this movie's hand for about the first hour, enough so that I was thinking about revising my rough "best of the decade" list I've started secretly compiling for the end of the year. Then the 40-minute single-take shot happened, and somehow, that jarred me out of the movie a bit. The shot takes what is initially one man's mystically infused personal quest and then blows it up into the story of the city of Kaili as a whole—which, normally that kind of "personal is a synecdoche of the communal" thing I would be a huge fan of, but there's just something about the way that that element of the movie interacts with those other elements that rubs me wrong, and the movie loses some of its unpredictable magic by tying the film down to what can be attained in a single shot. But make no mistake: this is still very good. It's got that Tarkovsky energy where every frame (that isn't part of the long take) vibrates with this spiritual potential energy that only bursts into something tangible once or twice during the film, but when it does, even subtly, it explodes. There was a shot early in the movie involving a projector and a train where I thought my head was going to melt it was so magical, and the movie ends on a similar effect. The whole thing is profound in this ineffable way that you so rarely get even in this kind of slow cinema, and I had a blast. Grade: A-

Would You Rather (2012)
A macabre, mean little thriller that violently riffs on the titular sleepover game. This gets commonly compared to Cheap Thrills (the reason I watched it, tbh), both being game-based metaphors for America's wealth divide released just a few months apart. Would You Rather has a much sharper political subtext, with the protagonist entering the game because of healthcare debt rather than just generic unemployment and with a much cleaner understanding of how the wealthy/powerful use the violence of the state to coerce the lower classes into a modern capitalistic game that they might otherwise rebel against (there's a butler literally holding everyone at gunpoint here, and it's revealed early on that he used to work for Mi6, so...). But also... Would You Rather just isn't as good as Cheap Thrills. Jeffrey Combs's sadistic gamemaster is about as compellingly watchable as David Koechner's parallel character in Cheap Thrills, but otherwise, the cast here is pretty cardboard and play barely sketched characters who are even less interesting than the performances, to say nothing about the even-less-engaging cinematic style. Plus, the lack of any sort of black-comic edge makes this movie just straight misery, and maybe I'm just a bourgeois loser for wanting my bleak class commentary to be just a tad bit more fun than this, but what can I say? Grade: B- 

The Beginning: Making "Episode I" (2001)
This is a remarkable making-of documentary on a number of counts, including the way it has virtually no interviews and instead presents a kind of fly-on-the-wall/Frederick Wiseman approach onset, giving us viewers a tremendous look at the moment-by-moment process of making The Phantom Menace. But more than anything, with the dramatic irony brought on by watching this in 2019, a deeply sad tragedy undergirds nearly every minute of this movie. Watching, for example, a young Jake Lloyd so genuinely excited to land a role for which he would be mercilessly harassed to such an extent that he would essentially renounce Star Wars forever; Ahmed Best throwing himself so completely and jovially into the physicality of Jar Jar Binks, a performance that would for all intents and purposes end his acting career; George Lucas himself working so dedicatedly to expand and challenge the Star Wars franchise, a vision for which he would receive so much hate that he would sell it off to Disney a mere decade later. This was Lucas's passion project, a bizarre little experimental film that just happened to have a budget of millions and an audience of billions, and regardless of how you feel about the final product of the prequels—I haven't watched them recently enough to have stronger feelings besides the notion that they don't deserve to be the whipping boy for the franchise—there's no denying just how singular the whole Lucas-led Star Wars series was: the most lucrative independent film project of all time, probably the most personal movie franchise to have ever made as much money as it did. In a lot of ways both technical and business-related, The Phantom Menace has proven itself to be one of the most important works of American mainstream filmmaking of the past twenty years, but perhaps the biggest one is how the fallout from this movie (alongside, much later, the Hobbit movies) made studios hit the brakes hard on this sort of blockbuster auteurism and eventually land at the bland competence of, for example, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Lucas's own words, Jar Jar is the key—a blessing in the specifics of how we rarely get characters this baldly terrible anymore, a curse in what it means that studios put up the bumpers so high that we can't get a character this baldly terrible again. To watch this documentary is to watch the movie industry change right before your eyes. Grade: A

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
I'm sure this has been said before, but it just clicked with me while I was watching this movie just how important the late '30s were for establishing certain norms in American mainstream entertainment. Among this movie, The Wizard of Oz, and *sigh* Gone with the Wind, there is an enormous innovation in how Hollywood films approach spectacle—no longer the majestic tableau of the silent era or the hushed theatricality of the early sound era but a bombastic-yet-fleet style defined by kineticism and color and musical sweep and actor charisma. The Adventures of Robin Hood is incredibly watchable in a way that feels distinctly modern compared to some of its immediate peers. Errol Flynn is pitch-perfect as Robin, the swashbuckling action is impressively staged and tensely executed, and every bit of this movie is a joy to experience. I had no idea that Disney's Robin Hood movie was basically 80% cribbed from this movie, but it makes sense, given how well this whole package works; why reinvent the wheel? That said, as is the case with most Robin Hood stories, it is a huge deflation that all the simmering populist energy is ultimately in service of propping up a monarch more than it is about the protection of the poor and that the central injustice to be righted in these stories always lands on the wrong person being on the throne rather than the poor being oppressed. So all the bit with King Richard in the movie's climax feels pretty dull to me. On a related note, it's kind of amazing that the 2010s, with all its discourse about wealth inequality and populism, still hasn't managed to make a good Robin Hood movie. Be better, filmmakers. Grade: A-

Television

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 6 (2019)
Still fun enough, I suppose, and the cast is, as always, extraordinarily engaging and winsome. But at this point, I'm mostly sticking with the show out of sunk cost. I've stuck with it this long; why not see it through to the end? I think I'm just tired of it; it's basically the same show it's ever been (the move to NBC doesn't seem to have made any huge creative changes to the show, although it feels just a tad sillier than it used to be—not sure if that would have happened at Fox anyway). But whereas something like Bob's Burgers is off-beat enough that even its recurring tropes don't wear thin, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is so conventionally a workplace sitcom that the longer some of its manners continue, the staler they feel because it's apparent that, aside from the amazing cast, we've been here before. Like I said, it's basically the same it's ever been, so this is more me than the show. But I'm wearing out on the Nine-Nine. Grade: B-

Music

Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride (2019)
Vampire Weekend isn't aiming for new fans with their first new album in six years. If you hated the preppy cosmopolitanism and Paul Simonisms of their first three albums, you're not going to be swept off your feet by Father of the Bride; if you enjoyed the wry lyrical turns, sharp hooks, and subtle melancholy of their first run, you'll probably find something to like here. I'm mostly in the latter camp, though unfortunately, most of what I found to like were things I'd already found; the best material ("Harmony Hall," "This Life," "Sunflower") the band dropped as singles long before the album's release. It's not as if the songs beyond the pre-release material are bad, but it's disappointing that there isn't a "Hannah Hunt" hiding deep in the tracklist. I suppose some might attribute this to the departure of Rostam Batmanglij from the band prior to this album's recording, and without Batmanglij playing instruments or producing, there's definitely a looser feel to the music. The tight precision of the previous album's production has sometimes been traded for some intentionally messy choices, like including studio chatter or burying melodies in off-format mixing or making the album 18 tracks long (!) or just overall letting the band slow down and sound more jammy, in the style of Grateful Dead or some other '70s FM rock. I gotta say, it's telling that the best song by far here, "Harmony Hall," has a Batmanglij writing credit. It's not that these new styles don't yield good songs or even that these are that radical of changes (like I said, if you liked their previous material, you'll like this), but it's clear to me that the band's strengths lie more in the highly affected production and tight songwriting of their past than in their apparently whoolier future. But the band is hardly adrift without Rostam. As always, their lyrics are barbed in unexpected ways and slyly political. It's fascinating to see what may be the quintessential Obama-era indie band deal with a distinctly post-Obama world, definitively on the other side of the ambivalence of Modern Vampires of the City and into a much more studied weariness; "I know pain is as natural as the rain, I just thought it didn't rain in California," Ezra Koenig sings on "This Life," his duet with Danielle Haim that sums up pretty neatly the intersection of self-aware privilege and regretted idealism at this album's emotional core. There were probably more concise, more disciplined ways to get us to that emotion, but the fact that they made it to begin with is something. Grade: B+

Favorite Music of 2013

Well, folks, it's almost the end of 2013, and you know what that means for the pop culture world: lists. Being the shameless trend-follower that I am, I decided to make a list of my own. So here it is. My favorite music of 2013.

It speaks to my unhealthy addiction to obsessing about pop culture that I managed to craft this post in the midst of end-of-semester projects and papers. Yeah, making lists like these is pretty self-indulgent (even more so in my case, considering I really know next to nothing about music), but I've been doing the whole self-indulgent-blogger thing for about five months already, so why stop now? I do realize that it's only the 7th of December, so this is technically my favorite 2013 music released between January 1st and December 7th. Having looked at the release schedule for the rest of the month, though, I don't think I'll be interested in anything else released this month.

Still, it's probably in my best interest to admit that this list was not made with any sort of comprehensive knowledge of 2013's musical output. Even not counting these last few weeks of December I'm ignoring, I'm sure there are many, many great albums and songs I've missed, especially because I have only a narrow exposure to this year's releases. Metal and rap, for example, are almost completely absent from this post because I don't keep up with either genre very closely. So if you think I've missed something great, let me know! I'm always open for music suggestions. Alternately, I realize this list (as well as all other pop culture lists) is a bit reductive and arbitrary, so if you disagree with my rankings, let me know that, too! Discussion is the great product of lists like these, and I wholeheatedly encourage it.

Sorry for all the wordiness, both in the above introduction and in the commentary below. Feel free to skip it all if you want. It won't hurt my feelings. Now, without further ado, let the listing commence.

Favorite Albums

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend shed most of their world-music and twee influences and upped the thematic heft of their lyrics, and they managed to do so without losing their ear for lightweight melody, by itself a great achievement. What's even more impressive is that in the process they created something that is actually profound, something I never expected of VW (a band I considered good but mostly just "for fun," whatever that means). Modern Vampires of the City is about the disconnect between doubt and faith that in the end comes down on the side of doubt, but what's great about it is its nuance in that position, making the faith just as appealing, if only romantically so. Very compelling stuff.

2. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
The rumors are true: Reflektor is too long, the lyrics can be overbearing, and it lacks the chest-thumping climax of previous Arcade Fire albums. It speaks to the towering achievement of Reflektor that even with those flaws, the Arcade Fire's latest is a near-masterpiece of rock theatrics. You'll be hard-pressed to find a band out there right now (especially in the increasingly complacent indie world that birthed AF) so committed the marriage of sonic expansion and conceptual complexity. More so than ever before, Arcade Fire's approach to music recalls the '70s heyday of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, when rock was not only a sound but a medium for philosophical discourse.

3. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
Before Shaking the Habitual, I hadn't listened to The Knife very much outside of "Heartbeats," the closest this duo every got to a hit song. With Shaking the Habitual, though, The Knife is about as far from "Heartbeats" as you could imagine. Gone are the electronica hooks, and in their place are dissonance, ambiance, and polyphonic rhythms. It's hypnotic and tense music full of strange left turns (19-minute ambient interlude, anyone?) and dance beats to soundtrack the most paranoid party you've ever been to. The whole thing takes some close listening to get into, but once you're on its brainwave, it's entirely worth the effort.

4. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
When I wrote about Janelle Monáe's first album, The ArchAndroid, in my 2010 year-end list of albums (in one of those old-fashioned Facebook notes, no less—hello, old-school social media), I wrote that she was the only contemporary R&B artist I really liked. Well, things have changed in the three years since (both in my own musical tastes and the creatively renewed R&B scene), but Janelle Monáe is still the queen of whatever genre she decides to try on. The Electric Lady isn't quite as colorful as the kaleidoscopic ArchAndroid, more focused on soul and funk grooves, but it's still an inventive, danceable, and infectiously fun entry into Monáe's android world. Power up!

5. Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
I don't really have anything to add to my initial write-up on this album and its position in the current musical landscape. It's a great album full of fun songs with great hooks, made even greater for people like me who hold an unabashed affection for the late-'60s underground scene its production mimics. Fans of Loaded rejoice!

6. Savages: Silence Yourself 
Sufjan Stevens may not have been a big fan of the font used on the cover (and I'm wont to agree with him—it's a bit cluttered, isn't it, folks?), but other than that, there's not much to complain about with Savages' debut. Propulsive tunes like "She Will" and "I Am Here" are give the record an awesomely primal punk sound, while pieces like "Waiting For a Sign" and "Marshall Dear" texture out the album with tinges of black metal and jazz. The way I'm talking about it kind of makes Savages' music sound academic, and in a sense it is. But really, Silence Yourself just rocks hard. Prepare to headbang.
 

7. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
I was still in diapers when the last (and long-presumed final) My Bloody Valentine record, Loveless, debuted, so I can't make any claims to the decades-long wait that some fans endured for this album. Still, having a new MBV album was an unexpected pleasure for me, and having that album somehow not turn into indie rock's Chinese Democracy (much less be this good) was an even greater pleasure. With the glut of dream pop/shoegaze that indie rock has experienced in recent years, it's pretty awesome that the granddaddy of the genre can still come back to teach everyone something new.

8. David Bowie: The Next Day 
Next in this year's "Surprise Art-Rock Return" is David Bowie, an artist who I (along with many others) assumed had entered that semi-retired, semi-nostalgic state of his career where he would churn a new single every few years just to let everyone know he was still alive (see also: The Rolling Stones). Boy was I wrong. With The Next Day, Bowie comes out of the gates swinging, delivering a smart, winning collection of hard rock ("The Next Day"), majestic ballads ("You Feel So Lonely You Could Die"), and classic-Bowie weirdness ("Dancing In Outer Space"). Semi-retired, nothing.

9. Jars of Clay: Inland 
I have a lot of problems with CCM (that's Contemporary Christian Music, for those of you unfamiliar with the wild, woolly world of Evangelical lingo). But Jars of Clay have always been a bright spot in the genre for me, and on this album, they've rarely been better. On Inland (without a doubt their best work since Good Monsters [by my money, still their masterpiece]), Jars of Clay deliver some of the most poignant and insightful lyrics of their career, set to some of their most adventurous musicianship in years. It's a compelling look at what it means to be aging, irrelevant, and Christian in 2013, and you'll be hard-pressed to find introspection that balances doubt and joy so well.

10. The National: Trouble Will Find Me 
Speaking of balancing doubt and joy... well, The National aren't so good at it. This Brooklyn quintet has always skewed much closer to the doubting (some might say despairing) end of the emotional spectrum, and this album is no different. Trouble Will Find Me shows The National in the rockingest mood they've been in since 2008's Boxer, but don't let the increased tempo fool you; these are still the same sad sacks we know and love, and the results are typically gorgeous. What's pleasantly surprising about this one, though, is that the band gets less and less dour as the album progresses, and by "Humiliation," the lyrics are actually playful. Maybe they're closer to joy than I think.


10 Great Songs Not On These Albums

Atoms for Peace: "Default"—While the Atoms for Peace album AMOK lacked the warmth and sparse sensuality that made Radiohead's underrated King of Limbs so enjoyable for me (was I the only one hoping Flea would play a more prominent role in AfP?), Thom Yorke's latest project yielded its fair share of good songs, most notably this one. "Default" is groovy and percussive and awesome in a way that Radiohead hasn't been for years.

Chance the Rapper: "Pusha Man (feat. Nate Fox & Lili K.)"—Chance the Rapper's mixtape Acid Rap was number 11 on the albums list, so really, the whole thing is worth a listen. But this song in particular captures the best of Chance the Rapper: the jazzy production, Chance's woozy delivery, the uneasiness with drug culture, and the tension between hedonism and social commentary that undergirds the whole mixtape.

The Civil Wars: "From This Valley"—This one's just gorgeous. There was apparently some intra-band turmoil leading up to the release of The Civil Wars' eponymous second album (so much so that it's kind of a surprise that there's an album at all), but you can't hear any of it on this song. It's a beautiful bit of country folk, and if we never hear anything else from The Civil Wars again, it might well be their mini-Abbey Road, for all the joy its 3:33 run time exudes.

Daft Punk: "Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)"—Daft Punk albums tend to run a little long and tedious for my tastes (this year's Random Access Memories included), but taken in single doses, this duo can sure crank out some excellent tunes. Of the veritable tsunami of neo-disco that's come out in the past few years, "Get Lucky" is among the best, funkiest, and catchiest of them all, not to mention a pretty great return to pop songwriting by Daft Punk.

The Flaming Lips: "You Lust (feat. Phantogram)"—Has there ever been a group so determined to defy aging-rock-band conventions as The Flaming Lips? Thirty years into their careers, these guys are still constantly pushing themselves into new territories, be it 24-hour-long songs, Virgin Mobile commercials, possible Ke$ha collaborations, or, as is the case with "You Lust," 13-minute krautrock jams. "You Lust" sounds more like a cut from a Can or Kraftwerk album than anything from the band that released The Soft Bulletin, but that doesn't stop it from being a fantastically aggressive, provocative piece of music. It's dark stuff, to be sure, but it's also riveting to hear unfold.

Laura Marling: "Master Hunter"—This British folk singer channels Joni Mitchell and especially Led Zeppelin III-period Led Zeppelin, and the results are fantastic. Laura Marling delivers an awesome three minutes of progressive folk, sounding at once mythic and personal.

Saint Pepsi: "Call Me Maybe (SAINT PEPSI Edit)"—I've already written at length about my love for "Call Me Maybe," so I'll just leave you with this proposition: what if it were an R&B slow jam? Wonder no more.

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"—Even for someone like me who doesn't listen to a lot of radio Top 40, 2013 was a great year for pop music. Exhibit A: "Mirrors." While I never really got into the whole "JT pretends to be Stevie Wonder" shtick that was The 20/20 Experience, "Mirrors" hits that epic, melodic, just-cheesy-enough sweet spot that all Justin Timberlake songs should aim for. Don't listen to the radio edit; let all eight minutes of the album cut wash over you. An added bonus: the song also has a seriously great music video set to the eight-minute version.

Kanye West: "New Slaves"—Yeezus. Good grief. For every brilliant moment Kanye delivers on that album (and there are quite a few), there are at least three more eye-rolling, narcissistic, and straight-up ugly ones in close proximity. "New Slaves," however, manages to condense everything great about Yeezus (the noisy production, the social commentary, the classic-soul allusions) without absorbing the worst (the misogyny, the self-obsession, the *ugh* "Jesus wept" line). There's still plenty of ugliness in "New Slaves," but I'd argue that it's necessary ugliness in service of the song's razor-sharp criticism of consumerism. Kanye's often a provocateur, but when he's using that status to call out the racism in consumer culture and big business, I don't so much mind it.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Sacrilege"—Mosquito is not a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, but "Sacrilege," the lead single and opening track from that album, is most definitely a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. One of their best ever, I'd say. It takes the high production values and sweeping scope of their more recent albums and mixes it with the visceral impact of their earlier work. The end product is stunning.

Until next time!