AudioFemme’s Top 50 Albums of 2013, Part 2

Audiofemme lists the top 25 LPs we’ll forever associate with 2013.

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Yo La Tengo Fade Album Art25. Yo La Tengo – Fade

Fade is quintessential Yo La Tengo and, at the same time, a break from their norm: a subdued, extremely well-thought-out affair produced by John McEntire instead of Roger Moutenot (the band’s go-to for the past 20 years). Familiarly fuzzy guitars rule on “Paddle Forward” while expertly implemented instruments (like violin, cornet, and trombone) make appearances in tracks like the sweet and tender “Cornelia and Jane.” It’s a warm and quietly welcoming record that was overlooked by many.

 

 

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Palma Violets 180 Album Art24. Palma Violets – 180

We first got into Palma Violets about a year ago, when they played a string of shows on the Kent Ave strip in BK, prior to their festivals tour. They had just released their debut two-track EP, which caught on like wildfire. They played some packed SXSW shows and then, like a chimera, quietly vanished for the summer. Suddenly around late fall, their full-length, 180, seemingly appeared out of nowhere. After listening to it for a week straight, it was decided that this band had actually perfected garage rock. Moody and drawling, while raucous in its aesthetic, 180 has its roots planted in more purist brands of yelpy, reverb-laden grunge, yet toward the extremities it branches out, building on if not spearheading a new movement in the genre, with sentimental lyrical leanings and experimentation with fuzzy electronics.

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Valerie June Pushin' Against A Stone Album Art23. Valerie June – Pushin’ Against A Stone

In pulling equally from country, gospel and soul, one might worry that Pushin’ Against a Stone would come across confused and unfocused.  But that’s far from true, thanks to the personality behind Valerie June’s vocals and arrangements. Thoughtfully loose, skilled and palatable, these tracks draw together sweet, simple songs that have staying power due to their timeless feel.  The singer-songwriter’s authenticity plays a big part in that as well; she’s been active in the Memphis music scene since helping her dad promote soul acts there when she was just a little girl, and has long been a part of the Broken String Collective there.  An apt chronicle of the struggles of a musician’s life, Stone boasts co-writing and production credits from blues-rock stalwart Dan Auerbach and the legendary Booker T. Jones.

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A$AP Rocky LongLiveA$AP Album Art22. A$AP Rocky – LongLiveA$AP

In a year that was packed with enormous hip-hop projects, A$AP Rocky more than held his own.  After he landed his major label deal with RCA, fans waited breathlessly for the follow-up to 2012 mixtape LiveLoveA$AP. A full year and some odd months’ delay didn’t bode well for the young Harlem-based rapper, but just one blast of LongLiveA$AP‘s thunderstorming beats and varied guest production was enough to shore up our faith in A$AP as a curator; he knows how to pick beats, but more importantly, he knows how to pick his friends. Then, there’s his slippery, slithery rhyming that exists in its own cross-section between old East Coast braggadocio and West Coast psychedelia.  He’s still a rookie but the choices on LongLiveA$AP indicate a rapper with his own lane aesthetically, lyrically and sonically.

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Thee Oh Sees Floating Coffin Album Art21. Thee Oh Sees – Floating Coffin

In little more than five years, SF-based surf punks Thee Oh Sees have a amassed an avalanche of deliriously frenzied garage rock on countless comps, singles, EPs, live records, and a whopping seven studio albums. That frantic pace is indicative of the band’s uncontrolled stage energy, which has earned them a reputation as a must-see live act. On Floating Coffin, the band’s latest release (and sadly its last; frontman John Dwyer announced the group’s hiatus in December) sees them taking their cult horror movie concepts to a place more informed by mythology, drawing imagery from mountains, minotaurs and mazes. The blistering guitars, thunderous drums, feverish tempos, and off-the wall flourishes that have characterized the Oh Sees’ catalogue are in full effect here, fine-tuned after tireless touring.

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Chelsea Wolfe Pain Is Beauty Album Art20. Chelsea Wolfe – Pain Is Beauty

Dark without veering into pastiche, Chelsea Wolfe struck a balance on Pain Is Beauty that had previously eluded her gothic-leaning sound. Her vocals soar operatically over crushing guitar, dramatic strings, and moody synths. There’s both weight and brightness here, as Wolfe builds to towering crescendos, her emotive wails layered and distorted and echoing into timelessness. It’s a long-playing record, best listened beginning to end, but it rolls by at a gallop, like fog on a dusky horizon.

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Chance the Rapper Acid Rap Album Art19. Chance The Rapper – Acid Rap

There’s a joyfulness to Chance the Rapper’s free-for-all cadence that pervades even the depressing, soul-searching tracks of his second mixtape Acid Rap. Chance, it seems, actually likes rapping, a quality that has fallen by the wayside in the midst of swaggering and molly-popping major label deals. Replete with horns, squawking, roller coastering guest verses and Chance’s own unstoppable greased lighting flow, Acid Rap served the same purpose as a label debut for the Chicago rapper even though he remains unsigned.  And though he uses his platform to lobby for intervention into the dark corners of Chicago, there’s plenty of sunshine and love on the tape as well.  Psychedelic, introspective and gleeful, it’s Chance’s acid trip – we’re just living in it.

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Unknown Mortal Orchestra II Album Art18. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – II

On Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s sophomore release (aptly titled II) the band has mellowed out a bit since their more raucous, rock-driven 2011 debut, and as is the case with most projects whose second album puts them on the map, perfected their sound—a mix between sunny, jangly Beatles throwback and manipulated garage rock. Lyrically, each track weaves a relatable narrative, though is never overly literal, waxing tales of existential woe (“Swim And Sleep”), heartbreak (“So Good At Being In Trouble”) and grumpy Christians (“Secret Xtians). This sentiment is mirrored sonically as well. They’ve managed to coax out the best aspects of old school psych rock, and grittier indie grunge without being overly referential toward either.

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Deafheaven Sunbather Album Art17. Deafheaven – Sunbather

The solid-pink cover art on Sunbather, apparently representative of the view of the insides of your eyelids as you stare at the sun, is indicative of the unusual direction this album takes from its black metal roots. Often euphoric and triumphant, borrowing from shoegaze and all but totally eschewing black metal’s usual depressive violence, this album sounds like a whole new genre the making.

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Darkside Psychic Album Art16. Darkside – Psychic

Nicholas Jaar and Dave Harrington are not in the business of reading minds, per se, but with their full-length debut they certainly harness the ability to expand them. Merging spacious electronics, looming techno grooves, sparse ambient washes, and tribal percussion, Jaar and Harrington have taken the thousand-yard stare at the end of the party and stretched it to infinity. The resulting compositions are atmospheric but feel internally focused; the option of zoning out is available but zoning in is more rewarding. Like being at a club and watching everything slow-mo, the duo test the limits of what’s still considered danceable, as on their eleven minute lead-off track “Golden Arrow”, or in the claps and stomps of “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen”.

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The National Trouble Will Find Me Album Art15. The National – Trouble Will Find Me

Why fix what isn’t broken? That must be the motto of Brooklyn’s The National, who have been exceedingly successful at creating cerebral, moody indie rock since 2001. The thirteen tracks on Trouble will Find Me are no exception; Matt Berringer’s deep, velvety voice delivers brooding lyrics about failed romantic entanglements and life’s disappointments throughout the album, backed by intricate polyrhythms and lush instrumentation. The record builds momentum only to double back on itself like MC Escher’s staircase drawings, relying less on the explosive tension of 2010’s High Violet and opting instead for restless subtleties.

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Savages Silence Yourself Album Art14. Savages – Silence Yourself

Savages have been making waves with their fierce live shows since forming in the fall of 2011 but waited to record a proper album, letting that intensity build so they could better harness it in the studio. The result is Silence Yourself, a record with enough depth to immerse the listener in the kind of visceral gauntlet fans of the band’s live shows have come to expect. The record reads like a manifesto, offering new, more subtle perspectives on violence and desire, examining the intersection of the two in rich detail. Darkly romantic, the aggression here is tempered with sensitivity in a rare and exciting way.

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Bill Callahan Dream River Album Art13. Bill Callahan – Dream River

The graveness in Bill Callahan’s vocal performance is belied by the adept, even banal humor of his lyrics. Emerging from the liminal grunge of his former moniker Smog, Callahan has edged closer and closer to folksy songwriting and all-out Americana. On Dream River, his fifth as solo LP (there are also 13 Smog albums), the gravity and laughter swirl past in rapid progression. Flutes, oddly strummed acoustic guitars, and a smattering of drums are all that populates the record alongside Callahan’s gravedigger voice. It’s a marvelously sparse series of subjective reflections on nature, beer, and mortality simmering with loneliness. The record finds Callahan going through the motions with deftness that remakes everyday life into something worthy of praise, revealing that minutiae can be enormous.

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Waxahatchee Cerulean Salt Album Art12. Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt

Katie Crutchfield left PS Eliot in 2011, a band she’d fronted and in which her twin sister Alison played drums. Alison went on to form Swearin’, a paean to girl-fronted pop-punk, while Katie released American Weekend as Waxahatchee, a decidedly lo-fi acoustic-based project meant to showcase Katie’s raspy vocals and innate vulnerability. If that record was a ribcage, Cerulean Salt is a backbone, each song a vertebrae stacked on the next, housing sensitive spinal cords, a throbbing conduit of sensory perception. Crutchfield reunited with old collaborators (including sis) for instrumental and production duties; for that we have an artifact far more polished than its predecessor but every bit as raw.

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Run The Jewels Album Art11. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels

After collaborating on each other’s stellar 2012 releases, it seemed obvious that Killer Mike and El-P would work together again, but no one quite expected it to take the form of a whole album’s worth of bombastic, no holds-barred hip-hop. The two make natural conspirators, taking on the world as an unstoppable tag-team willing to show up anyone who dares dis the crew. Production ranges from more modern-sounding glitchiness to cleverly referential retro – sometimes even on the same track – but everything ends up sounding massive, buoyant and incendiary. Even at their most aggressive, the duo’s verses are indicative of the fun they had in putting it all together; the record is a victory lap and everyone’s invited to the party.

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Blood Orange Cupid Deluxe Album Art10. Blood Orange – Cupid Deluxe

In the time that’s passed since Dev Hynes released his 2011 debut Coastal Grooves, he’s produced hits for Solange Knowles and Sky Ferreira (among others), and it’s his hand as a producer that can be felt most absolutely on his sophomore release. Despite his ability to carry a song with his soulful falsetto, the record is stuffed with guest performances – from Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth to Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek to Clams Casino to Despot to Skepta to girlfriend and Friends frontwoman Samantha Urbani. There are as many slow-burners as dancefloor bangers here, each feeling, sultry, intimate, and vibrant all at once.

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Mutual Benefit Love's Crushing Diamond Album Art9. Mutual Benefit – Love’s Crushing Diamond

Love’s Crushing Diamond, the highly anticipated debut from Mutual Benefit’s Jordan Lee, falls somewhere in the perfect nexus of folk and the next wave of melody-driven chamber rock. He manages to blend sweet, strings-driven, twinkling phrasing with classic folk motifs for guitar and banjo, in a way that could easily become overly sentimental if it weren’t for his impressive capacity as a songwriter and his expansive musicianship. We can’t wait to see what this young virtuoso has in store for us next.

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Julia Holter Loud City Song Album Art8. Julia Holter – Loud City Song

Angelic-voiced Holter takes “concept” to a whole new level. It’s not just that each song documents a particular sense of place with lush drift, but that the whole record is infused with the very essence of living in an urban environment, romanticized to its most endearing extreme. The ambient backing elements are equivalent to falling asleep to a tape of whale noises for those who cannot live (or more importantly, wish not to) without the soothing whoosh of nighttime highways or rain falling on pavement.  But there’s also a strong melodic aspect to the album’s most swaying  moments; Holter is a true artist who continues to mine the rift between the atmospheric and the literal.

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Deerhunter Monomania Album Art7. Deerhunter – Monomania

Monomania is Deerhunter’s sixth studio album and, in some ways, is the clearest picture into the psyche of Bradford Cox that the elusive frontman has yet offered.  Even when assuming his alter-ego in early performances of the material, Cox could not obscure the stories behind it – rebounding from the departure of bassist Josh Fauver, for instance, or struggling with the nature of his own self-obsession. No stranger to social disillusionment, Cox turns this grating, aggressive loneliness into agony on tracks like “Leather Jacket II” and “T.H.M.” On more jangly, carousing numbers like “Penascola” and “Back to the Middle” the band reveal their chops as experts in the Southern existential indie rock they’ve helped mint. But brooding title track “Monomania” brings things to a head—escaping the self is impossible, so why not embrace it?

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Majical Cloudz Impersonator Album Art6. Majical Cloudz – Impersonator

Taking a relatively minimalist set-up to astonishingly emotive heights, the Montreal duo delivered a gorgeous, devastating masterpiece. The songs themselves are simple, built around Matthew Otto’s sparse, organic synth patches that present just a few electronic elements without much in the way of melody. But Devon Welsh’s powerful, emotionally raw vocals transmit a magnetic intensity that’s quite unlike anything else that came out in 2013. It is distinctly not a hardcore record, but it has the same pummeling effect, the themes centering on the varied, illusory roles we play as performers, as lovers, in families, as friends. The lyric sheet features some form of the word “love” upwards of 25 times, but every syllable is equally a crushing blow and tender moment.

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Haim Days Are Gone Album Art5. Haim – Days Are Gone

There was and still is a lot of hype around the Haim sisters’ debut, but Days Are Gone lives up to every ounce of it. This album showcases a variety of influences that are perfectly implemented—some ‘70s rock n’ roll, some ‘80s synthpop, and some ‘90s R&B. Everything comes together pretty much flawlessly, with each of the 11 tracks perfectly capable of standing firmly on their own two feet while also fluidly coalescing into a phenomenal pop tour-de-force.

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Kanye West Yeezus Album Art4. Kanye West – Yeezus

As if it was even necessary at this point, Kanye West cemented himself as an off-kilter taste-maker, a misunderstood genius, a cultural bell-weather, and, of course, a god. Over beats far more abrasive than most anything in mainstream hip-hop, West’s anger is at the forefront of this aggressive record – he attacks the very spotlight perpetually pointed at him, tackles racism from both within and without black culture, touches on abortion, rough sex, and self-destruction. Though it was released with little fanfare (down to the understated-as-a-statement artwork), it has been nothing but talked about since, whether that discussion revolved around the elaborate tour (including White Jesus, a Golem, and an Agro-crag) that followed or the parodies of “Bound 2″s not-safe-for-work (or for the highway) motorcycle porno starring Ye’s wife Kim Kardashian.

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Daft Punk Random Access Memories Album Art3. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

The French electronic duo put together a glittering yearbook of influences, producers, and samples they’ve used over the last twenty years by collaborating and recording tracks live with the very same musicians they’ve made reference to in the past. Pharrell Williams, Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Chilly Gonzales, and Panda Bear are but a few of these, sometimes to slightly strange or eccentric effect, but just as often resulting in pop-smash-hits like “Get Lucky”.  It’s a concept record about records and recording them, a love letter to a career’s worth of electronic muses that will inspire generations to come.

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Arcade Fire Reflektor Album Art2. Arcade Fire – Reflektor

After a massive rollout that included mystifying graffitti, SNL performances, and secret shows with mandatory ritz, Arcade Fire returned with the Haitian-rara-meets-Greek-mythology-inspired disco-infused behemoth that is Reflektor. Opening the band to electronic elements more than ever, fleshed out in a Jamaican castle and co-produced by the legendary James Murphy, Reflektor is as epic as anything Arcade Fire have created to date. The title is a reference to Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age” in which the philosopher discusses a passionate age versus a reflective one, and the thematic content of Reflektor follows suit, examining culture’s sticky intersections with technology, human connectedness (or disconnect), and where the soul truly lies in the thick of it all.

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My Bloody Valentine mbv Album Art1. My Bloody Valentine – m b v

If 2013 was anything, it was the year of the comeback (as our top three records should sufficiently indicate). Bands reunited to release long-overdue records, organize commemorative tours, or appear with top billing on festival rosters. But there was no return more significant than that of Dublin shoegazers My Bloody Valentine, who returned after a 22-year hiatus by releasing m b v with no real announcement save stray rumors that had circulated for two decades. It neither adds to or detracts from the band’s legacy and in that way feels like it’s picking up exactly where the band left off so long ago, as progenitors of a genre that’s left the world in a swirl of fuzzy guitar loops ever since.

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<< Missed albums 26 through 50? No worries!

Check out our Top Albums of 2013 Playlist on Spotify.

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