2013 was a veritable, unending gold mine for music fans. At times it felt there were upwards of five MUST LISTEN records released each week. From pop to rap to indie to rock to r&b, the year was stacked with both heavyweights and newcomers releasing complex, densely-layered, forward-thinking, and ultimately lasting records. What’s more is the music released throughout the year featured artists continuing to amalgamate sounds, further unifying the overall musical landscape. One couldn’t simply make a rock or a pop or a rap record in 2013. As the musical playing field continues its inevitable leveling-out process, and the internet further shifts music away from a mosaic into something more homogenous, the best musicians of today are rapidly evolving; both emulating styles and crafting completely new sounds all their own.
These are the 20 albums from 2013 that have resonated the most with me. This last year of my life has been one of great personal growth as I’ve overcome many of the barriers that have long stood in my way. At the same time, solitude, the blues, and wrangling over what’s next has continued to nag at, and color my world view. Isolated from most of my family and friends on the Korean Peninsula, music has been a connective tissue for me to people, feelings, memories, foods, and places so far away. Each of these albums reflect and embody the realities which I have lived with throughout 2013. They’ve lasted through 12 months of re-listens, personal evolution, strict criticism, and ultimately, will forever define 2013 to me.
Along with my top 20, I’ve also included six honorable mentions that couldn’t quite crack my final list, but are certainly worth your time in their own right.
Honorable Mentions
Colin Stetson — New History Warfare vol 3: To See More Light
Oneohtrix Point Never — R Plus Seven
Page McConnell — Unsung Cities & Movies Never Made
Youth Lagoon — Wondrous Bughouse
My Twenty Favorite Records Of 2013
20. Cass McCombs — Big Wheel & Others
It’s fitting that this is where we’ve come with this sprawling, songwriting troubadour in 2013. A lengthy, 22-song record which hears McCombs write some of his simplest songs, along with some of his most abstract. Interspersed with innocent, yet bizarre interviews with a young boy named Sean, (these are actually audio clips from a 1969 documentary called Sean, about a 4-yr-old growing up in Haight-Ashbury) who documents — among other things — his preference for eating grass, and his fully-formed, cynical views on cops, the record feels like a lot of loose-ends and ideas, disjointedly tied together. In many ways, this resembles a mid-career bootleg session. A result of McCombs infatuation with northern California’s history of “drugs, gunslingers, and gold,” the record carries the solitary, open-ended wanderlust of its regional heartbeat. Yet, within its vast, oft discombobulated arc, are tracks like “Brighter” (Both I & II), “There Can Only Be One,” “Unknown Spain Song,” and “Morning Star” that are pure Cass, through-and-through. For whatever reason, “I stopped in for a little while / And learned a host of sins / I wandered off a little while / Cause you can never win” from “Brighter,” is a line that keeps bouncing around in my head. While not nearly as focused as his two finest records — 2009's Catacombs and 2011's Wit’s End — Big Wheel sees McCombs continuing to evolve in search of the elusive wisdoms and divine energies that ultimately keep him going.
19. The Knife — Shaking The Habitual
Seven years after Silent Shout, The Knife returned with a fiery & brash concept album that attacked the horrendous greed, economic destruction, mass-corporatizing, and human oppression that ravages our planet seemingly without end. Preachy, loud, often-times obnoxiously leftist, Shaking The Habitual lives and dies on the demented and chaotic catchiness that makes up its best moments. “A Tooth For An Eye,” “Full Of Fire,” “Networking,” and “Stay Out Here” sound like the greatest dance party imaginable for the impending apocalypse. (If it’s the last night on Earth, and there are two dance parties happening simultaneously, there’s no question, I’m going to the Shaking The Habitual party over the Reflektor party…) Leveling things out midway through is the methodical, 19-minute, “Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realized.” Recorded in an old boiler room, it’s a piece that requires incredible patience, but offers thematic contemplation in return. While the album overall could have benefitted greatly by a few tracks being cut — the abrasively unnecessary, nine minute “Fracking Fluid Injection” immediately comes to mind — in the end, this was one of the first records of 2013 to announce — with visceral directness — that, musically, 2013 would matter.
Take three classically trained, young musicians. Allow them a few years of open-ended, acid-jazz, abstract improvisational experiments. Send them out on the road with a plethora of West African rhythm records, electronic dance albums, and ambient soundscapes. Get them in a room and have them try to recreate the minimalistic passages and rhythmic-based musical themes bouncing around in their heads on acoustic instruments. Have them engage is hyper-competitive 3am tennis matches. Hit record. The result: Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia. A fluid, focused, hypnotic record that serves as both the perfect background music for writing/reading/cooking, and also an irresistible passageway into an altered mindset. While there were certainly other records I enjoyed more than this one, perhaps no other record in 2013 shocked me into a trance quite like Dysnomia did on a regular basis.
You either love Kanye, or you hate Kanye. There’s no middle ground. I unabashedly love Kanye. I love his unchecked arrogance. I love his boldness. I love how isolated and scared he can sound one minute, and how certain, angry, and brash he can sound the next. I love how big, how important, how relevant all of his music is. I love how he alters the state of pop with every single record he puts out. I love all the soulful samples he throws in his songs. I love that he’s embraced noise as a concept and a directional art-form. I love the contradictions between his importance within the fashion industry, and his take-no-prisoners call-outs on Black America. I love how he’s clearly trolling Kim Kardashian & the concept of the Kardashian’s. I love that no matter how big a dick he is, that if you call yourself even a novice on modern music and pop culture, you have to just nod and accept that he’s right 99% of the time.
All that said, I want to love Yeezus more than I actually do. To me, were this a five or six song EP, it’d be perfect. “On Sight,” “Black Skinhead,” “I Am A God,” “New Slaves,” “Blood On The Leaves,” and “Bound 2" are up there with the best songs Kanye’s ever written. The rest? Meh. Personally I just don’t care that much how deep Kanye is in with Asian pussy. To me, Yeezus has always sounded like a transitional record, much in the same way 808's & Heartbreak was. One can only imagine though, that in the same way 808's led to the brilliance of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus will certainly point the way towards something even bigger and even more important sometime within the next two years.
16. Boards Of Canada — Tomorrow’s Harvest
In the midst of my second soul-crushing Korean winter, perhaps no other album from 2013 sounds like the vast deadness of winter in Asia quite like Tomorrow’s Harvest. Even as I listened to it for the first few times back in June, an ominous sense of cold isolation poured over me. On their first proper album since 2005, Boards Of Canada crafted a mesmerizing sonic spectrum that valued musical subtitles over over-arching musical highlights. As a result, this was one of the most rewarding growers of 2013 for me. An album that could sound one way after three listens, and then like something completely different some four months later. Balancing blissful, sub-tempo beats with ambient soundscapes, this was the kind of record I could throw on for background noise while eating dinner, or dive into via headphones and a long run. Reminiscent personally of Eno’s Music For Airports, Broken Social Scene’s Feel Good Lost, and Pantha Du Prince’s Black Noise, this is the kind of record I’ll be able to count on as a reliable headphones listen whenever I’m traveling, for years to come.
15. Grouper — The Man Who Died In His Boat
I’ve really got a thing for music that forces me to be patient as a listener. On her eighth record, Oregon’s Liz Harris, aka, Grouper, crafted a late-night, ambient, bedroom-trance by way of an acoustic guitar, keyboard, and her layered vocal patterns. Reminiscent of Julianna Barwick’s gorgeous 2011 The Magic Place, The Man Who Died In His Boat is singular in its rawness, and in the homemade quality that accompanies each of its tracks. I listened to this for the first time on our flight from Chicago — San Fran, en route to Korea. Crossing the Rocky Mountain Front on a blue-bird-sky February 28th, this album worked like an anesthetic. Multiple listens later, it’s revealed itself to me in a multitude of ways. Ultimately, the record is most engrossing for the fact that one feels as though they’re peering into Harris’s most personal thoughts throughout. These are the sounds within the silence of our own lives. While “Vital,” “Cover The Long Way,” “Vanishing Point,” “Towers,” and “Living Room” stick out as the most fully-realized tracks, the beauty of a record like The Man Who Died In His Boat is how well it caters to just pressing play and walking away.
14. Bob Dylan — The Bootleg Series vol 10: Another Self Portrait (1969 — 1971)
Five years removed from his peak as “The Voice Of His Generation,” this tenth release in The Bootleg Series is the most personal, the loosest, the most isolated Dylan one may ever hear. First takes and alternate cuts from his Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning sessions, this 53-track compilation hears Dylan working through many of the simplest and deeply personal songs he ever recorded. Songs like “Went To See The Gypsy,” “New Morning,” “I Threw It All Away,” “If Not For You,” “Time Passes Slowly,” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” are toyed with, and experimented with, in ramble-some ways that reflect the open-ended vibe of Dylan’s recording style. What’s more is the inclusion of a full Isle Of Wright concert with The Band backing him where one can here the close bond, and freewheelin’ spirit that defined their musical partnership.
I’m going on ten years now of Dylan being an entrenched force in my life, and it continually blows me away how much of his music I’ve never heard, and how each new recording opens some new avenue into his wondrous mind. In the end, perhaps no song sums up the overall worth of this release than the devastatingly beautiful — and previously unreleased — “Pretty Saro.” There’ve been a lot of great songs released throughout 2013, but it often felt as though none crushed me quite like that one did.
If Shaking The Habitual is the sound of a demented dance-party celebrating the oncoming apocalypse, then Tim Hecker’s stunning Virgins is a slowly burning lament to a dying world. At the same time — as its title indicates — this, Hecker’s first fully-live-recorded album, is full of a sense of renewal, rebirth, and the wonder that comes with the onsetting of the unknown.
A testament to his entire catalogue, Virgins hears Hecker continuously find pleasure in systematically altering and distorting the blissful soundscapes he crafts, thus constantly leaving his listener unbalanced. Where many of the other instrumental, and ambient-laced records on my list have swayed towards the ethereal and the sublime, Virgins is as uncomfortable, and unsettling as it is beautiful. Nowhere is this sense more apparent than on the staggering nine-minute back-to-back placement of“Live Room” and “Live Room Out.” One can only imagine the way the walls reverberated, the way the air hung, and the understated smiles that emerged from the musicians as this musical passage reached its peak, before ultimately fading away to nothing.
“Sometimes the bad guys come out on top / Sometimes the good guys lose / We’ll try not to lose our hearts / Not to lose our minds…” Thus opens “Ohm,” the first track off Yo La Tengo’s first record since 2009's Popular Songs. Through-and-through, “Ohm” just reeks of Yo La Tengo. A sublime, summery melody layered by Ira Kaplan’s trademarked distortion, supported by Georgia Hubley and James McNew’s rock-solid drum and bass, all the while Ira and Georgia filter their flately-falsetto voices in-and-out; the song exemplifies why, after 30 years, there are few equals in the indie rock world to Yo La Tengo.
What follows is a deeply personal, subdued, often-times achingly soft record about the evolving marriage between Ira and Georgia. Reflective, insightful, incredibly moving, and textured, the record is ripe with stories of fights, misgivings, awkward glances, and well-earned make-ups that resonated heavily with me in my first year of marriage. Akin in some ways to 2000's late-night, stoned and blissed-out And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, Fade displays both the unending diversity contained within Yo La Tengo, and also their clear importance as a solid unit some thirty years into their career.
There’s something about hearing a young, boundlessly talented, ambitious band figure it out. On their second album, the NYC quintet Caveman stretch their musical minds beyond the folksy limitations of their debut, incorporating new-age gloss, and Beach Boys-esque kaleidoscope vocals to craft a contemplative and ultimately rewarding record. Probably the most reliable album for me in 2013, Caveman was the record I could throw on in any situation, and somehow, it just fit. Maybe it’s the Fleet Foxes-meet-Animal Collective-meet-1982-U2-vibe that emanates from their sound. Maybe it’s the fully-flowing, wholly-realized, complete nature of the overall album. Maybe it’s the fact that “Where Is The Time?” seemed to speak directly to me throughout the entire year. Maybe it’s the way they seemed to sum up all the insecurities, questions, and discoveries that come with being a twenty-something in America today. Whatever it is, this album clicked the first time I heard it, and never let up. A band I can’t wait to watch mature and develop over the next few years, Caveman is as promising a release by a young band in 2013 as any other I heard.
10. Burial — Truant/Rough Sleeper EP
Technically speaking, this is a 2012 record. The mercurial and secluded London-based DJ released his second phenomenal EP of the year in the final week of 2012. Probably in another attempt to remain mercurial and secluded.
Technicalities aside though, this record will forever sound like 2013 to me. Trademarked with all the soundscapes and ambitious qualities that have long made Burial one of the most revered and intriguing artists of our time, Truant/Rough Sleeper entered my rotation in early-January and never left.
At 26-minutes, the two-song EP can be consumed easily (& quickly) enough. Yet, densely layered with blissful soundscapes, musical holes, industrial beats, divergent themes, passerby vocals, and urbane samples, the two songs provide the listener with more than enough musical ideas to latch onto and explore with each repeated listen. Whether I was cooking, sitting on a train, in the midst of another training run, reading, trying to write, or just sitting on my balcony with a beer in hand sweating out an August night, Truant/Rough Sleeper was one of those highly-engaging and consistently-rewarding musical documents that ultimately defined this year to me.
I often think about if there’s any larger goal to making and listening to music. And if there is, what is it?
Perhaps the ultimate goal of music is to transcend time and create something that sounds as though it were born out of the compounds of human existence. Something that has an undefinable, even magical quality to it. Something that, rather than adhering to any style, place, or trend, feels as natural, and as authentic as the dirt in the ground. Muchacho, the sixth record from Matthew Houck’s Phosphorescent, is exactly this.
Following the tour in support of their 2010 record, Here’s To Taking It Easy, Houck returned to NYC to discover he’d lost his Brooklyn studio and his long-time girlfriend. In response, he hit the road for some soul-searching throughout Mexico. The result is Muchacho. A deeply personal album about love, loss, and that unique feeling of absolute clarity and smallness that can only be found through travel, Muchacho is most powerful in its ability to transcend all personalities — and life experiences — and relate with seemingly everyone who hears it. “Song For Zulu,” “Ride On, Right On,” “A Charm, A Blade,” “Muchacho’s Tune,” fuck, every single song on this record is more than worth your time and your concentration. Just try to listen to this record and not find yourself thinking that the answers to whatever ails you is just waiting to be discovered in the unknown journeys of the open road.
On October 31st 2013, Phish broke with their Halloween tradition of covering another band’s album and instead debuted their own forthcoming record.
No one outside of the band had ever heard any of the twelve new songs before. In an age when seemingly every artist has to shrug and accept their work will reach their fans before its scheduled release, Phish zagged, and in turn, controlled their own art’s destiny.
By inviting their fans into the studio with them, they not only engaged in a trust exercise resulting from 30-years of live improvisational experimentations, but they also allowed their new songs to be open to the unknown energy that would ultimately be present throughout the 90-minute set of brand new music. What’s more, is that of these twelve new Phish songs, many were the direct result of the profound improvisational jams the band has embarked upon over the previous 18 months.
Renewed following their five-year “break-up,” these songs reflect not only the new musical planes the band has reached, but also the far more insightful lyrical passages the band is now capable of writing. For me, as a dedicated Phish fan through-and-through, Wingsuit merges — for the first time ever, no less — the musical sounds of my favorite band, with the lyrical prowess of the world of rock, rap and indie that have long dominated my non-Phish listening periods.
From the title track, to the hauntingly relatable “The Line,” to the Yo La Tengo-esque “Waiting All Night,” to the nostalgic and emotive “Devotion To A Dream,” to the spiritual yearnings of “555,” to the working-man’s rebellion of “Amidst The Peals Of Laughter,” Wingsuit is as clear a sign as any that, 30 years in, Phish is ready to pivot once more towards even more ambitious heights.
07. Kurt Vile — Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze
It’s possible that no lyric has ever summed up the musical musings of Kurt Vile quite as poignantly as this one from, “Goldtone,” the final track on his 2o13 record: “Sometimes when I get in my zone, you’d think I was stoned / But I never, as they say, ‘touched the stuff’ / I might be adrift, but I’m still alert / Concentrating my hurt into a gold tone.”
Vile’s always gotten pegged by critics as a stoner. Be it from the garage-rock, distorted fuzz of his earlier records, or the sound of isolated drifting on his Square Shells EP. Whatever the reason’s are, he’s continually flown further under-the-radar than he should for his take on downtempo, 70's-era, guitar rock. That entire perception, however, should be cast aside completely as a result of his phenomenal 2013 album Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze. Fusing the rough and homemade edge of his earlier records, with the somber lyricism of Square Shells, and the professional sheen and maturity of 2011's Smoke Ring For My Halo, Pretty Daze ultimately feels like a fully realized, peak moment for Vile.
With six tracks stretching beyond the six minute mark, Vile dives into the ethos of his mind to reflect upon the evolution of his life, from that of a desolate junk-rocker, to now, a young father. If I ever needed an album to help explain my own personal evolution, and my own place in this limbo period between post-collegiate dissolution and parenthood, Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze was it. Insightful without being preachy, reflective without being overtly-nostalgic, Vile combines lengthy, shimmering musical passages with equally-long lyrical experimentations, crafting densely layered songs that consistently reward a listener with each subsequent listen. In some ways a throwback artist to a looser and less-regulated era, something about Wakin’ On A Pretty Daze bridged the gap for me between the iconoclastic sounds of my Father’s music with the world in which I live in today.
06. Majical Cloudz — Impersonator
There are no two ways to put it, this record just fucking crushes me. The musical union between singer/songwriter Devon Welsh and synth programmer Matthew Otto, Impersonator is their second record as Majical Cloudz. Full of sparse, beatless melodies, and some of the most unabashedly direct, and uncomfortably personal lyrics in modern indie rock, this is an album that captivated me the first time I heard it, and has yet to relinquish its grip some six months later. A brazenly raw and powerful force, there are times when I simply cannot allow myself to listen to it, it’s so all-consuming.
If musical progression and stuff happening is what does it for you, then by no means is Impersonator the kind of record for you. This is a record wherein which the space surrounding the notes, and the lyrical pauses are often-times more critical than the actual notes played. For me, this record bridges the ambient soundscapes that have captivated me since the first time I heard Brian Eno with the lyrical certainties and contextual nudity I’ve sought out ever since Dylan clicked. By no means is this an easy record. But during my most isolated and contemplative moments of 2013, Impersonator was there like a desperately reliable friend to gain necessary advice from at 3am on a Tuesday night.
05. The National — Trouble Will Find Me
In the Spring of 2010 as I prepared to leave Korea for the first time, The National’s High Violet hit me like a ton of bricks and immediately became my favorite record of that year.
In the Spring of 2013 as I settled back into my second year in Korea, The National’s Trouble Will Find Me hit me in a completely different way, but still had an undeniably lasting impact on me throughout year.
Perhaps The National’s most The National sounding album, Trouble Will Find Me is not the dark and prodding, outwardly observant expose that High Violet was. Rather, it’s introspective, it’s simple, and it’s diverse in its ability to sum up the entire reason why one should listen to The National in just 13 tracks. A grower with a capitol G, the best moments on this album revealed themselves over time instead of immediately forcing me to rediscover my bearings.
Ultimately it was the raw power of singer Matt Berninger apologizing to his oft-misunderstood brother on “I Should Live In Salt,” the off-kilter rhythms that made “Don’t Swallow The Cap” so engrossing, the darkly-lit humor of “Sea Of Love” (‘What did Harvard teach you?’), the shrugging and understated acknowledgement of nothing being accomplished within the 467,233 fight with your partner on “I Need My Girl,” the devastating and relatable account of heart-break on “Pink Rabbits” (‘I was a television version of a person with a broken heart’) that hooked me and transfixed throughout the year.
While Trouble did not have the total visceral impact on me personally as High Violet did four years ago, it was, nevertheless, present for me the entire year. Proof that a truly powerful band will evolve with you, both offering reflections and insights into who you are, who you were, and who you may become in a multitude of ways.
04. Bill Callahan — Dream River
Of all the praiseworthy things I could say about the fifth solo-record from Bill Callahan, perhaps the simplest would be that throughout the entire 41-minutes of Dream River, Callahan just sounds happy. And this is a good thing.
A long-revered, sardonic drifter, Dream River finds Callahan sounding content and satisfied throughout. Whether it be his desire to simply sit and reflect in a hotel bar — “The Sing” — wherein which one will find perhaps the greatest lyric of 2013: “Well the only words I’ve said today, are beer, and thank you / Beer….thank you / Beer….thank you,” or his understated realization of the blissful ease with which marriage can satiate all other aspects of life on “Small Plane,” or his wizened counseling on “Winter Road,” that, “I have learned / When things are beautiful / To just keep on / To just keep on,” this is a far more contemplatively satisfying record than any he’s made before.
Akin to an instagram-worthy plate piled with a perfectly-cooked, medium rare T-bone, succulent cob-of-corn, lumpy mashed ‘taters, toasted and buttery garlic bread, and a ripe IPA, on a lake-side porch overlooking a mellowing late-summer sunset, Dream River carries that weighty magic that sits in your belly when everything in life just feels right, even for just one fleeting moment.
Dancing and thinking have never really gone together. A troubling reality for me seeing as I love to dance, and I think too much.
With this in mind, Nicolas Jaar’s hypnotic, and intellectually-crafted, 2011 debut Space Is Only Noise was a phenomenal bridge between that side of me that loves to hover over the “what does this mean?” aspect of music, with the part of my personality that just wants to fucking boogie.
Reuniting with his guitar partner from Brown — Dave Harrington — under the nom de plume of Darkside, the two crafted the auspicious, 45-minute Psychic, perhaps the most infectious album of 2013. Patient and seductive, melodic and beat-driven, relevant and arcane, Psychic nabbed me immediately and still has yet to relinquish its power. Fusing the slow-burning, dimly-lit textures of 70's-era Floyd, with accessible and instinctually direct melodic dialogue, supported by a thick, sultry, voluminous, and all-knowing underbelly of rhythm, Psychic is the 2013 dance party Random Access Memories had been hoping to be.
Patience is the key throughout. The most rewarding aspects of Psychic are the well-earned payoffs in “Golden Arrow,” “Paper Trails,” and “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen,” each the result of carefully crafted tension, that, when released is a cathartic experience to say the least. Concluding with the sublime, yet brilliant, melodic bliss of “Metatron” some 40-minutes later, the record is ultimately a sneak peek inside the world of groove Jaar and Harrington cultivate. A live show that’s been raved about all Fall, if you’re in need of a mid-winter throw-down — a record that’ll make you ponder the origins of groove & the beauty of life, all while you’re busy shaking yer ass — look no further than this absolute masterpiece.
Three years after the densely-layered, and sonically-enhanced breakthrough of Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter returned in 2013 with perhaps their raunchiest, loosest, and, initially, most confounding record of their (thus-far) phenomenal career.
Where many expected the band to expand on the atmospheric soundscapes that defined Halcyon Digest’s best moments — “Earthquake,” “Revival,” “Desire Lines,” “Helicopter,” “Coronado” — Deerhunter instead zagged. Embracing garage-rock as something of a patriotic statement, Monomania is the sound of a band tearing down the walls around them and rebuilding their sound with the suffocating rubble. By the time “Neon Junkyard” spills into “Leather Jacket II” it’s clear the only thing Deerhunter cares about is how gritty and loud they sound.
Initially this album felt completely one-note to me. And then, somewhere in mid-June, something clicked.
Perhaps it was the melodic brilliance of guitarist Lockett Pundt’s “The Missing,” perhaps it was the fact that packed deep in all that noise there were these shimmering layers of melody and cacophonous, yet ultimately celebratory, hooks that just hit me, perhaps it was the saturation-point introspection offered by guitarist/lead-singer Bradford Cox and Pundt throughout, perhaps it was the fact that I in fact, spent much of my own year obsessively focused over singular goals and obstacles; whatever it was, as 2013 evolved, Monomania emerged as an absolutely necessary album for my life. Webbing out from it’s immediate burst of aggression and noise, Monomania is perhaps the best proof we have now — five albums in — that Deerhunter may in fact be the best rock & roll band of our time.
Take the hyperbole for what it’s worth. Regardless your feelings on the best rock being crafted here in 2013, do yourself a favor and allow Monomania to sink its claws in your heart, your soul, and your life. The rewards are a-plenty, and, in the end, who doesn’t love/need to just thrash their head around for 40 minutes?
01. Vampire Weekend — Modern Vampires Of The City
As with High Violet (2010) and Bon Iver (2011), there was no other album that could have even come close to claiming the top spot in 2013 after Modern Vampires Of The City first entered my life. A combination of intricate musical development from the band, a fully-flowing nature to the record, lyrics that speak directly to where I’m at in life right now, and that unexplainable, intangible magic that defines an album to a specific point in time, this was my No. 1 album as early as May 6th, and has never once come close to retreating.
At 28, I’m the same age as these guys. Their entire career, their songs, their creative arc, their progression has accompanied my entire post-collegiate life.
When I partied too hard in the months following graduation — in a desperate plea to re-embrace the innocent decadence of college, yet in the face of so many uncertainties in front of me — Vampire Weekend was there with songs like “Campus,” “Oxford Comma,” “M79,” and “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance,” that equally reassured me, made me nostalgic, and scared the shit out of me all at once.
When I returned to America some two years later, preparing to both ask my girlfriend to marry me, and enter the American workforce, it was songs like “Taxi Cab” off Contra, with lines like: “You’re not a victim / Neither am I / Nostalgic for garbage / Desperate for time / I could blame it on your Mother’s hair / Or the colors that your Father wears / But I know that I was never fair / You were always fine,” that further helped me grasp and understand the rapidly evolving world around me.
Now, in 2013, back in Asia, on a mission to trim all the physical, mental, spiritual, and material fat from my life, Modern Vampires Of The City spoke directly to me in the same way Steinbeck’s East Of Eden, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the film Before Midnight, Breaking Bad, Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas did throughout the entire year. Be it “Obvious Bicycle’s” call to a friend to push on through the noise around you in search of what drives you, “Unbelievers” embrace of the path that’s right for you as an singular individual — consequences be damned — “Diane Young’s” playful preach to live one’s life to the fullest, particularly in their youth, “Ya Hey’s” compassionate, and contemplative questioning of the powerful role religion plays in the lives of so many people as they age, or the simple brilliance of “Hannah Hunt” — exemplified by the vocal crack from Ezra when he desperately pleads, “If I can’t trust you then damn it Hannah / There’s no future, there’s no answer / Though we live on the US Dollar / You and me we, got our own sense of time” — Modern Vampires was constantly there to push me, console me, reassure me, and test me throughout 2013. In the end, isn’t that what we’re all looking for out of music each year?
This past year was an astonishing time to be a music fan. Particularly from February through June, and then again from September through October, a slew of memorable, innovative, and important records were released. It was one of those years that can only give music lovers faith that, no matter what happens to the music industry, there’re always going to be a plethora of thoughtful, exciting, and transcendent musicians crafting records capable of changing your life at any time.
This list is chock-full of album’s I’m going to take with me as I move into 2014, and beyond. I can’t wait hear how they change with me, how they further reveal themselves to me, and how different they sound in five years, yet how much each of them ultimately reminds me of who I was throughout 2013.
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