My Top Ten for 2013
more than two months late, and no more interesting today than it was then
This has been sitting in my drafts since late December, and I’m just now getting around to posting it. My main motivation is so that I can refer to it in conversation.
10. Basia Bulat — Tall Tall Shadow
Tall Tall Shadow is a very personal rumination with which I’ve spent many of my own quiet moments this year, and can see myself returning to in the future. Basia Bulat, a Canadian folk singer who accompanies herself on the autoharp and sings with arresting fragility, uses these songs to ponder the influence of people and places gone by. It’s a wintry album that deals in shadows, ghosts, and memories — the only people present in any of these songs are shades in the narrator’s memory. Title track “Tall Tall Shadow” is a world-weary statement on the depths of self-deception, and it shows her ability to communicate abstract ideas in the confident voice of experience. Her playing is dextrous and her voice is expressive throughout, with songs like “It Can’t Be You” exhibit piercing highs while “Never Let Me Go” and “Tall Tall Shadow” find her projecting a powerful middle register.
9. Shearwater — Fellow Travelers
Shearwater has become one of my absolute favorite bands over the last several years, and to an extent anything they did was going to be one of my favorite things to happen in the year. The band decided that, after years of touring behind their six previous albums, it would be a fun project to record cover versions of songs by bands with whom they’d toured. As a covers album, Fellow Travelers is not a “true” followup to 2012's excellent Animal Joy. Even so, it delivers in several spots — songs “I Luv The Valley OH!” (by Xiu Xiu) and “Fucked Up Life” (by The Baptist Generals) take songs that were already great in their original forms and add their own unique ambiance to them, and the Coldplay song “Hurts Like Heaven” receives a treatment that renders it nearly unrecognizable. It’s a treat, as a longtime fan, to hear the band having fun and stretching their legs by trying something new.
What I’ve loved about this album is the pieces that have surrounded the music. Singer Jonathan Meiburg is a famously well-spoken guy, and he’s kept very busy this year talking about music, how he listens to it, how it gets created, and why. These pieces have helped me deepen my own involvement with all music, and lend an air of thoughtfulness to the album. The gorgeously creepy album cover is by frequent Shearwater collaborators Kahn & Selesnick, whose otherworldly compositions have helped to define the band’s aesthetic since 2008's Rook. The LP’s liner notes include snippets from Meiburg’s diaries repurposed as poetic aphorisms on life as a touring musician, and are practically worth the price of admission themselves. While the songs here are larks and are for the most part less memorable than original Shearwater compositions, Fellow Travelers serves as a wonderful artifact of its time, and shows us a band who are exploring their sound while preparing their next album. Shearwater will almost certainly be on this list again in 2014.
8. The-Drum — Contact
Contact is the ambient sound of the creepy future. Wet mechanical noise, digitized clicks and whirs, and thick percussion populate a landscape that, from the opening “connection” vignette, all seems to take place in a virtual world that sounds expansive, with echoing waves playing alongside alarmingly immediate semi-human vocalizations. There’s life in here, and that’s the scary part, because whatever it is that’s moving around is definitely not living. Songs like “Sim Stem B” and “Narco” use a number of “organic” elements but in a context that ensures that only heightens their strangeness. It’s a wordless album that focuses instead on creating rhythmic textures to evoke decayed technology. Pitchfork describes it as “ the sound of 2013, but more specifically of 2013 as it looked in the early days of Wired magazine, when digital culture was first starting to emerge” and I’m inclined to agree with them. This is some Terminator shit. The good news is we’re in the future. The bad news is that it sounds like the machines won.
7. Chase Hamblin — Vaudeville
I’m proud to be able to include a local musician on this list along with these great nationally-known artists. To quote my Houstonia review of a show in February of 2014:
Hamblin and his band The Roustabouts meander through stylistic shifts, from the maudlin barroom piano of the lost-love lament “One More Hour” to the jaunty walking bass in “Can You See The Beast?”, a warning call against society’s imminent destruction at our own hands. “I’ve Got A Brain” deploys punchy brass to support its simple, childlike sentiments. In each compact song Hamblin communicates a gentle humanity matched by the lightness of his slightly lisped lyrical delivery. It’s an eminently accessible record that calls to mind the stage shows of its namesake era, and was one of the most enjoyable albums released by a Houston artist last year.
6. HAIM — Days Are Gone
These girls were everywhere, and justifiably so. Their album is top-to-bottom catchy pop-synthesis that throws the last several decades in a blender and pairs perfectly with the other sounds of 2013. Everyone’s doing nostalgia, but some people are doing it better than others.
5. of Montreal — Lousy With Sylvianbriar
Boy, Kevin Barnes whines a lot. Here he doesn’t even stick to a recognizable meter sometimes (or at least, not recognizable to me). Still, I’m used to of Montreal’s albums being difficult to work my way into, and he rewards patience with a richly poetic stream of biting invective. Whoever these songs are about, I feel bad for ‘em.
4. Daft Punk — Random Access Memories
I’ve never considered myself a big Daft Punk fan, but songs like “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Veridis Quo” have been embedded in my consciousness since the heyday of LimeWire and Kazaa. My musical vocabulary in high school was limited, but Daft Punk found a foothold. Still, I’d never even heard their last album Human After All or had an inkling of the fact that they’d been cool and then lost favor when the announcement of their new album appeared.
All I knew was that these dudes dress up as robots and they play music that somehow gets away with being repetitive and simple, and they make even a dweeb like myself want to dance. Part of my enjoyment of this album was certainly the hype cycle around i — as someone who spends most of his waking hours thinking about music in one form or another, it was fun to see others join in, and the media-driven mythologizing of a band that I kinda like wasn’t a focal point for it that I minded.
A lot of the discussion about Random Access Memories is about Pharell-led single “Get Lucky.” It’s one of the biggest songs of this year, and for good reason. It’s incredibly simple (“We’re up all night to the sun/we’re up all night to get some/we’re up all night to get lucky”) in a way that makes it feel less like a song and more like an archetype being explained. Daft Punk saw an unmined room in the many-splendored manion of Cool and plundered it for all they’re worth, doing their best to singlehandedly revive disco for a new generation.
The album is bigger than that one song, though. Listened to in a single sitting, it comes across conflicted about its own exhortations. Opener “Give Life Back To Music” is a response to the ever-increasing commodification of art.
3. Jason Isbell — Southeastern
I’ll be honest — I hadn’t heard of Jason Isbell until long after he’d parted ways with Drive-By Truckers and taken up with his own band The 400 Unit. I haven’t even really listened to his previous two solo albums, Sirens of the Ditch and self-titled Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. I’d seen him once in concert, opening for James McMurtry, and he struck me as a fun time with a country drawl and a loud guitar. But I was surprised when this this album cam along. It contains some of the most personal and touching songs I’ve heard in a long time. “Cover Me Up” is a song I can listen to on repeat for hours (and have), about seeking refuge from the refuges you’ve found. It sets the tone for the album, which apart from the jarringly energetic “Super 8" is a slow meander through stories of loss. Isbell has publicly struggled with sobriety in the past, and this album is colored throughout by observations about the human weakness, refusal to own up to mistakes, and the trouble they get us into. It’s a masterful album from front to back, but murder ballad “Live Oak” and cancer-suffering “Elephant” stand out for their quiet empathy and practiced weariness. Perhaps my own struggle to stay sober has lent the songs extra resonance, but even if it’s just that this album deserves accolades. Isbell knows exactly how lonely the road can be, but he’s moving down it anyway, carrying with him a kind heart and an incisive pen, sending back messages of hope.
2. Christopher Owens — Lysandre
Christopher Owens disbanded his former outfit Girls in the middle of 2012, following the success of their second full-length album Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I return to Father and the earlier Broken Dreams Club EP regularly for songs like “Vomit” and “Substance” which manage to express existential doubt, fear, anger, confusion, and innocence like little else. On the strength of the three releases they had under their belt, Girls was a band that seemed to have momentum on their side. So I was crushed when I learned that they’d broken up, but fortunately the font of Owens’ genius was far from dry. Lysandre was released in mid-January, and was reportedly written in a single night. It catalogues Owens’ journey during his tour behind the first Girls album by painting a series of vignettes, tied together by repetitions of a central musical theme and all composed in the key of A, from two consecutive days of the trip: one at a music showcase in New York, and a second at a music festival in France. Throughout the album, Owens sings with childlike vulnerability and bluntness about memories of selling drugs, running into old loves, basking in success, and coming to terms with life’s insistent progress. It’s a short album — just 28 minutes long — but he uses simple vocabulary and a wide palette of sounds to create a story that’s simultaneously universal and completely personal. It sounds dashed-off, and yet perfectly composed. It’s as if he’s reading back journal entries to himself, encountering the different shades of feeling that enveloped him totally for an instant and then are gone as quickly.
- I did not count myself among “Beyonce fans” before this album. Before this album I did not know that Miss Carter is the force that she is. Before this album I was as ignorant as the rest of the world about the intimate details of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s sex life. This album changed a lot, for all of us. But most of all, it threw everyone for a loop with the complete self-assurance of its creation, production, and release. Sure, Beyonce’s one of the most powerful and well-liked artists in the world, so she can get away with anything she wants — but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from her example. She’s flawless and she’s fearless. She inhabits so many different people over the course of this album, and all of them are strong and weak in their own ways. Watching this album the whole way through (the only way to truly experience it) gives one the sense that there is a complete viewpoint at work here, a holistic understanding that can confidently deal with any challenge. And isn’t that the feeling that pop stars are here to give us?
