Top ten favourite albums of 2013

Thought long and hard about these personal rankings. There's a few more albums I want to listen to more closely like Laura Marling and Kurt Vile, and I'm still trying to convince myself I like more than a handful of songs on Arcade Fire's Reflektor. Alas, these are the ones I encountered throughout the year and that I feel will have the most staying power for me for years to come.

10. Robby Hunter Band - Magic City Hippies
9. Darkside - Psychic
8. The National - Trouble Will Find Me
7. Lorde - Pure Heroine
6. London Grammar - If You Wait
5. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
4. Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe
3. Phoenix - Bankrupt!
2. HAIM - Days Are Gone

1. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

Honourable mentions: Lucius - Wildewoman, Sigur Ros - Kveikur, Rudimental - Home, Basia Bulat - Tall Tall Shadow


Daft Punk takes home the title in the end... not because I love all of it (Cupid Deluxe and Psychic are the only two albums I would listen to all at once in the future), but when it hits its strong parts, man they're strong. I've listened to "Give Life Back to Music", "Giorgio by Moroder", "Get Lucky", "Motherboard" and "Fragments of Time" countless times, and I don't know if I'll ever tire of them. Unfortunately I didn't quite 'get' "Touch" which is supposed to be the piece de resistance of the LP, but the supporting cast of the back half of the album made up for it. To me though, this album was more than just the songs. In a day and age where it's cool to have made an album in a day in your underwear, the robots crammed every bit of sound and layer in ridiculously expensive studios, almost exclusively used live instrumentation without looping, and marked the trendy return of disco in the music industry this year (which looks like will continue into 2014).


In the end, there wasn't one album that I absolutely loved from top to bottom, and of course HAIM and Daft Punk were as close as it got, with them more of a 1a and 1b, I'd say. I like how the list covered all parts of the year... there were a few weeks in the summer where I was almost exclusively listening to Phoenix and Vampire Weekend. Lorde's album caught me by surprise in the fall when I was really into If You Wait. The National just hung around all year.

With all that said, I'm gonna be making some changes with the blog. I'll detail more in the next post but I think I'm gonna be moving all my music-related posts to my tumblr except for Friday Night Music.