Year-End Critics' Polls 2013

dummy as well - a year or two ago dummy pretty much covered the same stuff as fact but its leaned a lot more towards the wire end of things now

Last years Kerrang had a top 100 that wasnt bad. But look at this piece of utter shit. Close this mag now!

Kerrang Albums of 2013 "The Albums That Rocked 2013"
25. A Day To Remember - Common Courtesy
24. Jamie Lenman - Muscle Memory
23. Panic At The Disco - Too Weird To Live,Too Rare To Die
22. The Defiled - Daggers
21. Nails - Abandon All Life
20. State Champs - The Finer Things
19. Deafheaven- Sunbather
18. Fall Out Boy - Save Rock And Roll
17. Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Mind Control
16. Pearl Jam - Lightning Bolt
15. Alter Bridge - Fortress
14. Deaf Havana - Old Souls
13. Black Sabbath - 13
12. Watain - The Wild Hunt
11. Tonight Alive - The Other Side
10. Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork
09. The Bronx - The Bronx IV
08. The Wonder Years - The Greatest Generation
07. LetLive - The Blackest Beautiful
06. Paramore - Paramore
05. Avenged Sevenfold- Hail to the King
04. Asking Alexandria - From Death To Destiny
03. Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks
02. Biffy Clyro - Embarrassment to Scotland
01. Bring Me The Horizon - Sempiternal

No Carcass! What a joke!

Bring back DJ Martian!

heh i'm one of those old school wire readers - in the minority i'm sure - who has stopped buying the mag because of its drift towards the centre in the last few years. think this is partly just an effect of history - the big guns of 20th century free improv/jazz and electronic composition are dying off, so the mag has had to re-focus a bit - and partly a result of changes to the editorial makeup of the mag. i don't begrudge them trying to adapt and survive, but i miss the beardscratching and noisewank.

write-off since kopf took over

No CarcassSubRosa! What a joke!

well yeah but I dont expect Kerrang to cover them.

lol does the Wire really cost 6 quid now?!

They have genre lists too just like the wire!

Pop-punk
1. A Day To Remember
2. State Champs - The Finer Things
3. The Wonder Years - Te Greatest Generation
4. Tonight Alive - The Other Side
5. Fall Out Boy - Save Rock And Roll

The New Breed!
1. Asking Alexandria - From Death To Destiny
2. Falling In Reverse - Fashionably Late
3. Escape The Fate - Ungrateful
4. Glamour Of The Kill - Savages
5. Survive This! - The Life You've Chosen

Bring back Philip Sherburne for Critical Beats, Joe Muggs is a good writer but microhouse >>>> UK Bass/footwork

K-Punk was nail in the coffin too.

Although every now and again...I am vaguely interested in the South African jazz piece.

well yeah but I dont expect Kerrang to cover them.
I've never looked at that magazine so I wouldn't know what they cover but I just wanted to use the strikethrough function and look cool for a moment.

Alt. Weirdness
1. Biffy Clyro LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL "weirdness"
2. Arcane Roots - Blood & Chemistry
3. Tomahawk- Oddfellows
4. Jamie Lehman - Muscle Memory
5. Hawk Eyes - That's What This Is

no imago, no MUTation

Arena Rock!
1. Pearl Jam - Lightning Bolt
2. Nine Inch Nails- Hesitation Marks
3. Qotsa - ... Like Clockwork
4. Alter Bridge - Fortress
5. Alice In Chains - The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here

Club Metal!
1. Korn - The Paradigm Shift (still doing the pop dubstep rock thing i presume)
2. The Defiled - Daggers
3. Crossfaith - Apocalyze
4. Five Finger Death Punch - The Wrong Side Of Heaven and the Righteous Side Of Hell Volume 1
5. Device - Device

Extreme Metal!
1. Watain - The Wild Hunt
2. Carcass - Surgical Steel
3. Grave Miasma - Odori Sepulchorum
4. Moss- Horrible Night
5. In Solitude - Sister

In Solitude are extreme? They sounded to me like a cross between QOTSA and Echo & the Bunnymen

lol does the Wire really cost 6 quid now?!

err no

they arent extreme but their "expert" probably ran out of bands he knew..

bless

That's what the site said: https://thewire.co.uk/shop/basket. Looks like 4 quid something when you look at the cover closely.

yeah, it's £4.50

you can buy an e-version of the end of year one for cheap though:
https://twitter.com/thewiremagazine/status/410729095195279361

dunno if the wire is the intended target but this piece feels relevant to the discussion of where it's at:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v472/birdnestsoup/bb.png

Dazed Digital: Tracks http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/18137/1/top-ten-tracks-of-2013

10 Jon Hopkins - Open Eye Signal
09 Lorde - Tennis Court
08 Big Sean - Control ft. Jay Electronica & Kendrick Lamar
07 Autre Ne Veut - Play By Play
06 Mariah Carey - #Beautiful ft. Miguel
05 VIsionist - Pain
04 Ciara - Body Party
03 Glasser - Design
02 FKA Twigs - Water Me
01 Kingdom - Bank Head ft. Kelela

Underground has been populated by "cults of personality" since about 1287.

Britt Brown may well be otm but as a non-Wire reader it's funny to see Laurel Halo, James Ferraro and Oneohtrix held up as the acme of PR-led overexposure. I guess they are within a very tiny world.

6 quid will include postage?

That's true Julio, and there's also an air of waking up the sheeple about that piece, but some of it's feels right too? Not sure what this new conformity in the 'dance music revival' is though. xps

dunno if the wire is the intended target but this piece feels relevant to the discussion of where it's at

Yeah, that one resonates for me.

I really miss Penman and Watson in the Wire.

Even looking at the new issue in the newsagent's yesterday felt like going to school.

yeah that britt brown piece completely resonates

the examples are interesting too - in the mainstream, of course those names aren't the ultimate examples of PR-driven hype, but the inward-facing circles that the internet encourages all have their own established names who are considered important by default...

It adds a quid extra for p&p.

Nick - Most of it doesn't feel right at all: plenty of labels aren't just contemporary or retro, plenty of people are working to turn their talents (or lack ofs) into something/anything, and you can always go somewhere for a conversation.

Note how no concerts are mentioned - just internet and records.

I used to like abrasive, conceptual techno but now there is literally no other type of dance music being made or talked about, I'm starting to regret my tastes

Annual subscription to the Wire is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned: it's about the only magazine in print that covers the stuff I like. Much as I enjoy sites like The Quietus, the internet in general is not conducive to reading large banks of text.

Nick - Most of it doesn't feel right at all: plenty of labels aren't just contemporary or retro, plenty of people are working to turn their talents (or lack ofs) into something/anything, and you can always go somewhere for a conversation.

I think that bit is referring to how music is treated by PR and the press/music websites. They're arguing that those sorts of binaries are only helpful as marketing devices and that - like you say - there's an enormous amount of diversity within experimental and underground music (and yes, the live improv circuit or whatever) that you can neither apply that logic to or wants to be part of that system in the first place.

as if pr is a new thing. the problem with any of these narratives of woe is that presumably the writer is excluding themselves, or excluding some people, not everyone is a blind follower, in which case how did the ones who escape manage to outwit the pernicious system? music writers moulding neg pieces out of paycheck ennui and lack of ideas is prob a newer phenomenon than anything he describe.

Agreed.

Some writers do come across more like the puree of all end of year lists than others do, but for the most part the music critic industry resembles puree because the opinions/contributions of individual writers themselves are then being aggregated.

Everyone is their own special snowflake viewed close up.

I feel like these ideas about consensus have been badly hashed out for years, like 6/7 years ago I can remember people having this exact kind of conversation. You'd need to make a proper data-based theory to really argue it, it's all just shooting in the dark.

At the same time as things float to the top, or buzz builds more quickly, there's also more freedom than ever for people to buy, stream, or steal literally any record they want.

The idea that they aren't is ridiculous, of course they are. Just nobody is commissioning pieces about somebody who found a great record from 1962 on Spotify.

It's real echo chamber stuff to act like the web isn't silently serving as an incredible window into the world for those who choose to use it as such. Perhaps the problem is just that "news" can't reflect this.

Nick - Britt is recommending "ignorance is bliss". I wouldn't pay any attention to this. xp

the internet in general is not conducive to reading large banks of text

This outlook really needs to change.

I know what BB is saying – the alternative becomes its own mainstream straitjacket, everything reduced to some quasi-utopian bland Shoreditch broth – but in that case why contribute to its non-flow?

going back to records, that connan mockasin album, which featured in some list way upthread, is really good.

the internet in general is not conducive to reading large banks of text
This outlook really needs to change.

― Here he is with the classic "Poème Électronique." Good track (Marcello Carlin), Thursday, December 12, 2013 11:41 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There was a really good article a while back about this and about how sites like the Quietus should do a digestible monthly eBook for use on Kindles/iPads etc. I don't have a reader, and I find reading websites quite distracting sometimes - there's always a banner or a link to another article trying to claim my attention. There's a lot of tl;dr going on. Call me a cranky old vinyl fetishising so and so, but I think part of the reason I decided to subscribe to Wire is because it's the only mag-format publication that says anything about my interests.

I think the whole 'booohoo everybody likes the same popular things' argument is bullshit btw.

There was a really good article a while back about this and about how sites like the Quietus should do a digestible monthly eBook for use on Kindles/iPads etc.

― a beef supreme (dog latin)

This was the piece: http://mrtrick.net/2013/09/26/could-music-journalism-be-more-profitable-away-from-the-web/

cheers

But this is where the problem lies: for me, that whole environment is by design working against allowing someone to just sit and read, which in turn makes it utterly at odds with the core purpose of the website.

cue Wire subscription.

For all the talk of PR, consensus, etc, I've got a list as long as my arm of wildly divergent albums to investigate from these lists. You notice the names that come up repeatedly so it feels like "oh them again" but every publication has its eccentricities and pet favourites. There are so many albums that are Top 10 in one list and completely absent from the next so if your tastes are broad and you read a lot I don't see that there's an overall problem, just different ones in different silos of taste.

Kelela #7 in the Guardian, presuming that was the other out-and-out surprise:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/dec/12/best-albums-2013-kelela-number-7