Year-End Critics' Polls 2013

Never heard of them. Who are they?

I usually roll my eyes at The Quietus but that Grumbling Fur album they voted at #1 is really good. Kinda like if Delia & Gavin made a psychedelic rock album.

On first listen, Dawn of Midi is really nice! I'm also enjoying Old Apparatus, which I hadn't heard of before.

BEST SELLING ALBUMS IN THE UK 2013
http://www.gigwise.com/news/86817/Emeli-Sande%27s-album-is-the-UK%27s-best-selling-for-a-second-year

1) Emeli Sande - Our Version of Events
2) Michael Buble - To Be Loved
3) Les Miserables - Motion Picture Cast Recording
4) Bruno Mars - Unorthodox Jukebox
5) Rod Stewart - Time
6) Jake Bugg - Jake Bugg
7) Arctic Monkeys - AM
8) Bastille - Bad Blood
9) Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
10) Mumford & Sons - Babel

jfc

haha

dunno what i'm laughing at there. life perhaps.

haha@theuk

Seems a bit silly to call that in December when One Direction have just released a new one.

that's true. would've bumped mumford off the list too.

I had no idea Rod Stewart released an album in 2013.

*Frantically reworks personal top 10*

Bruno Mars

I had no idea Rod Stewart released an album in 2013.

Apparently...

The album entered the UK Albums Chart at No. 1, setting a new British record for the longest gap between chart-topping albums by an artist

37 years!

There was some OK stuff on that Rod Stewart album, I thought., particularly "Brighton Beach".

The Oneohtrix is definitely a slow burner but I'm really getting into it now.

Addendum to discussion 100 posts ago.

as always VICE aBSOLUTEY smash everyone elses lists:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-vice-albums-of-the-year-2013?utm_source=vicetwitter

It was in the latest chunk of the FACT list:
http://www.factmag.com/2013/12/09/the-50-best-albums-of-2013/12/

xp

I had no idea Rod Stewart released an album in 2013.

Two! Don't forget the Christmas one.

These Vice entries are all uncannily otm

50: The theoretical position of the Bowie album if he'd released it five years after Reality, rather than ten – i.e. when the public’s indifference was tangible.

49: Act who would be several places higher had their heroic refusal to sell out to the Spotify bloodsuckers meant that practically no one got round to listening to their record.

45: The A$AP Ferg album strategically listed a few places higher than the A$AP Rocky record ('cus we know our shit).

29: Rapper who does things to girls that Robin Thicke wouldn't in a million years, yet has surfed the wave towards acclaim because all the nakedness in his videos is so haphazardly vulgar and genuinely worrying that no one could possibly cobble together a cogent and newspaper-friendly piece of thumbsuck op-ed about it.

18: Woman who can sing quite well. She’s successfully tilted for the on-trend nu-soul/future RnB market, and her success has largely been based on the fact that – so far – no one has spotted that deep down she's a classic Brit School jazz-hands archetype who's basically Jessie J with Dev Hynes’ phone number.

NME Readers Album of the Year

1. Foals – 'Holy Fire'
2. Arctic Monkeys – 'AM'
3. Queens of the Stone Age – '... Like Clockwork'

NME Readers Track of the Year

1. Foals – 'My Number'
2. Arctic Monkeys – 'Do I Wanna Know?'
3. Queens of the Stone Age – 'Smooth Sailing'

http://www.nme.com/news/foals/74330

xp - I actually LOLed at "NUMBER 1: some bloke humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire)"

Wait, he makes that same joke every year?

last few #1 albums in the Wire have been Laurel Halo, James Ferraro, Actress, Broadcast, The Bug, Robert Wyatt and Burial so that's not really that accurate tbh

as always, a handful of OTM zings disguise the fact that 75% of the vice piece is hoary rockcrit received wisdom, lazy anti-pop snobbery or just total nonsense

the thing is if vice really wanted to skewer EOY pretensions/bullshit they could probably do it quite well but it's not like they're any different to anyone else

Really? Which bits?

Pretty scary to see how irrelevant most of the 2012 names sound today: Django Django? Peaking Lights? Mac DeMarco?

lol lex just because you choose to listen to miley cyrus m8, chill out lmao

also the divide isn't between "records no one felt passionately about" and "records some people loved and others hated" - the latter ALWAYS make it into EOY lists - it's between "records that people heard because the band got their positioning and PR etc right" and "records that three people heard and loved but no one else even bothered to listen to"

DY i think your attempt at an insouciant posting style would work better with either the lol at the start or the lmao at the end but not both, bc that's a bit try-hard tbh

Pretty scary to see how irrelevant most of the 2012 names sound today: Django Django? Peaking Lights? Mac DeMarco?

wow you're easily scared

like to mix it up, shows much much im laughing innit

Vice list is pretty funny but loses marks for recycling several of its jokes from last year.

25: Miley Cyrus. Clearly no one actually listened to this sludge, but the staff must pretend they’ve been devouring it to justify a) the large photo of Cyrus fingering herself with a hammer / foam finger and b) a thinkpiece boxout called "Was 2013 The Year Pop Went Punk?" or "The Return Of The Spectacle" or some other such contrived horseshit.

this is basically on the level of the guardian commenters we've been correctly mocking

45: The A$AP Ferg album strategically listed a few places higher than the A$AP Rocky record ('cus we know our shit).

or because it's better?

29: Rapper who does things to girls that Robin Thicke wouldn't in a million years, yet has surfed the wave towards acclaim because all the nakedness in his videos is so haphazardly vulgar and genuinely worrying that no one could possibly cobble together a cogent and newspaper-friendly piece of thumbsuck op-ed about it.

everyone knows those scary, bad rappers are the most misogynistic scum of all yet somehow they avoid any criticism for it, oh wait // oh wait

26: At least one person in the office is dating a minor-league pop player. This is her / his album.

would be a better zing if it was "mates with" not "dating" but that might be a lil too on the nose

11: Ominous point in human history where people voting for Drake as a joke meets people voting for Drake because they are deadly serious. This is basically how the Nazis got power.

did anyone vote drake as a joke ever?

I know humour isn't your thing Lex but it's meant to be funny.

49: Act who would be several places higher had their heroic refusal to sell out to the Spotify bloodsuckers meant that practically no one got round to listening to their record.

Was this Future of the Left? Their album is GREAT and the story behind them having to pretty much fund and produce the other thing entirely themselves is something I keep meaning to read up about more.

I know humour isn't your thing Lex but it's meant to be funny.

but it's cliché after cliché! about three of them are funny.

I trust your opinion on many things but you're always saying how much you hate comedy so you're not my go-to guy when it comes to funny. 80% of it worked for me. Agree that the Miley Cyrus entry is lazy though.

Pretty scary to see how irrelevant most of the 2012 names sound today: Django Django? Peaking Lights? Mac DeMarco?

― ArchCarrier, Tuesday, December 10, 2013 12:56 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not sure what this is referring to but I think it says more about you than the '2012 names'

to take the one act of those three I care about as an example, why are Peaking Lights (a once fairly prolific duo who now have a baby together) obliged to release music within a 12-month window for the sole purpose of staying "relevant"

In fairness, it is mostly zings at indie bands.

48. Rapper who has done things that would make Chris Brown cut off his dick in shame, but because they're not to anyone famous, they still count towards his grizzled street cred with Pitchfork readers who are too scared and confused by WSHH to get their news from source.

From last year's list. SMDH @ Vice.

Many of them are very similar to last year's, and the year before. Which is kind of the point about these lists, in some ways.

xps the new FOTL album seems to be on Spotify and had a press officer and all that jazz so doesn't really fit the bill

DY i think your attempt at an insouciant posting style would work better with either the lol at the start or the lmao at the end but not both, bc that's a bit try-hard tbh

― lex pretend, Tuesday, December 10, 2013 12:58 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha

Bleep Top 50 Albums

Oneohtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven
Special Request - Soul Music
Tim Hecker - Virgins
The National - Trouble Will Find Me
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
These New Puritans - Field of Reeds
Holden - The Inheritors
Forest Swords - Engravings
Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus
Karen Gwyer - Needs Continuum
Four Tet - Beautiful Rewind
Autechre - Exai
Mount Kimbie - Cold Spring Fault Less Youth
Factory Floor - Factory Floor
John Roberts - Fences
Machinedrum - Vapor City
Kanye West - Yeezus
The Haxan Cloak - Excavation
Darkside (Nicolas Jaar + Dave Harrington) - Psychic
Jessy Lanza - Pull My Hair Back
Omar Souleyman - Wenu Wenu
Laurel Halo - Chance of Rain
Ron Morelli - Spit
Young Echo - Nexus
Zomby - With Love
Moderat - II
Recondite - Hinterland
Floorplan (Robert Hood) - Paradise
The Knife - Shaking The Habitual
Thundercat - Apocalypse
Arctic Monkeys - AM
Wolf Eyes - No Answer: Lower Floors
Atom TM - HD
Tropic Of Cancer - Restless Idylls
KMFH (Kyle Hall) - The Boat Party
Connan Mockasin - Caramel
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
Falty DL - Hardcourage
Mika Vainio - Kilo
Beautiful Swimmers - Son
senking - Capsize Recovery
Sano - Sano
Rabih Beaini - Albidaya
Roly Porter - Life Cycle Of A Massive Star
Function - Incubation
Julia Holter - Loud City Song
Atoms For Peace - AMOK
Zed Bias - Boss
Rene Hell - Vanilla Call Option
John Wizards - John Wizards

NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums Of 2013
http://www.npr.org/blogs/bestmusic2013/2013/12/10/249243871/npr-musics-50-favorite-albums-of-2013

Kyle Hall - The Boat Party

^ been meaning to buy this all year long

The National in that top five is just bizarre.

They just can't resist a bit of morose adult contemporary. I'd think Weekend - Jinx or Pop. 1280, Chelsea Wolfe or TV Ghost would fit their tastes better.