(sorry -- excruciatingly long text-dump of basically all my >1-ns opinions ahead, plz skip if uninterested)
ok so i only voted for 3 albums on this poll (up from 1 last yr). basically i am still not a big albums listener and even the ones i enjoy generally end up in this territory where each listen is certainly rewarding in some way yet it's phenomenally difficult to force myself to proceed beyond the ~fifth full listen. the ones i voted for were the few that sort of broke free from that and got wholly under my skin. NONETHELESS i did hear a decent amount of the albums that made the list so here we go…
64 CIARA Ciara in the week leading up to this one's release -- with "body party" and a bass-heavy remix both burning up r&b airwaves, a fantastic performance on the bet awards, and the amazing "i'm out" video dropping -- there was pretty much nothing that could have excited me more than the thought of having this album. the full thing didn't quite live up to that excitement, but aside from the excellent singles, it also delivered plenty of nice jams like "super turnt up", "overdose" (or was that a single?) and "livin' it up". ciara feat ciara remains inspired.
51 ASHLEY MONROE Like a Rose this is an album i'd like to revisit soon now that i'm thinking about it. enjoyable for sure, but perhaps less accessible to newer country fans like me than the other albums along this vein from the year.
43 JON HOPKINS Immunity actually rather liked this one. wouldn't say it exactly encapsulates a 'story of a night out' like much of the press seemed to say, but it certainly has an appealing sonic arc to it. i found the ambient half more to my taste, with "abandon window" being my highlight and "collider" the closest thing to a stinker. "sun harmonics" which sort of combined the propulsion of the latter w/ the smoothened texture of the former was also v nice. album will prob be a minor incidental play fixture on reality shows or as tv spot background, which might make u laugh depending on whether you like or hate it.
34 MILEY CYRUS Bangerz haven't spent a whole lot of time with this but i have a feeling only about a half of it will connect in the end: the singles of course (just heard "adore you" on the radio the other night and it sounds great there) + other highlights like "drive". who knows tho! if not for a certain other album that came out last-minute last yr this would be one i'd point to as the 2013 pop-cultural artifact.
32 ARIANA GRANDE Yours Truly "the way" and "right there" were def some nice rhythmic radio jams. not everything has revealed itself to me -- could easily do w/o the last two tracks + maybe a couple of the more nauseatingly old-timey ones -- but lots of neat songs here. gotta love "piano". "baby i" is the best b/c she sounds completely gleeful, just letting herself go on the emotional ride even if it might pull her along too fast, her vocal appropriately both effortless and frenzied.
29 HOLDEN The Inheritors umm i guess this is for the dance/electronic music purists who are more 'connected to the tradition' or w/e and are aghast @ cute-n-cuddly stuff like jon hopkins getting mainstream crit love. i've only given this two full listens thus far but it seems like for each track that engages me there's another to match it that's just completely dull, plodding, meandering w/ all sorts of noodling that does nothing for me (except the saxophone in that one track which i like). thankfully many of the good tracks come consecutively so i might just delete the ones i don't like and pretend it's an ep or something.
28 TEGAN & SARA Heartthrob this is one of those weird albums for me where all the songs are good but none of them are great. still nice to hear "closer" or "i was a fool" come on shuffle or something tho.
26 TIM HECKER Virgins only recently heard this for the first time but have a feeling i'll really get into it!! only other one i'd heard from him before was mirages which was... nice, but in a completely forgettable way, so i was pretty surprised at how good this is. i never have anything resembling a clear idea what drone music is supposed to represent and my attempts to even describe why i do or don't like some of it thus feel like contrived crap, but i love what the sounds are doing here throughout: what sounds like footsteps creeping in some corner, the repeated piano line played with such intent but w/ tormented arrhythmic fumbles lurking in, the jarring compression-like start-stops. whatever it 'means' (it doesn't matter, b/c i don't know what my favorite ambient records mean), there's a lot there to thrill me and i'm excited to keep listening.
24 BOARDS OF CANADA Tomorrow's Harvest dull tbh, can't even really think of anything to say about it. only bought it b/c it was discounted one day and i had quite liked "reach for the dead" (and still do tbf).
22 BRANDY CLARK 12 Stories truly gorgeous at moments. i can't hop fully on board this one b/c there's something about her delivery that comes up ever so slightly short on some songs, however incisively they're all written, but when it all aligns, as on "what'll keep me out of heaven" and "just like him", it's magic. also i kind of don't like "take a little pill". like yes, the pill is a v powerful metaphor for the modern-day quick-fix that we are all-too-often eager to stack upon itself until the problems we're trying to remedy have ultimately transmuted to something unrecognizable and somewhat horrifying, but on the other hand... shit, people already face enough pressure not to treat or even acknowledge mental health issues. basically all press i've seen on that song favorably views it as being about addiction to prescription drugs, but every time i hear it it seems quite plainly to be about medication in general, so... no thanks, don't need that mess. still love ya tho brandy.
20 KURT VILE Walkin On a Pretty Daze i was super excited for this b/c smoke ring was probably my favorite album from its year, but i must say i was faintly disappointed w/ this. maybe it's b/c the sunny vibe of the first track didn't mesh totally (or at all) w/ how i was feeling, whereas smoke ring really tapped into what i was feeling @ the time -- but more likely it's that 2/3 of the tracks have an obvious analog from the previous album in sound and even occasionally lyrics (altho at least he didn't flat-out reuse lyrics like he used to do, or maybe he did and i didn't notice). i would have preferred something that felt like newer territory for him but it's still a good album.
17 CHARLI XCX True Romance it was hard for me to get too excited about this b/c so many of its tracks had dropped over the past couple of years (all of which were worse than "stay away" tbh) BUT this was still a worthwhile listen. i actually deleted a decent number of the tracks but there's plenty of good here too. i feel like "what i like" made me finally kind of understand the charli xcx aesthetic after all this time.
14 M.I.A. Matangi another recent listen for me. i was worried it'd be another mess like her 3rd album but it's good!! there are a few songs where i just totally tune out but then you've got "yala" and "sexodus" and the like so i'm pretty cool w/ it.
12 DAWN RICHARD Goldenheart i think i'm too stupid for this album? i bought it very excitedly but didn't end up listening to it much. "'86" was catnip for me last year prob partly b/c peter gabriel's so is one of my favorite albums -- and yet the "in your eyes" interpolation in the identically-titled next track sounded so labored. (i know people liked it! and the whole album! i just wasn't one of them? it was sad to admit.)
10 KANYE WEST Yeezus i know this has nothing to do w/ the album but parts of its promotion kinda bugged me, like the audience/press constantly had to be reminded that there were no radio singles and that there's no album cover (even tho oops, there were singles and that stupid omnipresent image of the blank cd in the jewel case with the red sticker IS effectively the album cover), like we were battered with the idea that 'this is reaching u authentically + ~organically~' forever before we even heard it all. BUT despite all that it was much better than mbdtf and i actually became somewhat interested in him again.
8 PARAMORE Paramore man this would be an amazing album if it were a bit shorter and scrubbed clean of "now" and the other forgettable ones. "ain't it fun" is a monster and it hit me really hard -- it's like a megadose of the feeling that pervades the rest of the album's runtime in digestible little pieces, growing up and feeling free but also/especially finally feeling the weight of having to find your own way.
7 THE KNIFE Shaking the Habitual i think i kinda said this in the tracks rollout but i got more enjoyment out of reading reviews that were basically apologies for not liking the album than i did out of listening to the album. "full of fire" is cool tho.
aaaaand the ones that were on my ballot (in 3-2-1 order)...
5 SKY FERREIRA Night Time, My Time
maybe it was inevitable that i was gonna like this? i've been a sky fan since "one" (it was my favorite track in 2010) and believed in her potential ever since, even if she dropped some occasionally patchy material. even so i never would have imagined that the album she'd ultimately release would be so well received, here or in the critical sphere. but despite everything that should have predisposed me to loving this on first listen, it was actually initially a fairly jarring experience -- i remember getting through the final crescendo leading up to that gasp that ends the album and feeling almost disoriented. yet i had to listen again.
so yeah, there are all those rough edges and that vaguely unfinished quality that ppl always mention, but they softened out within a few listens, and for me the thing that kept sticking out was how skeptical, distrustful, and self-deprecating she is on the record: even as "24 hours" sonically evokes the sheer overwhelming glory of young love ephemera, we've got her singing about how you could say she's a cynic; on the bizarrely infectious "kristine" (one of my favorite tracks), hanging out with her rich fashion buddies leaves her feeling like an empty fraud ("pretending i am, what's the point of saving? ... but i'm never working, i'm just spending"); on my other favorite, "i blame myself", she's placing herself at the center of all the transgressions she's endured as the room previously occupied by all the machinelike guitars gives way for the bubblegum synths and her own emotional space. it says a lot that all three of those, despite how different they sound, are just as catchy and compulsively replayable to me. she delivered.
9 KACEY MUSGRAVES Same Trailer Different Park
real talk! i guess. i mean, sure, there's plenty of it, but what i really loved about this album wasn't so much that she's just 'telling it like it is,' but rather how powerfully she creates her world's overwhelming sense of inertia as she, yes, rather deftly picks apart its uncomfortable realities. after the semi-optimistic one-two punch of the first two tracks unexpectedly leads her right into the thick of it with "merry go 'round", she's lost: lost and wanting movement but feeling like it's all hopeless ("dandelion"), finding movement but scared not to know where it's all headed ("back on the map"), relieved to get somewhere nice and yet still feeling empty ("i miss you"). the killer for me is "keep it to yourself", her delicate delivery only just revealing the depth of her feeling for this man; she tells him off and feels his pain in the same cold breath. "follow your arrow" probably does more for the pr angle than it does for the actual album, and i rarely ever feel like listening to it on its own, but it's actually quite lovable tucked toward the end the way it is, the last positive note before we watch her languidly accept the way things are on the at-first charming but ultimately devastating "it is what it is". my emotional-car-listening album of the year.
4 BEYONCÉ Beyoncé
first of all, lol at me for even believing the people who said that this album coming out late would favor its chances for #1 on the poll. i mean yeah, the surprise wasn't nothing: i've never been one who would instantly buy a beyonce album with little second thought, but there was just something about the way it dropped, the whole package, the way it was presented, that convinced me it could be something special that i just had to listen to right away. there may or may not have been a moment during my first listen/viewing when i legitimately pondered whether this would be one of the best albums i've ever heard; every track seemed like it was giving unexpected, inspired touches that completely electrified me: the satisfied giggle punctuating her incredible and seemingly effortless "drunk in love" verse, "xo" pulling hard on both end of my heartstrings just as she rides the crest of the rollercoaster, her delivery of "i'm just jealous / i'm just human / don't judge me", the expertly deployed chimamanda adichie sample used to jaw-dropping effect at just the moment when i was expecting something else entirely.
i guess i became somewhat more level-headed about it later on after the excitement of the release itself had diminished, the radios stopped playing the album in its entirety and the individual songs started taking on lives of their own. but despite all that, it still completely thrills me with every listen, and it demanded that i listen repeatedly. the videos are no fluff: they tell a cohesive story of a black woman painfully navigating the rules largely set by white men while pretending it's all painless, all for success she finds increasingly hollow; how she later revels in the joy of using sexuality for her own benefit and asserts her own personal power; how she copes with loss and finds relief, hope, and satisfaction in motherhood and community. the videos tie together all the disparate electrifying moments that the album's songs deliver -- and they makes the whole story, purchased by over a million people before the year even finished, even more explicitly about race and gender.
2013 was the year in which i, after having spent ~8 years relentlessly pursuing grades, academic awards, money, and other qualifications that i gradually began to view as meaningless and arbitrary, began a huge struggle with depression and suddenly dropped out of graduate school, only to start bouncing around aimlessly and wondering if i had just wasted my entire young life or if i'm even fit to do anything else other than what i had groomed myself to do. on the night when bey's album dropped and i was lying on my bed watching "pretty hurts" for the first time and i saw her plunge into that pool of water, clutching her head in pain as the echoes of "what is your aspiration in life?" rang through her mind like a rude awakening -- that was the first moment of many that hit me really hard. i have a feeling i'm not completely alone there. people often cynically dismiss pop music as an exercise in trying to create something that as many people as possible will interpret as being "for" them so that they'll buy it, but bey reminded me that it can be quite an amazing thing.
… ok, done now. thanks for everyone who put everything together and who voted etc. for making this such an enjoyable time to reflect. maybe i'll listen to some of these other albums sometime, esp the ones w/ tracks i loved this yr on them. i may be an album person yet.
― dyl, Sunday, 2 February 2014 22:57 (ten years ago) link