ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2013

will get back at it tomorrow

Today is the first time that I was aware that These New Puritans released an album that was worth checking out. (I've seen their name bandied about but have never actually heard their music, so I guess I just missed all the hype.)

uberweiss otm

how's life, check your ilx email

also those prince-y guitar licks in "m.o.n.e.y." which act as sort of curled responses toward the vocal melody, uh literally everything about "talk!" the pitched delivery of which made me ecstatic for a week, i've also come around to "she way out" bc of how much i like the phrase "two phone everything." "is there somebody who can watch you" sounding delicately strained from a larger and mostly silent mark hollis song and honestly i can't think of another song about feeling like a terrible brother

i promise to focus as much on the individual textures of the paramore record

I didn't write about this one tho, ppl were noticing that I was blurbing my favorite albums instead of doing my day job (oops)

― SHAUN (DJP), Wednesday, January 29, 2014 8:52 AM

this was me, today

not feeling inspired to listen/write w/this run, oh well. Hecker was on my long-list ballot but I honestly prefer something like that Yo La Tengo album with all of its same old same old if I'm listing my records of the year. gonna do a quick Spotify run through looking for surprises...

OK this PSB record is very cool, glad I'm listening

fab to play Classixx and this mix back to back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJS2FZtC6Ao

PSB became kinda blaring on track 2, moved on to the Marling which is good... L says it reminds her of Shawn Colvin & also Joni Mitchell.

particularly dig Marling's guitar playing, my kind of strummy intensity

chillwave oldie but goldie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuxE7TjYuo4

classix was on my first ballot but i dropped it for floorplan when they added it to the nominees

haha I remember that Pictureplane song...always heard Bowie singing "Seven Years of Tibet" over it.

There's a really good EP in the sprawl of the 1975 album which they had the good grace to release before the actual album

Looks like only me and johnny crunch voted for The-Dream, damn shame since it's his best album since Love/Hate

at the risk of opening the floodgates of Terius stan album rankings, that is crazy talk

omg ban dayo

>:)

Looks like only me and johnny crunch voted for The-Dream, damn shame since it's his best album since Love/Hate

― 龜, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 10:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is insane but its solid and i def gave a sideeye to the lex taking shots @ it upthread

think there's a silent swell of voters (sarahell for ex. who I know voted for TNP) with fairly artrockish tastes. we can hope TNP was the rallying-point (other than MBV)

― in fact, do read if you hate me (imago), Wednesday, January 29, 2014 4:30 PM (2 hours ago

uh, sorry, I didn't vote for your puritans band. I don't know them. They have never done anything for me.

the most silent of swells

lol oops, got wires xed

imago is gonna go have a talk with his people and make sure he's getting solid exit polling info

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2012/11/07/07-megyn-kelly-decision-room-2.o.jpg/a_560x375.jpg

Thread has convinced me to take out my stopwatch for the next time a metal album places

I voted for TNP too! ..although it was not high on my ballot

I guess the Oneohtrix Point Never album wasn't a hit with ILX? I was expecting it to show up somewhere, but at this point it doesn't seem likely

the most silent of swells

http://www.charleslay.com/uploaded_images/jimmy_truck-784553.jpg

and I'm not talking musically -- they literally have done nothing for me: they haven't played a show i booked, or paid me to do their taxes, or even shared smokes or snacks with me. People often talk about music "not doing anything for them," so I decided I would vote only for music that has literally done things for me. Mainly because I didn't listen to any 2013 albums, I made my ballot totally out of financial self-interest.

Thread has convinced me to take out my stopwatch for the next time a metal album places

― 龜, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 10:59 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the infamous occasion upon which j0rdan unveiled two albums 9 minutes apart and then waited 11 minutes to post the next one will heretofore be known as 9/11

never forget

Omg sd

let's lol

I'm currently listening to one of my favourite albums of the last few years, possibly a ballot top-3, for the first time. You have about 15 minutes to guess what I'm talking about before I post the albums I've reviewed. N.B. you'll get it wrong

Like, this album is *completely blowing my mind*. That's your clue.

that's a pretty shitty clue, dude.

guesssss

1 month passes

PET SHOP BOYS Electric - THIS ALBUM HAS MY GODDAMNED ATTENTION. Turns out that I *do* like str8-up thumping dancepop when it's done with a New Romantic widescreen openness and proggish swagger, rather than the dismal DFA-isms of toss like Factory Floor and so forth. Oh YES! :D *gets up from chair, performs extremely physical living-room walk-dance* Gonna let this stew for a few songs...track 2 is kinda less amazing, in fact a trifle rote. Happily, Love Is A Bourgeois Concept is an *absolute fucking banger*, feels like a true dance-music classic, the sort of song that will be fondly remembered many years from now. If there's one potential problem with this music, it's that I can't fathom how a whole album of this stuff will really work - they don't seem to have too many tricks (we shall see) - but when the highs are this high you've gotta say they've done their jobs. This is no Rio (basically no album is these days) but it's so far very good. Fluorescent heads in a slightly different direction - less drummish, more moody, and builds to a mighty head. Album is sustaining pretty well. Really well, even - Inside A Dream had an awesome progression and this Springsteen cover is working splendidly. OK, enough of 'Thursday', god. 'Vocal' is...pretty euphoric, yeah. It dices with kitsch and wins, altho I wd guess that has been the PSBs' steez for 30 years now...

LAURA MARLING Once I Was an Eagle - Oh christ how long is this fucking album? *time passes* Oh, absolutely enough of this. She's always been the peon of fucking BBC evening-slot helldrudgery and this shit stops here. Apologies to all. Yes, I can tell this is wilder and sparser than 'her previous stuff' but this doesn't mean I'll like it. I don't get any transcendence, any cosmic energy from this; it reaches for a level I can't access the edges of sanity from. Comparisons to Joni Mitchell kinda ridiculous and insulting, tbh.

DJ KOZE Amygdala - Haha, this album's even goddamn longer. First track features Caribou though, which is a surefire way to pique my interest. Well, features a Caribou sample, at least. *a lot of time passes* Royal Asscher Cut is the first song to really reach me but it's great! *more time passes* Das Wort is REALLY lovely triphoppy chillvibez! All the ones with German in their title, or something. *pauses album to watch movie*

HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA The Woman In The Dunes - This is one of the best fucking films I will ever see in my life. A sort of Wicker Man of the capitalist condition, except ten times better than that sounds - all our schemes for extracting water using dead fish, our schemes for selling sand, our schemes for trapping crows and using them as messengers (hint: crows ALWAYS know better), our bug-collecting, our at-first reluctant but then willing and eventually automatic obeisance to our overlords, our endless struggle against downward forces...this occupies a similar headspace to Pynchon, fuck it, and is similarly rife with nuclear angst, a kind of apocalypse-threat that does more damage than an actual apocalypse...twisted and mutilated sexual dynamics, initially our consolation, our escape from Hell, played increasingly for others' benefit, increasingly the very lure that keeps us servile, culminating in one of the most extraordinary scenes I'll ever witness in film (the drumming/mask/spotlight 'performance' scene, where the surreal nature of the movie finally spills over into an explicit stage-show, our reality revealed as a mock-up, a fraud, a farce and yet a source of tremendous pain and hurt) - this is an existential howl of despair at the capitalist condition to dwarf all others. Now, climb back in your pit...

RESUME DJ KOZE Amygdala - How can anything follow that movie up? This is good music for this state - slightly anaesthetic, mellow, subliminal. Allows me to manipulate my own thoughts into a rested state. Shit, this album still has like 40 minutes left, even after this (very soothing) ten-minute monster. Can I namecheck Global Communication and be done? Yeah it's really good. That film has quite blown me to fuck.

DJ RASHAD Double Cup - More excellent midnight music, a bit more frenetic, but still got that soulful slightly psychedelic slightly insane vibe to it, kinda creepy how closely this falls to my headspace in fact, even more than the Koze...oh NICE, track 2 is really off-kilter and delicious - this isn't as completely bewildering and crazy as the RP Boo (which I voted for in the traxpoll) but has incredible charms of its own. Really good head-music. Really weird. I'd wager really original, too. Heckuva lot of craft and skill gone into composing these. OMG LOL, the RYM reviews are all 'where are the beats I can't dance to this?!' well lemme tell youse punks this is HEAD MUSIC, music to hear at FOUR THIRTY IN THE FUCKING MORNING WHEN REALITY DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. Mind you, I'd dance the fuck outta this shit too. OH MY GOD THIS ALBUM IS INCREDIBLE, what the FUCK. Completely crazy! This is such new music to me - such untrammelled creativity, holy crap...when people say that the most revolutionary music is coming from hip-hop & urban dance, I guess this is what they fucken mean! My absolute mind is getting blown here. So glad I chose to play this album instead of going to bed! This will definitely be the last for the evening, if only because Miley's not gonna be able to follow this up. Well, also because I need to sleep. Only One is just...a spin-cycle of techno-psychological breakdown and hypercrushed musical obsession, all microtooled and precision-murdered into a slash-cut meat display of dance music, a wonky lucid message heard softly through the side of your brain in the final seconds before the night claims you entirely, for its own ambiguous needs...everything's too fast or too slow, messages are repeated like abandoned weather stations, circuits short on purpose, you've fallen off the grid, the chain, the ecosystem - you're being lined up but all wrong...oh my god, I Don't Give A Fuck is one of the best SONGS I've heard recently full stop, fuck fuck fuck, shit, fuck, the machines haven't won, they've lost, and this is their lament as they're led to the reprocessing plant...seriously, that was Autechre reimagined as death-march, 'cept a march you dance, that was tension without release until you realise that heightened tension IS release, this shit's turning me luriqua, dear christ oh my lord. This would have been in my top...3 of albums? 4? 3 or 4? This is absolutely INSANE. How, ILX, how? How can I be exposed to so much unbelievable, penetrative art in the space of a few small hours? My jaw is dropped, I'm gone. This album does things with rhythm that I didn't even think were possible in hentai. I'm done, defeated. Spent. It just keeps it coming. This is the music The Prodigy thought they were making but weren't. This is the endless trip into a certainty you can't calculate, and it just keeps coming for more. Yes, this is better than that RP Boo song I heard, and I'd argue crazier - it moves subtly and devastatingly thru the gears rather than starting in 5 and proceeding therefrom. It laser-adjusts the gearbox before your very trembling face without having to move the fucking stick. Cogs are magnetised, lifted, replaced, swirled, shunted, dematerialised...this is a device that has learnt how to build itself, the point of technological singularity...we belong to the music now. Just two tracks left. Let U No - the light pours into me, solidifies. I am an illuminated bar of unbending attention. Last track. The countdown. Thudding evasions. We're all too high, so high we've forgotten what high even is, what dimension either metaphorical or mathematical might signify, and are simply accepting of and solely concerned with time's onward rollerdisco, its paradoxical stillness...nothing snaps the spell despite a million interruptions...zen is chaos...peace is violence...where can I find more of this shit

you know just because they're called 'superlatives' that doesn't make them peculiarly resistant to constant abuse

*twitches, exposed wires crackle*

hentai??

list of actual superlatives in that post:

[one of the] best [fucking films]
[one of the] most extraordinary [scenes]
Are we counting 'completely (adjective)' as a superlative? Disputed.
[people say that the] most revolutionary [music] <<<-direct quote
[the] last [for the evening] <<<-actually a noun
[one of the] best [SONGS]
[my] top[...3]

^^^so mostly prefixed by 'one of the' or otherwise easily-qualified. Nice try pal :D

[one of the] most extraordinary [scenes]

are we still talking about hentai?

yes we are

*goes to bed still completely amped ^_O*

it moves subtly and devastatingly thru the gears rather than starting in 5 and proceeding therefrom. It laser-adjusts the gearbox before your very trembling face without having to move the fucking stick.

one of those ordinary student nights, then...

http://media0.giphy.com/media/5vsp9FqLBVk4g/giphy.gif

lying in bed now srsly abt to drop off but that^ is basically how that album makes me feel, in a good way

^^excellent series of posts

I'm glad LJ likes DJ Rashad! :D

I thought I Am The Center would place as there seemed to be a lot of love for it here but can't see it being Top 20

@ imago get to Teklife vol. 1 right away