We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share their personal highs and lows of 2013. Check back for more installments of My Year in Music throughout the next week.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Kanye West: "Black Skinhead"
02 Neko Case: "Man"
03 Classixx: "All You're Waiting For" [ft. Nancy Whang]
04 Daft Punk: "Get Lucky"
05 Disclosure: "White Noise" [feat. AlunaGeorge] (Hudson Mohawke Remix)
06 Kingdom: "Bank Head" [ft. Kelela]
07 A$AP Ferg: "Shabba" [ft. A$AP Rocky]
08 King Khan & the Shrines: "Idle No More"
09 M.I.A.: "Bring the Noize"
10 Kurt Vile: "KV Crimes"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01. Danny Brown: Old
02. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels
03. Ka: The Night's Gambit
04. Action Bronson & Party Supplies: Blue Chips 2
05. DJ Rashad: Double Cup
06. Prodigy / The Alchemist: Albert Einstein
07. Thundercat: Apocalypse
08. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
09. Chance the Rapper: Acid Rap
10. Savages: Silence Yourself
Most Played Song of 2013: Going by iTunes playcount, I actually lucked out and came up with "Run the Jewels", from Run the Jewels, off Run the Jewels. So it's good that one of my favorite songs/groups/albums of the year qualifies under what I suspect Chuck Klosterman would call the Black Sabbath Naming Trifecta. By the more stringent criteria of vague suspicion, I'm thinking that Kingdom's "Bank Head"—both the instrumental version off Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 and the version featuring Kelela on Vertical XL—probably wins out. Bonus for biggest earworm goes to Danny Brown's "Wonderbread".
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Thanks to the deathless existence of a few remaining super-obscuro-peddling MP3 blogs and an urge for constant, voracious consumption that would horrify your typical wolverine, I wound up listening to at least a couple previously unheard old records—often as many as a dozen—over the course of every day. It's not going to be the permanent state of things for me that much longer; I think most of it has been a listen-once/save-for-future-reference undertaking that is probably going to pan out better when that stuff pops up again ambushing me in shuffle mode. With too many to list, here are a few of my favorite highlights, albeit ones that are a bit easier to find: Coroner, No More Color (one of those thrash metal albums where the drums alone are enough to make you flip out); Lone Ranger, M 16 (deeper-than-deep early '80s dancehall); Larry Young, Unity (a '65 Blue Note session where the whole band—Young on B-3, Woody Shaw on trumpet, Joe Henderson tenor sax, Elvin Jones on drums—teeters amazingly between bop and avant garde); Janet Jackson, Rhythm Nation 1814 (which falls more under 'rediscovered' -- try avoiding a Flyte Tyme production when you're 12 in 1989 Twin Cities—and is probably the most 2013 album of the late '80s given its mixture of conceptual ambition and immediate-thrill pop.)
Musical Highlights: An unexpected twin-bill I experienced during a trip to NYC earlier this spring. Well, I expected the first half, at least: I got to see Kvelertak at Webster Hall, and the alternate-universe version of me that gravitated completely towards metal instead of cutting it with hip-hop, dance music, and R&B probably would've enjoyed it as much as my current-universe dilletante self did thanks to a packed basement crowd and the band's relentless dedication to chest-caving volume. (Also, they went all monkey-bars on the lighting rig and played guitar atop the bar. That helps.) The unexpected half came when I headed back to the place I was staying and discovered that one of Kanye West's video-projection pop-up situations was happening a couple blocks away, so I got to watch a pre-AutoTune rendition of "New Slaves" with a few dozen people milling about in the street who had no idea what to expect. Say what you will about Kanye, somehow he made a big orchestrated famous-artist maneuver like that feel like a weird sort of guerilla-art Happening.
Musical Lowlights: Having my first-ever chance to see Björk cut short at the Pitchfork Festival due to what shortly proved to be the worst torrential downpour I've ever been caught in. At least I got to hear a god-mode version of "Hidden Place".