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: "Blood on the Leaves"
02 James Blake: "Retrograde"
03 Rhye: "Open"
04 Phoenix: "Trying to Be Cool"
05 Richard Buckner: "Mood"
06 Jon Hopkins: "We Disappear"
07 Bill Callahan: "Summer Painter"
08 Disclosure: "White Noise" [ft. AlunaGeorge]
09 Blood Orange: "Chamakay"
10 Camera Obscura: "William's Heart"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Phoenix: Bankrupt!
02 James Blake: Overgrown
03 Kanye West: Yeezus
04 Rhye: Woman
05 Richard Buckner: Surrounded
06 Jon Hopkins: Immunity
07 Disclosure: Settle
08 Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe
09 The Field: Cupid's Head
10 Camera Obscura: Desire Lines
Most Played Song of 2013: Rhye, "Open". They say that other people’s dreams are boring to hear about, and so it goes with strangers' breakups, so I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say that I started 2013 at the end of something long and ended it at the beginning of a new cycle, which I had not expected. Just as James Blake’s Overgrown was the black galleon I steered through a funereal summer, Rhye’s "Open" was my airborne vessel of rebirth this fall. I abstractly liked the song at its release, but at first I couldn’t intimately connect with its incredible pertness and freshness, its huge muffled urgency—its openness, at a time when I was kind of closed. "I want to make this play . . ." Life hadn’t felt like that in awhile. Then, suddenly, it did, and I packed more plays of "Open" into the last quarter of 2013 than any other song for the whole year. The way that stark shift in my life situation woke me up to the essential utility and necessity of the music caused me to think a lot about criticism as well: How music can’t be treated as just an aesthetic equation that happens between headphones or even in the context of other music; how maybe it has to be addressed in the places where it directly mingles with life. Otherwise, it’s like testing a life jacket on the shore.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: Jamie Woon, Mirrorwriting. Yes, for a music critic in almost-2014, 2011 is "old." The same dramatic awakening of emotional life that activated Rhye for me also brought this album back in a big way. Like a lot of people, I was mostly into "Lady Luck" and "Night Air" when Mirrorwriting came out, but I wanted to flag it here in order to defend the sometimes-maligned deep cuts, such as "Gravity" and "Waterfront", which I realized are the fucking greatest during many late-night plays, as they so perfectly matched my own impatient wee-hours wanderings, my mingled adventurous and melancholy weather.
Musical Highlights: James Blake crushing a sold-out Cat’s Cradle in one of those shows where you wind up with your arms around the shoulders of strangers; Richard Buckner psychically picking my favorite songs for an entrancing solo acoustic show at the Pinhook; getting to report on Laura Ballance’s era-ending exit from Superchunk; interviewing one of my favorite composers and finding him to be as thoughtful and kind as his music; that pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road-intense first play of Yeezus; watching Key & Peele’s dubstep and Superbowl Shuffle sketches over and over; Spiritualized and Grouper marking out the far dynamic ends of entrancement at the Hopscotch Music Festival; and my summer—don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all mournful James Blake—of being really really into mainstream country radio, which was basically all I could listen to for a spell (a few favorites: Cassadee Pope’s "Wasting All These Tears", Chris Young’s "Aw Naw"; Easton Corbin’s "All Over the Road", and Luke Bryan’s "Crash My Party"). I’m always fascinated by the ingenious production and arrangement strategies pop-country songwriters use to reconcile the slickness on the left side of the hyphen with the rustic quality on the right—and by how relentlessly the songs are about the beach, drunk driving and women’s fashion accessories. But this summer, I was just connecting super-hard with earnest, manipulative tales of lost love and new romance, too.
Musical Lowlights: First listen of Dismemberment Plan’s Uncanny Valley actually caused me to take Emergency & I and Change off my iPhone. Tainted love.