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 few days.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 Deafheaven: "Dream House"
02 Oranssi Pazuzu: "Vino Verso"
03 Prurient: "Through the Window"
04 Kinit Her: "Hyperion"
05 Bill Callahan: "The Sing"
06 Drug Church: "Donny’s Woods"
07 Vår: "The World Fell"
08 Night Birds: "Born to Die in Suburbia"
09 Windhand: "Woodbine"
10 Germ: "Butterfly"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 Locrian: Return to Annihilation
02 Chelsea Wolfe: Pain Is Beauty
03 Speedy Ortiz: Major Arcana
04 The Body: Christs/Redeemers
05 Deafheaven: Sunbather
06 Subrosa: More Constant Than the Gods
07 Kinit Her: The Poet & the Blue Flower
08 Savages: Silence Yourself
09 Waxahatchee: Cerulean Salt
10 My Bloody Valentine: mbv
Most Played Song of 2013: Vår’s "The World Fell" wasn’t my overall favorite song of 2013, but it’s the one I kept coming back to most often. Overshadowed by Elias Rønnenfelt’s other band, Iceage, Vår is an even chillier affair—but "The World Fell" is a dark blast of arctic isolation that pulses with a fierce yet mournful romanticism. Fuck, gotta go listen to it again now.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: It had been many, many years since I’d heard Naked Aggression’s 1993 album Bitter Youth. But I dug it up again in preparation of an article I was working on earlier this year, and it’s such a perfect example of how could punk could be in the ’90s: impassioned, committed, traditional yet inventive, and possessing one of the most forceful singers in punk since Penelope Houston, Kirsten Patches.
Musical Highlights: Getting to scream and string-strangle my way through a righteously shitty cover of the Eagles’ "Already Gone" this spring, when one of old bands did a kinda-sorta reunion show. I wasn’t even the lead singer of that particular band, but our frontman declined the honor and let me take the lead. I can’t for my life imagine why. Even better, believe it or not, was seeing the legendary Goblin play an ornery, bare-bones, entirely fantastic set that seemed defiantly designed to disappoint Argento fanboys and reassert the band as a world-class prog outfit in its own right—not just a soundtrack factory, as sublime as said soundtracks are.
Musical Lowlights: Having the Denver stop of Hawkwind current tour—The Chronicle of the Black Sword in its entirety, no less, a treat for a dual Hawkwind/Moorcock fanatic—postponed, then moved to another venue, then postponed again. On the positive side, it’s proof of Hawkwind’s power to traverse spacetime with impunity.