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.
Favorite Tracks of 2013:
01 The Knife: "Full of Fire"
02 Sky Ferreira: "I Blame Myself"
03 Jessie Ware: "Imagine It Was Us"
04 Goldfrapp: "Thea"
05 Charli XCX: "Set Me Free"
06 Patrick Kelleher: "Put Out the Lights and Cry"
07 Disclosure: "White Noise" [ft. AlunaGeorge]
08 Katy B: "5 AM"
09 M.I.A.: "Come Walk With Me"
10 Daft Punk: "Get Lucky"
Favorite Albums of 2013:
01 The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
02 Throwing Muses: Purgatory/Paradise
03 Charli XCX: True Romance
04 Laura Marling: Once I Was an Eagle
05 Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time
06 Goldfrapp: Tales of Us
07 Haim: Days Are Gone
08 Dawn Richard: Goldenheart
09 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
10 Kanye West: Yeezus
Most Played Song of 2013: I'm a writer, so when I do things like listen to "Get Lucky" on Infinite Jukebox-like repeat, it's for research, so peope can read something more informed than "NILE RODGERS! Daft Punk! Pharrell, I guess!" Still, when it comes to figuring out what I actually listened to, this makes things complicated. So based on a totally informal poll (i.e. dumping my 2013 downloads into Winamp, shuffling, playing, and seeing what muscle memory stops me from skipping most), it’s maybe gotta be: "Control", a 2012 Disclosure track unfairly cut from Settle (Ria Ritchie, to me, is worth at least two Ella Eyres and five London Grammars); Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Tonight I’m Getting Over You", which is also 2012 but the best pop song off the best pop album of that year.
An Old Album I Discovered/Rediscovered This Year: "Old" only in Internet years, but Roisin Murphy's Overpowered. While Murphy's since settled into a career of quietly releasing one destroyer of a track per year (2013's is Hot Natured collaboration "Altered State"), Overpowered remains her best work (Ruby Blue a close second). "Overpowered" is a romance novel for the quantified self; “Modern Timing" is like Roisin dancing on the entrails of the Summer of Smoove (the entrails being her doing); "Cry Baby" is excellent motivation music, if you’re motivated by drill sergeants with cowbell; “Let Me Know” will break your heart if you're even sorta close to being in its situation.
Musical Highlights: The all-female DJ set I put together at Arrow Bar in the spring, opening with Dawn Richard’s still-dormant party starter "Riot"; tangents for Toya and deep Brandy album cuts (specifically, this one) and everything I loved and could now foist upon a captive audience (Milla Jovovich’s slinky 2012 "comeback" "single" "Electric Sky", Swedish neo-disco by Tight Silk and Sophie Rimheden, Charlotte Hatherley's Sylver Tongue and their clickety-clackety twich dance track "Creatures"); and closing with Haim, as everything should.
I didn’t go to as many shows this year as I wanted to, but I did go to the Pitchfork Music Festival and it was a year’s worth of highlights: seeing the Breeders in 2013; catching solid sets by Blood Orange and Savages; hearing Bjork play in a dim park as rain began to mist, like something out of War for the Oaks. (And then rain began to not-mist and she was rained out, but sometimes highlights are fleeting.)
The little moments where you lose entire days to music: walking home at midnight listening to Charli XCX’s True Romance, then walking around the block twice to hear "Set Me Free" again; putting Jessie Ware’s "Imagine It Was Us" on repeat for an entire week, when the city seemed to shudder with the beat; doing the same with the Patrick Kelleher single up there, or with Justin Timberlake’s "Tunnel Vision" (and only "Tunnel Vision"); spending three winter afternoons and counting with Algerian pop radio streaming for a feature; hearing "I Blame Myself" and wanting to sing it every day since, defiant, for the rest of the year.
Musical Lowlights: The worst musical lowlights are the ones that actively mock you. And anybody who steeps regularly in the Internet shit-stew is familiar with being actively mocked; if 2012 was the year of trollgaze music, 2013 was the year trollgaze operated like actual trolling: provoking you into caring, then caring another day, then a third day, with tens of thousands of impassioned published words a day, then laughing at you, usually from a catbird seat at No. 1 at the charts: U MAD?
I'm not going to list examples ("Remember 'Harlem Shake'? What fun!"), because my year has got a lowlight that sums it all up: trekking the length of Queens trying to find a bar screening the VMAs instead of "Breaking Bad" so I could hypothetically write about them, in the process becoming the woman who walks into a bar full of people there for "Breaking Bad" and asks about the VMAs (you are the punchline), streaming buffered split-seconds of stuffed animals and Timberlake tributes on my phone while trying to do the half-assed math of how many bars toward Long Island City I could check before the show was over (a freelance writer walks south at not enough miles per hour, the VMAs flash by at far too many, how long until they don’t meet?), giving up, trudging back and falling asleep blistered, then oversleeping to realize I was due for a wisecrack and opinion on Fursuit Miley Cyrus x Beetlejuice/Coach Z Robin Thicke x the entirety of U.S. race relations as applied to music-industry trends. I think I might have just fallen back asleep. Fuck 2013.