Albums of 2013

Anna’s brother, Joe, takes his lists seriously: throughout the year, he makes intricate notes about his responses to each record he buys, compiling star ratings and real-time rankings which mature across a twelve-month period into a final, incorruptible top five.

This list is nothing like that.

Subjective and skewed, my top five is drawn together in the final hours of the year, based on my looking at that section of my record collection and seeing what jumps out. Then I double-check that first instinct, and sometimes shuffle one or two out and in. This is usually to try and achieve something like a spread of genres or moods, and also to reward the exciting and eclectic over the baldly accessible. So what might be my most-listened record of the year, Caitlin Rose’s The Stand-In, is left spurned on the shelf; Ed Harcourt’s Back Into The Woods, originally part of the final quintet, is removed at round two; and, as is always the way, albums I listened to rather later in the year just can’t compete with LPs I’ve known longer (both Okkervil River’s superb The Silver Gymnasium, and Midlake’s brave and dense Antiphon miss out on probably deserved stardom).

All that is by way of apology for the below. All in all, 2013 seemed like a good year to me. Even the disappointments – Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Mosquito or Flaming Lips’ The Terror – weren’t bad records by anything but the high standards previously set by each act. Obviously I was lucky with my purchases: a year in which Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires in the City, Lord Huron’s Lonesome Dreams, or John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts don’t make the grade has to have been a half-decent one. So. Onwards.

Stornoway – Tales From Terra Firma

This was the only one of the five that was a shoe-in from the get-go. In part, my admiration for this glorious record, the band’s second, is rooted in a brilliant and beautiful live show they put on at Gloucester’s Guildhall in March: tight without seeming over-rehearsed, ambitious without pretension, it was a revelation and revealed a band at a real creative boiling point. But Tales From Terra Firma is more than just an aide memoire: it’s a thing in itself, an album with light and shade, hidden corners, twisting structures and hummable melodies. Its songs are lyrically rewarding, emotionally affecting and never less than energetic, even at their most reflective. A stunning progression from the band’s debut, Tales From Terra Firma is a real piece of work. If anything can give folk-pop back its good name, currently stashed under the stairs at the house Marcus Mumford shares with Gary Barlow, it’s this intelligent, innovative little album.

Steve Mason – Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Times

The erstwhile Beta Band frontman crafted a genuinely surprising artifact with this Byzantine LP, which begins with a poetry recital and proceeds via soundscapes, electronica and Beatles singalongs towards something approaching a definitive ‘state of England’ statement. I wrote about this record whilst listening to it (usually a sign I doubted its final inclusion here), and said, “this meandering monster of an LP kicks the wedges from under the wheels of the rickety old singer-songwriter biplane and takes her for a proper fly.” I still think this is right, since there’s something defiant about the manner in which Mason denies the listener the traditional comforts of a solo artist’s record: from raps about Michael Duggan to recordings of radio football commentary, Monkey Minds asks you to pay attention to the movement of the album as a whole as much as it does its individual songs. If this makes for a certain bagginess, it also offers a useful argument for the album in a year in which half of the ten best-selling were in fact released in 2012.

Laura Veirs – Warp and Weft

This one is just lovely. Veirs’s July Flame was an ‘album of the quarter-year in 2010’, but didn’t make the final cut in what, looking back, was a weirdly strong year. This one deserves to rectify that omission: in some ways it is of a piece with that LP, all swooping, weirded strings and grooving, growling acoustic guitars, seasoned with multi-tracked vocals and enigmatic lyrics; followers of Veirs will know what to expect. But the tunes are so blinking infectious, and the song structures so interesting and yet immediately accessible, that Warp and Weft also feels like a refinement, even a perfection, of Veirs’s signature sound. It deserves an audience a great deal larger than it seems to have reached. Listening back to the album today, I realised how many of its songs felt to me already like classics I’d been living with for years – I was surprised some were on this record, and not another, older, one. That’s the quality of Warp and Weft. Buy it.

Arctic Monkeys – AM

The Arctic Monkeys’ fifth studio album, on the other hand, has surely sold enough copies already. Its a success thoroughly deserved – this might be the band’s best and most mature album to date, an argument you’d have also been able to make about perhaps every record in the career so far, with the possible exception of mis-step Suck It And See. Lead single ‘Do I Wanna Know?’ has been everywhere, it’s chunky riff fronting even the album’s TV promo spot. If there’s a criticism of the Monkeys, it lies in this old-fashioned sensibility: if Britpop had a fevered dream as it died, coughing and spluttering over its copy of The Man Who, it was of Alex Turner. Perhaps that was why so much was made of the hip-hop influences on AM – not particularly visible anywhere but in some of the drumbeats banged out by Matt Helders. With all the falsetto, in fact, AM sounds more often like a grumpy Prince record, c. ‘Kiss’. But AM grabs you from the first second and allows not a duffer to make it into its old-fashioned 45-ish minutes running time. If any of these five albums have made it into the top flight on the basis of repeat listens, it’s AM. Go to sleep, Britpop. It’ll all be OK.

Josh Ritter – The Beast In Its Tracks

For all that I have admired Josh Ritter’s songwriting since I first heard his Golden Age of Radio around 2004 or so, I’m not sure any of his album’s have ever made it close to a year’s-end list. His third, The Animal Years, might have been close; but otherwise there has always been something rather too precise about Ritter’s impeccable songwriting quite to offer the kind of edge that cuts through at length. Ironically, The Beast In Its Tracks doesn’t offer a ‘Monster Ballads’ or ‘The Temptation of Adam’ – songs like ‘Harrisburg’ or ‘Kathleen’ which sparkle with wit and catchy energy. Instead, the album stands as an urgent statement in a way Ritter’s other albums never have. Perhaps, alas, that’s because this LP chronicles Ritter’s divorce from Dawn Landes; perhaps it’s because the songs share lyrics and motifs (“she only looks like you in a certain kind of light” Ritter sings on both ‘A Certain Light’ and ‘New Lover’); perhaps it’s because the songs taken together tell a story more focused than the American mythmaking of 2010’s So Runs The World Away. Ritter also varies his vocal delivery – the rapid-fire stacatto syllables of ‘Hopeful’ contrasting with the folky croon of ‘The Apple Blossom Rag’ (“this new girl’s got a real forked tongue”). Special, sweet and sad.

Albums of 2009

I was compiling a list of 2009’s best songs to post here, but I realized that doing so would leave off two of my favourite albums. I’ve always been more of an LP guy than a singles fella, so it seemed distorting not to do a top five albums post instead. I’m somewhat pained to have to leave out The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ memorable It’s Blitz!, and Magnolia Electric Company, The Decemberists and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy all released records worth a listen in 2009, too. Anyway, omission is the nature of the listing beast. So here goes:

5. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin

This is a simply gorgeous record. At times it is ruthlessly simple – the finger-picking which starts the album is standard country stuff – and yet there is always something to add texture, weight or depth. On opener ‘Charlie Darwin’, its Ben Knox Miller’s other-wordly falsetto, couched in the warm tones of backing vocals and humming organs; on the raucous ‘Home I’ll Never Be’, it’s the off-kilter percussion. The vocal delivery is particularly strong throughout, making the record a crowd-pleaser, but a decidedly fragile one. Undemanding possibly, but irrefutably lovely.

4. British Sea Power – Man of Aran

I wrote about this upon release, and it’s remained at the top of ‘to play’ pile ever since. This was one of the albums which would have been passed over by a mere songs list, since there’s no single track – with the exception perhaps of the 12-minute ‘Spearing The Sunfish’ – which can or should be taken from the whole. The band have successfully crafted both a soundtrack and an album in its own right, and the eery sounds which often only just approach the musical remain some of the most piercing I’ve heard all year. Incomparable, really.

3. Arctic Monkeys – Humbug

Being one for the underdog, I really didn’t want to select this record, but it would have been disingenuous not to. I haven’t been a great fan of the Monkeys before now – Favourite Worst Nightmare simply didn’t come together for me, whilst Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not was entertaining but callow. That last adjective is not a word that can be applied to ‘Humbug’, which is a substantial record on every level. It’s simply the best thing the band have recorded, and in a period when British music feels very much a poor relation to its American cousin, a joy to behold.

2. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion

The second record which would have been unrepresented in a songs list (although Pitchfork counter-intuitively selected ‘My Girls’ as its song of the year), this was the first record I purchased in 2009 and was left largely untouched in quality for twelve whole months. In terms of inventiveness, audacity and sheer verve, Merriweather Post Pavillion was braver than the Flaming Lips, quirkier than Devendra Banhart, and catchier than My Latest Novel. ‘Also Frightened’,  ‘Summertime Clothes’ and ‘Brother Sport’ are highlights – along with the gloriously hypnotic ‘My Girls’, of course – and even when the album flirts with disaster – on the bonkers ‘Lion in a Coma’, or the calculatedly messy ‘Guys Eyes’ – the band’s instinct for the exact moment at which to insert a slither of melody doesn’t abandon them. Tip top stuff, pop pickers.

1. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

This is in some ways a less ambitious work than some of the others on the list – in a sense, it’s a step back into comfortable territory for Callahan, as I suggested when I wrote about it earlier in the year. But comfort is relative, and there’s little on this record in terms of easy resolution or soft consolation. “It’s time to put God away,” Callahan sings, and the whole album is suffused with this abandonment of, well, hope. It’s a lighter album than that makes it sound, though, as if, as in the wonderful ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ (“Show me the way, show me the way, show me the way / To shake a memory”), Callahan is haunted by the possibility of beauty. There’s just wonderful songwriting going on here – on the suitably airy ‘Rococo Zephyr’, or the harrowing ‘all thoughts are prey to some beast’ (the closest anyone has got, though in quite a different fashion, to the intesity of Of Montreal’s ‘The Past Is A Grotesque Animal’ since its release), Callahan allies perfection in both composition and performance to superb effect. Ultimately, this is a thoroughly coherent album bursting with incident – and there’s the alchemy which shades it into the album of the year slot.

Throwing Caution to the Colorful: ‘Humbug’

"Humbug", by Arctic Monkeys

Arctic Monkeys arrived on the UK music scene as something of a watershed, it seemed to me: everyone who liked a certain type of British music could agree, in the poppy hiatus between the salad days of Britpop and the re-emergence of UK guitar music that the charts were awful. But with Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, it felt to me at the time, four spotty chaps from Sheffield peeled off one half of those fans from the other: those who didn’t like the Monkeys’ debut album stayed at home with their Gene and Suede albums; the rest moved on.

The band has come a long way since that callow inauguration. Not only did My Favourite Nightmare complicate and darken the band’s sound; lead singer and lyricst Alex Turner’s side project, The Last Shadow Puppets, revealed a far richer sonic palette than he had previously betrayed. For the record, I’m a big fan both of Turner’s lyrics and voice, and consider him quite the finest English exponent of either art of this decade. So I was predisposed to enjoy Humbug, released yesterday and Turner’s third album with Arctic Monkeys. I became very fond of The Age of the Understatement, but am not disappointed that the soaring string and retro pastiches of that album find no home with Turner’s main project; Humbug is again another development, neither forced nor poorer than what came before it.

The lyrics still impress – “[You] stood and puffed your chest out like you’d never lost a war” or “I smelt your scent on the seatbelt and kept my shortcuts to myself” are the sorts of turn of phrase with which songwriters pray to leave a listener – but, crucially, so too do the tunes. Arctic Monkeys have always offered angular not-quite-melodies, and the reliance of the chants here assembled on the counter-riffs which play beneath them remains. With Queens of the Stone Age’s Joshua Homme on production duties for the bulk of the record, it’s no surprise that these riffs are beefier than ever. What is surprising, though, is how the band has retained the straight-ahead pop song rubric: this album sounds more mature, for sure, but that isn’t at the price of accessibility.

Indeed, as good as it is, current single ‘Crying Lightning’ might be one of the least convincing songs on the record: catchy, yes, but with the sort of lyrics Turner isn’t otherwise writing anymore. Much of Humbug eschews the laconic kitchen sink stuff with which he made his name. This is A Good Thing, given that he now lives in New York with Alexa Chung. So the album refuses, except for that one moment, to hanker for past glories: ‘Secret Door’ is expansive and wry about high society, ‘Fire and the Thud’ a love song both tender and sinister, ‘The Jeweller’s Hands’ mysterious and rolling, the poetry quite divorced from the specifity of a song like ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But’. In short, here is an album worth listening to: recognisably of an oeuvre, but so commendably uninterested in retreading old ground that the Arctic Monkeys feel new all over again.