Stereogum's Top 25 Albums of 2013 So Far

There are deftly wielded forces of darkness and light at work on Vampire Weekend’s third record. Elegiac, alive with ideas, and coproduced by Ariel Rechtshaid, *Modern Vampires of the City* moves beyond the grabby, backpacking indie of its predecessors. In fact, whether through the hiccuping, distorted storm of “Diane Young” or “Unbelievers”—a sprinting guitar-pop jewel about the notion of afterlife—this is nothing less than the sound of a band making a huge but sure-footed creative leap.

Crisp drums, juicy chords, irresistible hooks—Disclosure’s debut album couldn\'t have sounded fresher. Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence were just kids when their favorite styles were last in vogue, and they bring the right balance of innocence and insouciance to swinging drums and plunging organ basslines, while vocalists like Sam Smith and AlunaGeorge lend a soulful shine to the impeccably polished productions.

There is an early Daft Punk track named “Teachers” that, effectively, served as a roll call for the French duo’s influences: Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, DJ Sneak. Within the context of 1997’s *Homework*, “Teachers” presented the group as bright kids ready to absorb the lessons of those who came before them. But it also marked Daft Punk as a group with a strong, dynamic relationship to the past whose music served an almost dialogic function: They weren’t just expressing themselves, they were talking to their inspirations—a conversation that spanned countries, decades, styles and technological revolutions. So while the live-band-driven sound of 2013’s *Random Access Memories* was a curveball, it was also a logical next step. The theatricality that had always been part of their stage show and presentation found its musical outlet (“Giorgio by Moroder,” the Paul Williams feature “Touch”), and the soft-rock panache they started playing with on 2001’s *Discovery* got a fuller, more earnest treatment (“Within,” the Julian Casablancas feature “Instant Crush,” the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-The-Doobie-Brothers moves of “Fragments of Time”). The concept, as much as the album had one, was to suggest that as great as our frictionless digital world may be, there was a sense of adventurousness and connection to the spirit of the ’70s that, if not lost, had at least been subdued. “Touch” was “All You Need Is Love” for the alienation of a post-*Space Odyssey* universe; “Give Life Back to Music” wasn’t just there to set the scene, it was a command—just think of all the joy music has brought *you*. “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”—spotlights both for Pharrell and the pioneering work of Chic’s Nile Rodgers—recaptured the innocence of early disco and invited their audience to do the same. There was joy in it, but there was melancholy, too: Here was a world seen through the rearview, beautiful in part because you couldn’t quite go back to it. “As we look back at the Earth, it’s, uh, up at about 11 o’clock, about, uh, well, maybe 10 or 12 diameters,” the sampled voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan says on “Contact.” “I don\'t know whether that does you any good. But there\'s somethin’ out there.” This was the Apollo 17 mission, December 1972. It remains the last time humans have been on the moon.

The main feeling that Kevin Shields felt upon the release of *m b v* in 2013 was relief. The process of making his band’s third album—and first since 1991’s era-defining *Loveless*—had begun almost two decades before, and, after a last-minute race to complete it before a planned tour, it was done. “We had a six-month tour in front of us and we literally just finished it in time,” Shields tells Apple Music. Continuing a theme begun by *Loveless* and 1988’s *Isn’t Anything*, Shields compromised nothing on *m b v*. This time, though, it was a totally independent production, all on him. “I spent about £50,000 mastering it,” he says. “If we were with a record company, they would have been going absolutely crazy, but we paid for it ourselves and we put it out ourselves and we made a lot more money than we would’ve made if we’d put it out on a label.” *m b v* began back in 1996. The band’s classic lineup had started to disintegrate, with drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig and bassist Debbie Googe departing. Perhaps in a reflection of this unsettling period, Shields began to approach songwriting in a much more experimental manner. “I went on this process of recording a lot of ideas in a purposely abstract way,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to write a song with a beginning and an end. Instead of writing a part in a song, I’d record it and then record another part. I was doing the writing process and the recording process at the same time but in different ways. It might be weeks between a verse and a chorus…well, I don’t do choruses.” The idea was that eventually these ideas would form a coherent whole that would be a new my bloody valentine record, but the project stalled in 1997 when Shields ran out of money. “And then I started hanging out with Primal Scream and I kind of drifted into that world, which was fun for quite a while.” It wasn’t until Shields was remastering the band’s back catalog in 2006 that he listened back to the unfinished sessions. “I realized it was actually better and more relevant than I thought it was,” he recalls. “I’d kind of forgotten about the more melodic parts of it and realized they were quite strong. I thought, ‘I should finish this and make it into an album.’” It was a freeing process, Shields says, filled with lots of “crazy shit.” At one point, they paid to fly people from England to Japan with proofs of the artwork because they didn’t trust just seeing it on a computer. “We were literally throwing money at it to make sure it was as good as possible,” he says. “Every single penny was justified.” By the end, Shields felt vindicated. “We did it our way and it was perfectly good.” No my bloody valentine record ever sounds of its time—they all sound like the future. But there is something especially reinvigorating about listening to their third album, perhaps because of how unlikely its release seemed at points. To hear Shields still erecting signposts on where guitar music can go on the sensational closer “wonder 2,” which sounds like a rock band playing drum and bass from inside the engine of a 747, or the slo-mo sway of “if i am” is to be reminded that this is a visionary at work. One of the central themes of *m b v*, says Shields, was a strong sense of everything coming to an end. He thinks that’s why it still resonated when he listened back in 2006, the feeling growing as he recommenced work on it in 2011 and even more so now. “We’re in a cycle of the world of things coming to an end and moving into a new phase,” he says. “The record is more relevant as every decade goes by.”

Since The National\'s 2001 debut, the world-weary baritone of frontman and songwriter Matt Berninger has become one of the most compelling voices in Brooklyn’s well-groomed indie scene, begging comparisons to darkly tempered rock outsiders like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. The follow-up to 2010’s celebrated *High Violet* is a set of beautifully produced contemplations on shadowy love, self-destruction, and urban ennui. Chipper? Hardly. But songs like “Demons,” “Heavenfaced,” and “I Need My Girl” are impossible to shake.

In January 2012, following a twenty-two month tour to promote the band’s previous record, High Violet, guitarist Aaron Dessner returned home to Brooklyn, where the fitfulness of his newborn daughter threw Aaron into a more or less sustained fugue state—“sleepless and up all the time,” as he puts it. Punch-drunk, he shuffled into the band’s studio (situated in Aaron’s backyard), where he amused himself writing musical fragments that he then sent over to vocalist Matt Berninger. Recalls Matt of Aaron, “He’d be so tired while he was playing his guitar and working on ideas that he wouldn’t intellectualize anything. In the past, he and Aaron’s twin brother, Bryce would be reluctant to send me things that weren’t in their opinion musically interesting—which I respected, but often those would be hard for me to connect to emotionally. This time around, they sent me sketch after sketch that immediately got me on a visceral level." From beginning to end, Trouble Will Find Me possesses the effortless and unself-conscious groove of a downstream swimmer. It’s at times lush and at others austere, suffused with insomniacal preoccupations that skirt despair without succumbing to it. There are alluring melodies, and the murderously deft undercurrent supplied by the Devendorfs. There are songs that seem (for Matt anyway) overtly sentimental—among them, the Simon & Garfunkel-esque 'Fireproof', 'I Need My Girl' (with Matt’s unforgettable if throwaway reference to a party “full of punks and cannonballers”) and 'I Should Live In Salt' (which Aaron composed as a send-up to the Kinks and which Matt wrote about his brother). While a recognition of mortality looms in these numbers, they’re buoyed by a kind of emotional resoluteness—“We’ll all arrive in heaven alive”—that will surprise devotees of Matt’s customary wry fatalism. Then there are the songs that Aaron describes as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” These include 'Demons'—a mordant romp in 7/4, proof that bleakness can actually be rousing—and the haunting 'Humiliation' in which the insistent locomotion of Bryan’s snarebeat is offset by Matt’s semi-detached gallows rumination: “If I die this instant/taken from a distance/they will probably list it down among other things around town.” Finally there are songs—like 'Pink Rabbits' and the lilting 'Slipped' (the latter termed by Aaron “the kind of song we’ve always wanted to write”)—that aspire to be classics, with Orbison-like melodic geometry. In these songs, as well as in 'Heavenfaced', Matt emerges from his self-described “comfort zone of chant-rock” and glides into a sonorous high register of unexpected gorgeousness. The results are simultaneously breakthrough and oddly familiar, the culmination of an artistic journey that has led The National both to a new crest and, somehow, back to their beginnings—when, says Aaron, “our ideas would immediately click with each other. It’s free-wheeling again. The songs on one level are our most complex, and on another they’re our most simple and human. It just feels like we’ve embraced the chemistry we have.”

While Waxahatchee’s debut, *American Weekend*, is often described as “haunting” (for good reason), the artist’s sophomore release exudes a more pointed, aggressive sound. Waxahatchee is Katie Crutchfield, a singer/songwriter and Alabama native doing what should be impossible by now: giving new life to a well-worn musical genre. On *Cerulean Salt*, she swings from stabbing, grimy guitars on the first two tracks to a relaxed and almost sweet-seeming saunter featuring tambourines and acoustic guitar (“Lips and Limbs“). Then a thudding, spare bass and hollow snare paint a bleak picture on “Brother Bryan.” That song opens with the line “I said to you on the night we met, ‘I am not well,’” which tells you what to expect lyrically on this beguiling work. Crutchfield’s an honest, straightforward artist who emits the smart pop-flavored confidence of Liz Phair, the mystery of Cat Power, and the melodic playfulness of Pavement, though Waxahatchee’s sound is considerably simpler. Whether she’s slamming her electric guitar or strumming an acoustic, the emotional nakedness of *Cerulean Salt* is a beautiful thing.

On her second full-length record as Waxahatchee, former P.S. Eliot singer Katie Crutchfield’s compelling hyper-personal poetry is continuously crushing. Cerulean Salt follows last January’s American Weekend -- a collection of minimal acoustic-guitar pop written and recorded in a week at her family’s Birmingham home. On this new record, Crutchfield’s songs continue to be marked by her sharp, hooky songwriting; her striking voice and lyrics that simultaneously seem hyper-personal yet relentlessly relatable, teetering between endearingly nostaglic and depressingly dark. But whereas before the thematic focus of her songcraft was on break ups and passive-aggressive crushing, this record reflects on her family and Alabama upbringing. And whereas American Weekend was mostly just Crutchfield and her guitar, Cerulean Salt is occasionally amped up, with a full band and higher-fi production. At times, Cerulean Salt creeps closer to the sound of PS Eliot: moody, 90s-inspired rock backed by Keith Spencer and Swearin’ guitarist Kyle Gilbride on drums and bass. The full band means fleshed-out fuzzy lead guitars on “Coast to Coast”, its poppy hook almost masking its dark lyrics. Big distorted guitars and deep steady drums mark songs like “Misery over Dispute” and “Waiting”. There’s plenty of American Weekend‘s instrospection and minimalism to be found, though. “Blue Pt. II” is stripped down, Crutchfield and her sister Alison (of Swearin’) singing in harmony with deadpan vox. She’s still an open booking, musing on self-doubt versus self-reliance, transience versus permanence. “Peace and Quiet” ebbs and flows from moody, minimal verses to a sing-song chorus. “Swan Dive” tackles nostalgia, transience, indifference, regret — over the a minimal strum of an electric-guitar, the picking at a chirpy riff and the double-time tapping of a muted drum. The album closes with a haunting acoustic-guitar reflection on “You’re Damaged,” possibly the best Waxahatchee song to date.

A few years removed from *Acid Rap*’s 2013 debut as a free mixtape, it’s surprisingly easy to hear impending greatness in Chance the Rapper. This hindsight comes, of course, well after the BET, Soul Train, and NAACP Image awards for best new artist, the Best Rap Album Grammy, hosting *Saturday Night Live*, the noted influence on rap demigod Kanye West’s *The Life of Pablo*, the friendship with the Obama family, the Kit Kat endorsement, and so on. But it’s here, across 13 genre-melding tracks (14, if you count the second half of “Pusha Man”), on the follow-up to 2012\'s debut *10 Day*. In the moment, Chance the Rapper’s aesthetics—a distinct singing voice stretched in all directions over a jazzy confluence of choir melodies, R&B guitar lines, vintage soul samples, trap drums, golden-era hip-hop beats, and Chicago juke music—were something of an outlier within his city\'s emerging drill music scene. “I dropped *10 Day* the same year Chief Keef started blowing up,” Chance told Apple Music’s Nadeska. “All the labels came into Chicago and the drill movement came up and it was a lot of pressure. Also around that time was when Chief Keef worked with Ye, so there was a big question of, \'Yo, you\'re the dude that super loves Ye, you’re quote-unquote “conscious rap.” You should be doing this stuff.\' So I just had a lot of pressure to bring something.” Chance would inevitably link with Kanye, but most who found their way to *Acid Rap* were looking for an alternative to drill. Which is not to say that Chance didn’t acknowledge the plight of his hometown. Topically, the second half of the album’s “Pusha Man” (colloquially known as “Paranoia”) is one of the most affecting songs of the period, with Chance singing, “Everybody dies in the summer/Wanna say goodbye?/Tell \'em while it’s spring.” Elsewhere, he uses his melodic croak to reminisce on the simple joys of childhood (“Cocoa Butter Kisses”), the man he’s becoming (“Lost”), and problems within his relationship (“Acid Rain”). *Acid Rap*’s guests are mostly voices just left of hip-hop center (Childish Gambino, Action Bronson, Ab-Soul), but Chance also made it a point to include Chicago speed-rap legend Twista and to introduce listeners to the young genius of Noname. So who then, by way of this 13-song conflation of sounds and voices, could have have known that Chance the Rapper would go on to become one of the most celebrated voices in hip-hop and a force of pop culture in his own right? The answer, simply enough, is anyone who would have listened.

Rhye\'s music is so Sade-like and heavy with musical instruments that it might seem odd to label it electronic. Yet it shares the chillwave DNA of The xx, Inc., and even Toro y Moi. *Woman* is an appropriately earthly title for this silky-smooth debut, perfect for a laidback late-night lounge set. “The Fall” layers murmuring piano phrases with a woozy, danceable mélange of brass and synthetic strings. Meanwhile, violins and cascading harps introduce the finger-snapping swing of \"Open.\" Michael Milosh\'s falsetto vocals are androgynous and pitch-perfect.

Britain\'s Charli XCX can be regarded as the power behind Icona Pop\'s fantastic girl-power anthem \"I Love It\" (she cowrote it with two producers). And that song\'s considerable muscle and sass easily set it apart from music by scores of other female pop artists. While the 20-year-old professes a love for classic Spice Girls and Britney (and, we suspect, Madonna), she\'s nurtured a slightly edgier vision that puts her more in the camp of artists like Marina & The Diamonds. Synths, drums, more synths, pounding dance floor beats, and a husky voice capable of both withering heat and alluring warmth turn what could be humdrum dance pop tunes (like \"Take My Hand\" and \"Black Roses\") into something bigger that rattles more than your ankle bones. The sultry, winsome \"Nuclear Seasons\" rings with the memories of Talk Talk\'s \"It\'s My Life\" and murkier memories of Duran Duran, while the snarl of \"You (Ha Ha Ha)\" hints at the power of \"I Love It,\" though it sparkles and pinwheels on a sweeter bed of synth notes. Watching Charli XCX stretch out into new pop spaces is guaranteed to be a fun ride. 

They’re called punk and metal, but at their hearts Norwegian berserkers Kvelertak are the living, fire breathing embodiment of rock and roll. “This is going to blow your brains out”, says singer Erlend Hjelvik.

Deerhunter’s 2010 opus *Halcyon Digest* captures the dream-pop savants at their most elegant and fragile, but on their follow-up album, *Monomania*, Bradford Cox and company rediscover their scuzzy punk roots. “Neon Junkyard” rattles out of its cage with inhuman vocal contortions while “Pensacola” straddles over a hooky cowpunk guitar riff. The noisy title track cranks up the volume further and further, drowning out Cox’s screeching vocals with a torrential downpour of twisted feedback.

The RCA logo that dominates the album art of *Comedown Machine* sarcastically signifies The Strokes fulfilling their five-album contract obligation to the label. With similarly endearing cheekiness, the opening song is titled “Tap Out.” Inside jokes aside, *Comedown Machine* is a seriously approached indie-pop album that furthers the band’s hip cosmopolitan sound. “Tap Out” plays with striking similarities to Julian Casablancas’ solo album *Phrazes for the Young*, replete with falsetto vocals set to muted disco flourishes. But the following single “All The Time” properly sets the album’s tone with The Strokes\' familiar post-punk influences and driving guitar riffs chugging alongside Casablancas’ more recognizable tenor. It’s impossible not to recall A-ha’s 1985 synth-pop hit “Take On Me” when hearing the percolating keyboards in “One Way Trigger”—especially when Casablancas ramps up his glassy falsetto to Morten Harket’s range. But with help from producer Gus Oberg (who also mixed the band’s preceding album, *Angels*), The Strokes succeed at importing such \'80s influences without drowning in them.

Laura Marling’s questing nature reaches its zenith on album four, the 16-song epic *Once I Was an Eagle*. It kicks off with a hypnotic four-track suite of songs tied together by a raga-like drone and hand percussion, sucking the listener into her existential headspace. Further in, there’s classical guitar (“Little Love Caster”), tender devotionals (“Love Be Brave”), and Dylan evocations (“It ain’t me, babe,” she affirms on “Master Hunter”), all stirred by her steely interrogations.