The Daily Beast's 13 Best Albums of 2013

The Athens, Ga.–based singer/songwriter Matthew Houck—a.k.a. Phosphorescent—works an alt-country/indie-pop territory occupied by Bonnie \"Prince\" Billy, Shearwater, and many other acts that get weirder the closer they come to turning pro. *Muchacho* plays out like a classic breakup album, with the singing laying claim to angst by shouting the lyrics into the night sky, where they bounce off the studio reverb caught in the stars. \"Song for Zula\" is the album\'s obvious high point: a hazy, lazy melody brought to life by a stuttering rhythm and a clunky bass line that provides the pulse. \"Terror in the Canyons\" evokes a mid-\'70s country tune rewritten by Ryan Adams and performed like Adams being backed by My Morning Jacket. \"Muchacho\'s Tune\" turns in a loose, achy vocal worthy of Will Oldham. \"Sun, Arise!\" and \"Sun\'s Arising\" bracket the album with multitracked vocal weaves; they provide a spiritual vibe that\'s both rustic and modern.

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.

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.

At just 16 years old, New Zealand pop singer Ella Yelich-O’Connor—d.b.a. Lorde—captured the top of the pop charts with the smart and wise-beyond-her-years single “Royals,” where she trashes modern pop and hip-hop’s obsession with materialism in favor of a world of love, friendship, and ideas. It’s the best Morrissey song he never wrote. Her earlier *The Love Club EP* primed audiences for what they’d be hearing, but nothing could prepare one for the actual excitement of her debut album’s best cuts. Lorde’s co-conspirator/producer/writer Joel Little ensures that songs like “Tennis Court,” “Ribs,\" and “Buzzcut Season” never lose their way. This is sharp, inspired pop music that knows how much fun it can be to play up to type and then spin things on their heads for a new conclusion.

This talented three-sister act received what felt like years of hype with its advance EPs before finally releasing its debut album, *Days Are Gone*—which sports a title seemingly aware of how much time passed while fans were waiting. With such expectations, *Days Are Gone* delivers on the hype, with self-penned songs so perfectly performed that it feels unfair that Haim has received so many comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, no matter how kind and worthy. A catchy tune like “The Wire” is so immediately likable that it\'d throw the rest of an album by a lesser act off balance. Except Haim is the real deal, and even the very next songs—“If I Could Change Your Mind,” “Honey & I,” “Don’t Save Me”—exhibit fresh excitement of their own propulsion. Producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Usher, Vampire Weekend) helped these songs flow with their identities intact. The album features the best attributes of \'80s pop; while those who lived through that era might feel a sense of untraceable déjà vu, everyone should marvel at the catchy, unforced fun heard throughout this remarkable debut.

Combining lean, spastic post-punk with the fractured charm of ‘90s indie-rock pinups Pavement, Parquet Courts’ debut is probably the only place you’ll ever hear anyone shout about Socrates in such close proximity to shouting about donuts. Opening with the whip-smart one-two punch of “Master of My Craft” and “Borrowed Time,” *Light Up Gold* reads like a poetry chapbook and sounds like an overheated garage, anchored by offhand beauty (“N Dakota”), jagged, surrealistic rants (“Donuts Only”), and the locomotive drone of “Stoned and Starving,” which turns a routine trip to the corner store into an odyssey of ancient-Grecian proportions.

Little was said about Parquet Courts' debut effort, American Specialties. Released exclusively on cassette tape, the quasi-album was an odd collection of 4 track recordings that left those who were paying attention wanting more. A year of woodshedding live sets passed before the Courts committed another song to tape. The band's first proper LP, Light Up Gold, is a dynamic and diverse foray into the back alleys of the American DIY underground. Bright guitars swirl serpentine over looping, groovy post-punk bass lines and drums that border on robotic precision. While the initial rawness of the band's early output remains, the songwriting has gracefully evolved. Primary wordsmiths A. Savage and Austin Brown combine for a dynamic lyrical experience, one part an erudite overflow of ideas, the other an exercise in laid-back observation. Lyrically dense, the poetry is in how it flows along with the melody, often times as locked-in as the rhythm section. “This record is for the over-socialized victims of the 1990's 'you can be anything you want', Nickelodeon-induced lethargy that ran away from home not out of any wide-eyed big city daydream, but just out of a subconscious return to America's scandalous origin," writes Savage in the album's scratched-out liner notes. Recorded over a few days in a ice-box practice space, Light Up Gold is equally indebted to Krautrock, The Fall, and a slew of contemporaries like Tyvek and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Though made up of Texan transplants, Parquet Courts are a New York band. Throw out the countless shallow Brooklyn bands of the blasé 2000's: Light Up Gold is a conscious effort to draw from the rich culture of the city - the bands like Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground that are not from New York, but of it. A panoramic landscape of dilapidated corner-stores and crowded apartments is superimposed over bare-bones Americana, leaving little room for romance or sentiment. It's punk, it's American, it's New York... it's the color of something you were looking for. Austin Brown guitar A Savage guitar Max Savage drums Sean Yeaton bass

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.