How are we halfway through the year already? It seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating the new calendar, wondering what releases would blow us away in 2013. It’s been a fantastic year for music so far, with surprisingly strong efforts arriving faster than we can get to know them.
To keep up with the madness, I’m marking the halfway point with a walk through the Top 10 Albums of 2013 So Far – you’ve checked out Crave writer Iann Robinson’s Best of 2013 list – now here’s another angle. In a shocking development, we actually agree on a few of the choices! Check out the collection – and justification – below…
Check out the Top 10 Queens of The Stone Age Songs of All Time!
Band of the Month: The Mowgli’s Exclusive Studio Performance & Interview
Best Albums of 2013 (So Far)
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Portugal. The Man - Evil Friends
Stomping on the concept of consistent accessibility, Portugal The Man embrace the bewildering, mixing alt-rock bombastics with indie charm and an endless stream of restless weirdness that defies the songs' infectious melodies and addictive riffs. With checks and balances provided by producer Danger Mouse, this ambitious release is at once inventive and familiar, wholly engaging yet awesomely perplexing. Live performance showcases the strength of these new compositions, but one thing is for certain: the future looks very good for PTM.
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Clutch - Earth Rocker
What the hell has gotten inside of Clutch? These are grown-ass men in their forties, swinging like an '86 Mike Tyson on their new album Earth Rocker – eleven tracks of pure piston-pumping juggernaut uppercuts of devastating excellence. No fat, no hesitation, just raw muscle and smirk.
Neil Fallon and Co. didn't just hash this one out in the studio, opting instead to plot out every moment beforehand - and the resulting polished offering hitting our ears like a stampede of ripped & rabid giants on that crazy Limitless drug.
Earth Rocker captures a live essence that carries the listener through a balanced journey, an album full of A-sides that finds Clutch at their finest. Superior programming. Superior hardware. Superior firepower. Find this album and blast it righteously.
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Kanye West - Yeezus
When the distorted acid instrumental of tremendous electro-grind opener "On Sight" buzz-pulses in, it's immediately clear that we're taking a very different vehicle than we rode in through 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. This is a Summer-bounce anthem collection strictly for grownups, a progressive clash of textures and sounds, dance-mandate beats and bouts of free-fall silence that marks Kanye's most honest work yet amid a wash of Godzilla-sized egomania. Yeezus is an intensely polarizing release, with no middle ground for "okay" – you're either going to love it, or hate the almighty shit out of it.
Outrageous, violent and misogynistic lyricism? Check. Red-level sonic overload polished by superproducer Rick Rubin? Check. Primal screaming over what 'Ye describes as a “super low-bit” sound with completely dissonant mid-song interludes? You bet your ass. It's a deliciously challenging forty-minute run for the invested, wherein Frank Ocean and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon mix with samples from Brenda Lee to Indian film scores to Hungarian rock. It's all over the place, held together by a progressive command of intensity and dark-dancefloor aggression.
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Atoms For Peace - Amok
The debut-album release of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke's side project Atoms For Peace, orchestrated by Yorke, Nigel Godrich, drummer Joey Waronker, percussionist Mauro Refosco and legendary Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist Flea – is a gorgeous celebration of counterintuitive beat patterns, subtle organics and digital manipulation. Amok has nothing to offer the guitar-loving analog disciples of the Church of Grohl & White – while not entirely free of guitar, it is a laptop album through and through, a collection of digitized schizophrenic beat designs one might listen to while preparing to impersonate someone with advanced Parkinson's on the dancefloor.
The delight is in the details, however, and headphones are essential for the full appreciation of Refosco's percussion work, with countless beat treats trickled into the menacing apathy vortex of "Unless". "Judge, Jury and Executioner" builds on ghostly vocal backdrops, sharp handclaps and minimal click-hits, while the drip-beats and wet percussion of "Ingenue" bring an alley shine to the Yorke's ethereal falsetto and Flea's heartbeat bass. It's as good as you imagined it would be, an interpretive soundtrack to 21st century minimalism with heavy replay power.
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Queens of The Stone Age - Like Clockwork
More real, raw and direct than ever before in both production and composition, …Like Clockwork is a trip of honest fragility bleeding through deeply layered textures and harmonies, a pendular swing volleying between forlorn vulnerability and fire-christened renewal. The much-discussed “no trick at all” approach to QOTSA’s typically enigmatic haunt is far more an autobiographical narrative lean than a lack of sonic trap doors.
Vulnerable, pensive and introspective, this is not a free-balling drunk-robot sequel to Songs For The Deaf a decade later, a high-velocity ride packed with a cocksman’s banquet of caricaturized drunken narrators. As we find ourselves on the far banks of the most difficult era of Queens of The Stone Age’s existence, the spilled blood still drying, new hope springs from Homme taking off the mask and showing what’s beneath the leather. While the tone of the album’s exit is ominous, these are the sounds of fighting demons in real time – honest struggle and catharsis alchemized and tantalized by the most revered gang in Rock.
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Sigur Ros - Kveikur
There's a reason Kveikur sounds like a band reborn - with the departure of multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson in 2012, the Icelandic outfit has issued a challenge to themselves by putting the ethereal euphoria of their signature sound on the backburner for a more brooding, darker atmosphere with gritty overtones. It's a screaming leap ahead of 2012’s gorgeous but hollow Valtari, heavy on percussion, expanding dynamics and passion. Just when we'd been lulled to sleep by Sigur Ros, they wake us once more with a revitalized energy.
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Cold War Kids - Dear Miss Lonelyhearts
Through the lens of evolution fans have watched Cold War Kids move from a raucous bar-band outfit to a bona fide pop-rocker machine with soul, and Dear Miss Loneleyhearts - CWK's fourth full-length - is a leap in the right direction after 2011's polished ambition of Mine Is Yours was met with disgruntled perplexity. Frontman Nathan Willett digs into a more honest lyrical realm, while the band behind him has tightened and sharpened with a greater focus on percussion. These may be pop songs, but the soul has returned, and we're dancing along.
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Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
French duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the men beneath those amazing helmets, are godfathers of the today's electronica, and Random Access Memories is the sound of maestros recoiling from the dumb glut of the EDM scene that owes everything to them. Rather than meeting the modern musical equivalent of the Idiocracy world with cynicism and damnation, however, Bangalter and Homem-Christo simply turn over the stone and celebrate the organic life crawling beneath – with beautiful results. Live instrumentation, exquisite arrangements and magnificent production are centerpieces of evidence that, when you insist on originality with a perfectionist edge, even flirtation with campy disco can hit like a live-wire of thrashing passion. To the genre inspired so largely by the architects of this album, this is an impossibly high new bar, one that has rendered the play-button hand-waver DJs painfully and obviously flaccid.
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Tricky - False Idols
Most artists struggle to live up to their landmark works, and Tricky's Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension are high bars for any artist to meet. But False Idols is a re-lighting of the passion torch for Tricky, whose smoky-gravel trip-hop narratives hit a new stride of infectious goodness in this collection.
False Idols is certainly a step forward, with more than a handful of tracks boasting solid mixtape potential amidst a deeper maturity, a depth of familiarity with the creative struggle, and makes for one hell of a satisfying listen - especially while blunted as the rain hits your window outside.
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Jay-Z - Magna Carter Holy Grail
It's 2013. Jay-Z goes platinum before his album's released because he's putting it out through phones. What the fuck. Good thing for him (and us), it's a damn fine record that defies the gimmickry of its distribution. Somehow, one of the album's most standout tracks is only a minute long ("Beach is Better") but it only makes for a further enchanting experience by a man we had begun to believe was fading into the history books of rap. With Magna Carter Holy Grail, Hova reminds us that he's still got plenty of flame left, and settling down with the hottest chick in the game has only upped his strengths as an MC.
