Fancy a few albums of the year? Of course you do. Plenty to choose from this year too - here's the first instalment of my top fifty.
50. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
Let’s start off with a REALLY obvious one shall we? This would have been a lot higher on my list were it not for everyone else out playing the cock, arse and bollocks off it since it came out over the summer. Even set against their back catalogue this is a stunning achievement, a flawless torrent of streamlined disco and thumping club anthems that boasts both graceful attention to detail and universally accessible dancefloor appeal. Everyone latched onto this from the snootiest of music journalists to the most gormless of clubland punters which is testament to its potency as a crossover classic and any future retrospectives of 2013 will be woefully incomplete without reference to its many high points.
49. Dutch Uncles – Out Of Touch Into The Wild
Set against the worrying tendency for young bands to hedge their bets by penning music equally suited to bank adverts as indie dancefloors there was plenty of scope for this one to fall flat on its face but these boys managed to pull off an unexpected blinder back in January, coming strapped with polished studio chops and an ear for danceable guitar pop weaned on the cream of 80s Britain (Talk Talk, Orange Juice, early OMD). They’re perhaps a little too polite to warrant any sensationalist press attention but Dutch Uncles are rooted in catchy tunes and stand out ahead of their well-bred music student peers (Alt-J, Everything Everything et al) with their tightly trimmed brand of polished indie pop.
48. The Knife – Shaking the Habitual
Half disarming genius and half freeform arthouse bollocks, The Knife’s latest outing should have run away with the ‘Album of the Year’ plaudits and would have done so had the duo been able to focus their charge on bowel quaking voyages through leftfield electronica and epic strobe-flecked performance pieces. Their desire to cultivate and challenge the listener spilled over into pretentiousness in places but even saddling this LP with a twenty minute track of abstract fridge noise couldn’t spoil the ride when set against meticulously constructed rave-ups like ‘Full of Fire’ and ‘Networking’. Not a flawless performance by any means but where ‘Shaking the Habitual’ was good it was bloody brilliant.
47. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest
Orbits between BOC albums are getting progressively longer as the duo seemingly glide further out into space but this one was worth the wait, conjuring up a lucid stroll across some barren moonscape at the end of the galaxy. Like Portishead before them the Scottish duo didn’t so much time their return to maximise sales as simply wait for emergent trends in electronic music to dislodge them from the ocean floor and bring them bubbling back to the surface for another well-received bout of knob-twiddling and sense-tinkering. This was like a warm footbath for your mind and reminded us all why they continue to be one of the genre’s best loved acts.
46. Drenge – s/t
Raging slabs from Metz and The Men brought splunderous garage indie back into the spotlight in 2012 and the same tidal wave of spew-infested slurry rolled on into the new year with corking debuts from the likes of Drenge whose hymns to violence, rutting and morbid obsession hit home like an out of control bin lorry. Subtlety isn’t so much sacrificed on here as rejected outright over thirteen tracks of rollicking garage fuzz that have the potential to turn your local toilet venue into scurvy bedlam when they rage through on tour – there’s nothing radically new on here but Drenge bring enough life to the formula to keep it alive and kicking for another bout of sweat, splatter and high volume showmanship.
45. Black Sabbath – 13
The tagline ‘Metal Legends back to their awesome best!’ has been shackled to myriad disappointments over recent years but Sabbath aren’t your average veterans and their back to basics approach proved devastatingly effective on this long-awaited return to grace. The band’s members have done more than enough to torpedo their own legacy since the glory days of the early 70s but ’13’ was a fitting addition to the likes of ‘Vol 4’ and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’, stripping things back to the planet-crunching basics for a new setlist reminding you why they terrified so many people first time round. If they never do anything else then this will be a more than fitting epitaph for Metal’s founding fathers.
44. Kvelertak – Meir
In the same manner that Yank outfits like Clutch and Mastodon didn’t seem to form so much as emerge from the earth’s crust soaked in rock heritage and primordial fury, Kvelertak sound like they’ve floated to the top of a Fjord after years marinading in Black Metal dogma and imported Motorhead riffs – if their 2011 debut was the soundtrack to their surfacing then ‘Meir’ is them lurching onto the shores and baring down on the nearest village for a feast of terrified peasants, lunging and roaring through a torrent of bone-quaking rock ‘n’ roll and scorching metal delivery. The lyrics may be in Norwegian but they’re speaking a language that any discerning metalhead will understand only too well.
43. Chelsea Wolfe – Pain Is Beauty
Satan’s babysitter came through with the goods again this year with her most diverse offering to date, elaborating on her bone-dry acoustics and tormented garage rock with some poised electronic tangents and more languid passages to thrill and chill all over again. She could easily have turned herself into another gaudy caricature of moon-baked eccentricity by now just to curry favour with the Goth crowd but ‘Pain Is Beauty’ is deftly calculated, the soundtrack to a nervous tour around a mansion whose every room is haunted by a different type of ghost. Wolfe’s morbid visions become ever more vivid and fascinating with each release and four albums in she’s still impossible to predict. Spellbinding stuff.
42. Cult of Luna – Vertikal
Luna’s rise to prominence as part of the post-metal boom in the early noughties looked to have lapsed into complacency by the end of the decade but they burst back into life with this stonking return to form that projected the epic hardcore turbulence of their earlier work onto the far edge of the solar system for something truly spectacular. ‘Vertikal’ sounded like Prometheus-style Titans banging out Neurosis riffs from the inside of a hollowed-out planet somewhere far, far away – like cyborgs disassembled and rebuilt backwards in a terrifying new age, this LP was an earth-shaking roar of staggered alienation that was well worth several years of creative blight and confusion.
41. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
The class of 2008 came back in force this year (Foals, Fuck Buttons) but no-one shouldered quite the anticipation of Vampire Weekend whose third offering seemed to surface in a totally different world to their opening twinset. The rapid-fire festival anthems of yesteryear were dismantled and re-assembled for ‘Modern…’ resulting in a mix that was less immediate but ultimately all the more rewarding - they still have the potential to irritate but these lads are clever enough to balance their shtick between easily accessible pop and PHD quality genre-splicing. They remind me a bit of post-Police Sting with the wit and World Music, easy to hate on but impossible to resist in the long term.
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