It’s that time of year again. On Friday I’ll be posting my list of the top 100 albums of the year…to very little fanfare. I’m no Stereogum; I have no industry clout. No one waits with baited breath for me to cobble together my grammatically incorrect, typo-riddled list of all the obscure and pretentious records I enjoyed this year. I simply write it because five years from now Ian will ask if I’ve ever heard any Je Suis Petit Chevalier and I’ll invariably respond with, “Yeah dude. L’Enfant Sauvage was #53 on my top albums of 2011!” And then I’ll get really self-conscious and start to wonder if all my friends are lying when they say they keep up my blog.
Paranoid? Who, me?
Before you call bullshit, let me just say this: Yes, there were absolutely 110 albums I heard this year that were good enough to formulate this list. 2013 was a pretty good year for music! And hopefully 2014 will be even better. Of course, not every good album was good enough to make the Swan Fungus Top 100. For those that just missed the list, there is… honorable mention!
The Top 100 Albums Of 2013: Honorable Mention
• Jesu – Everyday I Get Closer To the Light from Which I Came (Avalanche) – Long gone are the days when a Jesu album would rank among the year’s best recordings. Conqueror was the last one to really move me and that ranked 12th on my 2007 list. The last few studio albums hardly interested me, so I was expecting more of the same from the wordily-titled Everyday… Alas, I listened to it a couple months ago and it was better than I expected. The combination of shoegaze and doom works well, while the electronic elements (remember that terrible Rocky Horror Picture Show sample from Pale Sketches? BLECH!) are restrained. That’s about as much as we can ask from Jesu at this point: Just don’t fuck it up with stupid electronic crap. The heavy/druggy thing works. The electronics don’t.
• Ty Segall – Sleeper (Drag City) – Okay, I’m starting to get what people like about this guy, I just don’t GET IT yet.
• Hive Mind – Beneath Triangle and Crescent (Chondritic Sound) – Ever since I saw Greh Holger perform (at a show I went to just to see William Fowler Collins) I’ve been intrigued by his musical output as Hive Mind. There’s a lot of formless noise to sift through in his oeuvre, but on this year’s Beneath Triangle And Crescent there’s some attention paid to structure, which makes it one of the most enjoyable Hive Mind listening experiences I’ve had yet.
• Sebadoh – Defend Yourself (Joyful Noise Recordings) – It feels WEIRD to say “I like the new Sebadoh”. Because when did The Sebadoh come out, 15 years ago? I was still in high school at the time! Oh my God. I’m old!
• Pelican – Forever Becoming (Southern Lord) – Honestly, I forgot Pelican still existed until a regular customer of mine (and metal head) asked me if we’d received any copies of the new Pelican record from our Southern Lord pals. Their last album came out…what? Three or four or five years ago? And by then the best review I could muster would probably be “the drums don’t totally suck.” Because let’s face it, the drums are what have long kept Pelican from being an awesome band. It’s what keeps them — in my mind — a middle of the road post-rock band. At least on this album, they sound heavier and the drums are less offensive. “The Tundra” in particular is a standout composition on an album of solid tunes.
• Eluvium – Nightmare Ending (Temporary Residence Limited) – It feels really good to be happy about Eluvium again. It’s been about six years since I’ve invested myself enough to give a Matthew Cooper record repeat listens. With Nightmare Ending, all memory of post-Copia Eluvium is forgotten, and I can get back to blissing out and letting this delightfully lengthy (80+ minutes!) effort wash over me. It’s also gotten the thumbs up from at least ONE of my roommates, which is more than most albums that will appear on my Top 100 List can boast. That alone is worth an honorable mention.
• Yellow Eyes – Hammer Of Night (Sibir) – Another Ian recommendation. You’ll see plenty of those on the Top 100 once it’s published Friday. I feel like four of the five days we converse via Gchat will feature at least one new music recommendation. Usually it’s him telling me about a metal band I’ve never heard of, and rarely I’ll attempt to hip him to something weird I recently discovered. He’s almost always right on the money with his picks, and Yellow Eyes took a while to get into but once I did I found I really liked it. There’s melody, the vocals are bearable (for me, I have standards!) and there’s that element of psych/shoegaze I can latch onto. There’s even a bit of that acoustic, folksy stuff you’ll find on records by Panopticon or Agalloch. If their next one as good as this one, I could see it not just cracking my Top 100, but making an impressive leap high up the list.
• Carcass – Surgical Steel (Nuclear Blast) – And this is the part of the list where all my metal-loving friends perk up and wonder, “If Carcass didn’t even make the Top 100, what the fuck did make the cut?” And the answer, of course, is “other stuff.” Maybe because I never got into the group until this came recommended to me a couple months ago. I wasn’t hip to the group before then, so I have no prior connection to their initial run from 1988-1995. But I like this! I especially like the um…collegiate (?) lyrics, which to my ears are entirely unique to the metal world as I know it. I mean… “Indulging in sarcocysts / Epicurean pericarditis / Cariosus tender and lean / After all you are what you eat.” No kidding.
Mt. Eerie – Pre-Human Ideas – (P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.) – He might never again effect me the same way he did with The Glow, Pt. 2 and Mount Eerie, but that doesn’t mean we can cease paying attention to Phil Elverum’s recorded output. If anything, his ability to craft innovative albums warrants my paying attention to each successive release. Much like the aforementioned eponymous album (even though it was technically credited to The Microphones), the highlights here are the droning organ pieces that begin (6 minutes) and end (2 minutes) the record. As for the rest of it, I can appreciate the idea but the execution just isn’t there enough for me to include it in the top 100.
• The Melvins – Tres Cabrones (Ipecac) – It’s hard not to rank the Melvins on one of my Year-End list because I love them so much, but I just wasn’t feeling this one compared to all the other great records that were released this year. [Listen to “City Dump” [MP3]]
