Spin's 50 Best Albums of 2013

Spin's 50 Best Albums of 2013

Original Source →

50.

September 24, 2013
Critic Score
77
29 reviews

A steely affair that finds Drake and longtime producer Noah "40" Shebib pulling their sound and worldview further inward to increasingly murky results.

49.

June 4, 2013
Critic Score
83
49 reviews

This is tension, then more tension, then even more tension on the chorus until your subconscious has been thoroughly scrambled; only then does release come, usually in the form of a gnarled guitar solo.

48.

September 10, 2013
Critic Score
72
16 reviews

At no other time in her career has Gordon been so forceful, so in her own power. 

47.

September 3, 2013
Critic Score
81
29 reviews

Her voice is a bear hug in the literal sense; succumbing to it is like being carjacked by Patsy Cline.

46.

October 8, 2013
Critic Score
78
24 reviews

Kanye and all the production cosigns he can bring to this thing make this record too ambitious to fail; Pusha T, forever an outlier even when he had clubby crack-rap hits, has finally made a solo project that isn't totally beneath him, even if parts of it still are.

45.

August 20, 2013
Critic Score
79
23 reviews

Now, less shy about their place in the world and shot through with adult resignation, the band's anthems play as a sort of mortality blues. But with I Hate Music, Superchunk prove that we were weren't wrong to believe.

44.

William Tyler - Impossible Truth
March 19, 2013
Critic Score
81
15 reviews

Although he's stretching traditional, time-tested folk templates culled from around the world and back again, Tyler's vision is both distinctly American and deeply modern. 

43.

November 13, 2013
Critic Score
76
17 reviews
An album so urgent and pressing that it often foregoes language for feeling, explanations for executions.

42.

June 17, 2013
Critic Score
81
22 reviews

41.

April 30, 2013
Critic Score
80
20 reviews

Like most free jazz, it's music of the moment, a work of granular epiphanies that accrete, finally, into a magnificent whole.

40.

September 17, 2013
Critic Score
79
30 reviews

Dream River flows from one track to the next, with a similarity of tempo that makes it play like eight movements of one 40-minute song. But a few moments stand out.

39.

February 3, 2013
Critic Score
87
42 reviews

m b v seems like both the "logical next step" after Loveless (as if bands were subject to teleological pressures) and utterly contemporary.

38.

September 10, 2013
Critic Score
83
41 reviews

It is possible to love The Electric Lady, even if deep listening may be required to seal the deal. She certainly works hard for our devotion.

37.

October 29, 2013
Critic Score
77
49 reviews

Reflektor is long and weird and indulgent and deeply committed. It has three to five genuinely great songs; it also wanders off into the filler hinterlands for 20 minutes or so (out of 70). 

36.

October 1, 2013
Critic Score
79
7 reviews

34.

March 25, 2013
Critic Score
81
15 reviews

Restraint is the order of the day: While their debut had enough meatballs-to-the-wall ragers to fill a fjord, this one highlights the group's songwriting skills. 

33.

May 27, 2013
Critic Score
86
40 reviews

Marling has always trafficked in understated elegance, but she's firmly in attack mode here. Mostly against herself.

32.

March 19, 2013
Critic Score
75
38 reviews

Much has been made of the album's length, but Timberlake and Timbaland prove to have more than enough ingenuity to make it worth our while.

31.

August 20, 2013
Critic Score
80
33 reviews

Enamored with language itself, Doris is a celebration of syntax, a yoga pose pushing the limits of the MC's flexibility

30.

September 10, 2013
Critic Score
64
11 reviews

B.O.A.T.S II ups the production values like a true sequel should. Whereas his last album felt at times like a mixtape in expensive packaging, the beats here are full and gleaming with the fruits of success

29.

April 29, 2013
Critic Score
69
15 reviews

At its best, Home is a sumptuous, thrilling experience on a purely sonic level. There are absolutely zero boring moments here, and the details are often transcendent

28.

November 5, 2013
Critic Score
69
30 reviews

This, the "sequel" (or whatever) to his landmark 2000 LP, is little more than a rapsploitation vehicle where practically every line is gratuitous, beyond ridiculous, an effortless and almost empty display of showboating, a carnival trick.

27.

June 13, 2013
Critic Score
77
2 reviews
A new wave of worker-bee, trap-rap weirdos has arrived.

26.

March 5, 2013
Critic Score
77
23 reviews

Not only does this come across as a feminist statement, but it also plays like a declaration of Sapphic love: an unlikely achievement from two dudes expressing hetero desire.

25.

February 25, 2013
Critic Score
77
24 reviews

Mostly, it's the wilting pedal steel, warm analog tubes, and lush heartbreak flourishes of "When I'm Gone" that distinguish Rose from the merchants of new country's jingles.

24.

DJ Rashad - I Don't Give a Fuck
July 22, 2013
Critic Score
74
6 reviews

23.

October 1, 2013
Critic Score
80
29 reviews

Nothing lingers long on Seven, but you can hear just how quickly OPN gobbles up EDM's bass frequencies, the Max-DSP moves of Fennesz, Ryuichi Sakamoto's synthetic silkiness, even the frenetic arpeggios of Glassworks and sampler chops of footwork.

22.

June 11, 2013
Critic Score
89
23 reviews

Sunbather comes laced with post-rock grace and a pop-like accessibility. Nor are those elements sequestered from the black-metal bombardment: They are part of it, or, depending upon your perspective, it is part of them. 

21.

June 26, 2013
Critic Score
84
29 reviews

This quick, free joint project is comparatively frizzy, and doesn't leave a bruising stain of forced mind expansion -- just a pleasant memory of good times had by reclaiming “jewels” from the corporate overlords of mainstream rap

20.

March 5, 2013
Critic Score
76
26 reviews

The recordings are dry and vérité, which they have to be to help Crutchfield make her point: Namely, that these are honest songs about real people being hammered out in the basements and garages of unromantic places.

19.

May 21, 2013
Critic Score
83
50 reviews

If Daft Punk's Random Access Memories sounds like a new Broadway musical, that's because it might as well be.

18.

May 7, 2013
Critic Score
82
24 reviews
Over ten songs detailing a young man's despair and self-doubt, he delivers a performance that's both deeply confident and convincingly vulnerable, replete with stark, piano-based meditations and fuzz-pedal-abetted fury.

17.

March 19, 2013
Critic Score
84
10 reviews
She’s got a superb knack for melodies, even if it means swiping them from Radiohead (“I Miss You” is a blatant “Creep” rip, probably another country first) and maybe Jimmy Eat World (“Silver Lining”). “Dandelion” is so gorgeous that anything other than teenage notebook poetry would wreck its mood.

16.

October 22, 2013
Critic Score
76
26 reviews

15.

September 3, 2013
Critic Score
76
38 reviews

Through his own twisted K-hole, #ARTPOP icon Reznor is once again one of the most vital artists working today, coming back haunted, breaking the habitual. 

14.

April 15, 2013
Critic Score
84
18 reviews

Ultimately, what makes Excavation such an awesome and absorbing listen is precisely its indifference to the listener. There are no half-measures, no fallbacks, no guideposts.

13.

January 29, 2013
Critic Score
78
30 reviews

Bright, busy, and unapologetically direct, Heartthrob nonetheless makes everything Tegan and Sara did before seem perversely obscure.

12.

October 8, 2013
Critic Score
84
29 reviews

Old is XXX without that fun first half. It isn't traditionally enjoyable, and it isn't supposed to be. But for Danny Brown, the pill-popping, pussy-eating squawk-box, it's the most daring record he could've made.

11.

November 5, 2013
Critic Score
77
44 reviews

Like its creator, Matangi is flawed, frustrating, and occasionally confusing, but it's also intermittently brilliant and completely unique.

10.

April 9, 2013
Critic Score
81
39 reviews

Wakin on a Pretty Daze, Vile's fifth album, is the product of both thought and effort. That it feels like it took neither thought nor effort is a product of talent.

9.

April 8, 2013
Critic Score
80
44 reviews

They've never sounded more in tune with the materiality of sound or the sonorousness of the physical world.

8.

July 13, 2013
Critic Score
81
8 reviews

The Night's Gambit is the best example yet of Ka's take-it-or-leave-it rap-auteurist style. Content-wise, it's hindsight-fraught, regret-filled hip-hop from a man, now in his early forties, who better understands his past transgressions now, even if he doesn't feel any better about them.

7.

June 11, 2013
Critic Score
81
44 reviews

It still sounds unmistakably like Boards of Canada, even if their telltale tropes are now scattered across Harvest rather than made to define each of its 17 tracks.

6.

October 14, 2013
Critic Score
83
29 reviews

It convulses with a sense of limitless possibility; it rolls up everything Hecker has done before this and, as is his wont, pulverizes it into a fine mash. What's new is the thing he molds from the dampened ashes.

5.

June 3, 2013
Critic Score
76
36 reviews

Fortunately, Settle doesn't settle; each new track finds them testing their own formulas. 

4.

September 27, 2013
Critic Score
76
36 reviews

Freakily poised but never cloying, Days Are Gone is an album that will fade blissfully into your local Urban Outfitters/vintage shop/American gathering, where, like some kind of mollifying drug, people exposed to it will be happier without either knowing or caring why.

3.

May 14, 2013
Critic Score
81
45 reviews

Like art, Vampires is dense; like pop, it seems to float in effortlessly from some place you're sure you've been, but by some trick of déjà vu eludes your conscious brain.

2.

April 30, 2013
Critic Score
82
18 reviews

At just 19, aspiring to compete with such ambitious rap visionaries, and mostly succeeding, is an impressive feat.

1.

June 18, 2013
Critic Score
83
46 reviews

Yeezus ranks as more than a glorified placeholder in West's catalogue, but one can't help feeling that parenthood will compel his muse to even more Olympian levels of bombast and grandiosity.

Original Source: http://www.spin.com/articles/best-albums-2013/
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