Deafheaven: Provided 2013's most highly-rated album, and the 4th top-rated album in our all-time chart
The ADM Top 10 2013
The most acclaimed albums of the year: you can't argue with mathematics
Now everyone's had their say with the Best Albums of 2013
roundups, it's time to take stock of the cold hard facts of what
really were the most critically-acclaimed albums over the past 12
months.
The AnyDecentMusic top 10 of 2013 is the most reliable guide to
what earned the most extensive overall praise from reviewers. It's
the widest survey of worldwide critical opinion around, and you
can't argue with mathematics.
We have excluded from the rankings any albums with fewer than 10
reviews from our list of 50 sources from the UK, US, Canada,
Australia and Ireland, and the formula we apply to arrive at the
ADM rating takes the number of reviews into account.
NB: The ratings in our database are to two decimal places although
we display them to one decimal place. So, for example, Patty
Griffin's's album has achieved a higher rating than Future Of The
Left, which also appears with an 8.5 rating.
Below, we give our analysis of what it all means.
8.8
Deafheaven
Sunbather
Sunbather is a future classic, no matter where you pigeonhole
it, and that's the mark of a true sonic masterpiece - Beats Per
Minute
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8.7
My Bloody Valentine
m b v
m b v leaves all other post-rock experimentalists looking like
trivial dilettantes. If jet engines could sing, these would be
their hymns - Independent on Sunday
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8.5
Patty Griffin
American Kid
Seals Griffin's reputation as a remarkable artist in the roots
tradition - Irish Times
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8.5
Future Of The Left
How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident
Marries prickly melody with glossy discord, eclipsing not only
its predecessors but its entire genre - The Fly
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8.4
Nils Frahm
Spaces
A work of gentle genius, and one of the year's best albums - The
Quietus
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8.3
Laura Marling
Once I Was An Eagle
Once I Was an Eagle is close to a masterpiece, a heavenly
composition with just enough hell to keep things from feeling too
familiar - Slant
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8.3
John Grant
Pale Green Ghosts
A genuinely remarkable album: self-obsessed but completely
compelling, profoundly discomforting but beautiful - The
Guardian
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8.3
Danny Brown
Old
It's an entire universe in an album: Brown's past and present in
the lyrics, the past and present of hip-hop in the music - Faster
Louder
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8.2
Kanye West
Yeezus
Yeezus feels very proto- something, the roots of some aesthetic
that has yet to be minted. It's revolutionary at its most urgent -
Consequence of Sound
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8.2
Julia Holter
Loud City Song
One of the most ambitious, unusual, and engaging albums of the
year - Spin
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And the next 10
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires Of The
City
El-P and Killer Mike - Run The Jewels
The National - Trouble Will Find Me
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Push the Sky
Away
Chance The Rapper - Acid Rap
Burial - Rival Dealer
William Tyler - Impossible Truth
Jason Isbell - Southeastern
David Bowie - The Next Day
Tim Hecker - Virgins
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In the handful of years since we have been compiling both the
ADM albums of the year and the Poll of Polls, which amalgamates our
sources' end-of-year lists, there has never been a greater contrast
between the two.
Only two of the 2013 ADM top 10 albums listed above figured in the
poll of polls top 10 - and one of these, Kanye West's Yeezus, is
only there after two higher-rated albums were excluded (Matthew
E.White's Big Inner was released in 2012 in the US and Jenny Hval's
Innocence is Kinky didn't receive sufficient reviews).
The other, My Bloody Valentine's comeback LP, was one of the event
albums of the year, (and probably of the last two decades in
many people's eyes) and was always going to be hugely prominent in
any year-end reckoning.
However what to make of our most highly-rated album of 2013, and
our all-time chart No.4 no less, Deafheaven's Sunbather, struggling
to reach a lowly 27 in the year-end polls?
Or the albums at No.3, No.4, and No.5 failing to feature ANYWHERE
in the top 50 in the year-end lists?
From the other perspective, how is it that the albums from David
Bowie, Arctic Monkeys, The National, and Daft Punk could achieve
respectable but hardly stunning ratings on their release and then
go on to feature so strongly in the best albums roundup?
We are, of course, comparing the results of two different
processes: there is an inevitable degree of compromise in year-end
roundups which favours those wider-appeal albums which feature in a
lot of individuals' lists over those albums which feature very
highly in fewer lists, while assessments at the time of release
tend to be given by reviewers who are specialists in that album's
genre and thus more likely to give a favourable rating.
However that is the case every year, and that hasn't stopped the
more experimental likes of Grimes, Tune-Yards, Fuck Buttons,
Japandroids, Sleigh Bells, Big Boi, St Vincent, Wild Beasts and
others in previous years from featuring in both the ADM chart and
the end-of-year poll of polls.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that the ADM albums of 2013
comprises releases which have attracted fervent support from those
inclined towards that form of music while the poll of polls
listings exclude many releases which could be deemed divisive.
Black metal screaming (Deafheaven), acerbic hardcore alt.rock
(Future of The Left), field recordings and incidental noise (Nils
Frahm), visceral trap-rap (Danny Brown), experimental "new weird
america" (Julia Holter) . . . all sit happily in exalted positions
in the ADM rankings but are replaced in the poll of polls by
Vampire Weekend, Daft Punk, David Bowie, Disclosure et al.
Does one list have more merit than the other? As with most issues
regarding music, that's an entirely subjective debate.