Year in Music: 2013 in 10 Songs

It seems that a lot of the music I listened to this past year, even the new stuff, sounded like older stuff. I guess there were a few reasons for that. For one, the older I get, and the more music I've heard, the more I hear similarities and spot (or imagine) influences. Also, the older I get, the more the element of nostalgia creeps in to my appreciation of music (as with everything else). As a Gen-X'er who chuckled at boomers reliving their glory days at Eagles reunion tours and the like, it's particularly painful to see the heroes of my youth re-form and go out on tour and realize that I'm now in that demographic myself. No matter how much one tries to be open-minded, it's hard to shake the feeling that the music of one's youth was really the best kind of music. Last, but perhaps not least, it seems like there are more quality bands these days trying to recreate older styles.

Since I deliberately selected only live clips for this list, I also ended up focusing mainly on bands that play "real" instruments, which limited me to more traditional styles. Don't get me wrong, I listened to a lot of music played on "unreal" instruments this year - like the new M.I.A. album, which I thought was a return to form after the patchy Maya - but I couldn't find a decent live clip of any of those songs. (There was one Conan O'Brien clip with decent sound and picture quality, but perhaps the less said about that the better.)

So anyway up first we have Ghost, who if I were to assign them to a phase of my youth, would probably fit best with my days at Christian schools and youth groups, where I was duly instructed about the perils of secular music and heard cautionary tales of records that when played backwards were found to contain praises to Satan, no less. Well, Ghost don't even bother backward-masking their allegiances to the Evil One, though they do have a thing for masks, as you can see in the clip. In this song, they seem to be daring their secular listeners to take them for a joke. The secular world and its materialistic concerns, they seem to suggest, are a Satanic ruse to delude folks from understanding the true stakes of the spiritual warfare being fought all around them. It's almost a Christian message, though of course, they are coming at it from the opposite perspective.

Up next, we have that preppy band that everyone loves to hate, Vampire Weekend. I thought their new album, if not quite as consistent as the debut, was also a return to form, and chock full of snappy melodies and witticisms, such as on this track, and they also managed the neat trick of actually looking like they were enjoying themselves on SNL.

Next up, we have Laura Marling, who's probably rather sick of reading about how talented she is. Personally, I'd rather be untalented and with an undeniable classic record under my belt than to be extremely talented and always have people measuring my very respectable work against the vast untapped potential they see in me, but I guess things could be worse. She really is talented though. I kind of miss the fuller arrangements of her previous record at times, but this has lots of great stuff on it. Recommended to fans of Sandy Denny, Judee Sill, and lots of other awesome '70s singer-songwriters.

Next up, and no slouches in the nostalgia sweepstakes themselves, we have HAIM. Not that they themselves are nostalgic for the music of the '80s. How could they be? They weren't even born yet when this kind of sound was popular. But before you write them off as a retread, keep in mind a couple of things: (1) Popular music in the '80s was often quite good (except when it sucked) and (2) HAIM distill a surprisingly large percentage of what didn’t suck about the '80s into their music - not least the fact that that may have been the last decade when rock could effortlessly cross the borders of pop and dance without seeming stiff or calculating about it (nowadays it seems like only country does that).

Anyway, onto our next band, Fuzz. Fuzz play a timeless sort of garage-psych. Timeless because it's raw and uncomplicated and probably hasn't changed much since the '60s period brilliantly documented on the Nuggets box set. I imagine they use different pedals nowadays, but who knows. Anyway, this stuff rocks and if you like stuff that rocks you will probably like it.

Next up is Waxahatchee, which is also kind of a singer-songwriter thing, but more in a '90s indie-rock, Liz Phair-ish type vein. This is very much the sort of thing I'd have been listening to on headphones alone in my dorm room at 1 AM on a Friday night in that decade, because I was kind of a loser back then, but listening to music like this made it seem kinda okay.

Up next, we have Kadavar, also no slouches in the nostalgia sweepstakes. These guys traffic in unreconstructed hard rock that hearkens back to the days when dinosaurs like Sabbath, Zeppelin and Hawkind roamed the earth. Slightly before my time, I guess. This was the kind of music that the cool high school kids were blaring from their Camaros as they peeled out of the 7-Eleven parking lot as I was pedaling by on my bike.

I feel like I probably enjoy Camera Obscura more than the average person, but I'm okay with that. Their singer has one of the most coolly evocative voices of any band going, and I think I may have a crush on her, though a purely Platonic one of course. I’ve been informed that Camera Obscura sound like their fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian, but I wouldn’t know about that because I've never been able to listen to Belle and Sebastian for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and as soon as I stop, I promptly forget what they sounded like. It's weird how two bands can sound alike, and yet one of them speaks to me and the other doesn't. Music is weird like that.

Anyway, next up is another band that I think I like more than the average person, judging by the fact they are not super world famous, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. It's hard to think of an older band that sounds like Thao and The Get Down Stay Down. I want to say Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians. I guess I just haven't heard enough "alternative folk" - if Wikipedia is correct and that is truly the style of music that they play. I would have said that they make a sort of off-kilter (hate that word), angular (even worse), catchy (another overused word), kind of jazzy rock. But not jazzy rock like, say, Steely Dan, whom they don’t sound like at all.

And finally, themselves no slouches in the nostalgia sweepstakes, we have Parquet Courts (which I guess is a basketball reference?). These guys also sound very '90s indie rock to me, with little bits of Pavement and Sonic Youth especially in their sound. Since those were at one time probably two of my top 4 or 5 favorite bands, it should be no wonder I like these guys as well, except that I usually hate bands that sound like Pavement and Sonic Youth. So why do I like this? Who knows, probably dead brain cells.

10. Ghost - Secular Haze