It was an embarrassment of riches for music lovers in 2013. I've never had a harder time settling on a top 10 list of albums. And you can forget about a top 10 songs list. I added more than 4,000 new tracks to my library this year, and that's really only a fraction of all the great music I heard in 2013.
I know Bob Boilen meticulously star-rates every song he hears then compiles a list of the albums with the most five-star tracks. NPR Music's Lars Gotrich makes his top 10 list by methodically writing the titles of his favorite albums on strips of paper and rearranges them on a table top. I usually just go with the ones I'm still listening to the most at the end of the year or the ones I obsessed about the most. I found it impossible (wonderfully impossible) to rate any of my favorites against one another this year. So here are 10 of the ones I simply found myself returning to again and again in 2013. In my mind they're all number one records.
Apologies to these other number one records I didn't include: Juana Molina's Wed 21, Ty Segall's Sleeper, My Bloody Valentine's m b v, James Blake's Overgrown, Foxygen's We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace And Magic, Jetlag by Milosh, Rhye's Woman, Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires Of The City, Lily And Madeleine, FKA Twigs, Jucifer, The Knife, and about 100 other memorable albums I'll still be listening to years from now.
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