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Guest List: Dr. David Rando's Top Ten of 2013

10. Arcade Fire - Reflektor

James Murphy set loose the danceable version of Arcade Fire that the band hardly knew it was dying to become since 2004’s Funeral. If only a good editor had also encouraged indie rock’s favorite canny but self-righteous kids to throw away some of their throwaways, Arcade Fire could have had a nearly flawless 38-minute album. Instead, Reflektor is bloated at 86 minutes, but that better album comprised of the album’s best tracks (“Reflektor,” “We Exist,” “Here Comes the Night Time,” “Joan of Arc,” “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus),” and “Afterlife”) takes the intense drama of adolescence that Funeral embodied so well and forces it to stop moping around the house and shake a leg for a change.

(Hey, you know, that debut album from Savages was about 38 minutes long and all of it was pretty solid. Maybe #10 should have been Silence Yourself…)

9. Bill Orcutt - A History of Every One

Experimental guitarist Bill Orcutt is up to his old mischief again, this time with a covers album that dismantles and reduces mediocre songs like “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” into truly dreadful songs, and in doing so may even partially redeem them.

8. The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

There was no way for The Knife to follow up 2006’s synthpop masterpiece, Silent Shout, on that album’s own terms, but the rewards of Shaking the Habitual come from the extent to which it does shake some of the habits of Silent Shout. It can do what Silent Shout could not, for instance, to crown a song so full of fire as “Full of Fire” with one so patiently and creepily perfect as “A Cherry on Top,” which consolidates what The Knife gained from its 2010 experimental opera about Charles Darwin’s Galapagos Islands voyage, Tomorrow, In a Year, and returns from that remote location with new ambitions and renewed enthusiasm to and for pop.

7. Melt Banana - Fetch

A string of noise confections like a dainty row of decorated mini cupcakes to be smushed, one by one and icing first, into the ears.

6. Oneohtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven 

Vaporwave begins from the premise that consumer capitalism levels all sounds until they are all somehow strangely exchangeable. Or perhaps it is better to say: until they are precisely exchangeable. R Plus Seven is best understood as a record “about” rather than “of” sounds, composed as it is with sounds that are so generic—the title suggests that they can be replaced with other sounds as easily as nouns are substituted in the famous Oulipo poetic function of “N + 7”—that it becomes a serious challenge to pay attention to them. This will be irritating to some, but Daniel Lopatin’s considerable skill and intelligence in weaving such sounds into meditative relation will dispose others more cheerfully to play his high-concept game.\

5. Alan Licht - Four Years Older

This album consists of two solo guitar performances of the same composition, the first from 2012 and the second from 2008. But what is the composition called and where is it located? As the track titles indicate, the pieces can only be understood relative to one another: “Four Years Later” and “Four Years Earlier.” Neither can stand as the definitive piece to the other. The album meditates in this way on where and how a musical composition exists as it changes over time. More broadly it hints that this opaque existence has something to do with human aging (“Four Years Older”), even though music and people necessarily stand in different relation to time. It’s also a scorching piece for electric guitar.

4. Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Singa - Open the Crown

The shamanic Arrington de Dionyso is singing some songs in English again, instead of exclusively in self-taught Indonesian. And that’s a good thing, too, because, statistically speaking, at least some of the demons and gods of creativity he conjures must be strict Anglophones.

3. Death Grips - Government Plates

This is almost an all-instrumental Death Grips album, which is initially surprising because MC Ride’s brutal vocals and nightmarish visions have been so central to Death Grips in the past. Now MC Ride has his brutality and his visions still, but this time around they are used to support a more expressive, always intriguing, and often intoxicating range of sounds that are harsh and alarming and sometimes, dare I say, pretty.

2. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

This is an album for people who love digital music about robots who love analog music to the very extent and even beyond the extent that they can love anything. I lost track of my pronoun. Does “they” refer to the robots or the humans? Abort, retry, fail? Play on repeat?

1. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile

On this truly breathtaking album, Matana Roberts uses her grandmother’s quilt as the figurative space to tell a family and a racial history of Mississippi—with special attention to the Freedom Summer of 1964—as well as to sew together a stunning variety of jazz and other musical forms, blues, praise song, and opera among them. Mississippi Moonchile was recorded in late 2012, but when we hear Matana Roberts repeat the phrase, “His name was Reverend John Roberts,” referring to her great grandfather, it is impossible not to think of Chief Justice John Roberts, who in 2013 wrote the majority opinion that dissolved a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mantana Roberts probably couldn’t have predicted that coincidence, but, as Seth Colter Walls has noted, her album seems uncannily to speak back to 2013, which, as many have commented, was a potentially catastrophic year for black rights. 

Accordingly, this historically illuminating piece of personal and political art is not only as beautiful, troubling, and moving as it would be in any year, but also all of these things so crucially right now. With this second installment, it becomes obvious that Roberts’s experiential history project, Coin Coin, projected to total 12 parts, is smarter, more creative, more affecting, and, in spite or perhaps because of its experimental difficulty, more rewarding by bounds than any other current work in (or of) progress.

David Rando is an associate professor of English at Trinity University.