Nothing Was the Same is far from a perfect album, but a flawed Drake record with moments of brilliance is still far better than so much else on offer, and you can’t fault his ambition. The album’s “unheimlich disruptiveness” (as Maya Kalev pinpointed in her review ) was underlined by the accompanying live shows, which maddened some fans but enthralled others as the duo toyed with the concept of ‘authentic’ performance, hiding among their troupe of glitter-faced dancers and miming with fantastical instruments apparently nicked from the Star Wars cantina band. ‘Full Of Fire’ is probably the best thing they’ve ever done, bristling with deranged voices (“liberals giving me a nerve itch”) and sinister technoid shapes that subdivide and mutate like a monstrous sarcoma. No longer attempting to hide their radicalism inside a Trojan horse of gleaming electro-pop, on this record The Knife express their ideas not just through their warped voices – which again feel their way inside an ambiguous third gender – but in the sounds themselves. The false binaries of electronic and acoustic, ‘real’ and ‘fake’, are battered down to create an unsettling, alien environment that’s primitive and futuristic at once. With its catapult aimed at the three-horned goliath of patriarchy, capitalism and looming environmental disaster, Shaking The Habitual is the most explicitly political album yet from Stockholm siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer. And at the end of the day, surely we can all get behind Mike Will executive producing a number one album on the Billboard 100. Snip those, though, and you’re left with one of pop’s best recent break-up albums. Bangerz isn’t without its face-palm moments: the album’s rides through the country with Nelly (on ‘4×4’), on a dubstep carousel with French Montana (‘FU’) and through the barely-beating heart of monotony itself with rap game Nyquil Big Sean (‘Love Money Party’) should all have been left on the cutting room floor. The artist formerly known as Hannah Montana spent most of 2013 successfully seeking attention from the tabloids and Twitter, but in amongst the endless coverage of the outfits, the award shows and the appropriation, few picked up on the fact that the album all of this was promoting was really good. Sure, you think you’re better than Bangerz, but in a year where few albums from pop music’s big names lived up to potential (step forward Gaga, Britney and Jay-Z), Miley Cyrus undoubtedly ruled the roost. Use your keyboard’s arrow keys or hit the prev / next arrows on your screen to turn pages (page 1/52)
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Grab your cans, crack open a tin, still your sense of outrage, and enjoy. We’ll be counting down the albums of 2013 in blocks of ten over the next five days, finishing up with the Top Ten on Friday. For the first time, we’ve also elected to include our favourite EPs too – rather than agonising over the cut-off point between long-form and short-form, we’ve decided simply to prioritise those collections that moved us the most. More so than any previous FACT list, this year’s Top 50 is a patchwork – a mix of official LP releases, Bandcamp freebies, cassettes, DatPiff drops and bootlegs. It doesn’t matter if it’s lengthy or snappy, physical or invisible – if it’s a great record, it’s in it. We’ve elected to take the other road, allowing different formats to sit happily alongside one other. Mindful of not being Cnuts, we’ve no intention of holding back the tide.įaced with navigating this increasingly complicated landscape, plenty of blogs have gone down the Grammys route of hyper-specification – Best Hip-Hop Albums That Aren’t Mixtapes Best Albums Under 15 Minutes That Aren’t Singles Best Albums With A 16×16 Floor Tom Best Albums That Didn’t Feature Nile Rodgers. To quarantine mixtape releases, say, away from our albums list might have made sense a few years ago now, it seems blockheaded and perverse.
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Is a mini-album a full-length or an extended single? Should a clutch of Soundcloud demos be judged alongside a 3xLP pack? Are leaks off-limits – and, if so, why? In a year full of marketing campaign razzmatazz and big bruisers dropping surprise albums, it’s telling – and heartening – that much of the best music arrived through rogue channels. In 2013, album lists aren’t just best-to-worst rundowns – they’re ways of demarcating what an “album” is (or isn’t) in the first place. Skip to: #50 / #40 / #30 / #20 / #10 or view the selection as a single page text list – without audio, images, or write-ups – here.