Album Of The Year 2013 according to....

Hey there gang! In the following days and weeks I'll publish two to three picks for 2013's best album according to people that Halifax Collect can jive with. These people are musicians, writers, film makers, fans, philanthropists and what have you. All I know is, they have good taste.
These segments will not be comprehensive short or long lists from various folks packed together in one post, rather they'll come before you in increments. Furthermore, this is not Halifax Collect's year end anything not a proclamation of what are the best albums of the year according to Halifax Collect.
With that out of the way, let us agree or disagree. Here are some worthy picks by great people of music.

ALTAR OF PLAGUES - Teethed Glory & Injury

The album of the year is Ireland's Altar Of Plague's third long player, Teethed Glory & Injury [Candlelight / Profound Lore]. From start to finish this release is great, the vocals cold and grim, noisey electronics get mixed with more conventional instruments. This mix of sound works and the result is perfect. Teethed Glory & Injury is extreme, intense, powerful, dynamic and atmospheric.
My introduction to this album came via the music video for "God Alone" when it got previewed on Pitchfork. Both song and video captured me and peeked my interest. This was unconventional, pretty yet cold and disgusting at the same time. I wanted to hear more.
This summer passed it was announced the band had broken up, unfortunately. It's leader James Kelly will continue on and focus on his solo project WIFE.
- Guðný Lára

*** Guðný (twitter) co-directs the world best music festival Eistnaflug (site) and is a label manager  at Plastic Head (site).





ARCTIC MONKEYS - AM

I hardly listen to new stuff anymore. This year's best? Arctic Monkey's AM [Domino], because there's so many break up songs on it. It is the best. I'm too lazy checking out new releases but this on, AM, really gets to me, and I get it.
- Elli Bang

*** Elli;  a man of few words, but a man of many delicious non-genre specific beats currently and most recently for Ojba Rasta (facebook), previous to that Celestine and I Adapt.




MY BLOODY VALENTINE - m b v

2013 is the year that I started listening to music again after a few years of break. From 2009 to 2012, I was working in the music industry and stopped listening to music altogether. In part this stop was due to the fact that the job I held as CEO of gogoyoko (during a large part of that time) forced me to look at the crappy underbelly of the music industry and I stopped being able to hear anything but a string of marketing messages set to music. It was also because I was frightfully busy at my work and I find it almost impossible to listen to music and do anything else. Fortunately for me, 2013 has afforded me a considerable amount of time to listen and the listening has been constant since the start of the year.

That said, not much of what I've been listening to has been music released in 2013. There was a lot of stuff to catch up on and the later stages of my transition have come with a hankering for all things Rihanna, allowing me to indulge in pop in a way that I have not done since before I was 12 years old and I was introduced to Metallica by my surly, slightly younger cousin Andrew.

My favourite albums have almost always been recommendations from other people. Adrian Merrick introduced me to Polvo's Today Active Lifestyles and Shellac's At Action Park in 1995 with one cherished 90 minute cassette tape that is still sitting on my shelf. Brendan Ryan introduced me to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Isn't Anything in the summer of 1997. These albums were already several years old by that point and so they were detached from any kind of scene or time. Because of that they always seemed to be just be for me to listen to on my own. No one song has ever summed up the state of my mind better than "Lose My Breath" from Isn't Anything. Its layers of melancholia are painted so thick that the sadness distorts and abstracts into something beautiful.

Because My Bloody Valentine has never really existed in any particular time for me, 22 years didn't really feel like it was going by in between Loveless and m b v. Besides, I've been listening to the earlier albums pretty consistently ever since I heard them the first time (last time I listened to Loveless in its entirety was in March right before I went to see them play live in London). I don't know if they will make another album and, if they do, I probably won't be aware of the passage of time between this album and the next. m b v doesn't sound like anything else that was made this year or the last 22 years, for that matter. For some reason, that is important to me. So much rock music just sounds the same to me. The same riffs, the same sounds, the same pantomime of masculinity that feels like an old box of sweaty Pavement t-shirts I will never wear again. In that context, this album sounds impossibly fresh.

When the new album was announced in February this year, I bought it as quickly as I could online and downloaded the high-res files. Then I imported the whole thing into ProTools and listened to the album through my studio monitors. I believe I then wrote an epic status update about adding some reverb to the mix that was liked by the three friends of mine on Facebook who understood what the fuck I was talking about and also got the joke. I avoided reading reviews of the record and I avoided getting into discussions about the album, because listening to My Bloody Valentine has always been something that I've done alone. I've kept track of who has said they like the album and added a little star next to their face in my mind, but that's about as far as this album goes socially for me. I'll never put it on at a party. That is probably a lie.

This album is not perfect. Not in the way that Loveless is a perfect listen. Loveless is seamless. This album goes sometimes very awkwardly from one track to the next. The beginning is very much like Loveless, as if they were trying to ease us into listening to them again, although I can't imagine that they would actually do something so considerate on purpose, so I'm pretty sure that's bullshit. In any case, the later half of the album is better for me. My Bloody Valentine's greatest contribution to music is to take many difficult sounds and layer them into a beautiful whole, so something that might be really irritating on its own becomes relaxing, aggressive becomes soothing, masculine becomes feminine.

Any of the final three songs could represent the best of this record for me. "Wonder 2" probably stands out the most, especially after having seen the band play live in March this year. In that concert, there was a broad mix of material from m b v, Loveless, Isn't Anything and You Made Me Realise. They played almost everything from You Made Me Realise and the title track's 10 minute noise extension was absolutely the most beautiful piece of music I've ever heard played live. When they followed that with "Wonder 2," you could tell that they'd had more time to think about the older material. That 10 minutes of noise is only about 30 seconds long on the You Made Me Realise EP and, to be honest, I'd never really given the track a second thought until I heard it live. The difference with m b v is that the noise makes it onto the album. I would prefer to have a recording of the live version of "You Made Me Realise" that I heard in March, but for now I will settle for this record.

I doubt that m b v will ever catch up to Loveless and Isn't Anything, who have had 16 years to etch themselves onto my soul, but I was asked to write about one album that was released this year that I consider to be the best and for that, m b v takes the top prize.
- Alison McNeil

*** Alison (twitter) plays guitar and sings, thus making up for one third of the fantastic Kimono (site).

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