Top 50 Albums Of 2013: End-Of-The-Year List of Rainbows and Sunshine

Because I had to find a way to fit in a Pentatonix reference.

Over the past twelve months, I finished high school, questioned (and then came back around to) my faith, wrote a lot of angsty teen poetry, took too many selfies, and met a lot of great people. That aside, I also lost a good deal of my hearing listening to all of the fabulous music that came out in 2013. To put it this way: the albums on this list alone run for a combined length of 36 hours, give or take a few minutes. I've listened to most of them a good three or four times, and some of the ones near the top of this list I've heard upwards of ten times. For the sake of convenience, let's assume I listened to each of these about five times, making for a total listening time of 180 hours for only the 50 albums below. Then consider that this isn't even a third of the music I've heard this year when you count all of the other albums, EPs, and singles from 2013. I would estimate I spent about 600 hours (or 25 days) listening to music this year, which is 6.85% of the entire year--an even larger proportion when you exclude the time I spent asleep. It's no surprise that when I look back on 2013, music will be an enormous part of my memories.

But even when I'm old and deaf in one ear, I won't regret a moment of the time I spent here: MuzikDizcovery has become a home for me, not just for the fantastic community of staff members but for every single one of you who read, listen and (as our site's name suggests) discover. You make this one of the best places for a music lover to be.

Clicking on an album title will take you to an album stream or, failing that, a stream of a single. Onwards!

Album Review: The Boxer Rebellion - Promises

Album Rating: A-

Promises? The word itself is tainted. Just think of every New Year’s Day you’ve ever had and count the number of resolutions that remain unbroken on one hand. It’s a silly, impractical word of flighty gravity, a weapon wielded by wily kids and desperate, deluded lovers. So when you wait until your fourth album in fourteen years to make one of these, the cards are stacked against you. Yet here we are, in 2013, with English indie-rock band The Boxer Rebellion’s latest: Promises.

Oddly enough, though, the band doesn’t fight the connotations of that cursed title. If anything, it embraces them, blurring the lines between the murky emotional tones of its previous work and a previously unseen sunny side—showing that world-weariness and optimism aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive philosophies. The blue skies on the cover need no words to embellish their significance: Promises is The Boxer Rebellion at its brightest, and paradoxically, that attribute also makes it the band’s most mature statement to date.