Best Of The Year 2013: First Half Update

Welcome to MuzikDizcovery's quarterly article on our favorite releases of the year to date. Each of our staff members has posted a list of our five favorite albums of the year to date, with a little blurb showing why we love each one so much. Every album released in 2013 that we have heard was eligible, even if the album has not been released to the public just yet. As always, there's a wide variety of music on these lists, and every release on here is worth checking out. Owel, The World Is A Beautiful Place, Kanye West, Captain, We're Sinking, Rare Monk, Justin Timberlake, Sigur Ros, The Knife, Tegan And Sara, Youth Lagoon, The Wonder Years and Lights and Motion all take prominent spots in multiple lists, and represent some of the best that 2013 has to offer. Check out of all of our lists below, and click on any links in the album names for our reviews.

Best Of The Year 2013: First Quarter Update

As we've done every three months since the beginning of 2011, we will again be doing quarterly updates in 2013. All of the staff here at MuzikDizcovery listed our top five albums that we've heard so far in 2013, and wrote up little blurbs about why we love these albums. We really hope you check out the albums on our lists, as I'm sure most of them are very dear to us. There's a very wide variety of music that you'll find on these lists, as groups such as Owel, Autre Ne Veut, Justin Timberlake, K Sera, The Story So Far, My Bloody Valentine, Youth Lagoon, Foals and Frightened Rabbit all have mentions from at least two of our staff members, so we guarantee that there will be at least one artist on here that you will end up loving. Check out all of our lists below.

Album Review: Youth Lagoon - Wondrous Bughouse

Album Rating: A

The début album of Youth Lagoon (aka Trevor Powers) was one which covered a surprisingly ambitious amount of ground, especially considering the juvenescence of the artist who produced it. The Year of Hibernation was ambient, atmospheric and experimental, and it showed Powers to be fiercely purposeful as well as a perfectionist. The guitar and piano which often underpinned his songs such as “Seventeen” demonstrated his eye for detail, as layer upon layer of intricacies comprised each song and were easy to miss if not for equally adept attention from the listener. His vocal delivery was delicate and ethereal if not effeminate, and it haunted the melodies as if from the past rather than coexisting with the songs in the present. What’s more, the progressive passages which were commonplace showcased his experimental side, as they spiralled unpredictably at every turn, and were as likely to begin a song as they were to see one out.

Sean's Top 10 Albums of 2011

10 | Giraffes? Giraffes! - Pink Magick

The demented and chaotic nature of Giraffes? Giraffes! third full length, Ping Magick, is accurately described in just about everything concerning the album except for the music. everything from the absurd track titles to the pretty pink and green explosion of an album cover captures everything that Pink Magick is all about. The band consists of nothing but a guitarist and a drummer, but the monstrosity of tracks such as "DRGNFKR" sounds like something that could not have been done by two musicians alone. Pick Magick is an extraordinary accomplishment for math rock and is easily one of the finest works to come out of this year.

My 2011 Alphabet

2011 was a solid year for music but it was a year without any identity. 2011 had no reoccurring themes (unless you are Ali and are a lot smarter than me,) it had no "defining moment," and it had no clear artist or song of the year. 2011 to me was more of a pillar of consistency across multiple genres. 2011 was a year that was so complicated that it cannot be defined with just a few paragraphs or links to a few songs. It has to be defined almost like an alphabet or a dictionary. So here is my 2011 dictionary*

*Songs without descriptions are simply good songs!*

Artist Spotlight: Youth Lagoon

I've never been to Boise, ID, but a handful of preconceived notions and a perfunctory google search yielding the headline of "Non-profit donates $10,000 toward Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline" have led me to believe that perhaps I'm not missing much. To my knowledge, the city of Boise is notorious as a place stuck between an archaic past and a bright future, with recent entrepreneurial generations putting their best foot forward in the attempt to tame the expansive Idaho landscape and to sprout an environmentally conscious city from the depths of Mother Nature's creative prowess. The money-minded city-slickers aren't the only ones leaving their mark on that staggering stretch of America, however. For as the townsfolk of the great Northwest get up and go about their quotidian affairs, something bigger than that yet subtle as a raindrop into the sea is coming to fruition beneath their very feet. Somewhere in a dark and damp Boise basement is Trevor Powers, the one-man force behind recently fabricated Youth Lagoon, endeavoring to bridge the daunting gap between past and present, to truly compromise his city's role as a naturalist's Eden and a playground for tycoons. With his debut LP under his new moniker, entitled The Year of Hibernation, Powers is doing just that. In listening to "Afternoon", a number built on synthesized instrumentation alongside the natural simplicity of whistle-based melodies, Powers has showcased his ability to create surreal, layered tracks that sound out with the poise of not just one man, but nature itself. Simple yet elegant, affecting but understated - The Year of Hibernation is a young man's compelling realization of his insignificance amongst nature and humankind, as well as his general, beautiful indifference toward that fact. I guess that means one more apathetic soul for Boise's suicide prevention team to keep an eye on.

Stream some Youth Lagoon tracks over at Pitchfork, or visit their Facebook.