Sick of the sight of twerky
SEX and pop have always danced around each another and in 2013 their strange tango commandeered the headlines as never before. On the one hand, this was the year of the twerk — of Miley shaking her bum in Robin Thicke’s face, of Robin Thicke shaking his misogyny in the whole world’s face, of Kanye West’s Yeezus, simultaneously a work of quasi genius and a borderline anti-woman diatribe.
But it was also the year that gave us Lorde, a teenager who might just be the smartest, most grown up singer of her generation. Refusing to conform to the industry’s vision of young women as gyrating sex pots, she quietly and elegantly became one of the biggest talents on the planet, with a debut album that trembled with the carefree guilelessness of youth and yet was shot through with a beyond-her-years wisdom. Meanwhile, Katy Perry covered up and urged others to do likewise, and Haim proved that a rock group fronted by three flaxen-haired Californians could be about the tunes, not the flesh.
The other theme running through 2013 was the rise of the covert recording. First David Bowie caught the world unawares with The Next Day, a rumpled masterpiece and his finest since 1980’s Scary Monsters. Then, just as we closed the book on the year, Beyoncé sprang the same trick, blindsiding fans and critics with a self-titled album assembled in hermetic secrecy.
Amid the twerks and the twitter feuds — Miley Cyrus’s putdown of Sinéad O’Connor was wrenchingly cruel — rock music sometimes looked like a crestfallen guest at its own party. A rare exception was Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, wherein the New Yorkers dialled down their trade-mark smarm and ratcheted up the stuttering rhythms and weird choruses.
As mentioned, Yeezus was perhaps Kanye West’s stand-out record to date, a hallucinogenic rush of braggadocio and musical OCD in which every beat and glitch was burnished to perfection. Once you got past its contrived oddness — specifically the track that desperately wanted to be a Broadway tune – Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories was both delightful and cheesy.
The best dance album of the year was John Hopkins’s glistening, minimalist Immunity. Smart and soulful, it offered a merciful counterpoint to the all conquering EDM scene, a genre that stresses jackhammer beats over musicianship and is hard to love unless you’re 19-years-old and enjoying fist-pumping with your top off.
Hopkins received a Mercury Music Prize nomination, though was edged out by James Blake’s sad, crepuscular Overgrown, a bedroom project into which were woven womping great dubstep beats. Tipped to win the gong, but in the end not even shortlisted, was London Grammar’s If You Wait, which had as secret ingredient Hannah Reid’s dulcet singing.
One of the bigger letdowns of 2013 was Arcade Fire’s Reflektor. The single of the same name that preceded the LP appeared to indicate that the Canadians, so old fashioned and earnest in the past, had finally embraced the possibilities of technology. Alas, when the album, dropped, it suggested that, as with late period U2, Arcade Fire have started to mistake bloat for ambition.
Another ‘meh’ moment was offered by the National’s Trouble Will Find Me. Led by the increasingly disconsolate Matt Berninger — smile Matt, you’re a rock star — the quintet put in a bravura turn at Live at the Marquee in Cork. On record, though, they remain stoic to a fault, an arena band who refuse the acknowledge that, to reach a very large audience, you have to be prepared to look ridiculous now and then. The desire to be taken seriously no matter what cast a pall over Trouble Will Find Me, a one-note tone poem that blinded you with its workaday misanthropy.
Of all the disappointments, perhaps the most crushing was My Bloody Valentine’s mbv. Following 21 years of recording silence, the band at last released the follow-up to their hugely influential Loveless and you sort of wished they hadn’t. Muggy, only vaguely tuneful, it was a record that seemed to recoil from the listener, as if it wanted to be left alone. Cold shouldered by the Mercury judges and forgotten within a few weeks, ultimately its wish came true.
Showing how to wear your age with dignity, Bowie’s finest in more than three decades was a bristling meditation on mortality.
A sometime collaborator with Coldplay and Brian Eno, with his fifth long player Hopkins served a perfect synthesis of small hours melancholy and dance floor twinkle.
Savvy and soulful, listening to Pure Heroine you could briefly pretend you lived in a world where nobody twerked
If Joy Division were fronted by an angry French woman with a PhD in gender studies, this is what they would sound like.
With grandiose beats and ridiculous lyrics, in less confident hands Yeezus could easily have collapsed under the sheer weight of its ambition. It took an ego as vast as Kanye’s to carry the conceit off.
Brilliantly bonkers electro pop from brother/sister Swedish duo.
Minimalist electronica that has more in common with Philip Glass than Calvin Harris.
Merseyside producer Matthew Barnes weaves together folk, dance and dub. The results are like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
R’n’B’s answer to Dark Side of The Moon, The 20/20 Experience was a pop sprawl with hidden depths.
Sun-kissed California pop with a hint of edge just under the surface.
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