Earbuddy's Best Albums of 2013: 70–56

Their previous album was cut live in ten days with Nick Stumpf. This one took the Bar Harbor band nine months of overdubs at home on Mount Desert Island, with Stumpf back to produce and mix. Milan McAlevey wrote the songs and shares the vocals with Nina Donghia, and despite the title it is the heaviest thing they had made.

The Chapel Hill band’s second album since re-forming in 2008 for All Tomorrow’s Parties, four years after In Prism. Ash Bowie said many of these songs were barely rehearsed, unlike last time. Five of the eight run past five minutes, “The Water Wheel” almost eight, and all of it is built on the interplay of his guitar and Dave Brylawski’s.

Trevor Powers wrote the whole record alone, starting at the piano and layering ideas on an old cassette recorder, then took it to the producer Ben Allen in Georgia and hired friends to fill it out. Critics heard his bedroom pop turn denser and stranger, full of God and mortality; death, he said, is what makes life on Earth beautiful.

Matt Korvette worked days as an insurance claims adjuster, and these songs are about grown-up worries: pet allergies on “Cathouse”, fear of the doctor on “Health Plan”, ‘adult angst’, as he put it. Alex Newport, who made King of Jeans with them, recorded it, and an 82-second track the band taped as teenagers in the mid-90s splits it in half.

Jordan Lee moved from Ohio to Austin, St. Louis and Boston, recording these seven songs in all three and on the road, with friends met along the way. He insisted it was not a break-up record but came from a year in which he lost people close to him. Soft Eyes’ first pressing ran short, and Other Music reissued it.

Matthew Barnes mixed it outdoors on his laptop, on the Wirral, staying out until the weather or the battery gave in. Hearing problems had slowed him down, and he called it simpler and more exposed than Dagger Paths. “Thor’s Stone” is named after a sandstone outcrop on Thurstaston Common, and he designed the sleeve himself.

A tick bite at 12 or 13 gave Kyle Morton Lyme disease, which ended, years later, in a kidney transplant from his father; he thought this might be his last record. Typhoon spent six weeks on Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, Oregon, turning it into songs for twelve players, with Yann Tiersen on the violin that ends “The Lake”.

Sam France and Jonathan Rado, friends since a sixth-grade maths class, wrote it in about a week, a song a day, while living together, and Richard Swift produced. It is a raid on late-60s rock, and “San Francisco” answers the flower-power standard of the same name with a shrug: ‘That’s okay, I was bored anyway’.

His first album dealt with endings, college and Los Angeles among them; Merge pitched this one as new beginnings after a move to San Francisco and touring with Ty Segall. Cronin played every instrument apart from the guest spots, Segall’s guitar solos and K. Dylan Edrich’s viola and violin among them, and recorded it with Eric Bauer in late 2012.

Sadie Dupuis started the band as a solo project after moving to Northampton for an MFA, and by this debut she was teaching writing at UMass Amherst. The four of them cut it mostly live at Justin Pizzoferrato’s Sonelab, Tuesday to Friday, and a book on the history of the occult left its sulphur and salt in her lyrics.

The Montreal songwriter Devon Welsh made it with Matthew Otto, who co-produced and performs it with him, and Matador framed it as songs about death, family and desire set over white noise and synths. It made the Polaris Prize long list, and the video for “Childhood’s End” stars Welsh’s father, the Twin Peaks actor Kenneth Welsh.

Justin Vernon’s second album with Volcano Choir came four years after Unmap, made this time by a working six-piece, not from ideas swapped at a distance. Vernon said a song that takes years to finish ‘takes on a lot of water’. The group vocals went down in one room into one stereo microphone, an idea Thomas Wincek credits to Vernon.

It is dedicated ‘for Dave’, their late friend David Doernberg, whose death runs through several of these songs. The title comes from “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo”, where music cannot bring anyone back. Merge called it the dark twin of Majesty Shredding, just as aggressive, and a note thanks Roger Angell for inspiring the words of “Overflows”.

Their 13th album, and the first they made with John McEntire of Tortoise, at Soma Studios in Chicago. Its press notes call it their most direct and personal record, about ageing, personal tragedy and the bonds between people, and it runs from “Ohm”, sung in unison, to the horns and strings of the closing “Before We Run”.

Katie Crutchfield made American Weekend in a week at her family’s home in Birmingham; these songs she wrote slowly, over about a year. She recorded them in October 2012 in the basement of her West Philadelphia house, with Keith Spencer and Kyle Gilbride of Swearin’ on drums and bass, and turned from break-ups to her family and her Alabama upbringing.