Happy new year, everyone. Since we’re into 2014 now, and (perhaps more pertinently) since all of our 2013 charts generated so much traffic to www.www.uncut.co.uk last month, I thought it’d be useful/cynical to post a Best Of 2014 (Thus Far) list.
Apologies - I've been a little late posting my Best Albums Of 2013 list. In mitigation, at least I managed to post my Best Films Of 2013 last week, which you can read here.
This month’s issue of Uncut, as you may have seen, comes with a free supplement showcasing our extensive end-of-year charts. We’ve decided, though, to post our 80 Best Albums Of 2013 list here.
You can read new assessments of these albums in the booklet. But in the meantime, click on the links to read the original Uncut reviews. A reminder, too, that Uncut staffers have been posting their individual 2013 lists:
While our current magazine features a 52-page supplement revealing Uncut’s top 80 albums of 2013, voted for by the Uncut staff and nearly 50 contributors, here we’re gradually publishing some of our staff’s individual picks of the year’s best releases.
Oddly, perhaps, I've just signed off my film pages for the first issue of 2014. January is traditionally a strong month for releases, as the studios hit heavy for the big awards season push, all the same it looks like next year is off to a strong start with new releases from the Coen brothers, Steve McQueen and Spike Jonze.
The current issue of Uncut comes with a rather spiffing free 52-page magazine that hosts our essential guide to the best new albums, reissues, box sets, films, DVDs and books of 2013. This year we’ve expanded our new album section to a Top 80, as voted for by the Uncut staff and nigh on 50 of our regular contributors.
OK, I’ve managed to remember 143 albums that came out this year and that I liked. As in previous years, I didn’t see much point in hacking my list down to a Top 100, or Top 50, or whatever. While it’d be a stretch to claim every one is an imperishable classic, I do feel broadly confident recommending them all.
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
I don’t know about you, but I’m still reeling from final episodes of Top Of The Lake and Southcliffe on television over the weekend. Both, I suppose, had a loose thematic link - they were studies of tragedy in small communities - and I think in the end I preferred Southcliffe’s open-endedness to Top Of The Lake’s flurry of final act revelations; but that said, they were both brilliant TV, easily among the best things I've seen this year.
