Looking back over this last list for 2013, I’ve realized one major flaw to it. There are no women on here. We’ve had our love for women this year, but this list contains our most obsessed about music with musicians consistently present throughout the year.
Doja Cat was our closest girl, but we only fell for one of hers. She did have a lot of other potentials that fell short because the production wasn’t to the level of that voice. Producers, this girls got talents!
London Grammar probably has the most right to be up here, but I credited their best to their collab with Disclosure and I didn’t fall for ‘Strong’ in time (wish it was still 2013). They’re also two-thirds dude, so that didn’t help them either […]
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The only thing more difficult than writing is categorizing these damn top 2013 lists. I messed up our last 2013 favorites, the lady vocals, so I thought I would clarify this list for all of us.
A few years back this would have been called, “Indie to R&B,” in fact it was, but the latter has flipped producer-side and is more accurately classified under electronic for us this year.
While this is obviously intended to be centered around indie & pop music, including alternative & folk, genres are hard to pin down, especially to one or even two nowadays. So to give this list a more accurate, less appealing title, the music here is centered around a vocal-bases.
Like rock before it, indie & pop have become rock’s sliding scale contemporaries, putting the singer smack out in front. Which compared to electronic goes back to a composer or producer-bases, like jazz and classical before it.
And yes, there are elements of electronic, jazz & disco on this list, which is why I had to go on this rant in the first place.
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There’s alotta music that sounds good, but few become all that memorable. To have a sound you know you’ll be listening to for a good long while, as sparing as that while may be, is what we all look for in music.
I first caught wind of Max Frost with his ‘White Lies’ track that’s topping the charts on the Hype Machine right now. And as memorable as ‘White Lies’ may be, what I didn’t expect was to find a bunch more memorables.
Frost’s SoundCloud is littered with funky hick jives that are all single worthy in their own right. His 50’s bebop style with Black Keys like vocals could only be topped off right with such memorable chorus lines. I’m looking with a keen eye on this guy, not a mediocre track to his name, yet.
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