![]() Instead, Musgraves sang in her been-there-done-that drawl about restaurant workers waiting for a break, small-town kids slowly morphing into the parents they resent and strong women who know that a hook-up might be just a hook-up and Prince Charming is sometimes best kept as a memory. Texas-born, Nashville-based Kacey Musgraves set the standard with a major label debut that sounded like current country while avoiding all the clichés about Chevys and flags and spring break debauchery. The biggest quiet story in popular music this year involved women singer-songwriters who kept their tongues in their mouths and told the truth of ordinary lives. Kacey Musgraves' Same Trailer Different Park. "Soap Box" turns funky and asks Roc Marciano, Ka's only real competition in their brand of heady, concrete jungle, grown ass man rap, to jump on. The loops he sets in motion have a hair-raising, noir groove, except for a break in the middle of the album. Ka's voice is stooped under the responsibilities he shoulders here, for his old neighborhood, for his friends who've died, for his own artistry. "My heart is never the question / I write hard: phonetic aggression," he says on "Peace Akhi." And then he says he'll keep going until he's "rigid with lividity." It would be gloomy if it weren't so sharp. On The Night's Gambit, Ka rhymes under his breath, repenting, raging, mourning, but mostly believing. He did it his way, and all by himself - producing every track, shooting videos, taking orders and going to the post office himself ( not every day though). Ka's introspective album, the third he's released as a solo artist, smolders. Each one knows it's beautiful, knows it's sad, even if it doesn't know why. You are invited to gawk at Cupid Deluxe's songs as photos of stylized vulnerability and self-aware emotional bleeding. With its broken and disconnected lyrics about heartbreak and tortured relationships, the album is very much reflective of our post-privacy, Instagram times. Cupid Deluxe is a decidedly experimental affair, drawing on everything from Norman Whitfield's chucking guitar funk, Maxwell's Caribbean ambient soul, Prince's psychosexual Minneapolis dream-pop, East Coast Audio-Two style hip-hop and the washed-out '80s hipster cool of the Drive soundtrack. It's denouement nightlife music, the chill that comes after the cocaine rush at the club. But where the French duo's retro-disco gets soggy and their are-we-human-are-we-robots shtick inspires a yawn, Blood Orange is conceptual R&B for the 21st century that feels both emotionally pungent and post-euphoria sexy. Texan-British Brooklyn transplant Devonté Hynes hasn't made the richest sounding R&B album of the year working under his new moniker Blood Orange - that accolade might go to the multi-million dollar, sonically-intimidating Random Access Memories by Daft Punk. Those shared words could be the limitations of language, but they might illuminate what this cross-section of music lovers most needed to hear this year. "Wry" hit the spot twice (country singer again, and a pair of rappers). We were seduced by darkness at least five times (electronic, rock, classical, metal) and loved sounds that we call "delicate" (three out of four made by men). Not every one of the 22 different people with bylines here agree on which albums did any of that to them - we don't listen the same way, or for the same reasons - but you'll read the word "warm" more than once (as applied to an indie songwriter, a country singer and two electronic producers). In what we've written about each one below, you can see what we felt should be rewarded, what shook us up and what sucked us in over the 12 months of 2013. These are the albums we loved the most this year. ![]()
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