The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Three

It was coming. It was always going to come. This year's Musical Advent Calendar was billed as a battle between Laura Marling and The National for our overall number one slot. And with one day left to go, one of them has made a decisive move.

Andy Welch

Laura Marling - Once I Was An Eagle (Virgin)

It’s almost a cliché among the Ragged Glories panel to say you like Laura Marling. In fact, saying ‘it’s almost a cliché among the Ragged Glories panel to say you like Laura Marling’ is a cliché in itself. Nevertheless, there’s a reason for that. She’s pretty amazing, and Once I Was An Eagle is her best album yet. That’s not to say it’s my favourite – that’s still I Speak Because I Can – but this is Marling’s most adventurous, challenging record, lyrically brilliant and musically ambitious. There are singer songwriters, and then there’s Laura Marling.



Matt Collins

Sigur Ros - Kveikur (XL)

The low key return of Sigur Ros heard on Valtari was just a red herring. Iceland's finest soundscapers have found the amp that goes up to 11, plugged in a fuzz bass, and made as big a noise as possible.

Pranam Mavahalli

My Bloody Valentine – MBV (Pickpocket Records)

There are moments on this album that are among My Bloody Valentines' best. Who Sees You takes the sensual, foggy, wooziness perfected in Loveless to new heights. The chords seem to slip, slide and collide with each other. It should be disconcerting, but in fact it's sublime. I love the last three tracks too, insistently pounding, and like nothing else they've done. Not every track works for me (New You being one example) but given the wait between albums I'm still genuinely surprised at how well this record turned out.




Ali Mason


Valerie June – Pushin’ Against A Stone (Sunday Best)

When most of your record collection is made of indie and folk music ranging from twee to depressing and back again, it can be difficult to know what to play when entertaining people whose musical tastes don’t intersect. Valerie June has become my failsafe option because it’s just so damn good, who could object? With a touch of blues here, a splash of country there, as engaging a vocal as you could hope for and a particular type of intensity that demands your attention, I’ve yet to play it for anyone who didn’t love it.




Guy Atkinson

The Appleseed Cast - Illumination Ritual (Graveface Records)

Sometimes it takes seeing a band live for an album to truly cement itself in your heart and that's exactly what happened with The Appleseed Cast's eighth full length after seeing them at the Brudenell earlier this year. The record beautifully melds the band's signature sounds of twinkly emo and cinematic post-rock to stunning effect. Also, a shout out for their drummer who blew my mind to pieces with one of the greatest displays of drumming I've ever seen.



Dom Farrell

Laura Marling – Once I Was An Eagle (Virgin)

The opening four-track suite on Once I Was An Eagle is a simply staggering songwriting achievement. I literally stopped in my tracks the first time I listened to it, although given I was standing on one of those airport escalator-walkway thingies at the time this wasn’t as dramatic a moment as it might have been. But on repeat listens, Laura Marling’s fourth album still takes the breath away. Her acid tongue is at its most eviscerating during the first half, and the first person in the songs often comes off worst. Mistakes are openly confessed to but apologies don’t arrive. Marling has often suggested her lyrics are not of a personal nature but there is a sense of powerful, autobiographical honest at play. A visceral set comes up for air towards the end, with producer Ethan Johns’ well-judged instrumentation a vital ingredient alongside Marling’s increasingly fantastic guitar work, as the musical and lyrical threads link spectacularly together. Saying Laura Marling is the best British singer songwriter of her generation almost feels like a waste of breath by now. She stands comparisons with the all-time greats.



Ian Parker

Laura Marling - Once I Was An Eagle (Virgin)



It wasn't love at first listen. With Alas I Cannot Swim, I Speak Because I Can and, perhaps to a lesser extent, A Creature I Don't Know, it was love at first listen, but Marling's fourth took a bit of effort for me. It struck me as technically brilliant but somehow a little cold. Of course, it's well established I can be an idiot, because on further reflection, Once I Was An Eagle is her best yet.




Rory Dollard

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd)

If you could choose a single image to sum up Nick Cave's unique appeal better than any other, it would come from his unhinged Glastonbury performance this summer - there he was gangly of limb, foul of mouth and malicious of intent as he lurched across to hold the hand of a rapt young girl dressed all in white. He was Stagger Lee and she was surely Eliza Day.That he was also literally trampling on the heads of some perplexed Mumford fans in the process just made it all the sweeter. Push the Sky Away tells a very similar tale. It’s full of theatrical imagery, lusty scenery-chewing and broiling intensity, but it's also got levity, archness and visions of Miley Cyrus' untimely end (no, really). A pleasure, as always.

Steve Pill

Thundercat – Apocalypse (Brainfeeder)

Blurred Lines and Get Lucky may have dominated the headlines and YouTube play counts, but two of 2013's most surprising and far less misogynistic floorfillers both came courtesy of the same album. Oh Sheit It's X and Heartbreaks + Setbacks make me dizzily happy whenever I hear them. Like all the greatest pop-dance tunes, they are undercut with melancholy but still have a twitchy beat and gliding synths that beg for a bit of bad dancing or car stealing (Oh Sheit… featured on Grand Theft Auto V’s radio). Elsewhere, Thundercat flexes his bass playing skills around some goofy, glitchy beats courtesy of Flying Lotus.

John Skilbeck

California X - California X (Don Giovanni)

J Mascis and Frank Black share a home town in Amherst, Massachusetts, and chances are that fellow residents California X have been inspired by both Dinosaur Jr and Pixies. The influence of the former is unmistakeable, Dinosaur's cacophonic squall of guitar noise being a trademark sound California X are appropriating into their own splenetic work. Formed only last year, they became the latest in an impressive line of bands to appear from the Don Giovanni label's conveyor belt of bands who could save your life.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Two

As we reach the medal positions of the 2013 Musical Advent Calendar, Dollard is losing himself in some x-rated folk, and Skillers reveals his true identity: Veruca Salt.

Andy Welch
Summer Camp – Summer Camp (Moshi Moshi)

I really liked the first Summer Camp album, although perhaps I didn't love it. Maybe the synthetic backstory stopped me falling for it completely? Whatever the reason, I didn't have the same problem with the duo's second album. On it, Summer Camp make the decision to stop pretending they're from a fictional neighbourhood and admit to being husband and wife in real life. It might seem symbolic, but it seems to make a sizeable difference to their music, brighter and more confident than it had been before, emboldened by stronger songs and the production sheen given them by Stephen Street. Two Chords is one of my favourite songs of the year.

Matt Collins

The National - Trouble Will Find Me (4AD)

Not as classic a National album as previous booming bassy voiced efforts, but that's still better than most records this year. Graceless in particular is irresistible.

Pranam Mavahalli

Clark – Feast/Beast (Warp)

Remix albums tend to be patchy affairs, yet this is a remarkably cohesive record. Spread over two discs, and ranging from avant electronica to wonky hip hop, the tracks never seem to dip in quality. Among the many highlights is the Nils Frahm remix below, which takes the restrained beauty of the original and transforms it into something staggeringly epic.

Ali Mason

Volcano Choir – Repave (Jagjaguwar)

I’ve handed out ‘lyric of the year’ and ‘track of the year’, so now to Volcano Choir I award the title of ‘delightful surprise of the year’. Having been something of Bon Iver-sceptic in the past, I almost didn’t even bother hitting play when a track from his latest project arrived in my inbox. But with a rock band behind him, suddenly Justin Vernon seemed to make sense to me. Always dramatic, occasionally overblown and all the better for it, Repave is exhilarating from the start to the finish of its assuredly brief eight-track existence.

Guy Atkinson

Balance and Composure - The Things We Think We’re Missing (No Sleep Records)

One of a whole host of bands on my list this year dealing in the currency of grungy 90s alt-rock and these guys are doing it better than anyone. Despite this only being their second album, they've firmly staked their claim as the natural successors to Brand New's crown.

Dom Farrell

Arctic Monkeys – A.M. (Domino)

If 2009’s Humbug was Arctic Monkeys’ Californian desert album, then A.M moves them right into the middle of the sleaze and smut of the L.A. strip. The record almost plays as an utterly debauched night out from the irresistible opening swagger of ‘Do I Wanna Know’. ‘Arabella’ more or less invites Black Sabbath to the party and we hurtle downhill until someone switches the lights on for ‘Number One Party Anthem’ to find the song’s protagonist “on the prowl” – Alex Turner’s wry observation vignettes are rarely of the kitchen sink variety anymore but remain razor sharp. A change of pace, amid booty calls, regret and further leering, follows as this remarkable band showcase their impeccable and varied arsenal. Even those who aren’t keen on the Arctics must admire them for not being on ‘Mardy Bum Pt VI’ by now. Turner and company’s thirst for reinvention might be their greatest quality of all. It will be thrilling to see where they go next.

Ian Parker

Jimi Hendrix - People, Hell and Angels (Sony)

There might have been some question as to whether People, Hell and Angels should actually be eligible for the Advent Calendar, having been recorded more than 40 years ago and with alternative versions of just about everything on here released elsewhere in the meantime. But once we'd decided that it fit the criteria - unreleased material in album form - chances are it actually deserved to be No. 1 on my list. It would feel slightly bad form to put something largely recorded in 1970 at the top of the list of albums from 2013, but nothing else really blew my mind like the first time I played this record. I was feeling light-headed before the opening triple whammy of 'Earth Blues', 'Somewhere' and 'Hear My Train A Comin'' was done, and was pretty much a mess by the time I'd made it all the way through. It might even be my favourite Hendrix album - which considering the competition would be pretty good going.



Rory Dollard

Laura Marling - Once I was an Eagle (Virgin)

I think by now we all know the Ragged Glories panel is cleaved asunder in two distinct groups - Marlings and non-Marlings and ne'er the twain shall meet. With apologies to those in the latter group, this really is another great installment in what is becoming a formidable canon. In particular, the suite of songs that kicks the album off, bleeding imperceptibly into one another, is an act of outrageous showboating. It's John Barnes at the Maracana; it's Malcolm Tucker's best rant; it’s Daniel Day Lewis doing his "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE" schtick in There Will Be Blood. It's sensational. It is also proper X-rated, hardcore guitar porn for those of us who like to hear fingers brushing against strings.

Steve Pill

Mount Kimbie – Cold Spring Fault Less Youth (Warp)

For a long while, I thought this would top my list and it remains the one record I’ve listened to more than any other this year. Warp Records duo Dominic Maker and Kai Campos use a lot of “field recordings” in their music, making samples of everyday life that they distort and play around with until they find a beat within it. If you or I tried that, it would sound like shit. Not so here. On second album Cold Spring… they’ve coupled this technique to more live percussion and a better understanding of melody to best their own debut, Crooks And Lovers. Each listen reveals new highlights: the vocal hook in Made to Stray; the high-fretted bassline running through Meter, Pale, Tone; the way in which Break Well picks up pace a minute from the end in a low-key yet euphoric fashion.



John Skilbeck

Speedy Ortiz - Major Arcana (Carpark Records)

Speedy Ortiz driving force Sadie Dupuis definitely reminds me of that 90s singer, and her band, well… if their sound isn't a 20-year echo of an edition of MTV's Alternative Nation, I'm Veruca Salt and Seether is my golden ticket. Yet against the odds Major Arcana was a glorious triumph in 2013, an album from a band who acknowledge their influences but are not restrained by them and bring their own particular personality into play. Dupuis, a current poetry Masters student in her home state of Massachusetts, possesses weapons-grade and wickedly sardonic phraseology; musically, she and her band frequently follow a route where being assertive and obnoxiously discordant complements those words, but satisfyingly they can hit the chorus freeway too.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-One

As the intensity grows and we near the end of this process, Steve suggests everybody takes a brief time out and lies down on the floor. You can enjoy our No. 4 albums of the year as you do it. 

Andy Welch

Anna Calvi - One Breath (Domino)

There was so much to like about Anna Calvi’s debut, although at times it was a bit too bombastic to properly fall for. One Breath manages to take the dark and stormy elements of the debut and ramp them up even more while moving into more experimental areas. The album was inspired by the death of a family member, as well as the breakdown of a relationship. Calvi wrote her way out of the blackness, and listening to her do so is mesmerising. The ethereal Sing To Me is the best track.

Matt Collins

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City (XL)

All killer no filler from the band with best name ever. They've grabbed the joie de vivre from their debut and chucked a load of fun noise all over it.

Pranam Mavahalli

Holden – The Inheritors (Border Community)

There's certain records I return to time and time again – Bitches Brew, The Rite of Spring and Histoire de Melody Nelson being three. What links such pieces of music? I think it's that they create unique, esoteric soundworlds that can't be compared to anything else. Holden's Inheritors might well join that elusive club. It takes dance music, and mutates it into something primal, ritualistic, and otherworldly. Like those other albums, there's nothing like it so I imagine I'll be returning to it regularly for a fix.

Ali Mason

Veronica Falls - Waiting For Something To Happen (Bella Union)

It feels like I buy an album of shoegaze-inflected indie pop every year, and it always disappoints. This year, Veronica Falls bucked the trend in spectacular fashion. Every time I listen to it I get nervous that it won’t be as good as I remember it being, then every track puts a bigger grin on face than the last one and by the end I can’t remember what I was worried about. Good work, Veronica. Let’s be BFFs.

Guy Atkinson

Touche Amore - Is Survived By… (Deathwish Inc.)

There isn't a band in modern hardcore pushing the boundaries quite like these 20-something Californians. Twinkly, almost indie-rock guitars, underpin Jeremy Bolm's cathartic punk-rooted vocals, which combines to create a stirring third album which has soundtracked much of my year.

Dom Farrell

Elvis Costello and The Roots – Wise Up Ghost (Blue Note)

Much-loved songsmith with his glory days well behind him teams up with uber-cool, genre-fusing band whose best moments may also hover in the rear-view mirror. Just because you wanted Wise Up Ghost to be great didn’t mean it would be. But it is! Rejoice! An important factor here is that Costello, much like his old pal Bruce Springsteen last year, is thoroughly pissed off on account of railing against society’s ills throughout a magnificent career, only to reach his autumn years and realise those cloth-eared types in power haven’t paid so much attention. The buggers. Anyone who caught his incendiary performance of the Thatcher-baiting ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’ at Glastonbury this year will vouch for Costello being in the mood for a scrap, and Questlove et al provide an urgent and sleek backdrop for an at-times apocalyptic address. His back-catalogue is pleasingly pilfered, with ‘Pills and Soap’ exceptionally reimagined as ‘Stick Out Your Tongue’, while ‘Tripwire’ and ‘If I Could Believe’ provide beams of soulful light through the darkness.

Ian Parker

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Push The Sky Away (Bad Seed Ltd)

Returning to the cathartic feel of his masterpiece The Boatman’s Call Cave is here to wrap an arm around your shoulder, but, given the dark twist always lurking in his lyrics, he’s not necessarily going to tell you its all going to be okay. Cave has described his 15th album with the Bad Seeds as a “ghost baby in the incubator”, a vulnerable child fighting for life, and while there is something delicate about this record on the surface, there is a power too in its brooding intensity.

Rory Dollard

Son Lux - Lanterns (Joyful Noise Recordings)

After starting out as a purveyor of dark, portentous mood music where the mood was always lonely and fearful, Son Lux's latest feels like someone switching on a light. Contrarily, I've picked the sparsest of the lot to play you here - but even the creepy, sleezy sounding Easy is punctuated by unlikely handclaps and inexplicably riotous two-note sax blasts. Elsewhere, he's drenched the place in sight and sound, with massed ranks of vocalists, grandiose arrangements and even flutes used to set an increasingly dream-like scene.

Steve Pill

Tim Hecker – Virgins (Kranky)

Seeing a great gig can have a huge bearing on my appreciation of an artist or album in particular, none more so than when Canadian sound artist Tim Hecker played the church of St John at Hackney back in September. Beer was served by candlelight and the cold meant that a capacity crowd could see their breath. Hecker came on and switched all the lights off completely, save for a couple of spotlights that were positioned outside the church windows and sent beams of light across the vaulting ceiling. I was stood near the back with a friend and, a few minutes into the first piece, the scrawny 40-something guy in the Mogwai t-shirt next to us just put his beer down on the floor and lay down on the concrete in the middle of a crowd. It seemed like the right thing to do. Virgins is of a piece with this whole crazy evening: haunting, hymnal, unexpected, atmospheric and, above all, beautiful.

John Skilbeck

Foret - Foret (Simone Records)

There was an album that came out of Montreal this year accompanied by the needy level of publicity push that would make an electioneering politician blush, but Foret's self-titled album wasn't it. It was better than that. Its standout song La Cage didn't need Bowie half a mile back in the mix to make it an intensely beautiful two-and-a-half-minute meander through the heart of its creators, and it felt theatrical by compulsion rather than design. Enough already about my gripe with that other band. Joseph Marchand and Emilie Laforest, who together form Foret, made a small wonder in their self-titled LP, one that clad the words of Quebecoise poet Kim Doré in a handsome autumn coat: soft to touch, warm and elegant, yet dark and one in which the listener could lie rendered inert. Montreal, a city where 60% of residents have French as their first language, has thrown up an awful lot of English-speaking bands. Foret are not the only Francophones making music, but they are the most magical I've heard and a duo I'm dearly glad I discovered this year.

Forêt - La cage [vidéoclip] from Simone Records on Vimeo.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty

As we enter the critical stretch - our top five albums of the year - Rory explains what only his wife Jo previously understood: just why he is, in fact, a rare catch. 

Andy Welch

Goldheart Assembly - Long Distance Song Effects (New Music Club)

Goldheart Assembly’s debut Wolves And Thieves made my list in 2010. It was a long time in the making, but this is their second album. A very different animal to the first, it’s not as immediate, with layers and layers of arrangement and orchestration, offbeat time signatures and a great deal of sadness. Linnaeus, too, is probably the most beautiful song I’ve heard all year. 

Matt Collins

Arcade Fire - Reflektor (Sonovox)

As edgy, dirty and melodically irresistible as an Arcade Fire album should be. An album full of life.

Pranam Mavahalli

Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (Columbia)

Six months after its release, I'm still flabbergasted by how well this album has sold. It's utterly bonkers. How many number one albums feature a nine-minute spoken word track as their centrepiece? Much works, and some doesn't (The Game of Love is a proper stinker), but I love that the risks that Daft Punk have taken with this record when it would have been so much easier to stick to their tried and tested formula. There are increasingly few wilfully perverse artists subverting the mainstream, and doing it so succesfully.

Ali Mason

Laura Marling – Once I Was An Eagle (Virgin)

I finally got to see Laura Marling live this year, and I was stunned by how good her voice was. It was one of those occasions too when experiencing the music live made me totally love an album I’d previously been a little unsure of. The noodly suite of tracks that kicks off the album, beginning with ‘Take The Night Off’, is totally bewitching and the guitar work on ‘Little Love Caster’ is almost otherworldly. Marling’s status as the queen of the British folk scene perhaps allows her space to be indulgent that other artists wouldn’t get – but then maybe other artists wouldn’t be able to use it to such effect anyway.

Guy Atkinson

The Wonder Years - The Greatest Generation (Hopeless)

The winners of my list two years ago delivered another collection of pop-punk jams that boast lyrical content uncomfortably close to my own confusions about growing older.

Dom Farrell

Kurt Vile – Waking On A Pretty Daze (Matador)

When I decided to up sticks and move to Malta this year, the effect living on a blazing hot island might have on this list was something to ponder. Alas, my pasty complexion’s reaction to lengthy sunlight exposure and mosquitoes was already painfully established and held much less mystery. The point being, I’m not sure I’d have enjoyed Wakin on a Pretty Dazequite as much amid Mancunian drizzle. Vile’s much-feted Smoke Rings For My Halo never totally landed for me, and I say this as a person who is all over The War On Drugs in a big way. But Vile’s latest, hazy, sprawling outing was a perfect soundtrack for long, scorched days. It also works well as a musical bridge from the previous night’s hangover to that afternoon’s two-for-one cocktail offer, you know, if you ever have need for such a thing.

Ian Parker

Anna Calvi – One Breath (Domino)

Anna Calvi lives in a world cinematic flair, of drama and passion communicated through records which feel like soundtracks to imagined films. Her debut album seemed to position her directly between comparisons to PJ Harvey and Jeff Buckley, but her second strikes out altogether new territory. Where the brilliance of ‘Blackout’ teased among the more brooding sound of her first album, One Breathdoes not hold back, an entirely more urgent, aggressive and dramatic record. And it's glorious.  

Rory Dollard

Atoms For Peace - Amok (XL)

I'm the die-hard Radiohead fan who didn't really like King Of Limbs. Look after me, I'm quite a rare catch you know. I fully expected my path to veer even further from Thom Yorke's on this project, not least when I heard Flea was on board (fucking Flea…seriously), but Amok is a knockout. Yorke's voice is a central pillar throughout, the human centre to a relentless swirl of pulsing and probing, throbbing and clunking. Musically its denser than ever, but there are splashes of colour that suggest a man rediscovering the pleasures of a band and the limits of a laptop.

Steve Pill

The National – Trouble Will Find Me (4AD)

Would this have topped my list if it were three songs shorter? The National has produced another flawed masterpiece in Trouble Will Find Me, but I have a nagging suspicion that a few less mid-tempo, lighters-aloft moments might have made me love it that little bit more. The greatest songs are peerless, from the haunting peels of feedback in I Need My Girl to the way that Sea of Love builds like a wave of horses in that old Guinness advert. On their recent tour, I saw them play in Copenhagen when Matt Berninger screamed the latter song like he was exorcising demons from his own brain. It remains genuinely thrilling to see him lose his shit a little, like a white-collar indie version of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. It’s a shame that there isn’t a little more of that in Trouble Will Find Me but I bloody love it all the same.

John Skilbeck

Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold (What's Your Rupture)

Parquet Courts have been portrayed as breadline-toeing Brooklynites and, whether or not that factoid holds up to forensic examination, there is little doubt a murkily anarchic underbelly accompanied their hymns for a new blank generation. You're not short of touchstones: Husker Du, the Strokes, Pavement to name an obvious trio. Their irrepressible energy meant Light Up Gold fizzed with the rabid, ribald vitality of any of those bands' best work.