My Tunes Of The Year, 2013

A year in which we were only ever a single Miley Cyrus tweet from imploding as a species and John Lewis again opted not to use German industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten for their Christmas ad still had plenty of musical delights to keep its spirits up. These are my favourites.

Trillmatic, A$AP Mob (feat Method Man) 
Few can negotiate a corridor like a bunch of rappers with nowhere particular to be. They’re at this end and… woops! They’re at the other end. Now they’re in the middle. It’s like some Hong Kong Phooey shit. Built this on a sample of WAR’s The World Is A Ghetto and with a video that will confound corridologists for generations, this was a '90s gem, 2013 style.

Where Are We Now?, David Bowie 

Just when it seemed that David Bowie’s career had turned into an elaborate game of Chinese whispers, your accountant’s cleaner’s second cousin emailed to say that this gem had been released. Here was the proof, magicked online in a viral-marketing coup that saw Bowie reinvent himself yet again, this time as Ziggy Startup.

Just Make It Stop, Low 

Curiously, this is exactly what people said when I put this on the Empire stereo. Well, I still think it’s Christmassy.

Latch, Disclosure 

Spellbinding soul meets shimmery electronica on the dance floor and pulls amazingly freaky shapes in the hope of getting a cheeky snog out of it. This is first place on my year-end chart, with daylight in second and third. 

Black Balloons, Local Natives 

Being pals with The National – Aaron Dessner produced their second album – doesn’t seem to have been enough to get Local Natives’s Hummingbird on a single end-of-year list. EXCEPT THIS ONE, LADS.

All You're Waiting For, Classixx 

This is a genuinely terrible music video. We don't yet have the technology available to tell whether it's ironically terrible or actually terrible, so I'm just going to mumble something about hipsters and move on.

Reflektor, Arcade Fire  
Clear winner in the Best Track You Needed A ‘B’ Or Above In French GSCE To Appreciate category.

It’s Going Down, Midlake  
American ruralists Midlake’s permanent state of melancholy, presaged by the departure of lead singer Tim Smith and the failure of yet another corn crop, was softened this year by a sonic diversion led by newbie lead vocalist Eric Pulido. It’s not Young Bride, but then, what is? 

Lisbon, Eagles For Hands  
All I know about this is that it’s the work of a classically-trained Brighton producer called Laurie James and that if his friends don’t call him Laurie Eaglehands, they’re missing out on some easy lolz.

Byegone, Volcano Choir 

For people who love Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon but prefer him when he's not living in a cabin, wrestling bears and having relationship issues.

Clay, Goldfrapp

I discovered that Goldfrapp love Louis Malle’s films, which is nice because I love Louis Malle’s films too. This Tales Of Us closer soars higher and smoother than a crooner strapped to a spaceship. 

Peace Sword (Open Your Heart), The Flaming Lips 

It made all kinds of sense that lovable psychonauts The Flaming Lips found their way onto the Ender’s Game soundtrack. After all, this was a film in which small children in fancy dress battled alien insectoids, while a Maori Ben Kingsley watched on from a space pod. Or, as The Flaming Lips usually call it, "Tuesday".

This Is the Last Time, The National 

Me and @AliPlumb went to see The National at Alexandra Palace in November. Inspired by their delicate anthems to heartache and widescreen live presence, our discussions ranged long and loud on a journey home complicated by getting massively lost on Muswell Hill. One was a possible new direction for their next record: @AliPlumb thought grimecore; I suggested oom-pah folkstep. Either way, this feels like a good time to expand the formula.

COOL, Le Youth

Aka Just Got Lucky.

Shell Suite, Chad Valley

A zom-com with a side order of rom, Warm Bodies had a very decent soundtrack that featured Bob Dylan, Springsteen, The National, M83, planet-bestridding power balladeer John Waite and this gem from Oxford glo-core outfit Chad Valley. Yes, glo-core.

Open (Jeff Samuel Faded Mix), Rhye

The original by soul duo Rhye was kinda lovely but this filtered house remix pushes its Everything But The Girl-y tenderness into the nearest bush and gets serious with a big bassline and some serious hands-in-the-air activity. 

Galactic Cinema, Maceo Plex 

I really love Maceo Plex. Not only is his techno funkier than the contents of my laundry basket, Signor Plex has remixed everyone from INXS to John Digweed to great effect and did this storming Essential Mix last year.

The Jaguar, Justin Jay 

I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving house music even when I’m old and can’t find my teeth. This is one of the reasons why.

Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s tackle the waterboard in the room first. Does Kathryn Bigelow’s CIA thriller condone torture? Well, if you believe controversy hunters, drawn like moths to its incendiary subject matter, its depiction of ‘enchanced interrogation’ is blandly unquestioning at best, actively supportive at worst. Leaving aside the idea that the director of Strange Days, pretty much a liberal manifesto clad in sci-fi clothing, is some kind of crypto-fascist, the flak flying in Bigelow’s direction misreads a subtle, intelligent film that deliberately leaves the viewer to tackle the questions of morality it raises. There’s no spoonfeeding on offer, no easy answers; just an acute reflection of the byzantine, murky world of spies, politicians and terrorists that should reasonably keep you awake at night.

Our conduit into it is ‘Maya’ (not her real name), played by Jessica Chastain (real name) with exactly the kind of cold-eyed gaze and restraint you’d expect in a real-life spook. Contextualised by a haunting audio montage of voices from the Twin Towers that definitely will keep you awake at night, her task is a stark one. She ghosts from one CIA black site to another, playing uneasy witness to interrogations run with brutal efficiency by Jason Clarke’s wonk, hunting a lead to the elusive ‘OBL’. One Al-Qaeda suspect after another is waterboarded, humiliated, and, in one particularly gruelling instance, incarcerated in a box barely bigger than a kitchen shelf. It’s not played for sensation – like Ken Loach’s Route Irish, we’re spared none of the mundane horror of the American inquisition – and when a name is finally spluttered up by a defeated suspect, lips loosened by a rare moment of kindness, you’d need to be Dick Cheney to feel a sense of uplift.

Lead secured, Maya’s hunt for bin Laden enables Bigelow to crank through the gears, flaunting her command of thrilling set-pieces with sequences that rival The Hurt Locker for adrenaline expenditure. One, involving two cars, a crowded souk and a mobile phone, is a masterclass in simple tension-building. It’s no spoiler to point out that the movie ends with another, more renowned, event, this time in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, or that it ends badly for the terrorist. Here, too, Bigelow eschews big musical cues and gung-ho thrills to let the event tell its own story. Like what comes before, it’s executed with the confidence and brio of an Oscar-winner.