Features

M+N Readers Poll 2013

By Mess+Noise 2013-12-19T13:00:00+00:00

Our critics have had their say about the year’s best albums. Now it’s our readers? turn to count down the Top 50 of 2013.

1. Dick Diver
Calendar Days
(Chapter)

These are the stories no one else is telling. Accounts of worlds colliding in Alice Springs (?Arrernte and white?), of two-year leases and lime green shirts, of days and weeks and months – those fleeting calendar days – spent in the Safeway deli, the IGA, a third-floor Fitness First and ?rusty old paddock bombs.? They’re the stories too small to register, except register they do – and how. After 2011?s debut New Start Again* ranked at #6 in that year’s Readers Poll, Dick Diver’s second album *Calendar Days sits confidently at the top. There’s no way four people as cheeky and unassuming as Alistair McKay, Rupert Edwards, Steph Hughes and Al Montfort should be able to stumble upon such consistent profoundness, but they do even more than that: they locate and wield it like masters, all while making it safe for a whole generation of Australian bands to sing about their world without that tell-tale cringe.

Water Damage by Dick Diver Calendar Days

2. The Drones
I See Seaweed
(Independent/MGM)

It starts with a living nightmare: seaweed on the lawn, blind overpopulation, horse tranqs in fuel tanks, dead bird songs. Only it’s real – we’re looking it in the face – and, as Gareth Liddiard quips, we’re all fiddling while Rome not burns but stews. Too busy breeding and consuming and tweeting to do anything about what’s ahead. Even if this album was limited to simply that opening title track – which, yeah, should have been on this list – it’d be a contender for album of the year. But there’s more here than Liddiard’s gushing words and rabid-dog snap. There’s the luxuriant s’ance of ?How to See Through Fog?, the riled-up pub-punk rave-up ?A Moat You Can Stand In?, the swooning soundtrack-isms of ?Laila? and the unmoored melodic instincts of ?Nine Eyes?. Like Calendar Days*, *I See Seaweed is an album we’ll remember – and still love – decades from now. It’s an album you instantly admire the hell out of it and, like the ugly truths it deals in, can maybe even come to grips with someday.

3. Adalita
All Day Venus
(Liberation)

?Look at the carnage now,? instructs Adalita on the very first song of her second solo album. She may as well be talking to herself, because she spends the rest of All Day Venus* doing just that: surveying fallout, turning over rubble, examining wounds. The hooks and choruses are quick to connect, but that’s not to downplay just what an intense, adult record this is. Every song is a long list of lessons that Adalita shares even as she lives them. Hearing this album is to be brought immediately into her grimy world – she *is an island, to debunk a saying, and it’s no tropical paradise – but there’s something of value beyond mere downcast toiling through her troubles. There’s always hope, always light. That it’s not in copious surplus only makes it that much more valuable.