A band whose live presence I’ve been chasing in my mind ever since their appearance on HBO’s excellent concert series Reverb, circa ‘99/‘00, when they memorably played “Stop The Show” and a few other songs. One thing I never knew, until years later the other night, is that Doug Martsch shakes every word out of his mouth, whether unthinking or with a physical effort that complicates his serene delivery. Some crisis during “Carry The Zero,” maybe the huge one told in the lyrics, caused him to keep neglecting the effort entirely, dropping lines and focusing instead on the guitar work that sets the song up for bigger and bigger moments, until it can’t get any closer to infinity and surrenders.

Still the funniest and most serious band living in the world today, Brett and Rennie Sparks tell competing jokes over each other’s voices between songs, and then fall back into American music that’s like a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of the quaint, strange, ordinary world. Their new album Wilderness contains songs about animals. Their older songs are about human creatures, like the ones who take their lives in “Weightless Again,” my primary resource for thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge ever since I first heard it. At Low Spirits they played a pricklier version of the song (musically speaking; the effect has always been prickly), with banjo. From the Sparks’ vast stringed instrument library, which includes a bathtub full of guitars at home, they also employed a bass guitar the size of a ukulele, which Rennie somehow caused to make the long, low notes of an upright bass, delivering what a ukulele never did, the thuds of the real world.

Intermittently defunct opening act Pawn Drive own a very large array of stringed instruments, too, and were sort of like what would happen if Daniel Johnston found a bunch of like-minded older guys to play them. Johnston was definitely the guy on the right playing the tiny guitar, promising songs about “aliens and delusions.” To be sure, I caught some weird phrases:

blood and vomit and tears and shit
father to a son, too many mothers on my mind
you crush a chrysanthemum into the ground, it breaks your heart

And during the song “Art,” some character or characters ask, “Who was the first impressionist?” to which the singer replies, “I showed them.”

And between sets, Abbey Road played on shuffle. It was disorienting and very pleasurable.

The third and best set I’ve seen them play locally, this time consisting of their new album in full, followed by a non-album song that recalled Luna in the same way the slightly smaller album versions of their huge anthems also sometimes recall Luna. Speaking of that album, Electric Sounds, it’s fantastic, more about that later. These guys are heroes, proof that cool, ordinary rock music is still there for me as an adult, that I need not be embarrassed by a continuing need for it.

After the Doolittle and Last Splash tours, it’s excellent to find that Kim Deal still lives in the present. The drums and bass and rhythmic noise of the songs from her new solo singles series (all year long!) aren’t really surprising, for her, but they’re all about right now, and the first offering, “Walking With A Killer,” is just great, as good as anything from the last Breeders album. It suffers no one’s expectations, and is pretty weird and free, in a familiar garage creation sort of way.

Exactly the opposite of what I thought something called Acid Rap would sound like, this album exists mostly in sober morning light. Even the one called “Favorite Song” is pretty reflective, not an excuse for creating a new banger. Maybe Acid Rap’s a joke, and the psychedelic colors of the beautiful album cover are just bits of Chance’s hyper-real world reflected and smeared on his skin.

A song that recalls everything you can’t name and nothing you can, but that makes good complementary listening with Prefab Sprout, whose Paddy McAloon sang “I spend the days with my vanity / I’m lost in heaven and I’m lost to Earth,” or The Blue Nile, whose Hats contains songs about a working man finding unimaginably vast pockets of time during his off hours in the city. The singer of “Open” owns nothing but such hours, it seems.

Monroe sings the usual sad story, but her proud self-assessment (the sorta punchline of the title) offers a neat twist at the end of each verse. Musgraves, on the other hand, creates herself as merely equal to her circumstances. But both women are strong enough to dispense excellent advice elsewhere on their new albums: who to kiss, what to smoke. They’re young and wise and keep getting lumped together (this is the last time I’ll dishonor them by continuing the trend), and if Musgraves sounds a little lower and more alone it’s only because she doesn’t have her own Pistol Annies, release date imminent, to bolster her. The only bum track on either album, as far as I can tell, is Monroe’s “You Ain’t Dolly,” not bad exactly (the way Blake Shelton sings “fuller” is pretty good) but no better than the most obvious imagination would have made it. At the end of a surprisingly subversive album I’d hoped for something a little riskier, like a duet between two straights, self-identifying as ordinary, unaware there’s no such thing, trying to make the most of the sexualities they were born with, screw those stranger folks who came before.

The Musgraves and Monroe, plus Annie Up by Pistol Annies, Anything In Return by Toro Y Moi, Bankrupt! by Phoenix. ALL DISCS. CONTINUE.

Actually it’s called the “lifestyles” desk at my work, and though I find totally ridiculous the idea of music as an aspect of a lifestyle, best used as a means of lubricating people for shopping, I have to admit these albums work pretty well in that context, even if it doesn’t allow them to reveal much of themselves.

I’m still high on this album, trying not to be bothered by dismissive reviews that only want to bury a rock ‘n’ roll that’s already fading, as if totally unaware that everything dies naturally, there’s no need to rush the process, once it’s gone it’s gone and then sorrow comes rushing in for something that only nostalgia can revive. I get it, the sounds here are well used, the band works harder and soars not quite as high, but that’s why I love it. It walks heavy on the ground but keeps trying.

Again: Like mbv, my other current favorite album of 2013, this one doesn’t have much to do with 2013, at least no more so than it does with 1999, 2011, etc. The latter year is when Archie Moore posted Chemtrail Surfer, a collection of four sketches that in hindsight reveal Dreamshit’s experimental origins, and how long it must’ve taken to hit this perfect balance: 12 minutes of instrumentals (jazz solos; serious ambient passages) and 21 minutes of dense, classic pop tunes. I’ll keep this one at #10 for the rest of the year, then bump it up to #1.