Pop music abstracted to the point it no longer resembles pop music – such a type of thing often lands at the top of these lists. Holter’s music retains its elusive moments but this is also a wonderfully contained set of songs, rich with physical detail. The subtle grounding of her astonishing musical imagination could have resulted in something too exacting or severe, but again Loud City Song seems just to happen.

I saw Hart play a 25-song set the day after Christmas, new ones sewn in quite unobtrusively, and noted, as I’d already done, that more than one of them sound a lot like “Flexible Flyer.” That’s one of the things I like best about The Argument, the way the songs add up to a staggering piece but have such modest individual lives, to the point of recycled chords. His own catalog and a much broader, older catalog figure into The Argument so that it’s to rock ‘n’ roll and baroque inflection what Random Access Memories is to its own corner of the musical landscape…

The first disco album I ever loved. This is going to sound either incredibly crass or incredibly obvious, but I’d like to submit that the “life” Daft Punk intend to give back to music is all that’s been lost—verifiably, tragically lost—since men danced to this kind of music in the years before 1981. There’s nothing trivial on the album, which contains, at the very least, moments of simple pleasure and grace of a kind stolen from an entire generation. That would make “Doin’ It Right” a song about the anxiety and ultimate helplessness of musicians, but no one can say they didn’t try.

Not the first person to borrow specific sounds from Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” (on “Send Me Out”) but maybe the first to build her own intimate world, different and complete, from them – and all attendant sonic material, texture, feeling, atmosphere (http://fadetomind.net/music/albums/cut-4-me).

No one sticks it out with bands anymore. Apparently only sheer physical impact counts. Deerhunter got typecast as scuzzy this year because that’s what people wanted them to be, The Thermals and No Age presented exquisite reductions of their craft, were thus ignored altogether, and The Men just weren’t loud enough, I guess, on their best and most engaging album by miles. This is the first time their music has shaken off the weight of its history and influences and gelled in a meaningful way. Still, it’s all here, and already by the time I get to the barely held together country of track four, “The Seeds,” there’s nothing I want that this album can’t or hasn’t given me.

I always dreamed they’d make an album I’d love as much as this one sometime during my adulthood. They make everything better, especially when they’re slyly nodding outside the club: My favorite rap verse of the year is delivered quite ordinarily by Example on “Thursday,” but the beat sells it; my favorite guitar moment of the year is the album’s only allusion to the existence of such an instrument, that bit of processed goo on the highly affecting Springsteen cover. I referred to Discography as a guide for living; here’s the latest edition.

Outtake from an unwritten live review, 9/9/13: The locked nature of records (despite tangible unheard possibilities) breaks apart again live. That said, the band tended to treat songs from Monomania as unalterable gems. (Rightly so.)

Possibly unique among all those recent albums (My Bloody Valentine, Mazzy Star) that bear little relation to the present, parts of this actually were recorded as long ago as 1999, but no matter, as its 33 minutes, from incidental music to “Incidental Music” and back again, follow such a singular, compelling trajectory toward the data dump of our year (http://archiemoore.bandcamp.com/album/dreamshit-surfer).

“This is a flawless record. I’ve spent hours and hours listening to it and enjoying it. Perfectly executed,” says Bradford Cox. It made me so happy to read that.

The way he goes over and over and over his past and comes up with music as compulsively listenable as this… no artist is doing more useful and instructive work right now.