Sunday, January 26, 2014

Combined Best of 2013 List


It's that time of the year again; I have combed through the various year-end music lists to try to come a critical consensus of the best albums released in 2013.

A quick run-down of my methodology: I start by listing out the various professional lists published by the various music magazines...and a couple of more general news sites. The lists I look at include Rolling Stone, NPR and Pitchfork, among many others. For any lists that rank their choices, I assigned a certain point value based on an album's position in the list. So, a number one album received ten points and a number ten album received one point, with the corresponding point values in between.

Many lists go beyond ten albums, so albums falling below the number ten spot received fractions of points based on position: 11-20 received 0.5 points, 21-30 got 0.4, 31-40 got 0.3, 41-50 got 0.2 and anything falling below 50, but still ranked, got 0.1 point. NPR does not rank their list, so anyone appearing there received three points.

The points were then combined and the albums ranked in descending order. In total, there were 393 unique albums in all of the lists that I used, many not getting more than 0.1 points. The best-ranked albums usually appeared on multiple lists and ranked high on most. And now, without further ado, the generally consented best albums of 2013!

10. Deafheaven - Sunbather: 26.7 points (4 top ten lists)
9.   David Bowie - The Next Day: 27.5 points (3 top ten lists)
8.   Chvrches - The Bones of What You Believe: 30.9 points (5 top ten lists)
7.   Arcade Fire - Reflektor: 31.3 points (4 top ten lists)
6.   My Bloody Valentine - mbv: 32.3 points (7 top ten lists)
5.   Disclosure - Settle: 33.9 points (6 top ten lists)
4.   Haim - Days Are Gone: 35.2 points (6 top ten lists)
3.   Daft Punk - Random Access Memories: 45.0 points (8 top ten lists; 1 number one spot)
2.   Kanye West - Yeezus: 91.2 points (9 top ten lists; 3 number one spots)
1.   Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City: 100.0 points (12 top ten lists; 4 number one spots)



My spreadsheet for calculating this list can be downloaded here.

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