This month’s issue of Uncut, as you may have seen, comes with a free supplement showcasing our extensive end-of-year charts. We’ve decided, though, to post our 80 Best Albums Of 2013 list here.
You can read new assessments of these albums in the booklet. But in the meantime, click on the links to read the original Uncut reviews. A reminder, too, that Uncut staffers have been posting their individual 2013 lists:
While our current magazine features a 52-page supplement revealing Uncut’s top 80 albums of 2013, voted for by the Uncut staff and nearly 50 contributors, here we’re gradually publishing some of our staff’s individual picks of the year’s best releases.
The current issue of Uncut comes with a rather spiffing free 52-page magazine that hosts our essential guide to the best new albums, reissues, box sets, films, DVDs and books of 2013. This year we’ve expanded our new album section to a Top 80, as voted for by the Uncut staff and nigh on 50 of our regular contributors.
OK, I’ve managed to remember 143 albums that came out this year and that I liked. As in previous years, I didn’t see much point in hacking my list down to a Top 100, or Top 50, or whatever. While it’d be a stretch to claim every one is an imperishable classic, I do feel broadly confident recommending them all.
If you were a fan, you probably watched with horror, incredulity and fretful concern at the things Lou Reed put himself through in the '70s, especially after the critical and commercial rejection of Berlin hardened an already cynical disposition into an unsparing bitterness and what seemed like a headlong pursuit of self-obliteration. Even more than Keith Richards at the time, Lou seemed the rock star most likely to become a casualty of his addictions.
Eric Clapton and Robert Plant are among the artists confirmed for A Celebration of Bert Jansch, a concert to be held at London's Royal Festival Hall on December 3, 2013.
The Festival Hall was the venue for Pentangle’s first major performance in 1967 and the group recorded part of their Sweet Child album there in 1968. The original line-up reformed to play at the Royal Festival Hall exactly 40 years later and a Pentangle show there in August 2011 proved to be Jansch’s final performance.
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
Conspicuously wealthy blues collectors probably know about this by now, but a copy of Tommy Johnson’s “Alcohol And Jake Blues” has surfaced – only the second that’s ever been found – and is on sale at Ebay. It’ll be interesting to see how bidding shapes up before the auction closes around 10 tonight (UK time): at time of writing, the highest offer is $16,800.00.
