Albums of the year? Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t 

Albums of the year? What a good question. Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t. The essence of pop music is its newness, its absolute determination to upgrade itself and keep on upgrading itself, often beyond anyone’s interest in its upgrading itself. Accordingly, there are some years when the paid-up music obsessive has to retrench and consolidate and — quite simply — stop buying new records until he can find somewhere to put them.

I only bought about 25 new CDs this year, of which only five or so were new-new-new. As yet, none of them has really come through. But there’s time. There’s tomorrow, there’s next week, and there’s the rest of my life to get the most out of the David Bowie album. And there’s not even that for the Daft Punk album, which I thought was very thin. My copy has already progressed to the next phase of its existence, under the letter ‘D’ in Oxfam Books & Music, with all the other Daft Punk albums people were underwhelmed by. As only the middle-aged now buy CDs, it’s clearly punters of a certain vintage who were fooled by the hype and the deep, Nile Rodgers-inspired catchiness of ‘Get Lucky’. Daft Punk got lucky. I’m not sure we did.

In a year of musical retrenchment, though, it doesn’t really matter what else is going on. Most of the records you listen to are the ones you already had. I wrote here a couple of months ago about suddenly ‘getting’ Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden, which had been sitting on my shelves virtually unplayed for a quarter of a century. That would probably be my album of 2013, and there are a couple of others that have also made the breakthrough.