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Best Music of the Year 2013

2013 turned out to be not such a great music year as I was expecting, considering that many artists and bands I liked throughout the last years were about to release new records. Some were great disappointments (Phoenix! Pixies!), other just poorly delivered (Vampire Weekend, Midlake). Some, like Kanye West and The Knife, chose unexpected, experimental ways to follow up a success, which was both enthralling and disconcerting. But Arcade Fire succeeded once again and created its fourth masterpiece in a row with Refektor - and a bunch of highly creative videos. Certainly the most iconic album of the year together with Daft Punk's instant-classic album Random Access Memories. Of course there were many interesting new trends and newcomers, and even if there were few perfect albums, there has been plenty of great tunes to make my day. Here is a 4 hours Spotify playlist with 50 of my favourite tracks for 2013 - for the record, so to speak.

2013 was also a great year for movie soundtracks, with many memorable films centered around music or giving music a central function, from the Coen's brilliant Inside Llewyn Davis to Belgian bluegrass drama Broken Circle Breakdown, not to mention Harmony Korine's music-driven psychedelic trip Spring Breakers and its companion piece The Bling Ring from Sofia Coppola, pitch-perfect as ever. Or Mogwai's hypnotic soundtrack to the French tv-series Les Revenants, and Tindersticks' always fruitful collaboration with Claire Denis (for the Les Salauds soundtrack).

With two new young bands and the re-issue of an overlooked gem from 2003 making my top five, great music always comes from unexpected places and there is still plenty to discover, like and be up all night to get lucky.

Best Albums of the Year 2013

1. Arcade Fire - Reflektor 2. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories 3. Savages - Silence Yourself 4. Speedy Ortiz - Major Arcana 5. Songs: Ohia - Magnolia Electric Co.

6. Kanye West - Yeezus 7. CHVRCHES - The Bones Of What You Believe 8. Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus 9. FAUVE ≠ BLIZZARD EP 10. The Knife - Shaking The Habitual

11. Stromae - Racine Carrée 12. The National - Trouble Will Find Me 13. James Blake - Overgrown 14. The Broken Circle Breakdown Original Soundtrack 15. Alela Diane - About Farewell

16. Mariam The Believer - Blood Donation 17. Vincent Delerm - Les Amants Parallèles 18. Omar Souleyman - Wenu Wenu 19. Neko Case - The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight 20. Arctic Monkeys - AM

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Best Films of the Year 2013

I never really had the feeling that 2013 was a great film year until it was time to make my best-films-of-the-year list. Though I don't really end up with one big favorite movie of the year, I have seen so many good films that I needed at least a Top 30 to name most of them. And I still have missed a lot. Most films on the list are really in a tie and it has almost been impossible to rank them, so consider this ranking as very fluctuant. I don't know if Inside Llewyn Davis really is the best film of the year, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable new movie from some of my favorite filmmakers, and probably one of their bests. There is much to say about this year and I have been considering making a more thematic sum-up, since there were exciting new trends and connexions between some of the most remarkable films. I will try to make it shortly in a new post. This list is based on the films I have been able to watch this year, mainly films that have been theatrically released in Sweden where I'm living. But I have also had the opportunity to see some films that will be released in 2014 (such as Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, All Is Lost, Borgman) and they make my list this year. On the other hand, I have missed some titles in release that I still look forward to and that might have made it into my list, especially: Act of Killing, Blue Jasmine, Mud, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Återträffen, Prisoners, Les Salauds, Post Tenebras Lux, Stoker, Stories We Tell, Silver Linings Playbook. They might be part of next year's list if I succeed to catch them up. One Upon A Time In Anatolia is such a catch-up, a 2011 title that remains unreleased in Sweden and clearly deserves a place in one of my yearly lists. Top of the Lake is the great Jane Campion's new work, produced as a mini-series for television, but I think it deserves a place in my annual film list (as well as in an upcoming tv-list of course). Ulrich Seidl's Paradise-trilogy is definitely one of the year's highs, a complex, thought-engaging and impressive piece of work, both film by film and as a whole. The first film Paradise: Love is clearly the best and strongest of the three, but I found it best to rank the Trilogy as a whole in the list.

1. INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS Joel & Ethan Coen (USA, 2013)

2. LA VIE D'ADELE (Blue Is The Warmest Color) Abdellatif Kechiche (France, 2013)

3. THE MASTER Paul Thomas Anderson (USA, 2012)

4. ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da) Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey, 2011)

5. THE TURIN HORSE (A Torinói Ló) Béla Tarr (Hungary-Fr-Ger, 2012)

6. LIFE OF PI Ang Lee (USA, 2012)

7. HELI Amat Escalante (Mexico, 2013)

8. THE BLING RING Sofia Coppola (USA, 2013)

9. PARADISE TRILOGY (Paradies: Liebe, Paradies: Glaube, Paradies: Hoffnung)              Ulrich Seidl (Austria-Ger-Fr, 2012-2013)

10. BEFORE MIDNIGHT Richard Linklater (USA, 2013)

11. THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES Derek Cianfrance (USA, 2013)

12. 12 YEARS A SLAVE Steve McQueen (USA, 2013)

13. DJANGO UNCHAINED Quentin Tarantino (USA, 2012)

14. GRAVITY Alfonso Cuarón (USA, 2013) + ANINGAAQ Jonás Cuarón

15. ONLY GOD FORGIVES Nicolas Winding Refn (DK-Fr-Sw, 2013)

16. TOP OF THE LAKE Jane Campion (UK-Australia, 2013)

17. NO Pablo Larraín (Chile, 2012)

18. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE Jim Jarmusch (USA, 2013)

19. ALL IS LOST JC Chandor (USA, 2013)

20. BORGMAN Alex van Warmerdam (Netherlands, 2013)

21. ZERO DARK THIRTY Kathryn Bigelow (USA, 2012) 22. JAGTEN (The Hunt) Thomas Vinterberg (Dan-Sw-Fr, 2012) 23. FRANCES HA Noah Baumbach (USA, 2013) 24. SPRING BREAKERS Harmony Korine (USA, 2012) 25. A FIELD IN ENGLAND, &  SIGHTSEERS Ben Wheatley (UK, 2013 & 2012)

26. SALVO Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza (Italy, 2013) 27. NEBRASKA Alexander Payne (USA, 2013) 28. GRAND CENTRAL Rebecca Zlotowski (France-Austria, 2013) 29. HOTELL Lisa Langseth (Sweden, 2013) 30. ELLE S'EN VA Emmanuelle Bercot (France, 2013)

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Danse Serpentine (perfomed by Loïe Fuller), 1896 - one of the early films from the Lumiere brothers. In colour. Pure magic.

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Ömheten (Sofia Norlin, 2013)

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Great poster (La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961)

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MUSIKVIDEO | Jag har skrivit det förut, men jag är svag för animation i musikvideos. Som denna, som kom i veckan, dessutom till en av de bästa låtarna i en av årets bästa skivor. Savages - Marshal Dear (from debutskivan Silence Yourself)

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MUSIKVIDEO | Ja, nu är Arcade Fire:s fjärde album här och efter en knapp vecka on repeat måste den hårdbitne fan erkänna sig besegrad, än en gång. Inte nog att kanadensarna har gjort ännu ett musikaliskt mästerverk, deras visuella kreativitet når samma höjder - från Anton Corbijns enormt njutbara Reflektor-video som kom för två månader sen till Afterlife-videon som postades förra veckan och består enbart av klipp från Guldpalmen anno 1959, Marcel Camus Orfeu Negro (en film som jag aldrig riktigt förstått mig på men som jag  får lust att omedelbart se om igen efter det här).

Och igår på Youtubes första music awards gjorde bandet, tillsammans med genierna Spike Jonze och Greta Gerwig, något så unikt som en "live music video", filmat live i en tagning, där GG i stort sett gör det vi alla vill göra när vi lyssnar på Afterlife. Hur coolt är inte detta.

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FILM | Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom was my favourite movie of last year, so my expectations are of course high for his new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. After a beautiful poster some days ago, a first trailer is now available and it looks of course really gorgeous and, well, completely Wes Anderson-ian. The film will be released in March 2014, less than two years after his last work, and it seems like an incredible production pace, given the huge perfectionism on display here. And yes, WA keeps doing the same kind of films, but frankly it's not an issue. Nobody blames painters for doing the same kind of paintings and I kind of prefer to see Anderson improving his trade-mark style rather than trying something different. As he once told The Playlist: "My natural handwriting is neat and it is like my personality. Somewhere along the way I made this choice: I can force myself to not be what I feel I naturally am or I can just go with it and develop it". Obviously he chose the second option.

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MUSIC VIDEOS | Ok, I've always been a sucker for tracking shots on mopeds, and I will never get tired of Nanni Moretti's wonderful vespa drifting in Caro Diario. So no wonder I fell for this one too. French art/music/film collective FAUVE gets a growing reputation for its raw slam lyrics paired with beautiful videos, such as the newly released VOYOU but I just recently discovered the amazing BLIZZARD, apparently something of a hit in France. Addictive and strong, at least for us francophones...

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Fist of Fury

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MUSIK | Ok, vid det här laget vet vi att Arcade Fire släpper nya albumet Reflektor den 29 oktober, och efter den ursnygga teasern som kom i veckan vet vi att de ska göra, ja, "något" den 9 september kl 21 (dvs 9/9 9 pm). Antagligen för att Reflektor har 9 bokstäver, som passar fint i ett 3x3-rutnät. Idag verkar AFs gerillamarketing ha spridit sig till våra gator, då jag har stött på flera sådana kritcirklar på Stockholms trottoarer. Väldigt snygg idé, måste jag säga. Och eftersom kanadensarna har i mitt tycke bara gjort rätt sedan debutskivan Funeral, så är mina förväntningar klart skyhöga. See you on 9/9/9.

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FILM | Under The Skin | Jonathan Glazer is back, finally, nine years after the wonderful and extremely underrated Birth. And it seems it was worth the wait, judging from the early reviews from Venice. And from this amazing first teaser. Will Under The Skin be some kind of Mullholland Drive for the 10s? Can't wait.

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Debut album "Engravings" out Aug 26 2013

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The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)