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Preparing to make a year-end list always exposes the bad habits in my music consumption.

Looking over to my Spotify history for 2013, I found that between August and December, I listened Fear Fun by Father John Misty upwards of 150 times. So in a big way, my year was defined by a six-month affair with an album came out in 2012. I’m one year behind the cool folks and that seems about right. I will absolutely crack open Reflektor sometime next summer, so don’t even worry about it.

So this isn’t the perfect critical reflection on 2013 — that doesn’t exist anywhere — but it does contain some of my favorite things. I use the word “myth” at least one time. It talks about The Killers with both apology and admiration. I have one last point to make about Tim Kasher’s Adult Film even after one story and two podcasts.

Also, making this list gave me the opportunity to reflect on six months of working for Hear Nebraska. When I think of all the beautiful, passionate people I’m privileged to work with and around, my heart becomes very warm.

Happy 2014, and here are some of my favorite musical moments of 2013 before we make new ones: 

BEST NEBRASKA ALBUMS

1. Adult Film by Tim Kasher

Below you can hear HN’s Jacob Zlomke and I discuss Adult Film in detail. It was both of our favorites this year, a consensus we came to independently. Before that, though, one additional note:

One of the points we never made it around to is that Tim Kasher is one the few figures in Nebraska music for whom many of us have a preconceived notion. We see the songwriter and album-writer as interested in irony, humor and big ideas and living those out through artistic torture, concept albums and a lot of laughs. Adult Film was an album that absolutely confirmed the most enjoyable parts of his artistic persona on a platter of pop and rock. I feel like that’s important to note.

Here’s more:

2. MOTEL by Travelling Mercies

3. Dust In Wire by Kill County

BEST NATIONAL ALBUMS

1. Tall Tall Shadow by Basia Bulat

With Tall Tall Shadow, the Canadian folk musician Basia Bulat accomplished a unique feat. Now, I don’t believe in throwing around the word “sellout” or ragging on pop music, but I will admit that there is a correlation between making a genre feel catchier (maybe, closer to center) and music becoming too obvious. On her third album, Bulat still totes her trusty autoharp and an Andean string-plucking instrument called the charango while also offering her most consumable melodies to date. But even while employing the simplest of four-chord melodies, Bulat still refuses (with a kind smile, of course) to spell out much of her songs. There is abject sadness at the loss of a friend on Tall Tall Shadow, but the 10 lamentations are elevated by the gospel wholeness of Bulat’s joyful bellows.

BEST NATIONAL SONGS

1. “Warm Hands” by The Kickback

“Warm Hands” is the b-side of the Chicago rock band’s Please Hurt seven-inch. It used to be titled simply “Death Song,” so that gives us just a little insight into the cryogenic ambiguity of whatever “I can be the bag man for your warm hands” means. The band might still perform a sparse synth/glockenspiel version of the song live, but the recording on the seven-inch stands alone. The instrumentation seems to speak to the band’s continuing push-pull relationship to The Strokes, and it's the smoothest version of the classic Kickback breaking point. Drowning in guitars akin to Fleetwood Mac’s “Seven Wonders,” singer Billy Yost still jumps octaves up 75 percent of the way through and screams into the song’s atmosphere. Death isn’t an uncommon subject in The Kickback’s work, and while the songs are too smart and too cynical to forget its inevitable arrival, the symbolic scream in the final chorus is a cathartic resistance every time.

2. “Big House” by Deer Tick

This year’s Deer Tick album Negativity pointed toward a kind of straightforward classic rock that ironed out much of the rage and desperation of their earlier albums. However on the final track of Negativity, “Big House” tells us more about the undoing of that desperation than just its absence. In a song about heroin addiction, the now-sober singer John McCauley lets it all run down his arms.

3. “Shot at the Night” by The Killers

With this M83-produced single, The Killers returned to old form after a lackluster album of Brandon Flowers weeping over Springsteen and the devil. “Shot at the Night” sends Flowers’ smartly soaring with an important injection of Cyndi Lauper that carts the listener back to 2002’s Hot Fuss. Give it a year before this song is backing a movie scene of a lost character on cab ride to a debaucherous night club while observing a towering cityscape. Then things probably take a dark turn. I hope that’s where The Killers’ next album comes in.

BEST NEBRASKA SONGS

1. “Easy Thoughts” by Twinsmith

This song from Twinsmith's debut album was my 2013 Nebraska Earworm of the year. I can explain:

2. “Maggie” by Kill County

The prettiest song on a record that doesn’t promote prettiness, “Maggie” was my winner for Best Sad Bastard Lyric of 2013. I explain here:

3. “Frida” by Conchance

It’s a great example of Conchance’s combining a love of history with sharp, summer jam sensibility. But what amazes me about this song is Downtown James Brown creating a haunting piano loop out of Bessie Smith’s jazz standard “Oh Daddy.” It’s scary and unrecognizable, which frightens me even more.

BEST ALBUM ART

1. Dagger Beach by John Vanderslice

The cover of Dagger Beach looks like a scrap of water-colored parchment, and it’s the face of a collection of songs with a commitment to both sharpness and haze. Dagger Beach is the Seattle musician’s 10th album, and to hear him talk about its brilliant design is something educational.

BEST CONCERTS

1. Tallest Man on Earth at Waiting Room — Omaha, Nebraska

Calling concerts religious experiences is always a strange thing to say. Even though I think I’ve said it in passing before, it probably says more about how little I know about religion than the show. What I do know is that after The Tallest Man on Earth played at The Waiting Room, my face quite literally ached from smiling. I’d seen Kristian Matsson one year before at Town Hall in New York City in an ornate theater that he filled to the scaffolding with his open guitar tunings and guttural voice. Standing before him at the Waiting Room was more like living inside his mythical folk songs.

photo by Nickolai Hammar

Here’s what I wrote about Mattson's stage presence back in June:

“Matsson acted as his own ragdoll at The Waiting Room, sometimes hurling himself into the rearmost curtain of the stage as though he might not come ever back from those shadows. And when he inevitably did make it back to the microphone, people cheered him on. When he finally cleared the stage after 17 songs and an encore, it was littered with picks he’d thrown into the ground liked spiked footballs at the end of a dozen triumphant conclusions.”

2. Dawes at The Blue Note — Columbia, Missouri

Sometimes the best measure of a successful live show is not how faithfully a band performs their material, but how after months and years on the road, they still play the songs as though they’re coming out of the woodwork for the first time right then. That was the experience of watching Dawes singer/guitarist/songwriter Taylor Goldsmith on stage at The Blue Note in October. Punctuating two hours of shredding on his Fender, Goldsmith delivered the pontification of his lyrics to the crowd with hand gestures and a face twisted by incredulity, like he was speaking off the top of his head.

Seeing Goldsmith sing “… like January Christmas light under billion year old stars, she comes up with more of what is lost than what is found…” as though it were improvised is drawn into my memory.   

3. David Vidal at Zoo Bar — Lincoln, Nebraska

BEST MUSIC VIDEOS

1. “From the Window Seat” by Dawes

Taylor Goldsmith’s hair gets staticky at 30,000 feet. Also, imagine all the different times a songwriter has tried to pen lyrics about being on a plane while being on a plane. There’s nowhere that’s ever worked out, except for this one magnificent time.

“They are pointing out the exits, but it looks more like prayer…”

2. "22" by Night Beds (Live At Urban Outfitters Omaha)

Don’t pretend you don’t like your own work, Winston. We can see your face.

3. “Living Proof” by Gregory Alan Isakov

BEST ONSTAGE FASHION STATEMENTS

1. Kill County at the 1200 Club

Every member of the band wore sleeves to suit the gallant atmosphere of the Holland Center, so they owned the night before they played a note.

photo by Bridget McQuillan

2. John McCauley’s III Chicken Suit at Slowdown

I think it was probably hot, and I know it was definitely fuzzy. And we know from Deer Tick’s new album that he made that decision totally sober. Astonishing.

photo by Michael Todd

BEST NEBRASKA MUSIC DEVELOPMENT

1. Tim Kasher conquers Twitter.

This morning, Kasher wished an unprovoked "Happy New Year" to Melissa Joan Hart, so what else do you need to know? My favorite facet of Kasher’s social media presence is that if you look at his retweet responses, he’s left with 10-15 characters to make fun of people who’ve tweeted at him. Embracing artistic limitations. The Robert Frost of our day.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.