Music is awesome, isn’t it? Whether intentional or not, music is a big part of everyone’s lives. It’s all around us: on TV, in ads, in our headphones and earbuds attached to our smart phones with streaming audio. Chances are if you’re reading Submerge, you love music too. Even though there is more great music being made than ever and access to it is becoming easier and easier, it’s still sometimes hard to know where to look to discover new tunes. Enter Submerge’s annual year-end best-of list! In 2013 there were so many amazing albums released that we actually expanded this story to feature the top 30 instead of the top 20. You’ll notice that a lot of this list, approximately 50 percent, is local. That’s not by mistake. That’s not because we tried to include local albums just to round out our list. No, we just have that much talent right here in our own city.

Compiled by all of our contributing writers and staff, we hope this list will help you discover something new. And because all of our attention spans are so short nowadays (are you still with us?), we kept our reviews to 140 characters or less, because we all know that reading someone’s short, to-the-point Twitter post is a helluva lot better than reading someone’s four-paragraph-long Facebook rant. Now, set forth and discover some new jams! Who knows, your new favorite band/album may be waiting for you somewhere on this list.

30.

Danny Brown
Old

Fool’s Gold

What can you say about Danny Brown? He’s rap’s Jim Morrison, The Lizard King. Old has been on repeat since the day I got it. And will be.

29.

Run the Jewels
Run the Jewels

Fool’s Gold

As dope as promised, it gets no better than this. Killer Mike is at his best, and El-P provides the perfect sonic-scape for destruction.

28.

Biosexual
The Window Wants the Bedroom

Debacle

Fantastically produced debut album of avant-garde supergroup featuring the great Jocelyn of ALAK, brother Michael RJ Saalman and Zac Nelson.

27.

Paper Pistols
Deliver Us From Chemicals

Self-released

2 can do it all. Skinner & Lydell are all binary: beard/belle; drum/voice; age/youth; decadent/austere; beautiful/music.

26.

EGG
Overly Easy

Self-released

If Cake and Phish had a baby? Close, but doesn’t quite describe this amazing band. An infectious sound that makes you wanna get up and GO.

25.

M.I.A.
Matangi

N.E.E.T.

M.I.A. is pissed off, and still fresh as ever, rapping over aggressive beats and keeping the Sri Lankan sound alive.

24.

The Men
New Moon

Sacred Bones

Brooklyn noise punks retreat to a rural cabin, finding a balance between a Mudhoney dustup and a Grateful Dead peace-in.

23.

Gauntlet Hair
Stills

Dead Oceans

Gauntlet Hair dropped the dopest, weirdest album we’ve heard in a minute and then immediately broke up. Spacey, strange, with a dash of pop.

22.

Jacuzzi Boys
Jacuzzi Boys

Hardly Art

The Miami trio switched things up with a more polished than pure garage sound. Still playful and infectious, just adding new dimensions.

21.

Gap Dream
Shine Your Light

Burger

Mid-tempo sex appeal born of psychedelic melancholy and rock ‘n’ roll disco; drugs, dance, drugs, booze, dance, fuck.

20.

Miley Cyrus
Bangerz

RCA
 
Crying cats ftw! The most dissed/discussed AoY; w/ hits by Dr. Luke, Pharrell & Mike WiLL, twerk! This is Miley’s year.

19.

Chuuwee
Thrill

Self-released

With rap albums you usually either get bangin’ trap beats OR real lyricism. On Thrill you get both. One of Sac’s best in top form.

18.

Century Got Bars & Bru Lei
Midtown Marauders

Self-released

A flawless Tribe tribute and audible tour of this fair city’s nucleus. If you’ve spent more than five seconds in Midtown, you want this. 

17.

David Bowie
The Next Day

RCA

Charming, confidently progressive with kick-ass guitar solos. It’s classic Bowie with a modern, enthusiastically suspended twist.

16.

Black Sabbath
13

Vertigo/Universal

Pure smokin’ stoner doom rock at its finest! Timeless lyrics and riffs. This album picks up where the band left off with Ozzy 30 years ago.

15.

Nails
Abandon All Life 

Southern Lord

Yeah, it’s a light version of Unsilent Death (the most brutal album ever), but it’s still hard and evil enough to kill your grandma.   

14.

Bombino
Nomad

Nonesuch

A perfect album for trekking the Sahara. Blues guitar, smooth Tuareg vox, steady rhythm. Produced by Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys).

13.

Meat Puppets
Rat Farm

Megaforce Records

Return to form for desert-baked Brothers Kirkwood. Simple, honest, catchy… Bare bones and poignant. May the Puppets live forever.

12.

Foals
Holy Fire

Transgressive

With Holy Fire, these British boys delivered their most focused (and heaviest) album to date, bringing a new meaning to “modern rock.”

11.

City of Vain
Back Against the Wall

Self-released

Sacto punkers bring forth one of the best punk rock records of the year, not just locally, but globally. Warm tones and classic style!

10.

Middle Class Rut
Pick Up Your Head

Bright Antenna

More fierce rock ‘n’ roll from Sac’s Dynamic Duo…and we <3 it! Grimy grooves and distorted chaos mark MC Rut’s best album to date.

09.

Horseneck
The Worst People Ever

Artery

Booze-fueled bone-breaking sludge metal with a sense of humor. This EP gives Sac’s heavy music fans something to smile about.

08.

Tel Cairo
Voice of Reason

Illicit Artists

Tel Cairo is the best kind of weird. If Kurt Cobain made hip-hop music in space it would sound like Tel Cairo’s Voice of Reason.

07.

Foxygen
We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic

Jagjaguwar

Flamboyantly lilting pop with occasional Jagger twists; creates proneness for nymph-like prancing, sometimes mincing.

06.

Death Grips
Government Plates

Self-released

A dizzying mix of poetry, yelling and other stuff people hate. But in the eloquent words of MC Ride, “Fuck your idols/ Suck my dick.”

05. 

Screature
Screature

Ethel Scull

A solid debut by the Sacramento quartet. Guttural lyrical torrents coalesce with shadowy, rhythmic tones, blending into a dynamic framework of sound.

04.

!!!
THR!!!ER

Warp Records

Your favorite dance-punk band is back again with more rump shaking, baby making, all-night-party-inducing tunes. Instant classic!

03.

Cove
Candles

Self-released

It’s an insightful album. An emotional excavation replete with lyrical fluidity, melodic flirtations and a groovy aftertaste.

02.

Doombird
Cygnus

Eightmaps

Vivid percussive landscapes seen through a celestial-tinged lens. Spacey harmonies embedded within hypnotic textures and bright timbres.

01.

Chelsea Wolfe
Pain Is Beauty

Sargent House

A beautifully haunting album. Wolfe’s ghostly vocals, layered with cascading guitars, violins and synths, will put you in a trance.

Sacramento experimental band Cove readies for first EP and tour

It’s two weeks before Scott Ferreter’s band Cove drops its first EP (mostly self-recorded in Ferreter’s mom’s basement), and before the trio goes on its first tour in the freshly purchased “Cove Mobile.” He doesn’t explicitly state it, but Ferreter sounds like he’s floating on nirvana right now.

The 24-year-old Sacramento native patiently waited for these pieces to come together since he left his last band, Comfort Twin, in Santa Cruz more than a year ago.

“It was a zoo to begin with, an eight-piece band and half lived in the Bay Area and the other half in Santa Cruz,” he recalls. “It was a really fun band. Eight pieces is a real pain in the ass for getting together, but once you got it together, in every sense of the word, it was great.”

Ferreter moved back to Sacramento when his dad was diagnosed with cancer, and shortly thereafter Comfort Twin dissolved. The move became an opportunity to create the band he always wanted.

“Once I moved back I was really excited to start a more straightforward band,” he says. Through advertising and hanging fliers at Javalounge downtown, Ferreter met drummer Steven Cranston and 27-year-old bassist Charlie Dale.

The three fine-tuned their sound and lyrics, and had the EP and tour upcoming when Cranston left the band after getting a job. Ferreter became frantic to find a drummer last-minute.

“Our musical existence was weighing heavily on finding a drummer. I was worried we would have to settle so it was humorous when Omar pulled up and he was exactly what we wanted,” Ferreter says. “Charlie and I pontificated on finding a drummer, saying we should get someone who is good at even asking for money at the end of the night. The two of us, we’re not tough guys, so when Omar said the other day, ‘two things I really like is dealing with sound guys and dealing with club owners,’ it was meant to be.”

Omar Barajas, 23, also from Sacramento, joined Cove after stints in other local bands.

“The other bands I played in were completely different,” he says, on break from his day job. “The first was instrumental, then I toured with Sister Crayon and that’s electronically driven with heavy beats. But Cove is really mellow.”

It was a welcome change. Barajas, whose major influences are jazz and bands like Silversun Pickups, wanted a slower pace.

“I was used to just banging my drums, but now I’m focusing more on my technical skills,” he says.

He joined right after Cove recorded its EP. The new trio had their first show in mid-October and Barajas says he’s been able to see the backbone of the songs and insert his own style.

“Scott is a good songwriter, so it’s easy to get lost in the music.”

Ferreter says most of the seven songs on this EP came about from jamming together.

“When I got to Sacramento I had all these songs that I wanted to put on an album. As we started playing together, it was immediate, we saw this energy together that we couldn’t create on our own,” he says. “Cove is my first experience of actual co-writing. These sounds would not have happened had these exact people not been together at that time. Everyone has differing interests and musical paths but there is enough overlap in the stuff that matters: how to approach music, the process of playing together.”

And then there is a good amount of absolute happenstance, Ferreter says.

“I’m a Craigslist junkie, mostly in the name of getting a band together, so if a show needs to happen, I’ve got the stuff for that. I found this $30 electric piano and like a week later, we met Charlie and piano was his first instrument,” Ferreter says. “The last band he was in, he was playing drums but he was really excited about playing piano, and it became instrumental to us as a band.”

On their self-released album, Dale plays electric piano, synthesizer and bass. A few songs also have horns with help from one of Ferreter’s former bandmates, and extra vocals with help from David Lipp, who recorded half the record and, according to Ferreter, “took the project from an absolute zygote to a complete creature ready for the world.

“David (Spare Room Studios, San Francisco) did all of the engineering and I just cannot say enough about it,” he says. “He did it out of the love for the music. He took a handful of sand and turned it into a nice tropical beach. I’ve come to a loss of words, I can’t say enough.”

Some sounds from the album will obviously not be part of the tour, such as Lipp’s vocals, the horns and a full-sized harp that Dale received as a birthday rental.

“Of course in the middle of recording this album, we have a harp so it’s a no-brainer,” Ferreter laughs.

The album doesn’t have a theme per se, but the band thinks of it as more a process of selection.

“These are the songs over the last year we’ve felt a lot of energy from. We were thinking of timing, of this era of our lives. We have some songs that are some of our favorites, but we didn’t end up including them because certain songs feel like they ripen and will start rotting soon thereafter. We play what’s feeling ripe right now, what’s relevant right now. It was also about what tools we have. We have some grandiose ideas for other songs but don’t have what we would need to record them yet.”

For now, the band says, the EP and the tour is the direction they’re moving musically. It’s not a hint of what they’re doing—seven songs could be considered an album—it’s a full piece of pie.

“Basically,” Barajas adds, “If you appreciate good songwriting and cohesiveness, you’re gonna dig it. If you like folky writing, you’re gonna dig it.”

The tour and EP release party start at Luigi’s Fun Garden Nov. 7, 2013 with tickets on a sliding scale from $5 to $10. The orbit of the tour will be around Seattle, Olympia and Portland and will last two weeks. Check out Covetheband.com for more information and to sample two recordings.