Music is the best -- can we all agree on this? And 2013 was another stellar year for the stuff. Here are some of my very favorite albums this year. Click on each title to hear a song from the album on YouTube. Please share what you loved this year -- music. movies, books, tv programs, events, anything!!

Top Ten

Arp – More 

The best Brian Eno album of the year.

Buried Feather – Buried Feather 

Dreamy and spaced-out album from Melhourne, Australia. Excellent guitar + organ + bass.

Cass McCombs  - Big Wheel and Others 

A trove of great songs.

Steve Gunn – Time Off 

If you find a good riff, stick to it.

The Holydrug Couple – Noctuary

Best argument for taking psychedelics in Santiago.

Cate Le Bon - Mug Museum

A little bit Cat Power, a little bit Televsion. My favorite female performance of the year.

Stephen Malkmus – Plays Ege Bamyasi

Pavement plus Can. More or less literally.

Parquet Courts – Light Up Gold / Tall All the Things That You Broke EP

Pavement plus the Minutemen. Not literally.

Kurt Vile – Wakin on a Pretty Day

Hands down my favorite album of the year. Mellow, pretty and virtuosic. Taught me a whole new way of playing guitar.

Zachary Cale – Blue Rider

Pairing: Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left

Here's a taste of Arp:

The Next Ten

Cave - Threace / Bitchin Bajas – Bitchtronics

I'm super-impressed by this guy Cooper Crain, who realized two great albums in very different moods.

Follakzoid – II

Pairing:  Neu! – Neu!

Foxygen – We are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic

Like they took all the Stones and Kinks albums from between 1967 and 73, sliced the choruses from the verses, threw them in the air, and played them in whatever sloppy order they landed in.

I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990

Will certainly mellow out your evenings.

James McKeown – Sublime Knight Elect

Mellow and  strange instrumentals

Kosmischer Laufer – Volume One 

Krautrock grooves that could just go on forever and forever and forever, far as I’m concerned.

Moon – Moon

Deerhunter album (EP?) of the year.

Kevin Morby – Harlem River

More great, atmospheric songs.

Mick Turner – Don’t Tell the Driver

Pairing: Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden

Jonathan Wilson – Fanfare

Pairing: David Crosby – If I Could Only Remember My Name