In 2012 there was Pussy Riot; in 2013, twerking and wrecking balls made fed-up feminists out of otherwise non-committed observers. And back came Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) with a great album. Like Bowie, many figured the riot grrrl-in-chief had retired; in fact she had been battling Lyme disease. Happily, Run Fast is probably Hanna’s most upbeat and conventionally “musical” album yet, even though the subject matter – false friends, change, illness – feels as barbed as ever. Her rollicking five-piece band (including former B-Killer Kathi Wilcox) can punk out or funk out, as Kids in NY attests. Kitty Empire Photograph: PR
There are better-known Americana duos – the Civil Wars, say, or Gillian Welch (who works with her guitarist partner, Dave Rawlings). But the Handsome Family – Brett and Rennie Sparks – have cornered the market in mellifluous, literate American gothic. Nine albums into their tenure, Wilderness gives 12 totem animals each a song. The outcome of human-natural interaction is rarely cosy. On Caterpillars, a sleeping woman is struck by lightning, revived by radio waves and then plagued by electro smog; she escapes to the jungle to be cocooned by giant caterpillars. The sly bossa nova rhythm adds humour to this magic realist ballad of suffering. KE Photograph: PR
2013 produced at least three truly great instrumental records – namely those by the Necks, Dawn of Midi and the Norwegian trio Splashgirl, all operating on the jazz cusp but without the brassiness the genre usually implies. Significantly, Splashgirl’s fourth outing was produced by Randall Dunn, a man more at home with doom metal. Together they unite Splashgirl’s sombre piano and cinematic percussion with drones and bass thrums covered in pitch. But just when you’re settling in for the end of the world, tracks such as All the Vowels Missing pull the action back from the abyss, with Andreas Stensland Løwe’s piano anchoring Field Day Rituals in a very emotional place. KE Photograph: PR
From nowhere – well, Melbourne, Australia – came singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett and a track, Avant Gardener, that sounded like the Velvet Underground crossed with Jeffrey Lewis. With dry slacker wit, Barnett recounts an episode of anaphylactic shock that ends in hospital: it’s both hilarious and moving. Even better, the rest of the songs on her two hastily joined EPs do not let it down. Her band – the Courtney Barnetts, another chuckle – are way above average, backing Barnett’s rambly speak-sing with inventive feints and unexpected inflections. Since then, she has become slightly more notorious for daring to cover Kanye West’s Black Skinhead. Roll on the debut LP. KE Photograph: Adela Loconte/PR
In many ways it's a throwback to hip-hop that was being made before Chancellor Bennett had learned to walk or talk (think the Pharcyde crossed with OutKast), but this album-length mixtape, the 20-year-old's second to date, felt like one of the most vital rap releases of the year. This has partly to do with Chance's infectious flow, at once loose-limbed and lyrically dense. It's also down to the unexpected sensitivity amid the swagger: his lament for the victims of gun crime in his native Chicago, on Paranoia, is quietly heartbreaking. Killian Fox Photograph: PR
Dublin-based guitarist Cian Nugent expands with a full band for his second album, which refracts the raga-like guitar playing of John Fahey and influences as wide apart as the desert blues and Television's Marquee Moon through a Celtic filter. It's not always perfect. There are moments on Grass Above My Head where that approach seems over-fiddle-y and ill thought out. But elsewhere, as on the 16-minute Double Horse, you're with them all the transcendent way. The title describes a baby born with a bit of membrane over its head. Nugent chose the name before he learned from his mother that he was born that way too. KE Photograph: PR
Everything about Joanna Gruesome is suspect. Their name, for a start. The story that this Cardiff five-piece met in an anger management class. The fact that they revive the already hugely revisited C86 and shoegaze tendencies, with scant originality. And yet somehow their album makes for superlative, bristling boy-girl fun regardless. Those inclined towards early My Bloody Valentine will find their sound mimicked very agreeably here on any number of squally, cooed tracks. Songs such as Wussy Void, meanwhile, show a knowledge of the 60s via 80s bands such as Talulah Gosh, and jangle meets hardcore on Lemonade Grrrl. The audacity of the steals here is tempered by the skill with which JG break and enter. KE Photograph: PR
Some of the year’s best country rock came not from Nashville or Austin but Wales. The romantic partnership of Paul Zervas and Kathryn Pepper (sparked in a Cardiff folk club) delivers swooning vocal harmonies, driven along by a prairie wind of jumbo acoustics and the odd sigh of steel guitar. It’s an album of big skies and canyons, what they call “cosmic folk”, touched by the spirit of 1969. Buffalo Crow is the standout, a shimmering encounter with a Native American shaman, but there are songs about being broke in a small town for shade from the sunshine. Neil Spencer Photograph: PR
Take three Bristol multi-instrumentalists and a shared passion for Albion’s rural byways and you have a second album of Betjemanian lyricism. Not that there are any words here, just 22 finely wrought meditations on subjects from children’s street games to Hebridean bays and sci-fi TV cult show Quatermass. Chiming melodies on glockenspiel and guitar are set against jazzy trumpet and a cornucopia of stringed things. The tunes are serpentine, the mood playful. The recording venues include allotment sheds, chapels, a Welsh waterfall and a Bristol flyover, and the aroma of muddy leaves and old nettles is almost tangible. A delight. NS Photograph: PR
Adam Waldmann is no respecter of boundaries. The third album from the Brit saxophonist's group pushes persuasively into folk and neo-classical territory, with half the record given over to song. Sweden's Emilia Mårtensson's wistful tones return, slinky on Narrowboat Man, a duet with Ireland's Marc O'Reilly, who also voices a love ode penned by actor Rupert Friend. Unleashing London soul star Omar on the folksy Song for the Open Road proves a masterstroke, too. Waldmann's playing is joyous, not least on The 99, his tribute to the Occupy movement, and the various shades of cello, piano and stalking bass fall easily into place. NS Photograph: PR
Zoe Francis is a singer to listen out for. She communicates a love and understanding of classic American song with the lightest of touches. It sounds easy and casual until you notice how deftly each turn of phrase falls in just the right place, both rhythmically and to chime with the meaning of the words. Her choice of not-quite-forgotten songs (Down With Love, I Wish I Knew, etc) is canny, too. With the A-team accompaniment of pianist David Newton, guitarist Colin Oxley and bassist Andrew Cleyndert generating just the right kind of gentle but irresistible swing, it’s a classy set. Dave Gelly Photograph: PR
Profeti della Quinta (Linn)
The all-male, five-strong Israeli vocal ensemble Profeti della Quinta focus on music of the 16th and 17th century. One of their specialist areas is Salomone Rossi, the Italian-Jewish Renaissance composer who was a contemporary of Monteverdi and worked in Mantua at the court of the Gonzagas. He lived in the city’s ghetto but was excused from wearing the yellow star owing to his high standing at court. His sister, Europa, was a pioneering opera singer. This expertly performed collection of Italian madrigals, Hebrew prayers and instrumental music deserves recognition as a hidden gem, introducing this composer to many of us for the first time. Fiona Maddocks Photograph: PR
Momo Kodama (ECM)
Why shouldn’t a CD be more like a concert? This simple hour-long recital programme is a perfect example of musical logic, with the exotic concentrated colours of Ravel’s Miroirs and the extravagant extended birdsongs of Messiaen’s La fauvette des jardins linked by the elusive Japanese bridge of Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch, just four minutes long but evoking both the other composers. Though there are two photos, there is not one word about pianist Momo Kodama in the ECM booklet, but her playing has a rare glint and crispness of colour, like Messiaen’s dazzling birds reflected in Ravel’s sun-kissed valleys. Nicholas Kenyon Photograph: PR
Ernst Kovacic (violin), Mathilde Hoursiangou (piano) (Toccata)
Austria’s leading contemporary composer, 87-year-old Friedrich Cerha, hardly figures at all on British concert programmes (just once at the Proms, for instance, in 1999) so this recording is very much one that got away. As you might expect from a man best known for his completion of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Toccata’s release is not always the easiest listening, but it does offer a handy tour of 20th-century compositional methods, encompassing neoclassicism, 12-tone technique and serialism from a career of abundant creativity. Probably not one to pop in the player while you’re peeling the sprouts. Stephen Pritchard Photograph: Toccata Classics
(Directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner, 2012, StudioCanal, U)
A fringe hit at Cannes last year but scarcely released in the UK, this utterly beguiling French fancy is the year’s best animated film by a long, pastel-coloured chalk. Based on a popular series of children’s books, it’s an unexpectedly serene follow-up from directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar to their manic A Town Called Panic: a wistful tale of forbidden friendship between a misfit bear and a winsome mouse, with far more wit and eccentricity than the cutesy premise implies. An English-language dub featuring Forest Whitaker premieres at Sundance next month, but the subtitled version is already on DVD. Guy Lodge Photograph: PR
(Carlos Saura, 1976, Manga Films, 18)
I have an enterprising university Spanish lecturer to thank for ensuring that I was already in love with this hitherto neglected 1976 marvel – English title Raise Ravens – from director Carlos Saura when it surfaced as the year’s most welcome vintage release on dual-disc Blu-ray and DVD format. Still, transferred from a remastered 35mm print (theatrically released by the BFI on 2011), it feels a crisp discovery all over again. An elliptical, poetic portrait of Franco’s withered Spain as viewed through the eyes of a guilt-ridden young girl (the astonishing Ana Torrent), it’s coated no longer in murk but in rich, velvety shadow. GL Photograph: Courtesy of BFI
(Created by Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, Jonathan Krisel, Netflix)
Now in its fourth series, this cult US sketch comedy belatedly made its way across the pond this year. You could fork out for the boxsets, but its first three seasons are now available to stream on Netflix, where its lo-fi shoestring charms feel most at home. Devised by former Saturday Night Live regular Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney singer Carrie Brownstein, it’s a mercilessly deadpan satire of contemporary hipster culture, filtered through the microcosm of Portland, Oregon, the tofu utopia of middle-class America. Fad diets, feminist bookshops and neo-folk music all come in for a riotous ribbing; a UK response (StokeNewingtonia, perhaps?) is in order. GL Photograph: Everett / Rex Features
(Michel Franco, 2012, StudioCanal, 15)
No film this year was less deserving of the straight-to-video label than this remarkable Mexican conversation piece – a daring winner of the Un certain regard award at Cannes last year. Directed with an unnervingly steady hand by Michel Franco, it’s among the most vividly upsetting studies of high-school bullying yet put to screen. For all its topicality, however, this is no idle issue drama: the last act is a stinging segue into moral tail-chasing of which Michael Haneke would be proud. GL Photograph: PR
(Antonio Campos, 2012, Eureka, 18)
Unfortunately short-lived in cinemas – it’s not exactly the date movie of the year, for starters – Campos’s coldly mesmerising second feature unexpectedly emerged as one of the year’s most glistening Blu-ray packages thanks to the ever-discerning curators of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label. Detailing the psychological breakdown of a young American in Paris (Brady Corbet, acting most unlike Gene Kelly) with radical visual and sonic detailing, the film’s already a brutal beauty; accessorised with a surfeit of fascinating extras (including Campos’s excellent 2006 short The Last 15) and a lavish 52-page booklet, it’s a vital collectible for US indie aficionados. GL Photograph: PR
