LA Font is a rock band based in Echo Park. If you read about music, you are probably familiar with Echo Park as it has become famous as the neighborhood a mere 7 miles northeast of where the Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down. Unlike the late Biggie Smalls, LA Font records a brand of rock and roll that some have branded “independent” or, for short, “indie.” There are other bands in Echo Park that have followed suit and made a similar brand of indie rock.
LA Font is reminiscent of the Ponys, Silkworm (singer and songwriter Danny Bobbe spent time in Missoula, MT, no less), Built to Spill and others. That’s good company. Bobbe comes swinging, the guitars are chaotic, and the rhythm section keeps it all from derailing.
LA Font’s new album, Diving Man was released November 19 on New Professor Music, the boutique label that’s home to many of L.A.’s best underground bands. The album is all wry love songs and tales of failing your way through bad friendships and guitar heroics.
Bassist Greg Katz went through his record collection, and after careful consideration, these are his five favorite albums of 2013.
http://www.ranker.com/list/la-font_s-5-favorite-guitar-driven-albums-of-2013/la-font,
Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold
If I was writing a history book on 2013, Parquet Courts' Light Up Gold would probably be what I'd say is the most important album. Like, bigger-than-Yeezus levels of important. It like actually tells you about what it is to be existing here and now. These guys toy like cat-and-mouse with the malaise of our dumb declining society: we're all gonna have worse lives than our parents because the middle class will evaporate/is evaporating/has evaporated, we'll all be posting cat pictures for a living because that's the only way to make the rent, and we're trying to fabricate meaning wherever we can and then wring it out of the fabric, or at least mosh sometimes, because otherwise being an American human right now is a stupid vortex of despair: "I remember the feeling of the useless existence / of the drunk, bored and listless / endless waiting for something / that I knew wasn't coming."
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, II
If you like inventive guitar playing, I feel like this has been a good year for it, and Ruban Nielson from UMO might be the chief justice of the guitar supreme court in 2013. His psychedelic folk fingerpicking doesn't call a lot of attention to itself (even though his waterlogged guitar sound itself does). But seeing him do it live at a couple shows this year, I felt like he was just way ahead of the pack, weaving together interesting melodies and counterpoint. His sublime songs about drifting and depression, woven together with his dexterous playing, made this a go-to LP on the turntable this year for me. When I couldn't decide what to play, II is usually what I'd put on.
Speedy Ortiz - Major Arcana
Even though this album is loud and sometimes even brutal, it has a depth in the lyrics that eludes most mortal bands. If you were able to write words like Sadie's, this poetry that doubles in on itself and then back out again, with wry, sometimes sad wit that lands somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Elliott Smith, you'd probably want to write folk songs so that the lyrics took center stage. Speedy wisely does the exact opposite, bludgeoning you with a twisted, mangled wreck of distorted guitar mastery, with the lyrics crying out from under the pile.
Ovlov, AM
In terms of raw number of listens, AM might be the album I put on the most this year. It's this majestic punk-gaze from Connecticut. It sounds a lot like Hum, this big, warm, welcoming explosion of saturated guitars. The lyrics are simple and vague, so you get to pin your own meaning on them. But really the energy just doesn't let up, the grooves are tight, the guitars are torrential, and the melodies are insanely well-crafted.
Deerhunter, Monomania
It's possible that the stretch from "Sleepwalking" to "Back to the Middle" to "Monomania" is the best three song sequence on a rock record ever. Bradford Cox takes three very basic feelings – disappointment, heartbreak and obsession – and spins them into three exquisite garage pop nuggets that say so much about life in so little time. These songs could be teleported into pretty much any decade and be among the best of that decade. I think people have gotten so used to Bradford's brilliance at this point that people overlooked it on this album.