Kevin Bronson on December 20th, 2013

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Following is a simple Top 10 list of my favorite albums of 2013, abbreviated this year because my other job commitments (and obsession with following L.A. artists) limited my explorations. It was a long and trying year, something of a whirlwind.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, came a surprise: Old friends from across the Atlantic, silent for about two decades, whose early work I considered landmark, whose painterly swirl of guitars shaped my moods and told me secrets and got me home from bars at 2 a.m., whose album from the early 1990s had not left my car in all these years … They released an album. My bloody who?

1. Kitchens of Distinction, “Folly”

Never in a little over a decade of scribbling words about music did I ever figure I’d write about Kitchens of Distinction, other than to occasionally name-check them when new bands reminded me of their singular oeuvre. I’d relegated them secret obsession, the sonic elixir vitae I guzzled after tasting the latest flavor of the week. That said, I’ve been known to make a gift of Kitchens’ 1992 gem “The Death of Cool” to musician friends, because, invariably, there’d be an underpriced copy available on my next trip to Amoeba.

A short bio really doesn’t do them justice, but: Kitchens of Distinction – singer-bassist Patrick Fitzgerald, guitarist Julian Swales  and drummer Dan Godwin – formed in 1985, regrettably named for a fixtures company that they saw on a bus advertisement. They made four fairly well-reviewed albums, starting with 1989’s “Love Is Hell” and followed by “Strange Free World” (’91), “The Death of Cool” and, finally 1994’s “Cowboys & Aliens,” which their cult following liked a lot more than the band actually did.

They straddled the post-punk and shoegaze worlds, more sonically interesting than the Joy Divisions, more literate than the Jesus and Mary Chains. Swales’ guitarscapes were elegiac themselves (indeed, he went on to score for TV and theater), and combined with Fitzgerald’s often brutally frank poetry (and it is not hyperbole to call it that), Kitchens’ music achieved a filmic quality. An art film, at that. Fitzgerald wrestled equally with matters of lust and social class and politics, and it’s hard to believe, in retrospect, that the former didn’t sabotage the trio’s plot. Fitzgerald, a gay man who now practices medicine, laid bare his homosexuality in his lyrics.

But why am I writing in the past tense?

Kitchens of Distinction’s “accidental” reunion is covered brilliantly here in The Quietus. The album it yielded, “Folly” (as yet only available via import, and not yet on Spotify), is devastatingly beautiful. Layered and lush and adorned with orchestration, Kitchens’ first full-length in 19 years feels like a diary made into an epic movie, Fitzgerald’s always-dramatic baritone weaving narratives that aren’t weighed down by their obvious sentimentality. Never have I been more OK with feeling as if a rock frontman is giving a reading.

“Folly’s” highlights are many: “Japan to Jupiter” would stand out on a Bowie album; an everyman’s morning dread is encapsulated brilliantly in “I Wish It Would Snow;” you can envision water droplets on the lens in “Photographing Rain;” Fitzgerald laments lost love as only he can in “Disappeared;” and “Extravagance” (written for the late, eccentric Italian heiress Marchesa Luisa Casati) sends you scurrying to the lyric booklet. Unless you feel the way the singer draws out the word “extravagance” is verse enough, which it might be.

Like most of Kitchens of Distinction’s work, “Folly” is not short-attention-span theater. But it is rewarding in the same manner in which the third through fifth albums by The National are – musically surprising, emotionally arresting, intellectually vivid. And as an example of what guitar rock can be, entirely worth the investment.

||| Stream: “Japan to Jupiter,” “Photographing Rain” and “Tiny Moments, Tiny Omens”

||| Stream via Spotify: “Capsule” (2003’s best-of collection).

And here’s how the rest of my year looked, excepting the local albums, which I covered here:

2. Phosphorescent, “Muchacho”
3. Neko Case, “The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You”
4. Arctic Monkeys, “AM”
5. Speedy Ortiz, “Major Arcana”
6. Superchunk, “I Hate Music”
7. British Sea Power, “Machineries of Joy”
8. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Push the Sky Away”
9. Savages, “Silence Yourself”
10. Guards, “In Guards We Trust”