It may be bit early for “Best of 2013? lists, but it‰’s the middle of 2013 and we‰’re excited to share our most-repeated new albums from the last six months. This week, read about some of WVAU‰’s favorite records released in 2013.

In between four months of traveling in Europe and a summer of working in D.C., I returned home to suburban Philadelphia for a week to regain my bearings, with just one thing on my to-do list — to visit the Kurt Vile mural, the painting the Philly rocker commissioned in an abandoned lot to serve as the art for his newest release Wakin on a Pretty Daze. And while splashing an album title permanently on the side of a building sounds like a stunt more characteristic of Drake than Vile, the mural only hinted at Vile’s expanded ambitions approaching Pretty Daze, followed in turn by the release of the album’s impressionist painting of a lead single “Wakin on a Pretty Day.”

Vile‰’s sonic palette of muddled Americana shifts on Pretty Daze, abandoning the shadows that cloaked Smoke Ring for my Halo in favor of a newfound warmth. Vile still populates his songs with hazy vignettes woven from memories and nightmares, but the glow enveloping Pretty Daze suggests that Vile‰’s made peace with his demons, rising above the restlessness and peril that’s always gripped his music. Vile’s Jesus-like visage has inspired saintly comparisons in the past, but Pretty Daze shows him at the most psychically elevated we’ve seen yet.

And in a year of breathlessly high-profile releases, Vile’s casual transcendence has never felt more welcome. Sure, Pretty Daze doesn‰’t pack the same thrills as the crop of comeback albums that fell from the sky into my Dropbox this year — m b v, The 20/20 Experience, #RAM — and with five album releases in five years, Vile is nothing if not relentlessly consistent. But Vile‰’s newest offers a different kind of gratification, the element of surprise that comes not from waking up to a surprise new album from your favorite band, but rather from hearing a master songwriter tweak his craft towards nirvana.