2023 needed more great music
Here's a list of what I liked - I don't think I'll be coming back to much
Once again, I feel compelled by dark forces to catalogue the music I liked this year. It wasn’t a great year! What’s ordinarily an agonising effort to cull a list down to 25 records felt this year like a desperate attempt to bestow ‘best-of’ meaning and heft to some perfectly good, but hardly world-shaking records.
Nonetheless, catalogue we must, or the list gods will come for us.
Livxe - Girl in the Half Pearl
It was good!
Fever Ray - Radical Romantics
It was good!
Jamila Woods - Water Made Us
It was good! Her last one was better!
Water From Your Eyes - Everyone’s Crushed
It was good! It was also cool in a kind of ‘borrow the experimental spirit of early-00s rockers’ way.
Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love
It was good! I had a bath while it played once and I felt Soothed.
Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World
It was good! I’m always relieved when bands can age gracefully. That said, it doesn’t sound all that different to what they did (better) 20 years ago).
Kelela - Raven
Take Me Apart in 2017 was so good that this seemed to pass a little unremarked upon. Where’s the shock of the new!? But at her best, as on the thrilling ‘Contact’, she’s still keeping the torch of a sometimes flailing electronic scene burning.
boygenius - the record
Look, I could have tried to be cool and ‘above’ a supergroup, but look they’re very talented, and I’m enjoying Julien Baker’s shift into Gremlin Mode.
Sigur Ros - ATTA
Am I 42 years old? Yes.
Ratboys - The Window
Much as a 42 year old who listened to Agaetis Byrjun on repeat for 18 months cannot not feel the siren call of Jonsi’s vocals, nor can he resist a quirky callback band doing a near-cosplay of '<insert early 90s indie band>. Much like Wednesday did it too, but more about them later.
Youth Lagoon - Heaven is a Junkyard
Delightful crypto-folk infused with enough electroquirk to keep things interesting, and sufficient Midwestern ephemera and esoterica to make me feel like I know anything at all about Boise, ID.
Jaimie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
Is my year end list ever truly complete without a posthumous release from a beloved niche-jazz trumpeter? Reader, it is not.
billy woods & Kenny Segal - Maps
There’s a subgenre of hip hop that probably doesn’t have a name, but I put billy woods and Mach Hommy are in it, and it rules.
Parannoul - After the Magic
I think it’s lovely that Parannoul, whose debut was a bedroom album that so lacked studio tools it scuzzed his songs into shoegaze oblivion, took the chance to access those tools to….dial it way down and make what is best described as ‘cherry blossom-pop’, a phrase I basically lifted from the album cover. A delight.
Wednesday - Rat Saw God
The first time I played this record, it was in the car with my wife, and she so hated the screaming crescendo of ‘Bull Believer’ that it persuaded me I didn’t like. That was stupid. This record kicks ass. Another 90s throwback but with enough 21st century savvy to leaven the college radio/Nirvana worship shtick.
Yves Tumour - Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
You simply have to respect artists who can indulge themselves and pull it off. Avant-pop hasn’t really had a moment for over a decade, but somehow Sean Lee Bowie keeps his head above water, borrowing heavily from Prince and the other Bowie, while adding the kind of flourish which will all but guarantee a future absence of tiktok virality. That’s good.
Lana del Ray - Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard
Too many words have been written about Ms del Ray. When she’s good, she’s great. She needs to charge less for her records.
Model/Actriz - Dogsbody
Hardcore music has been ever so slightly less hardcore in recent years. The Armed and Turnstile both released excellent, but surprisingly accessible records in the past couple of years. This is no different, sacrificing hardness at the altar of melody, to really ravishing effect.
Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Not much to say, just 100% bulletproof pop melodies with enough (again) retro indie frisson to help it stand out.
Jessie Ware - That! Feels Good!
Jessie sniffed the breeze a few years back when she realised the dusky soul thing, for all of her evident talents, wasn’t exactly in the zeitgeist. Pivoting to disco, and in this instance a truly specific late-period disco, full of hedonism and gleeful overindulgence, is very, very much a record for the moment. There’s a long history of moments of strife leading the masses to seek more carnal pleasures, and Ms Ware just gave them the soundtrack.
Noname - Sundial
God damn this record is cool. It’s just really cool.
Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
Poor old Sufjan keeps have tragedy, and keeps going back to the well of musical experimentation. On one front, at least, things seem to be changing - this and his last release, Carrie and Lowell see him accepting that his true gifts are for songcraft, and letting that craft shine, rather than obscure it in electronic journeying. Here, he seems to deal with the loss of a partner, and in the process makes some of his most beautiful music to date. ‘Will Anybody Ever Really Love Me?’ is a peer with anything he’s previously recorded.
Yaeji - With a Hammer
One woman’s journey of self-discovery - that she’s extremely fucking angry at basically everything - channeled into a collection of slick, eclectic electropop? Yes please.
Lonnie Holley - Me Oh My
I have such a soft spot for older or late-career artists making great records that fully harness the age and wisdom they’ve accumulated over the years - late Dylan is, for instance, arguably my favourite Dylan period. Lonnie Holley - principally a visual artist - spent most of his life battling through truly horrific youthful circumstances, and his late-life move into songcraft has blended his avant sensibilities with aesthetic flair and a deep-set compassion and empathy. The title track is - easily - the most beautiful piece of music for the year.
ANOHNI and Antony and the Johnsons - My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross
Much like we wish Sufjan could follow his muse and thrive, it’s a little sorrowful that ANOHNI is simply too gifted at this kind of chamber pop/blue-eyed soul that we first saw on their debut in 2003. This return to the well is sublime, moving, wrenching and, newly, cool and fun. Triumphant.