My 30 Favorite Albums Of 2023, pt. 1: #1-5

Hell if I know what the state of new music is for everyone, but by a couple logical metrics, it’s never been better for me. I've found thirty albums released during 2023 I enjoyed enough to want to own, a number I don’t think I’ve ever hit at the end of a year before. On top of this bounty, I know of a large amount of albums I didn’t get around to hearing before the ball dropped (unheard LPs most likely to have made this chart based on hype and pedigree: Me’Shell Ndgeocello, Chemical Brothers, Dan Ex Machina). New music has never felt so enjoyable and accessible to me.

There's obviously some non-musical factors to credit for this. Streaming makes it possible to hear a ton for cheap even if you’re not on promo lists. I had a lot of time in 2023 to listen to new albums. I put in a lot of time listening to new albums. I was in a relatively good headspace this year, and found a way to hear about new albums without letting myself get overwhelmed by choice and hype. The idiosyncratic lifehack that works for me is to check a lot of sources to learn about new albums, but not actually consume any longford reviews once I know I’m curious to hear the subject. Instead, I throw everything in a playlist and only investigate details once I’m curious to know more about what I’m hearing. And if I’m not curious, I delete the album from the playlist fast. This spares me the experience of measuring an album on first listen against the perspective of writers whose tastes and rhetoric I may or may not respect. I'm not compelled to dwell on albums because of their renown, instead of my enjoyment and intrigue with the material itself.

Obviously, if I was a paid critic forced to comment on every album assigned relevance by the industry, my editor and sometimes a paying audience, this wouldn’t be a tenable process. But nobody’s paying me to look for signs of creativity, beauty and wisdom in the world currently. So I get to look where I feel like. And if I don’t get around to the new Olivia Rodrigo despite liking the last one, so be it. Plenty of others got around to that, anyway.

I’m happy with the relative diversity of voices captured in the albums in this post (and the one that will follow), but I’m a little self-conscious that the overwhelming majority were learned about from one site: Pitchfork. As implied above, the text of the reviews didn’t influence my enthusiasm much. I usually know by the explanatory subheader whether I want to bother dragging and clicking. This can lead to some real surprises once I compare their take with my own. Tim Hecker sure didn’t get the silver medal over there; I guess I’m contrarian without even trying. But, veteran acts spotted on the “albums released in 2023” wikipedia page aside, what new music Pitchfork bothers to write about tends to be what new music I bother to hear. Despite loving Bandcamp (or possibly, despite loving what Bandcamp was), I haven’t figured out how use it casually as an exploratory tool, instead using the demonic portal known as Spotify. Though I wholeheartedly endorse artists and labels pulling their full-lengths from Spotify if they can (and unionizing to earn the right if they can’t), few have dared to make the effort, so it remains the most logical tool for discovery I’ve got. 

Looking over this list (#6-30 coming soon), it seems like the new music that most floats my boat is, for the lack of a better word, shoegaze. I’m not necessarily referring to acts inspired by British pedal-hoppers circa 1991, or even the ongoing acts themselves (the new Slowdive is filed under “give it another try sometime”). Rather, I’ve noticed there’s a general blurry majesty to what I appreciate. Noise for noise’s sake. Mystery and grandeur. The kids are reportedly gaga about the vibe themselves, and I can’t blame them. In a world of misinformation, depression and dread, using all this tech to create something surreal, time-warping and other - or just paying witness to that creation - has a lot of appeal. CGI, AI, ProTools, etc, etc, has made the question of “how are they doing this?” in film, music, art, etc a little banal. Even if we don’t know how exactly something was constructed, we’ve accepted the capability of computers to do it. So instead, the mystery has to come from not being sure of what they’re doing and why.

While I’ve enjoyed Slowdive since a friend turned me onto them in the mid-‘00s (later than a lot of people, but before a lot of others!), I only saw the video for “Morningrise” for the first time in 2023 (or maybe 2022, time’s a flat circle). Drifting, delirious, somehow both disassociative and artful, I can see how kids today could claim this as their own, and even manage to bug parents raised on Nirvana with it. Drugs might also have something to do with the appeal. If you’ve read Lester Bangs on Tangerine Dream or pondering the wasteoids haunting CREEM HQ, you know there’s plenty of precedent for kids (and adults like me!) zoning out on slow, often ominous noise for the lack of anything better to do. But I’d argue that in 2023, technology made it even more seductive.

1. Everything But The Girl, Fuse

There’s no debating historical context plays a lot into this album’s appeal. Around the turn of the century, following 1999’s career highlight Temperamental, sweet sophisti-pop turned smoky techno-pop serenaders Everything But The Girl went on hiatus for the best of reasons: the professional and romantic duo of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were going to collaborate on raising their children instead, reviving their pre-EBTG solo careers and making music an outlet for individual expression (both are also published - and exceptional - authors). They always left open the possibility of working together again, and I loved that a new album, while not expected, was only a stroke of inspiration away. More than twenty years later, thanks to some mix of empty nest and COVID lockdown, that album finally arrived.

On first blush, it appears like little has changed. The music is no less polished or gorgeous than it’s ever been. Thorn’s voice has lost none of its contralto passion and casual poise, and - where previous liner notes announced who wrote what lyric, sometimes revealing an interpersonal dynamic cloaked on record by Thorn’s consistent vocal presence - all but one track is credited lyrically to both. Where most “supergroups” are a casual holiday for solo artists, Everything But The Girl remains a true collaboration, each participant’s work strengthened by the subtle, if not unidentifiable input of the other. Thorn is the star, but one enraptured by the music around her. And Watt remains a paragon of background vocal work, assured and companionable, identifiable but never pulling focus. The big spoon, but just barely. 

As mature and thoughtful as EBTG seemed in the ‘90s (this was a pair who worked with British jazz veterans and Tommy LiPuma long before they made tracks with Deep Dish and Spring Heel Jack), comparing Fuse with Temperamental reveals the relative age of its writers. The dance-floor desperation of “Nothing Left To Lose” is framed by “Lost”’s list of all-too-specific heartbreaks (“I lost the perfect job/ I lost the plot/ then I just lost it”). The anxiety of “Forever” and the advice of “When You Mess Up” collectively detail how knowing the right thing to do hardly means the end of internal debate. The romantic dynamics detailed in songs like “No One Knows We’re Dancing” and “Time And Time Again” suggest lovers with long shared lives, no longer enticed by the unknown. There’s a weathered familiarity with joy and pain on Fuse, capped by the goals and pleasures of “Karaoke,” as sincere as they are simple (“You take a breath and here goes/ you hit the highs and own the lows…is this working? Are you feeling something?”). 2023 was a year full of looming dark clouds, but Fuse conveys the silver lining of not being alone under them.

2. Tim Hecker, No Highs

Where I’ve spent more than half my life anticipating a new EBTG album, I’ve become a Tim Hecker fan so recently I still haven’t checked out most of the albums between this and 2003's Radio Amor, which I stumbled across looking for soundscapes and liked enough to grab on 2LP from Bandcamp. I have almost zero concept of how No Highs presents itself in terms of Hecker's career, but the mood is accurately summed up by titles like “Monotony,” “Pulse Depression,” and “Monotony II.” As I’ve yet to grab the physical disc, I didn’t know until last month that this album was meant as a challenge to those who want their ambient soothing, non-invasive and streaming friendly. Well, ha! I often like my instrumental music tense and foreboding at the end of the day, probably for the same reason I like to watch horror movies before bed: it’s easier to let go of anxiety when you have something to focus and spend it on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Spotify creates a playlist called High Tension or Uneasy Listening before long, including on a track or two from No Highs. A vibe is a vibe.

I didn’t get the big deal about Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 when exploring Pitchfork’s year-end list over a decade ago, so I shouldn’t be surprised critics seem relatively unmoved by No Highs now. The pulse and squirm of the synths definitely flirt with that retro '80s energy adored in film & TV for the last decade or so, and the appearance of Colin Stetson’s circular breathing-boosted saxwork adds to the familiarity for instrumental music junkies. I find the closing tracks too ersatz Eno in the glistening calm of their swells (the finale is even named “Living Spa Water”), but that sequence is the highlight for Daniel Bromfield at the ‘Fork. Personally, I would have stopped the thing after the extended fade-out on the jittery apex “Anxiety,” leaving only the brief, echo-laden “Winter Cop” as respite from the chafing, straining & claustrophobia around it. After all, the title is No Highs: why even hint at transcendence? We can’t escape the pulse of our speeding hearts. We just learn how to ride it, occasionally forgetting it’s even there.

3. Kelela, Raven

My #3 album of 2022 came from a female R&B artist I knew nothing about, whose work reminded me of the best elements of Nash/Stewart-produced Rihanna. This year the title goes to another woman I knew nothing about, her album reminding me of the best elements of Aaliyah. Online investigation revealed her personal frame of reference is considerably more overt in its identification and solidarity with Blackness, queerness, and womanhood than Aaliyah's publicly was. But as the lyrics don’t make Kelela's manifesto explicit, instead focusing on poetic and interpersonal imagery, it’s easy to compare how the breathy tenderness of both artists’ soprano voices never suggest fragility or a lack of confidence. And just as they both mine the frisson between vocal signifiers of vulnerability and a lyrical perspective of frankness and clarity, they both show exquisite taste in collaborators’ electronic beats and space-age synths. 

Kelela’s music is dreamier and less spunkily earthbound (she’s also 40 where Aaliyah only made it to 22), suggesting EDM reaching out to R&B rather than the opposite. But as absurd as it might be to talk about a modern artist with such an intellectual perspective and storied pedigree (she sang everything from jazz standards to progressive metal before her recording career) in relation to a millennial R&B star, I do it because I didn’t have that context before hearing Raven, and loved it anyway. Nothing about the album implies the finicky perfectionism implied by taking five years between singles, or Kelela’s admirable, Mekons-level desire to make people aware of political literature and philosophy. The appeal of Raven’s lustrous, seductive sound remained immediate and enveloping, rich enough to include these associations without being reliant upon them.

4. Kali Uchis, Red Moon In Venus

Another sumptuous platter of echo and ache, this one a little heavier on live instruments and erotic assertiveness than synth swells and oblique anxiety. Dismiss these artists at your peril, but I’ll understand if you need to write off my taste in 2023 as “Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music.” I’m asking for it, clearly. Some wine?

5. Black Belt Eagle Scout, The Land The Water The Sky

And now something shoegaze fans might actually call shoegaze! Cooing, anguished voices buried under distorted guitar chords! That's shoegaze, right? Satisfied? Of course, if you care about the term, you’re probably not. Black Belt Eagle Scout doesn’t really recall ear-bleeding Brits of the early ‘90s so much as throwback to post-shoegaze “alternative rock:” amateurish at the mic, elementary plod-rock where every dollar went towards the guitar’s pedalboard. So why does their music grab me, rather than elicit an “I already gave in college”? Maybe it’s how frequently the songs drift into wordless refrains, tapping into what Robert Christgau called The Roar back in the halcyon days of Lollapalooza ’96, rather than leaning on the indulgences The Roar's catharsis led the young and plaid-clad to forgive. Maybe it’s how the first track has the intensity of emotion one would expect from an album closer back when this overdriven anguish was the norm. Maybe it’s the minimalism of the lyrics, the fraught expressions of “I”/“you” anxiety blurring with ecological and intergenerational details (bandleader Katherine Paul lived in the Puget Sound’s Swinomish Indian Tribal Community before and after spending time in Portland). This sensibility arrives most hauntingly on “Treeline,” where the land she loves is no escape from a physical threat (“when I sit this way I can’t see you/ and I save myself…I wish I woulda told on you/ so I wouldn’t be on fire”). It’s hard enough for me to access the emotional intensity I once associated with this sound in my youth when listening to the albums I originally derived it from. It’s another for an artist to achieve that intensity in ways my age and experience are unable to discount today.

Coming up...25 more albums from 2023 I liked a little less than these but still liked a lot!