My Favorite Albums Of 2022
While the albums below are ranked for your consternation & delight, all of them qualify for an 8 on my Handy-Dandy Profoundly Subjective Numerical Rating Scheme. For comparison, 2021 list-toppers HEY WHAT and Things Take Time Take Time were solid 9s last year. It's a little disappointing to go without one, society! Honestly. Freakout/Release does sit at 239 on my Top 300 Albums of All Time list (yeah, baby! Not even all of those get 9s! I'm tough!), between Girls Against Boys' Venus Luxure No.1 Baby and Spoon's Gimme Fiction, but everything from Willie down (including the Christgau-style honorable mentions after the Top 10) contains good, good music that I'll probably have on my shelf when the urge is compelling and the price is nice enough. Even if nothing blew me out of the water. Don't want you to get any of this twisted.
I should also drop the caveat that a surprising-to-me number of these albums are by acquaintances made either online or at music critic hoe-downs, though only one made the effort to seek my attention regarding their album. While I'm not yet at a Meltzerian stage of life where I only acknowledge new albums if the acts have personally provided me beer, I do get how that happens. But with this list, I think it's just a matter of like minds and similar taste. Still, to avoid coming off too sympathetic to these loquacious types, I'll note that all of them broke my Led Zeppelin rule this year. The rule posits that if Led Zeppelin never needed more than 43 minutes of my time to deliver II, III, IV or Houses Of The Holy, why the hell would anyone need more time for their album? Unless you're giving me Physical Graffiti, two discs of the good stuff, you shouldn't. I want all these acquaintances to know they'd have ranked higher by tightening it up. Even just by a song. Tighten!
As I said last year, I don't sweat albums that don't immediately intrigue or appeal to me for long, and nobody took me up on the offer to dig in with "relevant" albums for money (still stands!). I'll cop that I didn't give Renaissance much of a listen (seemed real Hotter Than July, and I still need to give her Innervisions more time) and Harry Styles, while a respectable crush and Andy Gibb/Elton John hybrid, is truly "not my tempo." As for why anything else didn't show up, feel free to ask. Certainly possible I haven't even heard it. And don't forget I already shouted out a bunch of acts on my 22 New Songs I Knew In 2022 playlist.
- Hot Chip, Freakout/Release
Five goofy guys who never understood why there weren’t more bands like New Order, Hot Chip has managed to show up their heroes in at least one notable way. When Get Ready dropped twenty years after NO's debut, eight after the underwhelming Republic, people were impressed the band's sonic signifiers could still excite people. Hot Chip, twenty years out from their first EP, only once taking even four years between albums, show not just their trademark pleasures on Freakout/Release, but passion and wisdom. Opener “Down” establishes their maintained mojo as much as “Crystal” did for Barney & company. Then “Eleanor” sings even sweeter, “Freakout/Release” hits even harder, “Broken” throbs even deeper, and “Not Alone” reflects on what it means to be five goofy guys in a band. For comparison, New Order just assumed Gillian Gilbert would stay home with the kids in 2001 without asking. And if you can remember tracks 2-5 on Get Ready, I’m impressed.
In my love letter to Hot Chip's discography, I said I was torn over whether Freakout/Release was even better than their previous career peak, 2012's In Our Heads. I’ve decided it’s a photo finish, with Heads getting the nod for lacking a stumble as egregious as “The Evil That Men Do,” a well-intentioned slog guest-rapper Cadence Weapon deserved better than. But a solitary faceplant on an autumnal, politically conscious techno-pop album? One that still delivers the playful excitement of the best techno-pop? It’s enough to make you think Hot Chip can do this forever.
2. Willie Nelson, A Beautiful Time
Speaking of doing this forever… where rock icons tend to make a Death’s Coming For Me album and either die (Bowie, Zevon) or get healthy and rarely mention their mortality again (Dylan, Young), Willie Nelson has made an art for years (decades?) out of being casually ready to go. I haven’t been paying close enough attention to tell you where this one ranks in his elderly oeuvre, let alone his entire career. But where I was impressed to find a couple keepers on 2018’s all-W. Nelson/B. Cannon original Last Man Standing, A Beautiful Time matches a couple more original Nelson/Cannon keepers (“Energy Follows Thought,” “Don’t Touch Me There”) with some quality ringers wryly contemplative enough to pass as more (“I’ll Love You Till The Day I Die,” “We’re Not Happy (Til You’re Not Happy)”). Though the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tower Of Song” strikes me as pretentious karaoke, “With A Little Help From My Friends” is transcendent karaoke, avoiding an easy chance for feature credits so Nelson can question and answer himself instead.
“If I run out of time, I’ll wait for you in the sweet by and by…I just want to leave you with a smile” goes the closer, the “if” reaffirming the end isn't near, so much as he wants to make every day count. While I don’t suspect Willie’s actually walking off into the sunset as the cover suggests, I couldn’t blame him if he decided to drop the mic and retire after this one.
3. Amber Mark, Three Dimensions Deep
A reasonable fear of the self-serious pro-am critic posting a year-end best-of from a myriad of genres is the possibility of praising an album for being okay instead of noteworthy, inoffensive instead of genuinely worthy of attention. And Amber Mark gave me chills over this. Did I like this album more than most R&B in 2022 just for emulating the joys of a Nash/Stewart production and doing without distracting features from dudes, self-impressed or otherwise? Was anything particularly novel or unique, or just tasteful and familiar? Did the lack of feature credits keep her from getting shown up as anonymous? “If you hear one album from this genre in 2022, make it…” is a sentiment that ignores how most adults can happily avoid a genre they aren’t invested in for more than a year. Did I have a response if someone heard Three Dimensions Deep and said “or I could just play Good Girl Gone Bad again”? By the way, that album is fifteen now. Fifteen.
So I played Deep a lot. Not having checked out Mark’s considerable pile of non-album singles (including covers of “Heart-Shaped Box” and “I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City!”) and guest spots (including Chromeo and Dirty Projectors!), I don’t know if Mark is a classicist committed to this now old-school sound or bound to drop it for something more pretentious or commercial with a new set of producers in a year or four. But Deep is so warm and pleasurable for ersatz Rihanna, gradually expanding scope from “Healing Hurts” and “FOMO” to “Cosmic” and “Bliss,” that I wouldn’t rule out the former. Nor would I rule out that the more pretentious or commercial follow-up could be just as pleasurable.
4. Wire, Not About To Die
Look, it’s simply a fact that recorded music peaked in the latter half of the 20th century. So the last thing I’m going to do is kick a new album off my best-of list because it was recorded back then! Especially in 1977! If you don’t know why the official release of an ‘80s bootleg containing Pink Flag-style demos of Chairs Missing and 154 tracks would thrill me more than most music released this year, take it up with the educational system in your country. Apparently, a good number of these tracks were on an out-of-print compilation called Behind The Curtain released in 1995, and I blame the American educational system for me not grasping that. But that comp had 31 tracks, and this one has 18. That’s more my speed, anyway; with ’77 Wire, 18 songs fit on one LP! Plus I didn’t want to write a whole blurb about the Big Thief album. Been done.
5. Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, Airport Sparrows
Finding yourself listening to more singer-songwriters and more jazzy instrumental music (if not jazz) as you get older? I sure am. And this here’s a nice way to kill two birds with one stone. Hicks, a pianist as well as a music critic and novelist, has long had a lounge-friendly musical palette, with horns and strings infinitely more prominent and accomplished than indie singer-songwriterdom requires. But Airport Sparrows, the first album credited to Hicks and a backing band since the cassette days, gives the musicians behind his voice a real chance to stretch out. The songs on last year’s Accidental Birds averaged out under four minutes, only one song cracking five. Sparrows has an average song length of over 5 minutes, a third of the songs taking over 6. And despite lyrics that reaffirm Hicks’ literary chops (“Instead of this, you could be sitting S-shaped in a study carrel, looking through old Sandusky phone books for villainous names” starts track 1), the extended length is always for instrumental passages, never for extra verses.
This atypical but assured mix of strong songwriting and semi-improvised arrangements is how you wind up with a gorgeous song called “Ghost Blog” where the band builds up from bass for over a minute before Hicks shares images like “our heels clicking past the Seine/ like two retractable pens/ our coats comin’ apart at the seams.” Then comes a jazz guitar solo and one last chorus, before an extended coda where sax and cello get hard to distinguish from each other. Not only do I hope the Small Screens stick around for Hicks, I hope the next album’s a full double record. It's Physical Graffiti time! Warning: hearing this aesthetic sans sloppy affect may ruin acts like Joe Henry and Lambchop for some of you.
6. The Mountain Goats, Bleed Out
30 years after the first cassette, 20 years after the leap to major-adjacent distribution, 15 years after gaining Superchunk’s drummer, 10 years after joining Superchunk’s label, dozens of releases and countless concerts on bigger and bigger stages throughout, John Darnielle’s enduring “indie rock” project has finally made an all-caps ROCK album, producer Alicia Bognanno more than 20 years younger than Darnielle or that drummer. Not that the band’s remotely unrecognizable. Bleed Out still showcases narrators at their wits’ end, determined declarations of endurance, and advice to future narrators interested in endurance. The lyrics are a little heavier on cinematic noir, but the strum-thrum-and-snare sound is still more Heretic Pride than Black Love. The change is just a matter of allowing for extra oomph, never giving the rhythm section a break and letting the guitar hooks risk U2 adjacency.
Obviously a case of muse and amusement rather than commercial capitulation, Bleed Out is my favorite full-length from the MGs since 2019’s In League With Dragons, if not 2012’s Transcendental Youth, if not 2005’s The Sunset Tree. But even if it’s just my fave of the last three years, there was plenty of high-standard product in between. And I’m sure fifteen lyric sheets about seismology and Howard Cosell are lined up for ’23, steel drummer already booked.
7. King Princess, Hold On Baby
I’ve never been able to get into St. Vincent, though that might have something to do with the the level of antecedent claimed by the time I was really paying attention. When the hype machine acts like you’re the new David Byrne, if not David Bowie, and about to break pop, I’m going to need more than band-hand-choreography on SNL and non-hits with titles like “Los Ageless.” So it’s a compliment to Mikaela Straus that I don’t think of St Vincent when listening to King Princess, despite a similar vocal quiver, musical context and on-stage presence (I wouldn’t be shocked if Mick Ronson was thinking of St Vincent when he signed her). No, I go a little deeper and further back than that in my free association, to an earlier NYC-born music school drop-out who wasn’t afraid to shove her omnisexual erotic truths into our faces: Sophie B. Hawkins. Why? Because I can actually imagine hearing something from Hold On Baby on the radio without wondering why it’s happening.
Whoever came up with the big beats and booming hooks (along with Ronson, songwriting collaborators include those omnipresent Dessner brothers and several accomplished Canadians), it’s Straus who sells the young twenty-something narrator cringing “I hate myself, but I want to party,” “it’s a curse to be your friend” and “I was just a little bother.” Hating that fucking is easy, yet not enough to chill her out. Knowing she’s a big deal, but still at the mercy of these goddamn feelings. And instead of insisting this adds up to high art, all she wants is for you to check the band out before the Strokes & St. Vincent on the Chili Peppers’ big tour this spring. If I was going to be at the Fargodome this April, I would!
8. Drive-By Truckers, Welcome 2 Club XIII
It’s tempting to say these guys are getting even better with age, but Patterson Hood & Mike Cooley have been writing great songs since the Truckers first showed up in 1998. Every album’s featured affecting stories over big riffs, lumbering away like heartfelt clockwork, more than enough lyrical detail to make the samey sound (John Mellencamp & Crazy Horse, with a Muscle Shoals bassist in the family to impress) a feature rather than a bug. It’s just that I liked Jason Isbell’s songs more than Rob Malone’s. Then I liked Shonna Tucker’s more than Isbell’s (hey, I think you’re witty on Twitter too, that doesn’t mean I want to hear your po-faced old-soul alt-country music). Then I liked the Truckers going without a third songwriting banana entirely. Then I liked them finally following the Led Zeppelin rule. So let’s just say they’re getting better at editing with age, while somehow not losing the sly charisma they grabbed us with, or the big rock moves (that fanfare on “Every Single Storied Flameout!”) they’ve picked up along the way.
9. The Smile, A Light For Attracting Attention
It’s tempting to laugh at this not being a Radiohead album. After all, it’s got Thom Yorke. It’s got the lanky guy with the floppy hair and the movie score credits. Are we going to really miss the rhythm section? The guy who puts out albums under the name EOB, a name that’s right up there with John Entwistle's Ox in the silly sideperson showcase Hall Of Fame? Oddly enough, I do miss them! Not in terms of album quality, sure. Thom’s solo career is as reliable a source of gorgeous anxiety as the band’s, and Johnny "There Will Be Blood" Greenwood sure isn’t going to make the songs less gripping. But there’s something vaguely unsettling about hearing Yorke’s voice and Greenwood’s sense of grandeur without the heft of their old Oxford pals underneath (there is a drummer, thank goodness, lest this thing truly come off like demos).
If you’re agnostic if not atheist about Radiohead, nothing about A Light For Attracting Attention is going to change your mind. But I’m a full-on convert to the groove the band has worked since In Rainbows, the album that revealed they weren’t taking rock music to bold new dimensions in the ‘90s so much as finding themselves, working their way to a distinct sonic habitat that could sustain them for life. While the aural antecedents remain Pink Floyd, U2, Ennio Morricone, all that epic anomie business, I’m increasingly tempted to compare them to a non-live-centric Grateful Dead, endlessly making little changes to a vibe you either click with or you don’t. And this one's for the heads.
10. Too Much Joy, All These Fucking Feelings
I’ve known about Too Much Joy for thirty years - the grad student who watched me & my sis when our mom was out of town loved them - but I never actually heard them until this decade. While I read the reviews & record guide entries at the time, never forgetting the oft-quoted lyric “every band should be shot/ before they make their Combat Rock,” I couldn’t help assuming mere joke band status, especially with neither culture nor commerce bothering to play me a single. So I spun the babysitter’s copies of Mixed Up and Discography instead, focusing my listening pursuits on cheap used CDs and cassettes of four and five star bands (these guys always peaked at three-and-a-half in the mags).
That was that, until I saw singer Tim Quirk at the 2019 Pop Conference, recounting the band’s 1990 arrest for reciting 2 Live Crew lyrics in Florida. I was proud of myself for recalling the event from my precocious SPIN memorization as a tween, and was pleasantly surprised to learn about TMJ’s reunion on social media after. I don’t recall whether I heard Mistakes Were Made in 2021 or January ’22, but it would have been in an honorable mention had I thought to do those for last year’s post. All These Fucking Feelings is an impressive notch higher for an immediate follow-up, at its best resembling a Ramones where Joey’s politics were a little more self-aware and didn’t get have to get past a raging neocon on guitar. The sentiments & p.o.v., jocular but reflective, are right in the titles: “Normal Never Was,” “Our History In Hugs,” “What Pricks We Were,” “Old Friends Make Me Sad.” I guess it’s time for me to finally hear Son Of Sam I Am!
And now...those Honorable Mentions! Done in the curt style of Dean Robert Christgau, with two songs suggestions to make up for the brevity.
Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe You
Can’t blame cynics for just hearing a quirky college rock band, perfect for Hackeysack majors & English minors. But this is one where the drummer produces, and no boomer from the label tells them to gate that shit if they want to get on KROQ. Let that quirk soften you up for the singer, who’s more freak-folk funny than you might expect. (“Spud Infinity”, “Simulation Swarm”)
Bonnie Raitt, Just Like That
Her first solely self-produced album in a fifty year career. With a sound and sensibility this unique and timeless, she was right to find some fun songs & write some heartbreakers, get together her band, forget crossover, and keep those royalties for herself. (“Waitin’ For You To Blow,” “Down The Hall”)
Regina Spektor, Home, Before And After
Spektor's first album since Obama was President finds her determined to maintain her warmth and whimsy despite…all of this. But piss her off and she’ll cut you like she's Randy Newman. (“Up The Mountain,” “One Man’s Prayer”)
Brian Eno, FOREVERANDEVERMORE
If somebody’s going to risk a Scott Walker tribute, best it contain a voice I love and all too rarely hear. (“Who Gives A Thought,” “There Were Bells”)
Spoon, Lucifer On The Sofa
Boy, they still get the fingers snapping! (“The Hardest Cut,” “On The Radio”)
Shamir, Heterosexuality
Will write an epic LGBTQ+ indie-pop anthem or die trying. ("Abomination,” “Cold Brew”)
Art Moore, Art Moore
A rare Bang Bang Bar dream-pop band that loves their effects, but doesn’t need them. (“Snowy,” “Rewind”)
Oneida, Success
Veteran “experimental” Brooklyn combo, grateful to get together again, finally accepts break-neck drone-rock as their calling. (“Beat Me To The Punch,” “Paralyzed”)
Spiritualized, Everything Was Beautiful
The important thing is he still believes in the transcendence of drug-rock gospel blues. (“Let It Bleed (For Iggy),” “The Mainline Song”)
Neil Young & Crazy Horse, World Record
Neil’s right to keep recording with the surviving members of the ’71 Crazy Horse while he can, but maybe put some covers between the umpteen eco-anthems? (“Break The Chain,” “Chevrolet”)
Death Cab For Cutie, Asphalt Meadows
Hanging on to their sentimental virtues at 25 better than REM was, probably because their virtues were always more earthbound in the first place. (“Asphalt Meadows,” “I Miss Strangers”)
Dan Ex Machina, All Is Ours, Nothing Is Theirs
An aging young man refuses to give up either the dream of the ‘90s or sex apps. A woman is nice enough to harmonize. (“Leave A Mark,” “Drinking And Driving (Separately)”)
Hudson Mohawke, Cry Sugar
Meaningless psychedelic electronic post-everything casserole of the year. (“Bow,” “Lonely Days”)
The Beths, Experts In A Dying Field
They have more “holy shit!” hard rock climaxes than That Dog or Rainer Maria ever did. Now you know whether or not to care. (“Knees Deep”, “I Told You I Was Afraid”)
Sloan, Steady
Lockdown gave them something new to write about. Not that they’ve given up amiable radio rock pastiche or anything. (“Magical Thinking”, “Simply Leaving”)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down
Always too sane and/or privileged to force output, they get some potential singles together after a decade off for a glorified EP/excuse to tour. Blondie they still ain’t, for better and worse. (“Wolf,” “Burning”)