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confessionsofabargainbinaddict · 10 months ago

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My Favorite Albums of 2023*

*not necessarily from 2023

Last year, I decided that, instead of limiting my "favorite" list to just the past year, I would broaden the scope to include any CD I acquired that year, whether it was released that year or not. Over the past 12 months, I've added 155 CDs to the already over-burdened collection (which may seem like a lot but it's down from 260 last year, so I believe some praise is due). These are my favorite 9, in alphabetical order by album title.

Foo Fighters - But Here We Are

"Times Like These," whether he intended it to be or not, was one of the very few, great post-9/11 songs. And while I might expect that from Springsteen, Grohl didn't immediately spring to mind as a voice of comfort and empathy, so the song's impact may have actually been a bit greater than something akin to "The Rising" (which, don't get me wrong, is an amazing song). And now, a couple decades later, it shouldn't be surprising that a Foo Fighters album dealing with intense and intimate grief would also be stunning, but, like before, I certainly wasn't expecting it and also, like before, I've turned to it a hell of a lot more than I would have thought.

Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You

You know those albums where you really like a bunch of the songs but not all of them but you also know that, with each repeated listen, you're going to find ways into the songs you didn't like as much on previous listens and come up with reasons why you actually do like those songs and therefore, think the entire album is brilliant? Yeah, this is one of those albums.

billy woods and kenny segal - maps

Let me preface this by saying that I am years late to the billy woods party, so I do not have any way of comparing this to his previous, abundant discography, but if it is at all indicative of the rest of his work, I have some major catching up to do! woods is a top notch lyricist with a clear love of language and the ways in which it can be structured. His metaphors and imagery are complex and layered but never so obtuse that they alienate the listener. And all of this verbal brilliance is nestled comfortably on segal's inviting but never settled production. I'll come back to this one often.

Stevie Wonder - Original Musiquarium I

I'm not normally a fan of "best of" compilations but this one, with the addition of the four unreleased tracks capping each "side," is so well put together and clearly thought through, I'm thrilled to have it as a part of my collection. Plus, it's really hard to ever go wrong with Stevie.

Laura Mvula - Pink Noise

Roughly 5 years ago, I heard "She," and was blown away. I added Sing to the Moon to my discogs want list but never got around to snagging a copy. About 3 years ago, I heard "Got Me" and decided to be a bit more active in trying to acquire a copy of Pink Noise, but I think there were some transatlantic issues because nothing seemed to be remotely affordable. Fast forward to midway through this year, the album miraculously pops up on Amazon for under 10 bucks and a day or two later, I'm finally blessed with these 10 fiercely intelligent yet uncompromisingly catchy pop bangers.

Pool Kids - Pool Kids

It's mathy, it's tappy, it's stupidly technical, but if you strip that all away, at its heart, these are 12 solid pop-punk/emo songs. So while the base effort is already worthwhile, the tremendous musicality turns them into something truly special.

Atmosphere - Sad Clown Bad Fall 10

Okay, so it's only 5 tracks but hear me out. I was introduced to Slug and Ant through their brief stint with Epitaph Records and their, imho, brilliant album, Seven's Travels. Over the years, I've picked up an Atmosphere album here and there, but my takeaways have been lackluster and I started to wonder whether they were just a one-off in my book. And then I found this at a used record store in Seattle, and it not only reignited the flame but made me want to revisit the rest of my collection. That's pretty impressive for only 16 minutes of music.

Triple Fast Action - Triple Fast Action

Triple Fast Action were probably the favorite band your favorite 90's alt-rock band (The Colour and the Shape was, apparently, greatly influenced by Broadcaster) and with only two albums to their name, it was a wonderful surprise to discover this treasure trove of unreleased and rare tracks, most of which were recorded in their rehearsal studio. While not everything is great, there's a general bittersweet air hovering around this 2-disc compilation - they could have been big, but for whatever reason, the stars didn't align. At least we now have so much more music.

Ratboys - The Window

Ratboys aren't reinventing the wheel here. They pull upon most of the major indie rock tropes of the past couple of years (Americana, pop-punk, prog rock...) but even with the genre hopping, the album shifts seamlessly from track to track and always feels authentic. What would we do with a new wheel anyway? Wouldn't you rather just get the top-of-the-line version?

Other assorted 2023 stuff

Favorite Albums NOT acquired in 2023:

Proper. - The Great American Novel

Tigers Jaw - I Don't Care How You Remember Me

Elvis Costello - Brutal Youth

Face to Face - Face to Face

Florence + The Machine - High As Hope

Beauty Pill - The Unsustainable Lifestyle

Favorite Live Bands seen in 2023:

The Verve Pipe (City Winery - 4/23)

Home Is Where (Elsewhere - 7/8)

Four Year Strong (Rocks Off Concert Cruise - 10/15)

The Hold Steady (Brooklyn Bowl - 11/30)

Favorite Movies watched in 2023:

Soft and Quiet

Poor Things

Shotgun Wedding

Pearl

Favorite TV Shows watched in 2023:

Alice in Borderland (Season 1)

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Curse

This is Pop

Channel Zero (Seasons 1 and 2)

Evil (Seasons 1 and 2)

The Last of Us

Favorite Books read in 2023:

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado

Wraith - Joe Hill and Charles Paul Wilson III

Favorite Podcasts listened to in 2023:

Fearful Symmetry

Love and Radio

Detoxcity

U Springing Springsteen on My Bean?

"Finn and the Bell" episode of Radiolab

"Wake" episode of The Memory Palace

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dustedmagazine · 2 years ago

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Dust Volume 9, Number 1

The Beauty Pill

Every January, we grind the gears shifting from records that came out in the previous year to the ones that will come out in the current ones. It’s a rough transition, and lots of us have leftovers that deserve attention. We manage it, in part, with a late January Dust that clears out the backlog and allows us to focus on the new year. It’s not an iron clad rule. We will certainly cover a few more 2022s in the weeks to come, and there’s at least one 2023 in this batch (the estimable Dischord-era retrospective from the Beauty Pill, pictured above). But it’s a turning point, and we’re turning. Are you ready to turn with us?

Contributors include Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Andrew Forrell, Ray Garratty and Patrick Masterson.

1 Mile North — The Sunken Nest (Mutual Skies)

The Sunken Nest by 1 Mile North

Jon Hills discreetly snuck out his latest album as 1 Mile North in mid-December, a notorious no-man’s-land for new releases. However, this is strangely fitting for The Sunken Nest, which possesses an understated majesty and rich melancholy that harks back to the first wave of post-rock artists who emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hills’ close attention to dynamics and tone extend to the assembly of the track list, where the individual song titles together form a poem: “Plunge forth / Into muted depths / Where light collapses into night / Exhale and sink / Find rest / Amidst the ship / Your sunken nest.” The opening run of songs works especially well. “Into muted depths” nails Labradford’s signature sound of glacial guitar traced out over pulsing electronics. “Where light collapses into night,” the album’s longest and most satisfying piece, builds patiently into a hard-earned crescendo that’s almost anthemic. And the guitars on “Exhale and sink” have a post-metal edge that threatens to build into a cathartic climax, but instead settles for tense slow burn.

Tim Clarke

Beauty Pill — Blue Period (Ernest Jenning)

Blue Period by Beauty Pill

The Beauty Pill hid its sharp edges in a dream pop sheen, but they were there all the same. In the early aughts, the band recorded a full-length and an EP for Dischord, setting off a thousand hot takes about whether they were or were not a Dischord band (since they didn’t sound very much like Fugazi). But I’d suggest that the Beauty Pill was as fierce and intense and off kilter in its way as Fugazi, and there was more punk in its croon than most people would admit. The sleek, harmonized chill of “the mule on the plane,” for instance, explodes subliminally with rupturing drum energy. “Terrible Things,” bristles with its bass lick’s muted ferocity. “such large portions!” overlays the most beautiful white noise guitar skree over its loping, narcotized vocals. The music itself incorporates both beauty and destruction—and that’s before you even get started on the words, which are sharp and devastating. Take for instance, the couple that introduces “Goodnight for Real” and encapsulates everything you need to know about difficult music and its fans: “There’s a band on stage tonight/every note they play turns its back to you/still you want to add them to the sad list of things/you’ve said yes to.” Or the dual verses from “Terrible Things,” that coolly observe David Chapman and Idi Amin (“And David chapman shakes and hovers in the shadows of the Dakota/ hearing voices one of which will never sing again when this is over”). The Beauty Pill’s output slowed—but didn’t entirely stop—when bandleader Chad Clark suffered a rare viral infection of the heart. They’ve had one more full-length (Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are) and two EPs since. But if you’re just getting going, this double LP is a reasonable place to start. It collects all the songs from both Dischord releases, the You Are Right to Be Afraid EP from 2003 and The Unsustainable Lifestyle from 2004, along with a smattering of unreleased alternates and demos.

Jennifer Kelly

Best Fern — Earth Then Air (Backwards/Youngbloods)

Earth Then Air by Best Fern

Nick Schoefield is a Montreal-based ambient artist last observed distilling electronic and synthethic sounds into radiant, crystal-pure abstractions. His 2021 solo album, Glass Gallery, tinted Reichian rhythmic explorations with the glowing prettiness of melody. Best Fern, Schoefield’s collaboration with the singer Alexia Avina, dips even further into pop idioms, draping airy vocal motifs over lattice-work electronics. “On and On,” the single, distills the sounds of stringed instrument and, maybe, banjo, into a blinking bank of luminous tones, then tips Avina’s voice over in cascading waves. It is cerebral yet inviting. “World Spins,” by contrast, is nearly unadulterated indie pop, framed in keyboard chords, but putting wispy vocals up front; it sounds a bit like the earliest iteration of the XX. But “Way Inside,” the other single pits a cyber-storm of tinkling sounds against piano and subtly altered vocals, the organic world abutting the theoretical one in a lovely, arresting way.

Jennifer Kelly

David Blue — Stories (Eremite)

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This 50th anniversary reissue of David Blue’s Stories is undeniably a labor of love. It also represents the acme of craft. The retro, flip back sleeve and dead quiet vinyl have been manufactured with the determination to getting details right that one expects from Eremite Records. But who’d have expected that the label would break a quarter century run of jazz-derived releases with a singer-songwriter LP that was originally issued on Asylum and was made by a guy who ran with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen? Love makes a body do strange things, but that’s how you know that it’s really love. Blue’s writing style is as exacting and precision-oriented as Eremite’s production technique. His lyrical details are stark, his delivery muted, and the production (slide guitar by Ry Cooder, vocals by Rita Coolidge, strings by Jack Niesche, etc.) frames each tale with exquisite understatement. His baritone singing is similarly just-right. There are really no flaws to explain why Stories was a commercial dud back in the day, except that maybe the portraits of losers and love affairs were a little too real for comfort.

Bill Meyer

Color As Time — Soma Schema (Adhyâropa)

soma schema by color as time

Color as Time is Joshua Stamper’s jazz-into-classical project, which filters the composer’s bright, lucid melodic aesthetic through the improvisational lens of a six-member ensemble. Soma Schema appears to be the group’s second album, following 2018’s This Light Use to be a Mountain, perhaps incorporating some of that disc’s earlier material—there is a track on this disc called “This Light Used to be a Mountain,” though not on the album by that name. The music here flows effortlessly between fusion-y jazz and pointillist classicism, with individual instruments sometimes taking different sides in the argument. In “close cover gently,” for instance, Paul Arbogast’s unmistakably swinging trombone solo winds through the starry twinkle of abstract electric keyboard; later a saxophone (played by Mike Cemprola) blows blearily, earthily through that same pristine, percussive background. The other long piece “with (con) turning (verse)” lets cool flute and saxophones wander through a radiant, 3 a.m. jazz club space. Sophisticated, fluid and hard to pin down.

Jennifer Kelly

Fucked Up — One Day (Merge Records)

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One Day is yet another high-concept release from Fucked Up. This time around, the band members each spent a maximum of 24 hours (that titular “one day”) on their contributions to recording the music. It’s an interesting idea, folding Fucked Up’s attraction to the Big Idea into its formal processes; it also ends up being a useful corrective measure to some of the more expansive excesses (and, frankly, bloat) that have marked the band’s recent records. This reviewer liked Dose Your Dreams and was charmed by some of the nuttier aspects of Year of the Horse. But it was a lot to process, and all the accumulating bagginess and sagginess left its unhappy mark on Oberon. By contrast, there’s a very appealing zip and straight-to-the-gut punch to some of the tracks on One Day. The title track has the big-hearted, maximum-volume appeal of Fucked Up at their best, and opener “Found” reminds you what it’s like to be in the room when the band is making its violent, joyous sound. Look out, folks. Fucked Up is writing rock songs again.

Jonathan Shaw

Glassine & Sam Haberman — Radial (Cached)

Radial by Glassine & Sam Haberman

Radial is an intriguing collaboration between Baltimore-based producer Danny Greenwald, who releases music under the moniker Glassine, and Sam Haberman, who plays drums in avant-rock instrumentalists Horse Lords. If you’re expecting a record that sounds anything like Horse Lords, however, you’re out of luck — Radial is a mostly placid, intimate record. Haberman sent field recordings and four-track experiments to Greenwald, which he manipulated into these impressionistic compositions, to which the duo then added textural overdubs. The resulting half-hour of music veers between malfunctioning electronica (“Up, Together, Reach”), throbbing ambient drone (“St. Pete”), clattering percussive workouts (“Brushes in Woodstock”), and what could almost pass as vaporwave (“Behind a Seatbelt”). Together, the eight tracks are pleasingly disorientating, especially on headphones.

Tim Clarke

Joy Anonymous — “Joy (God Only Knows)” (self-released)

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Right up until the last week of the year, if you’d said 2022’s best dance edit was Ploy’s remix of Khia’s “My Neck, My Back,” you’d have been right — but Christmas came right on time for those hip to London duo Joy Anonymous and you might want to have a rethink yourself after giving this a listen. Henry Counsell and Louis Curran’s accelerated treatment to a 1975 Betty Everett cover of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” was a favorite among those who saw them open for Fred again.. in recent months, and it’s easy to see why: Even twice removed from Brian Wilson’s original vision, “Joy (God Only Knows)” soars with life-affirming positivity and the kind of smile-inducing energy made for outdoor summer dance parties, illegal warehouse raves, your living room, the biggest rooms (as God might have it)… anywhere open arms and hearts seek to groove together, that is to say. If you’re feeling bitter and despondent, tired of an uncaring world and fed up with pretending like there’s any chance of salvaging something from all of this, fine, maybe you’re right — but for at least four minutes, Joy Anonymous will have you reconsidering. I speak, of course, from personal experience.

Patrick Masterson

Kraus — Fire! Water! Air! Kraus! (Soft Abuse)

Fire! Water! Air! Kraus! by Kraus

Kraus is an ultra-productive one-man band from New Zealand, and Fire! Water! Air! Kraus! stands out from his discography in two respects. You can get it on vinyl, unlike 14 other entries in his 19 album catalog. And it’s his first production of completely electronic music. While he doesn’t publish the specs, one suspects that he is working with a combination of analog and digital gear. The drum machine pops, synthetic squelches and fluttering fake flutes on “Gunther’s Button” all bring to mind a world where pushbutton telephones were spanking new technology. The bright resolution of the chimes on “Canal du Midi,” on the other hand, suggests higher-bit sampling rates that might come from the sort of cheap, high-powered contemporary gadgetry. Kraus likes tunes, but he lets them emerge from squirming nests of short loops. And while he likes machine sounds, his music is most attractive when it sounds like a heavy human hand is manually retarding or accelerating the spinning cogs.

Bill Meyer

Memoriam — Rise to Power (Reaper Entertaiment)

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It may be indicative of where metal finds itself that the first song on Memoriam’s Rise to Power is titled “Never Forget, Never Again (6 Million Dead).” Memoriam is not a war metal band, in subgeneric terms, but like singer Karl Willets’ old band Bolt Thrower, Memoriam expends a good deal of creative energy making war-themed death metal. And in our current cultural environment, if you’re going to record anthemic metal tunes titled “Total War” and “Annihilation’s Dawn,” it makes sense to lay down a marker indicating just where you stand on the Holocaust. That said — and done — Rise to Power is a satisfying record of sometimes doomy melo-death, written and played by a crew of dudes with serious heavy-music chops: bassist Frank Healy put in nearly two decades with Benediction and briefly played with Napalm Death; drummer Spikey Smith has seemingly played with everyone, from Killing Joke to the English Dogs to Conflict to (say what?) Morrissey. For anyone familiar with Bolt Thrower’s early records, Willets will have the most recognizable presence, and his gravelly growl suffuses these sometimes by-the-books songs with some gravitas and drama. The opening 12 minutes of the record are its best, most ruthlessly grand passage, sometimes recalling the tougher sounds of Planks or invoking a meatier version of At the Gates.

Jonathan Shaw

E Millar & Christof Kurzmann — Rare Entertainment (Mystery & Wonder)

rare entertainment by e millar and christof kurzmann

Entertainment and improvisation certainly coexist on a frequent basis, but when it comes to improvised music, the pairing is not a given. So, the title of the CDR, which contains a performance by Canadian clarinetist Elizabeth Millar and Austrian singer/electronician Christof Kurzmann may raise questions. If you’re wondering if this is a slice of Bennink/Breuker/Zorn action, the answer is no. Over the course of not quite 50 minutes on a June night in Montreal, they judiciously added layers of hum, rattle, hiss, chime and whine, only occasional letting themselves sound like they were actually playing anything. Every once in a while, Kurzmann gently croons in English, Spanish or German; hearing Tall Dwarfs’ “Think Small” bob in the slow-moving swirl is not exactly entertaining, but it’s definitely an emotional inflection point . So, gestures of overt entertainment are rare, but if you’re ready to indulge some existential pondering whilst settling into a state of uneasy immersion, this duo has your sound bath ready.

Bill Meyer

Ivan Nahem + ex->tension — Crawling Through Glass (Arguably)

Crawling Through Grass by Ivan Nahem + ex->tension

Ivan Nahem came up through NYC’s no wave/post-punk underground, playing a role in such bands as The Situations, Carnival Crash, Swans and, most recently, Ritual Tension with his brother Andrew. This new project is far more reserved and atmospheric than anything in his history and reflects, in part, his experiences with the meditative aspects of yoga. “The Exhaltation of Nothing,” a track which he wrote with his brother, stretches the dissonance and clangor of punk guitar into infinity, turning the sounds that these instruments make into drones that melt in glowing, serene pools. “51st St Savasana” floats lighter, airier tones over skittering vibrations, buried spoken word and isolated pings of acoustic guitar. This latter cut brings in collaborators from prior, more heated projects, Norman Westberg of Swans and Carnival Crash on guitar and Mark C. from Live Skull on keyboards and synths. The music remains unruffled, though not without drama, big swells of organ tone promising revelation but delivering mostly calm.

Jennifer Kelly

Sneeze Awfull — Exercise #1 (We Be Friends)

Exercise #1 by Sneeze Awfull

Pittsburgh trio Sneeze Awfull are collagists whose outsider DIY background belies the sophistication of their music. Beneath the spoken word samples, twitchy beats and electronic effects lies a collection of art pop songs that evoke the work of Arthur Russell and These New Puritans. Vocalist Hunter, cellist Ricki and JF on beats, samples and synthesizers use all the busyness of their overlays to enhance rather than disguise the poignancy at the heart of Exercise #1. On “qlip qlop” Hunter’s vocal floats above the beat of marching feet as Ricki plucks jazz inflected riffs on their cello, CF drops a sample of what sounds like a grey flannelled mansplainer “I can really tell you’ve lost a lot of weight/That’s good, I said”, a polyphony of voices follows, more in conversation than competition. Such juxtapositions are a feature of their work, moments of intense beauty rising above the thrum of the world, the tracks constructed like intricate nested boxes, that reveal new secrets with every listen.

Andrew Forell

Torben Snekkestad / Søren Kjærgaard — Another Way of the Heart (Trost)

Another Way of the Heart by Torben Snekkestad / Søren Kjærgaard

In the 1970s, ECM Records’ penchant for packaging audiophile instrumental performances within strikingly colored album sleeves earned the label an association as a purveyor of soundtracks for imaginary fjord vistas. Not only does Another Way of the Heart sound about a three o’clock twist of the reverb knob away from being a vintage ECM release, it was actually recorded on the Western Norwegian island of Giske, which is one ferry ride away from some cruise-worthy fjord views, with the express intent of evoking the regional vibe. Both pianist Kjærgaard and reeds/trumpet player Snekkestad rein in their more extroverted tendencies in order to favor long, breathy tones, reverberant keyboard gestures, and creeping tempos. Each track draws its title from the poetry of Torben Ulrich (yep, Lars’ dad), and the music lives up to names like “Wind and Floating Lines” and “Into Particles of Light.” This is not an album for all occasions, but if you’re ready to reflect, it may be the one you need.

Bill Meyer

Valee — VACABULAREE (Shell Company)

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A proper original and maybe even a creator of its own genre, Chicago MC Valee now makes properly boring and unoriginal music, the kind AI could make if all Valee’s lyrics were fed into it. White audiences who likes their rap chilly and not daring will love it. Last year, MC Valee made an album titled The TrAppiEst Elevator Music Ever!, but VACABULAREE elevator music in the worst sense.

Ray Garraty

Zaliva-D — Misbegotten Ballads (SVBKVLT Records)

孽儿谣 Misbegotten Ballads by Zaliva-D

The haunted soundscapes of Beijing based duo Li Chao and Aisin-Gioro Yuanjin speak to entrapment in tradition and the harsh lockdowns from which China only recently emerged. Mixing eastern and western music into a disquieting hybrid, Zaliva-D, offer no easy entry into their world. The tracks on Misbegotten Ballads fall somewhere between the blasted bastardized blues of Beefheart or Waits and traditional music injected with off-kilter beats, discordant machine music and the wordless wheedling lamentations of ancestral spirits. Built on distinctly Chinese rhythmic cadences and played at a uniformly deliberate pace, the duo’s music is at once aloof and strangely engaging. Club music at the end of a labyrinth of alleys for which no map exists. Arm yourself with a large ball of string and venture forth.

Andrew Forell

Tucker Zimmerman & Joshua Burkett — Tunnel Visions (Idea/Mystra)

Tunnel Visions is a collaboration between poet Tucker Zimmerman and acoustic guitarist Joshua Burkett. The former is a Californian long transplanted to Europe who has been making records you never heard of since the 1970s, the latter has pursued a similarly obscure course for a quarter century whilst running Mystery Train Records in Massachusetts. Neither is too concerned with getting things perfect, which makes them perfectly suited to each other. As Zimmerman raspingly rhymes about seasons, long-gone musicians and radios saying things you know they’d never really say, Burkett and a few of his old freak folk friends trace meandering string tracks with just the right amount of bounce and melancholy to keep you listening past the words into the darkness of a very late night. This one might take some looking to track down; at press time, the only sources were Midheaven Mailorder or Burkett’s shop.

Bill Meyer

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