2023 AOTY: 30 to 16

The bottom half of my top 30 albums from 2023.

Dec 22, 2023

I’m continuing to find my way on Substack, and am trying to figure out where I want to take this newsletter with regards to things like frequency of posting, subject matter, and length of posts. When it comes to posting playlists or top album lists, I’m torn between wanting to write a blurb for each album and just posting the list with some minor release details. I’m leaning towards the former because it provides the opportunity for me to dig into what makes the music shine for me. But it takes time and effort, which is fine because I’m enjoying the writing, developing a new skill, and finding my voice. As such, this post does have some blurbiage for each entry. Whether that will be the case for the final post of the AOTY series, coming over the weekend, remains to be seen.

As usual, I’ve selected one track per album along with an embedded YouTube video. Albums are listed in descending order by ranking.

Here’s the Spotify playlist for this batch:

30. Phosphene - Transmute

Selected Track: Black Sheep

This is probably the most under the radar album on my list this year. With only 178 monthly listeners on Spotify, I’ve no idea how this even made its way to my ears. Finding gems like this album are one of the true joys of musical discovery.

Update: I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something Kevin Alexander introduced me to”. Lo and behold, after searching the On Repeat archives I found that Kevin had indeed written about the band and their latest single Black Sheep back in July.

Whatever you do (I’m surely preaching to the choir here) don’t miss out on one of the best music Substacks out there. Kevin’s writing, and his music recommendations, are always top notch and On Repeat is amongst my favorites and most eagerly anticipated Substacks every week.

29. Natalie Merchant - Keep Your Courage

Selected Track: Keep Your Courage

In September 1995 I returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia to resume my university studies after an enforced year-long absence due to consistently poor academic performance driven by my struggles with addiction. With 15 months of sobriety under my belt, it was an exhilarating, exciting and hopeful time for me. But it was also frightening to be back in the city where most of my hardcore drinking and drugging had taken place and where, quite frankly, very little but the grace of God saved me from pursuing the insanity of my addictions through the gates of death.

Prior to getting sober I’d sold off most if not all of my music collection to support my habits. While it would take a few years, I did manage to gradually rebuild a fairly comprehensive physical music collection. One of the early additions to my growing catalog was Natalie Merchant’s debut solo album Tigerlily, released in the summer of 1995. The album was a revelation to me, a balm for my soul, and one of the softest musical places to land that year. I have such vivid recollections of reading or studying in my apartment with that album playing in the background; it will always hold a special place in my heart.

Thanks to my then girlfriend, now wife of 24 years, I was extremely blessed to be able to see her perform at the 1998 Lilith Fair at The Woodlands in Texas, along with Sarah McLachlan, Bonnie Raitt, and Erykah Badu. Her May 1998 follow up Ophelia ,which I rated as good but not great, was the last I’d heard of Natalie Merchant until Keep Your Courage was released in April this year. In 2018 she faced a significant personal health challenge requiring emergency spinal surgery which left her unable to sing for months. Thankfully she’s made her way back with this first album of new material in close to a decade. Being able to savor her impeccable songwriting again and to have her lovely voice back in my life has been a joy.

28. H.C. McEntire - Every Acre

Selected Track: Soft Crook

This was an early 2023 release that I leaned into very heavily in the first quarter, one which I’ve been regularly revisiting over the course of the year. Michelle Dalarossa, reviewing the album for Under The Radar, perfectly captures my thoughts:

“There’s a rawness to Every Acre that is understated and reverent, from the measured poetry of its lyrics to the unhurried, solemn attitude of each of its songs. Lyrics about cornmeal and cattails, bobcat skulls and the “blush of dawn” weave naturally into folk-jazz instrumentation that is arranged with restraint, deliberately and gracefully. Rippling harmonies, searing electric guitars, and a rich piano melt into hushed drums to create soundscapes that are open and expansive. They complement McEntire’s lyrical meditations into both her emotional and external worlds and support the ebb and flow of her pure, warbling vocals beautifully.”

27. Jungle - Volcano

Selected Track: Back on 74

An album chock-a-block full of tap your toes, move your hips beats and supported by some of the most well-choreographed one-shot dance videos I’ve ever seen, this was one of three albums I couldn’t stop grooving to in 2023 (along with SG Lewis’ AudioLust & HigherLove and Roosevelt’s Embrace).

26. Lisa O'Neill - All Of This Is Chance

Selected Track: Old Note

In late March the Irish folk band Lankum released False Lankum, their critically acclaimed third album (they had previously released two albums as Lynched). While that album certainly has some fantastic songs, I found it hard going at times and never found myself enjoying it enough to give it a full listen in one sitting. While it did grow on me over the course of the year, it ended up not quite elevating itself into contention for a top 50 appearance.

At about the same time as False Lankum was released, I became aware of another Irish singer, Lisa O’Neill, whose fifth album All Of This Is Chance had been released six weeks earlier. This album immediately piqued my curiosity, but it also challenged my musical sensibilities in a similar way to Lankum’s work. I’m not overly familiar with this musical tradition; the instruments, the style of singing, the vocal phrasing, even the meter, they’re all somewhat jarring for me. Not in a bad way, just different. I couldn’t stop listening to this album and it continued to grow on me throughout the year. O’Neill has released four previous albums since 2009 and I’m looking forward to digging into her earlier work.

25. Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We

Selected Track: Buffalo Replaced

The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, Mitski’s seventh album, was critically acclaimed and one of the consensus top albums of the year. Out of the 32 reviews aggregated by albumoftheyear.org a full 15 of them gave it a rating of 9/10 or higher, with five rating it a 10/10. I’ve enjoyed Mitski’s work over the years, with each of her last 3 albums making my AOTY list. While I wasn’t as high as the critics on this release (its year-end aggregate ranking was 6th), it’s certainly received enough airplay and given me enough pleasure over the year to be worthy of a place within the top 30.

24. Meg Baird - Furling

Selected Track: Star Hill Song

In early February, a couple weeks after this album was released, I was in an extremely dark place. In addition to my ongoing struggles with depression, I was working through the grief associated with the death of a good friend from my high school days. As I traveled to Edinburgh to attend his funeral, I was faced with the prospect of trying to be present for a heartbreaking and emotionally draining event while also working full-time during the busiest, most stressful, and most demanding period I’d experienced at work in years. Immediately upon returning to my Airbnb after the funeral to prepare for two more hours of meetings, I received news that my uncle, also my godfather, had passed away earlier in the day.

In short, that week nearly broke me. Looking back now, I have no idea how the hell I made it through that week. What I do know is that, for a 2 to 3-week period after returning home from one funeral and preparing for another, Meg Baird’s album Furling was my soft place to land. I leaned into that album. Hard. Every morning I tuned into this lovely album, which provided the peace, serenity and strength to just put one foot in front of the other and pull myself out of the darkness one day at a time.

As a result, for the first half of the year, I was sure this would end the year as a top 5 album for me. But as often happens, more and more amazing music continued to be released over the course of the year and Furling relinquished its place as a top album. Nonetheless, I’ll always have a soft spot for this album for helping me to make it through an extremely challenging time.

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23. Skinny Pelembe - Hardly the Same Snake

Selected Track: Oh, Silly George

An extremely diverse, genre-defying album, Hardly the Same Snake, is the second album by Doya Beardmore who performs as Skinny Pelembe. This year more than most, I found myself listening to and falling in love with a handful of albums that really didn’t grab me at first listen. As with Lisa O’Neill’s album mentioned above, and a couple others on my top 30, Pelembe’s album is one that, with repeated listens, became too good to ignore. Like a sculptor starting with a block of marble, continually revisiting an initially challenging album sometimes becomes an exercise in chipping away my own resistance to reveal a masterpiece beneath. It’s an infrequent outcome, which makes it all the more rewarding when it does happen.

22. Robin Kester - Honeycomb Shades

Selected Track: Fries and Ice Cream

Honeycomb Shades is the debut full-length by Dutch artist Robin Kester released in February. I haven’t been able to learn much about this artist, but the description on the Bandcamp album page provides a good idea of what to expect:

“Kester’s experimental pop exudes a hazy euphoria and dark tension: the thrill of your synapses firing on all cylinders before turning into fully-formed thought.

Garnering widespread attention with her mini-album This Is Not A Democracy last year – with airplay from BBC 6 Radio, KCRW and KEXP – Kester has drawn a wide range of comparisons, ranging from Portishead, Broadcast to Julia Holter. Though operating on a comparable sonic wavelength, Robin Kester is a distinct voice coming fully into her own on Honeycomb Shades.

Drifting between the outer realms of chamber pop, electronic music and psychedelic rock, Kester writes wholly adventurous music.”

21. The National - First Two Pages of Frankenstein

Selected Track: Eucalyptus

I came to The National a little late with 2010’s High Violet, an album that surely would have been a top 5 for me that year (I wasn’t keeping track of my listening then the way I do now). It ended 2010 with an aggregate year-end rank of #4, including 12 sites that ranked it as a top 3 album. The song Afraid of Everyone, with that soul-crushing verse (“With my kid on my shoulders I try / Not to hurt anybody I like / But I don't have the drugs to sort it out”) remains a track that can easily bring me to tears and is one of 34 on My All-Time Favorite Songs Spotify playlist.

While 2013’s follow-up High Violet made it into my top ten list that year, their subsequent two studio releases fell short of the mark for me. With the release of each album, but particularly with 2019’s I Am Easy To Find, I found myself growing mournful at the thought that perhaps their musical output and my musical tastes had just diverged too much, ne’er the twain to meet. But then April brought forth the first of two 2023 albums by The National.

It’s an absolute emotional bombshell of an album with a real tear-jerker of a track in Eucalyptus, with its lyrics representing one half of a conversation around who gets to keep what at the end of a relationship. It’s devastating:

“What about the rainbow eucalyptus?
What about the instruments?
What about the Cowboy Junkies?
What about the Afghan Whigs?
What about the Mountain Valley Spring?
What about the ornaments?
What if I reinvented again?
What about the moon drop light?”

Angst and pain are also peppered through the song, from the post chorus (“I don’t want it / I don’t care”) to the vocal bridge/outro (“It wouldn’t be fair / It’d be so alone / without you there” and “There’s nobody home / I’m already there”). And the real kicker for me, the penultimate line from each of the two verses (“What if we moved back to New York?” and “What if I reinvented again?”). My god. The desperation and fear inherent in those two lines just breaks my heart.

While I’ve been remiss in not giving enough airtime to their second release of the year, September’s Laugh Track, this album is a fine return to their 2010 form and better than anything I could have dare hoped for.

20. Thea Gilmore - Thea Gilmore

Selected Track: The Bright Service

A huge thanks to Ian Sharp who writes the wonderful LP Substack for introducing me to this fantastic artist! Ian included the track The Bright Service, the closing track from her 2023 self-titled album, on his 24/11/2023 ‘Gems’ album playlist. I’ve been introduced to a wealth of new to me music here on Substack, but none from an artist with such a massive back catalog. Since her 1998 debut Burning Dorothy Gilmore has released over 20 albums, which opens up a deep musical seam for me to mine; I can’t wait to start digging!

When discussing the opening track Nice Normal Woman on her “Behind the song” series of videos, Gilmore has this to say:

“I wanted the track to surprise you. After 20 plus records, everyone thinks they know what they’ll get from a Thea Gilmore album. But I’m not the same person that made Burning Dorothy back in ‘98. I don’t want a sound or a genre. I don’t wanna be folk. I don’t wanna be rock. I wanna make interesting stuff, tracks that make you think, make you feel something, anything. This is the sound of me playing in the mud, letting you know I’m no prophet, I’m just trying to make sense of it all like everyone else.”

This is my kind of artist, someone who wants to continue to grow, to be neither defined nor categorized, someone who sees themselves as a part of humanity rather than apart from humanity. It motivates me that much more to dig into her earlier work.

Whether you’ve already been enjoying this album, or are hearing it for the first time, I highly recommend watching the “behind the song” series of videos on YouTube. The short videos provide wonderful background and context to each of the songs and significantly increased my enjoyment of the album. The individual videos were not all easily accessible (some were “shorts”, some were videos) so I pulled them all together into a playlist in the order in which they were released (album order).

19. Gaz Coombes - Turn the Car Around

Selected Track: Don’t Say It’s Over

In the mid-90s, when Supergrass was one of the mainstays of late-stage Britpop, I really enjoyed their debut album I Should Coco, especially two of the supporting singles, Caught By The Fuzz and Alright. But I never listened to any of their later albums, and they completely dropped off my radar. In the mid-2010s I saw one of my music loving pals at the grocery store and we started comparing listening notes on what we were loving recently. And he mentioned Gaz Coombes. “Gaz Coombes? Really? Like the lead singer from Supergrass Gaz Coombes?” Indeed, one in the same as it turned out. The last work of his I remember listening to was 2018’s World’s Strongest Man. It must not have resonated with me as it never made its way to my 2018 Music Tracking Excel spreadsheet (which was in its infancy in those days). That was the last time I spared a thought for Gaz Coombes until this year.

Turn the Car Around, released on January 13, was the fourth album this year to make it it onto my 2023 Music playlist on Spotify, and it was my second-most played album of the first quarter, right behind Meg Baird’s Furling. It’s a wonderfully diverse and expansive album - there’s hints of Bowie in here as well as OK Computer-era Radiohead. It’s a fine example of a singer and songwriter at the top of his game.

18. RVG - Brain Worms

Selected Track: Midnight Sun

The third album by Australia’s RVG packs an emotional punch both musically and lyrically. The songwriting is stunning, from the heartbreak of a live-streamed funeral during the pandemic on Tambourine:

“They’re playing Drops Of Jupiter / Cause they never even knew ya / The room is so cold and dark / Your family are wearing masks / I can’t hear the eulogy / The stream is bad quality / And I don’t wanna see you go / Through a tab on Google Chrome”

to the bizarre, almost psychedelic, dreamlike Squid, the music for which could easily have been drawn from Joy Division’s catalog:

“I stepped on an ancient fish / As I was walking on an ancient beach / I knew at once I'd done something wrong / My head, my body were completely gone
Now I'm something like a squid would be / Using squid technology / Living in a squid-like misery / A squid job and a squid TV
Don’t go back in time / It’s not worth it!”

to raging about climate change in Midnight Sun:

“The Freezer’s shutting down / The cold water’s running warm / You say I'll never understand how you feel / Well you’re right / But you’re so wrong
Looking at my future / Through a past I'll never have / How can anyone be sure of themselves / When the sky is turning black”

The music, the lyrics and the vocals (I love Romy Vager’s voice!) tick all the boxes for me and this is 35 minutes of absolute perfection.

17. Cowboy Junkies - Such Ferocious Beauty

Selected Track: What I Lost

Like Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily in 1995, Cowboy Junkies’ 1996 album Lay It Down was another musical mainstay of my last couple years spent in Halifax finishing out my degree. This is yet another artist that I discovered late (on their sixth studio album), absolutely adored, and then completely ignored. In the 17 years since Lay It Down, Cowboy Junkies released 14 more albums, including some live and archival material, before this year’s Such Ferocious Beauty. And ferociously beautiful it is.

Will Pinfold, covering the album for Spectrum Culture, hits the nail on the head in his review:

“Such Ferocious Beauty is almost uniformly sombre, but the tunes aren’t homogenous and the album flows beautifully without ever feeling monotonous. Some songs, like “What I Lost” and “Hell Is Real” are infused with blues and folk, but unlike some of Cowboy Junkies’ more glacially-paced music, the tempos are mostly not especially slow and are occasionally, as with “Hard to Build, Easy to Break,” almost jaunty, if not for the slightly bitter tone and subject matter. As always, there are some gorgeously fragile melodies, but Michael Timmins’ noise-rock tendencies are to the fore in many of the album’s songs too. Tempestuous feedback and distortion add to the emotional feel of tracks like the hypnotically grim “Flood” and the ominously moody “Mike Tyson (Here It Comes)” which is less about the former heavyweight champion than it is life’s tendency to treat you to unpleasant surprises. There’s even a bit of gnarled, funky, rockabilly-ish guitar on the closing “Throw a Match” but the point is that none of the album’s tracks does just one simple thing, but at the same time the apparent directness of the songs belies their musical and emotional complexity.”

16. The Murder Capital - Gigi's Recovery

Selected Track: Crying

Gigi’s Recovery is the second release for the Dublin-based Irish post-punk band The Murder Capital. I’m struggling to find the words to describe how this sounds to my ears. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s an uncomfortable tension, both musically and vocally, that imbues the album with a provocative and slightly menacing feel. When listening to this album, I feel almost compelled to be fully present, to sit back with a good pair of headphones and completely immerse myself in the experience without any distractions. For that reason, this is probably one of the least-listened albums on my AOTY list this year, definitely a case of the quality of the listening overcoming the quantity.

Did any of these make your top albums list this year? Which of these artists are new to you? And which ones are long-time favorites? Does any track/album particularly resonate with you?

Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Joy in the Journey

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