AOTY LIST 2023
It’s easy to dismiss the “album of the year list” as a useless symptom of one of the many useless deficiencies of the arguably useless human psyche. Our need to systematically categorize, rank, file, and decide a winner is held by opponents of the AOTY list as specially horrible when applied to music (our pure and beautiful and holy human expression). Now if we could just step over the standard points of contention associated with support vs dissent of yearly album lists and avoid a discussion about Objectivity vs Subjectivity in art criticism (a valid interesting argument, that I also have no interest in attempting to work in) let us please just start with that we as humans like to organize. We came up with genres for a reason, we put stuff in lists for a reason. For some evolutionary instinct human beings just enjoy these things: And while it is healthy to not always let your choices be controlled by your base instincts, I believe there is a way to work with yourself and let aoty lists be an exercise in celebration rather than frail internet squabbling. A way to share work that those around you might not have been exposed to, a way to measure your life not by wrinkles around your eyes but the art that you love, an exercise in our curatorial muscles in a fun and personal way. So here I am writing an Album Of The Year List and asking you to read it.
These records are in no particular order, yet some I do love more than others, I hope through my writing you can tell which I enjoy the most. They are all albums I think should be heard by many and most of them are made by people I know personally or have at least met in passing. So in short, yes an AOTY list can be an opportunity for those of us with ballooning egos to pretend like our taste has greater value than what is congruent with reality, however if we accept that to list is something we like and then to allow ourselves the satisfaction that only an end of year end list can accomplish, we can emphasize the positive effects they have and mitigate the nastiness also associated. So yeah, hopefully that makes sense.
It’s not new to sing the praises of lofi recording and what it can bring to a project, but often these praises are vague. We, the discerning music fan, accept some paltry combination of descriptors such as “atmosphere” “vibe” “warm” “lived in.” On this album of the year list there are many home recorded projects but I think clues blue’s by JARSCH specifically shows how a lofi recording can emphasize how true talent can be confident in itself. When the songs are as strong as they are and the vocals as emotive as they are, you can be confident that first take on an iPhone voice memo is going to hit you as hard as if it was the 10th take through a Neumann into a Neve console. "Sister" might be the best song of the year. Songs soft because the life of a true punk is hard enough. At least that’s what I got out of it.
A lot of bands have so much potential to be revolutionary but lack the ever so important ingredient of “taste” or equally important “ownership of something interesting to say”. Obvious examples to me would be any music schools darlings such as black midi, tool, or even vulfpeck. These fuckers can sometimes pull it off and write something tolerable but usually the broad effect is just convincing high schoolers to go shed scales like crazy for no reason. Sprain stands as the latest in a long line to take what Slint did and attempt to push it to something larger, this time however with the same vitality that made slint worth listening to in the first place (big claim I know) Not saying this album is as important as spider land, but I am saying that if most compositionally complex and difficult music makes you cringe from its lack of self awareness, the lamb as effigy will make you cringe from what feels like an overabundance of the stuff. Do you really know that Animals eat Animals and that Animals fuck Animals etc.? Described it to my roommate as all of our favorite shit in one thing. Heavy, orchestral, sound art breaks, droning organ, verbose esoteric lyrics. Yeah I love the new Liturgy album too, how can you tell?
The home’s primary function is to protect the daydreamer to therefore allow for daydreaming to occur. Caleb Chase has made a record that unfolds itself how the world initially unfurled itself when you were between the ages of 5-16. These are lush home recorded orchestras akin to your favorite Julian Koster projects but Caleb’s unmistakable compositional voice and vibrant arrangements shine through any elementary comparisons. Yeah we listen to Country Songs on Country Roads, where else would we? Make yourself dizzy trying to draw the lines between each fantastical instrument lovingly stacked, maybe it will fucking calm you down even if for just a minute.
“I WANT YOU TO KILL ME” is a lot of things and every listener can probably get a lot of different things out of it. I don’t want to repeat what the author herself has written as a description for the album and I don’t want to guess at what makes the album great without having sat with it for a while as the work is extremely powerful and the subject matter is so personal. What I will tell you is that first and foremost the craft is all the way there and the aesthetics, the “hyper confessional” aspects, the manic genre switching, the hard cuts, the extreme verbosity, the production pushed to its absolute limits, and whatever else present in the album beyond the pure songwriting just adds a further level of polish to what at its core is just a master level work of writing. It even has its own Beach Life In Death if that’s your kinda thing. The fact that in one year she can release both this record and the truly fantastic album Our Desire Lacks Knowing Music AND also the EP GIRLFRIENDS, it should go without saying that this is a true talent. It will make you want to read a coffee table book about the interpersonal dynamics of Boston based transexual pop pariahs between the years of 2018 and 2025
Our nations current premier 70s prog revivalist, if the albums Kevin put out were just mediocre indie rock the prolific rate of releases would be impressive enough. And as much as his proggressive rock epics are a fascinating practice in themselves, his last release for the year is what excited me the most. Featuring a bespoke graphic score and intricate system to govern even the name of the movements, every aspect has been meticulously planned. The ensemble of broken dulcimer and feedback via a PA is textually exciting and the “seismographic notation system” also allows for sonic events to be paced in a dynamic way throughout the piece. 12 minutes is also the perfect amount of time to let this machine run and all I can wish is for Wulf to go further with these concepts.
My friend Shaun took me to to try the drink cava for the first time in mid October. While having a lovely time letting my tongue numb in this daycare for decompressing millennials the conversation shifted to music we had been listening to. When I started to sing the praises of OLTH, nyc screamo band, he sang a refrain of his displease with how everything must be cool and wanted to make sure we had a definition of what made screamo screamo. The main question our argument is that if we (arty 20 something’s) make screamo cool and trendy will that erase the intrinsic lameness that attracted Shaun and those of similar demeanor in the first place. In all honesty I was never into screamo when I was younger other than some exposure to Saetia so I couldn’t carry my weight in the conversation as much as I’d hope. Sitting there across from Shaun with my sharper senses rung out of me via cava bar cocktail I mustered the effort to conjure this maxim: if it’s hard, it is hard, whether you want it to be or not. And that’s where we left it.
The sapphic album to weigh any other sapphic album against. It’s a love song. Might be the greatest love song. This is what symphonies are supposed to be in 2023 if you didn’t know. Lockwood makes these vitally modern pieces that put me in the same contemplative mood that a great motet or Gregorian chant puts me in. When you are crying from the way they say “darling” to one another look me in the eyes and tell me with a straight face you aren’t looking for anything serious right now. I met Annea when I was an assistant for Liz Phillips and what surprised me was how easily you can tell that she still has the same energy and heart captured in this material recorded decades ago. She brought Liz infused olive oil as a gift and Liz didn’t want it so it was regifted to me shhhh don’t tell anybody.
I don’t know if “confessional sound art” or maybe “autobiographical sound art” is a genre that has been coined yet but if it hasn’t I’d like to. So 1. Let the history books show that Emerson Borakove called it first and 2. Put “On village and field” lovingly into this group. This is not some sterile field recording mission someone set off on with a microphone too dope for their own good, this is just a girl in the world listening and letting us, the lucky audience, to listen in too. A perfect balance of letting in sound (including bandsaws, water, laughter) and releasing sound (including synths, organs, and a lovely banjo solo). Feels like embodiment in a bottle if you
are like me and I like to think that most people are like me, or at the very least like me.
Here is some context of my life in case you were wondering what kind of person would write these reviews.
