Honestly, I don’t think it’s been a standout year for albums, despite many gems. More solid than bursting, it feels like our current music diaspora is in a sort of post-peak glut, a bit like the TV world, so even as there are still a lot of excellent releases (more than ever, by volume) not so many artists are hitting absolute perfect form, or truly changing the game.
Maybe it’s just me but aside from Dublin’s incandescent folk resurgence (represented three times on this list) the best scenes and cliques seem to be playing it careful right now. Perhaps aware that we’re all rushing headlong into an era of greater uncertainty for music as a trade, in terms of both the desperately precarious live industry and the coming war over fairness in streaming.
Let’s face it, business-wise it was Taylor Swift’s year — and her tour was effectively a ‘best of’ and her huge selling ‘new’ album actually a soundalike redo of a decade old release that already sold millions first time around (and was still readily available). That’s not remotely a criticism of her, you know I stan Tay’s work, but it speaks to how people value their music and artists. It’s an example of an extraordinary, grand scale, funnelling of music-buyer resource away from new shizz and up into the echelons. I’m still convinced: at the moment, even many people who like music, like music less. Simply, it’s less important to them. I don’t specifically mean my own generation, I don’t think I’m being fooled by the ageing process, I mean across the board. Which can only be turned around creatively, with a game-changing something-or-other, not with business acumen, nor clever reworkings. Anyway.
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I couldn’t separate three albums for the #1 spot, and my top four are all big, obvious, widely acclaimed records, which loads of other people and publications placed high up their charts too.
Here’s a Sp*tify playlist of a track from each album on my list, except The Electric Soft Parade is missing, because Avenue Dot isn’t on there. They’re listed in order, except I’ve put Bara’s album SILVA down at the end, because the entire album is one 45min track.
Here are my 30 favourite albums of 2023.
01/ = Lankum — False Lankum
01/ = Caroline Polachek — Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
01/ = boygenius — The Record / The Rest EP
04/ Young Fathers — Heavy Heavy
05/ Bára Gísladóttir — SILVA
06/ Brighde Chaimbeul — Carry Them With Us
07/ SZA — SOS (here’s my Quietus review)
08/ Squid — O Monolith
09/ Lisa O’Neill — All Of This Is Chance
10/ Eva Lunny — Sonics & Meditations
11/ Mitski — The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We
12/ John Francis Flynn — Look Over The Wall, See The Sky
13/ Kara Jackson — Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?
14/ Aoife O’Donovan — Age Of Apathy - Solo Sessions
15/ Holly Humberstone — Paint My Bedroom Black
16/ Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily — Love In Exile
17/ Laufey — Bewitched
18/ Yo La Tengo — This Stupid World
19/ Sparks — The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte
20/ Billy Reeves — Nostalgia Of The Future
21/ bdrmm — I Don’t Know
22/ Lana Del Rey — Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
23/ The Electric Soft Parade — Avenue Dot
24/ PJ Harvey — I Inside The Old Year Dying
25/ SBT (Sarabeth Tucek) — Joan Of All
26/ Lambrini Girls — You’re Welcome
27/ The David Tattersall Group — The David Tattersall Group
28/ Candidate — Point Clear
29/ Olivia Rodrigo — Guts
30/ Brian Chatten — Chaos For The Fly
Obviously I couldn’t include Jim Bob — Thanks For Reaching Out but I think it would’ve made my Top 10 no sweat, if I wasn’t on there, tinkling away. Well, except it would’ve been less good without me, so that’s hard to say. Side-eye. Also, I’ll mention hearing Talk Talk’s late eighties masterpiece Spirit Of Eden (one of my all-time favourite albums) on vinyl for the first time, after decades of regular listening on the other formats, and immediately discovering new things in there.
Chris, do you know of Bob Lefsetz? Not sure how to describe him -- he's a music-industry insider, somehow (promoter? publicist? etc.... who knows?). Which I am definitely NOT. But he has a blog, not Substack-based, on which he posts regularly about all kinds of cultural matters, especially music. His most recent post is about how 2023 seems to have been weirdly empty, music-wise:
https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2023/12/24/consensus-hits/
Again, I'm in no position to judge. But this post from you, and that one from him, seem quite a bit in alignment.
Hope you're have a wonderful December 25, as secular as you do or don't want it to be!