The Best Album of 2023
~~As for last year, I'm keeping my eyes and ears open for any albums I hadn't heard all the way to the New Year and will add amendations later.~~
update (12/31/2023):
It's weird SZA's late-2022 album made it to several 2023 lists but, well, she's had an undeniable impact on the year so I begrudge her none.
I forgot to go through my Bandcamp collection. There's only one artist: Raphael Rogiński.
By the way, should I just de facto cite Bandcamp? I usually don't love any of Bandcamp's picks, but their Best Of lists are a celebration of idiosyncratic music, in intellectual and emotional ways, rather than what most lists devolve to, which are races to first place. For example, I don't love, but I do appreciate Mckinley Dixon's homage to Toni Morrison, "Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?" KNOWER's "KNOWER FOREVER" is really weird, and, just when you doubt it's more precious than interesting, you hear "Same Smile, Different Face". Oh, and the other reason for celebrating Bandcamp: they cover albums you hadn't heard.
boygenius's "Satanist" just sounds like Weezer's "Beverly Hills". I can't.
Entries have been added for Sleep Token, Mon Laferte, Kassa Overall, metal band Avatar and Kofi Flexxx.
One last anecdote: I had been re-running albums in case they would give me an epiphany (they hadn't). I wondered, "Am I still listening to Amaarae's Fountain Baby? Hadn't I changed it?" It was yeule's "softscars". This was Pitchfork's list. After a few hours of sampling songs, Caroline Polachek, Amaarae, Fever Ray, yeule, L'Rain and Yaeji merged into one big fever nightmare of drum machines and half-rapping. Am I too late to the party to say the magazine's tastes are getting a little predictable?
Not as good a year as 2023, but a great year nevertheless.
Let's just get Tisakorean out of the way: I have played "hOw yOu gOnE Do dAt.mp3" so many times. I dislike most joke songs because they just don't work as songs. The flow of the skits, the flow of his rhymes, and the instrumentals are intentional. It has serious "Just do better bro" vibes.
I'm probably out of the loop when it comes to metal: I had a great WTF moment when I heard the autotuned-emo-rap in band Sleep Token's "DYWTYLM". I think the genres having been melding for a decade now, but this made for a great laugh. It's compelling, too!
"Bull Believer" is your indie epic of the year. It was nice to see Wednesday bring back the long song.
Only The Streets has the audacity to make a song without being able to sing. I mean, even rapping requires flow. Do you know how he has persisted until now? He paints better stories about, ahem, the streets than most others can. I wondered how I could endure his awkward flow until I heard, in "Too Much Yayo": "Eh, why do I never learn? / Monday, Tuesday, my head feeling hurt, / Wednesday, done doing death, / Thursday, Friday, can't do it again." Then there's this funny little line: "He don't like Cocaine, / he just quite likes the smell." There are too many songs, but he's masterful in the good ones.
"Getting old" moment: listening to Marnie Stern's "The Comeback Kid" for nostalgia. I listened to "Chronicles of Marnia" in 2013. Didn't recall her voice was so squeaky. Sure, I'm affected, but no one plays guitar like Marnie and no one, for sure, constructs a song as she does. I'm pleased and horrified by age.
Sometimes going against the artists' intended order and - gasp - picking a random track works wonders. Mon Laferte is transcendent in "Mew Shiny", the penultimate track of "Autopoiética". That soaring, longing "I'm here!" is worth noting in of itself.
On that same tangent of occasionally being extraordinary lucky, Kassa Overall getting Lil B and Ishmael Butler on the same track for "ANIMALS" is ... genius? divinely sent? On the bad: it's an unfocused album, with too many guests. It makes me think of the syndrome DJ Shadow's sophomore suffers. On the flipside: he brought some great people together. They're all tied together by the fact that Kassa is, straight-up, a great musician; 2020's "I THINK I'M GOOD" is excellent. "Find Me", which is excellent, he references here, tongue-in-cheek, with "Still Ain't Find Me". He's figuring out a way of incorporating bebop into hip-hop. Not a new notion, but a concept, I think, he's done better than anyone else I've heard. The moment is good for it, too, because I think we're at saturation point with 2010s' industrial beat / trap in general (after hearing Kanye's latest thing). Here's hoping Kassa becomes the future.
It's kind of amazing that every Yo La Tengo album is a different kind of mumble. The band's fuzzy sound, here, sounds like a car drive away from "This Stupid World", as the cover seems to connote.
At some point this year I wanted to write an article about 100 gecs' "10,000 gecs". Obviously it did not, and will never, manifest. "Hollywood Baby" is still among my favorite songs of the year. I don't know what "rock" is anymore, as much as Kim Gordon probably does not know what "punk" is when she dissed The Smashing Pumpkins. If that's the case, then these words likely point to something more than the music itself. I have come to associate "rock" with what is ambitious, and "10,000 gecs" is audacious in how stupid it is. "Hollywood Baby" is the epitome of how stupid, how unaware, how moshable the music gets while expressing so much pathos about how much Hollywood fucking sucks. The first verse is the future of emo: "Whatcha cryin' 'bout, baby, / are you getting lazy? / Clear blue skies but it rains all the late fees; / did you get the payment? We had an arrangement, / we don't watch the news we just read statements."
I think I'm beginning to like short-metal. Punk-metal? Where the tracks are around 2 minutes long. That is Dryad's "The Abyssal Plain" - a quick journey, in and out, of their Dantean hellscape.
On the subject of metal, I'm kinda in love with Avatar's "Dance Devil Dance", which is some weird mix of the dance of Ministry and Type O Negative's sense of humor. Look no further than "Chimp Mosh Pit". The band is treading a dangerous path where "metal" and "fun" lead to "Ozzy", to the delight of the audience, at least. (They're Swedes! That adds to the theory that the Swedish make the best pop music.)
There's one bar that has struck me the most of all of billy woods' music: "It's two-one-one on the daiquiris, / it ruins the whole day when my baby mother mad at me." woods has always been an incredible painter with words, able to depict vivid scenes a la Rembrandt, but that's the first time, I can recall, he approached a line with any kind of vulnerability. The connective tissue in "Maps", being touring, is what I think woods needs: a plot to thread the character he has developed throughout the last decade.
When it comes to dance music, it's the beat for me, totally and entirely; vocalists just drag the whole thing down. So why am I fascinated by Avalon Emerson's "& The Charm"? The lyrics here do not feel forgettable, but they're certainly strange; Emerson coos, "All of my friends are having daughters, / beautiful just as them," in "Sandrail Silhouette". Weird as fuck line. But. If there is any type of music perfect for shower thoughts, it's dance music: the beat carries everything, the beat desires our alien parts, the beat dissolves everything of its awkwardness. Another alien lyric in "Entombed In Ice": "there are things they've done for themselves now." Anywhere else, what a awkward line. Here, it sounds great, it's got Zen.
This year shows me to be a sucker for guitar. I've been entertaining myself lately with the idea that its dominance for the last century comes from reverb, decidely chaotic, democratic, rude reverb, beloved by the people. It's an instrument of individuality and solitude. So describes Raphael Rogiński's "Talàn", the inherent blues of the guitar soaked in reverb, meant to reflect the endless patterns of the Black Sea.
Minimal jazz? Ambient? Do we call it jazz because it moves briskly, do we call it ambient because it's quiet, or shall we call it pointilist? Whichever is the case, there's something intriguing over Leo Takami's "Next Door".
I guess with Sparks' "The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte" you're not sure whether you're supposed to be annoyed by this overly clever band. Doesn't that describe their whole oeuvre? But I quite like this one not a little. In the first listen, "Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is" and "Escalator", my God, caught me, particularly the refrain in the latter, "She's going up / as I'm going down; / I'm going up, / as she's going down. / She's leaving work, / as I go to work; / I'm leaving work..." That little magic and bit of melancholy found in the mundane are just too enticing. Fine, Sparks, fine - I'll have to revisit your discography.
Ah! The other jazz-influenced rap album! I jest, but Billy Woods is the best I heard him all year in Kofi Flexxx's "Apothecary". I think Shabaka Hutchings, though, has shrugged off the "jazz" label, probably because jazz is, well, kinda boring now. Perhaps what characterizes "Flowers In The Dark" the most is menace, the feeling that Hutchings is holding onto something genuinely dangerous, that being the power of music, rather than something speaking to wealth. Standout track: "By Now (Accused of Magic)", wherein Anthony Joseph presents the future we ought to be in, rather than the one we live in, "where we build a music where everything happens below the waist."
Hey, Troye Sivan: thanks. You're most certainly reading this blog in the wilds of the Internet. So thanks, buddy. I really did not want to like "Something To Give Each Other" because I didn't want to explain the cover art to anyone. I feared this, because "Bloom" (2018) was also very good. But I think this album is the best dance record I've heard all year. It has none of the shallowness that often accompanies these types of albums; in fact, it has the tension and poetry of a George Michael record. Only Troye could sing "Tokyo just hit me like a wave" compellingly and not gratingly, as he does in "What's The Time Where You Are?"; "Still Got It" has a feel of "Father Figure". One could call Sivan's shtick as a kind of crossover of Michael and Frank Ocean's "Blonde", so, well, don't hesitate. How rare; most artists treat pleasure as currency; few approach pleasure as philosophy. So, again: thanks.
Too good to be true: music that sounds great loud. Isn't this a dying breed? "Who in this day and age wants to listen to Big Black? Psychocandy? Siamese Dream?! That Billy Corgan shit?!?!" I do. "Cherub Rock" is born again as Hotline TNT's "Cartwheel", but Will Anderson is much less of a jerk. (I do, uneasily, miss jerks.) Turn up your headphones ear-blastingly loud.
Seems that a recurring theme this year is sense of humor, as Zulu's "A New Tomorrow" indicates, no better demonstrated than the end of the first track "Africa"; after a fluttering of piano and strings, Anaiah Lei sneers, "Ay it's Zulu in this bitch, what ya'll niggas on?" Commence headbanging. But the album isn't really hardcore; it never gives the audience what they want in riffs. For example, two-thirds of "Music To Driveby" is a Curtis Mayfield sample. I think it's more akin the nebulous experimental genre - as in, it's all just sound. It just happens that the sound Zulu aspires to is the sound of protest. And they remind you of the purpose of that protest, too, as on the track "Must I Only Share My Pain", as a way of saying they've only been given to pain, so that is what they express. And as Alesia Miller expounds on "Créme de Cassis": "Discourse around blackness in America often orbits around black pain ... Why must I only share our struggle when our blackness is so much more? We're favored by the sun from the moment we're created, with skin soft and sweet like a serenade. We could be as pale as marshmellows, or as rich as basaltic rock of Nyiragongo." She ends: "Why is black discourse always about precipitation? While ignoring the sweet scent of petrichor after rain." I think that alone demonstrates the beauty of this album. It's punk as fuck to not give the audience what they want. In that, Zulu is king.
"I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A "Rap" Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time". Andre 3000 becoming his parody is a surprise. It's also a very welcomed one. I'm sure you can compare it to the works of Alice Coltrane, but the synth reminds me of George Clinton. The playfulness is Dilla. As someone who didn't really care about Andre before "New Blue Sun", I love how all over the map he is. The first half is an interesting modern mixture of hip hop and funk, and the latter half is largely Indian-inspired jazz. What's more important comes out of Benjamin's mouth: that this was the direction his life was taking him, his sense of humor, his musings on life, his thoughts on his placement in the world as more than a "rapper", are in this album more than any other. "May Eros, Artemis and Apollo guide you on your creative journey," indeed.
So here we are now, the contenders for best album of the year.
Lonnie Holley's Oh Me Oh My
Here's my process for album-listening: listen for 5 minutes or until 3 tracks are over. If you feel you "get" it, you stop, and move on. If you like it, you save it. And if you don't "get" it, you save it.
Lonnie Holley's 2020 "National Freedom" was in the "don't get it" pile and eventually left my library. To clarify, not "getting" an album doesn't mean I don't like it. It means that I want to make an attempt to understand it. Usually once I feel I understand enough, I make a decision to not listen to it anymore, though it's certain that it has made an impression on me. So "National Freedom" left.
But. I always remembered "Crystal Doorknob". I remembered Holley singing, over and over, with what almost seems like anguish, "that crystal doorknobb, that crystal doorknobbbb." I thought, This is surely a musician of great charisma. And his lyrics were very good too: he paints a whole tale around the aforementioned, mysterious doorknob that appears out of nowhere, glimmering in the distance.
The only issue was that the track was too long and too repetitive. Indeed, in doing a retrospective of his catalog, which extends to 2012 - around a decade, but a fraction of his 70+ year life as a visual artist - a lot of his music was in that vein: excellent spoken-word stories, but more-or-less meandering music-wise. (I do like "Sometimes I Wanna Dance".)
"Oh Me Oh My", then, is a lot of things from the artist. One, it's incredibly ambitious, even for someone who is a renowned storyteller. Two, it's by far the most musical album of his, with appropriate transitions within each song. There are lots of collaborations with more popular artists, such as Michael Stipe(!!!) and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame, which is almost a sheepish admission on Holley's part that he could use more music. Three, it's a very personal record, from a genuinely unique black experience: that of his experience growing up in the Jim Crow era and suffering intense pain during his time as a juvenile delinquent.
And, perhaps, there's a fourth: it's a little funny. Holley states his life, of black pain, was still a life after all. Let's begin at the end, then: at "Future Children", where Lonnie Holley acts like a robot, with goofy Martian music in the background. He mumbles behind a voice modulator, "It will happen soon, sooner than we realize. Future children, cannot access, no signal." Then this non-sequitur: "No winners, in the billion-dollar lottery. Billion-dollar lottery, win, win, win; we have a winner. Future children, go to bed. Go to your room. Powering down." You could read this as a warning against technology, but here's my take: I think it's cute. I think he is making a joke about the pace of technology, which has only escalated since his birth in 1950. And there is a commentary that a child is always a child, with adults forcing them to go to bed.
Which are the themes of the album: that adults are bending the spirit of children, deforming them into something unnatural, and that people are spiritual and free, with a natural connection to the planet.
So the album begins with "Testing": "We are all being tested. / Here we are, / testing our abilities." Only Holley could take something artificial - testing, like the SATs, multiple choice questions with predetermined answers, presented to students forced to sit obediently in seats for hours - and lend it human resonance, connecting it to our need to survive. The piano almost invokes the natural majesty of America, unspoiled by man, centuries ago.
Let's just get "Mount Meigs" out of the way, one of two standout tracks in the album. It's Holley's convincing depiction of fiery Hell in an industrial "school" - as Holley howls, "Nobody taught us anything, got no education, nobody let us have no wisdom, they beat the curiosity out of me, they beat it out of me, they whooped it, they knocked it, they banged it, slammed it, DAMNED it." Wow. I haven't forgotten at any point this year the moment it blows up, the squall of noise, the rapid-fire drums, that Holley line with menace, "Singing the song, Glory Coming And It Won't Be Long, [you're] gonna see old Sally with the red dress on," likening this intense abuse, of forcing children to tote bales and cut weeds, to shaking hands with Satan. For context, Mount Meigs was a correctional facility, though it happens, era after era, that wisdom says "correction" means "physical servitude". But, as Holley asserts, "I was only trying to run away to find my mother, I needed my mother, I needed to hug, I just needed... I just needed her, I needed to know who my grandpappy was, I needed to know who my own mamma was."
I'll be upfront: I did not know children were treated this way up to the '60s. It's a painful account to listen through. Out of everything the album has given me, I'm glad that Holley shared his experiences and his thoughts. He digs through the wealth of his career as an artist to show his audience, people like me, from an entirely different background, something completely foreign to them, show them how it felt to be there in mind and in spirit.
You need to get through "Mount Meigs" to gather a better understanding of the rest of the album. It doesn't exist for show, a la Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop", to shock the viewer unnecessarily.
"Oh Me, Oh My" is about the pleasure of crying. "You must please listen," Holley exhorts, "because sometimes it's alright / to wander a little deeper. / I suggest you all go as deep as you can, / because I believe / the deeper we go / the more chances there are / for us to understand. / Understand the oh me's, / understand the oh my's," before recounting the first time he heard "Life Every Voice And Sing" and the trials and tribulations of his grandmother. "And now I understand why she say these words: / Oh me, and oh my, / in a graceful and thankful way."
So we get to the album's thesis: that we must live and survive through present pain, and beauty exists in survival. "Better Get That Crop In Soon" follows the nightmarish "Mount Meigs", with a notably softer tone. "Looks like it's gonna rain," Holley mutters, invoking on his own experiences and the experiences of his ancestors to tend to the crops quickly, which they did not own, as we know from Holley's master saying "Get on back to work". Holley depicts the rain coming in thickly and coldly, adding onto his own pain, but to him it's just rain, all the same; it's part of the flow of life, just as the sadness is. In a later track, "None Of Us Have But A Little While", Holley mourns and celebrates the passing-on of others and the transience of life.
As consolation to our pain, Holley gives "I Am A Part Of The Wonder" and "Kindness Will Follow Your Tears", the other standout track, featuring Justin Vernon. No matter how old Holley gets, he says, "I can still hear my mother and my grandmother, / and them saying, / Hush, little babe, don't you cry." He intones, "Greatness comes in the morning, / and kindness will follow your tears, / and dry them up, down through the years." This is the image of perserverance. Holley ends with "I Can't Hush": "I need the black ropes of hope, / I need togetherness, / where we put our black hands together, and act like a rope."
So, back to "Future Children" - where we in our modern age decry the prevalence of technology around young minds nowadays, Holley asserts we have always tried to mechanize, productize, package children. This technology will not hurt them; only issues of the soul can hurt people. And, even then, the pain does not last forever. We come out of it, their efforts to bend our spirit, to break us, whole again, just as the Earth has withstood millions of years of change. When we realize the immensity of the universe and our abilities, we think: Oh, oh my, indeed.
Jaimie Branch's Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
Call Jaimie Branch a prophet: we live in her world war now. Beyond the escalated situation in the Gaza Strip, which is, uhhh, horrifying, 2023 also saw civil wars in Niger and Sudan. The invasion of Ukraine is still being prosecuted (and I doubt it'll end soon). I'm probably neglecting a million other things that stink of death and disease. In a way, I'm glad she isn't here to be miserable about it. But I'm also sad: at least misery lets us know we are alive. Branch held an anger throughout her life, a rage for a better world. That passion is in "Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die". Living, she at least had the hope that "we're going to take over the world / and give it back to the land", in "Take Over the World". It's her music that leads me to hope that her vision will be the right one, at the end.
It's difficult to separate "Fly or Die x3" from her death. As we're told, the album was essentially all composed, with a scattering of notes that were used to give the tracks names; her quartet, Fly or Die, and members of her family merely performed it. I'm in no conspiratorial mood, but it's...odd. It's worth going through Branch's discography because it depicts one of the greater visionaries in jazz music of the modern era. It also depicts someone who is a little messy. The previous "Fly or Die" albums aren't known for their cohesion, though they are consistent in their portrayal of despair followed by joy followed by despair, the titular "Fly or Die". That I like best in her music: as you retrospect, you are communing with her.
That "Fly or Die x3" is extremely cohesive and an extreme flowering of creativity, is all a little creepy. "Aurora Rising" and "Borealis Dancing" feel apocalyptic, almost as if Branch is painting so many dead souls dancing amidst those famous Northern lights. The keyboard in "Borealis Dancing" reminds me of the titular organ in DJ Shadow's "Organ Donor".
"Burning Grey" contains the first vocal of the track, where Branch raps "Watch out, / some people will tear your heart right out, / sell you and think nothing of it; / it happens all the time, all around the world, every city, every town, every girl." Branch seemed to exorcise her demons through music, particularly shown in a gut-wrenching live performance of "prayer for amerikkka, pts. 1 & 2". She's not the first nor the last, but she developed a complex language in order to share it. With "prayer", she and the band groans, as if struggling under the weight of the world, in the same vein blues singers would. The rapping on "Burning Grey" is not incidental. So she sings, "Memories so broken, / all we have are frozen, / you wonder why the world slips away, / burning grey." You can say this about Branch: there's no wallowing. Anger precedes her sadness. She shares this same quality with Mingus, and her music shares the same power as "Haitian Fight Song".
That being said, it's interesting how this record is the least aggressive of her previous ones, once you get to "The Mountain", a cover of a Meat Puppets' song, "Comin' Down". Here's a refresher on the Meat Puppets, for the many who don't know them: they're basically a country-punk band. They're kinda awesome. But Branch's cover is now the definitive version. "Comin' Down" is a song you can jam to, as is typical of the Puppets' oeuvre. Branch and primary vocalist Jason Ajemian lend the song transcendent beauty. It begins with the churning of the cello (I believe), followed by a moment of clarity. "Comin' down from the mountain, / I have seen the high and mighty; / I will go again someday, / but for now I'm comin' down," Ajemian sings, accompanied by light pluckings from his bass. It's the closest to a spiritual on "Fly or Die x3", fitted perfectly for the modern age. He continues, with Branch, "I have seen the information, / known the lighter side of dumbness, / I have heard the new statistics / and the stomping on the ground; / pickin' slowly up the rockslide, / one thing always seems apparent: / if the climb becomes too much, / I can always turn around." It combines Nietzsche's Zarathustra coming down from his solitude with our need to turn away from our fucking phones every now and then. That line too, "I can always turn around," contains many interpretations. In my mind, it's a brief sparkling moment of optimism of Branch: I can feel all this anger and sadness for the world, and I can discern what's right and wrong, but I also need to focus on myself occasionally. The songs concludes with her trumpet solo, a bird taking soaring flight.
The amount of joy "Baba Louie" has given me this year is indescribable. Since the titles for the song came from her notes, we don't really know if this was the ultimate title for this song. I'm not sure who it's a reference too, but I take it to be Louis Armstrong, possibly the trumpeteer to know. It certainly swings like an Armstrong song. I can't think of a trumpet in recent memory that made the world seem so much bigger. Why do I have to bother talking about the song? Go listen to it, and share in its immensity of feeling.
The aforementioned "Take Over the World" follows the military march and requiem, respectively, of "Bolinko Bass" and "And Kuma Walks". In Branch's voice is not a call for violence, as so many songs do, but a song for justice and glory. She calls for true freedom.
In "World War ((Reprise))" she returns back to our soil and exhorts the audience, "What the world could be, / if you only you could see; / their wings are false flags, / while our wings... / they are alright." Branch was a human through and through, in spite of her desire to take flight; even at this point she can't say her feathers are anything fine. But that's the point of music: to demonstrate the better side of our humanity.
In her last record, there's nothing defeatist or doubtful in her voice; she encompasses a vision in the truest sense, one we can actually see as the music unfolds. The revolution will happen, not a revolution in arms, but a revolution in thought, in spirit. Having listened to the album, I prefer and believe in her world.
Anohni and The Johnsons' My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross
Anohni and The Johnsons' "My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross" is ANOHNI with a guitar. More accurately, it's ANOHNI filtered through the blues.
"Filtered" is the operative word. ANOHNI's background was in experimental theatre. She possesses, possibly, one of the most expressive voices in music today. In previous albums with The Johnsons she would contrast her powerful voice with more traditional instruments, such as piano, violin, cello. Often the arrangements were bare. Again, with my rock-centric mentality, I do find their previous works to be a little precious, with the exception of their live work. "Cut the World" (2012) and "Turning" (2014) emphasize ANOHNI's voice, by not distracting you away from it. Where "Epilepsy Is Dancing" is showy in "The Crying Light" (2009), the piano in "Cut the World" gives space for ANOHNI's thoughts to breathe.
But all of this is to say that their previous work was a bit predictable. The power of, say, "Hope There's Someone" comes from the fantasy, of shed tears and angst, no different than the pretend angst of a Morrissey song (though I don't doubt, for ANOHNI, the feelings she puts in the music is real). As beautiful as the expression is, I feel many of the songs are too fragile to enter the outside world, which may be the music's intent. The music is interior, it evokes "Swan Lake", it asks us to suspend belief. I don't know if ANOHNI herself is aware of this quality; what makes "Hopelessness" (2016) so effective is that she heightens the fantasy to a violent orgy, such that it's difficult for the audience to ignore (which harkens to the purpose of performance art). I personally love "Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth?" The pain is palpable, and the horrifying thing is that we're unsure as to whom she is pointing fingers at. But this, too, is showy; it does not lose the artificial patina of art.
Then that guitar, in "My Back Was A Bridge", brings ANOHNI home and forces her to confront the world we live in now. Not that I want her to - the world is in a sorry state now - but, my God, the stories she has brought back to us was worth the entire effort. For example, how timely is "Scapegoat"? At the moment it was released, one could argue it was about transgender people, as ANOHNI herself identifies as trans. But ANOHNI, though I say often her music is showy, is not superficial; her music has always been about people, there is a reason why the cover of "My Back Was A Bridge" is that of LGBTQ activist Marsha P. Johnson. Suffering is immortal, it is always with people. So ANOHNI sings: "You're so kill-able, / I can say just what I want, / I can use you like a toilet." It speaks of both oppressor and victim: the oppressor is a generator of trash, and the victim is an endless repository of trash.
I can't speak for ANOHNI, but I do wonder if she's aware of this dual meaning in the beautiful "It's My Fault", which has echoes of the aforementioned "Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth?" She sings, "I didn't do it, / I didn't do it, / but I know that I did something wrong." Then, there is that transcendental chorus: "It's my fault, / it's my fault, / it's my fault I broke the Earth." So few people love anyone else as ANOHNI loves the Earth; she almost seems in tears as she sings "fault". She accepts the responsibility of being human; it is a shared responsibility, and not a burden that goes away by finger-pointing (and best believe, we are all probably more complicit than ANOHNI is).
We haven't even talked about the album highlight, "Sliver Of Ice", which was inspired by a conversation with Lou Reed. Lou Reed, before his death, purportedly discussed the feeling of an ice cube in his mouth with ANOHNI. So she sings "Now that I'm almost gone, / [a] sliver of ice on my tongue, / in the day's night. / It tastes so good, it felt so right, / for the first time in my life." Something so fragile, so fleeting, can even leave a lasting, transformational impact on a person.
Really think for a moment what ANOHNI is doing with her voice, particularly in "There Wasn't Enough". When we think of beautiful voices, we probably think of someone like Whitney Houston or Mariah, or an opera singer. And those are truly beautiful voices. But they are beautiful in the same sense a diamond or gold is: they are so bright they inspire ecstasy to the point of madness. ANOHNI rasps and croons; you can nearly hear the phlegm in her voice. You come to understand the hollows of her throat, sometimes because of the silence of the mix. But even this is beautiful. Here, her voice is the color and texture of mud. When she coos, as in "Why Am I Alive Now?", it takes the qualities of the warping wind. That is ANOHNI's way of demonstrating the beauty of the Earth to you. I really don't think there's anyone like her, with her expressive range.
"Rest" is a good place to give attention to the instrumentalists themselves. Of the previous iterations of The Johnsons, only Rob Moose remained for the recording of "My Back Was A Bridge", to play strings. Leo Abrahams (guitar), Jimmy Hogarth (guitar), Samuel Dixon (drums) and Chris Vatalaro (bass) are new additions. No piano, no viola, no clarinet; it's the set-up for a classic rock band. The blues, it turns out, is enough to accompany the singing. The blues, of genres, is probably the most understated; it's the same genre where John Lee Hooker scowls, "It serves you right to suffer, / it serves you right to be alone." The blues has so much pain in it, but it's also an exorcism. The musician sings so that they move on. So the strings and drums help ANOHNI keep time as she abides by the prison of her suffering, because she aspires to one day leave.
Thus the album ends on "You Be Free", whose rhythm dictates ANOHNI in this rare case, rather than the other way around. She seems to stutter: "I danced by / vi-o-lent times, / it was hard / to live, live." Though the long journey through pain destroyed her physically, she's still spiritually intact. And, in fact, she is invoking the spirit of Marsha P. Johnson: "Done my work, / my back was broke, / my back was a bridge for you to cross." Then, the final star of hope: "Ooh, you, you be free, / you be free for me, / for me, / you, / be free for me."
The year
This selection process was particularly painful for me. All three contenders for best album of the year are extremely good. If the highest function of music is to share experience, all three did this to the furthest extent. Let me summarize by saying, I was very happy saying "Oh Me Oh My" would be album of the year in March. The moment ANOHNI's record came I got very scared, and by the time I listened to "Fly or Die x3", I dunno, several times, front to back, I was praying nothing else would come in.
For the time being, ANOHNI and The Johnsons' "My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross" is the best, to me. At this point, it's the album that affected me the most. That's literally the only reason, because logic doesn't enter into it anymore when all three work are monumental. I think a major factor for ANOHNI's win is the majesty in her voice, and how unique an instrument it is. All to say, it's a fucking shame these guys had to fight it out this particular year.
Is there a theme for 2023? Not really, except, so far, less excess was best. None of my three picks were particularly loud or showy. Tisakorean, who piqued my interest, wasn't obnoxious with his shitposting; his humor was properly tempered. 100 gecs made, like, perfectly moderated rock music, where no lyric or sound made you sick, you just wanted to rock. I didn't mention Skrillex in the list above, even though he made very tasteful pop music. Then there was Ed Stasium's very tastefully done mix of The Replacements' "Tim".
For music I didn't much care for, well, I think I can say Sufjan Stevens' music is certainly not my thing, but I like where he is now, out of his baroque phase and into a firmly acoustic area. That's the thing about me: I don't mind if an artist does their thing, but I would like to ignore it if I don't care for it. Such is the case Yves Tumor, Mitski, etc. - they're very good at their thing, I don't care for it, I don't have to get sucked into their vortex. The only one I had to pay attention to was Olivia Rodrigo, who is a capable pop artist; I'm more annoyed "Get Him Back!" sounds disturbingly like Butthole Surfers' "Pepper". Well, that was a hole I got bothered by this year: the bizarre callbacks. Olivia Rodrigo seemed to be playing the '90s playbook, boygenius off Vampire Weekend's, and then, from the coattails of Beyonce, Jessie Ware did an odd disco throwback in "That! Feels Good!" which was disappointing because I very much like Jessie Ware and very much love disco, but she was so beige and boring. I'm fine with a throwback if the artist's individual voice is dominant, a la 100 gecs' frat rock and Troye Sivan's "chaka-chaka" which I think was criticized for being regressive.
To emphasize, everything in this article from Troye Sivan and after is really, really good, like classic-in-the-making good, and would make it to the top had they been more cohesive. I can't understate how many times I rotated Hotline TNT; Will Anderson singing "Don't buy in; / feeling counterfeit; / just stop it," in "Beauty Filter" is of epic proportions, even if it means nothing.
So it was a quiet year, thank goodness. This wasn't the year of Bad Bunny dominance, nor Taylor Swift hype (though the re-recording of "Speak Now" apparently broke records), nor an embarassing year. We shrugged when Harry Styles won the Grammys' Album of the Year; better than Mumford & Sons. It was just a good year, which is the best type of year. In a way it was a good year for underrepresented perspectives to be heard, as is reflected not just in the contenders but also in Zulu's "A New Tomorrow" and the new-age flute of Andre 3000's "New Blue Sun". In the same way, I shall as quietly bid 2023 adieu.