40 favorite albums of my 2023
National and international smashes, jazz, and if you squint, some semipopular music
Firstly my top ten for poll purposes, then a longer list that includes stuff I missed from 2022. The Dlala Thukzin review is new; the NewJeans is snipped from my longer piece; the JBL sews together two entries; the rest are verbatim re-runs, if you read them carefully enough the first time around.
1. Olivia Rodrigo: Guts
She’s ridiculous: in addition to being the best talk-rapper alive, she’s already historically good at rocking in the fifth octave with pop clarity, and you don’t need me to reprint the much-quoted oh-snap lines (my fave remains “blah blah blah.”) Not yet a historically great singer of slow ones—gotta save something for the third album—she can express commonplace emotions in the full knowledge that they’re commonplace without diminishing their intensity. Despite being excellent at everything the entertainment-industrial complex has asked of her, love, being <Spock voice> illogical, has been harder. Overachiever that she is, she’s made the most of that too. She’s a bitch/lover/child—not mother, gotta save something for the seventh album—and, pace Meredith Brooks, there’s never a sense that her inhabiting of disjoint identities is mere preening. She makes her initial recognition of her irrationality feel so Bildungsromany, her insecurities (unjustified but you try telling your insecurities that) so palpable. The only reasonable complaint is that there are too many non-power ballads, and after I decided “Making the Bed” is a revealing piece of writing and “Teenage Dream” is a thematically necessary ending, that leaves literal poetry class product “Lacy”. And even there I have to admire her trying to go strength for strength with Big Sis Taylor, by far her top similarity score (now that Billie Eilish has revealed, to the surprise of few, that she was a weirdo art kid all along.) Both want to give the sense of having wisdom beyond their years to help and sell to their audience, and if it’s more plausible that Rodrigo has that insight, even in the Fearless era Swift was savvy enough to realize that the appearance of it might be the essential thing. It could still turn out Rodrigo is merely ridiculous at the technical aspects of songmaking, whereas Taylor, despite having not made an LP this complete in fifteen years, has long proved herself a genius. But being the realest ain’t nothing.
2. Jason Moran: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield
The recorded output of unquestioned titan James Reese Europe always sounded stolid to me, though it’s not the Lieutenant’s fault that pre-electric recording couldn’t capture the frequency range and the little variations in tone and volume essential to the feeling of what people, once they could hear it properly, called big band jazz. No such impediment for Jason Moran, whose limitations as a Bright Young Thing weren’t technological but those of the Blue Note house style, not that they stopped him from racking up critics’ poll wins. Now on his and his wife’s own label, Moran’s been eclectic, mixing up solo piano recordings with collaborations with avant-gardists and art weirdos. While he’s never before come close to pulling the Grand Unification of All Black Music History that Greg Tate thought him capable of (let alone the Norah Jones numbers Blunimoth dreamed of), he has, however, learned how to make a rhythm section swing without having a drummer manslaughter him. Foremost, he knows that big bands are meant to be fun, and he emphasizes that Europe’s music fits as well with vaudeville (slide whistle, why not) as it did with bougie Vernon and Irene Castle parties. And of course with African-American music of the 1910s, fun wasn’t just fun—it could also be a reaction to loss or a demand for liberation or both. Moran folds Albert Ayler into Europe’s “Flee as a Bird to your Mountain” in a Minor Unification of Some Black Music History; on “St. Louis Blues”, there’s no need to be so explicit. And given a rag, he can still tear up the keyboard like a Bright Young Thing should. Roll over Europe, and tell Scott Joplin the news.
3. Isach Skeidsvoll: Dance to Summon
The Norwegian stars of this record (on Finnish label Ultraääni) are the Skeidsvoll brothers: composer Isach on piano, Lauritz on soprano sax, and Peder on pocket trumpet. Joined by Espen “Bobby” Songstad—good name—on tenor, Aksel Øvreås Røed on baritone, and a sturdy rhythm section, they have the personnel to blow up a racket, and they often do. “Bury Me Under a Four-Leaf Clover” careens through a South African-sounding head and flits free and back before Songstad goes apeshit. The fourteen-minute “Beer” has a middle section that’s perhaps too abstract and sometimes I can hear vocals, but at the beginning, there’s a Røed motif that the rest of the ensemble blows over with jazz funeral wildness (not worrying about being too in tune), and at the end, the motif returns low-key and hungover. “Hobo” is heavy as heck thanks to Isach’s hands, which periodically threaten to drag the band into a whole other tonality. The streaming-only “Bolero for People Feeling Blue” is one of the great celebratory pieces of recent years, with Isach back to roleplaying Chris McGregor, keeping things marching back to the tonic while the horns go on pointed explorations: Peder modest as befitting the size of his instrument, Lauritz in a parallel key, Songstad and Røed blowing big notes. All that’s missing is an amapiano one.
4. Victoria Monét: Jaguar II
Nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy; sometimes you do have to hand it to them. Monet’s been working backrooms for a while—she’s had her name on most of the major Ariana Grande songs over the last decade—and released the first Jaguar to some success in 2020, but this is a breakthrough, and we’ll see if “On My Mama” makes a real chart run post-Christmas. The opening “Smoke”, with fellow not-super-young R&B hope Lucky Daye, sets the tone: Monét’s in a relaxed place, able to take a toke without making it her whole thing. Main producer D’Mile finds fetching settings for her, toning down OutKast’s southern funk so she can drive her Cadillac at a pedestrian-safe speed. Monét’s singing too is smooth with a knowing low-end on “How Does It Make You Feel”, yet she still has a rhythmic bite that foregrounds the lyrics. She’s had it with needy men, preferring to emphasize her and her aforementioned mama’s intergenerational continuity in fineness that deepens after childbirth. She’s even wrangled a Grammy nomination for her two-year-old, who hopefully will get something shiny to bring to her first kindergarten show-and-tell.
5. James Brandon Lewis: For Mahalia, with Love/These Are Soulful Days
The rest of the Red Lily Quintet on For Mahalia, with Love—Knuffke/Chris Hoffman/W. Parker/C. Taylor—is a close-to-optimal supporting cast for Lewis, and on a dual tribute to the OG Ms. Jackson and his own grandmother, he has every incentive to play with feeling, if surprisingly tastefully. Best to think of it as a song album, showing Moses, Thomas A. Dorsey, and David Murray that the Promised Land may be more abstract than they realized. These Are Soulful Days, recorded live after a couple of days practice in Wrocław, is a real step forward for the long maligned “with strings” jazz mode yet was relegated to the bonus disc of For Mahalia—understandably, as the target audience for “America’s finest tenor sax player under retirement age meets a chamber group named after Poland’s foremost modernist composer” might be just me, and even I thought the gospel set seemed more promising a priori. Lewis rolls out slow, spiritual-inspired tunes that act less as bases for embellishment than as centers around which the action can take place. First and foremost this requires consistency of tone quality, and “Movement II”, from languid opening through octave-jumping avant-freakout, shows he’s as good at maintaining this as anybody working. The Lutosławskis too elide the difference between folky and modern: they do remarkably well for non-jazzbos at emphasizing the rhythm when that’s their job, bowing and pizzicatoing away as if they’re pros at another Polish art-barn dance, and showing as much control over volume as JBL does (diminuendo fans will eat up “Movement IV”.) There’s room for further exploration: only the epilogue tangles with the full potentialities of dissonance and, if I’m not imagining things, hip-hop rhythms; they’ll have the rest of the twenty-first century to work that out. As an encore, in case anyone was calling what he was wearing an outfit, there’s an unaccompanied “Take Me to the Water”.
6. Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden
Drawing from the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s sonics, this is one of Roberts’s more abstract Coin Coins, as opposed to the ones that derive more obviously from roots music (2 and 4, my previous faves.) To compensate, this might be their best-written chapter. The narrative through-line is about a mother who dies in 1925 following a violent attempt to terminate a pregnancy. Roberts’ sax and the supporting instrumentation (in particular Mazz Swift’s violin) are often harsh or disconcerting in ways that reflect hard times, a century ago or now: even the John Cage goof expresses a certain melancholy. Hope is easier to detect in the vocals: there’s spirit whenever one can speak, through one’s great-grandchild if necessary. Roberts is a heck of an actor, imbuing their character, who marries into a Southern Gothic family that would’ve preferred a cousin on both sides for colorist reasons, with a moral strength and an ability to half-chuckle from beyond the grave. If the finale, in which a Modelistean drum break emerges from a chorus of pennywhistles, isn’t exactly a happy ending, the mid-album benison and lullaby, “But I Never Heard a Sound So Long” and “The Promise”, linger.
7. NewJeans: Get Up EP
The big news for a certain kind of pop trainspotter was the addition of Portuguese-Cape Verdean-Belgian-Danish cult figure Erika de Casier to the songwriting pool. de Casier was a precursor to PinkPantheress in resizing the club (sonically and emotionally) to fit in the bedroom, and “Super Shy” very much resembles PinkPantheress, albeit with an optimism: shyness won’t stop them getting what they want. The melodies on Get Up are a lot more contemporary-sounding than their previous tunes: the descending title of “Cool with You” is very 2020s, as is the video, which stars the woman from Squid Game and hints at interracial romance until Tony Leung of all people drops in to prevent it. The clip for “ETA” is less textually rich—the boy’s a liar and did we mention you should buy an iPhone?—while the song, a Dimberg rather than a de Casier, is more interesting in the way it blends the club beat of “Ditto” with a more aggressive airhorned approach, the members agreeing that boys, while bad, are useful accessories.
8. Grupo Frontera: El Comienzo
It’s easy, and not wrong, to credit their unprecedented rise from South Texas norteño covers band to one of the U.S.’s most streamed artists to Bad Bunny’s rizzed-up guest spot on megahit “Un x100to” and to the song doctoring and patented artificial sweeteners of superproducer Edgar Barrera. But their momentum predates Bunny hopping on, and Barrera’s work with, say, the highly competent Becky G lacks the same zing. While the band aren’t writers, they adapt well to Barrera et al.’s tales of love in an age when a cell phone battery in the red can keep you roiling in your heartbreak for a surprisingly long time. They’re very comfortable within their home territory of Mexican cumbia, with accordionist Juan Javier Cantú measured and wistful and 20-year-old singer Payo Solis deploying his considerable Romanticism without oversinging or upstaging his senior bandmates, and they can branch out to meet guests halfway (brassy ranchera with sadboi corrido slinger Junior H, rock en español with sadgirl Yahritza) and to amuse themselves (“Cuídala” is Tejano country.) Still, they’re realest when the bajo quintos and congas have full room to maneuver, with Barrera’s programming easing their passage into the digital world. Texas ain’t big enough for them.
9. Dlala Thukzin: Permanent Music 3
Though Thukzin came up as a gqom producer, he’s since diversified his portfolio across the house-amapiano spectrum to considerable success. The single “iPlan”, at the time of writing still on top of the South African charts after eleven weeks, has been the commercial breakout of the “3-step” beat, which drops one kick drum per bar to both provide a sense of eternal return (three, four, ONE) and free up space for cool shit. And does he have some cool shit: big snares, synths that pulse with the inevitability of a heartbeat, Zaba and Sykes singing about being broke and faithful to remind you this is a pop record, a muffled version of the donk that makes it seem like you’re listening to the world’s best non-German club from outside where you can breathe and it smells better. Having introduced a sound to the wider world, he and Uncle Kabza immediately start running variations on it, throwing in eighth notes and dropping alternative beats like he’s Mozart or something. His gqom background lets him throw in a few oddball sonics, but the totality remains genial and functional even as the genres hybridize and recombine. Evolution: it’s permanent.
10. Jelly Roll: Whitsitt Chapel
I doubt anyone expected a guy whose first fifteen minutes of fame were for getting his mixtape cease-and-desisted by Waffle House to make the most serious popular music about popular religion since the first Withered Hand album. While the criminal justice system may consider his worst sins atoned for, guilt still burdens him. “I only talk to God when I need a favor”, he confesses like his soul depends on it, but this seems a more honest relationship with the Creator than the American average, not least because it means he talks to God a lot. He’s so committed to his spiritual quest that he gets away with calling a song “Nail Me”, making its chorus a magnificent mixed metaphor that has him getting stoned through glass by someone on both a horse and a throne (in an ivory tower, so touché.) If his theology isn’t mine, that’s fine—he’s “better with the lost than the found”, he says on the best song (a Miranda co-write, funny how this keeps happening), and they need it more. I can share the joys in his journey and in his music, which has guitars of surprising variety, and programming flourishes from former Christian rap producer Zach Crowell. And Jelly Roll’s earnestness and epistemic modesty buys his roar a lot of goodwill—hopefully not least from the Creator when He finds His charge hungover in a church pew. Maybe even from Waffle House’s legal department.
***
And here’s a top forty (and yes, I re-listened to everything here this month, most more than once.)
Olivia Rodrigo: Guts
Jason Moran: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield
Isach Skeidsvoll: Dance to Summon
Victoria Monét: Jaguar II
James Brandon Lewis & Lutosławski Quartet: These Are Soulful Days
Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden
NewJeans: Get Up EP
Grupo Frontera: El Comienzo
Dlala Thukzin: Permanent Music 3
Jelly Roll: Whitsitt Chapel
Machine Girl: Neon White Soundtrack Part 1: The Wicked Heart (2022)
Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))
Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet: Hear the Light Singing
Buck 65: Punk Rock B-Boy
Dolly Parton: Rockstar (sensible 90-minute edit)
The major consumer news here is the 2020 Brime! EP I reviewed has been filled out nicely to a full-length, with no discernible tail-off.
That’s it! Happy New Year!
Thanks for being a weekly highlight! Keep up the good work and Happy New Year!
Nice to see your Grupo write up here: everything else I put in my top 15ish last month ended up in other album lists, but that didn’t, and I didn’t know why? I teach high school, and regional Mexican music has never been more popular among the teens (even the ones who don’t speak Spanish).