I spent late 2022/early 2023 performing my annual ritual of trying to cram as much new music into my head as possible, ostensibly in an effort to compile year-end best-of lists, which some of my old musician friends and I have done off and on for the past thirty or so years. Increasingly, this exercise is probably less about grooving to the latest Taylor Swift release, and more about straining against the inevitable pull of mortality, an observation which is pretty tedious and best left unexplored.
With that out of the way, I present to you my list of top ten albums of 2022, which features mostly kind-of-obscure artists, along with references to other mostly kind-of-obscure artists. Enjoy!
10. Melody’s Echo Chamber, Unfold — French neo-psychedelia, with a breathy lead singer (Melody) who evokes Dominique Durand from Ivy and who will probably be a movie star or doing Louis Vuitton ads before the year is out. Hangs out with the dudes from Tame Impala, and it sure as hell sounds like it. The album clocks in at 21 minutes, which to my aging, impatient self feels like the ideal running time.
9. Yard Act, The Overload — Funny, sharp, very British
(an actual British person shared this observation, so it’s not just me making a sloppy generalization), similar in both content and deliverance to Mike Skinner. These guys also remind me a lot of Art Brut, and I suspect
their career trajectory will be similarly brief and forgettable, but good fun
while it lasts.
8. Elvis Costello & the Impostors, The Boy Named If
— The most Brutal Youth-sounding
album since, well since Brutal Youth. If a new artist dropped something
like this, we’d all be doing backflips. But because it’s EC, we don’t make so
much fuss. The curse of greatness, I suppose.
7. The Paranoid Style, For Executive Meeting — Elizabeth
Nelson writes extraordinarily erudite and insightful pieces in places like Pitchfork
and The New York Times on subjects as diverse as Warren
Zevon concert films and the rivalry between Bryson
DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. As someone who once fantasized about
challenging Hootie and
the Blowfish to a match play competition in which they would be able to scramble
four balls against my one, let’s just say I fit quite snugly in her demographic.
6. Carly Cosgrove, See You in Chemistry — The guitar tone
on this was so similar to Home Like
Noplace Is There that I had to check the Internets to see if it was the
same dude from The Hotelier. It’s not, and for a moment I imagined a good-natured effects pedal exchange program among emo bands,
which, ridiculous as it is, still gave me a warm feeling. Anyhoo, emo is normally not my thing, but there’s
an awful lot to like here. Wicked guitar playing. Scream-y vocals not overdone.
Musical themes introduced and re-introduced in just the right places. Girl bass
player. Strong ending.
5. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field — Irresistible Kiwis
with talent and energy to burn. They haven’t really made a misstep on their
last two efforts, so I hope they can keep this up.
4. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights — “Bad Habit” is one of
the most unlikely tracks ever to grace the single-digit end of the pop charts.
Two chords, dorky synth, totally undanceable, lyrics about regret; yet there it
was, firmly lodged at the very top of the Billboard charts and in our
brains. The rest of the album also resists
attempts at classification. Apple Music tells me this is “R&B/Soul,” and I
suppose one could see a little Frank Ocean or Andre3000 in his vibe (sexually
and otherwise), but then a track like “Mercury” drops, and he’s doing Tropicalia
in waltz time. I should stop trying to place him into a genre and just leave him be.
3. Richard Dawson, The Ruby Cord — Newcastle’s chief troubadour
completes his trilogy (with 2017’s Peasant and 2019’s 2020) covering
a span of roughly 2000 years — the first set in the 5th century in
the kingdom of Bryneich,
the second in present-day UK, and now this one several hundred years into
the future. Guess what: things have not turned out so well. Crow-pecked corpses
litter the landscape, cities are deserted, videos looping in a museum are all
that remain of the life that you and I know.
Yet through the characters which Dawson so fully inhabits, he shows us that, no matter the epoch, it’s always the same stuff with us humans: love and
death and cruelty and tenderness and survival. And, as intellectually juicy as
the concept is, it’s Dawson’s drop-dead gorgeous melodies, and choruses that
repeat until they start to resemble the movement of the oceans, that make this
such pure joy. RIYL: Ragnar Kjartansson’s The
Visitors.
2. Black Country, New Road, Ants from Up There — Since
last year’s offering, these kids have turned down the spazz a bit, but they’ve
dialed up the melodrama in the best way possible. Isaac Wood croons/moans about leaving home
and missing home and coming back home (depending on the situation, “home” may be a person, whom Wood often addresses in second person), over a well-oiled but
loose-limbed ensemble. This might have topped my ballot if they had ended the
album following the barn-burning “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” but instead
they chose to plow ahead with not one but two not-so-great tracks
clocking in at over 9:00 each. Maybe they were trying to emulate Illusory Walls from
last year, which is easier said than done.
1. Metronomy, Small World — All these albums exist for us at a particular point in time, and one of the reasons — maybe the reason — we do this every year is to give these albums and the year in which they arrived some enduring meaning beyond the ephemeral experience of living through them, and it. We realize, a little more each year, these attempts at assessing and ordering and ranking are kind of futile, but here we are. The track list for Small World — “Life and Death,” “Things Will Be Fine,” “It’s Good To Be Back” — reads like a string of headlines for the kind-of-but-not-really-post-Covid world of 2022. Sad and complicated and hopeful but still sad. Each day’s a little mystery.
P.P.S. Most of entry #7 refers to golf.
P.P.P.S. (*=recommended):
070 Shake, You Can’t Kill Me – Auto-croon. Resembles early The Weeknd more closely than The Weeknd does these days.
2nd grade, Easy Listening – Aspiring to be the GBV of jangle pop. Snotty lead singer and noise guitar in the background doesn’t match Bob Pollard’s swagger. Back to triple-A.
*Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer – Belgian dance act with a Roisin Murphy vibe. Best and funniest closing song.
Animal Collective, Time Skiffs – I cannot believe that any of the people who gave this album gushing reviews actually enjoyed themselves while listening to it.
*Beyonce, Renaissance – Ranges from breathless, mindless disco anthems to deep cuts where she discusses the color of her vagina and the stretch marks on her breasts. These are not the kind of moves one sees every mega-star making.
Dayglow, People in Motion – Owl City-esque. Should be doing ads for Skittles or toothpaste, or maybe Skittles-flavored toothpaste.
*Frontperson, Parade – Man/woman share lead vox over a bed of synths that sounds like a second-grade recorder orchestra playing Loveless. Intriguing.
Alex G, God Save the Animals — No relation to Kenny, I assume. Alternates vocal effects and styles from Sufjan Stephens’s gentle coo to early Kanye sped up samples. I find it hard to relate to, but the drum tone is amazing.
*Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers: I read something recently about how the purpose of art is to make us uncomfortable, and this does that. Taylour Paige and Tanna Leone make the best female guest appearances since Nicki Minaj.
Father John Misty, Chloë and The Next 20th Century – Singer-songwriter stuff over full orchestra, brushed drums, etc. Lyrics have a tinge of darkness that makes this more interesting than it sounds. I might like this more when I’m like 65.
Office Culture, Big Time Things – From the band name, I was expecting something literate, hyperactive, wry, maybe Vampire Weekend-y; instead it sounded like the verse to “Baby Come Back.”
Open Mike Eagle, Component System With The Auto Reverse – Name-checks an entire roster of backup NBA centers. Deserves a re-listen.
Beth Orton, Weather Alive – I believe I’m in a demographic that’s supposed to like this, but I do not like this. The music is moody and tasteful enough; singer sounds like she has been bouncing around NA meetings for a while now.
Pinegrove, 11:11 – An awful lot of first-person singular going on here. Like on every single song. Was this the guy who was accused of sexual assault or something? Heavy solipsism doesn’t help his case (e.g., “I climb inside my iridescent mind (?!)), no matter how nice the guitar tones are.
*Aaron Raitiere, Single Wide Dreamer – High-octane country music and deft observations of the human condition in America. Blue-staters will hear the pedal steel and deny that this applies to them, and they would be mistaken.
Saba, Few Good Things – Chicago rapper with a fondness for triplets and a desire for familial stability. Channels Kendrick and Drake on a couple of tracks, but who can blame him.
Sloan, Steady – Straight-faced MOR rock, nothing really not to like. Kinda reminds me of David Schreiber, RIP.
*Spoon, Lucifer On The Sofa – We always knew they could bring winning guitar and drum sounds, but Britt Daniel pulls off an impressive shift from aesthete to swaggering Texas (and seemingly born-again) rocker. Great bass playing.
Bartees Strange, See Through You – Guitar playing that sounds like a tape loop which is kind of cool. Sags in too many places, but like he says it’s been a hard year.
*Harry Styles, Harry’s House – what is it about Harry Styles that makes him such a likeable character in a way that, say, Charlie Puth is not? Musical inventiveness and leanness helps. Not a song on Harry’s World is too long; he knows when to trim a measure from a pre-chorus, etc.
Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen – Experimental R&B. Wants to have her titties out, apparently
Taylor Swift, Midnights – Who am I to give advice to Taylor Swift, but here it is: more Emily Haines, less Emily in Paris.
Wet Leg, Wet Leg – All the rage, but I just can’t get past the ASMR vocals. Music producers: please please please stop with that.
Billy Woods, Aethiopes – closer to spoken word or slam poetry than hip hop. Bonus points for finding a rhyme for “poultice” and for name-checking DFW.
*Nilüfer Yanya, Painless – Annie Lennox fanatics and their heirs will lap this up. Great drumming.
Years and Years, Night Call – Music for the horny. Bright and clean like a penny whistle.
*Other albums I liked but I didn’t listen to enough to say anything useful about: Belle & Sebastian, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Kiwi Jr, Big Thief
