→ January 2, 2023
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Elvis.

Elvis Presley was anything but boring, as a person or as an entertainer, which makes it all the more criminal that Baz Luhrman’s biopic Elvis is such a dull, overlong mess. Even a game performance by Austin Butler, who’s doing the sort of impersonation that Oscar voters seem to love, can’t salvage this thing, which could have been 45 minutes shorter yet somehow misses some of the most interesting parts of the singer’s life story. (It’s free for HBO Max subscribers, or you can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Elvis tries to be a cradle-to-grave story, or at least an early childhood to death one, starting out with Elvis as a very young boy who moves with his family to a house in the white part of a Black neighborhood, where he was introduced to the gospel and blues music that he later used (or appropriated) in his own sound. The narrative then winds its way through his rise to stardom, marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, stint in the army, the comeback special, and so on, until he gets addicted to drugs and dies, in connect-the-dots storytelling that might still have worked if Lurhman had any interest at all in telling the whole of Elvis’s story. Instead, we get a nonsense framing device of Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who is both the narrator and whose perspective is supposed to be our lens on the story, as Parker keeps trying to tell the viewers that he’s not that bad of a guy, and Elvis wouldn’t have been anything without him. It’s a pointless distraction and shifts the focus to a character nobody really cares about – or, if they did, maybe the film could have been called Parker and just put Elvis in the background. (Please, nobody do this.)be an

Presley’s actual life was far messier than the one we see in Elvis, not least of which is that he had several affairs while married to Priscilla, something the film glosses over almost entirely until the point where she announces that she’s leaving him and taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. Among other sins of the script, such as the superficial treatment of his substance abuse issues or scant discussion of his appropriation of Black music or how his success may have allowed Black artists to follow in his wake, this amounts to a sort of hagiography that paints Elvis as a victim. Col. Parker did take advantage of Elvis financially and probably did so emotionally as well, but the story is so weirdly one-sided – even though Parker is the narrator – that the singer comes off as a pathetic man-child, and often not responsible for his own actions. I doubt this is accurate, and it’s certainly not interesting to watch.

Luhrman also plays loose with some key facts, which I suppose is par for the course in these music biopics, but his depiction of a race riot at an Elvis concert at Memphis’s Russwood Park is almost pure fiction. It plays into Lurhman’s ham-fisted attempts to tie Elvis’s career to the civil rights movement, which comes up again when Luhrman moves the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in time so that it happens during the taping of the comeback special, rather than some weeks before it, so that there can be a Big Moment backstage where Elvis and the producer decide the singer has to make a statement during the show and change the closing number. (There’s some good comedy in that whole sequence, though, as Parker sold the show as a Christmas special, and keeps insisting that Elvis close with a Christmas song and wear an ugly sweater.) A screenwriter can alter some timelines or small facts in service of the story, but here, Luhrman does the opposite – it holds the story back, makes the film longer, and adds no real interest. Even the comeback special, which was the most-watched TV program of its year and has entered music history for its impact on the culture and the way it opened up the second act of his career, is kind of boring in Elvis. I’d much rather watch that special three times, which would match the running time of this mess, than watch Elvis again.

Butler is a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama, with Colin Farrell in a separate category because The Banshees of Inisherin counts as a Musical or Comedy. And Butler is good, even if he looks more like Miley Cyrus than Elvis when he’s in his stage makeup. The oddsmakers favor Elvis getting a Best Picture nod, which would be a real travesty, both on its face (this movie sucks) and because it’s going to push out something far more worthy. It’s just a waste of a lot of time and money, and the only film I’ve seen this year that I’d rank below it is Amsterdam, which would also fit that same description.

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→ January 1, 2023
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La Caja.

La Caja (The Box) was Venezuela’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, but didn’t make the shortlist of 15 that was announced in December; it’s on MUBI, for which we signed up to watch Decision to Leave, so I watched this as well. It’s a simple, bleak story that is exceptionally well-told, and while the story is quite specific to its setting, the themes of displacement and loss should have a much broader appeal.

Hatzín (Haztín Navarette) is a young Venezuelan teen or pre-teen who has traveled to a village in Chihuahaua, Mexico, to pick up the remains of his father, which were discovered in a mass grave there. After he gets the box, he’s on the bus back to Mexico City when he spots a man in the street (Hernán Mendoza) who looks just like the pictures of his father, whom he hasn’t seen since he was very little. Hatzín gets off the bus and confronts the man, who insists he’s not Hatzín’s father, but Hatzín returns the box of remains to the office and confronts the man, repeatedly, until he takes Hatzín in and ends up bringing him to his work as a recruiter for a maquiladora (factory) near the U.S. border. The work isn’t always savory, and at times is illegal, leading Hatzín to question whether he should stay there or even wants this man to turn out to be his father.

The story is pretty simple, and revolves around just those two questions: Is this man Hatzín’s father, and what will Hatzín do if it turns out that he is? The man, who calls himself Mario, is furious with Hatzín at the start for the boy’s insistence that this is his father and refusal to leave, although of course that could be a sign that Mario doesn’t want his old life – where he at the very least left Hatzín, Hatzín’s mother (since dead), and his own mother – to intrude on his new one. As Mario, he has a wife, child, and a baby on the way, as well as a job, a factory of his own in progress, and a middle-class existence. Or maybe he just thinks this kid is a pest and doesn’t want to be responsible for him. But he then takes Hatzín in and uses him as a helper, especially when he discovers the boy can read and write well and has a good memory. Does he actually care for the boy, or is he just an opportunist?

Meanwhile, Hatzín confronts an escalating set of moral quandaries as he follows Mario through his job, from recruiting desperate people to work in the sewing factory under dubious pretenses to quelling dissent to grand larceny, and more. Hatzín barely had any memories of his father; if Mario is, in fact, his dad, is this the dad he wanted? What happens to us when our memories of those we’ve lost are tainted by reality? Is it better to know the brutal truth, or to leave the past buried? He’s also faced with a more immediate dilemma: If he were to go to the police, would he be betraying his father? What if he does nothing, and it turns out that Mario isn’t his dad? The excellence of La Caja lies in just how many of these moral questions, ranging from basic to profound, it manages to pose despite just two main characters and what had to be a fairly short script.

This is Naverette’s first film or TV role, and he delivers an essential performance – without him, the film can’t work – that doesn’t line up with his lack of experience. Hatzín the character is a stoic, taciturn kid, already resigned to the tragedies that have taken both of his parents from him and the life it implies; when pure chance throws Mario into his path, he’s already mature enough to make the serious choices required of him. Navarette puts that tension to work on his face and in his sparing movements, making it easy to see his future as a noir detective or a sardonic action hero. Mendoza is almost his equal, threading the needle between the gruff and callous businessman he is at work and the caring family man he can be at home – or the maybe-father he is to Hatzín.

You can only find La Caja on MUBI, at least right now, but if you subscribe to that site it’s worth the watch. You can also sign up for it via amazon, with a 7-day free trial, which would also let you watch Decision to Leave, one of the best movies of 2022 that I’ve seen, and Aftersun, which is coming to MUBI on January 9th.

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→ December 31, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 12/31/22.

I skipped last Saturday’s post, since it was Christmas Eve (iiin the drunk tank…), but since the last roundup I’ve written up the Daulton Varsho/Gabriel Moreno trade and the still in-limbo Carlos Correa signing with the Mets.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2022, and posted reviews of two of them – Kites, a real-time cooperative game; and Lacrimosa, a heavier game based on the life of Mozart. For those of you interested in my board game content, I’m going to do some small giveaways of promos and small expansions via my Instagram account starting this week, so feel free to follow me there if you’re interested.

I’ve got a bunch of non-work writing to do this weekend before I get back to prospect calls on Monday, with a new issue of my free email newsletter next up once this post is done.

And now, the links…

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→ December 31, 2022
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Decision to Leave.

Decision to Leave is the latest film from South Korean director and screenwriter (co-writer, in this case) Park Chan-wook, his first since 2016’s The Handmaiden and only his third as director in the last ten years. It’s a Hitchcockian thriller with a slow burn, reminiscent in many ways of Vertigo, right down to the romance between the male lead and the femme fatale he’s chasing, that also taps into bigger themes of alienation and self-worth, anchored by two incredible lead performances that should be earning broader acclaim.

Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is called in to investigate the death of an immigration worker who fell while climbing a mountain near Busan, a mountain the man liked to climb and livestream. Jang suspects the man’s young Chinese wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), who works as a caregiver to senior citizens, and who has suspicious marks and bruises on her when they police speak to her. Jang only sees his wife on weekends, because she works at a nuclear power plant, and he quickly becomes obsessed with Seo-Rae, following her and imagining he’s with her at work or in her apartment, which she realizes and turns back around by following him. The two end up in a chaste relationship – not without sexual tension – that Jang must keep secret while she’s still a potential suspect. Of course, nothing is as it first appears, and he finds evidence that might point to Seo-Rae’s guilt, leading to a second act where their power dynamic shifts repeatedly as Jang tries to figure out what’s real and what matters.

Some of the plot points in Decision to Leave are a little easy to spot, but the story isn’t the real strength here – it’s the two main characters, and the actors who do such incredible work to flesh them out. Jang has shadings of the noir detective, a tough guy with a grim exterior, capable of solving tough crimes, earning plaudits from his colleagues while he’s also putting them down for their coarse methods, but he’s also dealing with an existential grief that he tries to assuage with Seo-Rae. He’s not maudlin, or quiet, but actually depressed – he doesn’t seem to love his wife, although he will go through the motions to keep them together, and he doesn’t seem to gain satisfaction from his job, even when he’s doing it well. Park Hae-il has won a slew of awards for his portrayal here, deservedly so, as there’s a nuance to the performance that keeps him away from the stock hard-boiled character that’s fine in genre films but would take away from the bigger ideas here. Seo-Rae, meanwhile, is an immigrant from China who frequently apologizes for her poor Korean and appears in many ways to be an isolated figure – perhaps a damsel in distress for Jang to save – but, of course, she might also be a very cunning killer. Tang, who first rose to prominence in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, is Park’s equal here, playing the did-she-or-didn’t-she part without the cheap seduction common to the archetype; in fact, there’s very little sex at all in this movie, as the script almost dispenses with the idea that these two are physically attracted to each other, or at least removes it from the equation so the focus is instead on who they are and what might be driving them. (Apropos of nothing, I couldn’t believe Tang is 43 years old; her character, at least, seems at least a decade younger than that.)

Park Chan-woo utilizes a number of symbols in the film, two of which recur enough to merit mention. One is the eyes of various characters, including the victim at the start of the film, whose eyes we see several times in close-up. Jang uses eye drops to moisten his eyes frequently throughout the film, which the director has said is his way of showing that the detective has a hard time seeing what’s right in front of him, whether it’s with Seo-Rae or his wife or other cases. Blurred or diminished vision also comes into play with the frequent fog and mist we see in the film, which apparently is a feature of Ipo, where Jang’s wife works. You could also have a field day just with Jang’s bespoke suit and its seemingly infinite number of pockets, and how Seo-Rae seems to know where he keeps various things – as he is always prepared with little supplies, like he has every mother’s purse’s contents scattered throughout his clothes – while his own wife doesn’t.

My only quibble with Decision to Leave is the ending, as it just doesn’t quite stick the landing, but that’s a tiny complaint in a movie of this ambition. Like Hitchcock’s best films, however, much of the film’s inherent mystery lingers after the conclusion – and Decision to Leave does just that, giving you plenty to ponder long after the movie ends. I seldom watch movies twice, but this one likely rewards a second viewing.

Park won Best Director at Cannes for the film, which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or, and at the Grand Bell Awards, the South Korean equivalent to the Oscars, it took home the honors for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Park Hae-il. Decision to Leave was South Korea’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the December shortlist and I have to assume eventually getting one of the five nominations. But it also seems like it’s going to get shut out of everything else, which seems like a shame – I can’t imagine there are ten better movies in the 2022 crop than this one.

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→ December 29, 2022
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The Eternal Daughter.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a semi-autobiographical film that received general plaudits from critics but was also notable for its casting of Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honora Swinton-Byrne as mother and daughter in the film, with the latter serving as Julie, Joanna’s stand-in. That film led to a sequel last year, and now a connected film, The Eternal Daughter, that features the same two characters but isn’t a direct sequel or continuation of any sort. The artifice this time is that Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother, Rosalind, as we’re about 30-35 years on, and the two women head off for a week’s stay at quite possibly the worst bed & breakfast in Wales – which happens to be in their former family home. (You can rent The Eternal Daughter on Amazon, iTunes, and so forth.)

Julie is hoping to make a movie about her mother’s life, and has taken her mother on this trip to try to entice her mum to tell her more of her story and, as we learn over the course of the film, to better understand her mother, who has always been just inscrutable enough that Julie feels insufficient to the task of summarizing her on film. The hotel is something out of a classic horror film, dark, empty save for the world’s least-helpful clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies, who is superb) and later one other staff member (Joseph Mydell), and constantly surrounded by mist and fog. Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s dog Louis (played by Louis, Swinton’s dog) are alone everywhere, in their room, the dining room, on the grounds, anywhere they go. There’s an air of mystery from the air itself, and the constant darkness. The hotel seems to have weird sounds, and Julie even thinks she sees the visage of an old woman in a particular window on the first floor. The answer to everything does appear near the end of the film, although the mystery isn’t the real point here; it’s about a mother and daughter, and how we can never truly know our parents no matter how close we try to get to them.

Swinton has become so known for playing weird characters – and doing so in weird fashion – that a bravura performance like this might just go unappreciated and even unnoticed. If you take GoldDerby’s Oscar odds seriously, she’s at 100 to 1 to win Best Actress, the lowest probability they assign to anyone who has better than a zero chance of winning, although they only gave seven actresses higher odds in that category. (Also at 100:1 is Ana de Armas, who was considered a likely nominee before Blonde bombed.) This is two performances, of course, and the roles required some improvisation, as Hogg typically does not provide word-for-word scripts to her actors, but provides treatments and works with them as director to see where the dialogue goes. There are several obvious reasons to cast Swinton in both roles, from the physical similarities we expect from a mother and a daughter to the fact that this was filmed early in 2021 when a small cast was probably a greater asset for COVID mitigation, but perhaps the best reason is that she’s an amazing actor and very much rises to this occasion. There’s one scene where she seems to pour it on a little thick, but after the film’s reveal at the end, her emotions in that one conversation are easier to understand.

The twist, or mystery, is not that hard to discern; my wife called it within five minutes, and of course we spent most of the film looking for clues to verify or debunk it, but she was right. It’s something we’ve seen before, although I won’t spoil it by citing other films that have used this conceit, but I will defend the choice again by saying it’s beside the point. When you find out what’s been happening, it provides context to everything that’s come before. It’s not a “did you figure it out?” mystery, and there are no jump scares or shocks here; any review calling this a horror movie, in any sense at all, has completely missed Hogg’s intentions. The gimmick exists so Hogg and Swinton can further elucidate the difficulties we face as adult children who are trying to understand our parents better before it is too late to do so. The fog and mist are fairly obvious metaphors for that last part – we simply cannot see our parents clearly because we haven’t lived their lives, or even seen the first portions of their lives, and have then spent much of our lives looking at them not as people, but as parents.

There are only seven credited actors in The Eternal Daughter, including Louis, since the hotel appears to have no other guests – I can’t imagine why not, as it’s dank, noisy, and the one full-time employee seems to hate her job. Davies is pretty fantastic as that clerk, and waitress, and almost everything else, as she isn’t so much mean as apathetic. Your concerns are not her concerns, and since there’s no one else there like a supervisor, she doesn’t have to worry about whether you ever get that kettle you asked for. Mydell plays Bill, who seems to work there sometimes in a sort of catchall porter/groundskeeper post; it’s a dicey role, as it veers close to the Magical Negro trope, since his main function here is to help and comfort Julie, with just a slight backstory of his own. I think the counterargument here is that his race is immaterial to his character, and there isn’t a good way to give him anything more to do in a script that is about 90% Julie and Rosalind. I have another possible explanation for this, but that would require spoiling something in the story to explain.

I find it incredibly impressive just how deep The Eternal Daughter is despite the sparse cast and single setting, a testament to what good writing can do and in many ways a nod to the movies’ roots on the stage, where words were almost all that mattered because you didn’t have huge casts, sets, or special effects to paper over flaws in the script. This exploration of filial ties felt especially poignant to myself and my wife, as our parents are all alive but getting older, and this desire to hold on to what you can because you can’t hold on to what you desire is something that crosses boundaries of race, class, and so on. The bond between a mother and daughter, and the strain that can coexist with it, is something I know I can’t understand, but I hope I can at least appreciate how Hogg has brought it to life on film. It’s a shame that The Eternal Daughter has been so overlooked, between Swinton’s excellent and – gasp! – understated twin performances and the themes that power the story.

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→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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→ December 22, 2022
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Top 100 songs of 2022.

There was such a flood of new music in the last two months of 2022 that I struggled to keep up with it, even slipping a couple of new albums on my best of 2022 list that I’d only listened to in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. It’s a good outcome, though, as 2022 shaped up to be a better year for new music than I would have said it was coming out of the summer, and I had more songs to put on this list than I could fit (and no, I’m not going past 100, this is work enough for something that’s not my actual job). You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

If you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can access it here.

100. beabadoobee – 10:36. Beatrice Kristi Laus’s second album, beatopia, refers to a fantasy world she created for herself when she moved with her family from the Philippines to London at age 7. It’s a clear step forward in her songwriting and gets her out of the lo-fi world of her first record. This was my second-favorite track on the album, although “Last Day on Earth,” her one-off single from 2021, isn’t on the LP at all.

99. Stella Donnelly – How Was Your Day? The Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter Donnelly released her second album, Flood, this spring to positive reviews. This track’s witty lyrics, revealing the hidden layers behind that innocuous phrase, and sunny indie-pop make it the album’s best.

98. Young Guv – Nowhere at All. Ben Cook of the Canadian band No Warning released his third album as Young Guv early this year and then followed it up with this one-off jangle-pop single that reminded me quite a bit of last year’s debut record from Chime School.

97. The Linda Lindas – Tonite. I’ve been a bit surprised that the Linda Linda’s debut album Growing Up didn’t appear on any year-end rankings or roundups of the year’s best music that I found, given the hype around the teenage punk band a year or two earlier – and given how good they sound for a bunch of kids. This is a great, vibrant young punk album, just angry enough about the right stuff. I admit it’s not breaking a ton of new ground, but tracks like this one are pretty infectious and point to a promising future.

96. Arlo Parks – Softly. The only music Parks released this year was this track, which brings some electronic music elements to her lovely vocals.

95. Bartees Strange – Wretched. Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, is his big coming-out as a songwriter, bringing him out from under the shadow of his influences (notably the National). This track was one of the album’s standouts, a slower, mournful song that offers thanks to the people who stood by him when he was at his worst.

94. Jungle – Good Times. One of two songs Jungle released this year ahead of an album that didn’t appear in 2022, although I imagine it won’t be that much longer now that their summer/fall tour is over.

93. SAULT – Money. SAULT released six albums this year, five of them at the start of November. One of those five was Today & Tomorrow, the band’s most rock-oriented record to date, even bringing in some punk influences. You can hear it here, where they channel the 1970s punk act Death.

92. The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. I know this style of very English art-rock music with talk-sung lyrics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but where else would you find a couplet like “Googling questions like ‘Should I start microdosing?’/And ‘How come I’m standing outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping?’”

91. The Fashion Weak ft. Gruff Rhys – Welsh Words. I admit to some pro-Cymru bias here, but this song is both extremely catch and makes me laugh every time I hear it. Rhys is the lead singer of Super Furry Animals, who’ve recorded entire albums in Welsh, while the Fashion Weak are a new wave revival act whose second single, “Fly Fishing,” featured Miki Berenyi of Lush.

90. Superbloom – Falling Up. The first few seconds are sort of nonsense, the kind of thing the band will grow out of, but I like where the track goes afterwards as these over Nirvana fans expand beyond the well-crafted mimicry of their first album into something more original over the foundation of grunge revival.

89. Stars – Pretenders. Stars’ first album in nearly five years was typically lovely, if perhaps a bit unambitious, featuring plenty of back-and-forth vocals from the two lead singers. They bring an ethereal beauty even to upbeat rock tracks like this one, my favorite on the record.

88. All Them Witches – Hush, I’m on TV. According to Wikipedia, ATW released nine original singles in 2022 plus two covers, but no album. Anyway, I dig their heavy, stoner/blues rock sound, which settles in after the loud, layered riffing that opens this track before the buzzsaw hits in the chorus.

87. The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die. The two best tracks from the Wombats’ 2022 album Fix Yourself, Not the World were both released in 2021, so even though the LP made my best-of-2022 list, this is the only song from the record on this year’s top 100.

86. Preoccupations – Ricochet. The best song from Preoccupations’ fourth album Arrangements is this track, which fuses their typical post-punk/early new wave sound with elements of early ‘90s shoegaze.

85. Porcupine Tree – Rats Return. “Harridan” was my favorite song on CLOSURE/CONTINUATION, but this is a close second, less ambitious but highlighted by the best guitar riff on the entire album, a dark, minor-key line that infuses the whole song with a sense of foreboding.

84. Cory Wong – Power Station. Wong released two albums in 2022, Wong’s Café in January and Power Station in April, with this, obviously from the latter album, sounding like something discovered in Prince’s archives from the early 1980s, just with a better guitar solo.

83. The Afghan Whigs – I’ll Make You See God. The Whigs have always been able to rock, but this track goes 0 to 90 in the opening seconds and never lets up – enough that it ended up in the video game Gran Turismo 7. The lyrics appear to be total nonsense, but man, this sucker rocks.

82. Gojira – Our Time is Now. Gojira put out the best metal song of the year – and it’s the only song they released all year, although I’m hopeful we’re getting a new Gojira album soon. It’s not my favorite Gojira song ever, but it might be their most accessible, if that’s possible.

81. Black Honey – Heavy. I didn’t love their previous single, “Charlie Bronson,” but “Heavy” is more the Black Honey I know and love, indie-rock with a strong melody crossed with a harder edge.

80. Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. Barely over two minutes long, this little earworm from the Liverpudlian quartet Crawlers is their best track to date and one of two strong singles from their second EP, Loud Without Noise, along with “Too Soon.”

79. Sports Team – The Drop. I could have put as many as five songs from Gulp! on this top 100, but ended up with two, adding this track because the main hook is so memorable, and it’s one of the more interesting tracks on the album because of the one right turn it takes at the bridge.

78. Killing Joke – Lord of Chaos. Jaz Coleman is 62, and with his age and seven years passing since Killing Joke’s last album, Pylon, I figured we were done getting new music from the band. Killing Joke defy labels as much as any artist I can think of – I suppose people who know Sparks’ music would say the same, but I don’t know their oeuvre as well – so it was sort of a pleasant surprise to hear this track and “Total” follow in the same heavy-rock vein as that last album, which gave us the incredible single “Euphoria.”

77. Band of Horses – Warning Signs. Band of Horses’ best songs can be pretty great, like “Is There a Ghost,” but I find their albums nearly always let me down, and this year’s Things Are Great was more of the same. This was my favorite track, although I think that’s probably because it reminds me of the way I want Band of Horses to sound all the time.

76. Melt Yourself Down – Balance. I admit to ignorance on Melt Yourself Down, and I need to explore their discography some more, as I liked what I heard from this year as they released their fourth album Pray for Me, I Don’t Fit In. Their music doesn’t just blend genres from around the world, but it does so in a frenetic fashion that holds my interest even when the song doesn’t have a great hook (“Nightsiren”). This was the best track from the album, with three great hooks in the vocals, the saxophone line, and the guitar riff around the 1:30 mark.

75. The Mysterines – Means to Bleed. The Mysterines released their debut album, Reeling, in March, but it didn’t include most of the great singles they’d released over the previous couple of years, like “I Win Every Time,” “Love’s Not Enough,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” or “Gasoline.” The album has the right vibe, just without the highlights, although this and “Hung Up” are solid examples of their sound and their potential.

74. Jack White feat. Q-Tip – Hi-De-Ho. The Jack White/Q-Tip partnership that first appeared on record with A Tribe Called Quest’s swan song We Got It From Here … Thank You For Your Service continued this year with Q-Tip’s guest spot on this track from the first of White’s two albums released in 2022, Fear of the Dawn. The result here, based on an interpolation of Cab Calloway’s famous scatting phrase, is wonderfully weird and catchy, and by now you probably realize I give 5 bonus points to any track including Kamaal the Abstract.

73. Kid Kapichi – Rob the Supermarket. I can’t avoid thinking of this as some sort of late-stage capitalist response to the Clash’s anti-consumerist “Lost in the Supermarket,” while also marveling at how Kid Kapichi have taken the mantle that Alex Turner dropped somewhere in the late teens.

72. Freddie Gibbs feat. Moneybagg Yo. Gibbs is one of the best technical rappers going now, and pairs it with consistently interesting and often weird backing music; this track, the best from the regular edition of Gibbs’s $oul $old $eparately, shows off his rhyming speed and rhythm better than anything else on the record.

71. beabadoobee – Talk. The best track from beatopia has a little harder of an edge to the music and mixes her vocals up accordingly to pair with the walls of distortion in the chorus, along with the album’s best melody.

70. Talk Show – Cold House. Talk Show, unrelated to the Stone Temple Pilots offshoot from about twenty years ago, released two EPs this year; Touch the Ground had six songs, including last year’s “Underworld” and this track that encapsulates their blend of post-punk, new wave revival, and dark wave.

69. HAIM – Lost Track. I’ve never gotten the hype for HAIM, but man this song has a hell of a hook in the chorus, and it’s the perfect length for a song of this simplicity.

68. FKA twigs featuring Jorja Smith and Unknown T – darjeeling. I love FKA twigs and I love Jorja Smith, so I’m clearly in the target audience for this track from FKA twigs’ album mixtape, and indeed it’s Smith’s vocals that elevate the track.

67. Tei Shi – GRIP. Big year for songs/albums calling out the music industry’s more exploitative practices. Tei Shi pulled her 2021 album La Linda from streaming services after Downtown Records refused to pay her the remainder of her advance two years aft, er its release. “GRIP” is her diss track against that label and the industry as a whole.

66. Editors – Karma Climb. I was a little underwhelmed by EBM, Editors’ latest album and first with Blanck Mass (Benjamin Power) as a member, but the chorus on “Karma Climb” is extremely catchy and I think a good example of their early Interpol-esque dark indie sound.

65. Greentea Peng – Your Mind. Greentea Peng’s eclectic mix of styles can be very hit or miss, missing on “Stuck in the Middle” but hitting here on “Your Mind,” which incorporates traditional soul, jazz, and some rock guitar lines. Both appeared on her mixtape GREENZONE 108 this September. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that this song’s length is 4:20.

64. Sudan Archives – Home Maker. The opening track from Natural Brown Prom Queen, my #2 album of the year, fakes you out with a minute-long intro that almost sounds like someone pressed ‘record’ before anyone was ready, but it’s all a matter of building tension before Britt Parks starts up with her mixture of rap and vocals, and by the two-minute mark she’s shipped you back almost fifty years in time with her classic R&B sounds.

63. Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget. I had forgotten, it turns out, as Ferreira released just one song between 2014 and 2022, 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby.” This track is supposed to herald the release of her long-awaited second album, Masochism, although it’s still unscheduled; if this is where her sound has evolved after the long layoff, into a darker version of synth-pop, I’m all for it.

62. Sprints – Literary Mind. Sprints released an EP earlier in 2022, Modern Job, featuring the title track and “Delia Smith,” while this single came later and might be their catchiest song to date, without losing any of their signature garage or punk elements.

61. Automatic – Skyscraper. Automatic released their second album, Excess, in June, and this third single from the record was actually the first of their songs I’d heard, a pulsing, dark synth-pop track powered by a prominent, wandering bass line.

60. Dry Cleaning – Don’t Press Me. I’m very sensitive to how a vocalist sings, and often it doesn’t even make that much sense to me. I don’t love the vocals from Dry Cleaning, even though that flat, almost toneless style of sing-talking doesn’t necessarily bother me from other singers, just as I can’t stand Porridge Radio’s whiny, cracking vocals. “Don’t Press Me” is a rare example where the vocals on a Dry Cleaning song aren’t enough to deter me from an outstanding Wire-ish track.

59. Hatchie – Quicksand. I was a little … not underwhelmed, but maybe just whelmed by Hatchie’s new album this year, as it seemed like the Aussie singer/songwriter might be stagnating; the best track was last year’s “This Enchanted,” followed by this song, both solid examples of her particular brand of dream pop.

58. CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. CVC have been gigging in Cardiff (that’s Wales) since before the pandemic but didn’t start releasing music until this year, when they dropped a couple of singles, including this odd mélange of psychedelic rock and ‘70s soft rock with a funk-adjacent bass line. “Docking My Pay” is also worth checking out if you like this track, as we wait for CVC to drop a full album.

57. Yard Act – Pour Another. Yard Act’s debut album The Overload dropped in January and its best songs had already appeared, including the superb title track and the peculiar “Payday,” leaving this as the best song from the band in 2022. I’ll forever compare them to Gang of Four, although here there’s a more joyous, almost silly vibe.

56. Crows – Garden of England. The standout track on Slowly Separate, bringing punk energy to their particular brand of hard-rock-verging-on-metal. I’d fly to London tomorrow for a Kid Kapichi/Crows double billing.

55. MUNA – What I Want. MUNA’s self-titled third album made a few best-of-2022 lists, although it didn’t quite make the cut for me. I do like their unabashedly poppy approach; I just feel like they’re often a little short in the hooks department. This was the best track on the record for me, and unsurprisingly I think the most acclaimed as well.

54. shame – Fingers of Steel. shame’s sophomore album Food for Worms is due out February 24th, with this the lead single. I see them tabbed everywhere as “post-punk,” but I don’t think it fits; they’re an alternative rock act in the clearest sense of the word, working with dissonant sounds and unusual rhythms that will probably always keep them out of the mainstream. I’m also in awe of the fact that they named a song “Baldur’s Gate” after my all-time favorite CPRG series.

53. John-Allison Weiss – Different Now. Weiss’ first new music since coming out as non-binary & trans in 2017, and first for Get Better Records, was this aptly titled song that doubles as a bittersweet breakup track.

52. Death Cab for Cutie – Here to Forever. DCFC seem good for one real standout single on every album at this point, such as “Gold Rush” from 2018’s Thank You for Today and “Black Sun” from Kintsugi. That may not quite hit the highs of Codes and Keys or Transatlanticism, but I’d say this is pretty good for a band approaching the 25th anniversary of its first album, and singing about mortality and surviving.

51. STONE – Waste. This Liverpool garage-punk band signed to Polydor earlier in the year and ended it with a banger of a six-song EP, highlighted by this abrasive track that starts angry and ends up furious.

50. Sam Fender – Alright. A tremendous non-album single from the Seventeen Going Under sessions, included in a live version on a bonus version of the 2021 LP released this summer. You’ll notice I don’t include many slower-tempo songs on these lists, especially ones that aren’t acoustic, so that should give you some sense of how much I like this.

49. Foals – Looking High. I thought Foals’ Life is Yours was just a big ol’ mess of danceable fun, but it didn’t receive the plaudits I expected, with a lot of criticism over the lyrics – which has never been a strength of Foals’ songwriter Yannis Philippakis. (“I see a mountain at my gates/I see it more and more each day.” Shades of Keats and Shelley there.) This or “Wake Me Up” vie for my favorite track on the album.

48. GIFT – Gumball Garden. A five-minute opus that starts out in shoegaze territory and then shifts almost to power-pop territory before turning back around on itself. Their album Momentary Presence has a lot of that combination, bigger melodies and faster tempos mixed with shimmering guitars and synths out of shoegaze.

47. Lizzo – About Damn Time. You may have heard this song. Special lists twenty-five different people as producers, and somehow, none of them was Nile Rodgers. This track is so chic Rodgers might as well have produced it and played guitar.

46. Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha – Father Time. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is certainly ambitious, but it’s too long and inconsistent, which led me to leave it off my top albums of the year list. “N95” is solid, and “Auntie Diaries” has a truly incredible and necessary sentiment (although it contains a word best omitted, despite the message). This song was the real highlight for me, thanks to the chorus from Mercury Prize winner Sampha.

45. The Head and the Heart – Shut Up. Every Shade of Blue had its highs and lows for me, which is how I pretty much always feel about H&H’s albums, although I loved this song and “Virginia (Wind in the Night)” from their latest.

44. SAULT – Above the Sky. The best track from the best of the six albums SAULT released this year (Today & Tomorrow), incorporating rock elements into the sound they honed on their first four albums, including a guitar solo with distortion and reverb that evoke Hendrix. Also, it’s kind of nuts that SAULT has released eleven albums in three and a half years.

43. The Lathums – Say My Name. The Arctic Monkeys meet the Amazons? It’s anthemic, muscular rock, and I’m fine with that, even if it’s of a sort we’ve heard before.

42. Anxious – Call From You. It’s post-hardcore, emo, whatever, but with real harmonies, and that little guitar riff you hear in the intro is so unexpected from this subgenre that it has consistently brought me back to this song on a generally great album.

41. Just Mustard – Mirrors. So I’ve said many times I was never a My Bloody Valentine fan, even with their general critical acclaim and my own affinity for shoegaze, because I just hear waves of noise, not individual notes or chords. “I Only Said” is the exception, because there’s an actual melody to latch on to. If you made an even more accessible version of that song, you’d get “Mirrors.”

40. Danger Mouse & Black Thought feat. MF Doom – Belize. Of course, I had to include this track from Cheat Codes, as it’s probably the final recording to feature the late MF Doom (a.k.a Zev Love X), although it’s hard to single out any particular tracks on the generally excellent DM/BT collaboration.

39. Young Fathers – I Saw. The Mercury Prize winners will drop their fourth album, Heavy Heavy, early in 2023, and from the first three singles it looks like we’re in for even more musical experimentation. This was by far my favorite of the three, though, as there’s a hint of their rap origins and a rising sense of indignation as the song progresses.

38. Belle & Sebastian – Unnecessary Drama. I don’t know why people get upset when Belle & Sebastian rock out a little, or hit the dance floor, as long as their essential Belle-and-Sebastian-ness is intact. Stuart Murdoch’s wry, sardonic lyrics are still here, as are the band’s harmonies, so who’s to argue if they have a little more fun?

37. Gang of Youths – in the wake of your leave. I don’t think any album disappointed me more than angel in realtime., which had three incredible singles to tease it (“the angel of 8th ave.” and “unison”) and nothing else of note. The rest of the record felt self-indulgent, even pretentious, and worst of all devoid of energy. But those three tracks … I’m not sure anyone has evoked early U2 so effortlessly.

36. Khruangbin feat. Leon Bridges – B-side. The collaboration that began two years ago with Texas Sun continued this year with Texas Moon, highlighted by this danceable, soulful, and of course jazz-inflected single.

35. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. The title track from my #1 album of 2022 is just a perfect Beths song, shiny and bright and poppy and just a little dark around the edges.

34. Sunflower Bean – I Don’t Have Control Sometimes. Sunflower Bean had a moment this year, pun intended, with “Moment in the Sun” appearing in the final episode of Netflix’s Heartstopper, and their latest album Headful of Sugar had a number of similarly melodic lo-fi gems, including this one, which hits you with the melody right out of the chute.

33. The Smile – Thin Thing. The more I listened to the Smile’s debut album, the less I liked it, finding it experimental in some ways but often exactly what you’d expect if you smushed Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack work with Thom Yorke’s vocals and the drummer from jazz group Sons of Kemet. It turns out it’s not that interesting. This track has the most to offer, starting with that odd syncopated guitar line that opens the song and moves on through it.

32. Blossoms – The Sulking Poet. Good luck getting this chorus out of your head. It’s a bit of Lord Huron, a bit of Head and the Heart, a bit of the Kooks, and oddly American-sounding for a band from Stockport, England.

31. Everything Everything – Bad Friday. If you liked Everything Everything’s early work, like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” “MY KZ UR BF,” and so on, this would likely be your favorite song from their newest album Raw Data Feel. It’s their most frenetic, most freewheeling track on the record, and we get more of the falsetto vocals that show up on just about all of their best songs.

30. Megan Thee Stallion – Her. I think Megan Thee Stallion is in the uppermost echelon of rappers today when it comes to speed, flow, and verbal dexterity, but I don’t think she picks music that does enough to accentuate her skills – or at least to work with them to make better songs. Only this and “Plan B” really stood out to me from Traumazine as songs that worked on all levels, from rhyme to music.

29. Rina Sawayama – This Hell. Sawayama’s second album, Hold the Girl, sees the singer/songwriter leaning far more into her pop sensibilities, which means it lacks the edge or ambition of her debut record, but also has a few more mainstream-ready tracks like this one. It’s her most overtly pop song yet, opening with a trite callback to Shania Twain and passing through a number of popular catchphrases and allusions, but highlights her idiosyncratic blend of styles and ability to craft a memorable hook.

28. Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten – I Saw Light. A spoken-word track over a hypnotic, minimalist synth line that sees the English poet/rapper Tempest sharing the vocals with Fontaines D.C. singer Chatten. Tempest’s lyrics are superb – a song like this can’t succeed without that – and the sparse music behind them creates a forbidding mood without getting in the way of the two speakers.

27. Griff & Sigrid – Head on Fire. Griff is a rising superstar, taking home a couple of Brit Award nominations last year shortly after she turned 21 (including Best New Artist, which she lost to Little Simz … who won for her fourth album), while Sigrid is already a star in Europe, so it was a little disappointing to see this track, with its catchy-as-hell chorus, fare poorly on the charts even in their home countries.

26. White Lies – Trouble in America. A bonus track on the deluxe edition of As I Try Not to Fall Apart that should have made the record proper given how potent this chorus is. It’s one of my favorite tracks ever from White Lies, six albums in, with some tremendous bass work from Charles Cave.

25. Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig – Tonight. The best track on Phoenix’s fun, straightforward new album Alpha Zulu, which had a few other standouts, including “All Eyes on Me.” This one features Vampire Weekend lead singer/founder Koenig, but I like it anyway.

24. Christine and the Queens – Je te vois enfin. The best track from Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) recalls the dark pop sounds from his 2020 EP La Vita Nuova and even parts of his 2018 album Chris.

23. Soccer Mommy – Shotgun. My favorite track from Soccer Mommy’s acclaimed album Sometimes, Forever has some of her strongest vocals – I find her voice can be droning, but here it’s well paired with the music and comes off as more ethereal and dreamy than whiny.

22. Little Simz – Angel. Simz won the Mercury Prize in October for Sometimes I Might Be, my #1 album of 2021, and then released NO THANK YOU, a simpler album that excoriates the music industry,twomonths later. This opener is a six-minute polemic against the exploitation Simz faced over the last year-plus since her magnum opus was first released, although I found in general NO THANK YOU doesn’t have the same degree of musical ambition as the preceding LP.

21. Mandrake Handshake – Emonzaemon. This Oxford-based psychedelic rock band released their second EP, The Triple Point of Water, last month, with three songs that run a total of nearly 20 minutes. I could see them being big on the jam-band circuit with this sound and those running times, but that’s not to dismiss the great guitar lick that opens this track and carries it all the way through until the heavier guitars kick in for the last thirty seconds.

20. Lizzo – 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready). The best track on Special is the one that calls back to Prince both in title and in sound, which couldn’t have been more tailor-made for me.

19. Momma – Speeding 72. There’s a big Veruca Salt vibe to the vocals on this track, but mixed with fuzzier garage-rock production and some heavier bass work from a band that likes to employ the drop-D tuning more associated with metal acts.

18. The Reytons – Avalanche. Sometimes I just want a big, crunchy rock song that announces its presence with authority in the opening seconds and never lets up on the gas pedal until it’s done. So I give you “Avalanche.”

17. Sharon van Etten – Mistakes. As with Soccer Mommy, van Etten’s vocal style often grates on me – she sounds stoned or just disinterested on so many of her songs – even when I like her music. Here she belts it out on the earworm chorus, maybe the best hook she’s ever crafted.

16. Kid Kapichi feat. Bob Vylan – New England. Vylan is the perfect collaborator for Kid Kapichi’s style of bitter, sarcastic attacks on modern British society between the duo’s track “GDP” last year and Kapichi’s … well, their entire catalog to date. “You’re such a fool, Britannia” probably wouldn’t get anyone many votes but it’s certainly sums up the Brexiteers.

15. Wet Leg – Angelica. I know “Chaise Longue” and “Ur Mum” have earned more plaudits, and the former was a legitimate commercial breakout track, but this is their best song by a mile – it’s got a better hook, the sonic interplay between the two vocalists works far better here than on other tracks, and this time the lyrics are actually funny.

14. Spiritualized – The Mainline Song. Everything Was Beautiful, the space-rock pioneers’ first new album in four years and only their second in a decade, came out in April, highlighted by this gorgeous, textured, melancholy song, the only flaw in which is that it could use some additional lyrics.

13. Let’s Eat Grandma – Levitation. I understand this band’s name (think “eats, shoots and leaves”) but it still kind of bugs me. They can write a pretty great synth-pop song, though.

12. Lucius – Next to Normal. One of the year’s best bass lines came on this funky track from Second Nature, Lucius’ first album of new material since 2016.

11. Metronomy – Good to Be Back. What a weirdly happy, bouncy song – it feels like someone slipped it into the TARDIS in the early 1980s, from the new wave-y sound to the sparse production, but that main synth line is so catchy it would fit in any era. The song is so good that Panic Shack’s punk cover of it works just as well.

10. FKA twigs feat. rema – jealousy. The best track from CAPRISONGS includes the Nigerian “Afrorave” singer Rema and has a swirling, Afrobeat-like backdrop to the vocals that feels immersive even with a too-short running time below three minutes.

9. Riverby – Chapel. Riverby is a punk act from Philly, but this song from their latest album Absolution is an absolutely gorgeous ballad that showcases lead singer/guitarist August Greenberg’s beautiful voice. I’d take a whole album made out of this, thanks.

8. Blossoms – Ode to NYC. The most Lord Huron-ish track on Ribbon Around the World also feels like the replacement for Ryan Adams’ “New York, New York.” As someone who grew up in the suburbs of the Big Apple, I was never not in love with New York City, but I’m also always happy to sing along with praises of my favorite place in the U.S.

7. Mattiel – Lighthouse. There are two great hooks in this track, both driven by the powerful voice of lead singer Mattiel Brown, from her new album Georgia Gothic. It reminds me a ton of Swing Out Sister’s breakout hit … uh, “Breakout,” from 1986, which I mean as a high compliment.

6. Jamie T – The Old Style Raiders. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys gave up on rock, we didn’t lack for artists stepping in to fill the void they’ve left behind, from the Lathums to the Reytons to Kid Kapichi, along with this track from British star Jamie T, whose 2022 album The Theory of Whatever hit #1 in the UK.

5. Sports Team – Dig! I loved Sports Team’s new album Gulp! and this is the song I keep coming back to. If I were a big-league reliever, I’d warm up to this track, which brings huge energy with the initial bass line and that three-chord riff, like someone put a cinder block on the gas pedal.

4. Sudan Archives – NBPQ (Topless). The best track from my #2 album of the year refers to that LP’s title, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and wanders through what feels like three different genres while always coming back to the tagline from the chorus, “I’m not average.” She’s anything but.

3. The Beths – When You Know You Know. If anyone ever asked me why I like the Beths so much, I’d just play this song, which has everything that makes them great: a big hook in the chorus, sunny vocals with a great harmony, witty lyrics, and jangly guitars. Almost all of Expert in a Dying Field is like this, but here everything comes together perfectly for the best song the Beths have ever recorded.

2. Spoon – Wild. Man, Lucifer on the Sofa did not live up to this single at all, but for three minutes it felt like we had peak Spoon again. That simple, sparing guitar line in the verse feels like a rubber band about to snap, and the song never quite lets out that tension. I liked the previous single, “The Hardest Cut,” as well, but the rest of the record was just filler after these two songs.

1. Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart. What’s the opposite of the sophomore slump? Strange’s debut album was solid, and promising, but also limited, and it seemed like he might just be another indie-rock singer/songwriter who had a distinct voice but whose music sounded like too much else from indie/college radio of the last decade or so – notably his primary influence, the National. Instead of continuing in that vein, we got Farm to Table, a wide-ranging, genre-skipping, guitar-driven record with sensitive, introspective lyrics, led by this song, which feels like two for the price of one, punctuated by that giant guitar break just after the two minute mark that I would bet brings the house down when he plays it live. I had Strange in the wrong category after the first record, figuring I’d respect his music more than I liked it. His growth as a musician and lyricist is one of the great stories of music in 2022.

Feel free to throw any of your favorites – songs, albums, EPs, mixtapes – in the comments!

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Top 22 albums of 2022.

I don’t think 2022 was as strong for albums as 2021 was, where I could have run 30 deep on the rankings, but I had enough that I could keep up this gimmick of ranking a number of LPs equal to the last two digits of the year, and even made a few cuts in the final go. I know streaming has sort of killed the album in a sense, and I’m partly to blame as someone who generally prefers listening to specific songs over full records, but I also appreciate the artist’s vision for an album and am happy to support that in a tiny way here, even if it’s just “I like this collection of songs.” Honorable mentions include Everything Everything’s Raw Data Feel, Foals’ Life is Yours, and the Mysterines’ Reeling (which would have made the cut if they’d included more of their early singles), MUNA’s MUNA, Little Simz’s NO THANK YOU (released just five days ago, and very good, but I need to listen to it more), and beabadoobee’s beatopia.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2022 will go up in the next day or two.

22. Elder – Innate Passage. A very last-minute addition to the list, as Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City recommended this LP to me over the weekend, and, since he knows my tastes pretty well, it hit its mark. Elder is a progressive metal band with heavy stoner/doom elements to their music, and this album, their sixth, is their first with vocalist/guitarist Nick DiSalvo as the only remaining founding member. It’s just five tracks and runs 53 minutes, with a solid mix of proggy metal riffing, tempo and tone changes, and even some harmonies in the vocals.

21. Sunflower Bean – Headful of Sugar. I feel like Sunflower Bean are a post-hype prospect at this point; the music press seem to have moved on, or decided the band isn’t going to hit its ceiling, rather than appreciating them for what they are and for the potential they still have. Their brand of sunny jangle-pop with a little bit of garage to it might be a little familiar, but they offer a perfect slice of it on this album. Highlights include “Baby Don’t Cry,” “Who Put You Up to This?,” “I Don’t Have Control Sometimes,” and the bonus track “Moment in the Sun,” a one-off single they added to the album after it was used in Heartstopper.

20. Porcupine Tree – CLOSURE/CONTINUATION. Porcupine Tree returned after a 12-year hiatus as if they’d never left, still proggy after all these years, but without becoming overindulgent as the genre often sees. Founder Steven Wilson has produced three Opeth albums in the interim, and Porcupine Tree previously toured with the prog-metal giants, so it’s hard not to hear the latter’s influence here in some of the strongest guitar riffing. Highlights include “Harridan,” “Chimera’s Wreck,” and “Rats Return.”

19. Danger Mouse and Black Thought – Cheat Codes. Hard to believe, but this was Danger Mouse’s first hip-hop album in 17 years, since the last Danger Doom collaboration with the late MF Doom, whose vocals appear on the track “Belize.” This is peak Black Thought, with solid contributions from Danger Mouse, although the producer gets first billing here. Highlights include “Belize,” of course, as well as “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine.”

18. The Wombats – Fix Yourself, Not the World. A return to form for the Wombats after the uneven Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, the band’s fifth album veers more into an overt pop direction than their best LP to date, Glitterbug, but doesn’t skimp on the witty lyrics or shifts in tone and tempo. The EP they released in November of tracks that didn’t make the album, Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, has six more songs in a similar vein, several of which probably should have made the cut. Highlights from the LP include “If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You,” “Everything I Love Is Going to Die,” and “Method to the Madness,” the last one of the most ornate songs the group has ever released.

17. Belle & Sebastian – A Bit of Previous. The Scottish indie stalwarts’ first new album in seven years, although they’ve released three EPs in the interim, A Bit of Previous doesn’t abandon the sunnier pop melodies and sounds of their last record, the effusive Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, although it’s a bit darker in tone and lyrics. Highlights include “Young and Stupid,” “Talk to Me Talk to Me,” and “Unnecessary Drama.”

16. Lizzo – Special. No record surprised me more than Lizzo’s Special, since I was certainly familiar with her work and her impressive voice, but never connected with her music at all. On her fourth album, Lizzo produced an ebullient record full of musical callbacks to pop, disco, and funk from the 1970s and 1980s, along with more than a little nod to Prince here and there. I guess we’ll always have to wonder what that never-made Lizzo EP that Prince was slated to produce would sound like, but I’d like to think we got some of that sound on Special. Highlights include “2 Be Loved (Am I Ready),” the #1 single “About Damn Time,” “The Sign,” and “Everybody’s Gay.”

15. Anxious – Little Green House. The debut full-length from this Connecticut quintet, which draws on emo and punk with a real dose of pop hooks and harmonies, was one of the best straight-out rock records of the year, and would have fit in quite well on a best-of list from 20 years ago at the height of emo and the absurdly titled “screamo” subgenre. There is a decent bit of screaming here, some of which I could have done without, as there’s plenty of dissonance coming from the guitarwork. The album is a raucous joy straight on through until the shocking closer “You When You’re Gone,” a slow song (!) with vocals from Stella Branstool of Hello Mary. Highlights include that track, “In April,” “Call from You,” and “Afternoon.”

14. Freddie Gibbs – $oul $old $eparately. Gibbs might be the best technical rapper going now, and he is certainly the most interesting, doing far more with the music over which he rhymes than anyone else I can think of. He has a host of guests on this sprawling, hour-long record, including Anderson .Paak, Raekwon, Pusha T, Musiq Soulchild, and Scarface. Highlights include “Too Much,” “Feel No Pain,” and “Dark Hearted,” as well as “Big Boss Rabbit” from the bonus edition.

13. Bartees Strange – Farm to Table. Strange’s sophomore album finds him leaning even more into his trad-rock side, and away from the comparisons to one of his inspirations, The National. The glimpses we had of the real Bartees on his debut are the dominant theme here, with great hooks and wistful lyrics about small things like the meaning of life and the prevalence of death. Highlights include “Heavy Heart,” “Wretched,” and “Black Gold.”

12. White Lies – As I Try Not to Fall Apart. Wikipedia calls White Lies a “post-punk revival” band, but this is new wave, and I will not stand for any erasure of that genre. (Get it? Erasure? Never mind.) Their sixth album feels like a culmination, as if they’ve truly identified their sound and have been working towards this for several records now, with previous albums having similar highlights (“There Goes Our Love Again” from Big TV, “Tokyo” from Five) but lacking this one’s depth and consistent quality. The contrast of melancholic lyrics and darkly joyous music is the strongest callback to 1980s new wave, and it’s practically pandering to an audience of me. The bonus edition includes four more tracks, including the outstanding “Trouble in America.” Highlights include the title track, “Am I Really Going to Die,” “I Don’t Want to Go to Mars,” and “Step Outside.”

11. Crows – Beware Believers. I was surprised how little press this sophomore album from Crows received, given the positive reception for their 2019 debut record Silver Tongues. Crows get billed as a punk band, but that sells them short – they’re a hard rock band in the old style, writing heavy, grinding tracks with distorted guitars, big riffs, and no pretense. Highlights include the title track, “Garden of England,” “Healing,” and “Closer Still.”

10. Christine and the Queens – Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue). Redcar is Christine & the Queens’ latest nom de plume, after he used Chris on his last album and briefly used the name Rahim last year. It’s a breakup album, at least off the lyrics, but the music is anything but depressing. He backs up these tracks about a lost love (or loves?) with soulful music that draws on pop, soul, even elements of jazz. Highlights include “rien dire,” “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” and “Je te vois enfin.”

9. Just Mustard – Heart Under. This Irish shoegaze band showed promise on their 2018 debut album Wednesday, but this album carves out its own post-shoegaze sound, with the same droning guitars but without the inscrutable walls of sound that made My Bloody Valentine critical darlings whose music I couldn’t abide. Highlights here include “Still,” “23,” “Mirrors,” and “I Am You.”

8. Sports Team – Gulp! Coming in at a scant 33:41, this barely full-length record from Sports Team, the band’s second, is ten tracks of raucous, fun, art-punk-inspired rock-and-roll. It gets off to a strong start with “The Game” and never lets up, with hooks and big energy all the way through. Highlights include “Dig!,” “The Drop,” “The Game,” and “R Entertainment.”

7. White Lung – Premonition. The newest album on the list, released just two weeks ago, is also the swan song for this Vancouver punk-metal band, as lead singer Mish Barber-Way decided to call it quits after having her second kid last year. (She’s also apparently still executive editor of Penthouse.) Premonition has apparently been in the works since 2019, but baby #1 and the pandemic pushed the record back, so while they’re going out with a bang, it appears this is the end for this underappreciated act. Highlights include “Tomorrow,” “Date Night,” and “Bird.”

6. Kid Kapichi – Here’s What You Could Have Won. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys confirmed for us all that they’re no longer a rock band – and some critics seemed unwilling to point out that Alex Turner has no clothes – Kid Kapichi are here to take up the mantle of guitar-driven rock with intelligent, sardonic lyrics, here taking aim at the popular targets of those disaffected with late-stage capitalist Britain. Kid Kapichi start off making it very clear where they stand on the snarling opener “New England” – which is not about the changing of the leaves in Vermont – featuring Bob Vylan, and the rage never really slows from there, not even for the acoustic “Party at No. 10.” Highlights include “New England,” “Rob the Supermarket,” “Super Soaker,” and “Cops and Robbers.”

5. SAULT – Today & Tomorrow. SAULT released six albums in 2022, five of them on one day in November. Each of the five explored a different genre or style, with Today & Tomorrow, my favorite of the set, finding the secretive London-based group delving into rock and punk sounds for the first time. Highlights include “The Plan,” “Lion,” “Money,” and “Above the Sky.” If you’re curious about the others, I’d rank the five albums Today & Tomorrow, Earth, 11, Aiir, and God, in order from best to worst.

4. FKA Twigs – CAPRISONGS. She calls this a mixtape, but it’s 17 songs and 48 minutes long. It’s an album. It’s uneven, both in quality and theme, less cohesive than her album Magdalene, but the highs are very high here, and FKA Twigs (Tahliah Barnett) experiments more with tones and styles than on her formal LP. Highlights include “honda,” “darjeeling,” and “jealousy.”

3. Yard Act – The Overload. The debut record from these likely lads from Leeds might as well be a spiritual sequel to the earliest work of Gang of Four or maybe a lost album from The Fall, but updated with occasional flourishes of hip-hop (which, I concede, don’t always work) and a more modern take on the working class progressivism of their forebears. Highlights include the title track, “Payday,” “Pour Another,” and “The Incident.”

2. Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen. Sudan Archives is violinist/singer Brittney Denise Parks, who released her second LP this year to massive and well-deserved acclaim. It’s a genre-bending, world-spanning record that features abrupt tonal shifts within and between songs, lyrics that are by turns smart and frivolous, and a whole bunch of songs that just plain groove. Highlights include “NBPQ (Topless),” “Yellow Brick Road,” the sinister-sounding “Homemaker,” and “Freakalizer.”

1. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. This is the album I’ve been waiting for the Beths to make since I first heard “You Wouldn’t Like Me” back in 2018. Expert in a Dying Field is a perfect exemplar of this New Zealand band’s sunny take on power-pop, with perfect harmonies and an endless supply of melodies. They call back to ‘80s power-pop standouts like Jellyfish and Apples in Stereo while adding their own stamp, not least from lead singer/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ delightful accent. There’s enough diversity in the tracks here to make it worth listening all the way through, but it’s also the best collection of singles I heard in 2022. Highlights include the title track, “When You Know You Know,” “Knees Deep,” and “Silence is Golden.”

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→ December 17, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 12/17/22.

Five new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic:

I’ll try to do a Klawchat this upcoming week as my schedule permits; I’m trying to fill my days with calls for the prospect rankings package that will run in late January or early February.

My top ten games of 2022 article is already in my editor’s hands at Paste, so that should be up any day now. I’ll update here when it runs.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Boston Globe writer Alex Speier, talking about the Red Sox’ confusing offseason so far and apparent desire to act like a small- or medium-payroll team. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve got a new email newsletter about half-written, so I’m really hoping I can finish that off tonight or tomorrow. You can sign up here, for free. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

Finally, I caved and set up an account on Mastodon, @keithlaw@mastodon.au. Perhaps that’ll prove a better place for actual discussions with readers as the bird site becomes overrun by trolls – even my post saying I was on Mastodon attracted three randos who seemed only there to mock anyone who said they were leaving Twitter (which I’m not).

And now, the links…

And now, the links…

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→ December 16, 2022
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The Bone Clocks.

I love David Mitchell’s prose, and I love his characters, but now that I’ve read all of his novels, I think I don’t really love his books as much as I should. The last one on my list was The Bone Clocks, which I tore through, as I have with every novel he’s written, but which once again left me kind of cold when it came to the story. Of his eight published novels, I think I’d say I truly liked only four, and even Cloud Atlas was probably more a respect and appreciation sort of ‘like.’

The Bone Clocks is a two-layered novel that brings back the body-snatching spirits who appear at least in passing in every one of Mitchell’s novels except for Black Swan Green. It turns out that there are two sorts, the Horologists and the Anchorites, and they’re waging a war across all of time because they differ in how they view humans – as hosts, or as food, to put it in the simplest terms. Rather than just follow these disembodied entities, however, The Bone Clocks instead follows a number of characters, notably Holly Sykes, across decades and around the world as they live their own complicated lives while often serving as unknowing vessels for Horologists. Holly is the closest thing to a central character here, as she appears at the start of the book as a rebellious teenager who finds out her boyfriend of a few weeks is actually sleeping with her best friend, which leads to a series of unfortunate events that put her on the path of the spirits, coincide with the disappearance of her younger brother (who appears to be autistic), and give her what she thinks are visions for much of the rest of her life. We also meet a group of obnoxious upper-class twits at a college that’s supposed to be like Cambridge and a bad-boy author named Crispin Hershey who’s on the downswing of his career, before eventually getting to the heart of the book, the battle for all things between the two disembodied groups, before concluding in a grim post-apocalyptic section that recalls the middle section of Cloud Atlas in setting and tone.

I just can’t get into the Horologists stuff, and Mitchell is fully invested in it, bringing them into almost every book of his, often shoehorning them in somewhere they don’t belong (Utopia Avenue). I enjoy the way he reuses characters and places, or inserts other references to his previous works into new ones, but for someone who writes such lovely, evocative prose about reality, he spends too much time in this unreal milieu. Mitchell captures much of the human experience as well as any contemporary writer, especially grief and sadness, so jerking the reader out of whatever emotions he’s created to go spend time with Marinus or Esther Little or the Mongolian or whoever does the work no favors. There’s a good novel here in The Bone Clocks that just follows Holly Sykes through her highly eventful life, but he’s written her a story that’s inextricable from the Horologists’ narrative.

Slade House is the ultimate Horologists/Anchorites novel for me – it’s a horror story and a thriller and at its heart it is just about those beings. There’s one focus there, so you’re not divided between a very real world and Mitchell’s fantasy environment. And Black Swan Green works the other way; with no mystical mumbo-jumbo, you just get a beautiful coming-of-age story, rendered in fine detail by Mitchell’s eye and pen. Even Utopia Avenue got most of the way there, as the spirits appear just once, in a brief section that you could probably skip and not miss at all. Since that’s his most recent novel, I’d like to think that it’s a sign that he’s getting away from the Horologists & Anchorites and might just continue to write straightforward novels – with lots of callbacks and other references, sure, but perhaps grounded in a single plane of existence instead.

Next up: John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, winner of the 1956 National Book Award for Fiction. O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is one of my favorite novels of all time.

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