Music — Page 2

→ May 4, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Columbia Spectator, with the help of New York magazine, has a detailed look at the protests, the encampments, the police overreach, and more on campus, through hundreds of interviews with students and faculty across the religious and ideological divides.

In the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes of how colleges positioned themselves as activist havens when speaking to prospective students, only to find that those students believed them.

The LA Times has the story of a man who engineered the theft of millions of gallons of water from California’s limited resources, while enriching himself and his friends and lying on his income taxes.

ProPublica reports on the EPA’s decision to ignore its own scientists and approve a plastic fuel additive that is nearly guaranteed to cause cancer in anyone exposed to it regularly over a lifetime. Well, a shortened lifetime, I guess.

The Washington Post ran a long piece on the effects of sea level rise on the coastal U.S., much of it in states whose elected officials have denied climate change and fought efforts to mitigate it.

A research study by the Australian government’s Institute of Criminology examined how anti-COVID protests brought together numerous anti-government forces, including those beholden to conspiracy theories and extremist anti-authority sentiments (like so-called “sovereign citizens”).

Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”

Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, after which Haaretz called for his firing.

Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.

The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote that college presidents who rush to call in the police haven’t learned a damn thing since the 1960s. Today is the anniversary of the police murdering four students at Kent State who were protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, by the way.

Credit goes to the Philadelphia police, however, who declined Penn’s request that they come clear out student protesters unless the school could provide evidence of imminent danger.

CNN’s Dana Bash went on air and parroted a bunch of pro-Israel talking points while comparing pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazi forces.

Ken Klippenstein resigned from The Intercept and revealed some of how management there sought to spike stories critical of Jeff Bezos and other rich, powerful targets, all while apparently paying themselves more while laying off editors and journalists. I’ve linked to quite a bit of Ken’s work here and will probably sign up for his newsletter now that he’s going solo.

Andrew Huberman’s podcast is one of the most popular in America. It’s also rife with false information.

Florida has removed over 22,000 children from its version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) this year, defying a federal law designed to protect them. I never though the wolves would eat my face!

Meanwhile, Florida’s farmers are suffering from a lack of labor thanks to the state’s draconian law attacking businesses that used undocumented workers, as are construction businesses, restaurants, and hoteliers, all major industries in the state.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) shared a video of white University of Mississippi students making monkey noises and shouting racist chants at a Black protester, saying “Ole Miss taking care of business” (while using the racist-derived nickname for the school). Collins has previously shared posts from neo-Nazis and suggested murdering migrants, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Chicago won’t discipline nine city police officers who were (are?) members of the right-wing extremist Oath Keepers group, after the mayor and CPD superintendent had promised to do so.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that North Carolina and West Virginia can’t deny gender-affirming medical coverage to transgender people. North Carolina sought to specifically deny it to state employees and their dependents, while West Virginia sought to do so for people enrolled in Medicaid.

Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.

A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.

The Guardian looks at how many bands make little to no money, even taking losses, from touring. With record sales in the toilet and tours unprofitable, what career is there in making music if you’re not a superstar?

I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.

Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

ProPublica reports on a new effort at the IRS to identify illegal tax avoidance schemes by sports-team owners. It would appear these owners are happy to take taxpayer money, but not to pay back in the legally required portion of their profits.

Paris claimed it was going to use the Olympics as a spur to revitalize one of its poorest districts, Seine-Saint-Denis; instead it appears they’ve evicted impoverished residents and decreased the region’s air quality. The district was the site of the 2005 riots against the police that inspired the Oscar-nominated 2019 film Les Misérables.

Antiabortion zealots are trying to force the Amarillo, Texas, city council to pass a ridiculous, unenforceable ordinance forbidding the use of city streets for the purpose of leaving the state for an abortion. Find someone who loves you as much as these people love depriving other people of their rights.

Utah passed a transphobic bathroom law, and in the first week in which the site to report alleged violations was live, they received almost 4000 bogus reports and left a bunch of information unprotected for anyone to access.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, colleges, environment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, misinformation, mississippi, Music, olympics, paris, police, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, trans rights, utah, water crisis

→ April 30, 2024
→ By keith

Music update, April 2024.

Whew; April was loaded, and took me more time than usual because I had to sort through so many songs I’d saved and listened to a bunch of albums from April and from my March backlog. I also have had the Libertines’ All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade on repeat for much of the month. Anyway, here’s my April playlist, and you can access the Spotify list here if you can’t see the widget below.

The Mysterines – Sink Ya Teeth. I’ve been a Mysterines fan since some of their earliest singles, including “Gasoline,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” and “I Win Every Time,” but their debut album, Reeling, left me a little disappointed, as they eschewed some of their uptempo hard-rock sound for slower, broodier material. This is their best song since 2021, at the very least, ahead of that debut album and their other singles “Stray” and “Begin Again.” Their second album, Afraid of Tomorrows, comes out on June 7^th.

Geese – The Bonecracker Acetates. What a great opening guitar riff from one of my favorite bands going. These NYC experimental rockers love to play with genres and forms, and they aren’t afraid to stretch a song out to play with its structure, but this time around they play it straight, maintaining the blues-rock vibe throughout its nearly 5-minute run time.

Fontaines D.C. – Starburster. I became a much bigger Fontaines D.C. after seeing them open up for the Arctic Monkeys in September; they’re incredible live, and despite being just as loud as you’d expect, the music came across as more textured and melodic, while lead singer Grian Chatten had great presence. This song is pretty accessible as their stuff goes, although I’m not sure if we needed to hear Chatten inhaling like some sort of inverted death-metal growl, though.

RINSE & Hatchie – Kiss Me (Kill Me). RINSE is Joe Agius, and he’s also Hatchie’s husband; they’ve collaborated before on “Back Into Your Arms.” This song has some of the dream-pop stylings of Hatchie’s solo work, but there’s more shoegazey guitars in the background here, and I think it complements Hatchie’s voice – which I’ve always thought was a bit thin to be mixed in the front of her songs – extremely well. I assume the B-side is called “Hold Me (Thrill Me).”

GIFT – Wish Me Away. I loved “Gumball Garden” from this NYC-based psychedelic-rock band in 2022, and they’ve returned now with what appears to be their first new song since that last album Momentary Presence.

Swim Deep – First Song. I don’t think I’d heard anything from Swim Deep before, but the shoegaze revival brought them to my ears and is probably a good thing for their pockets – this is straight-up shoegaze right out of my college years.

Pond – (I’m) Stung. So many bands draw from rock of the 1970s, particularly the psychedelic rock of the early part of that decade, but Pond manages to sound like they’re in the 1970s and just dropped by our era via the Tardis.

Mdou Moctar – Imouhar. Funeral for Justice will be out on Friday, May 3^rd, his long-awaited follow-up to Afrique Victime, which put the Tuareg guitarist/singer on the global map.

Altin Gün – Vallahi Yok. The Anatolian rock stars return with a two-sided single, along with “Kirik Cam.” Their signature sound blends psychedelia with traditional Turkish music; if I didn’t know who the band was, I’d say this sounds like a perfect song to get stoned to, if you’re into that sort of thing.

STONE – My Feelings Go. This might be STONE’s most melodic track yet, which cuts both ways – it’s bordering on emo, without the harder punk edge of some of their previous tracks.

Phosphorescent – Revelator. First Kacey Musgraves, now Phosphorescent? Am I going soft in my old age? This song is just gorgeous, a lush alt-country number that reminds me of the better Jason Isbell stuff.

Parsnip – The Babble. Behold is now out, and it’s full of little pop gems with a subtle edge to them, like this, “The Light,” “Duality,” and “Turn to Love.”

Griff – Pillow in My Arms. Griff released her latest EP, ver2igo vol. 2, earlier this month, and will be touring the U.S. in the fall. “Miss Me Too” is definitely the best song of the four on the record, but I’m really waiting for a full-length release from the British singer-songwriter, who has put out some of my favorite pop songs of the last five years (“One Night,” “Black Hole,” “Head on Fire”).

Sløtface – Tired Old Dog. Sløtface has been a solo project of Haley Shea since June of 2022, after which she put out an EP and a few singles that sounded like she’d changed the band’s sound or just kind of lost interest; their earliest work was funny, edgy, and rooted in classic punk. Her first album since the lineup change, Film Buff, is due out in September, and this second single is definitely her best work since at least 2020’s Sorry for the Late Reply.

Spiritual Cramp feat. White Reaper – Whatever You Say Man. This is apparently one half of a split 7” between White Reaper, the world’s greatest American band, and the San Francisco punk band Spiritual Cramp. It doesn’t sound exactly like either of their sounds, but it leans more towards Spiritual Cramp.

Bob Vylan – Reign. Vylan’s latest album, Humble as the Sun, is a righteously angry affair that blends alternative rock and traditional hip-hop in a way that makes them into a single sound, rather than, say, the rap-metal hybrid that terrorized the populace in the early aughts.

Les Savy Fav – Limo Scene. Oui, LSF, this Chicago noise-rock band’s first new album in 14 years, will be out on May 10^th, with this the second single from the record.

BODEGA – Cultural Consumer III. So there are indeed three tracks by this name on BODEGA’s latest album, Our Brand Could Be Yr Life, but the other two suck. This one’s chorus is really catchy, and the lyrics paint an interesting picture of consumerism run amok.

Jamie xx & Honey Dijon – Baddy on the Floor. It’s an average track for Jamie xx, not his best, but I’d say better than “Kill Dem,” which I assume will also be on whatever album he’s planning. I wasn’t familiar with Honey Dijon (the DC, not the salad dressing), but she’s apparently pretty well-regarded in American DJ circles.

Belle & Sebastian – What Happened to You, Son? Another new track from the Scottish indie popsters, this one left on the cutting floor from their Late Developers sessions.

The Folk Implosion – Moonlit Kind. They’re never going to match “Natural One,” but I’m glad Barlow & Davis are back at all. They returned after a 19-year hiatus in 2022, put out a four-song EP last April, and now we have this new track, heralding Walk Thru Me, their first full-length album with John Davis since 1999’s One Part Lullaby. It’s due out on June 28^th.

A Certain Ratio – Keep It Real. ACR were part of the first wave of post-punk bands in the UK, contemporaries of Wire, Gang of Four, Siouxie & the Banshees, and PiL, but never achieved the commercial or critical success of those bands. Their earliest sound incorporated more funk and dance influences than their peers, but not enough to latch on to the second, new wave that followed, where they were overshadowed by Joy Division and the Cure (and inferior to other commercially unsuccessful bands like The Sound or Josef K). ACR reunited in 2020 after a twelve-year hiatus, and they sound quite a bit like they did in their 1978-1982 peak.

Lionlimb feat. Angel Olson – Dream of You. Lionlimb is Stewart Bronaugh, who has also played in Olsen’s backing band, along with Joshua Jaeger, and their newest album Limbo comes out on the 24^th. I’m not a huge fan of Olsen’s solo work, but this track has a trippy Portishead vibe that grabbed me on first listen.

Ezra Collective – Ajala. Ezra Collective won last year’s Mercury Prize, which, to be honest, was the first I’d heard of them, but they remind me quite a bit of Ozomatli and that’s good enough to put them here, even if that represents a pretty low bar for my taste in jazz.

Yannis & the Yaw feat. Tony Allen – Walk Through Fire. That’s Yannis Phillippakis of Foals, and Tony Allen was a legendary Nigerian drummer who’d worked as Fela Kuti’s musical director for over a decade. The two recorded some material in the late 2010s, but Allen died in 2020 before they could finish the project; Phillippakis completed the few tracks they had begun and is releasing this five-song EP, Lagos Paris London, due out August 30^th.

Wheel – Disciple. Charismatic Leaders, the third album from this Finnish-American prog-metal band, drops on Friday the third; despite numerous lineup changes, their sound has been pretty consistent over the last five-odd years.

Alcest – Flamme Jumelle. Alcest will release Les Chants de l’aurore, their first new album in five years, on June 21^st; based on the two tracks we’ve heard so far, it sounds like they’ve gone back towards the straight shoegaze sound of Shelter, or at least most of the way there, with no sign of the black-metal trappings of their earliest work or the blackgaze sound of Spiritual Instinct. For the record, I like pretty much all of it.

Crypt Sermon – Heavy is the Crown of Bone. The latest LP from these Philly-based doom metal artists, The Stygian Rose, drops on June 14^th; I love this track, which is heavy and crunchy and draws heavily on classic doom acts (Sabbath, Candlemass, Cathedral) but also some NWOBHM as well.

High on Fire – Lamsbread. High on Fire dropped their ninth album, Cometh the Storm, on April 19^th; everyone describes them as sludge metal or stoner metal (including Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Metallum), but there’s too much thrash in here to lump them into those groups. I assume it’s just because Matt Pike is a co-founder of actual stoner metal band Sleep.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, indie, jazz, metal, Music, progressive metal, shoegaze

→ April 19, 2024
→ By keith

All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade.

I was lukewarm on the Libertines in their brief, drug-addled heyday, and largely oblivious to the drama around their self-titled second album, which looked for a decade like it might be their last, as the band broke up and Pete Doherty was in and out of rehab (and legal trouble). The likely lads returned in 2015 with a third album, Anthem for Doomed Youth, which had one great song (“Gunga Din”) but a lot of tepid material that couldn’t come close to the energy of their first two records. Even if you didn’t love their songs, those albums crackled with the thrill of a band that always felt like it was teetering on the edge of disaster – much like Oasis did at its peak, and in both cases it seemed to fuel greater creativity as well.

Over the last twenty years I’ve come to appreciate the Libertines even more. “Time for Heroes” has long been my favorite of their songs, and “Can’t Stand Me Now” is another banger that also has one of the best album intro passages I can remember hearing, but, taken together, their 2003-04 output feels like they captured a specific moment in British music history. They came along just a few years after the implosion of Britpop, owing something to that genre’s melodic instincts, but their playing was messier, almost dirtier, and they paired it with wry, witty lyrics, bringing some obvious Stones influence along with elements of punk and even …

The Libertines returned just this month with their fourth album, their first in nine years, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, and I think it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s certainly the most interesting new album I’ve heard this year, mixing in styles and sounds we haven’t heard from Carl Barât and Doherty before with that same reckless energy that made their first two LPs so exciting. (I’m not ignoring Cowboy Carter, which was nothing if not interesting, but I was shocked by how un-catchy much of that album is.) All Quiet is the album that they should have come back with in 2015. It’s a statement record, and just happens to be full of incredible hooks.

The album opens with one of the lead singles, the incredibly catchy “Run Run Run,” with its winking earworm chorus: “You’d better run, run, run/Faster than the past” might just refer to the band’s own sordid history, one would think. It’s a strong choice to start the record, setting the stage for the mostly uptempo songs to come while still sounding very much like the Libertines right from the introductory drum line. It’s one of four tracks on the record that connect this album to the first two, along with “Oh Shit, “I Have a Friend,” and “Be Young,” all of which are, to use the technical term, bangers.

Those tracks buy some goodwill for the lads to experiment a little, and fortunately this time around the experiments mostly land. “The Night of the Hunter” interpolates a bit of “Swan Lake,” of all things, while managing to sound like it came from the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. “Oh Shit” starts with a guitar lick that sounds so familiar – an inverted version of the main riff from “Boys Don’t Cry?” – and never takes its foot off the gas. “Shiver” is not a cover of the Coldplay song, but instead is a swirling, psychedelic track that’s unique in their catalog for its melding of that ‘70s psychedelia with some of the 1990s Britpop that paved the way for their initial success, and hearing the lads sing about “Reasons to stay alive/Not to die at 25” should certainly bring to mind the unlikeliness of this band still being intact twenty years on.

I couldn’t totally get on board with the closer, “Songs They Never Play on the Radio,” although the fact that the Libertines utilized a backing chorus on several tracks also marks some of the band’s progression into this older, wiser status. “Man With the Melody” is just a miss, one where I can’t even see the vision in what feels like a throwaway track in both music and lyrics, and “Baron’s Claw” also kills some of the momentum built up by the prior two tracks. “Merry Old England,” however, shows the Libertines slowing down the tempo while still managing to incorporate a strong hook, with some of their best lyrics ever, appropriating the language of the xenophobic right – even stealing a headline from The Sun about “illegals” – to cover the plight of migrants coming to England in search of a better life, only to receive “a B&B and vouchers for three square.”

The Libertines have now scored their second #1 album in the UK with All Quiet…, after their self-titled sophomore album did the same in 2004, but their commercial success has been limited to Britain and they’ve barely made a dent in the U.S. It contributes to an underrating of the band’s importance in music history, as they were critical in the resurgence of rock music after the death of Britpop in the late 1990s ushered in an era of more commercial pop and less rock-oriented indie pop acts like Coldplay and Travis. Without the Libertines, do we get the Arctic Monkeys, who have a very similar sound but cleaner production and playing, and take Doherty & Barât’s witty lyrical style to another level? Or Franz Ferdinand, the Wombats, Jamie T, the Rills, or Sports Team? The Libertines’ original two albums were part of a brief revival of garage-rock – often mislabeled as post-punk because they kind of played fast – that opened the doors for multiple waves of Brit-rock after their initial breakup. Let’s hope that this album gets them their due beyond the shores of merry old England.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, british music, garage rock, highly recommended, indie, Music

→ April 4, 2024
→ By keith

Music update, March 2024.

March had a slew of big album releases, even just limiting them to artists whose work I’ve liked at some point in the past: Ride, Everything Everything, Liam Gallagher/John Squire, Waxahatchee, Elbow, Kacey Musgraves, Judas Priest, Sheer Mag, Yard Act, and more. There are a few I liked, but several were just okay – not bad, but nothing that special. There were a lot of songs from upcoming albums that I’m excited for, and this playlist has tracks from four different albums due out on May 3^rd, so I guess that’ll be a busy listening weekend for me. As always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the Spotify widget below.

Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice. Moctar became a global phenomenon with 2021’s Afrique Victime, bringing his blend of Touareg music and Western guitar to a much broader audience as the English-language music press began to sing his praises. (It was #5 on my top albums of 2021.) This is the title track from his follow-up album, due out May 3^rd, and it’s very heavy on Moctar’s mesmerizing guitar work.

Elbow – Good Blood Mexico City. This banger from Elbow’s latest album, AUDIO VERTIGO, feels like the best song Doves never recorded. It’s fast and loud and intense, with a great hook at its heart. The album is solid and I think it’s the best new album from last month, at least of the ones I’ve listened to all the way through.

The Libertines – Oh Shit. The lads’ fourth album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, is due out on Friday, a week later than originally scheduled, and the singles so far have still been rough-and-ready but definitely show a mellower side of Barât and Doherty.

Kaiser Chiefs – Reasons to Stay Alive.The Kaisers may be approaching 30 years together as a band, and their most popular record, Employment, may turn 20 next year, but their new album has two absolute bangers in this and “Beautiful Girl.” I doubt it’ll get much play outside of the U.K., given the way we dispose of bands in the U.S. music scene, but they’ve had more than a few winners even post-“Ruby.”

Kid Kapichi – Can EU Hear Me? Angry Kid Kapichi is the best Kid Kapichi, and I wish the whole album – There Goes the Neighborhood – maintained this level of righteous rage throughout. This is obviously an anti-Brexit track (“I don’t wanna live alone on this island/But they put it to a vote, and they just kept lyin’”) but like all of the best Kapichi tracks it has some incredible hooks and the indignation shows up in the furious rhythm guitar.

Liam Gallagher/John Squire – You’re Not the Only One. Yeah, well, the anticipation was fun, but the album is kind of a snoozer. I think everyone – myself included – was so excited at the potential for some real John Squire material on par with his Stone Roses output that perhaps we ignored two key facts: Squire is a terrible lyricist, and Liam hasn’t seemed engaged with any music he’s put out since Oasis’s 2005 album Don’t Believe the Truth. One track on the album is called “I’m So Bored,” and when Liam sings it, I believe him.

Mourn – Endless Looping. I thought Mourn had disbanded after 2021’s Self Worth, as they seemed to vanish from the internet, but they returned in March with The Avoider, which feels oddly muted for a trio whose songs usually burst with energy that helped power them through even when songs weren’t polished or their vocals were (deliberately) a little off key. This opening track is the best on the record, although “Could Be Friends” is solid too.

White Reaper – I Can’t Escape Myself. White Reaper released this one-off single, a cover of the opening track from UK post-punk icons The Sound’s debut album Jeopardy!, to tide fans over until there’s a new Reaper album on the way. It’s a faithful cover translated through the White Reaper sound, with more polished production than the original but still the same haunting quality.

Yard Act – A Vineyard for the North. Where’s My Utopia?, the second album from these UK post-punks, didn’t quite hit as hard as their debut album did, although I applaud the band for experimenting further with their sound rather than just resting on the plaudits from the first record. This is maybe the fifth-best song on the record, but I’ve already included “We Make Hits,” “Dream Job,” “Petroleum,” and “When the Laughter Stops” on previous playlists.

Sheer Mag – Golden Hour. Sheer Mag were lo-fi critical darlings in their early EP stages, when they were harder-edged and leaned more into garage rock and punk, even flirting with metal at times, but their new album Playing Favorites – which started out as a disco EP during the pandemic that grew into a full-length album seems to dispense with punk influences entirely. There’s a lot of 12-bar blues here and some rockabilly sounds (“Golden Hour”), with some great melodies (“Moonstruck”) but not a ton of experimentation – except on this track, which features a killer guitar solo from none other than Mdou Moctar.

Lauren Mayberry – Change Shapes. I’ve been surprised by Mayberry’s solo output so far, including this sugar-sweet pop track about how to survive in a relationship with a manipulative partner; if the lyrics didn’t have a dark edge I’d call it twee and leave it off the playlist entirely.

Richard Hawley – Two For His Heels. Hawley, formerly of the shortlived Britpop band Longpigs and then briefly of Pulp, hasn’t released anything since his 2019 album Further, but he’s back with this single (taking its title from a cribbage rule, so, hey, boardgames!) ahead of the May release of his latest album In This City They Call You Love. This track is very noirish, suiting its lyrics about a deal gone wrong.

La Luz – Strange World. Speaking of noir, La Luz doesn’t do anything other than that, and that’s fine with me. The quartet has changed by 50% since their last album in 2021, but leader Shana Cleveland is still on board. They’ll release News of the Universe on May 24^th, featuring this track and the lugubrious “Poppies.”

Khruangbin – Pon Pón. A LA SALA, their first album of new material since 2020’s Mordechai, arrives this Friday; I loved Mordechai but it didn’t land with critics the way their earlier work had. This and “A Love International” are both standouts already, ahead of the slower (and non-instrumental) “May Ninth” of the three singles they’ve released from the album.

Kamasi Washington – Prologue. The acclaimed jazz saxophonist will release his latest album, Fearless Movement, on May 3^rd, and this track is actually the last one on the record, despite the title. Nobody is the new John Coltrane, but Washington’s work does remind me a bit of the GOAT.

Kacey Musgraves – Cardinal. I guess I’m a Kacey Musgraves fan now.

Waxahatchee – 3 Sisters. I still haven’t listened all the way through Tigers Blood, and I think part of it is that I thought Saint Cloud (her last album, released almost exactly four years before this one) was so good that I can’t imagine this will live up to it. I don’t think there’s a “Lilacs” or an “Under the Rock” here, at least not yet, but this song is quite lovely, especially the harmonies in the chorus.

Parsnip – Turn to Love. I wouldn’t rate this above the Aussie’ quartet’s previous single, the incredible power-pop gem “The Light,” but if you hang on here until the chorus you’ll hear what they’re capable of. Their sophomore album Behold drops on April 26^th.

Love Fame Tragedy – My Head’s in a Hurricane. LFT is Matthew Murphy, lead singer-songwriter for the Wombats, and his second solo album under that moniker, Life is a Killer, actually feels like a really good Wombats album – more than his solo debut did, certainly.

Courting – Battle. Courting’s New Last Name might be my top album of 2024 so far, and this extra track from those recording sessions has the same jangly, alt-poppy vibe as much of the LP did.

Blushing – Tamagotchi. The second song with this title to appear on one of my playlists this year, oddly enough, this “Tamagotchi” comes from a shoegaze band from Austin who’ve released two albums already, one co-produced by Mark Gardener of Ride. Their sound is very similar to early Lush, and indeed they covered “Out of Control” on an early release. Blushing’s third full-length album Sugarcoat comes out May 3^rd.

Ride – Portland Rocks. Speaking of Ride, their latest album Interplay came out last month, and it’s a solid grade-B record: exactly what you would want and expect from Ride, nothing more, nothing too novel, but nothing amiss, either. They came back from hiatus at the same time as slowdive, so the comparisons are a little too easy, but where slowdive has leaned more into their shoegaze roots and are riding the wave of the genre’s revival, Ride have reemerged in a softer form, closer to dream-pop than shoegaze, with Interplay harkening back more to British new wave than the original shoegaze movement that Ride helped pioneer.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Venal Eyes. The Guardian called the Reid brothers’ second comeback album “three-quarters of a good record” by way of praise; I might put the ratio closer to half. (Their real comeback album was 2017’s Damage and Joy, coming after a 19-year layoff; the wait this time was just seven years.) TJ&MC were always more shoegaze-adjacent to me, with more noise-rock elements and I think a pretty clear intent to create some chaos on record. This song does all of that, and does it well.

Drop Nineteens – Nest. Concluding the shoegaze portion of the playlist we have perhaps the only American band associated with the genre’s original heyday. Drop Nineteens put out a new album, Hard Light, in November of 2023, their first album in 30 years; this song didn’t make the album but came out of the same sessions.

Wheel – Empire. One of my favorite progressive metal bands going, Wheel has put out two singles from their forthcoming album Charismatic Leaders, this and the seven-minute “Porcelain.” The new album drops May 3^rd and will be their first as a trio after bassist Aki Virta left the band amicably last July.

Ministry – New Religion. Al Jourgensen is 65 years old now and as pissed-off as ever, with Ministry’s new album HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, which he’s hinted might be their last, a furious tirade against incels, white nationalists, right-wing grifters, and Trump himself.

Judas Priest – Invincible Shield. Then we have Judas Priest, with three members in their 1970s, still shredding like in their peak, but definitely with a way more uplifting message than I’d expect from the folks behind “Breaking the Law” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming.”

Pallbearer – Where the Light Fades. The kings of American doom metal will release their fifth album Mind Burns Alive on May 17^th, their first new music since 2020’s Forgotten Days.

Ufomammut – Leeched. An Italian doom metal band who’ve been around for almost a quarter-century now, Ufomammut just crossed my radar for the first time about a week ago; this is some seriously heavy stuff, with menacing vocals to go along with it.

Messiah – Sikhote Alin. Messiah were part of the Swiss metal vanguard in the 1980s along with Celtic Frost and Coroner, then broke up in the mid-1990s and, as far as I knew, were done for good. They actually returned in 2020 with their first new album in 26 years, and just released their second post-reunion album, Christus Hypercubus, last month. Their music is still heavily rooted in thrash, with shouted vocals that are a little less abrasive than the typical death-metal style. This isn’t totally my cup of tea, but old-school thrash riffing will always appeal to me on some level.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, alternative, doom metal, folk music, indie, jazz, metal, Music, progressive metal, shoegaze, thrash

→ March 1, 2024
→ By keith

Music update, February 2024.

Hey, not too bad for a month of just 29 days, although I think the quantity of songs on a playlist has more to do with how many Fridays a month has than how many days. I’m posting this on March 1^st, which is a strong album release day (Liam Gallagher & John Squire, Everything Everything, Kaiser Chiefs, Ministry, Sheer Mag, Yard Act), leading into what looks like a very promising spring of new LPs from some great artists. As always, if you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can click here.

Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well. I’m pretty sure this is the first song by Musgraves I’ve ever put on a playlist. It’s just gorgeous, with a hint of darkness in the lyrics to contrast to the lovely guitarwork and harmonies in the chorus.

Khruangbin – May Ninth. A La Sala, their first proper LP since 2020’s Mordechai, comes out on April 5^th, and it seems like it may be a return to their all-instrumental style from their prior work.

Parsnip – The Light. Parsnip is an Australian quartet who released an album in 2019 called When the Tree Bears Fruit, but this was the first track I’d heard by them. It’s jangly, catchy indie-pop with some smart-ass lyrics, loosely descended from a lot of the Britpop stuff I was all about in my 20s. It’s from their upcoming album Behold, due out April 26^th, their first new music of any sort since 2020.

Kaiser Chiefs – Beautiful Girl. Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Album comes out on March 1^st, their first LP since 2019, but even with production from Nike Rodgers, this is the only single I’ve heard of five worth listening to. It’s fantastic, though. Lead singer Ricky Wilson wrote a short, interesting retrospective on their sudden rise to fame and the vicissitudes of their career for The Guardian this past week.

Pond – Neon River. More weird psychedelic rock from down under. Stay with it through the lugubrious intro for the muscular, acid-tinged riffs in the chorus.

Elbow – Lovers’ Leap. Elbow came along at the wrong time for me, after Madchester and Britpop, two genres I still come back to all the time, but before I got back into current music again around 2007, thanks in no small part to the Arctic Monkeys’ debut album. I’ve checked in on them here and there, such as when they won the Mercury Prize for The Seldom Seen Kid, but their music has just drifted right on by me. That’s by way of explanation of why this is the first Elbow track to ever appear on one of my playlists: it’s not just that I think it’s good, but I think it’s very different. Frontman Guy Garvey promised the upcoming LP, Audio Vertigo, will be “groove-based,” and this song definitely qualifies.

Yard Act feat. Katy Pearson and David Thewlis – When the Laughter Stops. More post-punk goodness from Yard Act, with an appearance from Thewlis reading the “sound and fury” monologue from Hamlet. Their second album, Where’s My Utopia?, is out today, March 1^st.

English Teacher – R&B. There’s a slow start here but it picks up the pace partway through to sound more like other English Teacher tracks, with their modern take on post-punk; their debut full-length This Could Be Texas comes out on April 12^th.

Omni – Compliment. I seem to be very late to the Omni party, as the Atlanta post-punks have received critical acclaim for at least their last three albums now, including the just-released Souvenir, which has this track as the closer.

Squid – Fugue (Bin Song). I’m not always on Squid’s wavelength, but they’re one of the most innovative bands out there right now, especially in their punk-adjacent space, playing with time signatures and working outside of traditional keys. It’s a bit like black midi with less pretense.

Les Savy Fav – Legendary Tippers. I didn’t think LSF were still a going concern, but they’re about to release their first new album in 14 years, Oui, in May. They’ve dropped two singles so far; this one sounds similar to the sound they

Kid Kapichi – Get Down. Kid Kapichi have always reminded me of a harder-edged version of Arctic Monkeys, leaning more into punk than Alex Turner & company do, but here they go back a few decades with talk-sung lyrics telling a story before the hook in the chorus.

Cast – The Rain That Falls. So I sort of knew Cast were still around, but maybe I’d forgotten? I loved Cast in the 1990s – “Sandstorm,” “Alright,” “Beat Mama,” “Finetime” – as they emerged from the ashes of The La’s, whose Brian Wilson-esque frontman Lee Mavers refused to release any new music after their debut album. Cast’s latest LP Love Is the Call is a mixed bag, at best, but this is the best track on the album and you can hear their earlier Britpoppy sound poking through.

Everything Everything – The End of the Contender. These British art-rockers’ latest album, Mountainhead, drops on March 1^st, featuring this song, “Cold Reactor,” and “The Mad Stone.” Those three singles all have the EE sound, but they’ve also felt more restrained, without the sort of controlled chaos of Arc or A Fever Dream.

Love Fame Tragedy – It’s Ok To Be Shallow. The second single this winter from Matthew Murphy’s side project, after December’s “Don’t You Want To Sleep With Someone Normal,” with both sounding … a lot like the Wombats. I don’t think Murphy can write any other way, but fortunately I love most of what he writes, so we’re all good.

Ride – Last Frontier. Ride & Slowdive both making comebacks in the late teens ahead of, or perhaps encouraging, the new peak of shoegaze is a welcome development, given that I liked both bands in their original heydays but definitely did not fully appreciate either.

Brittany Howard – Prove It To You. What Now turned out to be a bit of a disappointment after the title track, the lead single from the record, was so good I named it my #1 track of 2023. I was hoping for more funk, but instead the album bounces all over the place, with a lot of house/electronica and a number of almost dirge-like tracks. Nothing lived up to the first single but this is the second-best song on the LP.

Little Simz – Mood Swings. Little Simz released a surprise EP, Drop 7, with seven tracks and a total run time of just 14:49; it is, as you’d expect, the seventh in a series of EPs that exist in parallel to her more traditional tracks on her albums. It’s weird, in a good way, although it reminds me I need to listen to No Thank You, her December 2022 album, again, as it came out in a dead time for new albums.

Paul Weller – Soul Wandering. Sixty-five and still rocking, Weller, the former leader of The Jam and The Style Council, is back with this soul-influenced track that has some powerful guitar work (I get a little early Tom Cochrane from it) before the Motown-esque backing vocalists come in for the chorus. His latest solo album, 66, will come out on May 24^th, one day before his 66^th birthday.

Waxahatchee – Bored. I can’t believe it’s been four years since Saint Cloud, Waxahatchee’s breakout album, came out, but I guess a fair amount has happened since then. This track is the second from her upcoming album Tiger Blood, due out March 24^th, and both songs seem to lean more into her alt.country side than the roots rock style of the last album.

The Mysterines – Stray. Lia Metcalfe and company will release their second album, Afraid of Tomorrows, on June 7^th. This lead single is more snarling than most of the tracks on their 2022 debut, Reeling, but not quite as fast-paced as their earliest singles, which remains my favorite version of the band. The song’s video definitely leans into Metcalfe’s looks and star power.

Slow Fiction – Apollo. An indie-rock group from Brooklyn – bet you haven’t heard of that before! – Slow Fiction put out an EP last year, followed by this one-off single, which does a tremendous job of building up energy and tension through the bridge and chorus, only releasing it in the final ten seconds or so of the track.

Screaming Females – Swallow the World. The Females announced their breakup in December, but they’ve now released their 2022 EP Clover, previously only available to buy at shows, on streaming sites and on bandcamp.

MAQUINA. – denial. I know very little about this band other than that they’re Portuguese, but this is very Ministry, with a little Death in Vegas thrown in.

Alcest – L’Envol. This French metal band pioneered the awkwardly-named subgenre of “blackgaze,” melding black metal elements with shoegaze, which was later taken over by the American band Deafheaven on their far less interesting album Sunbather. Anyway, Alcest has been putting out some of the best metal albums in the world in the last decade, and their first new LP in five years, Les Chants de l’aurore, will be out in June.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alternative, hip-hop, indie, metal, Music, post-punk, shoegaze

→ February 3, 2024
→ By keith

Music update, January 2024.

PSA: The top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the ten guys who just missed on Tuesday.

January ended up a big month for new music, especially for new albums – it seems like a lot of artists/labels held stuff back from mid-November until after the New Year. Not included were some new tracks from ‘90s faves like the Jesus & Mary Chain, Buffalo Tom, and Black Grape. As always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist here.

Liam Gallagher & John Squire – Just Another Rainbow. I can’t believe these two British rock icons (of Oasis and Stone Roses, respectively) have gotten together to put out an album, or that either of them sounds this good at their respective ages. The second single, “Mars to Liverpool,” was a bit of a letdown, though, and I’m hoping the record isn’t a bunch of mopers. Also props to Liam for knowing the order of colors in the visible spectrum.

Sprints – Heavy. This Irish punk act’s debut LP Letter to Self is going to end up on my top albums of the year, with this, “Adore Adore Adore,” “Up and Comer,” and “Literary Mind” all standouts.

Courting – We Look Good Together (Big Words). And Courting’s latest album, New Last Name, is also going to end up on my top albums of the year, leading with the poppy banger “Throw” followed by this track, with “Flex” and “The Wedding” also highlights.

Folly Group – Pressure Pad. Will Folly Group’s Down There! also make my top albums of the year list? We’ll have to wait on that one, but I’m a new fan of their experimental art-rock sound.

Bob Vylan – Hunger Games. “What will you win yourself tonight/spin the wheel for a chance at a hot meal.” The righteous anger here harkens back to the earliest days of punk, when working-class angst found its outlet in loud, short bursts of guitars and shouts.

Softcult – Heaven. I wasn’t familiar with Softcult until they popped up on my Spotify Release Radar playlist, which … well, sometimes the algorithm works, as they remind me a ton of early Lush (shoegaze era, not “Ladykillers”).

The Lemon Twigs – My Golden Years. I didn’t love the Lemon Twigs’ 2023 album Everything Harmony, although it made a slew of best-of lists for last year. This track has a way better melody than anything on that LP, with that same ‘60s power-pop sound that has some Beach Boys influence in the harmonies.

Talk Show – Red/White. Talk Show have been on my playlists for a few years now, so I was surprised to hear that their upcoming LP, Effigy, due out on the 16^th, is actually their debut. This last advance single has clearer vocals than in some of their other tracks, but still has that mélange of punk, goth, and industrial.

Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman – Right Back To It. I’m here for just about anything Waxhatchee does, and it says something that I have a track by Lenderman, whose work as a solo artist and with the band Wednesday does nothing for me, on my playlist.

Ride – Peace Sign. Ride were part of the original shoegaze movement, so it amuses me that they’ve moved into a much different space, more psychedelic dream-pop than the minor-key noise of shoegaze. I like both iterations, for what it’s worth.

Shabazz Palaces feat. Stas THEE Boss & Irene Barber – Angela. Shabazz Palaces is Ishmael Butler, formerly known as Butterfly while he was in the seminal jazz-rap trio Digable Planets. His output under the new moniker, which used to be a duo until Tendai Maraire departed the group, is more experimental, with funk, jazz, and electronic elements, although hip-hop still finds its way into many of their tracks. This song comes off their upcoming album Exotic Birds of Prey, due out March 29^th.

Jamie xx – It’s So Good. Yes, yes it is. Jamie xx – of the xx, of course – had two all-timers from his first true solo effort, “Loud Places” and “SeeSaw,” but this is the first thing he’s released since that 2015 record that’s captured that same ebullient feeling.

Etta Marcus – Girls That Play. Marcus’s second album, The Death of Summer & Other Promises, came out on January 24^th. Her alt-pop style reminds me of Ingrid Michaelson, but less cloying.

Yard Act – We Make Hits. I loved Yard Act’s debut album, and they’ve clearly evolved their sound to incorporate some new elements without losing the sardonic, witty lyrics and offbeat rhythms that made The Overload so good. Where’s My Utopia? comes out March 1^st.

Sheer Mag – Moonstruck. Sheer Mag’s third album, Playing Favorites, comes out March 1^st, and this track might be the poppiest thing the Philly garage-rockers have ever put out.

The Libertines – Shiver. The likely lads are sounding older, wiser, and … sober? Carl Barât’s vocals will always give their music a rougher edge, but the Libertines may actually have grown up a little.

Khruangbin – A Love International. A peak-form instrumental track from the Texas Thai-jazz trio ahead of their new album À la Sala, due out April 5^th.

Bill Ryder-Jones – If Tomorrow Starts Without Me. The best track on Ryder-Jones’s acclaimed new album, Iechyd Da (a Welsh toast meaning “good health”), this is also one of the only ones that doesn’t move at the pace of a funeral dirge.

swim school – Give Me a Reason Why. More shoegazey goodness from this Glaswegian trio ahead of a headlining tour in the UK.

Sunny Day Real Estate – Novum Vetus. I don’t know if it needed to be seven minutes, but hey, any SDRE track is good by me. It’s their first new release in ten years, although the song itself originated in the sessions for the 1997 album How It Feels to Be Something On.

Real Estate – Haunted World. I had to put these two back to back, didn’t I? Otherwise I might have lined this up with the Lemon Twigs, as it’s got a similar vibe, an acoustic track that reminded a lot of the Shins.

GEMZ – Younger. GEMZ is Jen Wood and Ted Chen, and if you’re close to my age, you might remember Jen Wood’s short-lived band Tattle Tale from the early 1990s, or maybe you know her from her contributions to The Postal Service. This is her newest endeavor, but her vocals are the draw no matter the style of music.

TORRES – Happy Man’s Shoes. What an Enormous Room, TORRES’s sixth album, came out on January 26^th, and the tracks I’ve heard seem weirder than their previous output, but in a good way. I saw one review compare the LP to Goldfrapp, which I can definitely hear on this track.

Masta Ace & Marco Polo feat. Coast Contra – Certified. Yes, that is Masta Ace of the Juice Crew, which also featured Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap, and for a man of 57 who’s fighting MS he sounds damn good.

Judas Priest – Crown of Horns. These Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees will release their nineteenth LP, Invincible Shield, in March, featuring this oddly upbeat track (which still has some great soloing). Glenn Tipton is credited as appearing on the album, although he’s now 76 and has been dealing with Parkinson’s for over a decade.

Tom McGovern & Cory Wong – Everything Smells Like Salmon. I’m not much for joke songs, either because they’re not funny or because the joke wears thin after one listen, but this one has some staying power. It’s pretty funny, the lyrics are very clever, and Wong’s guitar work is always worth a spin.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, alternative, hip-hop, Music, shoegaze

→ January 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

This fantastic episode of The Hidden Brain talks about persistence and uses R.A. Dickey as one of its core examples – and gets his story right.

In Nyack, New York, sex abuse claims against a former high school baseball coach have resurfaced in an attempt to get the name of the head coach (who is not the accused abuser) removed from the school’s field. Several former players have accused assistant coach Peter Recla, who coached at Nyack High School in the late 1990s and early 2000s, of grooming and sexual abuse. The district settled a lawsuit with some of the victims in November.

Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.

Now Florida schools are pulling dictionaries and encyclopedias from shelves because they may have “objectionable” content like … facts.

Following the lead of Iowa, Mississippi has withdrawn from a free federal program providing funds to states to feed underprivileged schoolchildren over the summer, part of a new Republican drive against the “welfare state.” I don’t understand why this is minor news, but a rat-shaped hole in Chicago gets coverage in national papers.

Meanwhile, a third of the current Representatives and Senators are election deniers. This just isn’t compatible with democracy as a going concern. It’s one or the other.

Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.

This NY Times story explains a new type of streaming fraud, where copycats steal obscure artists’ songs and repackage them under fake artist names. What’s interesting here is that Warner ended up distributing some of the bogus tracks.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital in England is inundated with measles cases because anti-vaxxers convinced enough parents not to vaccinate their children against the incredibly contagious and dangerous virus.

Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.

If you live in Ohio and are concerned about the recent anti-trans law passed by the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislature over Gov. Mike DeWine (R)’s veto, here are some things you can do to help the cause.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book banning, election denial, florida, links, mississippi, Music, ohio, psychology, religion, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ December 22, 2023
→ By keith

Top 100 songs of 2023.

This year’s top 100 was more of a struggle than most years, although by the end of the process I was still about a dozen songs over the limit; I just had to go back over a number of my monthly playlists and revisit some tracks and albums I’d missed before I could reach that point. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, though, and I think the top of the list is strong even if 2023 wasn’t a peak year for great new songs. You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. I posted my ranking of the top 23 albums of 2023 earlier this week.

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

100. Griff – Vertigo. Pure pop greatness from Griff, who just doesn’t miss whether she’s going for sunnier sounds (like this track) or melancholy ballads (like her song way farther up this list).

99. Del Water Gap – Quilt of Steam. I am now old enough that my daughter is telling me about artists that end up on my playlists; I hadn’t heard of Del Water Gap, who has been releasing music on his own for over a decade and put out his second album for Mom + Pop Records this fall, until she mentioned him to me, after which Spotify served me this track on my Release Radar. Sometimes the algorithm works.

98. Ghost of Vroom – Still Getting It Done. Mike Doughty’s latest project is the closest thing he’s done to Soul Coughing since the seminal drum-n-bass group called it quits after El Oso, driven by his sung/rapped lyrics and music that’s a little more ornate (and funky) than SC’s but still driven by percussion and heavy bass lines.

97. Beck & Phoenix – Odyssey. These two artists released a one-off collaboration to kick off their joint summer tour, and while I don’t think Beck exactly extended himself here, it’s similar to Phoenix’s musical revival on last year’s Alpha Zulu, and bouncy like a good summer hit should be.

96. bdrmm – It’s Just a Bit of Blood. These guys were about three years ahead of schedule for the shoegaze revival, ending up lumped in more with avant garde noisemakers black midi than with their true brethren. Their second album, I Don’t Know, came out this year and was similar to their first one but a little more upbeat, perhaps with more major keys than its predecessor offered.

95. Etta Marcus – Smile for the Camera. A sultry sophisti-pop track from this 22-year-old London singer’s EP A Heart-Shaped Bruise. I’d recommend this to fans of boygenius but if you like your singers to really sing.

94. Bully – Days Move Slow. The best song you’ll ever hear about a dog’s death. Bully’s album made a lot of top ten lists, but I find her nasal vocals hard to take for more than a song at a time. This had by far the best guitar hook on the record and I think justifies some of the musical comparisons and Nirvana.

93. Queens of the Stone Age – Paper Machete. The top track from In Times New Roman… has a heavy guitar riff appropriate to Josh Homme’s oeuvre, although I found the album as a whole kind of lacking in the rougher edge that characterized a lot of his earlier work.

92. Killing Joke – Full Spectrum Dominance. Jaz Coleman & company have undergone many iterations over their 44-year history, but their final act appeared to be their industrial-metal phase and their incredible swan song LP, 2015’s Pylon. They’re not quite done, however, and have returned with the occasional one-off single, including this one, which certainly would have fit well on Pylon, ahead of their 2023 tour.

91. Brooke Combe – Black is the New Gold. The title track from this Scottish soul singer’s newest album packs some clever turns of phrase and a driving bass line, along with a little flute interpolation that calls back to the genre’s 1970s heyday.

90. SENSES – Drifting. This Coventry four-piece first promised their debut album Little Pictures Without Sound in 2021, after over a decade working together, but the pandemic and other factors delayed its release until April of this year. This is the album’s strongest track, sitting somewhere between the Oasis end of Britpop and the spacier sound of Doves.

89. The Lottery Winners – Worry. I didn’t love their sophomore album Anxiety Replacement Therapy as much as I did their debut, which was absolutely packed with hooks and full of general cheer. This track had the most in common with their first album.

88. Seablite – Melancholy Molly. I was a big fan of Lush in their 1990s heyday and enjoyed member Emma Anderson’s solo debut album this year, so Seablite’s music is catnip to me. I also love that they call themselves “odd pop.” It is poppy, and they’d have every reason to jump on the shoegaze bandwagon, but they appear to have chosen their own path.

87. The Kills – New York. God Games marked this duo’s first album and first original material in seven years, although it was hit or miss for an album that in theory they’d had several years to work on. They’ll never top “Sour Cherry” for me, but if you liked “Doing It to Death,” this track is in that vein.

86. Everything Everything – The Mad Stone. I preferred this to “Cold Reactor” of the two singles EE has released so far ahead of their upcoming album Mountainhead, although both have elements of the band’s manic art-rock style, including Jonathan Higgs’ rapid-fire singing.

85. Folly Group – Big Ground. Speaking of Everything Everything, this track from Folly Group, whose debut album Down There! is due out on January 12^th, reminds me quite a bit of early EE, mixed with a little early post-punk in the chorus.

84. Screaming Females – Brass Bell. Screaming Females announced their dissolution earlier this month, about nine months after they released their eighth and presumably final album, Desire Pathway. I don’t know their discography well at all, so I can only say this is a pretty great showcase of singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s voice and guitar skills, enough that I’ll be watching to see if she releases another solo album.

83. Courting – Throw. I can’t place that opening riff, but it reminds me of some other track I liked from maybe 20-25 years ago; the rest of the song is like a smarter, snarkier emo track, and the whole song has a great bounce to it. New Last Name comes out January 26^th.

82. swim school – delirious. “swim school” is not an SEO-friendly band name, but this song rocks very hard, bordering on metal, with singer Alice Johnson’s voice a perfect foil for the crushing guitars. They put out a four-song EP this year and ended up opening for the Amazons, a British band known for giant guitar riffs, to close out 2023.

81. Public Image Ltd. – End of the World. PIL’s return this year wasn’t a surprise in and of itself, but the content was – first a touching song, “Hawaii,” about founder John Lydon’s wife, who at that point was dying of Alzheimer’s disease and passed away a few weeks after the song’s release; and then this banger, with a swirling guitar riff and Lydon’s voice as potent and angry as ever.

80. SPRINTS – Adore Adore Adore. I’ve been on the bandwagon for these Irish punks for a few years now, and we’re finally getting their debut album, Letter to Self, on January 5^th, including this track, “Up and Comer,” and “Shadow of a Doubt.”

79. Ratboys – Making Noise for the Ones You Love. Many people whose taste in music I respect, including Blake Murphy of Sportsnet/The FAN 590, love Ratboys; I think most of their songs sound like Waxahatchee singing over a shoegaze band and it doesn’t work for either. The combination does work on this track, in part because of how singer Julia Sterner sings between the verse and chorus. (I had a similar but more pronounced objection to Wednesday, whose singer sounds like she’s whining and deliberately goes off key so often I have never made it through the entire album.)

78. The Mysterines – Begin Again. I loved the early singles from Lia Metcalfe’s band, but their debut album, Reeling, didn’t include any of their best songs, so I felt a little let down by the LP. This song, their only new material in 2023, shows off her deep, smoky voice, and has a slow burn to the melody, so while it doesn’t quite rock like their pre-Reeling offerings it’s pretty compelling. Also, this track is part of a sort of Easter egg on the top 100, if you’re paying attention.

77. Arlo Parks – Impurities. My Soft Machine may be the moment that Parks broke out into mainstream success, at least in Europe, as she turned just slightly in the direction of electro-pop without losing her voice or the sparse approach of her debut album. I loved just about everything on the album, but there were two tracks that stood above the rest for their melodies. This was one.

76. Dexys – I’m Going to Get Free. It was a good year for ‘80s bands coming back around; PIL appeared above, Simply Red put out a solid album, Depeche Mode issued their Memento Mori to eulogize the late Andy Fletcher, and Dexys returned with The Feminine Divine, seven years after singer Kevin Rowland appeared to say he was retiring from music. This track brings back the sound of Philadelphia soul with big brass lines and a giant, catchy beat, while Rowland’s voice is still as distinctive as it was on “Come On Eileen” some 41 years ago.

75. Bartees Strange – Tisched Off. Strange issued two tracks as part of a singles series from Sub Pop, with this indignant rocker, ranting about posers in the industry, the better of the two.

74. Noname – Namesake. Picking any tracks off Sundial, my #2 album of 2023, for a singles list was difficult because the album as a whole is such an immersive listen, but I did have two that stood apart enough that I might listen to them on their own (rather than doing the entire album straight through).

73. CHVRCHES – Over. The Scottish trio released this one-off single to commemorate their signing with Island Records and, in their words, to serve as a bridge between 2021’s Screen Violence and whatever comes next.

72. Corinne Bailey Rae – New York Transit Queen. Rae’s genre-hopping on Black Rainbows extended to garage-rock here, bordering on punk, in a song with very little in the way of lyrics beyond Rae chanting the title.

71. Fucked Up – Cicada. The rest of Fucked Up’s latest album, One Day, is much more in their typical vein of hardcore punk, but my God does this sound like a lost track from Hüsker Dü’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories. This is part two of four for that Easter egg I mentioned above. I won’t tag the last two, though.

70. Bombino – Alwane. I admit to having no idea who Bombino was until I heard this track on one of NPR Music’s weekly new music playlists, but that’s on me, as the Nigerien (as in, from Niger) singer/guitarist was the subject of a 2010 documentary called Agadez, the Music and the Rebellion. He’s also the first artist from Niger to receive a Grammy nomination (Best World Music Album, for 2018’s Deran). This track is from his latest album, Sahel, a tribute to the region where he grew up and, on this track, to friends he’s lost in the area’s many armed conflicts.

69. Creeper – Sacred Blasphemy. The first track I heard off Sanguivore is bombastic, theatrical, and throws back to the earliest stages of glam rock (think Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love). Needless to say, it’s right in my wheelhouse.

68. Sampha – Suspended. Sampha’s voice really soars on this track off Lahai, one of the year’s best albums, as he sings about becoming a father over a light piano backing, with some staccato call-and-response to the verses that add texture and a little complexity to the song.

67. Black Honey – Cut the Cord. Black Honey’s third album A Fistful of Peaches was a departure for the Brighton indie-rockers, with some harder-edged songs (notably the 2022 single “Charlie Bronson”), but fewer of the big melodies than they had on their first two albums. “Cut the Cord” was never released as a single, but it was among the 2-3 best tracks on the album.

66. Jungle feat. Erick the Architect – Candle Flame. Jungle’s Volcano was my least favorite album from the English soul-revival duo yet, between the lack of interesting melodies and some experiments that didn’t pay off. Erick the Architect’s verses here are the best stuff on the album, and outside of the slightly annoying falsetto in the chorus, Jungle mostly stays out of his way.

65. boygenius – Satanist. I’m not a huge fan of the solo output of any of the three talented women in boygenius, primarily because of their singing style, which is more undersinging – they just don’t let it rip very often – and their tendency towards melancholy rhythms. This was by far the strongest track for me from their newest record, called the record, which netted them five Grammy nominations (two for the album, three for specific songs).

64. Cloud Nothings – Final Summer. Dylan Baldi & company signed to the punk label Pure Noise and released this new single in November, which … sounds just like Cloud Nothings, with a big hook to open it up and a tempo that makes you want to get behind the wheel and hit the gas.

63. DMA’s – Everybody’s Saying Thursday’s the Weekend. After their first two albums earned them comparisons to Oasis (which Noel Gallagher shat on, but Liam later endorsed), DMA’s shifted to a more electronic sound on their third album, then veered back towards the middle of the two genres on this year’s How Many Dreams?, failing to hit on either cylinder. They’ll never get back to the heights of “For Now” or “Too Soon,” I fear, but this sunnier track gets somewhat close with a hook and guitar work worthy of the Britpop comps.

62. The Japanese House – Sad to Breathe. Amber Mary Bain’s album In the End It Always Does was one of the year’s best, with two songs from it that blew me away back when they came out as singles in the spring. This one starts out like a mournful piano ballad about a lost love, then jumps from first to fourth gear around the 1:15 mark (I think that costs you several Heat cards) with an electronic percussion line and guitar that completely changes the texture of the vocal melody.

61. Blondshell – Salad. Another acclaimed album that just didn’t do it for me, as I don’t think Sabrina Teitelbaum’s melodies or voice are strong enough to support some decent rock hooks and thoughtful lyrics. This track has the album’s best riff and it plays perfectly against the angry lyrics.

60. Peace – Happy Cars. Peace self-released their latest album, Utopia, in the spring via a password-protected website, then issued it on vinyl in November. This single is the only track available via streaming sites right now; to hear the rest you have to purchase it, which the brothers Koisser told NME was “career suicide” according to their mates. I don’t know what to think of that – isn’t streaming killing the industry slowly anyway? Anyway, I love the melody here and have had this song in my head on and off for a month now.

59. Protomartyr – For Tomorrow. Formal Growth in the Desert was one of my favorite albums of 2023 and is an excellent distillation of what post-punk sounds like in its current incarnation, similar to Ceremony and more recent Thrice.

58. Yard Act – Dream Job. Yard Act released three singles this year, with a new album due out in March, and there’s some evolution in their sound already from their 2022 debut The Overload, with more musical elements and some electronic/dance ingredients as well. I also liked “The Trench Coat Museum,” but it’s eight minutes long and even I felt like it wore out its welcome by the end.

57. STONE – I Gotta Feeling. “Shout out to the writers of Peaky Blinders/You inspired a new age of wankers.” There’s a lot of punk to STONE’s lyrics and spoken-sung vocals, but musically they’re somewhere between alternative rock and hard rock, showing some of that range on their latest EP punkadonk2.

56. Slow Pulp – Cramps. Slow Pulp can rock a bit, harkening back to mid-90s alternative rock, and when they do I’m a big fan. Their album as a whole was a little disappointing, as so many of the songs were quiet and slow … I don’t know what I expected, really.

55. Deeper – Glare. The best track from Careful! still has that late ‘70s post-punk vibe, but it’s brighter and catcher, with a real earworm in the main guitar line.

54. Siracuse – Saviour. I compared this track to peak Charlatans when I put it on a playlist in April, and I think that holds, even to some extent to the sound of the vocalist, while the opening guitar riff still gets stuck in my head every time I listen to it.

53. Brad – Hey Now What’s the Problem. Brad’s final album, In the Moment That You’re Born, seems to have landed almost unnoticed this year, which is a shame because it’s both a fitting coda to the band’s unusual and diverse catalog, and a tribute to singer Shawn Smith, who died in 2019. The remaining band members, including Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, completed tracks where Smith had recorded his vocals, including this funk-rock track that recalls Smith’s work with Pigeonhed.

52. BLOXX – Modern Day. The title track from BLOXX’s August EP is the best thing they’ve done since their debut album, 2020’s Lie Out Loud, another great pop-punk track with a solid harmony in the chorus.

51. Drums – Isolette. Annoyingly catchy, but with a serious undercurrent – the entire album, Jonny, represents Jonathan Pierce’s efforts to reckon with his upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian church, abuse he suffered, and being gay in a community that wouldn’t accept him.

50. milk. – I Think I Lost My Number Can I Have Yours? This Irish pop band put out a few EPs this year, culminating in a seven-track release called 3, the EP, that included everything they’d released in 2023, led by this lilting pop gem that recalls some ‘70s soft-rock icons like 10cc.

49. Altin Gün – Rakiya Su Katamam. One of my two favorite tracks from this Anatolian rock band’s album Ask, along with “Su Siziyor;” this one gets the nod for the top 100 because of that swirling guitar riff that pops back up throughout the song in slightly different forms. Altin Gün’s blend of psychedelia and traditional Turkish music sounds like nothing else I’ve heard, and they have a great sense of melody on top of that to put the Turkish lyrics (which I don’t understand) in my head.

48. Squid – Swing (In a Dream). Squid’s experimental sound generally leaves me cold, even though I respect the ambition and risk-taking; O Monolith, their second album, saw them rein in the sound just enough to introduce some more traditional sense of melodies, particularly on this track, which has a strong hook in the chorus but sees Ollie Judge finish his vocal lines with a little upturn at the end to keep the listener off balance.

47. Nabihah Iqbal – This World Couldn’t See Us. I don’t use the subgenre term “cold wave” very often, but it sure fits here – Iqbal’s album DREAMER spans many genres, but this track, my favorite from the LP, has that detached lyrical style and electronic music that feels dark and gloomy, fitting the themes in her lyrics.

46. Pynch – Tin Foil. “I’m saving up for the apocalypse/Cause there are gonna be deals” remains my favorite line of the year from any song. This London indie-pop quartet put out their debut album Howling at a Concrete Moon in April.

45. Hotline TNT – I Thought You’d Change. As much as Hotline TNT earns the shoegaze tag with their production and heavily distorted guitars, you can still discern specific guitar lines on most of their tracks, and here they’re quite pronounced in a way that feels pretty timeless – these are guitar sounds you’d hear in many rock genres in almost any era of music from the 1970s onward.

44. Sundara Karma – Wishing Well. I need to listen to this band’s latest album, Better Luck Next Time, as I have always liked their brand of guitar-driven indie pop, which reminds me in several ways of early U2. I love the way this track builds to the big guitar distortion in the chorus, which recalls My Bloody Valentine’s “I Only Said” (my favorite song by MBV and one of the few of theirs that I like).

43. Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Know What You See in Me. Belle & Sebastian aren’t a pop band, and they don’t often veer into poppy territory, but there are few bands in the world who do pop better than these Scots do.

42. Pastel – Your Day. Credit to MLB.com’s Matthew Leach for posting about this song and introducing it to me. It’s very Big Pink, a little Britpop, muscular throughout yet still deeply melodic at its core. It’s the only track they released this year, unfortunately.

41. Geese – Cowboy Nudes. Geese’s 3D Country isn’t an album of singles, but more of a complete experience that bounces across an absurd number of genres and styles. If there’s a ‘hit’ of sorts here, it’s this song, which has a proper hook in the chorus on top of the experimentation beneath it.

40. White Reaper – Fog Machine. Is this “Detroit Rock City?” Maybe a little “The Boys Are Back?” It’s very ‘70s, a little less Maiden/Mötorhead than the rest of Asking for a Ride, so it stands a little more on its own. I really need to see these guys live at some point because it seems impossible that they don’t put on a raucous show.

39. Momma – Bang Bang. Momma’s one original track this year is, uh, a banger, although I think last year’s “Speeding 72” was a little better. They seem like the direct descendants of Veruca Salt, with a little Breeders thrown in.

38. The Libertines – Run Run Run. I’m always surprised when the Libertines return because, well, I suppose that’s obvious if you’ve followed the band at all for the last twenty-odd years. They’ve put out two singles ahead of their upcoming fourth album, their first in nine years and just their second since 2004, including this and “The Night of the Hunter.”

37. Kid Kapichi – Let’s Get to Work. One of three new tracks from Kid Kapichi this year, along with “999” and the oddball “Tamagotchi,” which features some rapping that’s on the border of cringe for me but still has a banger of a chorus. They’ve become one of my favorite active bands over the last three years, a sort of working-class successor to the Arctic Monkeys for me.

36. Caroline Polachek – Blood and Butter. I liked quite a bit of Polachek’s work with Chairlift, including “Ch-Ching” and “I Belong In Your Arms,” but her solo work has been too weird for me, almost anti-pop in some ways, which often doesn’t do justice to her incredible voice. This is my favorite solo track from her so far, though, with several hooks in the vocals and the music to bring me back.

35. Corinne Bailey Rae – Erasure. If you saw CBR’s career detour into garage-punk that bordered on hardcore coming, well, hats off to you. I’ll be over here calling Paul Goldschmidt a platoon bat. Black Rainbows is a real tour de force, and “Erasure” shows her vocal range and gift for theatrics as well.

34. English Teacher – The World’s Biggest Paving Slab. That guitar line is just killer, and then you get to the wry, witty lyrics. English Teacher put out three songs in 2023, two of them strong (this and “Nearly Daffodils”), which I assume is a harbinger of an LP next year now that they’ve signed to Island Records.

33. Genesis Owusu – Stay Blessed. Eddie Murphy had a routine in Delirious where he referred to Teddy Pendergrass’s vocal style, mimicking him shout-singing “YOU GOT, YOU GOT, YOU GOT WHAT I NEED!” and saying he would “scare the (women) into liking him.” Owusu kind of sings like that, except here you feel his rage, and it is very effective.

32. Yves Tumor – Lovely Sewer. A great case of where critical acclaim led me to reassess an album; Yves Tumor has always been so hard to pin down musically that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good handle on his previous albums, but Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume grabbed me on a second (and third) listen. Even as he’s playing with genres and textures, there’s a foundation to most of his songs that compels you to keep going … and then he drops the drum machine for a brief piano interlude to throw you off the scene once again.

31. Slowdive – alife. Not the last Slowdive song on this ranking. I have become a bigger Slowdive fan in their comeback phase than I was in their original heyday around Souvlaki (a great album I appreciate more in hindsight).

30. Baby Queen – We Can Be Anything. Baby Queen’s album was a letdown after this strong lead single that recalls the avant-pop of Grimes’ Art Angels period.

29. The Joy Formidable – Share My Heat. That drum/bass opening gives you some indication of the pulse of the song, and then at the 45-second mark, the guitar riff arrives to knock you out of your seat. I gave you the radio edit here, not the 15-minute version.

28. Daughter – Swim Back. Daughter’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game After the Storm, and you can hear some of that atmospheric influence here on this track off Stereo Mind Game in the layered synth lines.

27. The Last Dinner Party – Sinner. I couldn’t get on board with the praise for TLDP’s debut album, although it’s not about the excessive hype around the band – I don’t think their songs sound very finished, or their melodies polished. This is by far the best song on the album, and even in the chorus you can hear some of the cracks in the foundation. My glass-half-full side says they’ll produce something better with more time and experience.

26. Creeper – Teenage Sacrifice. They’re so gleefully over the top that it sells me, even though it sounds like Suede mashed up with Dokken doing a concept album about a modern-day vampire. “Can you live without your life?” is a funny one-liner, too.

25. Temples – Cicada. Temples will never leave the 1970s and I’m fine with that. The new album was less consistent than its predecessor, although this track with its spiraling synth hook is as good as anything they’ve done.

24. U.S. Girls – Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo). My friend Tim Grierson had U.S. Girls’ Bless This Mess as one of his top albums of the year, so I gave it a fresh listen earlier this month and while the album as a whole doesn’t work for me – I don’t think Meghan Remy can do slower material half as well as she does dance tracks – if the whole LP had been made out of (waves hands) this it would have made my top ten.

23. The Hives – Bogus Operandi. This is how you announce a comeback: With giant guitars and huge riffs bursting at the seams with bravado and testosterone. This track is right up there with peak Hives tracks like “Hate to Say I Told You So” and “Walk Idiot Walk.”

22. Speedy Ortiz – Ranch vs. Ranch. I like Speedy Ortiz for about three songs per album, which was true again for Rabbit Rabbit with this track, “Scabs,” and “You S02.” Sadie Dupuis’s songs always try to strike a balance between melody and their signature dissonant sound, thriving on the contrast when she gets that balance right.

21. Girl Ray – Everybody’s Saying That. Girl Ray’s album Prestige is a fun romp of disco/funk tracks that’s a little one-note, highlighted by this track and “Tell Me.”

20. Jorja Smith – Little Things. I love how this track starts out like it’s going to be a scat jazz song, then shifts into a jazzy R&B track without losing any of its energy. We had to wait a long time for her second album but it was well worth it.

19. Weakened Friends – Awkward. I wrote previously that I thought this might be a Sleater-Kinney track; the vocals here are obviously inspired by Corin Tucker, but it has a generally brighter vibe than S-K’s music.

18. flowerovlove – Next Best Exit. I think the 18-year-old flowerovlove is the youngest artist on the top 100 this year, and she’s already done some modeling for Gucci in addition to releasing an EP and a handful of strong singles, including this one, “Coffee Shop,” and the newest “Girl Like Me,” all of them warm, sophisticated electro-pop.

17. Noname feat. Common and Ayoni – Oblivion. Sundial is strong just about from start to finish on the power of Noname’s skills and incisive, brilliant lyrics, with this track the best on the album because of the beat and because Common isn’t hawking a free iPhone from T-mobile.

16. Grian Chatten – Fairlies. The lead singer of Fontaines D.C. surprised us all with his mostly acoustic, quiet solo album, highlighted by this trick with cynical lyrics over a shuffling Irish jig.

15. Griff – Astronaut. “You said that you needed space/Go on then, astronaut.” This gorgeous collaboration with Coldplay’s Chris Martin is Griff’s most intimate song yet, and I don’t know how it hasn’t become a huge viral hit already. It’s better than “Drivers License.”

14. Sampha – Spirit 2.0. Sampha’s second album, Lahai, is track after track of simple yet inventive music behind Sampha’s vocal acrobatics. This is my favorite song from the album, thanks to the contrast between the frenetic electro-beat and his softer vocals.

13. Charly Bliss – You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore. We got two new tracks from this Brooklyn power-pop band in 2023, their first new music since 2019’s Young Enough, and this is one of the best things they’ve ever done.

12. Slowdive – the slab. Everything Is Alive has been a triumph for these O.G. shoegazers, on par with 1993’s Souvlaki, boosted by the general revival around that niche genre from the early 1990s (so named because the musicians would seldom look at the audience, often looking at their effects pedals or, presumably, their shoes). And while their sound is still shoegaze at heart, there’s melody here, and production that keeps the various instruments and the vocals clear and distinct for most of the record.

11. Daughter – Be On Your Way. “So I’ll meet you on another planet/if the plans change” gets stuck in my head for days every time I hear this, and the various synth lines here come together to create a sense of vaguely unsettling sadness befitting the lyrics.

10. Cody Wong & dodie – Call Me Wild. I enjoyed Wong’s latest album, The Lucky One, with its panoply of collaborations, although Wong is nearly always the star of his own show with his guitar wizardry and genre-hopping. “Call Me Wild” is the one song here that’s a real pop single with funky guitars, a great hook, and vocals by English singer dodie.

9. Billy Porter – Children. A joyous, celebratory dance track about living your truth, from the Emmy & Tony winner’s first pop album, Black Mona Lisa.

8. Megan Thee Stallion – Cobra. Her only solo single of the year is a revealing look at her mental health struggles over the past few years – and an indictment of the hangers-on who didn’t notice or help her – followed by a killer guitar riff to wrap things up.

7. The Beths – Watching the Credits. I can’t remember the last time an extra track from an album’s deluxe edition was this good. “Watching the Credits” came out this spring on the deluxe version of Expert in a Dying Field, my #1 album of 2022, and it’s at least a top 5 track on the LP.

6. Arlo Parks – Blades. The perfect combination of Parks’s sweet, lithe vocals and her new shift into more electro-pop sounds on My Soft Machine.

5. Jessie Ware – Begin Again. Ware’s album That! Feels! Good! earned its way on to many best-of-2023 lists, and this samba-tinged track is easily the best on a record of unabashedly sunny pop material, although I will forever wish horrible things on whoever wrote the vacuous line “give me something good that’s even better than it seems.”

4. Pip Blom feat. Alex Kapranos – Is This Love? Not a cover of the Whitesnake song, fortunately, but a summer banger from this Dutch pop band and the lead singer/guitarist of Franz Ferdinand. It came out in May but has stuck with me all year, from the big arrangements behind “I wanna feel you in my dreams” to the disco/rock blend behind the two singers’ shared choruses.

3. Young Fathers – Rice. My #1 album of the year, Heavy Heavy, included this track and “I Saw,” which made my 2022 list but would be much higher if I re-ranked those songs now. (It’s an issue with songs that come out late in any calendar year – I actively try to avoid recency bias, and often keep those songs lower than they belong, or else I just haven’t had enough time to appreciate them.) I linked this in the albums post as well, but you have to see these guys perform both songs and two more live on KEXP.

2. The Japanese House – Boyhood. A lush, immersive dream-pop track elevated by Amber Mary Bain’s falsetto and her lyrics about the end of a relationship and the void that’s left behind.

1. Brittany Howard – What Now. The former Alabama Shakes singer/guitarist released this title track to her upcoming second album, due out February 2^nd, and it is a lightning bolt of funk, blues, and righteous anger, culminating in the chorus’s final line, “If you want someone to hate then blame it on me.” I recognized Howard as a talented guitarist from her time with the Shakes, but this is another level of songcraft and a big shift from her first album, which was mostly blues rock and the odd synth-heavy track. With her follow-up single, “Red Flags,” it seems like she’s going in new directions with What Now. I can’t wait.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2023 in music, alternative, hip-hop, indie, Music, post-punk, rankings, shoegaze

→ December 20, 2023
→ By keith

Top 23 albums of 2023.

This year turned out to be a very good one for albums, better than last year, but worse for individual tracks, which I’ll talk about a little more when that ranking goes up. I was afraid I’d struggle to keep up my gimmick of doing a ranking as long as the last two digits of the year, which I’ve had to abandon every once in a while, but I ended up with plenty of albums to consider and spent a lot of time listening or re-listening to albums to make some of these final cuts – and to decide on the actual #1, which was very much a game-time choice. Get ready to read a lot about shoegaze and post-punk, although the very top of the list goes in a different direction entirely. Some honorable mentions include Cory Wong – Rocket; Black Honey – A Fistful of Peaches; Emma Anderson – Pearlies; Queens of the Stone Age – In Times New Roman…; Speedy Ortiz – Rabbit Rabbit; Brad – In The Moment That You’re Born; and, of course, The Baseball Project – Grand Salami Time.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2023 will go up in the next day or two.

23. Egyptian Blue – A Living Commodity. If I told you there was a band that cited Wire, Gang of Four, Radiohead, and Iceage as influences (which Egyptian Blue has), you’d probably imagine something a lot like this Brighton band’s debut album, which wears all of these influences but weaves them into something new enough that it avoids sounding derivative of any of them. There’s a tremendous energy here that powers the album, something I interpreted as the freshness of youth – but maybe that’s just because I’m old now – and that makes the album feel incredibly alive even though it’s underpinned by a sound that’s nearly 50 years old. Standouts include the title track, “Matador,” and “Skin.”

22. Deeper – Careful! The latest add to my list, Careful! only hit my radar a few weeks ago when WXPN music director Dan Reed tabbed it as his #1 album of the year. (His top ten was pretty solid overall.) Deeper’s last album, Auto-Pain, came shortly on the heels of the news that their former guitarist had killed himself, and the album’s darker content reflected that. Careful! is more upbeat, almost ebullient at times, which contrasts with the post-punk sound that they still maintain on this album – with a heavy dose of David Bowie, according to singer/guitarist Nic Gohl. Standouts include “Glare,” “Tele,” and “Build a Bridge.”

21. The Hives – The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons. The Hives’ first new album in eleven years found the Swedish band, down just one of their original members, rejuvenated, sounding as good as they did on their first couple of records nearly twenty years ago. They announce their presence with giant riffs on the opener (and best track) “Bogus Operandi,” and the whole album carries that same sense of bluster and grandeur. There’s plenty of the muscular rock we’re used to from the Hives, plus some diversions into hardcore (the one-minute “Trapdoor Solution”, or the slightly longer “The Bomb”), These guys can rock, and they’re not afraid to do so. I suppose the lesson is to lean into what you do well. Standouts include “Bogus Operandi,” “Two Kinds of Trouble,” and “Countdown to Shutdown.”

20. Daughter – Stereo Mind Game. This Irish trio’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game Before the Storm, released in 2017, without so much as a single in the interim, to the point where I assumed they’d hung it up. (Bands come and go so quickly these days, and because I’m always trying to keep up with what’s new, I tend to forget even bands I liked.) Daughter’s sound was always ethereal and pensive, one of the few bands I liked who used mostly slower tempos, while here they expand their repertoire just slightly with some stronger melodies and even, dare I say, something a little upbeat like “Future Lover,” one of the standout tracks along with “Swim Back” and “Be On Your Way.”

19. White Reaper – Asking for a Ride. White Reaper’s first three albums were all pretty similar, hard power-pop records with a punk influence but an overriding sense of melody along with a good bit of obnoxious fun in the lyrics. On their fourth record, they actually go … metal. You can’t listen to the first two songs here and not think Motörhead or even some early Bay Area thrash, and even when White Reaper takes their foot off the gas a little bit on the album’s best track, “Fog Machine,” they just shift from early ‘80s metal to the late ‘70s metal sounds (think New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Maiden and Priest) from their previous records. Other standout tracks include “Pink Slip,” “Bozo,” and the title track. Also, if you’re into more serious metal, the best albums I heard this year in that genre were Wayfarer’s remarkable American Gothic, Horrendous’s Ontological Mysterium, and Myrkur’s Spine.

18. Grian Chatten – Chaos for the Fly. When I heard the lead singer of Fontaines D.C. would be doing a solo album, I assumed it would be something in the vein of his regular gig, something between punk and post-punk with a strong working-class edge … and Chatten instead delivered a thoughtful, meditative, acoustic record that’s mostly his vocals and a guitar. There’s a little rockabilly here in “Fairlies,” what I can only describe as lounge music on “Bob’s Casino,” and a mournful piano track on “All of the People.” Standouts include “Fairlies,” “The Score,” and “Last Time Every Time Forever.”

17. Belle & Sebastian – Late Developers. A surprise release from the Scottish icons, just eight months after A Bit of Previous, with their trademark wry lyrics along with sunny pop melodies with a dark undercurrent. I’ve been a little surprised to see it omitted from many year-end lists, to which I attribute its release very early in the year (January 13^th) and the way we tend to take bands this consistent for granted. Standouts include “Juliet Naked,” “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” and “Give a Little Time.”

16. Hotline TNT – Cartwheel. Hotline TNT’s second album hits during shoegaze’s big moment, a revival that I’m going to mention more than a few times in this list, and they’re one of the most authentic to the original sound, which dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s in England, led by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, and Ride. Cartwheel borrows quite a bit from those last two bands, with a little Hüsker Dü thrown in for good measure, getting that shimmering wall of distortion sound that’s intrinsic to proper shoegaze. Standouts include “I Thought You’d Change,” “Out of Town,” “Protocol,” and “Spot Me 100.”

15. The Japanese House – In the End It Always Does. Amber Mary Bain wrote much of her second album in the wake of the end of a thruple that also included Art School Girlfriend (who is now in a relationship with Bain’s ex, Marisa Hackman). Anyway, In the End It Always Does showcases Bain’s lovely voice over a substantial amount of piano and keyboard work, grounding the record to support its little experimentations into electronica, dream-pop, and folk, although it always comes back to her vocals for me. Standouts include “Boyhood,” “Sunshine Baby,” and “Sad to Breathe.”

14. Genesis Owusu – STRUGGLER. The Ghanaian-Australian singer/rapper Owusu’s second album blends-hip-hop with sounds from the earliest era of new wave when that genre had just broken away from its punk origins, with songs that are rapped, shouted, and even sung in falsetto (the ironic “See Ya There”). It’s equal parts rage-rock and dance, buoyed by Owusu’s charismatic delivery. Standouts include “Leaving the Light,” “The Roach” (complete with Kafka references), “Freak Boy,” and “Stay Blessed.”

13. Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert. This is actual post-punk, sometimes labeled post-hardcore, in 2023, and I’m being a little pedantic here because I think those labels have some real utility that’s lost when people just throw “post-whatever” on anything. (As opposed to Post Malone, whose music should just be thrown in the trash.) Vocalist and Tigers fan Joe Casey wrote some of the lyrics about his late mother and his grieving process, while other songs focus on existential dread or environmental crises, all over a stark, often detuned guitar-heavy backing. Standouts include “For Tomorrow,” “Elimination Dances,” and “Fun in Hi Skool.”

12. Altin Gün – Ask. I was not familiar with Anatolian rock, which blends traditional Turkish music with psychedelic rock from the late 1960s/early 1970s, until I stumbled on this Netherlands-based outfit and their fifth album, which had a similar effect on me as Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime: I was mesmerized by the translation of rock guitar into totally new sounds from other musical cultures. I can’t tell you much about the lyrics, but the music, which is always anchored by interesting and complex guitarwork, is enough to keep me listening even though I don’t know what they’re singing about. Standouts include “Su Siziyor,” “Leylim Ley,” and “Rakiya Su Katamam.”

11. Billy Porter – Black Mona Lisa. I knew of Porter from his work on Pose and at least by reputation from his stellar work on Broadway, but when this album appeared a month ago, it was one of the more pleasant surprises of the year, as Porter brings both his vocal talents and outsized personality to this record that mixes effusive dance numbers with lyrical introspection. The 54-year-old Porter had released four previous albums, but this is his first foray into popular music, a 12-song exploration of much of his personal history through dance, disco, and funk tracks – and it is just a blast to listen to. Standouts include “Children” (two versions), “Funk is on the One,” and “Baby Was a Dancer.”

10. Creeper – Sanguivore. Creeper’s second album, Sex, Death & the Infinite Void, was my #2 album of 2020, and while I think this one is a little less exciting overall, it’s still a very strong effort from this gothic post-punk act that, aside from one awful track, is the rare concept album that keeps you in its thrall from start to finish. (“The Ballad of Spook and Mercy” is just embarrassing.) There’s something extremely ‘80s about the whole endeavor – the opening bars of “Teenage Sacrifice” could easily be a hair-metal band circa 1987, while elsewhere they sound like they’d be on tour with Heaven 17 and the Blow Monkeys about five years earlier. Standouts include “Sacred Blasphemy,” “Teenage Sacrifice,” and “Cry to Heaven.”

9. Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds). Sean Lee Bowie’s fifth album melds psychedelic rock and shoegaze-esque guitars with electronica and funk for a record that’s theatrical, bombastic, and utterly compelling. It’s the album everyone thinks Lil’ Yachty made. Standouts include “Lovely Sewer,” “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood,” “God Is a Circle,” and “Echolalia.”

8. Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows. Rae has moved a long way from the neo-soul sound of “Put Your Records On” and her acclaimed self-titled debut album back in 2006. Black Rainbows might be the most unexpected album of the year, inspired (according to Rae) by an exhibit on Black history she saw at Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank. Her voice is still strong and carries songs whether she goes loud or smooth, but the music here is all over the place, even veering into punk/hardcore and electronica, rather than the jazzy soul where she’s typically resided. It’s extremely ambitious and for the most part achieves its goals. Standouts include “New York Transit Queen,” “Erasure,” and “A Spell, A Prayer.”

7. Slowdive – Everything is Alive. Slowdive were darlings in the original shoegaze movement, with their 1993 album Souvlaki one of the peaks of the genre, but after they shifted their sound for 1995’s Pygmalion just as Britpop was exploding, they lost their record deal and broke up for 17 years. They returned to recording with 2017’s Slowdive, a majestic return towards their initial sound, and now have followed it up with an even better album that I think translates 1990s shoegaze through a 2023 lens. I’ve seen at least two stories on the current shoegaze revival from Pitchfork (which includes a lot of artists that aren’t really shoegaze) and Steregum, both of which highlight Slowdive’s place and the fact that they’ve reached new commercial heights since their re-formation. Highlights include “alife,” “the slab,” and “skin in the game.”

6. Sampha – Lahai. Maybe I just missed the boat on Sampha’s debut album Process, which won him the Mercury Prize in 2017, but I am all about this album, his long-awaited follow-up, which follows a theme you’ll see a lot in my top six albums – a real sense of restraint, with simpler and even minimalist arrangements that run so counter to contemporary pop standards. Sampha’s higher-register voice might be drowned out by louder or richer accompaniments, but the electro-soul sounds across Lahai tend to highlight and elevate his vocals instead. Standouts include “Spirit 2.0,” “Only,” “Suspended,” and “Jonathan L. Seagull.”

5. Geese – 3D Country. Geese’s debut album Projector felt like these then-teenagers had been locked in a room with nothing but records by Wire, Gang of Four, and Television for several months, so their follow-up record’s turn into an experimental mélange of post-punk, space country, hillbilly rock, screamo, and more genres that musicians this age have no business knowing so well was a huge surprise. Even more of a surprise was how well it works: 3D Country could have been one big joke, but even when you can hear Geese having fun, they’re still serious musicians and the craft here is evident. They get a lot of “jam band” labels, but I think that’s more about critics who don’t know how to categorize them. Standouts include “Cowboy Nudes,” the title track, and “Mysterious Love,” although I don’t think any three tracks could give you an accurate sense of the overall sound here.

4. Arlo Parks – My Soft Machine. Parks’s follow-up to her Mercury Prize-winning debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams sees the English singer-songwriter expanding her sonic palette to include more electronic elements and richer instrumentation, but her voice and lyrics remain the heart of her music. (She even credited some surprising influences, including shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine and the 2022 album Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C.) Standout tracks include “Impurities,” “Weightless,” “Devotion,” “Bruises,” and her cover of Jai Paul’s “Jasmine” for the album’s deluxe edition.

3. Jorja Smith – falling or flying. Jorja Smith is a god-damned treasure. The English chanteuse got a Mercury nomination with her 2018 debut album Lost & Found, then teased with an eight-song EP in 2021 called Be Right Back before returning this year with her triumphant second LP. Often miscategorized as just an R&B singer, Smith moves seamlessly across styles from soul to jazz to blues to trip-hop, but the unifying forces here are her vocals and her minimalist approach. Everything she does puts her voice front and center, and even when you know there must be myriad instrumental tracks, it sounds spare, giving the sense that you’re witnessing an intimate performance – a welcome antidote to the overproduced sounds of most popular music today. Standouts include the title track, “Little Things,” and “Try Me.”

2. Noname – Sundial. Noname appeared to have quit the music industry in November of 2019 and cancelled her sophomore album, Factory Baby, but returned to live performances in the summer of 2022 and released a new second album, Sundial, this past August. It’s a tour de force of modern hip-hop, with some of the most intelligent lyrics you’ll hear from any MC and a style that reflects the influences across rap’s fifty-year history, while the music over which she drops her rhymes ranges from R&B to jazz to alternative electronic. Standout tracks include “Oblivion” with Common and Ayoni, “Namesake,” and “Black Mirror.” I couldn’t put this album at #1, however, given the guest appearance of antisemite Jay Electronica, who even drops a reference to the Rothschilds in his verse and claims the Ukraine war is a hoax; Noname said she didn’t care what people said about his inclusion, but I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to platform someone who expresses hateful views.

1. Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy. I loved this album when it came out, then set it aside for much of the year, then revisited it for this list – and because of their stunning performance on KEXP – and fell in love with it again. It’s experimental, exuberant, explosive, and full of great hooks. “I Saw” made my top 100 songs of 2022, and would be in the top 10 this year if I hadn’t already included it last year, while “Rice,” “Geronimo,” and “Drum” are all standouts. The Scottish trio started out as primarily an alternative hip-hop act, but have expanded their sound over the past twelve years to include more elements of soul, indietronica, dance, and Afrobeat in their style. They won a Mercury Prize in 2014 for their debut album Dead, but that is now, at most, their third-best album after this and 2018’s Cocoa Sugar. Nobody sounds like Young Fathers because nobody could.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2023 in music, alternative, hip-hop, indie, Music, post-punk, rankings, shoegaze

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