Ranking my favourite albums of the year is always a tricky task, but it’s one I insist on assigning to myself every December. This is, ostensibly, an exercise I undertake because it’s “fun.” But is it? Am I having fun right now, or am I simply acting out of habit? Does it make any sense whatsoever to engage with art by placing every instance of it in competition with one another? Why is it so important to me that I assess which albums I enjoyed “the most”? Is that something I’m even reliably capable of determining? This list will answer none of these questions. In place of answers, I offer only obfuscation. I remain as uncertain as ever about anything I profess to believe. Here’s the list. Take it or leave it.
Honourable mention: public service by new concern
I considered putting my own band’s EP on the list, but then I got self-conscious and decided against it. So instead, I am filing it away in its own “honourable mention” section, so that no one can accuse me of narcissism.1 public service: “it’s good.”™
13. Chthonic by Lea Bartucci and Lawrence English
In a word, “spooky.” This stuff sounds like it was excavated from the Earth’s molten core. I must apologize if that last sentence is meaningless to you. I just can’t figure out how else to describe it. Sorry.
12. Maps by billy woods and Kenny Segal
This is some top shelf “having a dissociative episode” music.
“Over time, symbols eclipse the things they symbolize,” as billy woods raps in “Blue Smoke.” Having recently read Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” I’m reminded of its fifth thesis, which begins: “The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast.”2
We can only make sense of our present moment if we interpret it as a continuation of that which has passed. Yet “history” is forever inaccessible, remembered only in shifting, illusory fragments. We are, therefore, always trapped in a time delay, unable to recognize even the present for what it is, filtering everything through the lens of prior experience. “Symbols” – images, words, memories – are the only thing we have that allows us to understand the things they symbolize; indeed, they are the only thing we have ever had. With such an inescapably partial and scattershot experience of our world, is it even possible to know what’s “real”?
And that’s just one lyric from the album. So be sure to check out the rest if you like listening to songs that provoke descent into an existential tailspin.
11. The Ceiling Reposes by Lia Kohl
Mesmerizing, gentle, gorgeous sound collage. Excellent deployment of radio clips and static throughout.
10. Sounds While Waiting by Ellen Arkbro
The theme of this year’s list is, to borrow a phrase, “music that makes you go ‘ouch.’” And what ouchier way to kick off the “top ten” (a concept that, admittedly, is only meaningful if one has an affinity for “round numbers”) than with 42 minutes of discordant organ? Arkbro has this shit down to a science. It’s like she sits herself down, asks “what’s the most obnoxious chord I can play right now?” and then holds it for so long that you’re forced to trick yourself into thinking it sounds good. “I like this, actually!” you’ll be telling yourself after 10 minutes. “This is pleasant to me!”
But the intentionality of it is what makes her work so ingenious. When you hear an annoying, continuous noise in your daily life – say, a car alarm that no one has bothered to turn off, or industrial equipment whirring loudly from the construction site down the street – do you spend the entire time wallowing in your aural pain? No. Or, at least, I don’t. I eventually tune it out. Maybe, before then, I’ll even have a little fun with it – start harmonizing or bobbing my head. Life’s full of unnerving noises. It can be a useful exercise to let yourself stew in them, grow accustomed to their shape, and develop an appreciation for the many sounds we hear while waiting for other, better sounds.
9. Fawn / Brute by Katie Gately
I don’t want to call this “avant-garde” pop because “avant-garde” doesn’t mean anything.3 But Gately’s pop music is of the sort that’s easy to brand as “avant-garde.” There’s just a lot going on here – densely layered vocals, synthesizers, brass instruments, and intrusive sound effects in service of peculiar, haunting melodies. There’s a certain menace to this approach, analogous to a parent catching their kid smoking cigarettes and forcing them to finish the pack. “Oh, you like these sounds? Individually? Well, what if I played them all at once, huh? You like that?” Yes. I do. Cacophony is a delight to my ears.
As an aside, I’ve glanced at the lyrics of this thing several times but never long enough to figure out what’s going on. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Katie Gately is playing five-dimensional chess, and I can barely keep up with the 2D version.
8. Julius Eastman Vol. 3 – If You’re so Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? by Wild Up
(Trying to riff on a meme format I’ve seen making the rounds recently): Julius, you have to stop. Your symphonies are too good. Your crescendos too powerful. Your use of staccato too unsettling. They’ll kill you.
(Looking him up on Wikipedia and seeing that he already died of cardiac arrest in 1990): Aw, shit.
7. I’ve Seen a Way by Mandy, Indiana
Blown-out dance punk being blasted at you through a wind tunnel. This is the type of shit they’d play at clubs in the Crimes of the Future universe.
6. Monochromes by Ingrid Laubrock
The scariest free jazz I’ve heard in my life. Frankly, it should be illegal to open a song with four minutes of harsh accordion and skittering drums only to then drop in two saxophones that suddenly start screaming at me like they just saw a demon – but it isn’t. And I’m all the gladder for it. This is the soundtrack of a nightmare in which all your friends reveal that they hated you the whole time as they stab you to death in an alleyway. This is that “waking up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m.”-type beat. This is primo “throwing up” music. Like, you know that dreadful sense of vertigo you feel in the immediate few seconds before vomiting? That’s what this sounds like. Thanks, Ingrid! I love it!
5. I Was Too Young to Hear Silence by Patrick Shiroishi
I described this to a friend as “an album consisting almost entirely of white noise + minimalist, reverbed saxophone that sounds like it’s being played plaintively from a mountaintop.” The reason for that is, as I found out later, the album was recorded in a parking garage (and as we all know, parking garages are “the mountains of the city,” so that checks out). Beautiful. It’s enough to make a girl feel lonesome – but only in a refined, “1950s noir” kind of way that’s cool and sophisticated of me to admit to. I am definitely not a sad loser.
4. Rat Saw God by Wednesday
“Kind of ironic that a band named after the worst day of the week would put out one of the best albums of the year!” (Is that anything? It better be, because I don’t have much else to say about it. It’s just a very solid assemblage of noisy country/rock songs about substance abuse and hanging out with your friends – two of my favourite things to do!)
3. SAVED! by Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter
As someone who was raised irreligious and sees no reason to convert anytime soon, gospel is a genre I’ve rarely connected with. Songs telling me to praise the Lord and rejoice in His magnificent creation tend to ring a bit hollow if, like me, you’re a nihilist who doesn’t believe in anything. This is where Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter intervenes. Her hymns are punctuated with tape distortion and echolalia, and often end abruptly. You already known I’m on board! I love it when songs sound fucked-up on purpose – and even more so when they sound fucked-up in a way that makes you think for a split second that your headphones are malfunctioning or that you accidentally skipped to the next song. But what makes this album so exquisitely painful (and therefore good) is the rising level of terror and desperation in the singer’s voice. In my reading, she believes in the divinity of Christ because she needs to. After all, there must be more to life than misery. There must be a God who will spare the righteous from eternal torment. And by saying the right combination of words, I can become one of them. I can be saved too! So when she sings “I know His blood can make me whole,” she is first and foremost trying to convince herself. Her devotion isn’t an expression of love, but of anguish:4 “I was sick, and I couldn’t get well.” This sickness is very familiar to me – the fear of death and the attendant suspicion that my choices are meaningless and my actions inconsequential. Could it be that the only cure is to throw myself at the mercy of God and beg Him for forgiveness? I don’t know, but I sure hope not!
2. Norm by Andy Shauf
I agree with everything this lady said.
But she didn’t really dig into the title track, so I’ll do that now. Norm is falling asleep on the couch after a long day of stalking his crush all about town when God decides to plant a message in his dream – “Stop these wicked ways and I will lead you to the promised land.” He wakes up in a daze and looks around the house, startled by this mysterious voice that could have been an intruder or God or, perhaps, his conscience. He hears the message once again: “Stop these wicked ways and I will lead you to the promised land.” This, you might think, is a perfect opportunity for our protagonist to self-reflect, to consider how his “wicked ways” harm himself and others, but he doesn’t do this. Instead, the song ends, “Halloween Store” starts, and everything just continues as normal. He had a chance to correct course and decided against it.
I feel personally implicated here. I know from experience how easy it can be to override your own conscience for the sake of maintaining comfort and familiarity. “Maybe if I ignore these inconvenient thoughts, they’ll go away, and I won’t have to act on them.” Wrong!
So let this be a lesson: a better life is possible if only you can stop getting in your own way all the time. Good luck figuring out how to do that.
1. Dogsbody by Model/Actriz
In any other year, Norm would have been my number one. It makes sense. After all, I’m a mark for sad songs about a guy who sucks because it allows me to imagine myself as “the guy who sucks” and then descend into a spiral of intense self-loathing. That, to me, is the essence of life.
But since 2023 was the year of “deciding to be gay,” my choice of favourite album should reflect this. And there is no more fitting candidate than Dogsbody – an inspired collection of flagrantly homosexual post-punk heaters. What’s not to love? It’s got that metallic, crunchy guitar tone I love so much; the rhythm section is infectious; the songs are sung-spoken with an insistent, huffy whisper that I find unbelievably hot. In much the same way that I’ll read an academic article about cruising as a way of living vicariously through the text, I’ll listen to this album when I want to feel the thrill that I imagine accompanies going to a leather bar and having someone beat the shit out of you, sexually. Or hell, I’ll listen to it at normal times too, such as when “walking home from school” or “getting on a bus.” It’s versatile that way.
Footnotes
- I leave it for the reader to decide if my desire to avoid the perception of narcissism is a manifestation of that very narcissism. ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond, 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. ↩︎
- That which is considered “avant-garde” in one era is often incorporated into the cultural lexicon of the next, thereby becoming … just “garde,” I guess? And that’s nothing. No one would ever say that. ↩︎
- On an unrelated note, I would imagine that being a communist is a similar experience, if you substitute “revolution” for “God,” and replace “Jesus’ blood” with, uh … “collective action”? I don’t know! You figure this metaphor out! I’m done with it. ↩︎
ruminations of a sad oaf. 