Tag Archives: 2023

Top Five Songs of 2023

31 Dec

2023 was weaker than I would have liked for music but the singles list is as strong as any and astonishingly varied. The final five that I brought it down to are not content merely to differ from each other but each cover vast swathes of ground individually. Any one of these songs is a journey, together they suffice to represent a year that never seemed to end.

5. Käärijä – Cha Cha Cha

It’s only fitting then that the first song comes from the start of the year. Not to relitigate the past but Käärijä was robbed at Eurovision. Firstly, this song is everything you want from Eurovision. I don’t watch it for generic ballads, I watch it for the experience and “Cha Cha Cha” is certainly an experience.

It’s not just the breaking open the box or the silhouette with the tongue though. The best thing about the song is the tone shift two thirds in. That’s what takes this song from Eurovision meme to something special. It’s unexpected but seamless and adds dimension to the dancing man, taking him from insubstantial to resonant and the song from joke to banger.

4. Esparanza Spalding and Fred Hersch – Girl Talk

I have never seen a cover so completely devour the original as this version of “Girl Talk.” Spalding and Hersch take a rather flimsy standard from the 60s and consume the misogyny of the original to create something subversive and feminist.

Spalding is friendly and conversational throughout this and her humor is absurdly effective. She’s too sharp to need blunt force and each of her dagger points slip in with ease. This is the most relaxed dismemberment that I’ve ever seen.

3. 100 gecs – Dumbest Girl Alive

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the alternative rock of the 00s is a cultural wasteland. It constantly shocks me then how much material current musicians are able to draw from it. Of course, there are no rules for 100 gecs. They take what they want and they do what they want and make music their forebears could never have dreamed of.

They’re also just much funnier than they have any right to be. “Put emojis on my grave / I’m the dumbest girl alive” is excellent set-up and the eventual pay-off of “Text, text, text, text like you’re tryna start a fight / Yeah, I’ll fucking text you back, I’m the dumbest girl alive” kills every time.

2. Peso Pluma – LADY GAGA

Peso Pluma is easily the most exciting sound of 2023 and “LADY GAGA” is where you should start with them. This is Mexican regional music for the current moment. It’s so deeply rooted in corridos and yet sounds so modern. There’s no confusing it for reggaeton or trap but there’s also no way to confuse Peso Plume with a mariachi band either. This sound could only have come in 2023 and Peso Pluma himself is very much a child of the present day. It’s what makes it so exciting to see what he does next.

1. Sufjan Stevens – Shit Talk

“Shit Talk” is the culmination of a career and heartbreak at its most visceral. I’ve heard it countless times over the past year and it still breaks me every time. Great art resists the flattening of human experience so natural to the prosaic concerns of daily life. It complicates and textures experiences that would otherwise collapse into trope. “Shit Talk” is beautiful and crushing and quite easily the best music of 2023.

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Asake – Work of Art

10 Dec

One of the real pleasures of Afrobeats is how omnivorous it is. The other is how fun it can be. There’s always something unexpected in Work of Art. There are trumpet sounds and buzzes and piano licks and vocalizations in the thicket of sound that catch me by surprise no matter how many times I hear this. There’s so much detail in these album that rewards attention but this is also a hell of an album to just turn on and have fun with. It’s great groove after great groove in songs full of ideas and motion and I cannot sit still when “Amapiano” starts up. The only issue you can have with this album is how hard it is to stop playing it when you need to go and do anything else.

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Young Thug – BUSINESS IS BUSINESS

2 Dec

Young Thug is just fun. He makes rap into simple, unabashed fun. It’s such a breath of fresh air to hear him in an industry that’s obsessed with all the trappings around the music. He’s very obviously not oblivious to the peripherals but when you hear him rap, you can be.

His fun extends to his guest stars. He loosens up Drake to great effect in “Oh U Went” and “Parade on Cleveland” and he corrupts poor Lil Uzi Vert on “Hellcat Kenny” for some shockingly funny bars. He’s also infectious as ever in “Gucci Grocery Bag” which brings back all of the best of trap. This is music that sounds like it was a pleasure to make and is a definite pleasure to listen to.

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LE SSERAFIM – UNFORGIVEN

28 Nov

LE SSERAFIM is quite comfortably my favorite thing in K-Pop right now. Their fashion and choreography are immaculate, their attitude is fully on-point and their pop is just so much more experimental than anyone else in the space. You see this in their K-Pop cuts. “Eve, Psyche & The Bluebeard’s Wife” and “UNFORGIVEN” are K-Pop chartbusters and rightfully so but you can see how omnivorous their taste is. The tracks constantly surprise with unexpected beats and breaks and they pull from a ton of influences.

They’re even willing to play out of K-Pop outright. “Blue Flame” is very “American Boy” and the strong “FEARNOT” could be a Taylor track. Their ear is evident across the album. Like Seo Taiji, it’s not just that they take many inspirations but that their ear for good music is impeccable and their ability to consume and integrate many sources is incredible. That they can do all of this and package it with the best K-Pop visuals that I have ever seen is absurd. There’s still a lot of roughness to this album and it’s somewhat of a loose bag but this is as exciting of a statement as you’ll get.

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Blondshell – Blondshell

19 Nov

Blondshell is why you always root for the indie band. It’s personal, it’s idiosyncratic, it’s clever and it’s excellent lo-fi rock and it’s not shy about any of it. Right from the opener, “Veronica Mars,” Blondshell is clear that she’s going to talk about what she wants and she’s going to do it well. The line “Logan’s a dick / I’m learning that’s hot” is succinct, packed with meaning and the kind of line that can redefine your relationship with a beloved series. More interesting still are the guitar screams that end the song and the fuzz it delves into.

They follow it with the much slower “Kiss City” with the expertly delivered “Kiss City / I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty” but return quite well to a more riotous energy in “Salad” and “Sepsis.” Blondshell does a great job moving between speeds from song to song. “Sober Together” slows down the tempo in order to deliver a very personal story underpinned by excellent, fundamental rock.

Blondshell finds a lot of ways to stick with you after a listen. Snippets of the music or the lyrics surface without warning during your day and they’re welcome every time.

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PinkPantheress – Heaven knows

13 Nov

Sometimes, you just cannot force a square peg into a round hole. This could have been a bedroom pop album in the way of something like Clairo’s debut album. That would have allowed her to deliver something short and focused and something that would stay more tightly defined within the sound that she got traction with. Heaven knows clearly has larger pop ambitions and while that might very well be in her future, the result right now is an album with plenty of strong moments, but not enough interesting music to carry the full project.

This comes up particularly strongly in the songs with features. You can see how these were designed for crossover appeal. However, the Central Cee verse just drags down a song with clever moments, but one that was already struggling to hold up its own weight. Similarly, I felt that the Ice Spice feature, while a cultural moment for both of them, is not one of her best.

PinkPantheress has moments, especially in songs like “Feelings”, with very compelling sounds and she’s still way too exciting to write off, but this album isn’t the breakout she wanted it to be.

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Amaarae – Fountain Baby

30 Oct

Amaarae does a lot of things with Fountain Baby. Some of it is great, some of it less so but the variety is tremendous. The best part of it is the horniness. “Sociopathic Dance Queen” has it in spades and is excellent for it and the same is true for “Co-Star.” This is also just clever music. The layers in “Disguise” are greatly compelling. There are some misses here, like the punk of “Sex, Violence, Suicide” but there’s a lot of things that work well and a lot of good music and you’re sure to find plenty to groove to.

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Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

23 Oct

“Shit Talk” is a magnificent song. A single song can absolutely make an album and “Shit Talk” is Sufjan’s best song yet. Crafting a song delicate and intricate enough to carry the emotion running through the song is virtuostic. The song ripples through and around the central contradiction fluidly as the line “I will always love you / but I cannot look at you” melds into the chorus of “I will always love you” and as “No more fighting” morphs to “Hold me closely / hold me tightly, lest I fall” morphs to “I don’t wanna fight at all.” It’s a song more charged by the unfortunate circumstances of Sufjan’s recent life, but would be a masterpiece no matter the context.

The rest of the album doesn’t quite live up to this standard. It opens with “Goodbye Evergreen” and “A Running Start,” both of which are reasonably tuneful but less interesting than I would like and then it ends with “There’s A World” which is again a solid melody but too Simon & Garfunkel for a Sufjan album. I do quite like “Genuflecting Ghost” and “My Red Little Fox” though and “Everything That Rises” is good folk-rock by way of Radiohead.

There is some inconsistency but Javelin ranges from good to some of the best music you will hear this year and you can’t miss that.

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Drake – For All The Dogs

11 Oct

I actually really like this album. In many ways, this is a low for Drake. His strength has never been his albums. He’s a man of moments, not of album-sized statements. This is the first time that there hasn’t even been a single to attach to. However, this is the easiest of his albums to just listen to. He’s had higher highs in all of his other albums but he has also had lower lows.

Honestly, I approach this album as background music. This is the rap equivalent of smooth jazz to me. Even the provocations that he puts in here – the shots at Rihanna, at Esparanza Spalding, the J. Cole feature – don’t really register as something worth thinking about. This is now all such well-trod ground. His talk about women is all stuff we’ve heard from him before. The 21 Savage feature is the same 21 Savage sound we’ve heard before. The Bad Bunny one is the same.

There are a couple of things that I do want to highlight. I really like “7969 Santa.” The production is so open and the song has so much space in it and the “I Don’t Like” sample is quite good. I also want to shout out the chorus of “Rich Baby Daddy” which finally brought out a little energy in Drake.

However, these are mostly just far too many songs that provide really easy-to-find grooves. One of the defenses of bloat is that you can build your own 10-track playlist from the raw materials it provides you, but honestly if I do that with Drake, none of these songs will make it. I’m never going to play this album or any track from it again. This is the least interesting Drake has ever been and somehow the most listenable album he’s ever made.

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Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

4 Oct

Olivia Rodrigo is very young and there’s nothing that’ll make you feel old quicker than a young popstar. Much of the best music is about bad decisions. “bad idea right?” manages to fall on the right side of making it sound fun. Even better is the soft vocalizing going into grunge. She moves into punk rock with this album and it suits her well. The rock is particularly good in the highlight of the album “ballad of a homeschooled girl.” She hits the chorus perfectly and the stripped-down storytelling is excellent. This is great lo-fi rock and shows her to her best.

“get him back” leans even harder into the mistakes of youth and ends up unconvincing. The rock is fun and the double meaning is cute, but there could have been a fun tension between the two halves of the song and instead it’s just cliche. This tendency towards easy-to-consume narratives regularly brings the album down. “all-american bitch” gestures to Didion (even if the essay has something very different to say), but there’s an honesty in Didion that you don’t see here. SOUR was a sharper, more pointed album and one that had a central motivation that gave Rodrigo a way to be honest. GUTS misses that and so leans hard on tropes instead.

I do really like the move to rock and to punk though. The ballads here like “teenage dream” and “making the bed” do nothing for me, but when she rocks out, she has fun and energy and it’s a great look for her. She’s big enough now to be able to take some risks as she fully defines herself and this was one that paid off magnificently.

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