100 Songs I Liked In 2023

 

As always, my official end of the year lists will start on December 29th with my 20 favorite albums of 2023.  But there's so much great music out there that my album post could never cover all of the things I enjoyed over the past 12 months.  So this list is an additional rundown, one that highlights songs from albums that won't be appearing on the top 20 in a few days.  I'm including songs from my five honorable mention albums, so if you see something on here from an album you love, who knows, maybe that album is ranked somewhere between 21 and 25 for me.  And this year I'm running so late that I actually haven't finalized my top 20, so there could be a song from an album that sneaks into that list at the last minute.  I've been going with 100 songs for this list for that past few years, but this time I really had to stretch and find some tracks to stretch to those last few slots.  Hopefully you enjoy these picks and find some new music to get into!

My 50 Favorite Albums of the Decade: 2010-2019

Part of the joy of being one man with a blog and not an important publication is that I don't feel any pressure to make an albums list that contextualizes the decade.  Nobody's reading this, so I don't need to fit anything in because it's "important" or "groundbreaking."  No, this list is only concerned with what "slaps" and "goes hard."  The real criteria was slightly more complicated, but only slightly.  In choosing my favorite albums of the decade, I thought about the records that meant the most to me at the time they came out, but often an album can seem great in the year of its release and then you never return to it.  So I also made sure to give credit to the albums that I returned to most often and the ones that still held up when I did my relistening throughout this year in preparation for this list.

They say that the music somebody listens to in their adolescence is the era that resonates the most with them and for me that's true, because if I had to choose, I'd probably say I enjoyed the music of the 2000s more than I enjoyed what the 2010s had to offer.  But that's not to say I didn't think this was a good music decade.  You could stretch the list you're about to read out to 100 picks and it would still include albums I love.  The early part of the decade saw the bombast of the 2000s give way to sleeker, more electronic based sounds, which led many writers to declare that rock music was dead. But really, it was just that great rock music was coming from different places.  Particularly in the last half of the 2010s, there was a boom of women making excellent DIY, punk, and music indebted to 90s alt-rock.  Meanwhile, as rap became the dominant force in our culture, and pop continued to be embraced more as a genre worthy of serious consideration, both scenes gave us terrific examples of the form.  Music was thriving all around, and it's ultimately a good thing that the wealth is being spread and not coming from the traditional modes of yore.

So let's celebrate all the 2010s had to offer...

The rules: In order to maximize the amount of variety on this list and ensure that certain artists don't clog it up, I've limited myself to one album per act.  If a certain artist made albums under two different projects -- like Julian Casablancas with The Strokes and The Voidz, for example -- they would both be eligible.  For my yearly lists, I usually consider EPs, but for this decade list I didn't really include EPs into consideration.  There is one exception, but that EP feels so massive and made such a splash that it's basically an album.  And in this day and age, a mixtape is the same thing as an album so naturally those are included.  Other than that, the window of eligibility includes anything released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2018

How do you sum up 2018 when it comes to music?  You can't, so I'll give a list of just a few of the phases of music discourse from this year: Kanye West produced five albums in five weeks, Drake and Pusha T had a beef in which a secret child was revealed, Beyonce and Jay-Z released a surprise album that everyone forgot about three days later, Eminem had a psychotic break in a Youtube video, Travis Scott rapped "She thought it was the ocean, it's just a pool," critics tried to convince us that The 1975 are good.

So yeah...it was a wild year.  Let's just get to the list.

The rules: Everything is the same as usual.  The window of eligibility for this list is anything released between January 1, 2018 and now.  This list can include albums, mixtapes, EPs, and anything in between.  I'm praying that nothing substantial comes out in the twilight hours of the year.  You never know with surprise releases these days...

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2015

2015 felt like a more enjoyable year for music than 2014.  There's always good stuff to find in any year, but there was more of it this year and it was better.  I could stretch my list out to 40 albums and it would still only consist of records I liked quite a bit.

This year also had more albums that seemed to grab the entire internet at large.  Of course, the one that towered above the rest was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, which is currently running laps around everyone else on end of the year lists.  But there was also stuff like Sufjan Stevens, Jamie xx, Tame Impala, Deafheaven, and Father John Misty.  There was even a jazz album that the big blogs loved! (I haven't had the time to sit down with Kamasi Washington's triple album The Epic in full, but the bits I've heard of it certainly make the praise seem warranted.)

My top 20 only represents a fraction of the diversity of greatness we saw in 2015, but I'm still satisfied with how it turned out.  There's rap, punk, R&B, pop, old favorites, exciting newcomers, and an out-of-left field choice or two.

The rules: Due to the constant changing of the way music gets released, anything can be an album for the sake of this list.  You especially have to play fast and loose given the fact that many rap mixtapes function as albums anyway.  So LPs, mixtapes, 40-minute songs, EPs if they're good enough -- they're all albums to me!  If something got released in another country in a previous year, but got an American release this year, it works on a case-by-case basis (although there are no examples of that this year).  Otherwise, the eligibility window is that the album has to have been released between January 1, 2015 and today.  That means that D'Angelo's Black Messiah, which came out at the very end of 2014 but has appeared on many publications' lists this year, will not show up here.  (Plus it was my number 5 last year, since I actually wait until the end of the year to finalize my lists.)  So now with that bit of business out of the way, on to the actual list...

Thank Your Lucky Stars: Beach House's 2nd album in 2 months

Beach House seem like a slow and methodical band.  Each of their first four albums came out two years between one another, and it's easy to imagine them using that entire timespan to carefully craft their precise, insular tunes.  That's why it was so shocking a month ago when the band announced via Twitter that they were going to be releasing a new album only two months after the release of their excellent Depression Cherry.  Even as the release date inched closer on the calendar, Thank Your Lucky Stars still felt unreal.  Could it be?  Did they really have another set of new songs that they were ready to unleash on the world?

Well, Thank Your Lucky Stars is here and feels nothing like a toss-off either.  These tracks are just as tight and meticulously constructed as the ones on Depression Cherry, unlocking themselves slowly over the course of many exploratory listens.  In a way, the record feels like vintage Beach House, if such a thing exists.  When discussing the duo back in their early days, I often described their music as "Halloween meets Valentine's Day."  Over the years, they slowly scraped off the Halloween half until all that remained was huge, gauzy dream pop.  Thank Your Lucky Stars makes an effort to bring the balance back, and it's a refreshing return.  When's the last time we heard something like the spooky, vaguely sinister "She's So Lovely," or the croaking synth lead of "Common Girl"?  In recalling those older sounds, the band really emphasizes just how far they had progressed away from it, putting to bed those notions that they've been making the same album over and over.  Beach House finds a way to carve out distinct plots in a single sonic space, and this album is no different.

In the tweets that announced Thank Your Lucky Stars, the band wrote, "We are very excited, it's an album being released the way we want.  It's not a companion to Depression Cherry or a surprise or b-sides."  It's true too, this album is not an afterthought or a series of songs that weren't good enough to make it on an album with the typical promotional cycle.  In fact, the songs on Thank Your Lucky Stars don't sound like they were made in the same sessions, or even the same head space, as Depression Cherry.  Still, it's hard not to think of the ways these two records contrast and complement each other.  The songs on Depression Cherry feel more glossy and blown-out, they're constructed to be so large you can't wrap your arms around them to hold them down.  This album is made up of tracks that feel more tangible -- it's the darker, dustier cousin of what we heard a few months ago.  Songs like "One Thing" or "Elegy to the Void" may crack open in their second halves, but it's nothing like the swirl of a "PPP."  That doesn't mean this record is less enjoyable, it just holds its pleasures closer to its chest.

Some critics have been acting like this album is ruining the band's mystique, that coming so shortly after Depression Cherry diminishes it in some way.  But honestly, it makes this album even more of an achievement, in that it shows off Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally's ability to create two distinct, but equally compelling records without needing to come up for air or reset themselves.  I've heard people referring to this as "minor Beach House."  But I've also heard Thank Your Lucky Stars itself, and it's another set of beautiful, emotionally overwhelming songs.  There's nothing minor about it.

"Depression Cherry" reveals subtle new shades in Beach House's sonic palette

Music enthusiasts get bored very easily.  Concoct a sound that excites and engages people the first time around, and you just might find yourself getting bored and disappointed reactions if you try the same thing a few years later.  It's a miracle, then, that Beach House has been able to a critical darling for so long, given their firm stance on not changing their sound.  They entered the world in 2006 with a specific musical sensibility on their debut album, and on the three albums they released afterward -- each two years after the previous one -- they expanded their sonic range incrementally with every new offering.  Tiny as they may have been, those additions were just enough to keep them on the right side of the critical tide, and though there has been some grumbling in recent years about their signature sound, most listeners haven't tired of it.

More so than ever before, people are going to tell you that their latest album Depression Cherry is the point where Beach House has finally become stale, that they haven't changed things up enough this time around.  This review is here to tell you that those people are wrong.  It's an understandable viewpoint, however -- the band's trajectory has been marked by a slow swelling of their sound, but Depression Cherry pares things back from the widescreen dream pop of the veritable Bloom.  Though they may have scaled down, the album doesn't feel like a step backward.  A new, eerie sci-fi tinge runs through songs like "Beyond Love," which centers around a crystalline guitar line that could puncture granite.  It's clear that the duo is cognizant of these influences in "Space Song," a track whose floaty weightlessness sounds like the score to walking on the surface of the moon for the first time.

And how could anybody accuse an album that contains "Sparks" of not being exciting enough?  There's a reason why it was chosen as the first single; it feels as if it's charging out of your speakers from the first note.  My Bloody Valentine has always been a band that Beach House has made wide circles around, but they've never targeted them in the way that "Sparks," with its squealing guitar line and smeared synths, does.  It's a dazzling, interesting new direction for them to take.

As ever, lead singer Victoria Legrand's voice is the force that pulls you into these songs.  After all these years, her vocals still have that ineffable ability to lull you into a trance.  She's less likely to let out a full-mouthed howl than she was on previous albums; this time around her voice has a soft, pillowy effect, resting deep within the Yamaha wash.  Legrand's showcase is without a doubt album-centerpiece "PPP," a towering beauty of a track where she alternates between bewitching spoken word verses and a haunting sway in the chorus.  She has a way of drilling her melodies into your head, until that soft coo is rattling around in the deepest recesses of your brain.  In contrast, the actual words she sings have a slightly impenetrable quality to them.  But that doesn't make them off-putting, it just adds to the aura and mystique of these songs about the inscrutable nature of love and desire.

The songs on Depression Cherry are a little more subtle than Beach House has been in their last few offerings.  Again, it's not hard to see why many are confusing it as a letdown, but the true pleasures of this record hide in the pockets and corners of songs.  Tracks build quietly, melodies and hooks sneak around just below the surface, only becoming crystal clear after a dozen listens.  You may have to walk a longer way to reach the rewards of this album, but once you get there, it will welcome you with open arms.