Best of January 2023
or: I listened to 36 albums this month and all I got was this lousy substack piece
Oh, hey! How’s it going? Back so soon? I know, I’m surprised too.
Wanted to thank everyone for the overwhelming support on my big comeback piece - I got so many kind messages and so much great feedback. I appreciate you all so much.
This is far from my day job, and the fact that so many people… care about what I have to say about music is exciting and fulfilling.
Also, not to be THAT person, but we’re almost at 100 subscribers! If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do, and tell your friends to do the same. More than 100 people receiving my silly little words in their inbox would be so funny. There’s a button right there. Just press it! Or trick someone else into pressing it.
Okay, shameless begging out of the way. Now, an intro - as the subtitle of this piece suggests, I listened to a LOT of music this month. One of my many new years’ resolutions was to listen to 100 albums this year - I think I’m gonna make it!
Thanks to my good friend Gannon, who wrote a great blurb in my last piece, for being my music listening buddy. It’s really fun randomly texting with him during our day-to-day about the stuff we’re hearing. He’s also a hell of a writer, and you should look for him to write some cool stuff in the near future.
Last year, Gannon created a fun little rating system that he used to categorize all the music he listened to, and I’ve adopted it for this year. It’s color-coded, organized, and super aesthetically pleasing.
If you want to take a look at every single album I’ve heard this year (many of which won’t be mentioned in this or further album of the month pieces), you can check that out here. I’m gonna keep that bad boy updated, and you can listen along with me if you want.
We’re gonna talk about a few of the albums in the “great” category (no AOTY contenders yet!) and some songs in the “song of the year” category that don’t have a companion album yet.
Samia - Honey
Samia is on track to be a standout figure in this generation of female singer-songwriters. That says a lot, because there are a lot of great ones. Honey is just that good.
Her 2020 album, The Baby, is just that - her first steps. There’s some real promise on that album, like indie rock slapper Fit N Full, but there was a lack of cohesive storytelling that left me wanting a bit.
Honey delivers on that storytelling, with jarring and symbolic highs and lows. The shifts in energy from track to track perfectly represent the album’s main thread of struggling with mental health throughout a tumultuous relationship.
The energetic lows deliver much of what staple albums like “Punisher” bring to the table, and the energetic highs deliver Samia’s expertise - her lush and catchy indie-pop sound.
Samia’s voice is smooth, the instrumentals are full, the album is cohesive, and it’s all Honey.
Jadu Heart - Derealised
Dearealised is awesome. It’s catchy, riff-y, lyrically dense, and consistent throughout. I really like the way it balances its instrumentals - there’s a lot of good guitar on this album, but not so much that it overpowers its pop-y synth and classic drums.
There’s a ton of great indie sensibility on Derealised. A lot of these albums would show up on a garage album at the height of the 2000s indie sound, and that style just flat-out works for me, and for Jadu Heart.
This is one of those albums where you need to take the time to read through the lyrics on Genius, because there’s a lot of introspective gems in there that get swept away in the pop-y sound.
Derealised is worth your time, and Jadu Heart has a fun career ahead if they can keep this up.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - 12
Ryuichi Sakamoto is a legend. His debut album, 1978’s “Thousand Knives,” is an experimental masterpiece that set the tone for ambient electronic music. His work with Yellow Magic Orchestra did the same for popular techno.
(That song came out in 1979! That’s crazy!)
He composed the brilliant Revenant and Last Emperor soundtracks, as well as scoring other movies throughout his career. He is, undoubtedly, unquestionably, larger than life.
But, even legends must grapple with their inevitable end.
Sakamoto is, thankfully, still with us. After surviving throat cancer in the mid-2010s, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2021. 12 was written in the wake of that second diagnosis. Sakamoto wrestles with his own mortality.
Sakamoto tells a similar story to Bowie’s “Blackstar” without having to utter a single word. It is tragic, beautiful, and peaceful.
It’s a hard listen, knowing the context, but is a look into a man’s brain near the end of his life that is rarely presented. 12 is art, in its highest and most challenging form.
Lil Yachty - Let’s Start Here.
Sorry to shift tone so suddenly, but I’m flat-out losing my shit over this Lil Yachty album. WHAT?????
The last song Yachty released before this… psychedelic rock-funk album was the objectively cursed Tiktok earworm Poland.
Why would he take the wock to Poland? How did he get it past TSA? Why did it get a Lyrical Lemonade video? Whatever, not the time.
Let’s Start Here. is, as I mentioned, a psychedelic rock-funk album. Let’s run through some of the musicians credited on this one. Take a deep breath -
Yachty himself, former Caroline Polachek collaborator Jacob Portrait, Teezo Touchdown, electronic duo Magdalena Bay, Fousheé, ALEX G (come on, man), Mac Demarco, Ant Clemons, MGMT songwriter Benjamin Goldwasser, future inmate Torey Lanez, Daniel Caesar, and elite jazz violinist Joe Kennedy, Jr.
The things that set this album back from being near-perfect are Yachty’s overreliance on autotune (it suits him in a hip-hop setting, but somewhat clashes at certain points on this album), and the overreliance on source material like Pink Floyd.
Intro track the BLACK seminole. is fantastic, but it’s a dead ringer for some of Floyd’s best. That’s not a bad thing, because he does it well, but it isn’t necessarily to the album’s benefit on my rankings, either. I’m a tough critic.
I loved this album, if not for its pure shock value alone. I knew nothing about this album going in, and I was so not looking forward to listening to another hour-long bloated trap album (shoutout Trippie Redd’s MANSION MUSIK).
Lil Yachty pleasantly surprised me, and I hope he continues to genre-hop and make cool stuff. Good on you, man. Enjoy some wock in a European country.
Biig Piig - Bubblegum
Bubblegum wears a lot of hats, and wears them well - the above PinkPantheress-esque track is followed immediately by the house-influenced Kerosene, which is one of my favorite songs so far this year.
Bubblegum has soft, dreamy tracks like Ghosting, upbeat indie pop songs like In the Dark, and smooth R&B tracks like Only One. Picking Up is really sonically individualistic and cool.
Bubblegum’s main detriment is that it’s only seven songs long.
Usually I don’t like albums that hop from genre to genre, but Bubblegum has enough of a common thread that I don’t really mind it in this case.
This is great stuff, especially if you like smooth female vocalists like the aforementioned PinkPantheress, Arlo Parks, or any of their R&B contemporaries.
Kascha - Gay and Thank You
What a great Bandcamp-only folk-punk album. I’m gonna pull the curtain back on this one - I am not constantly on the hunt for Bandcamp gems. This one comes to me via Jeff Rosenstock’s Twitter account. Sorry guys, I know that was a huge letdown. I’ll do better next time.
I really dig the stripped-down sound on Gay and Thank You, and there’s something about acoustic guitar, a drum machine, and a desert motif that just keeps me coming back.
There’s an inherent charm that comes with in-room recordings like these, and there’s also a really great sense of artistic freedom here. Kascha can say whatever she wants, and she chooses to let us know that she’s struggling, but trying to heal.
I got a nostalgic smile listening to songs like This Summer, where Kascha talks about how the pavement is too hot for her dog to go on a walk. I miss the desert sometimes.
AJJ - Disposable Everything (Single)
I am so, so, SO excited for the new AJJ album. I heard Disposable Everything live a few months back when AJJ was playing some unreleased songs while on tour, and it’s been stuck in the back of my brain since then.
2020’s Good Luck Everybody, aka the pre-pandemic clairvoyant album of the century, gives a very clear, catchy and concise look at American politics from the left.
Disposable Everything, along with its companion single Dissonance and 2022’s The Baby Panda, paint a bleak picture using cynicism partnered with AJJ’s well-developed acoustic pop sound.
I am really, really looking forward to this album. I am a massive fan of AJJ, and have been for almost a decade now. Expect Disposable Everything (out May 26th!) to have a spot on my albums of the year.
boygenius - $20 (Single)
You didn’t think you were gonna get out of this without me talking about boygenius, did you? Do you even know me like that?
$20 busts out a bit of a harder sound that I always think brings the best out of Phoebe, Julien and Lucy. Some of my favorite Phoebe tracks come by way of Better Oblivion Community Center, and Julien’s voice just fits like a glove with an electric guitar riff.
Emily I’m Sorry and True Blue are really promising as well. We’re getting another really good one this time around. I am very, very psyched for March 31. the record is also gonna slide into my albums of the year list.
Between AJJ, boygenius, three JPEGMAFIA projects, 100 gecs, Arlo Parks, and a potential Death Grips album, there’s really not a lot of spots left - this is gonna be a great year for music.
Alright, that’s enough of that. Thanks for reading, seriously. Maybe send this to your cool, taste-making music friends, and see if they’d like it.
I dunno. Like I said, this isn’t my day job, so I won’t kill over and die, but I’d like to expand this a little bit. Podcasts? Tiktoks? Youtube videos? I dunno. If you have thoughts, let me know.
Also, here’s a playlist. Love you, bye!
honey is sooooo good samia is a genius