Year in Review 2023
Welp, the year is over, and even though everyone’s away from campus, we here at Aural Wes have decided to resurrect the tradition of writing about our 5 favorite albums from the past 12 months! As long as your definition of “tradition” is “something we did once 2 years ago and didn’t get around to last year”. Anyways. Enjoy!
(P.S. Mark your calendars for next year when we’ll be releasing Elijah Davis’ long-awaited, never-before-seen 2022 album reviews!)
Use the links below to navigate to each person’s rankings and album reviews. Or just read them all in order if you’re cool like that. :)
Alexandra Taylor
2023 has been the year that the 2020s found their definitive aesthetics and interests. Beginning with a globally traumatic event, the 2020s did not exactly “recover” per se, but have developed a unique perspective from their contradictions. Luckily for me, the global mood of music in 2023 has mirrored my undying romanticism disguised under a blanket of ennui. While curating this list, I realized that these albums all have an appeal to escapism, which fits very well in a year where media seemed to be inflicted with an increasing interest in multiverses. Overall, I am excited to report that three songs in my top 5 listening were from this year (this is in contrast to 2022 where only one song from that year even cracked my top 10)!
Lil Yachty — Let’s Start Here.
The first new album that I listened to in 2023 was Lil Yachty’s Let’s Start Here., which kicked off my enthusiasm for a fantastic new year of music. The opening track, “the BLACK seminole.”, is a psychedelic masterpiece, and Yachty’s languid vocals unite the album through its exploration of psychedelia, funk, and soul. Let’s Start Here. reminds me of perhaps my favorite album, Childish Gambino’s “Awaken, My Love!”, but the key difference is in Lil Yachty’s experimentality, like in the disturbing intro to “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!”. This album creates its own unique soundscape which is exciting, disquieting, and transforming.
Yameii Online — Candy
The next album that I felt connected to from 2023 was Yameii Online’s Candy. The album inspired in me a great sense of escapism, as it is fun to imagine oneself in Yameii’s Oseanworld, beefing with her haters (Lil Hard Drive has been awfully quiet since…). Ultimately, the album is just really fun to listen to. Songs like “yummy dummy *°:⋆ₓₒ╰(◡‿◡✿╰)” and “short + sweet.。oo” perfectly cater to my musical sweet tooth, but there is a contrasting bite to songs like “loading*:..。(◠_◠)” and “venus saturn +”. I would also be betraying myself if I did not mention the superflat obscenity of its album cover. It’s cute, overwhelming, and utterly indulgent in a way that scratches my brain perfectly. This album defined my spring and summer and I recommend it to anyone who was considered “odd” in middle school.
Lana Del Rey — Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd was a fantastic comeback for Lana Del Rey after my previous disappointment with the albums she released after Norman Fucking Rockwell! Lana’s vocals are well utilized and complimented by the wilting, flush accompaniment. While overall gloomy, the album also shines in its playfulness, highlighted in “Let The Light In (feat. Father John Misty)”. The album shows great maturity from Lana, who has seemed to let go of her desire for the “bad boys” of Born to Die and Ultraviolence and the “man child” of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, instead reflecting on her family in “The Grants” and asking questions about marriage in “Sweet”. As a result, even through the wistfulness of Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, there is a calming hopefulness. Overall, the album provides a refreshing insight into hopes and dreams in an increasingly isolated world.
Mitski — The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
Mitski’s The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We perfectly represents the feeling of this year’s fall. The instrumentation of the album was noticeably different from Mitski’s previous albums with flush accents of acoustic guitars, strings, and folky elements permeating the album. Songs like “I Don’t Like My Mind” capture the raw intensity of emotion that bubbled up at the end of this year. “When Memories Snow” is cinematic and bold, yet cohesive with the rest of the album. Every song uniquely showcases a deep emotional journey for Mitski and the listener is taken along to feel the beauty within an unsettled mind. And I can not discuss the album without mentioning the colossus of a song that “My Love Mine All Mine” is. At just two minutes and eighteen seconds, the song packs an undeniable impact. The lyricism is so simple, yet so rich, and it’s paired with a gentle melody which captured the ears and hearts of millions. Everything about the song is perfect, and in my opinion, was the best song of the year.
Laufey — Bewitched
Famously heralded as an artist “with no bad songs”, Laufey certainly kept up her reputation on Bewitched. Songs straddle the line between the heartbreak of “Second Best” and “Promise” and the hopeful pining of “Must Be Love” and “From the Start”. The album seamlessly blends elements of jazz, bossa nova, and contemporary classical while still maintaining a wide appeal. The result is an enchanting soundscape that feels like a fairytale. This album is timeless and is going to be a staple in my musical collection for years to come.
A special shoutout to some fantastic EPs from this year: NewJeans’ Get Up, Theodora and Jeez Sauve’s Lili Aux Paradis Artificiels, and FiFi Zhang’s So Beautiful So Lonely.
Bennett Gottesman
It’s been a weird year for me musically. Last year I was caught up on new music and it was hard to pick favorites because there were just so many albums for me to choose from. This year it’s been the opposite. I don’t mean that there’s been nothing good or memorable—I just haven’t been as motivated to follow it. I’ve decided to write in a sort of meandering fashion, not going in order of release or preference—my listening this year was much the same. My selections are not supposed to be based on any metric of objective quality or importance, though I do think these five albums are all extremely well made. I listened to so much wonderful music this year that I promptly forgot, so here, I’ve chosen the music that’s continued to occur to me.
JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown — SCARING THE HOES
If any of these albums make sense together, it’s SCARING THE HOES and GUTS. These projects have energy. This is the music that’s kept me, as I like to say, “alive, awake, alert, and enthusiastic”. I spent a lot of time thinking about which of these albums I prefer. Originally, my pick was SCARING THE HOES but I ultimately ended up changing my mind. SCARING THE HOES may be “better music”—there’s nothing on GUTS that blows my mind in the way “Kingdom Hearts Key” does, for example. Really, all of the production on SCARING THE HOES is fantastic in a way I find to be unparalleled this year. Some of the samples on the album are just plain odd in the best way possible. The obvious example here is “Garbage Pale Kids” which samples an old advertisement and sounds unlike anything I can think of. I mentioned energy earlier, an attribute exemplified in the title track. I have used that song to get myself hyped up more times than I care to admit. SCARING THE HOES is really representative of the leaps experimental hip hop has made as a genre in the internet age. It’s incredibly innovative but still approachable.
Olivia Rodrigo — GUTS
Despite all of this, I now prefer GUTS. I listen to it more, and it has brought me more of what I seek from these two projects: a good time. The other reason I prefer GUTS to SCARING THE HOES is that it just makes me feel more. Part of why I love GUTS is the way it both has and hasn’t matured past the break up jams found on its predecessor, SOUR. It’s still a break up album with the same blend of bangers and ballads, but the bangers are more clever now and the ballads say more. Olivia Rodrigo’s vocals feel more genuine than ever. My personal favorite track, “pretty isn’t pretty”, a song about the uglier sides of the quest for prettiness, is written with such obvious care. SCARING THE HOES has plenty of fantastic lyricism, but it hasn’t been able to compete with GUTS for me. Its lyrics are clever, but never emotionally affecting, and ultimately a bit forgettable. When I listen to GUTS I genuinely care about what’s being said. I laugh at the jokes, get angry at Olivia’s asshole ex, and bemoan her lost loves along with her.
Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter — SAVED!
However, both of these albums pale in comparison to SAVED!, which is probably most thematically similar to GUTS. Both albums are about trying to move on and the various feelings and failings associated, but SAVED! takes a much more serious perspective. The broader context of the album is impossible to ignore—Kristin Hayter’s last album, SINNER GET READY, is about an extremely abusive relationship she was trapped in. When I listened to the opening track on SAVED!, “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN”, for the first time, I cried. Hearing Hayter sing that she’s “getting out while [she] can”, knowing that she really did, makes for an intense listening experience.
Musically, the album is very odd. It’s made to sound like an old folk music archive and includes several old Christian folk songs. I’m not Christian, but I found myself listening to these cuts the most. They’re quick and easy, something rare to find from Hayter, and they’re a great opportunity to hear her truly stunning vocal work without the intense emotions that are inescapable in most of her work. The original songs are as well written as I’ve come to expect from Hayter with intentionally lo-fi production. The album is folksy but still contains unique and quite experimental elements. For example, the closing track is interestingly ornamented with Hayter speaking in tongues quite loudly. Several cuts also include strange and terrifying tape manipulations on several songs that, while a bit random, never feel like a gimmick.
Lonnie Holley — Oh Me Oh My
Next, then, is Oh Me Oh My, the only album on this list that measures up to SAVED! in sheer weirdness. More than anything else released this year, Oh Me Oh My feels like a mystery. It holds a great deal of depth in its spoken word lyrics and honestly stunning instrumentals. I don’t think I’m close to finding all it has to offer. Regardless, this album—its songs, its cover art, the whole idea of it—just won’t stay out of my head. Lonnie Holley’s vocals aren’t anywhere near pretty, and they’re not ugly in a cool way like 60s Bob Dylan or something. I can really only defend them by noting how oddly compelling they are. I mentioned before that Olivia Rodrigo sounds more genuine than ever this year, but Holley’s vocals take this to an extreme. It’s like a blend of Daniel Johnston and Lead Belly but with some other element that I can’t describe. The real triumph of Oh Me Oh My is how immersive it is. I played it recently while driving to a dinner party at my girlfriend’s house. I was still watching the road of course, but beyond that, I felt outside of myself. I was in Holley’s world, not my own. I was late for dinner because I didn’t want to miss the last few minutes of the album even though I had already arrived. While I can’t in good faith say I prefer it to SAVED! and When we were that what wept for the sea, given how little I’ve listened to it, I do think that this is the album that will stick with me the longest out of everything on this list.
Colin Stetson — When we were that what wept for the sea
And finally, there’s When we were that what wept for the sea. I’ll be brief on it here because I covered it earlier this year. It and Oh Me Oh My are the only albums on my list from artists I hadn’t heard before this year. Between the two, I listened to When we were that what wept for the sea much more. It was my go to crying album for much of what was an extremely odd year for me. However, I stopped listening to it pretty soon after fall semester began. Maybe I’ve just been crying less. That drop off is what’s keeping it from the number one spot for me.
So that’s it. It’s been an odd year of music and life. The changing year never really means much to me. January 1st is only one day after December ends—it’s not such a big leap after all. Music isn’t really bound by the year it’s released in the way end of year lists tend to imply. Regardless, these five albums that share a number in their release date have each defined moments of my life over the past 12 months. They’re all albums that risk something and lack any sense of trepidation towards being full expressions of honest emotion. They’re the projects that excited me this year and, dear reader, they deserve your attention.
Nathan Hausspiegel
Thinking about my favorite albums from this year, some questions come to mind: How do you decide what your album of the year is? Is it the one you feel is the best? Or the one you listened to the most? Or the one that made you the happiest? Or the one you like the most songs from? Or the most thematically consistent project as a whole?
In lieu of any answers, here are my albums of the year. Blease enjoy.
Oneohtrix Point Never — Again
I have a lot of thoughts on this project. I think I can start by saying that if you’re open-minded and willing to have a fully engrossing experience, then get your best pair of headphones, turn them up one or two notches past where you normally would, put Again on, and lie down for an hour.
Oneohtrix Point Never (real name Daniel Lopatin) is an electronic musician who’s taken on a lot of different guises throughout the years. He’s had a cult following as an artist in his own right for a while now (and he’s performed at Wes!), but he’s also been involved with a lot of high-profile names in the past decade: he’s scored films by the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems and Good Time), executive produced full albums for The Weeknd and Soccer Mommy, and has also worked with Alex G, Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, Rosalía, and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins (to name a few). All that to say: he can hang with the big boys.
In light of these recent additions to Lopatin’s résumé, something that stuns me about Again is how unabashedly weird it is. OPN is definitely not known for making very normal music, but it’s clear from the list of names above that he’s been working on stuff that appeals to wider audiences lately. His last album before this one, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, made it seem like he was coming to terms with his brush with stardom, being more pop-oriented, vocal-driven, and reliant on traditional song structures than his previous work (The Weeknd was the executive producer). Again, on the other hand, is pretty much entirely through-composed, with very few choruses, refrains, or repeating sections, and has just a couple of vocal performances. (And I like his stuff without vocals more in general, so I don’t mind.) Someone learning about OPN from his production on The Weeknd’s Dawn FM and then checking out Magic might not find it too big of a jump, but I bet anyone going from any of the Soccer Mommy tracks to something like “World Outside” or “The Body Trail” off of Again would feel like they got punched in the stomach. This stylistic swerve is a supreme statement of confidence from Lopatin, akin to him saying “Yes, I can make pop music, but I haven’t lost my creativity”.
The through-composed, dense, and flowing nature of Again makes me want to listen to the whole thing over and over in full as opposed to just single tracks, but I still have my favorite moments. The title track (with “Elseware” as a fantastic orchestral intro) is one of my favorite songs of the year, equal parts surreal and overwhelmingly emotional. The AI-generated vocals of “The Body Trail”, one of the coolest conceptual aspects of the album, remind me of Steve Reich’s Different Trains in the weirdest way: Reich wrote melodies that approximated snippets of human voices speaking, while the Adobe Speech Enhance program applied to OPN’s composition tries to make sensical voices out of abstract melodies, resulting in something amazingly uncanny and weirdly touching (I feel like you can hear them repeating “someone’s there, someone’s there”). The closer, “A Barely Lit Path”, is much more inspiring in tone than a lot of other last songs on OPN albums (see “Nothing’s Special”, “Last Known Image of a Song”, “Preyouandi”), ascending among rising string melodies and heavy synth arpeggios—as its music video suggests, accelerating into the unknown. After the song’s climax, the minute-long outro feels as if it recedes backwards in time through the different musical styles that OPN has inherited throughout the years, eventually landing on some sweet and simplistic 8-bit-sounding melodies that remind me of feelings of childhood innocence.
The overarching theme of Again, as the title suggests, is OPN self-reflecting and revisiting the mindset of his older self. Daniel mentioned in an Anthony Fantano interview that he’s completely forgotten some of the techniques he used to make his older music, and on Again he attempted to emulate and rediscover these techniques. You can spot a ton of direct and indirect references to earlier OPN works within Again, specifically to R Plus Seven, the album that many people consider OPN’s magnum opus: “Plastic Antique” samples “Problem Areas”, the title of “World Outside” seems to be a reference to “Inside World”, and Again was released just a day before the 10-year anniversary of R Plus Seven. Another reference that I found poignant was the use of the Roland Juno synthesizer on this album. This was an instrument that Lopatin used very liberally in his earlier work, feeling so connected to his personal version of the synth that he nicknamed it “Judy the Juno” and compared it to a long term girlfriend, and it’s the defining sound in pretty much all of OPN’s greatest ambient tracks (like anything off of Rifts). You don’t really hear the Juno in any of Lopatin’s albums released after 2011, but early on in Again’s title track, it comes back in full force. Hearing its distinctive bitcrushed, wavering sound in a modern OPN song is really heartwarming in a way that’s hard to describe—it’s kind of like seeing Daniel reconnect with an old life partner.
I’m gonna stop writing about this album now because I have a bunch of other thoughts on it that I haven’t even scratched the surface of! Ultimately, I really do love all of the music on Again, but I feel like this album would only be someone’s favorite of the year if they were intimately familiar with OPN’s entire body of work. Luckily, I’m one of those people.
Jane Remover — Census Designated
A very, very close second favorite album for me this year is Jane Remover’s Census Designated. My first time listening to this album in full occurred while a friend was driving us back to Middletown after a brakence concert, and it was a pretty fitting time and place for it. brakence’s hypochondriac, which I definitely would have put it in my top 5 of 2022 if I found out about it fast enough, turned out to be a bit of a musical crutch for me this year. Along with being loud, emotional, amazingly produced, and full of earworms that I could use to block out the world when I needed to, it also has a characteristic juvenescence to it, and I mean that in kind of a derogatory way—I think of it as a concept album about being an angsty, emotionally unstable teenager.
Everything I just said also applies to Census Designated for me, except the derogatory part (Jane is definitely better at writing lyrics lol). The album was a great thing for me to fall back on during the tail end of 2023—I have some fond memories from this past semester of waking up early on a depressingly overcast day, chugging a can of yerba mate, and playing “Fling” as loud as I could handle it in my earbuds as I walked to my 8:50. (“Fond” probably isn’t the best word for that, but whatever). I didn’t grow up listening to the noisy, shoegaze-y, slowcore-y rock that Jane takes inspiration from on this album, but it’s definitely given me more respect for those genres. It kinda makes me feel nostalgic for a childhood that I never experienced.
Speaking of childhood, as far as I’m aware, Jane is only 20. Holy shit! This is a lesson that I learned very early on as a SoundCloud-addicted teenager, but it still blows my mind that people younger than me can produce things I couldn’t dream of doing in my lifetime. It’s so hard for me to pick a favorite song on this project. The title track was an early favorite of mine, and the main vocal melody lodged itself deep into my brain this semester. I also loved “Contingency Song” as a single, in all its unsettling, ambient glory, and I’m super happy it made it onto the album. “Cage Girl / Camgirl” is a perfect ethereal album opener, “Fling” is awesome and cathartic, and “Video” is a fantastic slow burn that builds into a controlled explosion (if you listen to one song off the album, I would recommend this one).
In short, Census Designated gave me the catharsis that I needed this year. Listen to it.
JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown — SCARING THE HOES
In one sentence: SCARING THE HOES is a concept album where the concept is “what if JPEGMAFIA decided to use all of his best beats on one project?”
I don’t have much to write about SCARING THE HOES that hasn’t already been said before (that it’s a modern-day Madvillainy, that the production fits Danny Brown’s off-kilter vocal stylings really well, etc, etc.). I think that this video that shows you where most of the samples come from says more than I’ll ever be able to. Just watch that video, and take into account that Peggy apparently produced every beat from the album on a Roland SP-404, which is fucking insane. I produce sometimes, and the idea of flipping a sample from “Milkshake” by Kelis to make the beat for “Fentanyl Tester” hurts my head, let alone doing it on a single glorified drum machine without a DAW. That’s definitely one of the best songs to come out this year, and my favorite from the album.
There are so many other great moments on SCARING THE HOES, but I think I’ll let you discover them yourself if you haven’t already listened. I’m really just happy that JPEGMAFIA is at the top of his game right now. He’s a great example of an artist who’s been able to obtain success without diluting his creativity.
Mac DeMarco — One Wayne G
In some sense this is my album of the year. In another sense, it shouldn’t even be on this list. I’m compromising by putting it 4th, but I don’t think a normal review is warranted here. All I know is that I can speak about it with some authority: I listened to the whole thing, front to back, in two days after it came out, which wasn’t easy given that it’s nine and a half hours long and has 199 songs. (That’s how it got its name, by the way — Wayne G is a reference to Wayne Gretzky, who played hockey with the number 99, so One Wayne G = 1 + 99 = 199. Anyway.)
Can I be honest with you? Remember a little while back, just a few sentences ago, when I said that listening to the whole album wasn’t easy? I totally lied. It was easy. It might have been the easiest thing I’ve done all year.
Before 2023 I hadn’t listened to Mac’s stuff much at all, but at the beginning of this year I became obsessed with Five Easy Hot Dogs, the first project he dropped this year, and I often found myself listening to it on loop as I walked around Auckland (I was studying abroad in New Zealand). The extremely high production quality, the organic feeling of the tracks, and the fact that none of the songs had vocals made it excellent background music for feeling at peace while familiarizing myself with an unknown place in the world. I have very fond memories from a solo day trip I took to some volcanic peaks outside the city center, during which I just listened to Mac’s entire catalog on shuffle.
Pictured: Where I went that day (Devonport, Auckland, NZ). Pairs nicely with “Crescent City” from Five Easy Hot Dogs.
It was in the middle of this obsession that One Wayne G happened to drop, and I literally took it as a gift from God, because it’s basically a comprehensive catalog of Mac’s (mostly instrumental) solo work from the past 5 years, in largely the same style as Five Easy Hot Dogs. I was vibing for the rest of that semester, and Mac immediately shot up to my #1 most listened to artist of all time on Spotify.
Because all the tracks are just named after the dates they were recorded on (except for the ones with lyrics, which have helpful titles), there’s an anonymity to One Wayne G that I really adore. It might be frustrating to some that, if you’re listening to the album and you really love a certain song, there’s not a good way to remember which specific one that was other than maybe adding it to a playlist. Add that to the fact that most of them don’t have lyrics, and you’re swirling in a vortex of anonymous bright blue for most of the album’s runtime. For me, though, it barely matters—pretty much every track is really enjoyable and excellently produced, so you’ll be having a good time no matter what you’re listening to. It essentially became my personal version of a “lo-fi beats to chill / study to” playlist for most of this year, and I’ve talked to others who treated it the same way, just shuffling it when they needed to relax or work.
After you’ve listened to it in order, the act of shuffling the album becomes sort of a way to travel leisurely through this new world that you’ve come to know. I would tell you my favorite tracks, but I literally don’t know the names of any of them from memory (except for “20200820 Turn My TV On”, my favorite track with lyrics), so hearing one that I remember liking in the past gives me the exact same feeling as running into a good friend while I’m going about my day. Maybe I’m granting too much artistic merit to One Wayne G by saying stuff like this—after all, it really is just a massive dump of old music from Mac—but who cares if there’s a disparity between an artist’s intentions for a body of work and how you personally receive it? One Wayne G has been there for the most genuinely peaceful moments I’ve experienced in 2023, and I’m grateful for that.
Slauson Malone 1 — EXCELSIOR
EXCELSIOR is a very puzzling album—but I love puzzles! Track titles reference one another, several musical motifs recur throughout the album, and the lyrics meander in a very stream-of-consciousness way, at times focusing on sexuality, radiation and nuclear fission, space exploration, medieval knighthood, and religious imagery. What’s not to love???
I didn’t really like the first couple projects that Slauson Malone 1 (real name Jasper Marsalis) released, despite their critical acclaim, and I skipped out on his performance at Wes a couple of years ago because of that. EXCELSIOR, though, is a noted departure in sound from him, much more upfront and structured than his previous work. It’s still just as experimental, but all the lo-fi, glitchy weirdness is grounded by hi-fi guitar melodies, driving drum beats, and refreshingly honest vocal performances. Getting to meet him in this new context was really enjoyable, and I might have to go back to the older stuff to see what I missed. (And now I regret not seeing him perform!)
Despite being “more structured”, EXCELSIOR can still be hard to wrap your head around—maybe that’s why I listened to it so much. As he mentioned in an interview, Jasper originally structured the album around two 15-minute long songs, and that’s definitely apparent while listening to it. Every song seems to melt and ooze into everything around it, and if you’re not looking at where the tracks start and stop, it might be hard to tell. The start of the album is abstract and trembling, seeming to barely hold itself together until it reaches a climax in the form of the glitchy drums and odd time signatures of “New Joy” (maybe my favorite song of the year), and THAT song’s melody is immediately recapitulated in “Arms, Armor”. The whole album is laid out this way, with songs bordering mutated versions of themselves, and sometimes containing their own (“Half-Life”).
Sometimes this seamless flow gets broken a bit. One notable moment on the project is “I Hear A New World”, a song that I didn’t really appreciate at first (with Jasper himself being able to see the humor in its ridiculous pitched-up chipmunk vocals) until I learned it was a surprisingly faithful cover of a 1960 (!) track by Joe Meek of the same name, which was created in the wake of the Sputnik satellite launches. Its awestruck admiration of the burgeoning space age is a really cool thing to evoke in this context, and it fits with everything that EXCELSIOR seems to be about.
I can’t really know what it’s about for sure, though. To me, EXCELSIOR’s focus on a lot of high-minded, grandiose themes makes it seem like it’s trying to evoke ancient mythology. The abstract yet emotional lyrics convey a sense of great power lost in translation over time, and the themes of sexuality and fission remind me of the concept of a cosmic egg cracking, which occurs in a bunch of creation myths. This isn’t too far off from Jasper’s stated inspiration for the album—a bootleg movie in which a sword called Excelsior grows until it splits the earth in half.
EXCELSIOR definitely isn’t for everybody, but as someone who loves listening to albums from front to back, this has been one of my favorite things to play in its entirety this year. As a whole, it feels like a complete package, and it’s endlessly compelling. I feel like I’ll be thinking about it well into the new year.
Max Levin
When Slauson Malone 1 performed live at Westco Café two years ago, they brought a computer, a cello, and a fog machine. That fog machine set off the fire alarm, got everyone evacuated, started a kerfuffle with PSafe, and delayed the show for a good half-hour. That was my first experience with music at Wesleyan. I’m not sure if having EXCELSIOR on my 2023 list counts as coming full circle with that show, even if I had a similar incident where my radiator broke and filled my room with hot steam a week after the album dropped, but I’ll say that this counts anyway. Jasper Marsalis and Nicholas Wetherell were the first musicians I saw live in my adult life, and they played some snippets from EXCELSIOR then, so whatever; I’ll call it closure.
It’s a bit silly for me to say that these are my top 5 albums of 2023, because I’m changing my mind every day. I listened to Sofia Kourtesis’ Madres for the first time just a couple weeks ago, and now it’s 10th on my list. I feel like I’m doing something antithetical to EXCELSIOR’s constants of change — in sound, in style, in state of mind — by pigeonholing albums to a number ranking. Though with a student organization like Aural Wes, now three semesters in my care, I think we just use lists as an excuse to talk about our favorite shit anyway. The order doesn’t matter to me all that much. I have Young Fathers’ Heavy Heavy in first place; I could have started off this blabber by gushing about how gracefully the music explodes on that album. Yet I find just as much merit in talking about EXCELSIOR, this wild and impossible knot of an album, with its lovely little intricacies that I’ll keep finding for as long as I live. As much of an unraveling stream of consciousness for Jasper Marsalis as EXCELSIOR is, so too are these writing exercises for myself and everyone else here.
This year I kept a listening log for every album I listened to up until November, so I’ll just share what I wrote for these five albums (with some commentary):
Young Fathers — Heavy Heavy
Feb 3
holyshit. i am dead. i have died
there are so many ideas and melodies and SOUNDS on this album that are all pulled off so well; it genuinely feels longer than 33 minutes in the best way possible. i am blown awayFeb 5
hosted an editorial for this on [a Discord server I run]. still spectacular. no further thoughts
I’ve mentioned how Young Fathers are probably my favorite band today, and this album cements that. It’s a complete, unrelenting, explosive triumph. “Holy Moly” may be their best song
Ruth Anderson / Annea Lockwood — Tête-à-tête
Jun 25
at the lake: a red-and-white card in a ripped-open white envelope, washed up next to a graying park bench. it's soaked through. someone put it here. i shouldn't have read this
(a deeply intimate album that lets Anderson's and Lockwood's unyielding love speak for itself. i was transfixed for its entire runtime. rest easy)
No further comment — I would be doing this album a disservice
Patrick Shiroishi — I was too young to hear silence
This one released after I stopped doing my listening log, so I’ll just do a quick blurb here. Shiroishi’s free improvisation for saxophone feels like characterizing a space — in particular, the parking structure under the Jazz Cat restaurant in Monterey Park, California; thirty miles from where I live. Silence takes up space here, and Shiroishi plays as if in conversation with it. I was too young to hear silence is such a perfectly paced album that I can’t believe Shiroishi improvised it, but I guess all great dialogues are like that to some degree.
James Holden — Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities
Mar 31
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
an album of half-remembered upward cycles. reminds me of my love for electronic music
“Continuous Revolution” is my favorite electronic song of the year. The way it constantly builds and builds is so unbelievably gorgeous
Slauson Malone 1 — EXCELSIOR
Oct 7
how in the living shit do you even begin to unpack this. i was tired and i had just finished my special relativity HW. i was in just the right delirious headspace for jasper to come along and bash me over the head with beautiful glitches. i should listen again. i love music so much
After listening again, I’ve decided that I’m not going to try and unpack this, because I think that’s beside the point anyway (given reasons I’ve discussed above). It’s an everywhere kind of album; why pin it down?
Elijah Davis
I think top album lists are kind of a lost cause for me. It’s hard to cull an entire year’s worth of albums down to just 5, and even then, I always end up finding something I really love right at the end of the year, or find something in the next year that I overlooked or discovered on some Youtuber’s end of year list (shoutout Mic The Snare). Hell, even after making my top 5 this year, I'm still finding new stuff I overlooked, and I’m sure I’ll find something that would’ve made my top 5 this year sometime soon. Regardless of that fact, I still want to share some of the albums that made my brain tingle the most this year.
yeule — softscars
I’d never really listened to yeule before this year. I knew about their 2022 album Glitch Princess, and the praise it received, but hadn’t actually given any of their catalog a listen. I was so, so happy that I decided to check out softscars. It's so good. It’s poppy, it’s rock-y, it's electronic… hell, it’s even got a piano interlude if you’re not into the hooky stuff. Songs like “sulky baby” and “4ui12” scratch my pop itches, while something like “dazies” hits the rock fan in me hard (and also has an amazing beat switch).
PinkPantheress — Heaven knows
I went to Gov Ball this year, and PinkPantheress was playing. Sadly, it was at the same time as one of my favorite bands, black midi, who I really wanted to see. In the end, I saw black midi that day. Do I regret it? Not entirely. But after spending hours upon hours listening to Heaven knows, I’ve started rethinking what I did that day, because this album is like a worm in my brain—I can’t stop listening. Bop after bop. From opener “Another life” (great bassline btw) to modern classic “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” to emotional hits like “Capable of love”, Heaven knows showed me that PinkPantheress is here to stay.
Jeff Rosenstock — HELLMODE
Here’s a fun fact about me: Jeff Rosenstock is one of my favorite artists of all time. His entire solo catalog is, in my opinion, some of the best stuff ever. I did not surprise myself by loving HELLMODE, but I love it nonetheless. Jeff brings his infectious energy into this album, as he always does, with songs like “HEAD” or “I WANNA BE WRONG''. But Jeff also manages to incorporate levels of emotional vulnerability and maturity into the album that make HELLMODE stand out from his previous releases, with songs like “HEALMODE” or “DOUBT” cutting deep. A great album from start to finish. I’m going to think about the lyrics of closer “3 SUMMERS” for ages. “Stay young until you die!”
Tinashe — BB/ANG3L
Tinashe is not an artist I’d typically find myself liking so much. It’s nothing against her, I just don’t listen to R&B too much. But BB/ANG3L was too good to not listen to. The production? CLEAN. Tinashe’s vocals? SMOOTH LIKE BUTTER. I was hooked on this album as soon as I heard opener “Treason”. There’s not a single dull moment on this album. From bops like “Needs” or “Uh-Huh”, or tracks that get me floating like “Gravity” or “Tightrope”, BB/ANG3L is such an amazing listen. While I’m typically a fan of short albums, and the length of this album in no way detracts from its good-ness, I only wish there was more than the 20 minutes of music Tinashe offers us.
Amaarae — Fountain Baby
My favorite album this year was Amaarae’s Fountain Baby. I’d never heard of Amaarae before this year. I am glad I learned who Amaarae was this year. This album is SUPREME. Opening track “Angels in Tibet” comes at you and tells you that it is the shit, and you listen. Amaarae’s voice flows over top of pristine production like water. “Co-Star” is a bop. “Princess Going Digital” is a bop. “Sociopathic Dance Queen” is a bop. There’s bops all over this thing. I wish I had better words to describe Fountain Baby, because I felt it was super underrated this year. But it’s just filled with pristine pop/R&B influenced bops. It’s awesome. Listen to it.
