Top 5 Albums of 2023

According to Apple Music, I listened to 49,181 minutes of music this year. That accounts for 4,873 songs across 420 albums by 1,376 different artists. Most of those albums were not recorded in 2023 — 840 minutes of my listening time, for example, came from Django Reinhardt, who, while being one of the greatest guitar players of all time, has also been dead since 1953.

That said, out of the 1,525 songs I added to my music library this year (as of Dec. 5, 2023, anyway), 421 of them, spread across 43 different albums, were released in 2023. The Apple-Music-defined genres of those albums included Alternative, Contemporary Blues, Country, Funk, Fusion, Indie Rock, Instrumental, Jazz, Metal, Pop, Psychedelic, Rock, and Singer-Songwriter.

It is an eclectic group that does not include some of the year’s most celebrated albums but does include popular artists such as Miley Cyrus, Wilco, and Feist, as well as niche artists such as Bill Orcutt and the Whatitdo Archive Group.

Without further adieu, I present my Top 5 Albums of 2023.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (KGLW) are perennials on this list, not only because they seem to release at least two albums per year, but because every album they release is incredible.

The band never fails to surprise me. When discussing them with friends, I often compare KGLW to Ween. KGLW is a thousand times more talented than Ween, but they have Ween’s ability to adopt the stylings of virtually any genre. Where Ween switched it up song by song, KGLW does it album by album.

This year, KGLW released PetroDragonic Apocalypse…, which is as about as heavy a metal as I’m able to stomach (or as they described it on Twitter, “heavy as fuck”). They also released The Silver Cord, which they created entirely on synthesizers. Petrodragonic Apocalypse… appears on this list because it came out first (I’ve had longer to listen to and love it) but you won’t go wrong listening to The Silver Cord instead.

Petrodragonic Apocalypse…continues the thrashing exploration KGLW started with 2019’s Infest the Rat’s Nest, except where the older album rages at the realities of the world (“There is no planet B,” they scream on the opening track, only to follow it with lower-class rage at a “red mars for the rich” and fear at a “superbug”), the newer album attempts a more mythic theme, a kind of this is what will happen if…

The suite of songs opens with a summoning of the “Motor Spirit” — “Summon forth thy motor spirit, drink the fuckin’ gas and killeth! Light the fuel, propagate oxygen and heat, deify motor spirit, kiss goodbye the weak!” — and goes on to explore the apocalypse soon to be delivered unto us by the continuous burning of fossil fuels and the rise and convergence of supercell storms — “the elements rage in wild excess” — until the people reject the modern world and turn back to witchcraft, performing an unholy ritual to unleash “a reptile thinking in terms of only a lizard brain.”

“Anon, a giant monster roams,” KGLW sings in “Gila Monster,” “I am gila, blood spiller, witch killer….growing immensely and vastly in size.” The monster promises to bring “annihilation of planet earth and the beginning of merciless damnation.”

This brings us to the song “Dragon,” where the monster’s “petrodragonic apocalypse” is unleashed upon terra firma. The humans scramble jets and launch ballistics to fight the dragon, but it’s no use: “pilots shriek, cities weep,” as the monster lays humanity to waste, “killing all in its path…until the dragon stands triumphantly high-lone.”

The music that accompanies this dark fantasy matches the vibe of the lyrics: dark, fast, and monstrous. The band gives it everything they have. Guitars scream. The drum beats mercilessly fast. The lyrics are belted from deep in the throat.

I am not now nor have I ever been a metalhead. But this album kicks ass.

My brother introduced me to Todd Snider about six or seven years ago. He sent me a video of a dude on a small stage with an acoustic guitar. The video was about ten minutes long. Most of it was the dude telling the story of how he came to write that particular song, and it was freakin’ hilarious. The dude combines incredible charisma with a laid-back, stoner attitude, and he delivers every punchline in the story with perfect timing.

But the best part was the song the story led up to. The music was simple. He’s a folk singer who knows his strengths aren’t on the guitar, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise (though he is sneaky good, make no mistake). So instead of trying to wow you on the fretboard, he wows you with his words.

The song he eventually sang, “If Tomorrow Never Comes,” is a non-stop, fast-sung plea to live a life of joy and harmony, to hell with what the Lord might want you to do.

“Any kind of heaven everybody doesn’t get in / won’t seem like heaven to me. / Well, they tell you that the Garden of Eden was perfect, but you couldn’t even eat off the apple tree. / And for heaven’s sake / you had to watch that snake / lying to your woman / constantly. / Adam must have scratched his head, looked up and said / ‘Lord, eh…this isn’t doing it for me.'”

I loved it, and I needed more. So for the next several weeks, I dug into the nearly thirty years of Todd Snider’s catalog. How had I never heard this guy before?! He was like Jimmy Buffett, if Buffett was a couch-surfing, stoner hobo instead of a wave-surfing, pirate billionaire. He was Nashville if Tennesee were a blue state.

His newest album, Crank It, We’re Doomed, is actually an old album. He recorded it in 2007 and then decided to shelve it. As he posted on Facebook:

“I felt like not only did I have all these story songs, sort of normal songs, there also were all these protest songs. And really that is where I lost the plot. I had too many scenes in the movie, and I had too many songs. It was all over the map. But I also remember feeling like it wasn’t done either. Like it needed more songs.”

Nearly twenty years later, with his health deteriorating and his body wracked with pain, he’s decided the album catches him in the prime of his playing and needs to be heard.

It’s a solid collection that contains studio versions of songs he’s played live since first recording them, including “America’s Favorite Pastime” (which is about the day in 1970 when Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping on LSD) and “West Nashville Ballroom Gown” (a cover of an early Jimmy Buffett song).

But my favorite song is one I hadn’t heard before: “Handleman’s Revenge.” It’s a series of rocking complaints from a middle-aged man:

1. His enemy at work, “that goddamned kiss-ass Handleman” has received a promotion at work
2. His daughter “can’t stand the sight of the car” her bought her
3. His wife and daughter spend his money nonstop because “they want everyone up and down the street to think” the family is rich
4. His son is “an unrepentant radical” who is “unimpressed by the plaques” in the father’s cubical

The father finally loses it when a kid at a drive-thru window asks if that will be everything. The dad couldn’t handle the question and nearly jerked the kid through the window in response.

As he sings in the chorus, “I’m stuck on the corner of sanity and madness. I’m looking them over. I can’t see a difference.”

If you enjoy folk singers who have been influenced by early Bob Dylan, the best of Jimmy Buffett, and the Nashville outlaws, and then added a 21st-century left-wing common-man sensibility atop of it, then you’ll love Todd Snider.

The Circling Sun is a New Zealand super-group comprised of jazz musicians, DJs, and producers who have, apparently, been wowing audiences in Auckland for nearly twenty years. The sound they make is Afro-and Latin-infused big band music, with heavy brass, trilling woodwinds, enlivening piano and keyboards, and a rhythm section that doesn’t quit.

Every song on Spirits delivers, which is why I’ve been proselytizing for these folks everywhere I go. It’s the kind of music that rewards deep listening but is perfect for background ambiance too. I listen to it when I’m cooking, writing, reading, and working on the computer.

My favorite tune on the album is “Bliss,” a five-minute demonstration of musical brilliance improvised atop a repetitive theme, with the rhythm players going nuts, piano solos that take you up and down the keys, and a saxophone that comes in the end and just wows ya.

I recently began digging into Alice Coltrane’s music, and The Circling Sun seems to fit right into her line of exploration. They both create similar atmospherics in their songs, using harps, woodwinds, keyboards, etc., but the Circling Sun’s Afro-Latin rhythms add a lot more fun to their version. Coltrane’s music (or at least, what I’ve heard of it so far) seems to come from a deeply religious place, and I don’t get that sense with The Circling Sun.

But what do I know? They named their album Spirits after all.

In “Masterpiece,” the final song of Grace Potter’s newest album, she provides a short autobiography of how she became who she is. Here’s the Cliffs Notes

Somewhere in the middle of the seventh grade / I realized everyone my age was an asshole…

I was the long lost kid in the middle / of the long lost American dream/ so I picked up my paintbrush and started on my masterpiece…

In my klepto phase / I stole my way across the deep blue sea / went looking for my dignity / stamp my passport / if you please…

He was wearing eyeliner, had a funny name … and he made me a woman / in the middle of the ocean…

I had a brand new head on my shoulders / and a nice pair of little titties / I said goodbye to the virgin and hello to my masterpiece…”

For the sake’a my story, I’m gonna skip ahead / past the part about the Grateful Dead / Straight to Booker T / (don’t forget the MGs) / I danced holes through my wooly socks / I felt a funny little tickle / ’cause I had pop rocks / in my pussy….”

Now I don’t shoplift and I don’t blackout / I have a handle and I have a spout / I’m a grownup / yeah, yeah, yeah / But I’m still painting and fucking and climbing trees / and dancing with my devils and my darling beasts / and every single ugly part of me / is just a color in the pallette of my ever-lovin’ never-done’in vagabond masterpiece!”

The story is accompanied by a repetitive rocking piano, laid-back yet dramatic drums, backing singers, the sprinkling of guitars adding emotional catharsis, until finally, we hit the bridge and it all comes to a screaming head before settling back into the verses. Great stuff.

I just love this tune.

The whole album is fun. My wife thinks a couple of the songs are on the corny side (“Lady Vagabond” especially), but I’m a sucker for Grace Potter, and what my wife calls corny feels to me like a musician playing with genres — “Lady Vagabond,” for example, plays with cowboy-movie tropes in a way that reminds me of Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory“. As you’ll see in what I chose for my #1 Album of the Year, I’m a fan of musicians exploring the possibilities of genres.

Mother Road is nearly a concept album focused on the lifelong voyage of a woman whose livelihood is tied to the highways and byways of America, an artist who is as familiar with hotel rooms as she is with the wide-open sky of craters and canyons, where the people in her life include truck stop angels, little hitchhikers, and all of her ghosts “tripping on LSD and sniffin’ glue.”

I’ve listened to this album while riding the straight lanes of the Interstate and hugging the night-time curves on rural dirt roads in Vermont. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a life on the move.

I don’t even know where to begin with these guys.

First, they’re from Reno, Nevada. Second, they seem to be driven by three individuals, but they recruit some of the finest jazz musicians in the region to help them realize their visions.

Here’s how this album’s sound is described by one magazine: “mid-century exotica and library music—from the Tropicalia-steeped Amazon to the minor key tonalities of the far-out Near East.”

Their record label, meanwhile, describes them as a “recording collective [that] focuses solely on curating, performing and preserving esoteric soundtrack, library, and deep-groove collections.”

On their second LP, Palace of a Thousand Sounds, the collective, comprised of the three composers and over 20 musicians, leads the listener through a tour of the palace, creating a deep exotica-infused album using vibraphones, pedal harps, minor key grooves, ’70s Spanish Gypsy Rock, violins, Ethiopian-influenced brass, classical guitars, flute, Turkish baglama saz, eastern psych rock, grand pianos, and the recreation of a misheard found-melody as played one afternoon by a street musician near the recording studio.

(For the record, I’ve taken that list from an article where one of the main composers discusses the album track by track)

It is an album that rewards repeat listening. The songs are familiar sounding without being familiar. You’ve heard their like in your dreams, snatches of non-existent songs your brain meshed together from our culture’s collective memory of the soundtracks of imaginary 1970s movies set in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

You’ll hear it and think, “Oh, this is from Tarantino’s next movie.”

It’s an album you didn’t know you needed, but you very much do.