It's been a year – gasp!
A reluctant music writer's top 11 albums of 2023

by Jon E. Lynch

Ugh. Suffice it to say, I’m not the biggest fan of year-end retrospectives. Surprising? Not if you know me at all past the pages I spew here. I find looking back a bit obnoxious. Tedious, really. It’s not the recollecting so much as it is the demarcation. I don’t like the societal expectation of this type of examination simply because the calendar is rolling over yet again. Maybe I’m more annoyed that many only find it necessary now, at an arbitrary end of a year, to take stock.

That said, as promised last month, I am here to give a quick recap of the albums I kept returning to over the course of the last 12 months. I’d hardly call this a “Best Of” – rather, it’s the music I couldn’t help but go back to over and over. If I had to begrudgingly choose a top 11 albums of the year, it’d likely be a tossup of the following:

1. Americana/alt-folk/country artist Dean Johnson (one fourth of Washington’s Sons of Rainier) gave us the wonderfully somber and introspective “Nothing for Me, Please.”  If this wasn’t a breakup album, it certainly worked as one for me. I must’ve flipped the record over and over 30 plus times over the year – and it never once failed to impress. Pretty certain he had a track featured in this year’s final season of Reservation Dogs, which will garner a handful of new fans, I’m sure.

2. Hip Hop luminary Billy Woods (stylized as billy woods) with producer Kenny Segal released “Maps” back in May. His sixth release, it features guest appearances from Elucid, Danny Brown, Aesop Rock, Quelle Chris, ShrapKnel, Benjamin Booker and Samuel T. Herring (of the band Future Islands). If I used “number of listens” to aggregate my top album, this might be it.

3. Chicago doom-dripping post-punkers FACS released “Still Life in Decay” on hometown label Trouble in Mind. Two years ago, when the world slowed to a crawl, many missed out on the brilliant “Present Tense.” If you’re a fan of classic discordant, angular guitars, give this both your time and energy.

4. Back in 2021, Ashville, N.C., band Wednesday released “Twin Plagues,” which earned them a spot on the storied Secretly Canadian adjacent label Dead Oceans. This year’s “Rat Saw God” – their first album after signing – honed their confluence of indie, shoegaze and alt-country. If that melding of styles doesn’t quite mesh in your brain, just give it a chance or two. It’s a scorcher.

5. Sweeping Promises, the duo of Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug, based in Lawrence, Kan., released a stripped-down earworm of low-fi, no-wave punk titled “Good Living is Coming for You.” I have a special place in my heart for LFK, and more so for a twosome that can create so much with seemingly so little. For fans of Pylon, The B-52’s, Kleenex or Gang of Four.

6. Psychedelic garage stalwarts Night Beats put their latest long player, “Rajan,” on the Pacific Northwest indie heavyweight label Suicide Squeeze. On “Rajan,” they deviate a bit into darker, soulful sonics but keep the momentum chugging forward. After releasing their debut over a decade ago, this may be their most cohesive and grounded album.

7. Lathe of Heaven (named after the 1971 sci-fi novel by Ursula K. Le Guin) is a NYC-based rock band that released “Bound by Naked Skies.” The album is described as “melodic riffs, urgent rhythms and science fiction-themed lyrics … in the no man’s land that exists between beauty and dissonance, offering a unique sound as reminiscent of Finnish post-punkers Musta Paratti as they are to pop pioneers A Flock of Seagulls.”

8. Andrew Savage (A. Savage) is the co-frontperson of Parquet Courts, but his latest solo album “Several Songs About Fire” stands firmly on its own. These don’t feel quite like the songs of his full band, though they’re clearly, obviously, of the same vein and family. I was sold after hearing the advanced singles “Thanksgiving Prayer” and “Elvis in the Army,” but the full album is worth your time and repeated spins.

9. Back in October, the Swedish collective known as Goat, released its fourth album for Sub Pop titled “Medicine.”  By any metric, it is a hard-to-pigeonhole record of “alternative and experimental fusion.” Is it folk? World? Psychedelia? Rock and roll? I’m honestly not sure, and I certainly don’t care. It was easily one of the best I heard all year, and it only got better with each subsequent listen.

10. Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers were all indie successes prior to forming boygenius and releasing “The Record.” I will admit to being fully late to them as a whole, while having seen two of the three rippers live in their solo states. The lone member I have never seen live, Julien Baker, won me over from a pure guitar-playing standpoint. I never gave their collaboration album the listens it deserved, but I made up for it the last five months or so after seeing footage of Baker. Consider me a convert.

11. As you may or may not know, I am fortunate enough to work for our local college and community/public radio station. As such, part of my job is monitoring the airwaves, our many students and volunteer DJ’s, and the music they choose to play. Over the last few months, I’d hear a band/song that I wasn’t rightly familiar with but very much into, and I’d either walk down to or call the main studio, or check kdur.org to see who it was. I think seven times out of 10, it was something off Slow Pulp’s sophomore record “Yard” – female-fronted downtempo indie rock, which I bet translates to a hell of a live show.

Finally, here are those that could’ve been made into a Top 11 on their own – and I gave them previous mention this past year. Keep in mind that all of them should be included in the above conversation. If you’re so inclined, go back for listens: Yo La Tengo – “This Stupid World;” Shana Cleveland – “Mannzanita;” Water From Your Eyes – “Everyone’s Crushed;” Slowdive – “everything is alive;” Gracie Horse – “L.A. Shit;” Woods – “Perennial;” Spitting Image – Full Sun;” and Ghost Woman (who actually released not one but TWO records this year) - “Anne, If” and “Hindsight is 50/50.”

Chances are I missed some of your favorites, so – per usual – please send those recommendations my way. Along with questions, comments, and gripes. Especially the gripes. KDUR_PD@fortlewis.edu ?