A few of my favorite things: New music that mattered to me in 2023

'Music, sweet music, I wish I could caress and kiss...'

Design by Kim Miers

The whole concept of “best” is, er, best left to the world of sports, I think. 

And even in that arena, the notion is still swayed by the vagaries of subjectivity. Your “best” might not be mine, nor mine yours. Rarely will one of us change the other’s mind. 

Particularly when it comes to music, ‘best’ isn’t so much a dirty word as it is an insignificant one. Music is rooted in principals of science and math, certainly. But our response to music is rooted in emotion, and is by definition, an entirely subjective one. Following this logic, there is no ‘best.’ 

Rolling Stone underscored the absurdity of the notion of “best” in October of this year, when it released a list of what it assessed to be ‘The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,’ an epic fail of large-scale clickbait proportions that did little more than celebrate the magazine’s inability to separate ‘music-qua-music’ from ‘wearing the guitar as a fashion accessory.’ The whole thing was embarrassing. Embarrassing to read, embarrassing to contemplate, and embarrassing to argue over - which, of course, it was, ad infinitum. (I guess I’m guilty of further fanning the flames by bringing it up here. Which is also embarrassing. Moving on, then…)

Music is bigger than us as individual listeners and musicians. Of course it is. Just as the universe is bigger than the astronomer, or the vastness of the cosmos dwarfs the starry-eyed kid who owns a telescope.

 In a recent (excellent) interview with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, timed to note the anniversary of Fripp’s collaborative effort with David Sylvain, 1991’s The First Day, (one of my favorite albums of any year) the journalist Andy Burns led his subject toward some wisdom-infused reflections on music’s ability to speak to us in a language above and beyond such pejorative notions as ‘best.’

“Find a piece of music that really speaks to you, that profoundly moves you, and listen,” Fripp said.

"And if we move…I don’t know whether it would be best to say inside the sound or completely outside the sound, but there is something utterly direct, and the music speaks, regardless of the person that’s playing it, and becomes immediately available to the person listening to it. You put on the music, and it speaks directly, and that is to be trusted, and that is the experience that we interrogate, and we follow it back. Now at a certain point … if we follow it back, we arrive at silence. Silence is where the music is before it’s born. In my experience, music moves from silence, and where do we find silence? We find silence in love.”

Fripp’s words were fresh in my mind as I looked back on 2023, the year in new music. And they made the notion of assembling a ‘best of’ list feel somewhat absurd. 

Here, then, are some of the albums released in 2023 that I fell in love with, for various reasons. I have no idea if they were the ‘best’ albums released this year. More significantly, I don’t care. 

This music spoke to me, directly. Maybe you’ll find something here that speaks to you as well. 

Sonar with David Torn & J. Peter Schwalm- Three Movements

I was lucky enough to pen the liner notes for this album. Here’s some of what I wrote: 

The three pieces that form the album ultimately reveal themselves to be movements in a single long-form composition, one that moves with intention through peaks and valleys of the timbral, temporal and textural variety, leaving the listener emotionally exhausted but spiritually satiated at journey’s end.

With each listen, new details emerge, all of them worth noting, as minimalist guitar motifs commingle with delicious restraint, polyrhythms lend an air of dramatic unfolding, and the bass makes statements of rhythmic and tonal stability at one moment, then skillfully disrupts the equilibrium with odd-time ostinati the next. The sum effect suggests what it might be like to watch a relay race being run inside a hall of mirrors, a feat of daring handled with offhand grace and unerring eloquence by the band members.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra - V

The fifth album from indie music auteur Ruban Nelson arrived like a familiar friend. The first time I listened to it, I felt I’d known it forever, and that feeling grew with each subsequent listen, as I fell deeper beneath the sway of its sultry, laid-back but deep-pocketed grooves, its indelible hooks, and its weird, warm and fuzzy production. 

Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex

Not much to say that hasn’t already been said. This is another Wilson masterpiece in a growing list of them. Conceptually, sonically, compositionally, The Harmony Codex is a major accomplishment from one of the most consistently interesting and truly progressive musicians of the past 30 years. 

Yusuf Dayes  - Black Classical Music

Like the best jazz albums throughout the history of the form, the debut effort from UK drummer, composer and bandleader Yusuf Dayes offers an expansive overview of the broad and varied sounds that its creator has absorbed over the years. However, unlike many of the more explicit attempts to marry hip-hop rhythms to jazz harmony and improvisation of the past decade-plus, Black Classical Music feels organic, as it moves through sounds that suggest psychedelia, soul-jazz and funk with grace, never abandoning harmonic depth and improvisational acuity for the sake of groove, or vice-versa. 

Peter Gabriel - I/o

It’s tempting to come right out of the gate swinging, clutching the proclamation that this is Gabriel’s best album ever. But take a breath, and consider a catalog that includes albums like Security, Us and Up, unfettered masterpieces, all, and realize that what we’re getting with i/o is what Gabriel has always given us - deeply considered musical craftsmanship with an iconoclast’s eye toward the cutting edge of record-making, and a weathered Romantic’s ability to unearth, and then celebrate, hope amidst an environment of hopelessness. So i/o is simply another best album ever in a career that’s full of best albums ever. 

Porcupine Tree - Closure/Continuation Live

A second installment of Steven Wilson music worked its way into my life during the final weeks of the year. This concert set truly feels like a live album, in the sense that the greatest double-live progressive music collections of the 70s and 80s felt necessary, complete, and vital. It takes you on a journey, particularly if you listen in Dolby Atmos. Stunning stuff. 

Ambrose Akinmusire - Owl Song

Sparse, minimalistic and reflective in mood and arrangement, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s first album for Nonesuch - following five stellar releases on the Blue Note label, beginning with 2011’s already iconic When the Heart Emerges Glistening - is a masterwork of soulful understatement. Working with only guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, Akinmusire summons eloquent sonic spaces redolent of the “silence born of love” Robert Fripp mentions in the quote above. This music stirs my soul - softly, but no less powerfully for that. 

Stick Men - Umeda

I’m not sure what to call this broad, majestic music that Tony Levin, Pat Mastelotto and Markus Reuter summon as Stick Men, and that’s a major component of my love for it. This live document of a 2022 show in Osaka, Japan, covers much stylistic ground - freaky, funky, profoundly eloquent, heart-rending, funny, virtuosic, playful, often within the same tune, Stick Men gave my heart wings throughout the year. I’m looking forward to catching the band live in Rochester, NY, in February. 

Laufey - Bewitched

The second album from the Icelandic Berklee School of Music graduate blends chamber pop with jazz harmony, and steals your soul along the way. At turns mature and playful, Bewitched bewitches at every turn, and offers proof positive (if any was actually needed) that pop music doesn’t need to be stupid and sophomoric to connect in a broad manner. 

Mike Keneally & Marcelo Radulovich - Bask

This album is a complete freak show, and I mean that in the most complimentary manner imaginable. I have no idea what genre this might be considered, which makes me love it even more. If you’re familiar with Keneally - who has worked with Frank Zappa, Andy Partridge, Marco Minnemann, Deathklok, and dozens of other iconoclasts - then you already know. If you’re not, now’s your chance. 

The Rolling Stones - Hackney Diamonds

By the laws of gravity and entropy, we should not be getting a “V.G. - plus” album of new material from the Rolling Stones in 2023. But here we are. Thanks, guys. 

I also loved and listened repeatedly to…

Khruangbin - Live at Sydney Opera House

Soft Machine - Other Doors 

Water From Your Eyes - Everyone’s Crushed

Ryuchi Sakamoto - 12 

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse

NoName - Sundial

Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

Sigur Ros - Atta

Pink Pantheress - Heaven Knows 

Lil Yachty- Let’s Start Here

Paul Simon - Seven Psalms

Metallica - 72 Seasons

The National - The First Two Pages of Frankenstein

Wilco - Cousin

Queens of the Stone Age - In New Times Roman

PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying

Explosions in the Sky - End