Best of 2023: Music

2023 was a strange year for me, music-wise. I feel like there were large swaths of the year when I didn’t listen to any music at all, and then others when I would listen to a lot of music. As a result, I don’t have a proper Top 10 list to share, although I do have a clear favorite. Instead, here are some albums I enjoyed listening to at various points of the year.

Graveyard Club’s Moonflower is the first album I really got into in 2023. Apple Music lists them as indie pop, which feels very appropriate. Think of Arcade Fire if they were to lean hard into melodic pop. Moonflower is the kind of album where all the songs sort of sound the same, so if you dig that sound then you’ll be happy for its 40 minute runtime. I’d recommend starting with the tracks “Valens” and “Rose Vine.”

In April I gave quite a few listens to The National’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein. Their previous album, I Am Easy to Find, took them in a slightly new (vaguely electronic/art pop) direction, and I dug it, but it feels like Frankenstein is a return to form for these indie stalwarts. The first track, “Once Upon a Poolside,” is my favorite on the album and one of my Top 5 National songs. Other highlights include “New Order T-Shirt” and “Alien.” (The National also released Laugh Track this year, and in some ways that album feels like more of a successor to I Am Easy to Find than Frankenstein. I haven’t given Laugh Track as much time, but in initial listens it didn’t grab me quite the same way as Frankenstein did.)

In June I started listening to my favorite album of the year: Brittain Ashford’s Trotter. Ashford is the singer/songwriter for Prairie Empire, an indie band with beautifully melancholic songs. Trotter is essentially another Prairie Empire album, which is excellent news. There are a couple songs that up the tempo, but most of the tracks are slow and sad with very pretty guitar and vocals. The whole album is fantastic. If you’re looking for a place to start: “Could’ve Done You Better,” “Tea Leaves,” “Saints of the Coast,” and if you’re in the mood for one of those more upbeat songs, then “Hold on Tight.”

I gave Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure a few listens over the summer. It’s a great summer album since it feels so bright and carefree. This album didn’t stick with me the way Dirty Computer did, maybe because so many of the tracks on The Age of Pleasure are relatively short — only two of the 12 tracks are over three minutes. While that brevity adds to its lightness, it also makes it harder to really dig in since so many songs are over right as you’re getting into them. That said, the opening track, “Float,” is probably my favorite, although I also really enjoy “Lipstick Lover.”

Spoiler alert: One of my favorite movies this year was Davy Chou’s Return To Seoul. I’ll have more to say about it when it comes time to write my Top 10 movies of the year, but for now I want to talk about the score/soundtrack, which was one reason I loved the movie. Jérémie Arcache & Christophe Musset’s Return to Seoul soundtrack doesn’t have all the tracks from the film (most notably it’s missing the Korean folk songs from the ‘60s), but it does have two absolute bangers: “Anybody,” which is featured in a great dance sequence and feels like it should be a required anthem for every club everywhere to play, and the closing song “All the People You’ll Never Be,” which I refuse to believe isn’t some lost Elliot Smith song that Christophe Musset stole and claimed as his own. But seriously, though: How is that song not a cover???

Speaking of single songs I loved: We watched the Clone High reboot, and there are quite a few fun songs from the new season. However, the best one is hands-down “The Re-Education Song,” a 40-second “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody catching the clones up on pop culture highlights from the past 20 years or so. It’s a perfect song perfectly sung/delivered by Phil Lord.

Another album that I listened to for a season was Sigur Rós’ ÁTTA. This Icelandic band is known for their melodic ambient songs, many of which are rather long — the average length of a song is often six or seven minutes. Their 2008 album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust is my favorite of theirs, if only because the songs tend to be a little shorter and a little poppier (for them, anyway). It was also one of the last Sigur Rós albums with Kjartan Sveinsson before he left the band in 2013. He rejoined the group in 2022, and ÁTTA is a return to form in more ways than one. It’s orchestral, it’s dreamy, and it’s often very beautiful.

In September we were up in Michigan for a wedding for one of Kaitlin's cousins. The day we were flying out, we got to spend a few hours with one of her uncles and aunt. At one point her uncle put on (a vinyl [!!!] copy of) Gregory Alan Isakov’s This Empty Northern Hemisphere. This 2009 album is full of slow, quiet indie folk/americana songs. It reminds me of Iron and Wine, if Sam Beam had a little more pep and a whole band. Anyway, as a result of Kaitin’s uncle introducing us to Isakov, we ended up seeing him play a show at the botanic garden here in Richmond. Good places to start: “Dandelion Wine” and “Evelyn.”

Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts is the much-anticipated follow-up to Sour, her 2021 debut. I think I still like Sour more, but Guts has grown on me in the past couple months. The thing is, there are a few seemingly incompatible genres mixed together here, from rock (almost borderline punk?) songs like “All-American Bitch” or “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl,” to the slow and quiet piano ballads “Vampire” or “Teenage Dream.” It’s a lot of aural ground for 39 minutes, which was true of her debut album as well, but here it feels a little more jarring to me. I’ve come around to the power rock songs, although I immediately loved the slower tunes. My mind was blown when I learned that Rodrigo’s collaborator/producer is Dan Nigro, former frontman of the great (and criminally underrated) indie rock band As Tall As Lions.

It wouldn’t be a best-of music list without some contemporary classical. Maxence Cyrin’s Springsong is the classical album I listened to most this year. It’s moody and cinematic — I can easily picture tracks like “Springsong” or “Candle” being used in a movie or TV show. For fans of Max Richter or really pretty instrumental music with strings and piano.

Finally, a pleasant surprise from a band I had kind of written off: The Mountain Goats’ Jenny from Thebes. The thing about The Mountain Goats is they have SO. MANY. ALBUMS. It’s often hard to keep up with them, although I’ve dutifully listened to each of their eight albums since 2012’s Transcendental Youth. Each new album always has one or two songs that remind me John Darnielle has still got it, although taken as a whole I’m often not as impressed with their records as I am with those standout tracks. Basically, The Mountain Goats has gone from a band where I’d listen to the whole album front-to-back to a band where I listen to a couple songs here and there. And then came Jenny from Thebes. Billed as a sequel to their 2002 album All Hail West Texas, there’s no denying that Jenny from Thebes sounds like an older Mountain Goats album while incorporating Matt Douglas’ added instrumentation. I’ve used the phrase “return to form” a couple times already, but here’s yet another example of an album that I found myself liking almost (almost!) as much as I like their older stuff. “Clean Slate” is my favorite track, but “One Way Out” and “Fresh Tattoo” are also great.