Not Another Top Music of ’23 Post
Another top music of ’23 post, this time featuring anecdotal evidence
Like many others, I was surprised to learn that Spotify had identified “My Sound Town” — i.e., the city that most closely aligns with my listening tastes — as a mid-sized pastoral hamlet several thousand miles away from me. Namely, Burlington, Vermont. Here’s how Spotify explained their methodology:
Listening is universal, a pastime loved by communities around the world. Streaming habits transcend borders, leading to songs, genres, and artists that achieve new lives in faraway places.
Sound Towns selected for eligible users are made up of two factors: a user’s most-streamed artists of the year, and the way in which those artists are streamed in other cities. It’s objective and driven by a user’s listening history.
Freshly automated marketing copy aside, obviously the element of surprise was the point. Maybe Spotify did use data to reveal hidden truths, but the fact that so many users were matched to the same aspirational enclaves just means that Spotify is in the lifestyle business. Which is to say, the flattery business. Granted they’re not necessarily good at it, but they’re assuming you don’t care. If Spotify is lazy about leveraging tranches of user data to support unique, meaningful, or useful outcomes, they’re betting you’re lazy, too. Game recognize game!
What’s less clear is if Spotify realized they may have been outing a lot of people. In addition to ranking among the most popular Sound Towns, Burlington, Berkeley, and Cambridge also have large LGBTQ populations. As for my home-away-from-home:
The Burlington girlies (gender neutral) are fond of sad lesbian music like boygenius and Big Thief, Cambridge is for the bisexuals who listen to Ethel Cain and Chappel Roan, and Berkeley is populated by gay men who listen to Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek. [Credit: Today in Tabs]
Guilty on both counts for this Burlington babe!
Anyway, here are three new albums I especially enjoyed this year. Not all officially made my Spotify Wrapped, but if it isn’t clear already, The Happy Few has an abiding prejudice for the anecdotal.
Also I’ve written about artists whom I think are a little more under the radar, for the simple reason that I don’t have anything to add about boygenius1 or Jason Isbell.2
Wednesday, Rat Saw God
Rat Saw God was my favorite album of 2023, and it wasn’t particularly close. I briefly wrote about Wednesday here and intended to write more but never did.
I saw the band perform twice, the first of which was their tour opener. It was standing room only in a venue with a max capacity of 625, the largest show they’d ever played as the main billing. They seemed thrilled if a little dumbfounded. Over the course of the night, MJ Lenderman briefly forgot to plug in his guitar, pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis blew out blew out his amp, and lead vocalist Karly Hartzman flubbed the lyrics a few times. It was great.
“Bull Believer” closed the show, a raucous wall-of-sound epic, and also the only song I know that paraphrases a line from Augustine’s Confessions before quoting from “Mortal Combat.” As the band played the opening chords, a man standing next to me turned and caught my eye. We smiled and nodded at one another; this was what we’d been waiting for. He was short and stocky, probably in his late forties. With wide-rimmed glasses and a silvery beard, he reminded me of George R. R. Martin in a Drive-By Truckers t-shirt. “I love these guys,” he said, leaning in. “My wife likes John Prine and Lucinda Williams. I do, too. But this reminds me of the bands I grew up listening to.”
He wasn’t alone. The tightly-packed crowd exuded excitement, as if we’d been let in on some conspiracy that the rest of the world hadn’t yet figured out. Would they ever?
Wednesday is soaked to the skin in Southern Gothic. Occasionally the music sounds rusted-over, as if someone was trying to turn the gears of a piece of abandoned industrial farming equipment. Also Wednesday can be loud. Quite loud. While slow ballads like “Formula One” and “What’s So Funny” underscore the band’s finesse and range, there’s never much room for doubt: this is a rock band. And despite repeated claims that rock is dead — which are really claims that the loudness of rock is dead — there are still some among us who traffic in loudness, bear witness to loudness. For whom loudness is a piece of sonic matter that beams into the brain and works its way into the bloodstream.
As “Bull Believer” entered its final movement, during which Hartzman screams above a colossal wave of distortion, I felt a tap on my shoulder. My new friend was laughing and grinning ear to ear. He gave me a thumbs up, then faced the band and threw a fist in the air.
Empty Country, Empty Country II
Empty Country’s Empty Country II is the sole release that might’ve challenged Rat Saw God for me. To be honest, it wasn’t a fair fight: as of writing, the album has only been out for six weeks, and I’ve only known about the band’s existence for five.
Led by Joseph D’Agostino, previously of Cymbals Eat Guitars, the band plays a hard-edged heartland rock for a country whose heart has been torn out. Beyond the standard three-piece setup, the band adds synths, keyboards, a harmonica, and an army of effects, occasionally recalling fellow Philadelphia expats, The War on Drugs, though with a notably different songwriting approach. Where Drugs songs tend to be dreamy and introspective, D’Agostino writes vivid, unnerving lyrics that function as short stories. “Early eighties, New York City, biblically filthy,” he sings on “Bootsie,” a disco-flavored trance that follows a teenage girl’s forays into the downtown club scene and features a chorus that would satisfy Thom Yorke as much as Dante Alighieri: “Hell is the place where everything happens.” As it goes, hell comes up a lot on this album. School shootings, addiction, suicide, climate catastrophe: Empty Country II seems to propose that, for all intents and purposes, hell is already here. Fair enough!
Fortunately there’s more on offer than commodified despair. (Anyway you don’t need me to show you where to find that.) “Pearl,” “FLA,” and “Lamb” evoke beauty in the midst of devastation. “Cool S,” told from the perspective of an inmate imprisoned for murder, is a staggering thirteen-minute elegy. “Destine” tosses off lines like “my sister says there is a next life / no one I know will be there,” but it’s an irresistible banger, a slower, grungier reprise of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep.”
Again, I’ve only logged a few weeks with Empty Country, so maybe my enthusiasm will wear off. But I hope not. This is bracing and vital stuff.
Blondshell, Blondshell
If the nineties are a major influence on contemporary rock music, are the awkwardly-labeled, culturally-questionable aughts next? The jury’s still out, but Wednesday and Blondshell (Sabrina Teitelbaum) both released albums within weeks of each other that directly invoke Veronica Mars, a TV show from the 2000s that I did not watch but understand to be popular.
Blondshell’s self-titled debut boasts a lot of earworms about awful men, including “Veronica Mars,” the opening track. As a gentleman of upstanding character and inviolable integrity, I wouldn’t know anything about being an awful guy, but I’ve certainly known my fair share. Who hasn’t? As the album attests, terrible men have a pimple-like capacity to keep popping up. How? Why? Power, arrogance, ignorance, and sheer numbers come to mind. But so does social conditioning: “Logan’s a dick / I’m learning that’s hot / Gimme shelter.”
At the same time, as the line hints, a lot of Blondshell’s musical influences are pulled from the phallowed halls of male rock icons, from The Rolling Stones to Radiohead — and the dream of the deep-down-good-guy is persistent. As long as there is hope, there will also be pain: “I’m in love with a feeling / Not with anyone or any real thing.”
Not to say that romance is the album’s sole focus. Addiction, recovery, and relapse all appear, culminating in “Dangerous,” which showcases some of Teitelbaum’s best singer-songwriter work. There’s also a good deal of comedy, some at Teitelbaum’s expense and some directed at her hapless, would-be love interests. For anyone with outsized expectations and a certain brand of arrested development, “I think you watched / way too much / HBO growing up” is a dagger.
But “Kiss City” is the stand-out single. A dreamy, seductive slow-burn that I’m confident will one day be featured as an emotionally devastating needle-drop. It also ranks among the horniest songs of the year:
Kiss city
I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I'm pretty
Did you expect something different?
I bet she talks dirty, like she's on a mission
Momma, I'm adjacent to a lot of love
Surely this is a trap! A bait-and-switch fantasy designed to catch unsuspecting goons. Is it a take on Liz Phair’s “Flower”? (Blondshell toured with Liz Phair this fall.) Has an erotic nightmare been slipped into my unconscious? Or maybe I’m being paranoid. And if so, what does my paranoia say about me? After all, I’m one of the good ones. I dislike the bad ones! I cheer on their doom! Those men who gaze and gape. Ogling, oleaginous men whose primary personality trait is cluelessness. “He wears a front-facing cap / the sex is almost always bad,” goes a line from “Joiner.” Terrible men. But not me! Not me.
Honorable Mentions
Some of these came out in 2022 before the existence of this newsletter.
Kevin Morby, “Bittersweet, TN”
A good midsummer night’s song, featuring Erin Rae.
Erin Rae, “Can’t See Stars”
A good midsummer’s night song, featuring Kevin Morby.
Geist, “Ornament”
Another band I recently came across. From what I can tell, just some guys with day jobs who recorded this in their living room in Vancouver. Imagine if a Radiohead side project recorded an alt country concept album loosely based on someone’s grandmother.
Hotline TNT, “I Thought You’d Change”
Friends and touring partners with Wednesday. Maybe more accessible as a brighter, janglier, but still-very-loud alternative. I don’t know; I like this song.
feeble little horse, “Steamroller”
I include this one mainly as another nominee for most salacious of 2023, though I’m not sure that description suffices here. Either way, move over James Taylor, we’re not in Martha’s Vineyard anymore!