Two-Zero-Two-Three C.E. — Counting Down The Year In Sound Worship

It’s almost noon on Sunday, December 31st. I’m sitting in my living room, my dog gently snoring next to me as I sip on a heavily nursed and tepid cup of coffee while typing out this list of favorite albums that’s been occupying my mind in multiple iterations since the last days of November. As is normally the case, I didn’t get to listen to or review anywhere near as many albums as I wanted to. I’m aiming to do better at keeping this blog active throughout the coming new year, and hopefully gain some readers and retain their interest. I moved into a new online platform earlier this year and I’m still trying to make it work in terms of content, navigation, and visual appeal. I think it looks good.

My top 10 was an odd mix in 2023, which is probably a good thing. For anyone who’s read through my year-end favorites lists of the past, there are a few familiar ol’ reliables featured. I was, though, impressed by some newer albums from bands and performers I hadn’t checked out before. Even now as I’m writing this intro, I’m rethinking the shape of this list. But, it’s taxed me long enough and I just need to commit.

Thank you, as always, for even the slightest engagement as I carry on with this passion project of mine. I’ll be coming up to 18 years writing Letters From A Tapehead in May of 2024. This endeavor continues to bring me joy, so logically I should grant it more attention.

Here’s to amazing live shows and listening for 2024 and further defense of bad taste.

**10. Meg Baird**

*Furling*
Drag City
Released: 1/27/23

“‘Ashes, Ashes’ sets a tone: a lush, melancholic, and captivating non-lyrical introduction to Meg Baird’s 2023 release, Furling. The first solo album from Baird (Espers, Heron Oblivion) to surface following 2015’s Don’t Weigh Down the Light, Furling is almost fully composed and performed by Baird with assistance from her Heron Oblivion bandmate and partner, Charlie Saufley. Rooted in folk, Baird captivates throughout the album as both an intimate performer and perceived band leader. A track like ‘Cross Bay’ offers a softer focus on her voice and acoustic guitar, while ‘Twelve Saints’ is built from layered instruments, varying the effort.”

Entry — No Ripcord’s 50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2023 feature

9.
Joseph Shabason

*Welcome To Hell*
Western Vinyl
Released: 10/20/23

Welcome To Hell is a 1996 skateboard video issued by Toy Machine Skateboards, a company owned and operated by one of my personal skate heroes, Ed Templeton. Citing the video’s personal impact, composer Joseph Shabason built a score for Welcome To Hell, stripping away the film’s culled together soundtrack and designing theme music for each of the team’s featured skaters and some of its montaged sections.

Of any album I’ve listened to or thought about this year, Shabason’s skate vid tribute has done the odd bit of packaging geek-level nostalgia in bliss-fueled sci-fi futurism, whose new world veneer is punctured by electric snares or embellished with dancing vibraphones. As I remember those days, the soundtrack of a skate video would normally consist of punk rock or hip-hop, a track list meant to resonate with youth culture and ramp up the analog-induced grit that a VHS tape would generate and the raw documented risks taken by the pros that were featured. The subversive nature of these videos epitomized disregard for authority, standoffs with police often captured along with contempt from the general public as the balance of their collective day-to-day lives were disrupted for a few seconds via every staircase that was cleared or guardrail that was conquered. It was Gonzo filmmaking and every bystander who interfered or loudly opined was part of the cast whether they liked it or not. Shabason’s score marches like an invasion as four-wheeled renegades co-opt commercial space, hints of Alain Goraguer or even John Carpenter evoking extraterrestrial takeover. Still, relative to the violent street maneuvering on display, it’s remarkable how tranquil the music can sound. This is especially true for the title track, which is sequenced last on the album and meant to soundtrack the video’s slam section, an especially taxing series of spills that the skaters endure(d), while various levels of testicular trauma and neck-twisting occur that make your asshole involuntarily constrict while you’re watching.

**8. Swans**

*The Beggar*
Young God
Released: 6/23/23

“Still prone as ever to musical tangents and resolute in terms of instilling some level of well-earned dread or sincerity, The Beggar manages to delve deep into the recesses of (Michael) Gira’s darkness-addled spirit without abandoning the benefits of being relatively understated, resultant in a Swans release that you don’t have to prepare to experience. Inasmuch as albums like The Seer and To Be Kind resonate as bold, brilliant, and oftentimes caustic creative statements, The Beggar permits the artist to speak, whisper, or simply breathe.”

Entry — Buys & Receipt: The Beggar by Swans

**7. Osees**

*Intercepted Message*
In The Red
Released: 8/17/23

Intercepted Message is the 28th album from the junk-art garage punk outfit known (for this iteration) as Osees. Ever-prolific, this John Dwyer-led outfit followed last year’s A Foul Form, a hardcore-as-viewed-through-the-Osees-prism release, with Intercepted Message, a more synth-driven, jagged romp that’s lighter on the bark and heavier on the 80s new wave and Kosmische Musik. Reliably raucous, Dwyer ably retains his Osees idiom and proves its malleability yet again, issuing a fun and energized volume that the band closes out hilariously with a rendition of the hold music from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (“LADWP Hold”).

6. billy woods
& Kenny Segal

*Maps*
Backwoodz Studioz
Released: 5/5/23

Once pandemic restrictions lifted for touring bands and artists following our worldwide collective lockdown, it was go time. Inspired by his return to touring life, hip-hop artist billy woods, with producer Kenny Segal acting as his maestro, released Maps, a concept album built from his experiences on the road. Woods’ detail-saturated verses exhibit diary-level candor, his trademark multi-syllabic delivery running near Thelonious Monk-like across the slow imbalance of “Soft Landing,” the smooth head-knock of “Soundcheck” (featuring Quelle Chris), the be-bop flavored “Blue Smoke,” and the dust and ash encrusted ivories in “The Layover”.

**5. Protomartyr**

*Formal Growth In The Desert*
Domino
Released: 6/2/23

“Did Protomartyr fans breathe a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that the band would release a follow-up to 2020’s Ultimate Success Today? Formal Growth In The Desert follows the personal crisis and COVID-addled uncertainty surrounding the prior LP, the mood typically dark and amusing while the band’s percussive invention and stark melodic arrangements amplify Joe Casey’s eccentric poetry. A well-sequenced and tightly cut album, Formal Growth In The Desert surges with Protomartyr’s familiar and unchanged sonic signature while somehow conveying a sense of creative renewal. The relatively danceable ‘For Tomorrow' (synthesizer amping up its new wave ties), the sturdily assembled bleakness of ‘Graft Vs. Host’, and the bouncy upswing of ‘3800 Tigers’ indicates an evolution of songcraft without the abandonment of identity. 'They are always different; they are always the same,' John Peel famously observed regarding The Fall, a statement well-suited for Protomartyr as well.”

Entry — No Ripcord’s 50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2023 feature

4. JPEGMAFIA
& Danny Brown

*SCARING THE HOES*
AWAL/Peggy
Released: 3/24/23

“Being distinct and avant voices in hip-hop, both of whom seemingly thrive as oddball characters setting their own rules for songcraft, the prospect of a collaboration between artists JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown seemed a no-brainer. The resultant LP, SCARING THE HOES, had the potential to be excellent or terrible—there wasn’t going to be any in-between. Thankfully, we got the former. Appropriately packaged in a genre-bending array of crudely sped-up samples (‘Fentanyl Tester’), hastily spliced dance club electronics (‘Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up / Muddy Waters’), and abrasive, fuzz-bleeding instrumentation (‘SCARING THE HOES’, ‘Garbage Pail Kids’), the album is a symbiotic trip. With production handled solely by Peggy, SCARING THE HOES is rife with surprises, with no tempo, melody, or rhythm spared from manipulation. In lesser hands, this lack of editing may have sounded aimless, but the equal space granted to its authors ensures that every second makes sense.”

Entry — No Ripcord’s 50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2023 feature

**3. Oozing Wound**

*We Cater To Cowards*
Thrill Jockey
Released: 1/27/23

“As a fan of 2019’s High Anxiety and its thrash-centric critiques, We Cater To Cowards seems somehow easier to absorb while being just as caustic. Oozing Wound (guitarist/vocalist Zack Weil, bassist Kevin Cribbin, and drummer Kyle Reynolds) remains hilariously succinct, able to communicate better than any self-important sophisticate with a trove of thirty dollar words on deck for all occasions, all while set to a muddy and wonderfully corrosive Touch & Go-grab bag of pigfuck’d fury. Needless to say, the commentary matches the sound and the song titles are always great: the fuzz-laced churn of 'Midlife Crisis Actor’ is a thing to behold as is ‘The Good Times (I Don’t Miss ‘Em)’, which seemingly dips into Bleach-era Nirvana, subterranean pop-riff and vocal tonality (‘It’s always been the same, from existence to now / Picked over and over again, golden calf’s a cow’).”

Entry — No Ripcord review of We Cater To Cowards

**2. Irreversible Entanglements**

*Protect Your Light*
Impulse!
Released: 9/8/23

Improv powerhouse and activist jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements released their Impulse! debut, Protect Your Light. The combined effort and creative outpour of vocalist Camae Ayewa (a.k.a., Moor Mother), drummer Tcheser Holmes, trumpet player Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and bassist Luke Stewart, Irreversible Entanglements remain a free-form and poetic colossus (the scribbling brass in “Soundness” cements this statement well enough). That said, Protect Your Light sounds appropriately at home with the varied Impulse! lineage, repping hard bop (“Free Love”), ensemble-level band arrangements (title track), and abstract blues (“Sunshine”) that to my ear immediately seem evocative of the label’s roster when it was at its peak. “Our Land Back” is pure Coltrane melancholia that becomes sinister and noir’ish as Ayewa’s stern poetry takes lead.

**1. SPELLLING**

SPELLLING &
The Mystery School
Sacred Bones
Released: 8/25/23

“In an age when the phrase ‘Taylor’s Version’ boasts cultural currency and reboots of film series are as ubiquitous as air and water, the public is well-accustomed to the idea of an artist reconsidering an already released work or generational touchstone. For SPELLLING, which is the sobriquet of multi-instrumentalist and art pop futurist Chrystia Cabral, the malleability and potential deepening of her work had evidently manifested via performances with her live band, leading to songs from her prior albums—2017’s Pantheon Of Me, 2019’s Mazy Fly, and 2021’s The Turning Wheel—to enjoy further attention and subsequent rework.”

Entry — No Ripcord review of SPELLLING & The Mystery School

Follow-ups:

11. Deerhoof - Miracle-Level (Joyful Noise, 3/31/23)

12. Marnie Stern - The Comeback Kid (Joyful Noise, 11/1/23)

13. Snooper - Super Snõõper (Third Man, 7/14/23)

14. Godflesh - Purge (Avalanche, 6/9/23)

15. Oxbow - Love’s Holiday (Ipecac, 7/21/23)

16. Queens of the Stone Age - In Times New Roman… (Matador, 6/16/23)

17. Matmos - Return To Archive (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 11/3/23)

18. The Necks – Travel (Northern Spy, 2/24/23)

19. Jaimie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) (International Anthem, 8/25/23)

20. PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying (Partisan Records, 7/7/23)