Ian Mathers’ 2023: J'suis fatiguée tu sais pas c'que j'suis fatiguée
a picture of Mandy, Indiana by Chris Hogge
It has been, if you’ll pardon the language, a stupid fucking year (or maybe it’s just, as Yo La Tengo correctly diagnosed, this stupid world). On any number of levels: for me, personally; in terms of international politics (although “stupid” is treating multiple ongoing genocides with a bit too much flippancy); the endless buffoonery of local politics; the people we’ve lost, even as the now pretty totally unchecked global progress of COVID thrashes peoples’ immune systems if not taking them out itself; and all of this means I barely have any energy these days to worry about our imminent environmental collapse (remember?). It’s been a grind, but as always music is one of the things that make life worthwhile, despite it all.
Even musically, I felt a bit adrift at times in 2023; one of my longstanding methods of music discovery, the esteemed group review site The Singles Jukebox, called it quits in 2022. And except for one last round of our traditional year-end Amnesty picks (where each writer gets to pick one song for coverage with none of the normal criteria for selection), that very much appeared to be that. And then a stray Discord comment late this year led to getting the band back together, and starting in late November the Jukebox has made a pretty amazing (temporary!) return. As always, that led to me encountering a ton of stuff I simply never would have heard of otherwise (and some new discoveries even slipped onto the lists below, just one more reason the practice most places have of running year end stuff early December makes me wince). It didn’t shift my existing favourites from 2023 much, nor did I expect it to, but it did make me feel like I had more context on the year as a whole, across more places and scenes and genres than I did before (but still incomplete, always incomplete).
This in turn feels tied to a change in my year-end list methodology. At this point I feel like I’m never going to settle on a consistent format forever and ever amen; different years pull different things out of me (both in terms of listening and in terms of sharing), and there’s also a bit of a pendulum-swing effect. For the past two years I’ve gone expansive, 40+ records, various other lists to get more things in. This was me chafing at (entirely self-imposed!) restrictions from years past, and it gave me a sense of freedom, even relief. I still stand by those lists (as much as I stand by any part of my past self). But this year looking at my account of what I’d listened to, realizing my shortlist was around 50 LPs and that if I was applying the kind of criteria I’d used recently I could easily include them all… I could feel myself wanting to go in the other direction. It took me a lot longer than I expected to pare that shortlist down to 20 albums (still an arbitrary number!), and I found the process oddly satisfying. Trying to decide what made those last couple of spots had me thinking harder about what I currently value and what my year has been like (and what my differing experiences with all these pieces of music were like) than I’d had to in a while.
Those longer lists have virtues this one doesn’t, of course; I have an even keener than normal feeling of leaving things out, of failing to adequately represent myself or music or… something. So while it’s true every year that there are records I loved that I don’t represent in any list, I feel the need to re-emphasize that truth here, specifically. Sometimes what made the cut over the days I spent putting this together surprised me; there are albums I wrote positive things about that I fully expected to be here that are hovering just out of sight in the 21-25 range. Some of them are represented in the accompanying list of songs that either don’t have albums or just stood out from their surroundings (and as last year I’ve tried to track down music videos, a form I still love, for all of those). From past experience, some of those standouts will wind up representing albums that, if I’d gotten more time with them this year, could have made it onto the main list. I also couldn’t let go of one of my secondary lists; I just really love EPs, and I wish more people made them (even if one of the entrants this year is long enough I’d normally consider it an album, if not for the band themselves dubbing it an EP).
As always these lists are alphabetical instead of ranked (and where I wrote about them, I’ve linked to it here); as I said, just narrowing them down was hard enough. I have no idea how to assess the relative merits of (say) L’Rain’s playfully, kaleidoscopically deep I Killed Your Dog versus a.s.o.’s self-titled, lush trip hop throwback versus the Drin’s gnomic, garage-bound bad vibes. They’re all great. But I did have two that felt like albums of my year, in different ways. The first of the National’s two 2023 records, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, was already a favourite when some of the personal stuff I alluded to above made me profoundly grateful that they’d put out this record, about mental health and the ends of things and mixed feelings, in this particular year (and then they put out a second record, which is not here because nobody gets to double dip, but it’s also good). I had a less specifically autobiographical resonance with Mandy, Indiana’s incredible debut i’ve seen a way but it did blow me away on purely sonic grounds in a way few bands have in the last decade or so. The greatness of that record to me is in more than just how stunningly different it felt the first few times I played it (although that was an experience I loved); as I said when I made their “Pinking Shears” my Amnesty pick for the Jukebox this year, it felt like a second miracle when the album did cohere into a set of songs that they wound up being some of my favourite songs of the year. Despite all the other ways I’ve been tired in 2023, it’s never been with music, and artists like the following (and the prospect of whatever I’ll encounter next year) are the reason why.
20 LPS
a.s.o. — a.s.o. (Low Lying Records)
ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT — “Darling the Dawn” (Constellation)
Avalon Emerson — & the Charm (Another Dove)
Brìghde Chaimbeul — Carry Them With Us (tak:til)
Carly Rae Jepsen — The Loveliest Time (Interscope)
Chappell Roan — The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Island)
The Drin — Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom (Feel It)
Eluvium — (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality (Temporary Residence Limited)
Ghost Marrow — earth + death (The Garotte)
The Hives — The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons (Disques Hives)
L’Rain — I Killed Your Dog (Mexican Summer)
Ladytron — Time’s Arrow (Cooking Vinyl)
Mandy, Indiana — i’ve seen a way (Fire Talk)
Mute Duo — Migrant Flocks (American Dreams)
The National — First Two Pages of Frankenstein (4AD)
Pearly Drops — A Little Disaster (Cascine)
Spanish Love Songs — No Joy (Pure Noise)
Tacoma Park — Tacoma Park (Self Released)
Tørrfall — Tørrfall (De Pene Inngang)
Yo La Tengo — This Stupid World (Matador)
5 EPS
Babygirl — Be Still My Heart (Sandlot)
Death of Heather — Forever (Big Romantic)
hkmori — forever (Self Released)
Tara Clerkin Trio — On the Turning Ground (World of Echo)
Weaklung — We Bring About Our Own Demise (Self Released)
20 MORE SONGS
100 gecs — “Hollywood Baby”
Blur — “Barbaric”
boygenius — “Not Strong Enough”
Caroline Polachek — “Dang”
Dua Lipa — “Houdini”
Eslabon Armado y Peso Pluma — "Ella Baila Sola"
Jiraya Uai & MC Tarapi — “Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela”
Kesha — “Eat the Acid”
Lexie Liu — “delulu”
Maria BC — “Mercury”
Mitski — “My Love Mine All Mine”
Olivia Rodrigo — “bad idea right?”
Picastro — “Earthseed”
Raye ft. 070 Shake — “Escapism.”
Sho Madjozi — “Chale”
Tinashe — “Needs”
Tyla — “Water”
Troye Sivan — “Rush”
Victoria Monét — “On My Mama”
Water From Your Eyes — “Barley”
Ian Mathers