Favorite Music of 2024

Not sure if anyone will read this now that I've quit Facebook and can't post there. But if you are reading it, hello! I don't have any preamble this year; hope you enjoy the list!

Favorite Albums:

1. Geordie Greep: The New Sound
An hour-long jazz-rock odyssey with showtune flourishes that is also a concept album featuring a bunch of satirical character portraits of awful men and their awful ideas about sex and women. This is either going to be very much your thing or it's going to be very much not your thing, and I guess this list tells you where I fall. No other record this year exhilarated me and repulsed me as much as this one. An oddly sad album, too, given the subject matter.

2. Charli xcx: BRAT
Glitchy, fuzzed-out club music reminiscent of Charli's work with PC Music back in the day, but for as experimental as that sounds on paper, it's also just an unrelenting parade of banger after banger. A great example of how pop lyrics can employ syntactical simplicity to find depths of emotion with more efficiency and power than more typically literary songsmiths.

3. Kim Gordon: The Collective
"Alt-rock legend talk-sings over trap beats for 40 minutes" was not a musical recipe I would have ever come up with, but the results speak for themselves. Probably the most successful rap-adjacent album a 71-year-old white woman is ever going to make, and the way that Gordon and producer Justin Raisen find credible continuity between Sonic-Youth-style experimentation and contemporary hip-hop is fun and interesting.

4. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score)
The final two tracks ("Challengers: Match Point" and "Compress / Repress") are obviously the best songs on here and the entire reason for listening to the score. The score knows it, too, because it spends a bunch of the preceding 30 minutes teasing little incomplete snippets of the finale until the pieces finally arrive in an orgiastic release. Kinda like the movie itself and its soon-to-be-legendary final scene (where "Match Point" plays, of course). Rarely has a score so fully encompassed the affect of its film in microcosm.

5. Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice
Every bit as good as Afrique Victime, maybe even better. Definitely more urgent. And as with all Mdou Moctar, the cherry on top of everything else is that it's pure guitar shredding the whole time.

6. Sea Urchin: Destroy!
Indie rock Meatloaf with a penchant for surreal, even at times psychotic flavors to its breakup songs. Plus, a surprisingly great cover of "Call Your Girlfriend" in the middle of it all.

7. Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us
A slight move back toward the familiar after the loose and jammy Father of the Bride, which for me means a more consistent record with fewer highs. But a Vampire Weekend album is still a Vampire Weekend album, and the tunes here are still infectious. The tempo jump in "Ice Cream Piano" alone is worth checking out the whole album.

8. Oranssi Pazuzu: Muuntautuja
I am very out of touch with the world of metal, but every once in a while, a metal release floats its way to my ears and I get hooked. That's what happened with this weird, sludgy, psychedelic metal album.

9. Nala Sinephro: Endlessness
We've gotten a little further into the ambient jazz wave that Sinephro helped codify with Space 1.8 back in 2021, and she's still one of the greats of this little corner of jazz. Immaculate textures. Not to mention the production and mixing by Nala herself, which are aces. One of the best headphone albums of the year.

10. Ches Smith: Laughing Ash
In the liner notes to this album, Smith sarcastically suggests that this album is "Bachman Turner Overdrive meets Last Exit-era Sonny Sharrock," and while his point is that he doesn't compose music to be a melange of influences, I gotta say that I don't think I could come up with a better way to describe this deeply odd, deeply arresting album. Oops. He also writes that it's okay to find this music funny, which is good, because I do think there's something very playful and even comedic about it, and I also don't think laughing at something has to be derogatory. The joy of invention is infectious and manifests itself as cathartic laughter, after all.

Great 2024 Songs Not On These Albums:

Adeem the Artist: "Night Sweats"—Adeem remarking that a murdered Palestinian child's "face is like my son's" is something that's never left me after I heard it the first time. I don't think I could ever say anything about this genocide that even approaches the power of that line. Oh my god, what have we done?

Bon Iver: "THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS"—Scratches a classic Bon Iver itch, only with Vernon singing at a non-falsetto register. The most I've liked a new Bon Iver track in quite some time.

Sabrina Carpenter: "Taste"—I didn't think I liked Sabrina Carpenter at first, but then "Espresso" broke down my defenses just in time for "Taste" to get me. Hooks on hooks.

Doechii & JT: "Alter Ego"—I don't know anything about Doechii, but I randomly heard this in a mix, and I quickly became addicted to a song that rhymes "vagina" and "designer" and sounds like M.I.A. covering Azealia Banks, or maybe the other way around.

Donato Dozzy: "Santa Cunegonda"—A hypnotizing techo groove. Probably not the most innovative thing out there, but I am but flesh.

Emergency Group: "Spirit Logic"—A great cosmic epic from a great fusion group. The effortless expansiveness that this group manages to evoke again and again remains intoxicating to me.

FATHER JOHN MISTY: "Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose"—I don't know if I heard a better distillation of the waking-nightmare feeling of being alive in 2024 than this track.

Floating Points: "Fast Forward"—Sam Shepherd continues to make some of the most exciting dance music out there. This rules. I would go to clubs more if this is the kind of thing they played.

Greg Foat: "Sea of Tranquility"—The delicious intersection of smooth jazz and spiritual jazz, with some ambient synths thrown in for extra flavor.

Fucked Up: "HOLD UP HALF THE SKY"—Fucked Up's limited-time-only album Who's Got the Time & A Half? is pretty solid overall, but this is the track on there that I found myself replaying most. An oddly addicting chat/groove.

Helena Hauff: "Punks in the Gym"—I hadn't checked in on Helena Hauff in a while, and when I do, lo and behold, her 12" from this year absolutely rules. This one's the clear standout, a throbbing, sinister banger that the liner notes accurately describe as "a volcanic dance where 303 earthquakes shake the ground before eruptions."

JPEGMAFIA: "either on or off the drugs"—The story surrounding JPEGMAFIA's album I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU was twofold: 1) he's incorporating rock elements, and 2) he's being uncharacteristically vulnerable. My favorite track off the record didn't do much of #1, but it had plenty of #2: a song that staggers between contemptuous swagger and self-loathing, culminating in a prayer that his children don't end up weak like him. May be the first song I've heard that samples an AI-generated song, too, which is something I don't know how I feel about.

Kendrick Lamar: "squabble up"—It was between this and "Meet the Grahams" for the Kendrick representation on this post (still need to spend more time with GNX as an album). Ultimately, I decided that it's a lot more fun to listen to the way he pronounces the "face / taste" rhyme than to six and a half minutes of a man being murdered in cold blood.

Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements: "We Waited for the Bears to Leave"—Lattimore's harp and McClements's accordion oscillate with each other into a 12-minute contemporary-classical crescendo. Very cool.

Kelly Lee Owens: "Dreamstate"—She's mostly just chanting the title of the song over an electropop pulse. I love that.

Chappell Roan: "Good Luck, Babe!"—Of the many, many Chappell Roan earworms that captivated everyone this year, this was the one that got its wormy hooks into me. That bridge is virtually Swiftian.

Shabaka feat. Floating Points & Laraaji: "I'll Do Whatever You Want"—Exactly the sum of its parts, and given the parts, that of course means it's great.

The Smile: "Zero Sum"—Had The Smile calmed down and released either a single album with only the best tracks from this year or two more sonically distinct albums, I probably would have found space for the band on the album list. Instead, in a crisis of indecision between their two very good 2024 albums, I decided to punt and simply include the best track from either album. Forever in my mind associated with some of the worst dancing by some of the worst people.

Patricia Taxxon: "Frat Claws"—I don't know a lot about furries or the music they make, but this is a terrific piece of indietronica. Good for the furries.

Xiu Xiu: "Piña, Coconut & Cherry"—People talked about the new Xiu Xiu record being their most accessible in years, and maybe it was, but the final track, which ended up being my favorite, feels like it could have come from the group's previous record, the abyss-black Ignore Grief. Dissonant strings, dissonant synths, and fuzzed out screaming turning what on paper seems like a love song into something that sounds apocalyptic. I guess that is now my preferred mode for the band.

Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Favorite Music of 2023

I'm back, baby!

Well, for this post and a year-end movie post, at least. In terms of this blog, the big thing about 2023 is that I stopped posting regularly—and it felt nice! Not that I didn't enjoy blogging every week for eight years, but as I alluded to in my year-end movie list last year, life has just become very full and busy for me over the past couple of years (in mostly good ways), and it's been something of a relief not to have the constant pressure to keep a weekly blog deadline; I honestly don't think I realized how strong that pressure was, and going on hiatus felt like when you suddenly realize you've been holding your breath and let it out in a rush. So speaking of holding breath, I wouldn't hold yours for the grand return of the weekly mini-reviews posts.

Anyway, y'all came here for music, not for a rehash of the "I'm so busy" jig that all adults spiral into if you ask them how things are going. So: music! 2023 was a weird year for me. More than any other year I can remember, I had a hard time finding music that I loved. My usual genre blind spots have become blinder than ever (I have literally zero idea what is going on in metal, and I have mostly bounced off most of the biggest hip-hop acts of the year, though based on commercial performance [dubious, but still], I'm not the only one struggling to connect with contemporary hip-hop), and the Top 40's very chaotic, TikTok-influenced hodge-podge yielded nothing that grabbed me. I believe this is what academics call Getting Old. That said, even within my home-base genres of rock and jazz, it was harder for me to find music that I was passionate about. Part of this certainly has to do with the increasingly fractured and marginal place listening to new music has in my life because of all the other demands that pull at my attention—again, I invoke Getting Old. I dunno; my "to-listen" list is longer than ever this year, so it's not as if I didn't have options. I'm confident that there are albums out there that I haven't given much time to that would have had a good chance to make my top 10 (for example: Saved! by the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, née Lingua Ignota), so maybe I just need to change my habits.

Whatever the case, enough reflection. There was still plenty of good music this year, so let's get on with it. I come not to bury 2023 but to praise it!

As always, I'd love to hear what music y'all readers (if you're still out there!) enjoyed this year! I view this as the beginning of a conversation—a semicolon rather than a period, if I can get English-teacher-y. Let me know what I'm missing!

Favorite Albums:

1. Sufjan Stevens: Javelin
Sufjan's most straightforward and accessible songwriting in quite some time, which might seem like it would be an issue for someone like me who definitely prefers Weird Sufjan. And initially, I was a little underwhelmed: "Carrie & Lowell by way of Illinois" was my initial, slightly disappointed reaction, but this grew in my estimation with each listen until here it is as my favorite of the year. The thing about straightforward, accessible songwriting is that it is straightforward and accessible, even for a pretentious curmudgeon like me, and I became bowled over at the beauty and clarity of this music. Plus, magic of all magic, he was able to turn "There's a World," probably the worst track off Neil Young's Harvest, into something delicate and gorgeous.

2. Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile
This isn't the kind of music people mean when they talk about ambient jazz, but it's the descriptor that comes most readily to mind when I try to describe this album: a 72-minute exploration of space and mood, Arooj Aftab's meditative vocals weaving in and out of the soundscapes laid down by Vijay Iyer's spare but precise piano and Shahzad Ismaily's Moog. I'm fairly familiar with Iyer's output and a little with Aftab's, but Ismaily' is entirely new to me, and he's a quiet revelation on here. Hypnotic music. Perfect in its own cosmic way.

3. Emergency Group: Inspection of Cruelty
Not a lot to explaining why I like this: it sounds like the early goings of electric jazz, especially Miles Davis c. In a Silent Way or A Tribute to Jack Johnson or maybe Tony Williams's Emergency!—aka some of my favorite music of all time. Probably my most-listened-to album of the year if I were able to keep those metrics. It just goes down so groovily and easily.

4. Kate NV: WOW
I don't know if this makes sense to anyone else, but this album sounds like Adventure Time music to me. I don't know what else to say.

5. more eaze: Eternity
Bandcamp (and, I suppose by extension, more eaze herself) classifies this as a "track," but it's 43 minutes long, so I declare an album. It's a beautiful piece of longform electronica that reminds me of early The Orb in its playfulness.

6. JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: SCARING THE HOES
About as much fun as you'd imagine a collaboration between these two being, i.e. very. Riding a line between uproarious and vaguely disquieting while spinning some ridiculous samples, these two are a match made in alt-rap heaven. And you really beat the delirious rhymes: "Let me tell you what I'm gonna do / Tell no lies, just tell your truth / I'm a big dog like Marmaduke / Park itself when I come through." Bespoke slant rhymes from above. Great album art.

7. Mandy, Indiana: i've seen a way
The debut album from this experimental electronica band is surprisingly diverse, pinging around from synth-core to ambient to industrial to more openly club-y material, but for as divergent as some of these sounds can be, there's a cohesive sense of space and tone that makes this feel like a unified vision of eclecticism rather than just scattershot pastiche.

8. Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My
I wish it hadn't taken Michael Stipe and Bon Iver being on one of his albums for Lonnie Holley to get on my radar, but better late than never, right? He's a bona-fide Southern weirdo in a way that appeals to me quite a bit, somehow very earthy and material while also coming across as a kind of cosmic mystic. Very much my speed.

9. Fever Ray: Radical Romantics
Not a particularly surprising album from Fever Ray, but still good. Also, it has some of the best worst cover art of the year.

10. Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I'm a very fair-weather Lana fan, but the weather turned out to be very fair this year. The title track and (especially) "A&W" are two of her best songs, and the rest of the album is very strong, too—except for the "Judah Smith Interlude," which may be my most-skipped track of the year.

Great 2023 Songs Not On These Albums:

Chief Adjuah: "Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning"—The pivot Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) made in his LP this year kind of threw me: there's a continuity in leaving spiritual jazz for West-African-inflected folk music that makes sense in retrospect (the connection between West Africa and New Orleans is one that Adjuah himself made very clear in his promotion of the record), but it's a left turn I certainly didn't see coming. Anyway, cool and interesting album, but one that only really coalesced into something I loved in its loping 15-minute title track, a more stripped back and somber song than many of the other compositions, with Adjuah intoning like a prophet over some picked string instrument (the liner notes aren't very specific) and Weedie Braimah's insistent, driving percussion.

Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids: "First Peoples"—I sometimes find what Idris Ackamoor does a little corny, but when he and the Pyramids hit, they hit. Exhibit A: this track, winding higher and higher around its reedy riff.

jamie branch: "burning grey"—RIP to weird jazz great jamie branch. Glad the third Fly or Die came together anyway. This track in particular rips.

Janelle Monáe: "Champagne Shit"—I could have picked any number of tracks from The Age of Pleasure, but I picked this one.

PJ Harvey: "The Nether-edge"—I wasn't a huge fan of the new PJ Harvey album, but this slinky, pulsing track lodged itself deep inside my brain and wouldn't leave.

Kieran Hebden & William Tyler: "Darkness, Darkness"—The "cosmic folk" great William Tyler working with Four Tet. I mean.

Octo Octa: "Late Night Love"—Kind of the consensus "this is the electronic dance track from this year that all the critics are into," and I dunno, critics can be right.

on4word: "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"—This is perilously close to a meme instead of real music, and the popularity of an album that recreated Radiohead's In Rainbows exclusively using samples from N64 games turned what was already a niche trend into a full-blown avalanche of imitators. But it's really good! Especially this song, which feels like boss music or maybe a really intense level where you have to outrun a robot while doing tricky platforming or something.

The Smile: "Bending Hectic"—And speaking of Radiohead, if we're not ever going to get a real new Radiohead album, I'll have to keep banging the drum for the almost Radiohead releases. When "Bending Hectic" changes gears, it thunders.

Spoon: "Sugar Babies"—Spoon just don't miss, and somehow it always sounds like something they just threw together in an hour. Surely false. Love the infectious shuffle of this one.

Xiu Xiu: "For M."—The moment when Xiu Xiu's album of already pitch-black sludge and terror pushes itself so far that it turns nearly ambient, and it's kind of beautiful.

Young Fathers: "I Saw"—I don't really understand what Young Fathers' whole deal is, and maybe that's their deal? The beginning of this song sounds furious, spitting out lyrics and that Viking-drum rock beat like venom, but then it morphs into something much sunnier and more anthemic? I can't parse it, but it's good.

Favorite Music of 2022

If you missed my Favorite Movies of 2022 list, here it is! Now here's my companion music post. I usually do the music post first, but my scheduling is weird this year. I'm genuinely sorry for how long this took, but at least here we are now!

I don't have a lot to say up here. Per usual, my usual disclaimers: I don't listen to enough metal, I feel out of touch with whatever's going on with rap, I'm slowly turning into a jazz dad. I also haven't had as much time as usual to review music on my weekly posts, so when there's a chance to link to a review, I will, but that doesn't happen a ton.

Anyway, enjoy! As always, I view this as a conversation-starter, not a definitive list; there's always more to hear, and I'm on the prowl to hear it! So let me know what music you enjoyed in 2022.

Favorite Albums:

1. The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention
Am I just nostalgic for Radiohead? Probably! This side project is the closest we're going to get to new Radiohead music for a while, and I ended up listening to it a ton in 2022. Probably not going to blow anyone's mind, but it's good music, y'all!

[Read original review]

2. Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen
I remember hearing the debut album from Brittney Parks, aka Sudan Archives, a few years ago and thinking it was good but never really returning to it. I should probably go spend some more time with it, because Sudan Archives's second album dominating my listening habits for the last month of 2022. A diverse collection of pop styles bent into beguiling, surprising shapes by Parks's penchant for exploration, I just couldn't get enough of Natural Brown Prom Queen. It really scratched an itch for me, an itch I didn't realize I had, honestly. Probably the catchiest album that I listened to this past year.

3. Makaya McCraven: In These Times
I coined a term last year to describe Blue Lick's Hold On, Hold Fast: plan-period core, and while this funky, orchestral-tinged jazz record doesn't really have a lot sonically in common with Blue Lick's experimental skitter, this was definitely the album I kept flipping on as soon as the bell rang and my planning block full of grading or lesson prep began at school. I hope this doesn't come across as me saying that In These Times is "background music," because nothing could be further from the truth. It is, above all, a surprising album, relentlessly inventive, folding big band flourishes into jazz fusion grooves that juke into twinkling string flourishes or percussive digressions. Love McCraven, love this record.

4. Alvvays: Blue Rev
I spent a long time more or less addicted to "In Undertow," the hazed-out anthem from Alvvays's previous album, so it's no surprise I cottoned to their album this year. I don't think there's anything I'm quite as in love with as "In Undertow," but there are an awful lot of ear-wormy tracks lurking in this record. "Easy On Your Own?" is probably the one sticking with me most right now, but plenty of other tracks could overtake it. It feels like over the past 5-6 years, we've seen a lot of bands trying to revive '80s/'90s indie rock sounds, and this is basically doing that UK fuzzy twee pop thing, but that's cool because Alvvays has the melodic chops to prove they could have cut it back in the heyday of that style.

5. Mary Halvorson: Amaryllis
Mary Halvorson is one of the great 21st century jazz guitarists and overall jazz innovators in general, and 2022 was a great year for her. Amaryllis is my favorite of the duo of records she released in May (the other being the still excellent Belladonna): technical yet playful, mind-bending, weirdly catchy. Belladonna is the more obvious showcase for Halvorson as a guitarist, but the fuller sound of Amaryllis gives her a much bigger canvas. I love her ability to make me think, "Oh, I think I know where this is going" right before juking into some completely unprecedented direction.

6. Jenny Hval: Classic Objects
The obligatory Jenny Hval spot. It feels like I put her in here every year. Looking back at my archives, I guess that's not true, but it's comforting to imagine her music as a constant presence in my life. As long as she keeps delivering songs like "Jupiter," I don't imagine that changing any time soon.

7. William Basinski & Janet Schaefer: "...on reflection"
Supremely relaxing. A piano piece edited ("woven," as the liner notes say) around itself for 43 minutes. I just got done assuring you that In These Times isn't background music, but "...on reflection" absolutely is, intentionally so, and it's beautiful.

8. Seabrook Trio: In the Swarm
A terrific jazz trio prominently featuring a diddley bow, which gives this album's uneasy, proggy sound an oddly Americana flavor. It's a weird juxtaposition, but I like it a ton.

9. SAULT: Earth
This enigmatic British soul group released six(!!!) albums in 2022, all of them worth a listen, each of them an incredibly distinct sonic object, from the symphonic choral music of Air and its sequel to the sincere gospel of Untitled (God). My favorite of the bunch is Earth, probably because it sounds a lot like a Parliament-Funkadelic record, which is hard to pass up.

10. Beyoncé: RENAISSANCE
In the 6 years since Lemonade, I had kind of wondered if Beyoncé had decided to wind down into a quiet, safe legacy act, what with misguided Lion King tie-in movies and such. But nope, she's still got it. There are some absolute monster dance-floor tracks here; my favorite is the stunning, Donna-Summer-sampling closer "Summer Renaissance," but few tracks on this album aren't monsters. Much as I continue to find the "Beyoncé as divine-right monarch" thing off-putting in theory, I continue to find her music irresistible in practice. Just banger after club banger here. I dunno if the house revival that Beyoncé and Drake seemed to want to will into existence will happen, but if all we got out of that was this album, I'd say we still ended up on top.

Great 2022 Songs Not On These Albums:

Arcade Fire: "The Lightning I, II"—It was a bad year to be an Arcade Fire fan, for reasons both quotidian (the new album was kinda meh) to catastrophic (Win Butler is a serial and pretty unrepentant sex pest, it turns out). But this track, the lead single for the new album, really captured the old magic. The moment when it shifts from "Part I" to "Part II" is that same goosebump-inducing crescendo they've been mining their whole career, and dammit, it still works. I don't know how I'll feel about Arcade Fire going forward, post-allegations, but at least there's this unintentional swan song.

Björk: "Fossora"—A lot of the press surrounding the new Björk album described a "mushroom rave," and this is the most mushroom ravey on the record. It melds the woodwind-heavy arrangements of Utopia with heavy, almost industrial beats in a way that evokes dank underground caverns, and I'm very into it. Oddly catchy.

Father John Misty: "The Next 20th Century"—I had a hard time getting into the new Father John Misty album, which was, bizarrely, very swing-jazz heavy, but this song, the final track, blew me away, and not just because it's mid-song explosion of guitar noise is a change of pace from the rest of the record. It's a song that opens with the lyric, "The nazis that we hired for our wedding band played your anthem like I wasn't there for the father-daughter dance," and doesn't let up with that sort of eerie, politically uneasy juxtaposition. Captures perfectly the weary paranoia I feel about the future. The prospect of another 20th century is a dreadful, apocalyptic one, but at least we'll get another round of good music.

Floating Points: "Vocoder"—I'm not 100% sure if it actually is a vocoder that Sam Shepherd's using on this club banger, but whatever it is, that liquid metal texture it has is incredible.

HAIM: "Lost Track"—At least once a year, it seems, HAIM just casually release these earworms that simply won't let me go. I couldn't even begin to estimate how many times I flipped this song on because it was stuck in my head.

Kendrick Lamar: "Mother I Sober"—A lot of Kendrick's album this past year felt like a response to his landmark Pulitzer award: a lugubrious, over-cooked record anxious to say Big Things. It was okay. "Mother I Sober" is maybe the most lugubrious and over-cooked track on the album (either that or the honestly kind of unlistenable "We Cry Together"), but for whatever the reason, it's the song of his I've returned to most from this album cycle, even more so than the critical favorite "The Heart Part 5." Built from a solemn piano loop and a knotty, emotionally anguished narrative (even for Kendrick) surrounding cycles of abuse in Black communities, it's a tough listen, but I find it riveting and profoundly poignant. I'm sure for some the "I broke the cycle" conclusion of the song feels like a self-aggrandizing manifestation of the savior complex Kendrick Lamar (and his fandom) has wrestled with for years now, but I find its admission profoundly moving.

Maren Morris: "The Furthest Thing"—I've heard Maren Morris compared to Golden Hour-era Kasey Musgraves, and while that's kinda true in places, this is really the only track of hers that registers as fully indebted to the Musgraves masterpiece. Golden Hour is great, so of course this is great, too, and the song has that knack that a lot of Morris's work has, i.e. taking fairly archetypal material (in this case, missing a distant lover) and making it feel distinct to her. Some really great, understated piano from co-writer Greg Kurstin on here, too.

Caroline Polachek: "Billions"—I guess I should start getting into Caroline Polachek. She kinda fell off my radar after Chairlift disbanded, but this song is great.

Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Kaiser, & Alex Varty: "Pacifica Koral Reef"—I'm cheating by including this, because it's basically an album: a 55-minute track, the only track from the one-track album of the same name. But it's good! Wadada Leo Smith is still out there doing his thing, and I love him for it.

CC Sorensen: "Alter Destiny"—An intoxicating synth (I think?) loop mixed with what sound like field recordings of frogs and other nocturnal creatures. Great, vibey, mildly kosmische stuff.

Spoon: "The Hardest Cut"—We need to be careful not to underappreciate Spoon, because it's not nearly as easy as they make it seem to churn out lithe indie pop-rock year after year like they do. One of their bouncier tracks in recent memory.

Szun Waves: "New Universe"—Szun Waves' typical electronic pulse mixed with spiritual jazz sounds great in this standout track from their album Earth Patterns, which was my #11 album of the year (if that makes any difference to you).

Jessie Ware: "Free Yourself"—Jessie Ware is easily the best person doing this disco-revival thing that's been going on for the past few years, and this is easily one of her best songs in that vein.

 

Honorable Mention:

Alison Swafford: Sonnets—My buddy Alison made a great album this year! It's a loose concept album inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, and you should go listen to it (and buy it!) if that sounds at all interesting to you. One of my most-listened-to albums of the year, and I would have put it in the top 10 if that didn't feel like a conflict of interest.

Favorite Movies of 2022

This year, I've had the distinct feeling that this blog is winding down. Even by the tiny numbers I would usually get, my readership has been especially small this year, going from 3-4 dozen per post to now 1-2 dozen, and I don't get as many comments (either on social media or on the blog site itself) as I used to. I've never been in it with the intent to gain a huge audience, but perhaps the waning readership is indicative of my own waning interest in this project. Life as a teacher plus father of two is pretty full right now, and I'm having less and less time (and energy) to devote to doing my Prog series, incidental non-review posts, summer projects, and even just non-movie write-ups in the weekly reviews posts, essentially turning the blog into just an outlet for me to repost my Letterboxd reviews, which makes me wonder what the use is of maintaining this site as well as my Letterboxd account. Furthermore, one email subscription option after another has fallen through, which means that the small circle of people who follow this through email alerts haven't been able to get updates in a while, and I'm not even sure if they're reading anymore.

I'm not ending the blog—not right now, anyway. But I do think that the blog's end is probably on the horizon. I'm not sad about it; this year marks a whole decade of this blog, and that's a good run. My life in 2023 is monumentally different from my life in 2013, and while a lot of those differences have made my life better, it's getting to the point where they've made it less conducive to blogging. If/when I decide to end this blog, it'll be a with a sense of satisfaction and finality on my part. I'm happy to have maintained this site for as long as I have.

Anyway, all of this is a long, mostly unrelated preamble to my annual favorite movies list, but it felt appropriate to have this kind of state-of-the-union in a space where I usually put year-end reflections. Here's the list, though. As always, I didn't get a chance to see everything, and not everything I wanted to see came to Knoxville, etc. But as of this writing, here's my favorites of 2022!

Favorite Movies

1. The Fabelmans
2022 has been marked by a few films that stick out for their old-school technical craft (and I do mean that as shade toward the majority of Hollywood releases, which are less technically competent than the output of any era of Hollywood I can think of), but among the Top Guns and Avatars, this one rises to the top of that already rarefied crew by being suffused with fascinating, knotty self-critique. A late-career home run from our boy Steve.

[Read original review]



 

2. Nope
I hope Jordan Peele continues to make weird, ungainly, mad-scientist-brained movies until the theaters collapse.

[Read original review]

3. TÁR
Real "makes ya think" cinema of the highest order. Cate Blanchett gives the performance of her career.

[Read original review]

4. The Northman
Robert Eggers goes full pulp with this viking revenge saga, but Eggers is fundamentally incapable of not being a little nerdy weirdo, so it's also got the shaman Willem Dafoe stuff, which is what truly elevates this.

[Read original review]

5. The Banshees of Inisherin
The funniest bummer of the year.

[Read original review]

6. Kimi
The most conventionally exciting movie Steven Soderbergh's made in a while, and I do love a good bit of conventional excitement. There have been a lot of paranoid, claustrophobic thrillers this year, many of them good, but this one's my favorite.

[Read original review]

7. RRR
Speaking of conventional excitement: who doesn't want to see a bunch of British colonizers get devoured by an army of jungle animals? Just good, clean family entertainment.

[Read original review]

8. We're All Going to the World's Fair
It's been marketed as a horror movie, and there are a few spooky things about it. But mostly it's a reflection of what digital life is like. Do you spend too much time online? You might feel seen by this movie.

[Read original review]

9. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
This was a weirdly good year for stop-motion films released on Netflix, and this was without a doubt the best of them. I can't believe it's taken this long for Guillermo del Toro to make a stop-motion movie.

[Read original review]

10. Crimes of the Future
Cronenberg doing his thing. "Surgery is the new sex" is the movie quote of the year, maybe?

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande—A lovely little movie about a woman exploring her sexuality as she approaches old age. I didn't hear many people talking about this movie except for the (fair) critiques about how it deals with sex work, but it really is nice.

Best Action: Avatar: The Way of Water—Of the two "its last act is one big action setpiece, and it's the best part of the movie by far" films released this year, Avatar absolutely eats Top Gun's lunch.

Stop-Motion Film Released on Netflix Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—The truly strange, bursting-at-the-seams brainchild of Henry Selick and Jordan Peele. Glad there's still room, at least in the streaming ecosystem, for weirdos like these fellas.

Jordan Peele Makes a Weird, Ungainly, Mad-Scientist-Brained Movie Runner-Up: Wendell and Wild—See above. Good year for Netflix animation; good year for Jordan Peele.

"Here's Another Good Animated Movie Released on Netflix, WTF Is Happening" Award: Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood—Richard Linklater rotoscopes his childhood, and the results are a fun little boomer dream.

Look, I Just Need to List Out a Couple More Good Animated Movies Released on Netflix This Year, Because It's Unbelievable to Me How Many There Were: My Father's Dragon and The House—Netflix has always been a secret bastion of interesting animation, but my god, they outdid themselves this year.

Pixar Corner: Turning Red—Maybe the most unfairly treated movie of the year, what between the disingenuous conservative moral panic and Disney's unceremonious dumping of it on Disney+. Release your best movies in theaters, you goons!

"What Are Some Other Paranoid, Claustrophobic Thrillers?" Award: Barbarian—Dances all over the "is this a horror movie or a thriller?" line, but whatever this is, I had a great time with it. A couple months later, and I'm still thinking about Justin Long singing "Riki Tiki Tavi."

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: X / Pearl—Seriously, what a year for Mia Goth. Easily the best thing about Ti West's duo (soon to be turned trilogy) of horror pastiche.

Unexpectedly Hilarious Award: The Batman—I dunno, I laughed a lot here. Colin Farrell in particular is very funny, but also, I just think the "The" in the title is funny.

"Never Dully with Sully" Award: Bones and All—People seem somewhat divided on Mark Rylance's performance here as the doddering Southern gentleman cannibal, but I thought he was great. One of the interesting tensions in Bones and All is the way it is constantly teetering on the edge of being something much goofier and pulpier than it presents itself as, and Rylance is a key part of complicating that balancing act.

Best Joke: Everything Everywhere All at Once—I just laughed so stupidly hard every time this movie wrapped back around to Raccacoonie.

Best Ending Credits: White Noise—I wish my grocery store played LCD Soundsystem over the PA.

Worst Movie of the Year: Lightyear—A completely cynical piece of trash and the more dire signs of Disney/Pixar's decline yet. Thank goodness we also got Turning Red this year, or the thought of Pixar's future would be unbearably bleak.

Best Non-2022 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2022: The Long Day Closes—Aching, personal filmmaking. Terence Davies at his absolute best.