Favorite releases of 2023
Listened to and wrote about more music this year than I have in a long time. I focused mostly on jazz and jazz-adjacent music, mostly from International Anthem and Colorfield Records, both of which labels were on an absolute tear this last year, putting out album after album of fascinating, adventurous music. Like last year, my favorites basically include everything I wrote about, plus a few other things that I never got around to putting up here. The list isn’t presented in any special order. I’d recommend checking out the always-great 2023 list at Said the Gramophone, Ana Gavrilovska’s favorite jazz albums of 2023, and Jeremy Larson’s list of Best Little Moments 2023.
The group’s new album, “Travel,” is the result of their practice of beginning each day in the studio with an improvisation. The album’s tracks are lightly edited and post-produced versions of those improvisations. Incredible to hear, a band that’s been around for 30-ish years putting out four tracks of dynamic and appealing explorations.
“Imprinting” starts with organ (I think?) and some clattering percussion (and what sounds like running water), and bass. Lots of texture in this one. It’s slower and quieter to some extent than the others, with the bass a constant presence and Buck’s percussion, active and always moving, shifting. Great track and probably my favorite on the album.
All four tracks on “Travel” have something to say and offer lots for the listener to hold onto—it’s so impressive to hear a group like this make music that’s both challenging and mysterious, but also generous, that swerves and counters your expectations but also lets you feel like you’re in on the secret.
Blue Note’s “Transmissions from Total Refreshment Centre” is a fun, varied compilation that features groups associated with London’s Total Refreshment Centre, a music venue and recording studio. Even with my own very limited perspective of the London jazz scene—based solely on things I’ve read in reviews and on message boards—I know there’s a lot happening there right now, and this compilation offers a great look at some of the artists and groups that are moving things forward and making connections.
First off, for being a compilation, the whole thing feels as cohesive as an album. There’s not a lot of whiplash from track to track, which is a testament to the vibe of the tracks here and the sequencing. There’s a mix of instrumental tracks and tracks that feature guest vocalists, and it has the shape of a lively, restless album. Soccer96—a duo—lead off the compilation with “Visions, feat. Kieron Boothe,” which has the high-energy jazz-and-hip-hop feel of some of the tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s “untitled unmastered” for example. Boothe fits in with Soccer96’s groove so well, matching the tone of his flow perfectly as the track shifts.
The new Rob Mazurek and Exploding Orchestra album, “Lightning Dreamers,” is the kind of listening experience—the kind of aesthetic experience—that I like best. You have no idea where the music is going to go, but you trust that you’re in for a good time. There’s confidence, authority, and ambition from the start. Some of my most memorable listening experiences, reading experiences, watching experiences start like that: some level of bewilderment gives way to excitement and understanding.
“Shape Shifter” starts in a somewhat more conventional way than some of the preceding tracks on the album, with statement of the main theme by Mazurek’s trumpet and the synth bass. The band runs through it a few times, taking a breather here and there to let Gerald Cleaver’s fantastic drumming shine. Then, a little more than 2 minutes in, it all changes. Cleaver picks up the pace and the band rolls into a super-kinetic groove, with a long showcase for Jeff Parker’s insane guitar playing (all over this track and all over this album, Parker adds beautiful textures and sounds in all the right places). “Shape Shifter,” like the other songs on the album, is deeply composed, deeply felt—every time I listen to this album, I feel like I come away with something different.
“Senzatempo” is the second collaborative album from Ozmotic (Simone Bosco and Riccardo Giovinetto) and Fennesz and it is astoundingly beautiful. It’s easy to get lost in the sounds of this album, and from what Ozmotic have said about the recording process, it seems as if that was part of the aim. “Senzatempo” took shape partially during the initial days of the pandemic, and it was that inability to get together in person to play or record that allowed Ozmotic and Fennesz to generate ideas that matured slowly, over many months of discussion and consideration. “Senzatempo” means “timeless” or “without time” and in the discussion of the compositions, Ozmotic has talked about focusing on a feeling of time becoming borderless, dilating, expanding. All the individual tracks on “Senzatempo” share that feeling, a wash of sounds that appears eternal and inexhaustible, an ocean wave crashing onto a shore now, the same as it did thousands of years ago, the same as it will do thousands of years from now.
“Movements I & II” illustrates this really well. There’s a kind of smash audio cut into the track, where slowly sliding strings move alongside a bass drone and lightly chirping electronics. The strings are orchestral, yearning, cinematic, and are interrupted occasional by static scorches and very faint bird noise. There’s a more pronounced electronic pulse around the five-minute mark, when the track grows in volume and intensity and then shuts down completely (with the exception of the birdsong in the background). A thrilling break in the song, and then what sounds like a muted and mechanically plucked electric guitar enters—imagine something like a robot with a dozen hands strumming a guitar above the nut. Part II has more motion, with guitar washes, blasts of hydraulic percussion, it’s all more danceable, more choreographic, winding down again to the mechanically plucked guitar and another smash cut out of the track into silence.
Gamedze launches “Wynter Time” with some fidgety percussion, stickwork and light chimes, with the bass and horns also twitching with anticipation before they burst into the tune’s main statement, with the horns taking the lead on a slow, melancholic phrase. But the track doesn’t stay in that spot. Buddy Wells plays an astounding sax solo, though what feels like a solo turns into a dialogue with Thembinkosi Mavimbela’s bass (amazing playing here and all over the whole album), and then a full-on conversation with Gamedze’s drums too, and a slight lull until Robin Fassie’s trumpet enters, lurking at first and then sounding out more forcefully, more demonstratively. I think it’s this kind of dynamic that Gamedze means, a dilation of time, “pushing and pulling in different directions,” stretching things out—the kind of conversation that’s so good and so fascinating that it can sustain itself for hours, for a whole night.
Gamedze’s band here is incredible, and they clearly have such a good feel for playing with each other. There are countless moments throughout the album where the players set each other up in interesting and unexpected ways—like they all trust and have confidence in each other’s creativity. Gamedze in particular is a really striking player, not ever overly showy, but always up to some kind of business, on the edges, in the background. You can even hear him doing it live, on the three bonus cuts on the album, where he’s playing with a totally different band (these versions are so cool to hear, Chérif El-Masri’s guitar takes the lead on some of these in place of the horns, and it alters the whole charge of the song, “Melancholia” especially feels darker, more drastic). A really special album.
Daniel Rotem’s new album, “Wave Nature,” resists easy description. It’s not quite a jazz album, not quite experimental, not quite pure soundcraft, it’s something in between all those. It offers challenging ideas paired with good hooks and catchy phrases, left-turns and guideposts. It’s reminiscent in some ways, maybe mostly in execution, to music like that of the Books, where you hear combinations of sounds and instruments that you would hardly expect to be paired together, musical styles that seem like they should be at odds with each other but that work incredibly well in combination (“Accumulated Shortcomings,” for instance, has a wistful synth line that wouldn’t feel out of place in an adventure RPG videogame, but it’s paired with a sax solo whose tone calls to mind the main theme from Lee Holdridge’s “Mr. Mom” score, and it all sounds beautiful. Or “Savior Complex,” which pairs a Liars circa-“They Were Wrong So We Drowned” beat and background drone with incredibly gorgeous, calligraphic sax playing from Rotem. You just gotta hear it.)
What “Wave Nature” is like, more than anything, is the music you imagine from textual descriptions before you hear the actual music. This is what I mean: when I read Alex Ross’s amazing “The Rest is Noise,” and his descriptions of the music of Webern, Berg, Stravinsky, Sibelius, or Hindemith, I imagined music so powerful and fascinating that it was beyond comprehension—blizzards of notes that were confounding and brain-breaking. And then when I actually listened to the music, I was often—but not always—disappointed by what I found. Rotem’s music is like imaginary music made real—something fanciful that you might idly cook up in your head, but he actually makes it happen.
The Clientele’s last album, “Music for the Age of Miracles,” felt like it could have been a finale for the band—there was something there in the album, haunted and elegiac, a sense that things were disappearing, ending, emptying out. But here they are, six years later, with a new album, the even more haunting and elegiac (and beautiful) “I Am Not There Anymore.”
Musically, this is the most adventurous the band has ever been. Early singles “Blue Over Blue” and “Dying in Mary” highlighted the band’s use of programmed beats, samples, unusual rhythms (Alasdair MacLean said “Dying in May” has an Arabic flamenco rhythm), drones, and general willingness to take some big swings. In some ways, a lot of this feels like a progression from what they did on “Everything You See Tonight Is Different from Itself” on “Music for the Age of Miracles,” a six-minute epic that prominently featured programmed beats and samples. There’s the bossa nova of “Claire’s Not Real,” the big beats and distorted guitar of “Garden Eye Mantra,” cut-up beats, samples, and field recordings on “The Village Is Always on Fire,” it’s a thread that runs through the album, the band becoming less mellow and more experimental with age. [Also not to gloss over the gorgeous interstitial songs by Mark Keen that break up the album: Radials B, C, E, and H, all delicate, lapidary works].
The album starts with the truly tremendous “Fables of the Silverlink,” an almost nine-minute masterpiece and one of the most moving things the Clientele have ever written. As a lyric writer, MacLean has a seemingly supernatural skill for being able to pick out the right concrete details, the right sequence of words, that can create a vivid atmosphere and provoke genuine emotion. “Fables of the Silverlink” doesn’t quite seem like it’s telling a linear narrative, it feels more like scenes and memories and imagining put together through association, but the whole effect is one of reflection, grief, joy, gratitude, a mix of moments from different times within a life. Much of the album, MacLean has said, is focused on memories of his mother’s death and memories of his childhood, and he sings in this song about both. “Fables of the Silverlink” starts with a string phrase, programmed drums, and MacLean’s vocals; a minute in, the guitar enters, live drums, and it sounds a little more like a standard Clientele song. Around two minutes, there are some big horns, and it all shifts up a gear while MacLean sings, “Still, so still/with your hands on your face/and I kissed your eyes…” “I was young again/I was young again.” And then the song drops back to strings, programmed drums, and Spanish vocals from Alicia Macanás before transitioning again to one of the most beautiful sections of the song, with MacLean singing, (at one point accompanied only by the strings): “Here in the face of your child/here in the face of your child/After you wake/after the dream/after your father’s hands have cradled still/your sleeping hair/his voice is so real/calling the girl that you were/calling you back through the night/lost and found in the fire/lost and found in the fire.” Later, at the end of the song, another moment of staggering beauty: the song slows, the horns bend and swell, and MacLean sings “I remember days at school/when the only thing I knew/I was nobody at all/till the streetlamps broke the spell/I don’t know why.” The conjunction of music and lyrics in this song work together to create something it would be hard to get at otherwise, an impressionistic autobiography that captures fleeting experiences and the feelings that accompany those experiences so faithfully for the listener.
“Distance of the Moon,” the debut album from the duo of Nora Stanley and Benny Bock, is a collection of discrete jewels, each cut and polished in a different way. There’s almost no track on the album that’s like the others. The sounds and dynamic the two conjure (with a couple guests) from pretty simple components bring to mind music as disparate as jazz fusion, post rock, videogame soundtracks, mid-00s electronic music, and Aphex Twin piano pieces. It makes for a fascinating, captivating listen. “Distance of the Moon” is the kind of album that feels so pleasant while you’re listening to it—lively, entertaining, catchy, kinetic—but when you listen really closely and start to parse the choices Stanley and Bock make, the moves they make, you realize how creative it is and unexpected, how sui generis the album is.
“Assembling,” for instance, starts off with what sounds like someone determinedly playing a kalimba at the bottom of an empty thousand-foot well. It’s strikingly pretty on its own, and then percussion, bass, and Nora Stanley’s sax enter, and the track gains so much depth and complexity, like it’s being switched to high definition. Stanley’s sax playing here, like on the whole album, feels so amiable and approachable—even when she’s coming at a track from oblique angles (on “Two” for example) or lighting it up (“Like Smoke”)—there’s a real warm personality to it. I think the general warmth of the album is part of what I really enjoy about it—it’s easy to imagine sitting in a room with Stanley, Bock, and the other players and seeing and hearing their collective summoning of this music.
What an album. “Time Ain’t Accidental” is Jess Williamson’s fifth full length, and it feels like the kind of album that’s career-defining. She’s taking big swings here with every song and connecting every time. “Time Ain’t Accidental” seems like the kind of album you make when you have a lot of confidence in what you’re doing and you really want to show them this time. Williamson’s songwriting, singing, and lyrics on this album all show the signs of inspiration and emotion giving extra oomph to great technique—a memoir in an album, true and personal. Musically, “Time Ain’t Accidental” is a little like the Plains album that Williamson did with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee: country-tinged, country-adjacent, but with traces of folk, indie rock (maybe in the neighborhood of bands like Bon Iver or My Morning Jacket).
There was an interview when the Plains album came out where Katie Crutchfield mentioned being blown away by Williamson’s songwriting, and it’s easy to see why based on the evidence of this album—like Crutchfield, Williamson has a beautiful voice and a writer’s knack for picking specific, concrete details that carry emotion. There are examples on every song too. On the title track’s chorus, she sings, “I read you Raymond Carver by the pool bar like a lady,” which later morphs into “I’ll read you Raymond Carver by the pool bar/I’m a lady,” as if reading American minimalists out loud was the equivalent of riding sidesaddle or wearing stockings—it’s so good and so memorable and paints an instant picture of this burgeoning relationship. Or “Chasing Spirits,” about Williamson’s break-up with her partner, where she sings later in the song, “I could start a garden with the landlord/something good and simple/and worth staying in town for.” A line that perfectly captures that post-break-up loneliness and desperation that would give rise to a thought like that, the search for direction, something you can pour yourself into. There’s lots like this, but for one more example, I also love this from the last track, “Roads,” “Got a hurricane in my heart for you/hailstorm in my head/tornado blowing through my bones/and there’s flooding up ahead.”
“Hunter” was one of the first songs on the album I connected with—it’s propulsive, Williamson’s voice goes from smoky, low-toned, and whispering to bright, clear, dominant throughout the song, that glassy piano rings out. “Hunter” is about Williamson’s experience’s dating in L.A. after the break-up with her longtime partner, and she sings about these fleeting, short-term encounters, where someone’s in your life for a minute and then gone. The first line of the chorus is such a killer: “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass/we went a hundred down the highway/I been known to move a little fast/I’m a hunter for the real thing/My love is pure as the universe/honest as an ashtray/baby it’s fine, I’da blown your mind/but I guess I’m gonna give you space.” Near the end of the song, a gorgeous pedal steel guitar solo kicks in that carries Williamson toward the resolution: it’s your loss if you’re not with her.
“New Future City Radio” is a collaborative project from Damon Locks and Rob Mazurek—who also teamed up on Mazurek’s recent (and wonderful) “Lightning Dreamers,” where Locks served as a kind of narrator for the album. “New Future City Radio” moves and sounds like a mixtape, but more in the vein of something that’s been sculpted, designed, sweated over—think about the sounds and vibe of something like DJ Rupture’s “Special Gunpowder” or even maybe one of the Avalanches’ vintage mixes (like “Some People,” though “New Future City Radio” is way more political than any mix from the Avalanches).
“New Future City Radio” is designed to sound like a pirate radio station (or stations), with a huge mix of genres from track to track, Locks interjecting as a DJ or just coming in to comment with spoken word, field recordings, samples from what sound like real radio bits, and other types of ephemera. It really works. It’s an incredibly entertaining album and there are so many little surprises that sneak up on you as you’re listening.
There are big beats all over this album, starting with the lead single, “Yes,” an exhilarating song both because of the percussion and Locks’s charged vocals. In one of the coolest, most moving spoken bits on the album, Locks says, “I’m living in darkness/You’re living in darkness, but you don’t know it/It’s so dark out here I can’t even see/And that’s the point/You can’t see—you won’t move/They got you where they want you: nowhere/Shrouded in confusion, grasping at straws/When you’re living like this/you can’t envision lines of possibility/This is where the plan kicks in/You ask me if I can form myself into a giant robot/and swallow up this black hole/and free the entire universe/My answer to you is:/Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” Locks saying this repeating “yes”—in conjunction with the beat they have going here—is the kind of thing that will make you want to run through a wall.
Jeremiah Chiu—who last year released the gorgeous “Recordings from the Åland Islands” with Marta Sofia Honer—is back with a solo album of totally beguiling synthesizer compositions, “In Electric Time.” Chiu created the whole album at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum in Los Angeles over the course of a few days. He worked with the museum’s founder and curator, Lance Hill, engineer Ben Lumsdaine, and Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas on the tracks and just kinda went for it (check out the great video for the title track, which shows Chiu working with various synths in the museum). Every track has so much happening on it—pulses, long tones, textural warps, percussive little explosions—and often these elements feel like the equivalent of an optical illusion, like the wagon-wheel effect or something similar, with things moving or seemingly moving in different directions, different wavelengths.
The title track here is a marvel. It’s lively and engaging, but also strange and a little alien, the kind of song you could easily imagine on the soundtrack to a moody sci-fi film, the main character gazing out blankly upon some vast desolation—but it’s also not quite like that either, the beats are too present somehow for it to be too melancholy. The long synth tones come back in, and then the track starts to fade into noisiness, the beats slow, a few trills fire off, and a voice says, “that’s the end of the tape,” and it’s all over.
Anthony Wilson’s “Collodion,” the newest release from Colorfield Records, has a playful spirit, in that the whole record feels like the result of Wilson coming into the studio, choosing an instrument, and sitting down to play—and from that action turning out these beautiful, intricate compositions. It’s the kind of staggering facility you see in some musicians, where no matter where they are, or what instrument or set up they’re presented with, they can just create cool shit. Wilson seems like that kind of musician—a talent that’s impossible to turn off or stymie. (Thinking about this reminded me of this rad video of Sam Shepherd/Floating Points talking through the set-up of his Buchla system and creating some pretty great loops in the process). “Collodion” feels like such a confident album, the kind of music you make when you know you have a strong musical aesthetic, but you can also play around with it and try new sounds, new forms. This is especially evident in the way Wilson takes the first song the album, the gorgeous “Star Maiden,” and repeats it twice more, as “Divine One” and “Muse of Joy,” in vastly different ways, with different arrangements and feeling, in restless creativity.
“Dream Oracle,” from the middle of the album, really shows off what Wilson’s doing on “Collodion.” “Dream Oracle” is a song that never sits still, it’s totally protean, shifting every 20 seconds into a new shape, but still maintaining a central drive. This song not only has something like five different types of keyboards (all played by Wilson—along with percussion), in addition to Wilson’s insane guitar playing, but also features fantastic playing from two other Colorfield-related folks: Anna Butterss on bass and Daniel Rotem on tenor sax. You can hear Butterss all through the track, adding heft and texture in all these interstices in the song, and then Rotem enters maybe midway through the song with the same kind of declarative, calligraphic playing he showed on this year’s “Wave Nature.” The tail end of this song is a whirlwind.
Daniel Villarreal’s new album, “Lados B” (which translates to “B-sides”), is an absolute blast from start to finish. This album is all Villarreal on drums and percussion, Anna Butterss on electric bass and double bass, and Jeff Parker on guitar (plus a gorgeous contribution from Neal Francis on Rhodes piano on “Salute)—all-star folks playing hard and beautifully, but with such ease, the total definition of sprezzatura. They recorded most of this album over a couple days in the fall of 2020, outdoors at Chicali Outpost (apparently the backyard of International Anthem co-founder Scottie McNiece’s house), and this is the kind of album whose recording it would’ve been fun to witness in person, to hear and see the staggering chemistry that these three have together.
“Salute,” launches with another great beat from Villarreal and an easy groove from Butterss. Parker enters with a stuttering riff, a little colder and more removed, but then Francis’s Rhodes enters too, and that warms up the whole track. Parker switches to some quickly cut-off strums. Parker later puts a little delay on his guitar and it opens up the sound of this one, it feels so welcoming, so relaxed and amiable. A great illustration of the dual appeals of the album—you can get totally absorbed in this, the one-time fleeting percussive touches that Villarreal puts on every track, the outrageous abilities of all three players, each person’s virtuosity, but you can also put it on and have a good time blasting it out loud.
Empty Country’s first album, the incredible “Empty Country,” came out at a tough time, late March, 2020, right when many pandemic restrictions started to go into effect. So there was no touring, of course, and though the album got good reviews, it didn’t seem like it got nearly the attention it should have. In between that album and the new one, “Empty Country II,” Joe D’Agostino moved from Philadelphia to Connecticut and, as he mentioned on his Patreon, went through a period of creative dormancy until 2021, when he wrote a few songs, including “Cool S”—a true epic (like the first album’s “SWIM,” also about a criminal) and the last song on the new album—which he said helped him find his voice again. The new album is D’Agostino pushing himself and his considerable storytelling skills in new directions—an album full of compelling characters moving through various forms of trouble: with themselves, family, love, the law, drugs, the world as a whole. There’s an evolution here from the first Empty Country album, both musically and lyrically—everything is bigger, wilder, higher stakes. D’Agostino inhabits these characters like a method actor and portrays their lives faithfully and humbly, never slipping into caricature or cliché.
“Dustine” is one of the story songs on the album—maybe about a girl who dabbles in witchcraft out in the way western part of Virginia—and probably one of my favorite songs that D’Agostino’s ever done. There’s something irresistible about the riff that powers this song, and the way it interacts with the bass, it all flows together so well with the melody and how D’Agostino delivers the lyrics: “My sister is a river/and I’m a figurine/made from the dust of my brother/and midribs of maple leaves.” The rhythm and weirdness of that, so good, so beautiful.
“Come With Fierce Grace” is a much quieter, more concentrated album than Alabaster DePlume’s 2022 release, “GOLD,” a kind of flipside companion to it, similar in inventiveness but different in vibe. “Come With Fierce Grace,” features far fewer vocals than “GOLD,” only a couple tracks of singing and a handful of tracks with DePlume’s soothing declamations. “GOLD” had high energy over a wide range, whereas “Come With Fierce Grace” feels more lived-in, more relaxed. There’s a palpable sense, in listening to this album, of people enjoying making music together, relishing the possibilities of collaboration, taking chances, engaging in leisurely experimentation.
“Greek Honey Slick” is among the most remarkable songs on the album: DePlume’s sax (doubled) with Sons of Kemet’s (and the Smile’s) Tom Skinner on drums. It’s all DePlume and Skinner at the start, sax phrases with a kind of loping, lurching beat from Skinner along with rumbling bass and synth. A quarter of the way through the track, DePlume doubles up his sax and adds what sounds like muted guitar strums—this all propels the song to its noisy end, with DePlume and Skinner both letting loose.
The new album from Carlos Niño & Friends, “(I’m just) Chillin’, on Fire,” is a monumental work—it’s a big album with big sounds, and it’s got a ton of incredibly talented folks playing on it. This album has so much: so much richness of sound, so many zigs and zags, so many excursions into different genres of music that sit together here in surprising ways. There’s jazz, and examinations of different types of jazz; post-rock, both the rockier kind (like Explosions in the Sky, for instance) and the more avant-garde kind (noisier or more drawn-out crashing moments on this album bring to mind Black Dice’s “Beaches and Canyons” or “Miles of Smiles”); a kind of rough-hewn new age jam music; and something like experimental collage. This is the kind of album you can get lost in. “Flutestargate” has a pretty drone at the start, with punctuating cymbal crashes and percussive rattles. This one has such a nice programmed beat, big and easy to hold onto. It’s such a pleasant groove, you just want to spend time with it.
Will Miller’s Resavoir project has a new self-titled album, “Resavoir.” Their first album, 2019’s “Resavoir,” was a wonder, a brisk album of speculative jazz and gorgeous grooves, easy to love. This new one is even better—less jazzy in some ways, for sure, but full of catchy melodies, beautiful playing, and songs with surprising trajectories. This album feels refined, less in the sense of elegance (though it is that too), and more in the sense of being pure, clear, and concentrated; a focused and perfectly executed batch of songs that conveys a set of particular feelings: peace, serenity, calm, and consideration.
It's incredible how easily and smoothly Miller moves from mode to mode on this album and still maintains a totally consistent mood. The album features expansive group jams (like “Midday,” “First Light,” and “Future”), quiet studies with one or two instruments (like “Sunset” or “Facets”), and big-beat pop songs (like “Inside Minds” and “Sunday Morning”)—but it all makes sense together, every song sits together with the others so naturally.
“Facets,” the last track on the album, is also all Miller, a stunning closer of piano and EVI (electronic valve instrument) that seems like such a statement, and (I think) a prominent example of what Miller has mentioned about this album, about how a single chord can provide a feeling of peace and wonder. “Facets” seems like it’s saying all that and more, expressing sorrow and gratitude, a resignation or recognition of the sorry state of the world but also a hope, maybe, in people or about people taking care of each other.
Bex Burch’s album, “There is only love and fear,” follows on from Jeremiah Chiu’s “In Electric Time” as another International Anthem release that broadens the range of the label further, into instrumental music that’s not easily classifiable, jazz-adjacent in some respects but also experimental. Burch herself calls it “messy minimalism,” which is as good a label as any. Across 12 tracks, Burch, who mostly plays xylophone, sanza, and various percussion, performs her compositions along with a bunch of other International Anthem-affiliated musicians, like Mikel Patrick Avery, Ben LeMar Gay, Rob Frye, Anna Butterss, Macie Stewart, Anton Hatwich, Dan Bitney, Diego Gaeta, and others. It’s an album, like a lot of International Anthem albums, that seems to revel in the possibilities of playing together, being open to chance and change, and finding the best expression of certain musical ideas. Burch’s album feels like wandering into a lovely workshop, where the practice of creativity is paramount, and the only product is beautiful music, delivered intermittently, patiently, sweetly.
“Dawn blessings,” the first track on the album and one of my favorites, opens with the sound of birds chirping, light footsteps, and a cuckoo calling out. The cuckoo’s call is echoed then by Burch’s xylophone, and then again, in a kind of slant rhyme, by Hatwich’s bass. That’s the inciting incident for the song, and the band expands on those phrases: Avery’s drum picks up and Stewart’s violin plays slow, sweet phrases above it. As the track progresses, the band moves further away from those initial sounds and continues to deepen and complicate their groove. A staggeringly beautiful track on a brilliant album.
Blur’s “Ballad of Darren” was probably the album I listened to most throughout 2023. I imagine that, like a lot of people, I was surprised the band had reformed to record a new album, and further surprised that the album was startlingly good. A totally enjoyable album. I can recognize that a lot of my emotional reaction to this album from this band comes from having listened to them so much when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Just the initial minute or so of “The Narcissist” somehow transported me back 20 years to hearing this band for the first time. Amazing to see these bands you love so much return and still have something vital and fascinating and affecting to say.
Some of the best and most fruitful collaborations are born out of chance, and that’s absolutely the case with “Intiha,” the new album from Pakistani singer and songwriter Ali Sethi and musician and producer Nicolás Jaar. As Sethi tells it in a recent Pitchfork piece, he’d heard and enjoyed Jaar’s music for years, and then, during the height of the pandemic, he started taking snippets from “Telas,” one of the three albums Jaar released in 2020, and recording raga phrases over the snippets. Sethi sent one of these recordings to a friend who’d worked with Jaar, and then Jaar got in touch to encourage him to keep doing what he was doing. It’s always inspiring to hear about art that emerges like this—from an artist reacting to another artist’s work, turning it to new uses, creating something simply because they want to see it exist. This album feels luxurious: Sethi’s singing throughout is so impressive, he has such great command of his voice, great command of the emotion he conveys; Jaar’s rich soundcraft provides the perfect background for Sethi’s performances.
“Muddat” is an absolutely killer song, the kind of song you can easily imagine lighting up the soundtrack for a movie. It starts with a percussive countdown, electric piano, cymbals, more percussion, and then Sethi comes in, singing clearly and declaratively. The track really takes off around 1:16, when an even bigger beat comes in, but then it actually explodes around 2 minutes, when Jaar goes into Against All Logic mode, and the tracks coasts at that plateau for a minute until a stretch around 3 minutes when Sethi really hits it, a big moment. Everything shuffles together again for one last big stretch from 4 minutes on, and then it slowly fades into shimmering tones, and Sethi returns, whispering the lyrics as he’s walking off stage.
Thandi Ntuli’s new album, “Rainbow Revisited,” recorded with Carlos Niño, feels much bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to believe there’s only two people playing on this album. The playing, the shifts in execution and mood, the imagination—it barely seems credible that this emerged from just Ntuli and Niño, but it did. In only the first third of the album, from “Sunrise (California)” to “Breath and Synth Experiment,” you hear, first of all, Ntuli’s wild chops on piano, her gorgeous singing, her gift for melody, and her willingness to play around, to revise and reconsider, to venture out. It’s so easy and so pleasant to get lost in Ntuli’s piano playing: she has such talent for ripping off these complex-sounding phrases, little labyrinths of notes, that nevertheless lead somewhere satisfying.
And then right in the middle of the album, Ntuli drops “Nomayoyo,” a staggeringly pretty song that sounds at once like a lullaby and like a lost classic from Scott Joplin. Ntuli’s piano playing here is delicate and considered, and her singing too is quiet and tender. Ntuli said that “Nomayoyo” was written by her grandfather, and it’s a song her family often sings at gatherings. What a boon, to have a song like this as a treasure in your family, and what a gift too for Ntuli to share it like this.
Colorfield Records specializes in putting out surprising albums. You don’t know what to expect as a listener, other than compelling tunes, a high degree of technical proficiency, playful experimentation, and a general sense of friendly collaboration. Rich Hinman’s “Memorial” checks all those boxes and, of course, has more: pedal steel guitar as lead, as structuring element for a number of beautiful jams, as generator of drones and background textures. Hinman has said that “Memorial” features music made with little or no forethought, without preconceived notions of what a song is or should be—and yet these songs all feel so considered and deliberate, a testament to Hinman, producer Pete Min, and their collaborators (Benny Bock, Daniel Rotem, Mark Giuliana, and others).
The title track, which is the final track on the album, has it all: Hinman’s pedal steel, echoing, layered through the tune; blasts of static; clattering and spacey pianos, barely held together. Around 2:40, the pedal steel takes over, among percussive detritus and long-frequency drones, for one of the most emotional stretches of the album. Hinman’s playing here makes the pedal steel seem like it’s reaching, stretching, searching, without resolution. Gorgeous.
I spent a lot of time this year with King Krule’s “Space Heavy” too. Archy Marshall, a producer of weird and compelling song shapes. These songs, like “Flimsier,” that almost always initially sound kind of backward and misshapen to me, but over the course of many listens reveal these odd hooks and beautiful melodies. For “Flimsier,” it’s that moment around 2:50 into the song, when the distorted guitar sits right next to Marshall’s vocals and he sings again, in a much higher register, “It’s been holding the weight of the world.” I think that’s what Marshall’s so good at—putting those instances of wildly enjoyable and gorgeous music in settings of lurching, jazz-adjacent post-punk, mixing adventurous elements with something that’s easier to hold on to.