The 21 best records you may have missed in 2023
From WheelUp to Witch, Danny Daze to Decisive Pink
The 21 best records you may have missed in 2023
For the last newsletter of 2023 I was toying with the idea of writing about my favourite records of the year. But then EVERYONE (on this side of the Atlantic anyway) put Lankum at number one - as they deserved - and I figured the world didn’t need another Lankum lick up. If you’re interested, you can hear my interview with Lankum here, in which we talk about the power of a good drone, singing to the dead and much more.
Instead of that, I thought I would concentrate on the best records you may have missed in 2023. I was going to say “overlooked” records but I don’t really know what that means. There are some very successful albums in here. But in each case, I don’t think they could do with just that little more love. So I hope you find something here you may enjoy.
WheelUp, aka West London producer Danny Wheeler, is largely responsible for the broken beat revival going on in my head over the past few months. As you might expect from someone named an “honorary Bugz” by the Bugz In The Attic collective, Wheeler’s second album, We Are The Magic, is classic broken beat: silky strings, elastic bass lines, jazz chords and elegantly rattling beats, with nothing here that couldn’t have come slinking out of West London 20 years ago. But in this, the fact that broken beat never really made its commercial breakthrough plays in its favour, as it can happily be revived with coming across as overplayed. Besides, We Are The Magic is pure honey.
… And talking of revivals, Zango was Zamrock legends Witch’s first new album in four decades. So how on earth does it sound so utterly fresh, bursting with lithe life and funk? Zango does a brilliant job of subtly updating the band’s classic sound for 2023, including a winning guest appearance from Zambian rapper Sampa The Great.
With her degree in environmental toxicology, Jayda G is very much not your run-of-the-mill electronic music producer. All the same, you would have got long odds on her second long player being an album-length tribute to her late father, incorporating recordings he made more than two decades ago, in which he talks of life experiences such as being posted to Thailand with the US military and his first wife leaving him, with Jayda’s songwriting simultaneously addressing the same subjects. What makes this all the more remarkable is Jayda does all this to the same high-octane, soulful and very shiny disco house that categorised her first album, like Fred Again making a record tracking income inequality in post-Brexit Britain. Much of this may go right over the heads of Jayda’s audience, particularly at her increasingly massive DJ gigs. But the beauty of this record is that it works on different levels and you can, if you want, just ignore the lyrics, in favour of the delightfully airy beats and sometimes exquisite songwriting - Meant To Be has a real doozy of a chorus, for example. Or you can sit down and engage with the wider concepts the album brings up. For all its reputation as a soundtrack to escape, house music has a long history of dealing with social issues - look at Gypsy Woman, if you want - and Guy is a fine example of this.
Mioclono are Oriol Riverola (aka John Talabot) and Arnau Obiols, two mainstays of the Barcelona dance scene. Their artist name references epilepsy and myoclonus - conditions experienced by both artists. The record is a fierce, dark, epic beast, full of atmospheric twists, slow builds, rolling percussion and rotted chill out and - for me - the best thing Talabot has put his name to in ages. On Acid Rain, for example, the two producers tease out a single 303 line until it squeals with delighted terror, like vintage Plastikman getting lost in a tropical jungle.
The last time I wrote about ::BLUE:, the long awaited debut album from Miami artist Danny Daze, I mentioned I didn’t really understand it. Two months on, I STILL can’t get my head around Daze’s wonderfully cinematic mix of Miami bass, IDM, ambient, electro and more. And I love it all the more for that. Sometimes confusion can be the best, as it breeds interest. And if Daze does bring the album to “advanced dome environments” then I will be 100% there for him.
Goldie: Timeless (The Remixes)
This remix collection offers a handy measurement of the health of drum & bass in 2023, as well as another well deserved moment in the sun for one of the most important albums of the 90s: Goldie’s Timeless. Released in 1995, right at the start of the jungle boom, Timeless brought jungle to a mainstream audience by going deeper, rather than levelling out, plunging into vast emotional depths, while losing none of jungle’s manic inventiveness. The remixes that accompanied it at the time, over a series of single releases, did an excellent job of showcasing the scene’s most important producers in its early days, from serial Goldie collaborators 4 Hero to Photek, then just breaking through. They don’t necessarily improve on the towering original tracks - but they certainly don’t disgrace them either, while offering up a slightly wider lens on what jungle was in 1995. (4 Hero’s remix, for example, shows how adept the duo were at stretching out the jazz influences on jungle, not found so much on the original track.) The disc of new remixes, meanwhile, is like an introduction to the cream of 2023 drum & bass talent, as curated by Goldie, who remains an important figure in D&B and a brilliant A&R with his Metalheadz label. So Irish duo Searchlight bring the 2023 jazz to State of Mind and Sensual (a little like 4 Hero did so many years before); Scar’s remix of Angel is thunderously heavy etc and so on. The album is one in the eye for anyone who thinks drum & bass lost it back in 1997.
Shoegazing and electronics have a brief, but beautiful history together. Slowdive were remixed by Reload back in the 90s, My Bloody Valentine were taken apart by Andrew Weatherall and Seefeel’s whole career came at the interaction of wispy electronics and shoegazing. LA band Luster are weighing in very much on the MBV side of shoegaze - dinosaur guitar drones and muttered, if pretty, vocal melodies (and come on: Thorn in Yr Kiss is practically a Valentine’s song title) - to which they add sampled and / or drum machine beats. It’s derivative, certainly. But derivative of a very small niche genre indeed, that many people haven’t even heard of. Besides, the quality is there: the guitars are immaculately warped and the vocals generally sweet, in that MBV, just-woken-up type way. It all rests on the drums, then. Sadly the title track has a rather horrible drum machine sound - the band reference “late 90's / early 00's Big Beat Electronica”, which they surely can’t really mean, can they? And that drags the song down a touch. Thorn in Yr Kiss, however, has a perfectly 90s Funky Drummer loop that takes me right back to the old sonic cathedral dance floors.
Dreamer, Nabihah Iqbal’s second album, was largely composed in the London artist’s head, after a studio robbery and urgent trip to Pakistan left her without her typical studio set up. But that seems fitting for what must be one of the most meditative, introspective and - yes - dream-y albums in recent years. The sound is one of reverb-ed out acoustic guitars, the gentle drone of the harmonium and Iqbal’s subtly authoritative voice, arriving as if from the deepest recesses of your own head. Take This World Couldn’t See Us, the album’s opening single: it has a beat that on the surface should be pretty driving and post-punk guitars but they come wrapped in the kind of reverberant and slightly surreal cloud that The Cure perfected on Faith, while Iqbal’s spoken-world vocal is ever so slightly out of range, like a storyteller lost in a forest. The highlight for me, though, is the album’s title track, which is an exemplary piece of dream pop, straight from the Sarah Records / Cranes / AR Kane axis. Even the album’s trance bangers are dreamy, as on the gorgeously nebulous Sky River. Bravo.
With the success of records from Ride, My Bloody Valentine and (especially) Slowdive, shoegaze acts have a strong record for post-revival albums. Sadly, Lush never got around to recording their own fourth album, after their 2015-6 revival crashed and burned, with the four-track Blind Spot EP being their only Mark Two output. Blind Spot was a decent EP that leaned heavily towards Lush’s debut album Spooky, without giving any idea of how the band might evolve. For that, we need to look to Pearlies, the debut album from Lush co-founder / guitarist / vocalist Emma Anderson. Many of the 10 tracks here were apparently written for Lush, before the band split for a second time, and they suggest a once possible - and very charming - way forward for the band. Songs like Clusters and I Was Miles Away evoke Lush’s almost casual mastery of melody and atmospherics, matched to gentle electronic tingles courtesy of producer Maps (on Clusters especially) and Spacemen 3-ish drone (I Was Miles Away). Elsewhere, there is the ghost of everything from spy music to trip hop. Obviously, it would be great to hear Anderson and Miki Berenyi’s voices intertwine on these Lush-ish (and, indeed, lush) ideas. But Pearlies works beautifully on its own.
Sparks - The Girl Is Crying In her Latte
Sparks’ last two studio albums (not including filmic excursions), Hippopotamus and A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip were way up with the best of their catalogue. They were also a touch conservative musically by Sparks’ standards, being based pretty solidly on the piano, drums and bass. So it is with considerable joy that the brothers’ 25th studio album, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte sees avant garde Sparks return, as brilliantly bonkers as ever. There are calls back to the band’s history - how could they not? - with distorted synths à la 2000’s Balls and hypnotic vocal repetition in the style of 2002’s Lil Beethoven. But their anti-cliché songwriting remains pin sharp, going to places where other artists fear to dread, such as North Korean rave on the wonderful We Go Dancing. This record is overlooked only in the sense that it should have been number one forever.
Decisive Pink - Ticket To Fame
Imagine Kraftwerk but fronted by women with a wicked sense of humour; or Tender Buttons-era Broadcast swapping acid and French spy films for laughing gas and Adam Sandler movies and you basically have Decisive Pink, a collaboration between Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian. Ode To Boy manages to pack all that AND a reference to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 into a song that is simultaneously hilarious and moving.
Brigitte Barbu - La science des imbéciles
To say that La science des Imbéciles, the second album by genius French house oddball Pepe Bradock under the Brigitte Barbu name, is slightly more conventional than the first, is like saying that onyx is slightly lighter on the eye than vantablack - fundamentally true, but hardly a vast relaxation of his impeccably odd standards. Unlike Muzak pour ascenseurs en Panne, Bardu’s first album, La science des Imbéciles does at least have drums and - at moments, such as Comput - there is the suggestion of some way conventional dance music on board. That is, until Pepe wades in to sabotage things. There’s cubist reggae too, in the shape of Wesh Finn Zerb, and mangled soul smooch (Audio Sexual Part 1) as Pepe runs the full gambit of his obtuse genius, with the guitar surprisingly to the fore.
Stings is a brilliantly serene work, where Debussy meets house meets hip hop meets London jazz meets cosmic LA-ness. Magnolia II was your first taste of it, an electronic re-imagining of the gorgeous orchestral album track Magnolia with Theo Croker on trumpet and Corey Fonville on drums, which hits hard but stays soft; but the title track, which appears to re-make Soho’s house classic Hot Music (Jazz mix) as an actual jazz song is the gem, showing an incredible blurring of the lines and admirable fluidity.
Júlia Colom has long been the hope of the folk scene in her native Mallorca, after her grandfather schooled her in the Balearic island’s tradition of El canto de la Sibila from the age of seven. Miramar, her debut album, contains several songs that will appeal to folk traditionalists, like the gorgeous Olivera, which uses just acoustic guitar and Colom’s haunting, yet surprisingly thick, voice, or the acapella opener Que m’abrasava (she sings largely in the Mallorcan language). But the most interesting moments on this album are when she allies this to an electronically-charged production, like the sub bass touches on Estròfica or Enveja’s drum machine strut, which reminds me rather charmingly of Dr. Dre’s The Next Episode. At these moments, her music brings to mind label mates Tarta Relena or a Majorcan take on Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés - further evidence of Spanish artists’ increasing confidence in re-purposing their rich musical history.
In 2002, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier collaborated with Common on an amazing track called The New Wave (with production from Quest Love, Dilla and James Poyser, if you please). It was astoundingly funky: a cross between lurching Dilla beats, sunshine psychedelia and Sadier’s spy theme vocals. It was also basically a dead end, with no one taking up the mantle… until now. Vanishing Twin’s fourth album sees the London band add funk drums and bass pulse to their psychedelic wandering, resulting in an album that sees them finally emerge from Broadcast’s shadow, expanding outwards into newly ambitious territory and yet still wonderfully sharp.
If The King, Anjimile’s second album, wasn’t at the top of many year-end lists, it might have been because it was so unusual, a combination of furiously hammered acoustic guitars, patchworked choral layers and staggering intensity. Anjimile said The King was "a very intense record” that contains a lot of “anger and hopelessness and fear”, which is undoubtedly true; it’s also a very beautiful record that you can utterly lose yourself within.
Public Image Limited - End Of World
Contrarian to the end, PiL’s eleventh studio album - which I reviewed for Pitchfork - was trailed by Hawaii, John Lydon’s sun.setting ode to his wife Nora Forster. It’s a gorgeous song and the album is worth it just for that. But there is also more to End Of World, including the disco slap-in-the-face of the title track and the weirdly swinging The Do That. End Of World falls down fairly often - but it is never less than interesting.
Cyclamen is the fifth album from Irish / Catalan singer Núria Graham and by some distance her best. The record is tender, jazzy and melancholy, with serene acoustic guitars, elegant, understated, string flourishes and wandering double bass lines, not to mention flushes of bassoon, harp, flute and saxophone. Cyclamen reminds me of Astral Weeks, in many ways, for its jazz / folk mixes, and it actually lives up to the comparison.
Is it jazz? The members of Anagrams can’t seem to agree: Shy Layers’ JD Walsh says it is; Atlanta multi-instrumentalist Jeff Crompton says it isn’t. Well, it sounds like jazz to me, of a particularly dreamy electronic kind that has guided me through many long days. Blue Voices is relaxed but engaging; drifty but focused; the album you put on when you don’t know where else to go - which is major compliment that perhaps doesn’t sound like one.
When I saw that Be Your Own Pet were playing Primavera Sound 2023, I got very excited indeed. BYOP were a band I loved back in the 2000s but never managed to see live and I spent a lot of the early part of this year studying up on them. (It didn’t take that long, given the brief length of their songs.) Their new album, Mommy, had all of the slightly pervy punk pop energy of their first two records, added to a subtle maturity which suits artists in their 30s. Worship The Whip, which opens the record, has been on repeat all year.
Grian Chatten - Chaos For The Fly
Sometimes it takes a while for music to hit you. Such was the case with Fontaines DC, who I hated at first and gradually got into last summer. Singer Grian Chatten’s debut solo album (which I also reviewed for Pitchfork), a low-key and very gentle mixture of folk music and electronics, was not what I - or indeed most people - were expecting of him. But the songwriting is incredibly strong and very relatable - Salt Throwers Off a Truck, for example, sounds eternal - and Dan Carey’s production gives it a lovely warm hug.
Some listening
ZOiD - Timelapse (Kaidi Tatham remix)
I received some charming reactions to my broken beat piece last week, with a number of fans of the genre come slinking out of the woodwork. So thank you for that. ZOiD - Irish electronic musician and composer Daniel Jacobson - was one of the people who got in touch and he sent me this wonderful Kaidi Tatham remix of a song from his recent album, Internal Space Element. It is a sumptuous jazz / techno / folk (?) hybrid that will make you re-consider your options in life. The 4 Hero-ish strings alone are worth your Christmas Bandcamp tokens.
Shygirl and Kingdom combine on this utterly arresting track, which manages to be simultaneously big and pop banging and subtly evoke the panic-y feeling of throwing up in a club toilet, via the slightest touch of Masters at Work’s classic The Ha Dance.
End ALL Christmas arguments with the soothing powers of my playlist of the newest and bestest music. Give it a like. Why not?