I think people often have a target in mind for a particular artist to hit, and they judge every new album by that. And I try not to think that way. Fall Out Boy already made what I consider to be a near perfect Fall Out Boy album, Folie A Deux, in 2008, but I haven't really minded that their 2010s albums were different things that irritated a lot of their fans (to be fair, a lot of those fans also disliked how different Folie A Deux was from their earlier records). So while I wasn't waiting around hoping for Fall Out Boy to reunite with producer Neal Avron and make an album essentially picking up where Folie A Deux left off, I must admit that I'm delighted that that's basically what they did with So Much (For) Stardust per recent interviews with the band. "What A Time To Be Alive" and "Hold Me Like A Grudge" are my favorites so far but I'm loving the whole thing. Here's the 2023 albums Spotify playlist that includes any new record I listen to this year. 

One day in February, I was driving home from band practice in heavy rain when a car rear-ended me. I only had some bumper damage, but I had to drive a rental for a week while it was getting fixed. Since I didn't have the pre-programmed radio stations I listen to in my car, I was flipping through the radio dial listening to random stations, and stumbled upon WKHS, a radio station that broadcasts out of a high school in Kent County, 90 minutes away, that got a new transmitter last year, and they were playing this guy Slaid Cleaves, a singer-songwriter from Maine and currently based in Austin, Texas. I liked what I heard and saw that the album they played a cut from was coming out in a couple weeks, and I wouldn't have heard this album if a guy hadn't hydroplaned and crashed into me on the BW Parkway. Cleaves writes these kinds of weary story songs full of sordid details and complex emotions that make me wonder whether this guy has lived a really hard life, just has a lively imagination, or if it's a bit of both. 

It's a shame this album missed the Billboard 200, it went top 5 in the UK and "Red Flags" and "Both Of Us" and "Remind You" are some of the catchiest pop songs I've heard this year, maybe she'll manage a sleeper hit in the U.S. eventually. 

Last summer I visited by brother Zac in Wisconsin and we saw The New Pornographers at Summer Fest, which really gave me a renewed appreciation for the band, who I'd never seen live and who Zac is a more diehard fan of than I am. Great show, and their new album feels like an interesting new chapter; even though New Pornographers are a 'supergroup' of talented people who all make their own records in different styles, when they assemble as one there's a certain bright power pop song they tend to make together. But Continue As A Guest has a much wider variety of tempos and textures, it was a quarantine album put together slowly in separate studios, and it feels a little slower and more experimental, in a good way, I love the title track and "Marie And The Undersea" and the other midtempo songs that feature a bit of saxophone. This is exactly the kind of shakeup a band should be able to go for on their 9th album. 

I kind of put this in the middle of my recent Spin ranking of every Depeche Mode album, which means it's damn good for a band that's been around for four decades. "Never Let Me Go" and "Don't Say You Love Me" are my early favorites, and "Ghosts Again" recently became the band's biggest alternative radio hit in the U.S. since "It's No Good" 26 years ago. 

2015's Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are was one of my top 10 albums of the last decade, so I was excited to see that one of Beauty Pill's recent archival releases features outtakes from the sessions for that album (I also enjoyed January's Blue Period, which collects the band's work from the mid-2000s, but I already knew and loved most of the stuff on there). Abandonware is sort of a deliberately loose and casual collection of sounds and sketches, a little bit of Devin Ocampo's incredible drumming following by a recording of a small child saying the band's name over and over followed by a woozy remix of "When Cornered," followed by a few minutes of Chad Clark running the metallic clangs of his dog's water bowl through a variety of effects. To me, this stuff is as exciting as hearing tapes from the Sgt. Pepper's or Dark Side Of The Moon sessions, partly because I got to go to the studio one day and talk to the band about what they were doing, but there's still a sense of mystery and intrigue for me about how a lot of Describes Things was put together. 

When Burt Bacharach died in February, this box set had already been announced, 4 discs containing pretty much all of the music Bacharach made with the most important collaborator of the last few decades of his life. When I ranked Elvis Costello's catalog last year, I put Painted From Memory pretty high up there, and it remains a masterpiece. And the set also includes a few great previously unreleased songs they wrote together for an unrealized Broadway musical (the tracks sung by Audra Mae are fantastic), the Bacharach co-writes from Costello's 2018 album Look Now, and assorted other material of interest including the Costello covering "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" back in 1977 on the first Attractions tour. I would've been excited about this set before Bacharach's death, but I'm especially glad to have it now. 

Making a TV show or movie about pop music with fictional artists is tricky because it often requires creating original songs that could plausibly be hits, at least in the time period it takes place. Great music can come from those kinds of projects -- That Thing You Do! is the gold standard, and of course Bacharach and Costello's first collaboration was "God Give Me Strength" from Grace of My Heart -- but it's rare. People have often compared the "Daisy Jones & The Six" series to Almost Famous, often unfavorably, but I will say that the Daisy Jones songs are way better than the Stillwater songs. Since Daisy Jones & The Six are loosely based on Fleetwood Mac and Aurora is their big hit album, you can of course compare it to Rumours and it absolutely has no hope of holding up to that kind of scrutiny, but it's a pretty enjoyable little record that's catchy and period appropriate enough to be plausible and support the story instead of undermining it. And it's kind of a clever way for Riley Keough to make a record without everyone focusing on how she's the granddaughter of Elvis Presley. 

I don't think enough people appreciate how wonderful it is that Willie Nelson is almost 90 and still averaging a new album a year, sometimes new songs and sometimes covers of songs that matter to him. Nelson has made albums paying tribute to other superstars (Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles) but he's also made albums saluting friends and contemporaries like Lefty Frizzell and now Harlan Howard, who like Nelson began writing hits in the late '50s and working with people like Patsy Cline and Hank Cochrane. One of Howard's most notable compositions is "Streets of Baltimore" (famously recorded by Bobby Bare and Gram Parsons), and I'm happy to add Willie Nelson to the list of great renditions of that song. 

Hit-Boy has been on a hot streak for the last few years that's included four albums with Nas, but it always feels like he's being hyped up as a producer can do no wrong when, like most producers, he's only as good as his collaborators. And his latest project, an album with a B-list neo soul singer who made his only notable songs 20 years ago, feels like a hell of a heat check. It's not as embarrassing as the music Musiq Soulchild was making in 2015 when he was dressing like Migos, but it's still a mediocre record from a minor talent and Hit-Boy really doesn't deliver any heat on it. "imreallytrynaf*ckwichu" in particular is just insipid. 

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