Terrace Martin is a veteran west coast hip hop producer with jazz training (he was one of the main architects behind Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, and is a cousin of Thundercat). This year, though, he's been on a great R&B tear, releasing duo projects with both James Fauntleroy and Alex Isley, who's Ernie Isley's daughter and a member of one of soul music's greatest dynasties. I Left My Heart In Ladera opens with a cover of one of Sade's greatest songs, "Paradise," which feels like a ballsy move, but after they pull that off, they follow it with 8 excellent original songs including "Honey" and "Glad I Found You," which has such a great little horn riff that Isley sings along with. Here's the 2023 albums Spotify playlist I constantly update with every new album I listen to. 

Producer/bassist Ben "Carrtoons" Carr is another guy with a jazz background who makes lush old-fashioned R&B grooves with live instrumentation, I interviewed him for Bandcamp Daily about his 2022 album Homegrown. And I think I like the follow-up even more, "Put Me On" and "Fool For Your Love" are gorgeous. 

When bands reunite after more than 10 years apart, I feel like it's an uphill battle to make any new music up to their old standard, even if they're still great live. So I'm kind of glad The Gaslight Anthem are back in action after just 5 or 6 years on hiatus (and even then they did some shows for the 10th anniversary of their best album, The '59 Sound, in 2018). It feels like they'd kind of worn out their sound and weren't sure what to do next on 2014's Get Hurt, but after a few solo albums Brian Fallon is ready to write Gaslight Anthem songs again. The big news on History Books is that the guy the band is constantly compared to, Bruce Springsteen, appears on the title track, but maybe that seemed like such an inevitable collaboration for so long that it doesn't really excite me, though it's an excellent song on an excellent album. 

The Baltimore band Super City's third album is probably my favorite they've done to date, it kinda feels like they've gradually become a harder rocking and more versatile band over the last 9 years. I interviewed the band recently, so look out for a piece about them soon. 

The Silver Cord picks up the thread of synth-heavy textures and pulsing dance music rhythms that were really introduced into King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's repertoire on 2021's Butterfly 3000 about...wow, seven albums ago. The band did something a little unusual here, offering the album's seven songs in two version: one set of concise 3-5 minute versions, and a set of 10-20 minute extended mixes. So far, I much prefer the longer versions, "Theia" and "Chang'e" in particular get a lot more interesting once they go into the spacey instrumental bridges. In general, though, I don't like this incarnation of the band as much as the stuff with guitars and live drums. 

I've always felt self-conscious about being an ugly American who only speaks one language -- I took French in high school and retained little of it, and really wish I'd taken Spanish instead given how many Americans speak it. And now that Bad Bunny is probably the most popular artist who records exclusively in Spanish in U.S. history, I don't wanna ignore that, even if it feels a little silly to listen to Bad Bunny without being fluent in Spanish (call it the Kendall Jenner experience I guess). I like his voice and his taste in production enough to at least get something out of it and occasionally look at translations of his lyrics to get a sense of the content, though. 

In October I released my first B-sides compilation, in part because I was always inspired by how many of my favorite indie/alternative bands had rarities comps that were as good as their proper albums. And I consider Superchunk to be the uncontested champions of the B-Sides comp -- Misfits & Mistakes is the fourth one they've released, with two of them being sprawling multi-disc collections (Mac McCaughan's solo project Portastatic also has a good one). My favorite Superchunk compilations, Incidental Music and Cup Of Sand, feel very thoughtfully curated and sequenced to feel like albums. And my only real disappointment with Misfits & Mistakes is that it feels more like a data dump of 50 tracks presented chronologically, with multiple versions of some songs that also appeared on proper albums. Still, it's got some great music, including one of the band's all-time great anthems one of their top streaming tracks, "This Summer," as well as a wide range of covers including The Cure, The Misfits, Wye Oak, and Destiny's Child. 

I had a lot of fun ranking every Rolling Stones album in October (spoiler alert: I put Hackney Diamonds at #17, above A Bigger Bang and below Steel Wheels). For me, the two final Charlie Watts songs, "Mess It Up" and "Live By The Sword," feel a lot more like true Stones songs than anything else on the album, but I really like "Get Close," too. Really, I like most of the songs besides the lead single "Angry," which just kind of feels forced and grating to me. 

The Meat Puppets have only released a couple live albums in their long career, both of them accompanying reissue campaigns of their back catalog. The Rykodisc release Live In Montana was a nice snapshot of a 1989 featuring great renditions of some songs as well as a bit of the band's famous penchant for antagonizing the audience with sloppy covers. And the new Camp Songs is, hilariously, a cherry-picked collection of recordings from the height of the band's fame in the '90s, but it's all sloppy country covers. It's almost like their Having Fun With Elvis On Stage, it's a gas. 

I was pretty annoyed with Taylor Swift for recording 1989 without Max Martin, but Roger Waters re-recording The Dark Side of the Moon without David Gilmour is definitely worse. Waters has done very profitable tours playing The Wall, which I can see being a good show, but I think Dark Side's songs are a lot harder for him to pull off without the other members of Pink Floyd, it really drains these songs of all their magic and mystique. 

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