I Promise You’re Wrong: The 20 Best Albums of 2023 So Far (#10-1)
R&B with ADHD, mumble-rap-metal, country-fried grunge
Alicia Bognanno of Bully (Photo by Scott Legato/Getty Images)
10. Bully, Lucky for You
Since “Trying” eight years ago, Alicia Bognanno has made a lot of dead-on ‘90s alt-racket with her crinkle-cut voice up top. But even Belly and Letters to Cleo have spent their careers hunting for more than one or two sticks of dynamite like that chorus. Lucky for You has at least three, which pushes her into Shirley Manson territory even if the exalted Courtney Love is out of reach. But these days, Courtney would kill for the killer “Change Your Mind,” the Dandy Warhols should kill for “Hard to Love,” which roughs up their Veronica Mars bassline, and I hope Soccer Mommy took notes while laying down her harmonies for “Lose You.” Despite Pitchfork’s belief that the brickwalled settings are unbecoming of her Albini apprenticeship and perhaps her monster hooks (hate the game not the player?), I’m partial to “How Will I Know,” which makes me hope that Bethany Cosentino would drop her a line. And I’d gladly welcome “Ms. America” to the Waxahatchee oeuvre, about wrestling with parenthood because no one wants to have to teach their kid to fight. “All This Noise” applies its title to the same philosophy, which wasn’t that different from “trying to hide from my mind” in 2015. Thank god she sucks at it, because this is an album about learning to fight. She should link up with the belatedly Yellowjackets-famous Anna Waronker before she’s priced out.
9. Gloss Up, Before the Gloss Up
As someone who finds Ice Spice’s appeal beat-driven and hopes Sexyy Red gets a lot funnier, I’m relieved that GloRilla’s tough-talking bestfrenn knows how to put together a capital-A album from typical cheap and hard trap materials. Less common are the groaning violin that augments the bright block piano chords of “Gymnastics” and the strange Clipse-cum-Burial water-thing on “Lemon Peppa.” Varied with the tried-and-true melodicism of “Hold Me Down” and Three 6 sample on “Don’t Worry Bout It,” you’ve got quite the facsimile of a strong major-label rap debut from a bygone era.
8. Water From Your Eyes, Everyone’s Crushed
This duo’s purported uncategorizability isn’t due to any particular thing you haven’t heard before. If anything, this is a triumph of the new eclecticism, the amorphous genre-fluid scam that’s supposed to disguise, say, Moses Sumney’s warm links to Jeff Buckley. So it took me a moment to realize I wasn’t playing it over and over to grasp it better. The Graceland bass burble of “Out There,” Longstreth-cum-Zé riffage of “Buy My Product,” and Beefheart-esque interjections of off-time, line-in distortion that carves up the title tune into vintage BiRd-BrAiNs — those are all bits I wanted to hear again. Having spent more than half my life glued to FL Studio, I can attest how few albums illustrate the pleasure of not striking gold when two discrete loops rub together perfectly but what accidental worlds open up when they don’t.
7. Lil Uzi Vert, Pink Tape
I’m sure there’s plenty to overthink here, like why rap’s reigning ambassador of pink (sorry Nicki) clinched Pride Month with an opus that begins and occasionally returns to deflecting gay rumors (because they “fuck eight bitches a day,” natch). So let’s not. When a rapper you’ve always admired more than enjoyed drops 1.5 hours of majestic, blippy, even beautiful beats, pilots them like Wayne’s spaciest, karaokes “Chop Suey!” (in one of the worst), hums like half a bar of Gotye (in one of the best), plucks Justice’s most jagged beat (in one of the many), and makes you wonder if you’ve been missing out on Bring Me the Horizon — not to mention reminding you to play Babymetal — you may, in a particularly bereft year for blockbusters, let it shoot its shot. Don’t take my word for it, though. After seven straight (ha) bangers, I actively feared the next 20. Then it only became stronger as we rounded the halfway point. Then Jersey-club juggernaut “Just Wanna Rock” signaled the freakiness to follow, which is thrilling and distracting enough but primarily serves to make you hungry for more Autotuned rapping, something I never thought I’d write. And before you know it, you’re left with the question of whether it really has to end. Neither Drake nor Future has ever been this tuneful for 80 minutes, much less 87.
6. Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World
Hype turns in cycles, so when you’re as old as Yo La Tengo, you go through a few, especially when you’ve been around long enough for people to play the best-since game. And sure, the hosannahs greeting my favorite working band’s 17th album has at least something to do with the surprise that quiet masters in their late 60s still use their fuzz pedals. Being my favorite working band, their 2010s output (Fade, Stuff Like That There, There’s a Riot Going On and especially 2020’s warmly consuming drone We Have Amnesia Sometimes) deserves more than to be casualties of a best-since game. But the tensely motorik basslines here adorned with noises like barbed-wire tinsel and uncommonly delicate, Georgia-sung ballads adrift like ice floes earn it. A reminder that great songwriters can swallow you with sound, too.
5. Wednesday, Rat Saw God
The most deserving Only Band That Matters in years sound like…Wussy? At least, if they were young enough to be dragged through emo rather than Athens, GA: Inside/Out. They’re even led by a power couple, god help them, of last year’s Boat Songsmith MJ Lenderman on paint-peeling axe that bridges the gap between Icky Mettle’s string bends and Chet Atkins’, and major imagist Karly Hartzman, whose cracked twang is always recounting some outrageous backwoods irony like she’s lined up her next urban legend to tell at the bonfire. They’re credible and hilarious because she’s besotted with Loudon Wainwright III and Patterson Hood. Unusually for a band that’s at least oft-mentioned alongside shoegaze, their lyrics are surer than their sound. But damnation rain upon you if you deny that anyone putting “Bull Believer” and “Chosen to Deserve” on the same record has one. It’s big, it’s confident, and most dangerously, they’re still figuring it out. Let’s crowd up front to watch before it’s all reserved seating.
4. JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown, Scaring the Hoes
Took me longer to figure out this wasn’t Danny’s worst than to determine it’s JPEG’s best, though Brown’s been tripping towards sonic nirvana over lyrical supremacy for some time. Sampling “Milkshake” probably just to incur Kelis’ post-Beyoncé wrath on “Fentanyl Tester” and who knows what clanging field vérité to create the god-tier “Garbage Pale Kids” (“Eat your ass like I’m Canibus,” not to mention these titles), plus the literal G-d-tier Timothy Wright gospel-a-go-go that forms the basis of “God Loves You,” not many people exist who can make Danny weirder. Hurtling towards d’n’b, hyperpop, and Death Grips, their 36-minute bricolage is a lot twitchier and more kinetic than the musique concrete proffered by the Earl/Navy nexus or the Backwoodz camp, not to mention punker and brattier. Between Danny’s substance troubles, Peggy’s accidental musicianship, and whatever Warp’s keeping from us, it feels more vital and on-the-run than any psychoactive collab in the decade (what??) since Young Thug and Bloody Jay’s (who??) Black Portland.
3. Liv.e, Girl in the Half Pearl
R&B auteurs get ADHD, too, I’m delighted to report, and this drum’n’bass-paced journey through Olivia Williams’ skittering mind and musical palette is the most engrossing since Dawn Richard’s psychedelic undersea rave Blackheart. She cherrypicks the Odd Future alums’ diminished chords (“Lake Psilocybin”), Esperanza Spalding’s melted modals (“Clowns”), and Navy Blue’s drumless, daybreaking instrumentals (“Find Out”) to warp something like “There’s more than 50 ways to leave your lover” into a feel-good story or take a bite out of her non-girlfriend’s ass over the dial-tone trip-hop of “A Slumber Party‽” My favorite sequence is the gorgeous synth ripple of “Snowing!” escaping into the detuned, electronically tickled ivories of “Wild Animals” and “Reset!” just when you can’t take any more music theory. The mellower Couldn’t Wait to Tell You similarly felt bursting with ideas until I went back so maybe the next Liv.e will blow this away too. She ain’t sitting any stiller.
2. 100 gecs, 10,000 gecs
“Doritos & Fritos” is their statement because few pop auteurs understand that snacks are their holy mission. Imagine if two dickwads who came up in the time of free AOL CDs conceived Dial-a-Song instead of They Might Be Giants, treating their ADHD with homemade Reel Big Fish, Limp Bizkit, and Blink-182 trifles instead of Elvis Costello and…I don’t know, Camper Van Beethoven. I wouldn’t say the gecs’ aural-trash dominion is as boundless as the awestruck claim; where’s their fake Garth Brooks ballad and “Cotton Eye Joe” sample? But they’ve damn near perfected the half-hour Saturday morning cartoon as music, equally a kidlike rush worth remembering and a now worth being alive to experience. There’s a supply-chain shortage of the latter.
1. Emperor X, Suggested Improvements to Transportation Infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor [EP]
Chad Matheny’s always had something to say, and he’s gotten better at saying it. Because in a post-Trump/COVID world he’s desperate for clearer communication as we all should be and partly because every other citizen’s so stupid now that satire is dangerous (not that he won’t indulge in a “Sad React” from time to time). As you’d imagine from the title(s), which defy Windows character limits, this wondrous, completely unreviewed EP laid down via four-track after early 2023 gigs breaks new ground in directness. A legally blind musician dependent on touring income needs public transportation to be efficient, simple as that. What isn’t simple is why it can’t be, which is where these six unforgettable tunes and their sledgehammer hooks come out swinging, including the spoken-word one: “Funding was not available,” “It was a cash grab,” “How you gonna pay for it?” That’s just the punctuation of these astonishingly detailed exhortations though, from suspiciously underattended zoning meetings to overwhelmed drainage grates and quietly singing Shape Notes in between. Matheny can’t bring himself in good conscience to charge for this. Direct action is tipping him handsomely.