December 29, 2023 8:00 am
Going through the natural progression of all things, when first come albums, songs must follow. Like the last few years, I’ve listed 100 favorite songs total: alphabetically listing 90 of them and then ranking my Top 10 below that. There’s no way I can rank 100 songs in order. I know some people who can. I respect them for it, and tremble in their resolve.
Looking back on my Best Songs of 2022 post, I wrote that I felt I had become more disconnected to the general “consensus” of universally loved songs across the indie-sphere. That trend became more severe this year, although any adept listener in 2023 will surely recognize most tracks on this list. I’m not reinventing the wheel, or presenting many new ideas to the table. I just was kind of dissatisfied with a lot of the overwhelming critical favorites that dominated this year.
What you’ll find below is a melange of indie pop with heavy grooves, electrifying house and dance music, two appearances by Danny Brown, some familiar faces and longtime favorites of the blog, some newcomers, and yes, I could not resist including a track off the new collection of World of Echo-era Arthur Russell cuts Picture of Bunny Rabbit. If I dig deeper potentially I could make a “favorite archival, reissue and compilation releases” list to really go full nerd mode, but that would likely come later in 2024. Also I’m including both Parts 1 + 2 of Blonde Redhead’s “Sit Down For Dinner”, because you can’t have just one. It’s my blog and I can make up the rules if I want to. But enough yapping, plenty of listening to be done below. I hope you enjoy and find something new you love.
Listen along with the Warm Visions’ Top Songs of 2023 Spotify playlist HERE.
One of my first favorite tracks of 2023 – something that really got me perked up and excited about music this year. It’s got a DAMN good groove, with a chunky, flexing bass line and slick mellotron, a sci-fi synth solo, string arrangements, stereo-panned rhythm guitar essentially riffing the whole track, and of course a charismatic, soulful vocal from Meernaa herself. This was a track where I said “ok Meernaa ain’t playing around” – and whoever isn’t clued in on that is unfortunately late to the party.
I love a track that rewards with a great build-up. “Exit Cycle” is a track that is great on its own, starting off with a leading mix of electric and acoustic guitar, with drums eventually coming in with the chorus. The control of dynamics and arrangement is what makes this track shine, with the volume of the track keeping the listener bound to see where things go. Then from 3:23 and on, the gang vocals, the layering of melodies, the driving percussion, the rising urgency of the guitars, all fuse into one glorious release that has enraptured me for most of the year. It’s a simple track, but again, it’s all about paying off with a satisfying ending.
After making my favorite album of 2022, Big Thief couldn’t help themselves from making another top favorite of mine in 2023 as well. “Vampire Empire” is just a plain ole great rock song, with really fun vocal delivery from Adrianne Lenker, and lyrics that are deeply relatable, along with slightly humorous, showcasing the outrageous behavior of some folks you feel bound to. I gotta imagine this song also rips live, adding this to the catalog of Dragon New Warm Mountain songs I need to see performed live.
You hear that bass? You hear that keyboard tone? You hear that tempo? You hear them snappy drums?You hear the repetition? You hear that build up? You hear that bass now? Oh now you hear the guitar now? It’s really coming in there. How many chords are in this song? Are you tapping your foot? Is the vein in your forehead starting to bump up? Are you up now? Are you running now? Is En Attendant Ana your favorite band now? Cool, me too.
“Trauma Mic”, the first single off We Buy Diabetic Test Strips showed that billy woods and ELUCID were out for blood this time around. DJ Haram’s industrial production and Pink Siifu’s doomsday preacher intro set the stage for this ripper of a track, which regularly gives me goosebumps. The guitar in particular in this beat is absolutely vicious, and the video’s setting taking place in a scrap shop was the perfect pairing. Incredible track.
My most listened-to song of this year! When I needed a hit of summery, feel-good music, Pearl & the Oysters had me covered. The whole album is fantastic, but “Pacific Ave” hit so many sweet spots that I had to pick this one as the favorite on this record. It feels culled from the same cloth as hits from the Pacific supergroup record, or a buried private press groover that you’d find on a well-curated compilation. It really made my spring something memorable, a shining spot in a rather dull year.
Was truly obsessed with this song earlier on in the year, as Fever Ray fills an arena with this booming pop banger. Every part of the track feels mutated, from the blobby, bass synths I could hear from Violator-era Depeche Mode, the wild arpeggios of computer electronics that sound almost pulled from “You Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive, and Karin Dreijer’s bold, unflinching vocals that they shout out into the expanse. The massive breakdown near the end of the track puts the whole thing over the top, making you a participant in this hedonistic, lovesick circus.
I wrote about this song when I sang my praises for the album it’s off of, and I wrote a lot, so I hope you don’t mind if I paraphrase what I said here. It’s a tremendous opener, setting the tone immediately and establishing the kind of timbres, rhythms, and textures heard throughout the rest of the LP. It’s driving enough to work in a club, but open and panoramic enough to feel like the sky is wide open. The result is hypnotic and beautifully intoxicating, with each micro-detail threaded into the song’s composition breathing human life into the song. It’s not often that a house track, complete with samples, beats, electronics, you know the drill etc, sounds like it could be pulled from the earth, or culled from the sky, or sourced from a river. One organism, breathing, moving.
Over the last few years I’ve described a certain flavor of late 90s / early 00s electro-pop with Euro trance flair as “laser tag music”, aka music that evokes the sugary, kid-brain-melting pop songs that dominated spaces that I frequented at the time. These places include of course laser tag spots for friends’ birthday parties (shout out Zap Zone), the local bowling alley (shout out Maplewood Lanes), the indoor soccer arena (shout out WideWorld Sports Center), or the ice cream shop / arcade at mini gold (waddup Putt Putt). Most of these places had a DDR machine as well, so the music from those (my mind immediately goes to “Butterfly”, of course), filtered with threads of Alice Deejay “Better Off Alone”, or Cher’s “Believe”, or even Daft Punk’s “One More Time”, fueled by cheese fries, blue moon ice cream, warhead candies, and desires to go home and play Pokemon Gold and feed my Tamagotchi, have left permanent couch prints on my pleasure center. That being said, “Now U Do” feels like a short circuit to those times, an endlessly replayable one at that.
This is it. This is the pinnacle of pop music in 2023. Marci had already been a recurring favorite of both myself and my partner in our apartment this year, as her 2022 debut still sounds as fresh and fun as ever. In 2023, she followed up that great album with two singles, hopefully hinting at another album to come in 2024. The most recent was “Stop”, and earlier this year was “KITY”, which I cannot discount because if “Stop” didn’t come out this year, “KITY” would have taken up a space on this list.
In “Stop”, we see pristine production collide with infectious songwriting. This is not a new concept, Marci is not inventing the wheel. But the way the song is executed has turned me upside down nearly every time I listen. There’s a reason why I usually replay it two or three times. And for fans of movies like Asteroid City (ie, movies about movies), this is essentially a pop song about a pop song. You can’t get someone out of your head, like a catchy pop song, no matter how much you try to get this earworm dislodged. I should also add that Marci (aka Marta Cikojevic) is a member of the blog forever favorite band TOPS, and works with fellow TOPS bandmate David Carriere on all Marci music, lending a natural TOPS-like sound to all the compositions. I love TOPS, so my predisposition to go into this track loving it was pretty much set from the beginning. But this exceeds my usual fandom, clearly.
Let’s start at the chorus. Instrumentally, this thing PUNCHES, with snappy drums and low bass synth that hums in a way that must stimulate my brain in some addicting way. There are a lot of great little vocal overdubs: “I can’t stop (…stop, stop, stop…) singin’ that song about you (and the way that it POPS) over again”, which add a lot of depth to the song, kind of reinforcing this concept of sticky thoughts coming at you from all angles. Furthermore, the mix in the chorus features so many little details scattered across each channel, like the “stop” overdubs pop in both left and right channels, and little synth riffs that are a bit buried, but reveal themselves on subsequent listens. I should add when she says “POPS” in the overdub it’s overlayed with a little popping sound, which like the bass synth vibrates at a certain frequency that releases an absurd amount of dopamine each time it happens.
The verses aren’t slouches either, with gorgeous, glassy washes of synth that pan across the soundscape (that are punctuated by the bass synth featured in the chorus!) and the same snappy drums as featured on the chorus, along with some well-placed overdubs as well, such as when she says “Every second like one, two three, and repeating”, there’s a little “one / two / three” counting in time in the background, panned in the stereo space so they’re floating around your head like the “stop’s” in the chorus. On the second verse, a slinky guitar starts subtly chiming in, which eventually returns in a more prominent role in the outro, as well as a beefed up version of the drums (with a nice, muted kick), as well as shimmery, almost rave-like keys. It’s a great capper, a celebratory one at that. Like I said – it’s pop perfection. There were few fountains of joy that I afforded myself this year, so something like this coming along really helped out a lot.
Reminder, you can listen to all these tracks on my Spotify playlist HERE. Thanks for reading!
Posted by Very Warm
Categories: Music
Tags: a.s.o., Active Surplus, Alan Palomo, Amaarae, Andrea, Anna B Savage, Armand Hammer, Arthur Russell, Asher White, BAMBII, Bart, Bernice, Best of 2023, Big Thief, Billy Woods, Blonde Redhead, Bombino, Braids, Carlos Niño, Caroline Polachek, Chuquimamani-Condori, Cleo Sol, Cole Pulice, Colin Stetson, Confidence Man, Courtesy, Crushed, dada Joãozinho, danny brown, DJ Seinfeld, Dusk, Edsel Axle, En Attendant Ana, Esther Rose, Faith Healer, Feeble Little Horse, Fever Ray, Freak Heat Waves, Gia Margaret, Glasser, Hayden Pedigo, jacques greene, Jam City, Jessie Ware, Jessy Lanza, Joanna Sternberg, Joanne Robertson, John Carroll Kirby, JPEGMAFIA, julie byrne, Kali Uchis, Kara Jackson, Kate NV, Kelela, Kenny Segal, Little Dragon, m83, Maple Glider, Marci, Mary Lattimore, Maya Ongaku, Meagre Martin, Meernaa, Meg Baird, Mega Bog, Mitski, ML Buch, mui zyu, Nabihah Iqbal, NewJeans, Nourished By Time, Overmono, Pangaea, Pearl and the Oysters, PJ Harvey, Powers / Pulice / Rolin, Salami Rose Joe Louis, Sampha, Scree, Shame, Sluice, Snow Strippers, Sofia Kourtesis, SPELLLING, sufjan stevens, Sun June, Tara Clerkin Trio, Tensnake, Thandi Ntuli, Tinashe, Tiny Ruins, Tirzah, TisaKorean, Titanic, Truth Club, Uh Huh, Wednesday, Westerman, Y La Bamba, Yeule, Yo La Tengo, Young Fathers, Yunè Pinku, Yussef Dayes, Yves Tumor
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