Letter to a Long, Hard Year
album reviews
My personal New Year happens in September, when the climax of my professional life happens; so I’m already deep in the work of reflection, recap, wrapping up. In honor of a chapter that feels like it is ending, I wanted to celebrate some of the albums that moved me this year.
2023 has been the hardest year on record for most of the people in my immediate vicinity, myself included. Things that I usually do to alleviate stress caused even more stress to build up. It has been a year for growth by doing, and of acceptance, loss, and change. In the wake of the hot, hectic summer, new things are beginning to emerge that feel like the payoff to a years’ worth of hard work, luck good and bad, and saying no to the devils I know.
Music helped me keep it movin’ this year - especially full albums. When I look at all of these records together, I notice that many of them have the same arc - a vocalist, protagonist, floating in a liminal space, gradually becoming more and more embodied and well definied. They move through grief at the start, and then come around to a new coming of age, some ending in more definitive shapes than others. And some of them are just a vibe. Here is a list, in chronological order.
People on Sunday - Domenique Dumont
Januaries in Maine are getting harder and harder for me - the demons come out viciously, and for some reason, the beginning of 2023 was all teeth. I was playing a lot of music out loud from the TV in the living room, hunkering down, trying to force a cathartically large writing project to get my mind off of I-don’t-know-what. At least there were buckets and buckets of snow. Domenique Dumont’s People on Sunday, is easy breezy ambient. Gentle, bouncy, textural and aquatic, the record is laced with little gimmicks and tricks that make it shine extra bright on the first three or four listens. The title is perfect - this record is evokes people, milling about in a beautiful mundane, getting their chores done. I borrowed its good attitude when I needed one last winter.
Raven - Kelela
Another of my winter coping mechanisms was that I started taking a keen interest in the way my little lizard, Nero (r.ip.), responded to certain music. I started seeking out music that would make him move, freeze, even sometimes mosh. But nothing effected him the way Kelela’s 2023 record Raven did - the beats are scoripionic, reaching your ears after traveling through layers and layers of dark, deep water. Listening to Raven is to imagine yourself in the sexiest club of your wildest dreams, where bodies ripple and lights flash. Whenever I put it on, Nero would sprawl out on the floor of his tank, eyes closed, and bliss t-f out. For me, the record’s deliberate subtlety set the stage for me real love affair of the year…
Love Deluxe - Sade
I am so in love with Sade. “If everyone in the world could give me what I wanted, I wouldn’t want for more than I had.” Only Sade has the buttery smooth, pulled punch expression that you get to hear on Love Deluxe - to me it is her greatest achievement. This album, just like Kelela’s Raven, follows a five year hiatus, and eases the musician back into making with mastery. The prerogative on this record is to do a lot with a little, to leave oceans of space for emotions to rush, gush, and flourish.
Sade takes us down through the journey of her own emotional making. It starts with sacrifice, with love too hard to work for and a world dedicated to keeping you down. From there, the album moves deeper and deeper down into the depths of Sade's feeling. The imagery of the mermaid is the thing that ties Love Deluxe together - this is not a love that soars, but one that swims to the bottom of an ocean, where a grotto of feeling is waiting, a tray of oysters ready.
“Pearls” is a track that I feel many different ways about - it is interesting that this singer, who sings so much about lavish, rich lifestyles, should also write a song imagining a Somali woman “scraping for pearls on the roadside,” and admiring a bravery of poverty. It does not always feel good to listen to. But I am also interested by the song’s position as the climax of the album - it is the deepest that Sade takes us down into her emotional place, and in that deep part of herself is empathy. It is through that empathy that we emerge, free and beautiful as a mermaid.
Love Deluxe came to me in the winter and followed me through every season of this year - putting it anywhere on this list is kind of difficult. It was there for me just as much on Vesper St. and Winter St. as it was making No on A campaign signs in a Portland Backyard, or on West Meadow Road in Rockland, where I would stand in my room in the middle of the night and sing very heartfelt “Cherish the Day” karaoke while clumsily playing along on my unplugged electric bass. Sade is the woman of the year.
A River Ain’t Too Much to Love - Smog
Working the bar at a Bill Callahan show on a rainy spring night in a Unitarian Church was the season premier of a new chapter of my life. I was interested in how many men are devotionally attached to him, and I was also very turned on by him. I didn’t know his music super well before that night, so A River Ain’t Too Much to Love was the record that I used to create an afterglow around my experience of seeing him live. The thoughtful, sometimes nostalgic ramblings of River sound to me like getting up out of bed in the middle of the night to go out and look at the stars. It was a map of how to have a masculine coming of age without whining - to ponder without pontificating, and to live in a sense of wonder. “I did not become someone different I did not want to be.” It helped me start imagine whether there was a life for me outside the city.
Four Calendar Cafe - Cocteau Twins
In getting over life’s hurdles, I thought that I would need speed and momentum. But really, to get over some of the peaks, I had to be deliberate, direct, and a little bit slow. I had to open up space for the summer sweetness to weave itself along with the sorrow, and let them both exist in the same place. Four Calendar Cafe was very meaningful in showing me ways to do that.
Something that sticks out about this record in the Cocteau Twins oeuvre is that you can actually tell what Elizabeth Fraiser is saying. In this album about liminal space, and about wondering, the vocals are a grounding element, an aid in processing the wide open feelings that the songs explore. The single from this record is not the upbeat and breezy, “Summerhead,” but instead the drawn out and outright emo, “Evangeline.” The record drips with earnestness, with self-love and patience. The closing track’s triumphant chorus is heartfelt to the point of being sappy: “I love you and I know that you’ll figure it out.”
Translucence - Poly Styrene
This summer I rented a room in a big old house in Midcoast Maine from a woman who studies scallops and plays hockey in the winter time. She had a finished attic over her garage that she let me use as an artist studio, with two big windows and a gorgeous, dusty linoleum floor. I half drew lots of comic strips and half wrote lots of short stories in that dusty room, and burned a lot of incense, and always had my shirt off, and most of the time I was listening to Translucsnce.
The best part of this album is the juxtaposition between the first two tracks. “Dreaming,” the opener, is a beautiful, beachy lullaby, whose nostalgic groove feels like the sun is shining right down on your face. And then, immediately after this track of gentle beauty, is the goofiest, clumsiest, worst song I have ever heard, “Talk in Toy Town.” It is a song so bad, after a song so good, that I cannot help but smile.
Mannequin Pussy on AudioTree Live - Mannequin Pussy
I am driving home from a day-long rural queer organizing summit - in the community that I’m trying to become a part of, there is usually a party that happens on Saturdays that starts at some point in the middle of the day. Everyone lives all spread over the rural Maine landscape, will rolling hills of trees and open vistas of blue skies and clouds. The clouds put on the most beautiful pageant you have ever seen every single day.
Mannequin Pussy are exactly the punk band I wish I was in - I wish I could scream like that. To me their rage is profound, their music is deliciously sapphic. Because of Mannequin Pussy you can’t say “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” Their music is energetic and I am ready to come back into the world. I do not need as much wide open space - all the songs on this live album are like two minutes long. I want to be keeping things moving.