Apologies for the delay once again – there was A LOT of great music out in March! I even broke through the 10-album goal and listed 12. From surprise AOTY contenders, to newcomers, to reliable favorites, March 2024 had it all, plus a ton of great tunes that come off albums I don’t feature below, but list in the GR8 SONGS segment! Don’t miss it!
Another late addition to the Recommended Albums party, but an addition nonetheless. 2024 is already shaping up to be a great year for music, as seen below with all these fantastic records. The Mk.gee one in particular I’ve been blasting for a while, along with the delirious Contrahouse.
I thought it would never come, but I finally was hit with the inspiration to feature some great albums from January 2024. December 2023 is a lost cause by now, but February shaped up to be a solid month. Looking forward to getting more solid records this year.
Here we go folks – it’s honestly my biggest 2023-related post of the year. This was the ninth year I’ve actively kept track of the songs that have sculpted my year. Whether they added clay or shaped me into who I am, these songs were the soundtrack to everything as it happened. If I was obsessed with a certain song, replaying it over and over, it goes in the list. If it was a song that I was listening to when I saw the best sunset in my life, it goes in the list. It it was something that was played a lot around the house with my partner, or a visceral cut I saw performed live, or anything that will clearly be attached to specific memories, emotions or feelings, it goes in the list. I’ve described it as a scrapbook of sorts, a collage. You can look back at older Retrospective posts HERE.
This will be my final 2023-related post, I’m sending it off in style. (I will not be doing a Recommended Albums of December 2023… I didn’t listen to a single album from that month, I don’t think). Thank you for reading Warm Visions for another year. We completely smashed my view count record this year, so I’m feeling encouraged to keep it up since people are clearly finding this blog. I also somehow got a ton of new Instagram followers as well, so shout out to y’all.
Below you’ll find 100 songs that soundtracked my year as it happened alongside a little blurb to go along with them. After that are my total listening stats for 2023 (most listened-to artists, albums and songs, etc). Then will be my other media wrap-up (movies, tv, books, games), and finally I have some wrap-up thoughts for 2023 as a whole. Thanks again for reading, and here’s to a healthy 2024.
To wrap up my Best of 2023 lists for Warm Visions, I’ve collected all my favorite concerts I attended this year, along with cataloging every show I went to as well. I’ve done this every year since 2016, when I moved to NYC and started going to a lot of shows, so I have a good idea of how my time here has ebbed and flowed in terms of catching concerts.
After a strong return back to live music in 2022, I felt like 2023 was a bit of a slowing. Sure I technically saw more artists than the year prior, but that was fully on account of attending SXSW, as well as a music conference in Philadelphia, NON-COMMvention, in May. If you remove those, I saw significantly less artists than last year. And I don’t even try to compare my modern stats to my pre-pandemic numbers, since that was when I was out nearly every night as a 20-something, living in Brooklyn and as a bachelor in a long distance relationship. Looking back on 2019 or 2018, man I get tired. It was a lot of fun though. Speaking of which, you can see all my Favorite Show posts on the sidebar of my blog. For mobile users, these posts should be listed in the “Best Of” tab as well.
Dipping back into this year and looking at the raw stats, I attended less shows than usual. Plain and simple. Contributing factors: I moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, putting myself farther away from the action of shows and making me less motivated to trek down and see things in Bushwick, for example. I also got a new job which entailed a lot more work, tiring me out. My partner’s job also made her infinitely more busy, so making time to see her instead of seeing Joe Schmo was also an utmost priority. And finally, maybe I’m just becoming disconnected with the roster of acts that smaller NYC clubs are bringing in. Don’t get me wrong, I had a packed calendar for most people’s standards, but I know some people in the city that went to probably three shows a week for the entire year. This is probably just my old, 31 year old brain telling me that I’m old and scared of the future. Alas.
I did happen to have a high percentage of “bucket list” artists crossed off, like The Cure, PJ Harvey, M83, Panda Bear and Laurel Halo, but even beyond that, I saw a fair amount of artists that I thought I’d never see in my lifetime. Arthur Verocai. Unwound. Helen. The Caretaker! Jai Paul for goodness’ sake! These big ticket shows are what marked my 2023, so I’ll absolutely look back on this year with positivity threaded throughout. Below I’ve selected 10 of my favorite shows I attended this year and wrote a chunk about them. After that you’ll find stats (I know you love stats) breaking down how many artists + individual performances I saw this year, as well as the full list. Let the live music flow in 2024!
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.
Greetings, dear readers of Warm Visions, and welcome to my favorite albums of 2023 post. Every year it becomes more apparent that ranking art is a bad thing, but let’s make that only apply to conglomerates of many writers, that are pooling their thoughts and are more widely beloved. We are all unique in our desires and pleasures – there’s no way to clump all of us together and objectively say what music is the best or not.
That is, until my “Warm Visions”™® come into play. I am one person, but I have stalked the internet high and low to find only the best records available, and have thusly presented them to you here. No reason to debate me when perfection is already achieved: this list is the premier collection of ranked music of 2023 available, and my choices are 100% correct. In seriousness though, I did enjoy a good chunk of records this year, and here are 50 of my favorites.
Like previous years, I’ve selected ten honorable mentions and then written blurbs + “Warm Visions descriptions” for the following 50 records, which are arranged from #50 to #1. This is a snapshot of how I’m feeling now, but everyone knows this will shift around A TON even by January. Heck I’m changing the order of this thing the day it got posted. I’m being for real! I’ll get more into my thoughts on music as a whole in 2023 in my Retrospective post coming at the top of 2024, so I won’t bore you with too many more of my opinions right now. In the meantime, check out my list below, listen to some records you hadn’t given time to before and support some artists to make spirits bright (Bandcamp streams below + album art linked with their pages as well). No EPs list this year, but Songs + Concerts coming soon. Happy Best of 2023 season!
November 2023 came and went, leaving behind some stellar records that easily found their way onto my Best Albums of 2023 list, which should be coming in the next few weeks now that I have this finished. I’m still going through a bunch of records that I missed from the year, but I’d say it’s pretty solidified.
Either way, hope you enjoy this last gasp of Recommended Albums for 2023. I even listed more than 10! Feeling generous out here!
Getting this out basically in December – no need to include descriptions. These are good albums, you’ll be seeing a few of them in my Top 50 of 2023, whenever that comes. Thanks for reading.
’95 sedan heat, carpet seats crumbs embedded, pilling flannel under dad’s old coat, arm cast signed xoxo, flattened field, glazed pewter skies, 3pm twilight, turnpike cowboy, fool’s nostalgia, snare shot to heaven, a letter you tucked away from another season.
It’s been a minute, but I felt the inspiration to craft another playlist, pulling from the touches of winter-adjacent autumn and the nostalgia that comes with it, along with three particular songs in the following playlist. In November 2021 I visited my home state of Michigan to visit two family member in the hospital. Alone in my hometown for the first time in 10 years, with a rental car to boot, I drove all over my memory’s landmarks as they were basked in that luscious, midwest fall glow. One of the songs that came on my shuffle was Black Marble’s “Say It First”, and the pairing of listening to this song while driving around my quaint past hometown has stuck with me ever since.
The other two tracks that gave me inspiration were Molly Nilsson’s “1995”, which was an obvious source of past mining thanks to its title and obvious throwback sound. The other was CCFX’s “The One To Wait”, which upon listening explicitly conjures ripe nostalgia of being in friends’ hand-me-down cars in November / December, the heat blaring, the skies fading quick after school lets out, the romance and drama of the holidays swirling, the lackadaisical attitude around responsibilities with winter breaks looming. At the same time though for me, it puts false images in my head of cinematic friend groups of the past doing the exact same thing in suburban, semi-converted rural areas across North America over a stretch of time, let’s say 1986 to 2002. Kids bringing camcorders to school to not only show off their exciting new tech, but to document the best days of their lives. Afternoons just spent driving along the never-ending backroads by the cemetery, or by the trampled corn field, defunct for the winter, or through the four-corner downtown. Putting on their winter coats after a season of hibernation, only to find a love note that a friend had passed them in the early spring of that year, forgotten, wrinkled. Or maybe even a note that was meant to be given, but shrunk away just in the last moment, and then rediscovered. Or perhaps just a love letter to the coats that return to comfort us every year.
With that, I was bound to make a collection of songs with obvious 80s/90s nostalgia production, focusing on synth/drum machine/bass/guitar combos that ` dark, but not too dark you lose hope for the future. Some of the songs lean a bit too hard into the dance / goth portion, but imagine this as a CD (or tape, hey!) you’d find in a car from the era. A windshield-shaped window into an exhibit on ennui, on drama, on being drunk on romance, seeped into every bursting pore. Listen & check the track list below.
Warm Visions 