Here are my albums of the year. 2023 has been a truly awful year for me, my family and my friends. It started with illness, continued with deaths and ended with an incurable disease for a wee bairn, but one thing has lifted my mood at times and that has been the amount of excellent new music I've thoroughly enjoyed this year.
There have been 15* 2023 albums that have graced my stereo or media player this year; some of them have been a bit meh, others - by artists who regularly featured in my Top 5 albums of yesteryear - have been a little disappointing (Motorpsycho, Steven Wilson, Carbon Based Lifeforms), but there have been six albums that have been on constant rotation throughout the year and all have claims - for one reason or another - to be my album of the year.
* One of the albums in my Top 6 was actually released in November 2022, but I didn't actually find out about it or buy it until the spring of 2023.
#6 - Sigur Ros - ATTA
When ATTA came out my first thoughts were, 'Oh a new Sigur Ros album' and then promptly forgot about it. When I decided to do a Top 5 albums of the year for the first time in ages, I decided that I should give the other 10 contenders a listen just in case one of them suddenly caught on fire and made me reconsider. ATTA is, IMHO, the best thing Sigur Ros has done in years. It is a beautiful and almost understated album that proves that a band that has been going for near on 30 years still has the ability to surprise and therefore I made my top 5 albums, my top 6 albums because this couldn't be missed out.
https://youtu.be/JQVOCcEG-BA?si=ovF4kdLm2Dzxhv9Y
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#5 - M83 - Fantasy
This was very much a contender for the #1 spot until the summer/autumn arrived and four other albums came along and knocked it down the pecking order. Given that I didn't even buy the previous proper M83 album - Junk - this really came out of nowhere. In many ways it's the best album the band has ever released because with one exemption - the title track, which even that isn't bad - it's full of absolute cracking tunes. This is shoegaze meets dance music meets indie pop meets the quite unique sound of Anthony Gonzalez and it has the distinction of being my most played album of the year. That, however, is because shortly after this album came out I got back into music after a period of time where I listened to very little. In any ordinary year this would be #1.
https://youtu.be/hrEQjbCgPoM?si=-8OlEMIQBnqDEfhP
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#4 - Solar Fields - Formations
Firstly this is an exception as it came out in November 2022, but I didn't get it until March as I had no idea it had come out. My top albums of the year wouldn't be complete without something from Scandinavia and Magnus Birgersson aka Solar Fields has produced some good albums over the last 15 years but nothing that has been this good. I remember six years ago when Carbon Based Lifeforms came out of nowhere and won my album of the year, Solar Fields - on the same label - had an album out that didn't even register on my radar. This year the roles are reversed with CBL just about limping into my top 10 but not enough to get more than this fleeting mention. This is an electronic album with a lot of 20th century influences and some absolutely banging tunes - Solar Fields are classed as Psybient (whatever that is), downtempo, progressive trance, and ambient, but I think there's elements of post rock and classic electronica. It's a cracking album however you want to label it.
https://youtu.be/1K74lgNWZB8?si=F1zhfjYY4XRG82S1
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#3 - North Atlantic Oscillation - United Wire
Yes, you're seeing this correctly. My favourite band only manage to make it to #3 and it was a really tough decision because this really was a return to form after the slightly less than perfect Grind Show in 2018. I use the expression 'in any other year' a lot but it applies to this as well, it would have been #1. It came out of the blue, I wasn't expecting it and when it arrived I was blown away. It wandered back into Sam Healy's post-progressive rock roots without betraying the band's signature folktronica and played as a continuous piece of music it is truly outstanding. There is so much experimentation in NAO's music, if Cardiacs had more ideas in one song than most bands have in their entire careers, then this band are a close second. It is a classy addition to a fabulous discography and while I feel I have let my friend Sam down by not making it my #1 album of the year, it has been beaten by two truly awe-inspiring albums...
https://youtu.be/mq7taGGKB70?si=zDjq-TNeiln41sw7
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#2 - Blur - The Ballad of Darren
What an absolute stonking album which would have won album of the year by a country (house) mile in any other year. In fact, I was listening to it as I typed this and I'm still blown away by how bloody brilliant every track is and how many influences you can hear - from David Bowie to the Velvets to Nikki Sudden to the indie music I grew up with. It's just an album that surpasses superlatives, it's like they've been working up to this all their careers and every single track is outstanding - even the three extras on the Japanese edition would not have seemed out of place had they been put on the standard UK and US releases. I'd list the tracks to listen to but that would essentially be the entire album, so if you haven't heard this go and buy it, you won't be disappointed, it's pretty much a work of genius.
https://youtu.be/6tyqxmIxIH4?si=hKzFkoAcZVkzf3r2
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What could possibly beat the Blur album to the top accolade? What work of pure unadulterated joy and spectacle could possibly beat that - an album that in many ways could have been one of the albums of the century? Well... this came along at a really good time; after a year of ill health both physical and mental I was just coming out of a tunnel I really didn't think I'd get through at points, which is why I've been so overwhelmed by the utterly wonderful albums that have graced my stereo in 2023. This album can be described as choral psychedelic folk music and is full of wonderfully Scottish tunes that absolutely floored me when I first heard them and continue to do so a few months later. Despite all the brilliance of music in 2023 nothing has brought me to tears the way this has at times and in many ways this little outfit with their small following, limited number of gigs and views on You Tube, that make North Atlantic Oscillation seems like a supergroup, have surpassed all my expectations. Three years ago they released an album called The Lagganberry Man which would have won my best album of 2020 if I'd bothered to do a best albums list and this is my favourite album of 2023; not because it's musically better than the Blur album or technically better than the NAO album, because from an emotional point of view I heard nothing else this year that had such a profound effect on me - everything about it had meaning.
Therefore, my Album of the Year is this:
Beluga Lagoon - The Kilfraggan Forest Choir
Here's the entire album: https://youtu.be/6qoUt7qfGbU?si=ReqR9mPDwCa2ggRt
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