My favourite things during 2023

The hotly anticipated 2023 edition of my assorted-things-I-love list, finally finished nearly a week into February 2024 because I happened to really love a lot of things, and also because writing is really, really hard.  Enjoy!

ALBUMS (from this year)

PATRICIA TAXXON - TECHDOG 1-7

Patricia Taxxon is a unique and prolific talent.  I got pretty zealously occupied with her music near the end of 2019, and since then she's put out something like 32 releases, many of which would rank amongst my favourites of the past few years.  But until this point, though her discographie has proven expansive and diverse, I never really thought of it as containing an obvious magnum opus, a singular work to contain all of Taxxon's strengths and signature qualities.  And though her sole 2023 release, the seven-part TECHDOG series, is arguably itself not a singular work, from my perspective it is undeniably the culmination of her years of producing music and carving out her unique identity as a musician.  TECHDOG 1-7 runs for a combined twelve hours and thirty-eight minutes, with each successive album being comprised of longer and longer tracks, but in addition to being subdivided by track length, each album in the series also has its own sound and feeling, indicated by their respective cover arts and descriptions (e.g. 'Feeling excitement/curiosity/at ease/etc').  The first four albums build on the rhythms and sound design of previous IDM-oriented material on albums such as 2021's Yes, And and 2022's Visiting Narcissa (two of my other favourite albums of Taxxon's), whilst TECHDOG 5 shifts to a more nocturnal, abstract and amelodic style à la Autechre, TECHDOG 6 diverges from the beat-driven compositions and veers into chaotic digital noise, and TECHDOG 7 is mostly sparse, airy and slow-moving.  The production and sound design on these albums are Taxxon's best yet, and the albums' sequencing both independently and as a whole are excellent as well, and if you'll allow me to consider this series to be one album then I have no doubt that it is my favourite of 2023 and an absolute must-listen for any electronic music fan with twelve hours free.

HANNAH DIAMOND - PERFECT PICTURE

This was my favourite album of 2023 that isn't actually seven albums in a trenchcoat, which makes it easier for me to recommend to people whose schedules aren't designed to accommodate twelve hours of furry electronica.  Hannah Diamond's sophomore effort Perfect Picture may as well be called 'Perfect Pop Album', and the fact that it has spawned no #1 hits is proof that we live in a broken world.  Every song could have been a single.  This album is beautifully produced and overflowing with hooks, and though it's perhaps not as emotionally raw as Reflections was, I think it's just as excellent.  PC Music stopped releasing new music shortly after this album came out, but although this is one of their last releases, I think it's also one of the label's best, and makes me wish they hadn't called it quits.

KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD - PETRODRAGONIC APOCALYPSE; OR, DAWN OF ETERNAL NIGHT: AN ANNIHILATION OF PLANET EARTH AND THE BEGINNING OF MERCILESS DAMNATION

I've been a pretty hardcore Gizzhead since high school, and my favourite albums of KGatLW's have always tended to be the heaviest and proggiest ones (e.g. Murder of the Universe, Infest the Rats' Nest, Polygondwanaland).  So, after the five increasingly jammy albums they released in 2022, PetroDragonic Apocalypse felt like both a welcome return to and extension of the sounds I love most from them; it's arguably their heaviest album yet, and certainly among the most progressive (compositionally) as well.  This album features the strongest guitar riffage on any King Gizzard album to date, and drummer Michael Cavanagh is in rare form here as well.  But ignoring the band's technical prowess, this album is great for the same reasons their previous albums have been great: the songs are really catchy and well-composed.  Like Infest the Rat's Nest, Petrodragonic Apocalypse is a metal album that kicks ass but is also really fun to sing along to, and also it's about dragons and gila monsters and stuff.  It's a guaranteed good time.

SIGUR RÓS - ÁTTA

I wasn't paying very close attention, but I had no idea there was going to be a new Sigur Rós album anytime soon.  This is the band's first record since the departure of their drummer, and perhaps as a result, there's very little percussion to be found on ÁTTA, which instead leans into their more ambient and contemplative tendencies.  There's also a very strong orchestral presence; Sigur Rós have always made use of strings and horns in their music, but this album in particular sounds as though the orchestra are just as central to the band as the three core members themselves, and the results are as beautiful as anything they've released.  I'm particularly fond of the hypnotic and immersive atmosphere of the opening track 'Glóð', and the propulsive and climactic 'Klettur', but the whole album is really solid and a lovely addition to a fantastic discographie.

LAUREN BOUSFIELD - SALESFORCE

I've listened to a little bit of Lauren Bousfield's music before, and liked it, but this is the first album of hers I've really fallen in love with.  Salesforce is an unrelenting blast of negative energy.  Even when the cathartically dense breakcore passages give way to ornate MIDI piano compositions, the same anxious, dissonant aura pervades every fibre of this album's being.  It's one of those albums that comes along every once in a while which seems to be exorcising a lot of the nightmarish feelings that come from existing in the late-stage-capitalistic hellhole the modern world has become (take a drink), but it's also weirdly fun to listen to, perhaps for that very reason.  Or perhaps because the production and sound design are consistently on point, or because of the jittery, antsy song structures.  A particular delight is the song 'Hazer' featuring Ada Rook, which is probably the fiercest song I've heard yet from Rook or Bousfield, and one of my favourites of the year.

YO LA TENGO - THIS STUPID WORLD

This is Yo La Tengo's most concise album in probably decades, and it's also their noisiest and hardest-rocking.  Despite having some slower and prettier moments (the alt-countryish 'Aselestine', and the beautiful 'Miles Away' which sounds like a fog descending on the night sky), This Stupid World overall has a lot of bite and grit to its production that's been mostly absent on recent albums like Fade and There's a Riot Going On.  It definitely manages to capture the sound and spirit of Y.L.T.'s groovy, distorted jams and feedback-drenched tunes as they do them live; when I managed to see a Yo La Tengo concert in the summer (one of the highlights of my year) I witnessed a guitar solo during which Ira unplugged his guitar, leaving just the noise of the cable, and plugged in a different guitar, and it was so noisy you could barely tell by hearing alone.  That abrasive yet wholly captivating sound, exemplified by the title track, 'Brain Capers', and 'Sinatra Drive Breakdown' among others, is exactly what makes This Stupid World a gem even in such a solid catalogue as Yo La Tengo's.

VYLET PONY - CAROUSEL (AN EXAMINATION OF THE SHADOW, CREEKFLOW, AND ITS LIFE AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT)

Last year, after the release of Can Opener's Notebook: Fish Whisperer, I declared that Vylet Pony was one of the greatest musical talents currently active, and her 2023 followup Carousel only further confirmed that to be true.  This album sort of splits the difference between her previous two efforts, maintaining the evolved songwriting and lush instrumentation of Can Opener while reintroducing the EDM elements of Cutiemarks, which makes for a great showcase of Trixie's myriad strengths as a musician.  The vocals are amazing, the production is some of the best in the biz, and the melodies are still, more often than not, thoroughly gorgeous, even if this album isn't as serene and meditative as its predecessor.  I could probably stand to analyze the storytelling and lyrics of this album more than I have too, since that's an undeniably important aspect of Vylet Pony's music, but I've never been a lyrics-focused person and as such I have trouble engaging with this album on any terms beyond 'this is one of the most amazing-sounding albums of the year'.  But it really is one of the most amazing-sounding albums of the year, and I'm fully in love with it.

JUTE GYTE - ECLOSE / KRUN MACULA / UNUS MUNDUS PATET

Jute Gyte is a very prolific and kind of niche solo artist whose previous work I'm aware of but mostly not really familiar with, but I listened to all three of his albums from 2023 and they were really lovely!  The first, Eclose, is an experimental electronic record very sonically indebted to Autechre (naturally, this is my personal favourite of the three), and its hypnotic and palpable atmosphere persists throughout every track.  Krun Macula dispenses with the beats and instead consists purely of ambient soundscapes, and though that kind of thing is my bread and butter in general, J. Gyte proves quite adept at it.  Unus Mundus Patet is quite different, much more in the black metal style Jute Gyte is known for, and I thought it was quite excellent as well, with the sonic blast of a closing track 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' standing out as possibly my favourite black metal track I've ever heard.  I'll definitely need to acquaint myself with more of this discographie, because all three of these albums were really phenomenal.

CAROLINE POLACHEK - DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU

This came out pretty early in 2023, which meant I spent a lot of the year thinking it would probably remain my favourite album of the entire year, and perhaps if not for the October one-two punch of Perfect Picture and TECHDOG 1-7 this would still get the gold medal.  It is a masterpiece of pop music.  The hooks are golden, the melodies are unusual but highly memorable and Polachek's voice is enchanting as it's ever been.  The production and arrangements are quite impressive as well, and are quite varied; this is a very eclectic album, but it also feels very consistent in spite of this.  Even in a year replete with gems, few albums were as exciting and immediately infectious as Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.

ANJIMILE - THE KING

My love for this album came as the result of several surprises.  The first surprise was that Courtney Barnett of all people was slated to do a show in my hometown (pop. ~12,000 people).  (It sold out immediately; this was not surprising.)  The second was that by some stroke of luck someone I knew had managed to get a couple tickets and I was offered one of them.  The third was that the concert's opening act, Anjimile, with whose work I was hitherto unfamiliar, delivered a really impressive set in his own right of enchanting and vulnerable solo acoustic numbers.  After the show, I got my hands on a copy of his most recent album and was caught off guard by how differently and intricately arranged the album versions of the songs are.  I love the way this album sounds; every instrumental element of The King is made up of (often digitally manipulated) acoustic guitar sounds, and the textures are warm and unusual and very exciting.  But Anjimile's talents as a singer/songwriter are the true star of the show, and his ability to palpably communicate the layers of emotion behind the songs is exceptionally strong.  The King is an excellent contemporary folk album, with direct and well-constructed songs complemented by creative sonic embellishments, and I love it.

JOANNA STERNBERG - I'VE GOT ME

Another one of my favourite singer-songwriter albums of the year came from Joanna Sternberg, whom I found out about through my dad (I'm very thankful for that!).  I've Got Me is a totally forthright album, which is I think the best way I can describe it.  Its instrumentation (entirely performed by Sternberg) is stark and austere, which befits the songwriting.  Sternberg's lyrics are direct and unambiguously about what they're about, and their vocals are strikingly up-front and authentic.  I've always been skeptical about how music feels more 'true' or 'real' by being simple and unembellished, but I've Got Me is a rare example where I would say that's exactly the case; it's a beautifully honest and personal album precisely for these qualities.  It's the kind of thing to make one (i.e. me) almost envious, of the sheer ability to so succinctly and powerfully express oneself.  The songs are fantastic and Joanna Sternberg is a wonderful musician.

WILLIAM FIELDS - ANTERO

Perhaps the opposing extreme, the yin to I've Got Me's yang, Antero is about as abstract and emotionally ambiguous as albums tend to get.  And compared to certain other experimental electronic albums for which that's also true, I can't say I feel any particular emotional connection to this album or any of the music on it.  No, I love this complicated album for very uncomplicated reasons: the sound design is really cool and it makes my brain light up.  It feels trite and almost dismissive to compare a second album on this list to Autechre, but this album is sort of an adroit extension of the kind of musical language introduced in late-period Autechre works.  It's seemingly loose-form but also methodically constructed, and the line between composition and sound design is often blurred but not totally erased.  It's somewhat unpredictable and unusual, even in the realm of experimental electronic music, and it's riveting at every turn.  This is to say, it's exactly the kind of thing I really go for.

LEAH SENIOR - THE MUSIC THAT I MAKE

Leah Senior is probably best known as the voice of the Reticent Raconteur from King Gizzard's Murder of the Universe, but I've been a fan of her own music for quite a while now, both solo and with twee-poppers Girlatones.  This new album of hers is particularly great.  Senior's voice is as soft as a pillow and the melodies on these songs are really pretty.  The whole experience is beautiful and really comfortable, and though I can't really think of a whole lot else to say about it, that's certainly enough good for me!

CARO♡ - WILD AT ♡

'Beautiful and really comfortable' is also certainly a description I'd apply to Wild at ♡, another one of the final albums to come out of the PC Music label.  Though I've not heard any of caro♡'s music beforehand, this album caught my eye due to its spectacular cover art, and more or less immediately after pressing play I was in ♡.  There's a lot of hyperpop-adjacent stuff out there that feels very personal, but Wild at ♡ is maybe the only example of this type of music feeling intimate, like trading secrets with a best friend or something.  The melodies and synths coruscate and effervesce, and the vocals almost never seem to rise far above an artifically-tuned whisper.  It's pure undiluted pop and yet successfully feels shy and vulnerable in a way that pop music so rarely does, and I ♡♡♡ it for that (though I'm not sure exactly how much demand there is for music that fits those criteria).  Of all the music I listened to in 2023, this album holds a special place in my ♡.

100 GECS - 10,000 GECS

While we're on the subject of nebulously hyperpop-adjacent music, 100 gecs' Difficult Second Album finally made it to release in 2023!  Woooo!  Though I personally view 1000 gecs as the more cohesive unit of the two albums, 10,000 gecs is a fantastic and exuberant followup.  Just about as compact and caffeinated as the debut, this album pushes 100 gecs' irreverence into some new and specific genre exercises, such as nu metal ('Billy Knows Jamie'), pop punk ('Hollywood Baby') and skater-ska ('I Got My Tooth Removed'), and it's nonstop fun from beginning to end.  It's as though the songs themselves are asking me to sing along, they're so catchy and clever and well-constructed.  The hooks are rock-solid as per usual, the lyrics are gold as per usual and the arrangements are inventive and multifarious as per usual.  Waiting four years for an album that doesn't so much as clear the 27-minute mark sounds kind of ridiculous, but for an album this great I'd happily wait even longer.

OCTAVIA M SHEFFNER - NEVER LOSE, PT. 1—4

Every year since 2021, I've done a thing w/ my friend where we send each other a list of 15 albums to listen to in order, and then we tell each other what we thought of them.  Of their list, my absolute favourite was in fact Never Lose, Pt. 1—4, a collection of four extended sound collages from Octa M. Sheffner, an experimental musician w/ a notoriously & dauntingly bounteous back catalogue.  I've heard a fair amount (i.e. approx. 1%) of Sheffner's existing work, but Never Lose is by far my favourite project I've heard from them to date; it's hypnotic, engrossing and wholly particular to their (Sheffner's) unique musical language.  Each track combines a plethora of disparate and seemingly unconnected elements and fuses them together shockingly beautifully, w/ results that are at once breathtakingly, staggeringly overwhelming and comforting.  When I put on this album, it feels like it's lulling me into a trance, I become instantly lost in it and lose track of everything else.  It is a sound collage album essentially w/o peer (including, from what I can ascertain, O.M.S.'s greater discographie) and I say that w/ no hyperbole whatsoever.  If anything, this album serves to reinforce the fact that incredibly inspired and even magical art can be found in even highly obscure and humble corners of the internet, if only one happens to look (or, I guess, listen) closely enough.

SUFJAN STEVENS - JAVELIN

Without getting too sensationalistic about it, 2023 appears to have been a deeply tragic and unfortunate year for Sufjan Stevens, who both lost his partner and had an apparently near-death experience himself after temporarily losing mobility to Guillain-Barré syndrome.  Though such personal and distressing news would be usually impertinent to a brief little album review such as this, including it is kind of unavoidable when discussing Javelin, Stevens' latest album, which is dedicated to his late partner.  Though quite a polished and refined album sonically, the grief and emotion behind this album are palpable and candid.  Javelin is heartbreaking.  Sufjan has, for a very long time now, been immensely talented at writing thoughtful, affecting songs, and this album is quite possibly the quintessential example of that talent.  His arrangements are also as colourful as ever, ornate but not overwhelming.  Though this may not be my favourite Sufjan album (there's some quite strong competition), it is one of his most powerful and well-executed projects yet, and one of the most beautiful things of the year that I came across.

WATER FROM YOUR EYES - EVERYONE'S CRUSHED

My biggest musical obsession of 2023 turned out to be Brooklyn's second-best songwriting duo Water From Your Eyes, which I was not expecting at all.  I hadn't even heard of this band until probably 2 minutes before I put this album on, and from what I can tell, most people haven't heard or heard of their first few albums at all.  And that's a shame!  Though perhaps unassuming, W.F.Y.E. have already become one of my favourite bands of all time, ever, and every album they've put out (except perhaps their covers album Somebody Else's Songs [plural]) is, I think, ridiculously good.

Everyone's Crushed is Water From Your Eyes' debut on Matador Records (essentially the indie-rock equivalent of a major label), and it's probably their most professional-sounding release yet, but it's not conventional by any means.  My knee-jerk point of comparison for this album was actually Stephen Malkmus's confusing (and awesome) solo album Groove Denied; it combines cynical post-punk sensibilities with indie pop, electronica and noise, sometimes simultaneously, and does so with impressive (and seemingly effortless) poise.  The rhythms are tight, the melodies are deliciously tense, and the songs are just as catchy as any you'd hear on pop radio.  It's so good: the instantly-compelling groove of 'Barley', the tense skronk of 'Everyone's Crushed', the ponderous, cryptic mood-swing of 'Remember Not My Name'; each track is wholly distinct, and yet this album feels quite cohesive and consistent in sound.  My favourite part is the brilliant non-sequitur between the last two tracks, the stunningly gorgeous '14' (the one moment of true uninhibited beauty on the album [with lyrics that are honestly quite moving, even if they're tantalizingly vague]), and 'Buy My Product', a song with uncomfortably obscure motivations, which provides no closure and paradoxically makes for one of the best endings to an album I can think of.

One thing that really surprised me about Everyone's Crushed is that it's not really like any of W.F.Y.E.'s previous records.  Going backwards through their catalogue revealed that this album's deadpan, detached affect is something the band has only more recently adopted, and that their earlier work is actually strikingly sincere and even sweet at times.  Their output is a little all over the place, though; 2017's Long Days, No Dreams is a cute indie-pop album, and 2018's All a Dance shifts into dancier post-punk territory, but their third and fourth albums (Somebody Else's Song [singular] and Structure respectively) vary unpredictably from song to song, ranging from sparse indie folk to post-industrial to dance-pop to lush balladry.  And they're great at all of it!  Nate Amos (the duo's producer/multi-instrumentalist) has a creative sense of melody and an aptitude for propulsive, danceable grooves, and is able to do a lot without being particularly showoffy about any of it.  But I'm particularly in love with Rachel Brown's vocals.  Their voice has a casual, sort of amateurish veneer, but I think it's the band's secret weapon; they're really an exceptionally versatile singer, and able to deliver lyrics with a twee sincerity at times and icy, inscrutable irony at others (although usually falling somewhere in between), and also I just really like the way they carry a melody.  N. Amos and R. Brown make for a naturally able duo in myriad genres, and their discographie is, as far as I'm concerned, practically impeccable.  (My favourite album of theirs so far is Somebody Else's Song [singular], but they're all fantastic.)  If all goes well, I'd expect these two to be on top of the indie world within the next couple years.  They're the best.

ALBUMS (not from this year)

AUTECHRE - AE_LIVE (2019) + AE_LIVE 2016/2018 (2020)

As a way of more or less completing my journey through the Autechre back-catalogue, I listened to the duo's 2 collections of live sets from the 2010s.  Each track is an approximately 1-hour-long unbroken live performance, and between the 2 collections there are 35 tracks, with a total runtime of about 36½ hours.  Both releases work as sort of variations on a single form; each set in a given collection takes a slightly different journey through usually the same locations, though sometimes the structure changes as sections grow slightly shorter or are added on to the end of a set.  This means it might seem unnecessary to listen to more than 1 set from each collection (particularly AE_LIVE, which has a staggering 28 tracks in its full version), and while that is somewhat true, I found it pretty enthralling to hear each different version of the sets and notice the ways they differ from 1 another.  And furthermore, these sets are pretty dense with material, and so it's almost certainly worth listening to at least a couple different versions to really get the full impact of the thing, I think.  But take my opinion here with a grain of salt, as I was probably at my peak Autechre-obsession while I was listening to these and would happily take as much of this stuff as I could get.  (I still would.)  1 thing I also find interesting about these live releases is that they use a lot of the same assets as late-period AE albums (especially elseq 1-5 & NTS Sessions 1-4), in different contexts and compositions than on said albums.  So, even though most if not all of the music here is unique to these particular live sets, a sharp-eared listener will notice elements of 'violvoic' or 'shimripl casual' or '7th slip' or 'oneum' or 'c7b2', recorded here years before those tracks were even released!  Isn't that cool?

PLUS-TECH SQUEEZE BOX - CARTOOOM! (2004)

Now, even though I've often professed my adoration for experimental megaliths like AE_LIVE (see immediately above), I still love me a really good concise pop album, and Cartooom! is exactly that.  13 tracks and barely 28 minutes long, this album is actually pretty maximalistic in its own right.  This album runs at warp-speed with no brakes, and it's impressively dense with melodies, hooks and enough production flourishes to make steam come out of Frank Zappa's ears.  According to the Japanese-language Wikipedia page for this band, this album uses about 4,500 different sample sources, a claim which has no cited source of its own, unfortunately, but I believe it!  The level of detail here is astonishing, and beyond being mere ear-candy this is also a really well-composed and -paced project that never grows totally overwhelming.  I mean, 'THE mARTIN SHOW!!!' and 'Dough-Nuts Town's Map' are legitimately among the most amazing pop songs I've ever heard, 'Uncle Chicken's drag rag' and 'starship.6' are breathtakingly creative, and 'f(ake)' is like a slightly more commercially-viable version of Melt-Banana.  This album thrills me to no end.

IMPOSSIBLE NOTHING - TONEMENOMICON (2017)

I listened to four different Impossible Nothing albums in 2023 and loved each one, but Tonemenomicon is the one that excited me the most.  The third album in the gargantuan -nomicon series, I find it to have characteristics in common with each of the first two; it's colourful and dense and eclectic, like Phonenomicon, but crazy consistent and sonically blown-out in a way similar to Lexemenomicon.  The first six tracks may comprise the most awe-inspiring hour of Impossible Nothing's discographie I've heard so far, but the album is wholly incredible, in its radical and shambolic recontextualizations of countless sample sources into surreal, jaw-droppingly creative hip-hop instrumentals.

THE BETHS - FUTURE ME HATES ME (2018)

On 2022's list I wrote about how much I loved The Beths' Expert in a Dying Field, but it wasn't until the beginning of 2023 that I got around to their first two records (as preparation for seeing them live the next day).  I loved them both, but Future Me Hates Me is particularly strong.  Despite being the band's debut LP, they still sound just as fully formed as they do on their followups, and the songs are also consistently great and well-constructed.  It's an album of life-affirming power-pop, with big hooks composed of insecurities and introspections.  Also, the band sounds incredibly tight here, just as they did when I saw them in concert.  (It was an awesome show!  And the band seemed to be having such a great time on stage and touring and everything.  It was a really sweet experience and they're an awesome band and everything they've done is amazing!)

COCTEAU TWINS - BLUE BELL KNOLL / HEAVEN OR LAS VEGAS (1988/1990)

Cocteau Twins are one of those classic bands that every hardcore music fan seems to adore, but despite growing up with the music of many other well-known dream-pop-type bands, strangely I never had really listened to their stuff until this year.  I'm glad I took the initiative to finally experience their oeuvre, because it is indeed full of gems, and in particular these two albums.  Blue Bell Knoll is I think my favourite Cocteau Twins album; it's got a beautiful underwater-type sound and the vocals are melodically front-and-centre but lyrically incomprehensible, which I love.  Heaven or Las Vegas is a bit more down-to-earth in that it's easier to make out what Liz Fraser is singing, and perhaps as a result it's probably the more pop-friendly of the two, but it's just æthereal and beautiful and not-of-this-world.  As it turns out, these are classic albums for very good reason!  Who knew?

IRON + WINE - OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS (2004)

I remember Iron and Wine being on in the house a lot during my early childhood.  Unlike a lot of music I got introduced to early on, though, it took a long time for me to really fall in love with their music until I revisited their first few albums this year; I don't know what it is about this album in particular that took so long to click with me, but I'm very glad it finally did.  This album is stark, but really beautiful, and its underlying melancholy is disarming and affecting.  The lyrics and melodies somehow feel particularly potent when filtered through Sam Beam's understated whisper, and the instrumentation leaves plenty of space for the vocals to have maximum impact.  It's such a lovely album that I almost feel embarrassed for not really appreciating it sooner.

SWIRLIES - BLONDER TONGUE AUDIO BATON (1993) / THEY SPENT THEIR WILD YOUTHFUL DAYS IN THE GLITTERING WORLD OF THE SALONS (1996)

I got into Swirlies' first album, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, shortly before I got the chance to see them live!  I saw their show in Easthampton, MA, in what seemed to be a restaurant that just happened to moonlight as a music venue, and the stage was so small that the five members could barely fit (particularly w/ the guitarists' enormous pedalboards taking up prime real-estate), and the venue was extremely crowded, but it was really incredible!  The band performed entirely their material from the '90s (I'm not sure if they've even come up with any material since), and they sounded as though I was seeing them at the time in their original incarnation, and not 30 years later.  After the show I was able to pick up a copy of their second album and immediately fell in love with it.  ...The Glittering World of the Salons is one of the all-time great shoegaze albums as far as I'm concerned; it's eclectic, experimental, angular, extraordinarily well-sequenced, and at times really, truly pretty ('Sunn').  And 'Two Girls Kissing' is one of the most awesome songs ever, period.  (Or perhaps, exclamation mark!)

FLOATING POINTS & PHAROAH SANDERS - PROMISES (2021)

I was a little late to the party with this one (as usual), but my word, this is a beautiful album.  Actually, I think the best word for Promises is 'enchanting'; it's like the soundtrack to exploring a lush and mysterious forest, I think.  It's a very meditative and atmospheric piece, built on a nearly-everpresent celesta motif, with layers of strings, organ, synthesizers and Pharoah Sanders' mesmerizing saxophone providing dynamics and momentum and organically melding jazz, classical and electronic musics.  It's an excellent work, and also a spectacular cap to Sanders' career.

CHARLES MINGUS - THE BLACK SAINT AND THE SINNER LADY (1963)

I listened to a decent amount of Mingus this year, and perhaps unsurprisingly my favourite album was The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, often considered his masterpiece.  It's a very peculiar and ambitious album, conceived as a quasi-ballet and probably one of the earliest examples of mastery of the album-as-conceptually-unified-art-object that I could name.  Musically, it's totally different from pretty much any other jazz album, even those by Mingus himself, with the brazen horns of the sleaziest-imaginable big-band number coupled with complex rhythmic figures, dissonant harmonies and passages including modern-classical piano and Spanish guitar.  It's about as vividly, wordlessly evocative as an album can be, and intensely captivating as well.

MELVINS - (A) SENILE ANIMAL (2006)

I listened to every Melvins album in 2023 (not including the collaborative ones with Jello Biafra or whatnot) and the clear standout for me was (A) Senile Animal.  It's the first album of theirs to use two drummers, which is awesome in and of itself, but the songs themselves are Melvins at their heaviest and most exciting.  'A History of Bad Men' in particular is maybe the greatest sludge-metal song ever made.  The mixing is also phenomenal on this album, and it's an album that manages to be extremely fun without resorting to the usual hallmarks of Melvins' occasionally excessively-stupid sense of humour (e.g. including '99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall' on an album, or 'I Fuck Around', a Beach Boys parody wherein half the words have been replaced with F-bombs).

IANNIS XENAKIS - ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC MUSIC (1970)

I was excited to obtain a copy of this record, because it seems to be pretty foundational to many contemporary forms of experimental music.  And even as someone who listens to quite a lot of experimental and electroacoustic music, often from several decades after these pieces were composed and recorded, this album still sounds really astonishing.  The 22-minute recording of 'Bohor I' is really sinister-sounding, with dissonant, low-pitched drones smothering layers of eerie percussive clatter, before the whole of the piece is subsumed by analogue noise.  The shorter pieces on side two are just as texturally rich and vivid-yet-enigmatic.  These are some of my favourite pieces of tape-music I've yet heard, and the particular recordings that appear on this record are very strong.

WILCO - SKY BLUE SKY (2007)

The album whose straightforward and laid-back sound launched the term 'dad-rock', Sky Blue Sky has in spite of this (okay, probably because of it, actually) recently become one of my favourite Wilco albums, if not my absolute favourite.  It's a very soothing and sweet album; I've put it on while I was crying, and it made me feel much better.  Also, I must point out: the songs in general totally rule!  This album has some of Wilco's most Beatles-y songs ('Shake It Off', 'Hate It Here', 'You Are My Face' and 'Walken' could all probably be on the White Album or Let It Be, and 'Side With the Seeds' could be a Wings song), and also 'Impossible Germany' has a wonderful extended guitar-solo reminiscent of Television.  But otherwise, Sky Blue Sky feels very special in the way it incorporates Wilco's country influence in a more tranquil way than their first few albums' more honky-tonk approach to the genre.  Jeff Tweedy's voice has medicinal properties on this album, and I love it to pieces.

TOWNES VAN ZANDT - TOWNES VAN ZANDT (1969)

Speaking of soothing albums (and country music), this was the year that Townes Van Zandt's eponymous record really struck a chord with me.  Really, it should have been much sooner that I realized just how lovely this album is, as it kind of bears similarity to my favourite Mike Nesmith songs (no, really), but in any case I love this album quite a lot.  Every selection on this album is potent and amazing.  I don't think T.V.D.'s plaintive drawl has quite brought me to tears yet, but I won't be surprised if one day I find myself sobbing uncontrollably to 'For the Sake of the Song' or 'None But the Rain'.

qebrµs - ◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙​◙ (2017)

I'd listened to one qebrµs album previously, that being 2012's ⊶⊑∷⌊∴⊹∵⌉∷⊒⊷ (I feel ridiculous italicizing that, but rules are rules), which was one of the most overwhelming, extraterrestrial experiences I've had with an album in recent memory.  Comparatively, this, his final album, is a lot more digestible, whilst just as texturally preternatural; it's suggestive of an EDM album that's started to mutate into intricate, fractal patterns like a growing crystal.  Like a lot of albums under the general umbrella of experimental-electronic music, it has its roots in more danceable electronic forms, but this album is less a corruption of said forms and more a recontextualization, employing sounds of a familiar ilk and arranging them into something completely original.  It is thrilling and tactile and flawlessly produced, and it makes my brain light up. 

OVAL - POPP (2016) / SO - SO (2003)

Oval (aka Markus Popp) was yet another artist whose discographie I perused in 2023, and my favourite album of his, surprisingly to me, turned out to be 2016's Popp.  The first several Oval albums are primarily built around looping and glitching sounds produced through hardware including skipping CDs, and as a result are quite unconventional, and at times, caustic.  Popp, on the other hand, is an album from Oval's later period, which uses a totally different and somewhat more smoothed-out compositional approach, and as its title suggests, it's also an album that plays with influences from the structure of pop and dance music.  Each track has a coherent 4/4 rhythm, and usually a noticeable chord pattern as well.  However, what makes this album interesting (and recognizable as an Oval recording) are the many layers of frenzied, glitchy melodies and sounds that cover everything like confetti.  It's actually a style not dissimilar to that of Impossible Nothing's, with its simple beats providing a steady foundation for ultra-dense collages of melody and harmony.

My other favourite Oval album turned out to not be an Oval album at all, but a self-titled collaboration between Popp and Eriko Toyoda under the moniker 'So'.  So is a product of Popp's earlier era, using his signature noisy, glitchy style to de- and re-construct Toyoda's vocals and guitar.  It's one of the most beautiful, organic and intimate-sounding glitch albums there is, melodic and pensive in a way that's only magnified, rather than hijacked, by the way it's nearly overtaken by noise and electronic sound-manglings.  It's moving in a way I find hard to truly describe.  It's an album that communicates deep emotion through abstraction, which I absolutely love.

MR. BUNGLE - DISCO VOLANTE (1995)

I'm not as hardcore a Mr. Bungle fan as one might expect me to be, given my fondness for Primus and Frank Zappa and Ween and Man Man and 100 gecs and whatnot.  But upon finally listening through their albums start to finish, I was dumbfounded by the excellence of their sophomore album.  Disco Volante is one of the most creatively fertile rock(?) albums on planet Earth, opening with the second-greatest sludge-metal song ever made and then immediately bouncing like a pinball in countless other directions, from demented space-age-pop to tightly-wound jazz to surf-rock to noise.  It's extremely high-octane and pulled off with such ferocious technical aptitude and manic energy that it leaves me agape.  Also, the whole album nails Mr. Bungle's silly sense of humour in a way that's absurd but not overly puerile; despite how obviously meticulously put-together it is, there's quite a lot of fun and spontaneity all throughout the album.  That such an album even exists is kind of miraculous in and of itself, and listening to it is a legitimately enriching experience.  

DUPPY GUN - MIRO TAPE (2018)

Miro Tape is one of the most fun albums ever.  It's essentially a V/A release, except constructed as two continuous 26-minute suites, with songs weaving in and out, bleeding into one another or abruptly stopping and starting.  It's not just a mixtape, it's a Mixed Tape (as purists of the medium call them), and its structure recalls many of my favourite aspects of the mixtape format.  It's one long series of adrenaline-fueled ragga gems condensed to rapid-fire moments.  The deejay performances are sharp and the production is consistently amazing, accented by countless recurring sound-effects that help tie each track together and make for smooth transitions, as well as the silly fun of covering tracks with recognizable noises like air-horns, the Wilhelm scream, the THX Deep Note (which also appears on 10,000 gecs, come to think of it) and the car-locking sound effect.  It's practically a bombardment of amazing music.

CRYING - BEYOND THE FLEETING GALES (2016)

Where has this album been all my life?!?  I owe my awareness of Crying's existence to a review that described this album as a 'mix of proggy synths, arena-rock guitars, power-pop songwriting, and detached indie vocals', and I later found a Tumblr page or something that referred to them as like 'Georgia Hubley fronting a chiptune band'.  I think both of these descriptions are self-evidently awesome, but both only hint at how amazing Beyond the Fleeting Gales is.  This album comprises ten of the most inspired, exciting, life-affirming songs ever put to tape, and that's no exaggeration.  There are moments like the bridge of 'A Sudden Gust' or the opening riff to 'There Was a Door' that thrill me so much that I can feel my heart race, but actually this album is entirely composed of moments such as those, and each song has, like, 20 of them.  The songwriting is extraordinarily detailed and riddled with hooks every step of the way, and the band sounds so tight and fluid that this album, which should theoretically feel like an eclectic grab-bag, is instead a remarkably consistent piece of musical genius.  It is a veritable tour de force, one that encapsulates so much of what makes music as an artform so important to me.  And, also, it's an indie-rock album that boasts synth-era Rush as one of its main influences.  That on its own is essentially love-at-first-sight for me.

WATER FROM YOUR EYES - SOMEBODY ELSE'S SONG (2019)

By some strange coincidence, at exactly the same point in the year I became enamored with Crying, I also grew obsessed with this band, whose name is practically the same.  I mentioned this album earlier on this list, but now that I think about it, I think this one deserves its own section.  Somebody Else's Song is the album right before W.F.Y.E.'s sort-of-breakthrough Structure, and two albums before their actual breakthrough Everyone's Crushed, which means it came out before most anyone had really heard of this band at all, and it seems like still very few people know or care about it.  But this album defied any expectations I had that this would therefore be an inferior product to those later albums.  It is, as far as I'm concerned, a masterpiece, and it was my greatest comfort album of the year, and even now (a month into 2024 as I'm writing this) nothing's yet usurped its spot.  When I'm feeling down or too exhausted to listen to new music or when I just want to put something familiar on, I put this album on and it instantly makes me feel better.

There are eight songs on Somebody Else's Song, and like with 2021's Structure, you can sort of pair them up into four types of song.  In the case of this album, those pairs are as follows: 'Somebody Else's Song' and 'This is Slow', two sweet folk numbers; 'Break' and 'Bad in the Sun', two extended electronic tracks; 'No Better Now' and 'Adeleine', two indie-pop songs; 'Look' and 'Look Again', two odd sort of atonal interludes with the same melody.  With the exception of that last pair (which I still like), everything on this album qualifies as a favourite of mine in the Water From Your Eyes canon, and I've already established that theirs is a very strong back-catalogue.  The sour industrial-jazz groove of 'Break' is positively bewitching.  'Somebody Else's Song' is exceptionally pretty, and its melody and lyrics are brilliantly reimagined on the euphoric 'Bad in the Sun'.  'Adeleine' is probably my favourite song on the whole album, though, and by now one of my favourites of all time; it's one of the duo's subtler songs, I think, but the melody is hauntingly beautiful, the instrumentation focused and reliable and Rachel Brown's vocals truly heartbreaking, direct yet almost otherworldly.  I could go on.  This album, though unassuming, is a diamond in the rough if I've ever heard one, and I love Water From Your Eyes so, so much.  Um, they're the best.

ALEXANDER PANOS - NASCENT (2022)

I was very intrigued by this album thanks to Patricia Taxxon's brilliant video-essay 'On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People' (there's no YouTube-videos section of this list, and you may thank your lucky stars for that, but if there was, that one would definitely be on there), and actually, I think I'm still very intrigued by it.  Nascent is a profoundly beautiful album, texturally abundant in a similar way to the qebrµs and William Fields albums above, but in a lush, harmonious, almost traditionally-pretty sort of way.  Alexander Panos utilizes a lot of production techniques of both contemporary dance and experimental music, but also incorporates many more naturalistic elements as well, including but not limited to piano, chimes and his own voice.  My favourite moments on the album are often among the most abstract (in particular the incomprehensibly-gorgeous vocoder étude 'reasonsnotto'), but the whole thing is just wondrous.  Nascent is a resplendent collage of some of the prettiest sounds I've ever witnessed, and what more could I possibly ask of an album?

CAMELLIA & NANAHIRA - GO-IN! (2019)

For a few days in autumn of 2023, a friend and I took a trip to Portland, ME, during which they took me to The Maine Mall.  The particular reason for this turned out to be the arcade on the second floor, which was very clean and modern and had a large portion entirely devoted to imported Japanese rhythm games, most of which I had never seen before.  That arcade was perhaps the single loudest, most overstimulating place I've ever been, to the point that the lack of a warning-sign indicating the venue's potential to inflict lasting psychic damage strikes me now as gross negligence, and prolonged exposure made me feel like I was going to go into cardiac arrest at age 20.  I bring this up because this album from EDM producer extraordinaire Camellia and singer Nanahira is essentially the album equivalent of that experience, if I had found it exhilarating instead of viscerally unendurable.  It's a dense, kawaii, intensely overwhelming clusterfuck of pure joy.

MOGWAI - ROCK ACTION (2001)

I've loved Mogwai's music for a very long time now, but it wasn't until very recently that I really spent quality time with their third album, Rock Action.  This one is very different from their other works, both before and after; it's shorter than their albums tend to be, but it also features more vocals than usual, as well as prominent string arrangements and the band's first real instances of adding electronic elements to their sound.  It's a transitional and an experimental album for the band, but those kinds of albums tend to be some of my favourites by a given artist, and Rock Action is certainly one of my favourite Mogwai albums.  The strings on 'Take Me Somewhere Nice' and 'Secret Pint' elevate already-very-good songs to some of Mogwai's best (on the latter, they sound like they're coming from a transistor radio in the post-apocalypse), and '2 Rights Make 1 Wrong' is a particular standout in the band's discographie, an almost transcendental piece that evolves from vocoder-fronted post-rock to blissful folktronica to choral chanting over the span of ten minutes.  The sequencing on this album is also excellent.

HIROKO YAKUSHIMARU - KOKINSHŪ (1984)

On what was admittedly little more than a whim, towards the end of the year I acquired a box of 1980s idol-kayō records from Japan.  I'm not quite done going through the box yet, but I've come across quite a few gems, with my favourite so far being this fantastic sesqui-album from action movie star Hiroko Yakushimaru.  Compared to most idol records from the same time, this album leans mostly into kayōkyoku balladry rather than uptempo synth-pop tracks.  The melodies on this album are really sweet (this album includes songs written by city-pop legends Taeko Ohnuki and Mariya Takeuchi, among others) and Yakushimaru's voice is excellent for them; the songs themselves just sound great, too, with elegant strings and intensely reverby production.  (The songs sound almost underwater at times, but in a beautiful, echoey way, not in a muffled way.)  It's a dulcet and tranquil album, rather uniquely so in its genre, and one of the most blissful listens I had during the year.  Plus, the album proper has a bonus EP sort of grafted onto it, which is also really lovely!

BOOKS

WHITE TEETH (2000) by Zadie Smith

I spent a not-insignificant portion of my conversations during the first couple of months of 2023 floundering in my attempts to describe what exactly White Teeth is as a novel and what it's about.  To be fair, it is quite the baroque assemblage of themes and story arcs (e.g. what I'd consider to be arguably the main plot element of the book isn't introduced until halfway through), but it's pulled off with such finesse as to not even register as so complex and dense until the reader is forced to summarize the thing.  It's astounding that White Teeth is Zadie Smith's first opus; in this book she displays a wisdom and a confidence as a writer that seem like they'd come from a much more seasoned novelist.  The characters are engaging and realistic (Smith has the great advantage as a writer of seeming like she really understands people, or at least more than I do, anyway), and the themes (particularly of personal-versus-cultural identity) are very strong, but more than anything this book appeals to me because of its meticulously interwoven plot threads.  The narrative's construction is so creative and yet it feels so natural, and it was a unique joy getting to see for myself how it unfolds, to the point that upon finishing the book I was convinced it was my favourite novel I'd ever read.  Roughly a year later, I think I still stand by that choice.  (Also, though it does not appear in the TV section of this list, I watched the Channel 4 mini-series adaptation of White Teeth after finishing the book and quite enjoyed it as well!  It's not perfect - its pacing feels a bit hurried - but it does manage to get through a lot of the plot in a relatively short runtime and it's very well-cast.)

THE WORLD'S WORST ASSISTANT (2022) by Sona Movsesian

In recent years I've become a pretty big fan of Conan O'Brien, and by far some of my favourite segments of his TBS show were the bits where Conan would interact with his assistant, Sona Movsesian.  The two play off each other in such a genuinely funny manner that it quickly becomes apparent that Movsesian is herself a comedic force to be reckoned with, and so I was very excited to discover while listening last year to her appearance on Andy Richter's Three Questions podcast that she was publishing a memoir.  Not only is The World's Worst Assistant interesting as the showbiz story of someone whose work (quote-unquote, eh?) has been mostly off-camera (it's not everyday you read a bestselling autobiography from essentially a regular person, a non-celebrity), it's also just a very funny book with its fair share of entertaining and silly anecdotes.  And, true to the spirit of the book, I ended up reading the whole thing while at work.

THE KIDS IN THE HALL: ONE DUMB GUY (2018) by Paul Myers

Last year I became deeply enamored with the Kids in the Hall to the point of obsession.  I watched every episode of the show multiple times (not including the reboot season on Amazon Prime - Jeff Bezos will have to pry my money from my cold dead fingers if he hopes to ever possess it), plus Brain Candy and Death Comes to Town, plus Dave Foley's The Wrong Guy and even some clips of their live performances.  My reading the K.I.T.H. biography One Dumb Guy sort of came at the tail end of this major fixation period, but that's not to say it caused me to lose interest in them; I thought it was wholly fascinating.  It's not a terribly longwinded read, but it's nonetheless a rather exhaustive and thorough account of the troupe's turbulent history.  For any K.I.T.H. fan as devoted as myself I'd consider this a must-read for some of the especially interesting stories, such as the film premises that were passed over in favour of what became Brain Candy, or Scott Thompson's battling with cancer while simultaneously writing for and performing in Death Comes to Town. 

INFINITE JEST (1996) by David Foster Wallace

Several years ago, I was given as a gift the published transcript of David Foster Wallace's iconic This is Water speech, but the true catalyst for my delving into his bibliography was last year, when I watched Jason Segel's moving (and, as far as I can tell, shockingly dead-on) portrayal of D.F.W. in The End of the Tour, a film based on an interview with Wallace conducted during the book tour for Infinite Jest.  I knew very little about the novel, but I remembered my dad reading it about a decade earlier and that I was shocked to hear that over 100 pages of the book were devoted entirely to footnotes.  But, having seen through The End of the Tour an insight into David Foster Wallace the person, my interest was piqued as to what exactly the book might be like.  I ended up checking the much shorter and more manageable story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men out of the library as they didn't have Infinite Jest at the time, and I was pretty instantly enamored with Wallace's range, depth of emotion and experimental idiosyncrasies as a writer.  Brief Interviews also accidentally proved to be a pretty good way to get comfortable with said idiosyncrasies before plunging into the deep end with Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest has demanded more pure effort from me as a reader than anything I've ever read beforehand.  It is a challenging novel in nearly every conceivable way: its timeline is both nonlinear and indicated through years with product-sponsored titles (e.g. Year of the Whopper) rather than numbers; the subject matter gets deeply, occasionally horrifically unpleasant; it contains colloquialisms unique to the novel; roughly 10% of the book consists of 'notes and errata', which are more or less central to the experience of the novel itself and therefore require the reader to use two bookmarks at all times; much of the context and plot are either left intentionally ambiguous or only subtly hinted at, necessitating a vigilant attention to detail in order to puzzle out what the hell the actual larger story is; the vocabulary is very technical and recondite.  And also, it's fucking long.  For as dense and experimental as the book is, getting through all 1,079 pages for the first time can seem like a borderline insurmountable task.  I made it through the last two-thirds of the novel in less than a month, but only by setting aside multiple hours every single day devoted to completing it.  The difficulty increases manifold during passages that are particularly uncomfortable or not as enjoyable.  This book definitely isn't without flaws or minor details I didn't really like, and so I can't call it a perfect novel, but even so I think it's the most fascinating and impressive book I've ever read.  Infinite Jest practically demands nothing short of hyperfixation from the reader to ever be completed, and that certainly won't work for everyone, but it did for me and as a result I think it's unbelievably good.

Infinite Jest is about a lot of things (the "Themes" section of its Wikipedia page lists something like nineteen of them), and it explores its ideas through a bevy of characters, on scales ranging from intrapersonal to global.  One reviewer in 1996 declared it a 'vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Wallace's mind', which, though maybe dismissive, is honestly a pretty apt description.  It's a very introspective novel and succeeds at placing the reader inside the heads of its point-of-view characters, but really it's Wallace's thoughts and feelings that are practically spewed from every page.  Infinite Jest is deeply personal.  To read it is to bear witness to the baroque curlicues of recursive thoughts, hyperspecific compounding emotions, an imagination run wild, etc.; it's an oddly beautiful experience that this book offers of temporary escape from being trapped in your own head, to be instead trapped in D.F.W.'s head for a while.  It's an engrossing and powerful Entertainment.

The moment when it truly struck me how amazing this book is came not when I was actually reading it, but after I had completed it.  (This paragraph and the next will contain some spoilers, so depending on how important that is to you, perhaps consider skipping to the next entry on the list.)  The end (i.e. last thirty or so pages?) of Infinite Jest kind of confounded me initially, because it is not actually the end of the story, nor do the final passages really resolve or clarify much of anything, as far as the plot on its most macro scale is concerned.  Only upon having read every word of the manuscript did I discover that many of the gaps between important story beats can actually be filled in through various clues and offhand remarks and whatnot scattered throughout, and in fact many of these show up in the first few hundred pages, thereby rendered inconspicuous to someone reading the book for the first time.  It's pretty ingenious - Infinite Jest offers very little to the reader in terms of direct and thorough explanation of what could ostensibly be considered the central plot, instead leaving only just enough information, strategically placed, to make the 'complete story' something like a logic puzzle to be solved amidst an ocean's worth of red herrings.  (This is, to put it bluntly, my shit.)  Arguably, the big picture isn't even really the point of the novel to begin with, but missing the forest for the trees is practically unavoidable, at least at first; the overall story arc isn't really able to be definitively pieced together until one has read the entire book, and so while reading the book for the first time, one has to focus somewhat more on the more immediate vignettes and minutiae as sort of like a concept-short-story-collection.  And even on this smaller scale, this book contains many of my favourite passages in all of literature; note 24, the list detailing J.O. Incandenza's filmography, is by itself one of the most brilliant things I've ever read.

And, but, so this headache-inducingly complex and obscured greater plotline is what really, for me, makes Infinite Jest's opening chapter extraordinary: it didn't really become clear until I'd finished the book, but the opening chapter is the chronologically final event in the story.  As such, this chapter is forced to play a dual role as both an effective beginning and an effective end.  What makes the execution of this rather tricky idea so successful is that it seems initially, as an introduction to the book, to be nothing but a beginning.  It starts slowly, and builds at a steady pace to a seductively ambiguous and unreliably explained event, one which the reader might expect to be elaborated on with more detail as the story progresses later on; in reality, the book is not about what comes next at all, and what ends up being actually important about this opening chapter lies in seemingly unimportant details (e.g. the question of the fate of one of the characters not present in this scene is apparently answered when another character makes reference to him in the present, rather than past, tense).  As with many of the chapters in this book, it'd make a compelling short story in its own right, but the way it fits into the larger whole is, to me, mind-blowing.

I could blather on for hundreds more paragraphs on things that stood out to me about this book if given the opportunity (and time), such as the occasions when its predictive contemplations on the not-too-distant future were really quite astute, or the genius and sort of reverent satire of conceptual and contemporary art film, or the passages that struck me as particularly unadaptable into other media, or the simultaneous discomforting eeriness and poignancy of D.F.W.'s works in retrospect given their frequent thematic preoccupation with suicide and despair, but for the sake of not losing sight entirely of the fact that this is but one entry in an already excessively long list, I should probably just move on.

TONIGHT AT NOON: A LOVE STORY (2002) by Sue Graham Mingus

I am an incurable obsessive when it comes to music, so I also tend to read a lot of nonfiction about music and musicians.  Tonight at Noon is rather unique in this genre for reasons given away by its subtitle; written by Sue Graham Mingus about her late husband, jazz deity Charles Mingus, his story is not told through the lens of his music so much as through the lens of their relationship and personal lives.  This is all for the better, both because it makes for a much more intimate story than one tends to get from musicians' biographies, but also because Charles Mingus was a wholly unique and fascinating individual, and who could've been more acutely understanding of the nuances and eccentricities of Mingus the person than someone who was married to him for thirteen years?  Also interesting is the relationship and dialogue between the two of them, as they were two very different people with very different backgrounds and the contrast of their personalities is riveting, as is the connection between them.  It also helps that Sue is also just a very good writer and capable of composing a really touching and focused chronicle out of her particular life story.  This is easily one of the best and most unusual biographies I've yet read.

WHITE NOISE (1985) by Don DeLillo

This was the year I really got into the type of fiction sometimes known as 'hysterical realism'.  This term was originally coined as a way to sort of disparage the works of writers like Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace, but one of the progenitors of this pseudo-genre is apparently one Don DeLillo.  I'd actually been planning on reading this book for a while before reading anything by Smith or D.F.W., but DeLillo's influence on them did probably help me to actually get a round tuit.  And whereas Smith and Wallace both knocked me out more or less immediately, it took me a while to really warm up to White Noise.  It's a rather peculiar novel, both in content and form.  The book is divided into 3 main parts; the first of these, "Waves and Radiation", is a series of plotless and mundane episodic segments, the second, "The Toxic Airborne Event", introduces a sudden and apocalyptic disaster narrative, and the third, "Dylarama", is something of an extension of the first, but with a dramatic and thrilling plot that feels natural yet largely unexpected, given the glacially slow manner in which the stage is set in Part I.  Many of the details of the story are rather absurd, but played totally straight, and the dialogue is very unusual too.  White Noise is a novel that seems in some ways to follow its own logic, and I rather like that about it; it definitely isn't like anything I've read before, and I found it to be mostly pretty engaging despite its slow start.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN: ESSAYS AND ARGUMENTS (1997) by David Foster Wallace

Over the summer I was discussing Infinite Jest with my uncle, who's read it multiple times all the way through, and he mentioned that the title essay of this book was in fact his favourite thing D.F.W. ever wrote.  This was good news for me, as I was already planning on reading it very soon afterwards.  And now that I've read it (twice), I think I probably agree.  'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again', which explores the absurd, bizarre, awe-inspiring, despair-inducing, ethically questionable, and repellent aspects of a week-long luxury cruise, is perhaps the funniest and, dare I say it, cleverest piece of writing I've ever read.  (Even the mere footnotes in this essay are a riot; the bit about Wallace's 'apparent breaches of Elegant Tea Time etiquette' is a particular favourite.)  The spiritual predecessor to this essay, 'Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All', a firsthand account of the 1993 Illinois State Fair, is also a cornucopia of observational humour, and either of these essays alone would be worth the price of admission.  The other essays in this collection discuss, among other things, tennis (of course), David Lynch, and literary theory, and they're all pretty good, but the remaining major highlight for me was 'E Unibus Pluram', an incisive discussion of postmodernism, television, and irony, and how these things have impacted fiction over the decades.  Perhaps the essays on tennis weren't quite as personally fascinating to me, but this was still a collection of strong writing and some of my favourite pieces from one of my favourite authors.

SWAMPLANDIA! (2011) by Karen Russell

Like a couple of the other novels on this list, Swamplandia! is built upon a very unusual premise, the absurdism of which is tempered by being tonally a thoughtful and character-driven story.  The book is about a family of Floridian alligator wrestlers who run their own small gator-swamp theme park, and how both the family and their business struggle to remain functional following the death of the matriarch-slash-star-performer.  The genius of Swamplandia! lies in its meticulous and subtle subversion of what appears to be a fantastical coming-of-age story; author Karen Russell avoids playfully messing with tropes, instead gradually stripping away the layers of mystique and wonder that permeate the earlier chapters until the reader and protagonists are left with a sense of clarity that is bleak and even devastating, and yet rather moving.  The review I read that enticed me to read this book in the first place described it as 'life-affirming', and that's absolutely true, though perhaps not in the way one might expect a novel to be that.  Which, in my opinion, only reveals it to be that much more special of a book.  Fluidly and gracefully balancing tragedy, black comedy, suspense and adventure, Swamplandia! is a beautiful and excellent novel I had trouble putting down, even at work.  (Which is actually where I read a lot of these books, come to think of it.)

CHANGING MY MIND: OCCASIONAL ESSAYS (2009) by Zadie Smith

One of the consequences of my falling deeply in love with Zadie Smith's White Teeth at the beginning of the year is that I've since acquired copies of three or four other books of hers, but so far I've only read this one.  (I haven't gotten around to On Beauty yet, and only picked up Swing Time a couple weeks ago, but hopefully they appear on next year's list!)  The essays in Changing My Mind are varied, but organized by general topic; the book begins with analyses of other books, then moves on to pieces on writing, film reviews, personal experiences, and so on.  Some essays would probably be more impactful on readers with better context than I had (I haven't yet read many of the books she writes about here, though her dissections have made me quite interested in getting around to them), but I never felt truly out of my element, simply because Smith is a very good writer and I enjoy reading what she has to say.  One particular favourite piece for me was one of the shortest ones, 'Accidental Hero', which discusses Smith's father's experience in World War II and which makes it quite apparent to anyone who's read White Teeth that he and the character Archie Jones are the same exact person.  Also of particular interest to me, of course, was the final essay, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace', which I love merely for the fact that it's one of my favourite authors writing about another one of my favourite authors, but which is also a deeply thoughtful appraisal of what I'd consider some of the most poignant literature of the postmodern era.  (I've read a few different analyses of Brief Interviews, in particular after I finished it, and Smith's is by far the best - she seems to connect with and 'get' the book in the same way I think I do, but is able to express what makes it so great in far more focused and eloquent language than I could.)  I love a good essay, and every one of the seventeen in Changing My Mind was great.  I can't wait to get around to her other books.

ROAMING (2023) by Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki

My mom has introduced me to a handful of lesbian graphic novels.  I think the first time this happened was midway through 2020, when she let me borrow Tillie Walden's Are You Listening? from her (a book I believe I'm still "borrowing" even as I write this), which quickly became one of my favourite things ever in any medium, as did Spinning, which I also read at her recommendation.  Point being, I'm always happy on the occasion when she brings a new queer comic to my attention.  Most recently, she introduced me to Roaming, which despite a couple of truly glaring flaws (the rather ugly blue-and-beige colour palette & the fact that it's set in New York City, the worst place on Earth) is really excellent in its own right.  The illustrations are beautiful and well-composed, and the story is totally up my alley; at a point in the year when I was feeling moderately depressed, stressed out from recent travel, confused about love and a little lost in general, Roaming made for apt accompaniment.  Also it's pretty gay, which I appreciate.

TELEVISION

BARRY (Seasons 1-4, 2018-2023)

I watched all of Barry in the earlier part of the year, and so looking back and trying to remember the full scope of the show is kind of tricky - though even at the time, I remember it being hard to place exactly what this show was.  It seems that we've entered an age where TV shows no longer have much of an obligation to be any one particular thing and instead have the artistic liberty to experiment with shifting tone, points of view, timeline, genre, and so on, and I as someone with nothing better to do than sit around and watch this stuff think that that's great.  That seems to be the reason Barry is allowed to take as many turns as it does, apparently determined to make itself un-elevator-pitch-able by its final season.  Barry, the story of an ex-marine hitman with dreams of making it big in Hollywood, was always poised to balance between grim, noirish grittiness and borderline farcical humour, and was able to pull off that combination surprisingly well in no small part due to the proven range of key cast members such as Bill Hader and Stephen Root.  And while I thought the first couple seasons were pretty great - the dark parts are successfully dark and the funny parts are really funny - something about the later seasons really struck me in its own way, and I think perhaps the fourth season was my favourite of them all due to its eerily empty atmosphere and wonderfully sinister directing and editing choices; this show is my new prime example of why deliberately un-stylized and un-glorified violence on film can be much more effective.  Barry gets a lot of mileage out of its ability to surprise the audience (by which I mean, me), but what makes the show so special isn't merely that it tries a lot of unusual things, but that it's able to so skillfully pull them off every time.  It's a show that always confidently knows exactly what it is, even if exactly what it is isn't always so easy to explain.

CUNK ON EARTH (Season 1, 2023)

Diane Morgan's Philomena Cunk character has apparently been around for over a decade now, but it wasn't until watching this series that I became aware of her schtick, which pretty immediately won me over (a fact probably unsurprising to anyone who knows me).  The humour is dense and dry and consistently smart, even (especially) when it's very stupid.  Cunk's deadpan and occasionally troubled delivery is relentlessly hilarious and the show's nods to and subversions of typical historical-docuseries editing choices are clever and funny, but of course the greatest thing Cunk on Earth has to offer are Cunk's woefully misinformed interview segments with hapless real-life historians and experts.  This show also is quite helpful for bringing proper historical context to Technotronic's 1989 masterwork "Pump Up the Jam".

THE REHEARSAL (Season 1, 2022)

Nathan Fielder is probably a genius of some kind.  I've always seen him as a Borat-like figure for his infallible knack for bringing out the bizarre in seemingly ordinary people, but instead of doing so through a confusing and over-the-top character, Fielder's on-screen persona has always been completely innocuous and understated.  Compared to previous work on Nathan For You, The Rehearsal feels far more personal and conceptual, as Fielder maps out ornate dialogue trees for participants to 'rehearse' upcoming life events, and for himself to 'rehearse' interactions with said participants, and so on.  The show quickly becomes a tangled mess of its own design, as its status as pseudo-'reality television' begins to melt away and Fielder appears to trap himself in hopelessly elaborate layers of inauthenticity.  It's a pretty deeply uncomfortable show, not simply in the awkward and occasionally tense interactions, but also in the total ambiguity as to what, if anything in this meticulously pre-planned series, can be said to be 'real'.  But it's not a total psychological drama or anything; it's still really funny, and quite creative, and despite its best efforts to obfuscate reality I do think this show touches on some very real ideas and emotions.  As someone who spends quite a lot of her time scripting future potential interactions and situations, I found The Rehearsal to be kind of poignant, even, in its own way.

THE WHITE LOTUS (Season 2, 2022)

Oh, man.  Oh man, oh man, oh man.  In last year's list I gushed about how unbelievably good the first season of The White Lotus, but somehow I think Mike White totally outdid himself with the follow-up.  I've watched this second season in its entirety three times over the course of the year and I still don't know how I'm to try to describe how fantastic everything about this show is.  It's maybe surprisingly compelling to me as well - tales of sex and deceit aren't always my 'thing' necessarily - but the introduction of a slowly unfolding mystery-ish plot amidst the White Lotus's brilliantly confluential style established in Season 1 makes for a thrilling experience.  And of course the visuals and setting (this season takes place in Sicily) help make the show fun to watch and re-watch as well.  And, as with the first season, Season 2 is exceptionally cast.  In particular, F. Murray Abraham's role as a lecherous widow and his fraught exchanges with his son (played by Michael Imperioli) are truly hilarious, Jennifer Coolidge's return as Tanya brings a lot of new depth to the character, and though Meghann Fahy's performance is maybe one of the subtler ones, I'm floored by its complexity and emotional suppression every time.  But of course the most exceptional aspect of The White Lotus remains its writing; the storyline unravels with expert precision, and the characters are impressively multidimensional and their interactions nuanced and authentic.  This is, without a doubt, one of my absolute favourite television series of all time and I can hardly wait for the third installment.

POKER FACE (Season 1, 2023)

I've quite enjoyed Rian Johnson's recent mystery films so I was very excited to see he was one of the forces behind Poker Face, a Columbo-style mystery series where Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a sort of hard-boiled detective-of-circumstance who can instinctually and infallibly tell whenever someone is lying.  This near-supernatural ability is very creatively explored across the ten episodes of the show, because Cale doesn't have an innate sense of what the actual truth is, only a sense of lies being told.  Each story is also mostly self-contained, set in an entirely unique location with an entirely unique set of supporting characters.  This makes each story very memorable and interesting, and the variety of characters and motives and such are very compelling, but probably the greatest asset this show has is Lyonne's naturally charismatic and convincing performance.  This is the perfect role for her, and because the episodes' format means that the fun of watching the show is dependent on watching Cale put the pieces together rather than trying yourself to gather information and figure out 'whodunit', the show being well-cast and well-acted is crucial.  I think Poker Face perfectly accomplished what it was going for, and really stands out amongst the current crop of TV content.

MR. SHOW (Seasons 1-4, 1995-1998) / W/ BOB & DAVID (Season 1, 2015)

Mr. Show appeals to me for a few reasons.  One is that I'm generally pretty fond of sketch comedy and alternative comedy; another is that this particular show is kind of the jumping off point for the careers of a lot of people whose other work I like; another is that the actual sketches that make up the show are usually pretty hilarious.  That last reason should really be the main one, and perhaps it is, but my gut instinct is to insist that my favourite thing about this show (and its 2015 revival under a different name) is its structure.  Each episode flows with stream-of-consciousness fluidity, with each sketch bleeding into the next and with elements or characters occasionally recurring or with the ending linking back to the beginning, or stuff like that.  It's like a series of side-two-of-Abbey-Road's, an extremely creative show in the way it constantly experiments with the formula both on a sketch level and on an episode level.  Perhaps this is naught but a way to avoid the tricky business of writing beginnings and endings to each sketch, but even if that's why the show is constructed the way it is, it's in no small part why the show is so much fun to watch.  I'm also shocked by how most of the show really holds up today - maybe it's because there are a few sketches that have aged quite poorly that I find myself noticing how infrequently that's the case, but for a show whose style of comedy is decently edgy I think most of it has stood the test of time.  And the revival season, though tantalizingly short, is quite solid as well.  I had a lot of fun going through these shows.

I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE (Seasons 1-3, 2019-2023)

I'd seen a handful of sketches from I Think You Should Leave (and I think the entire first episode) a couple years ago, but didn't until this year really sit down and go through the whole thing, and... I'm kind of baffled by how widely beloved and acclaimed it is.  This isn't to say that it isn't a terrific piece of comedy; I'm in fact quite convinced it is exactly that.  What I mean is that this show feels purely like a cult classic, a niche curiosity, a show I was surprised to hear was even getting a third season to begin with.  Tim Robinson's style is so uncomfortable, anxious, abrasive, that he never quite seemed to fit in during his stint on Saturday Night Live, and Detroiters doesn't seem to have lit the world on fire, so it's very exciting to me that I Think You Should Leave has gotten the recognition it deserves.  Why is it so surprising that people 'get' this show?  It's pretty easy to understand and sledgehammer-blunt.  I guess it's just that this show manages to communicate a lot of the deeply distressing aspects of being a person interacting with other people so palpably, that it's sort of comforting that other people are able to find this show as funny as I happen to think it is.  Apparently Tim Robinson has won an Emmy and is up for another one.  That's really cool.

PAUL T. GOLDMAN (Season 1, 2023)

Director Jason Woliner's decade-in-the-making document of the story of one Paul T. Goldman is one of the most unpredictable and fascinating things I experienced this year.  The series functions as both a meta-documentary of sorts and a series of re-enactments based around Goldman's experiences as a man who purports to have discovered an elaborate sex trafficking ring.  Though it starts out roughly in the same vein as any number of true-crime shows, it doesn't take very long before it becomes apparent that Goldman is not a remotely reliable narrator and seems to have fabricated much of his own story via rather baseless inferences, and additionally he seems to be convinced that his role in this docuseries will bring him into the spotlight.  Woliner appears to assign himself the task of filming re-enactments (with Goldman playing himself) of everything Goldman describes, and presenting his monologues mostly without any comment or overtly biased framing; it's left up to the audience to determine whether or not Goldman is merely a charming, delusional rube, or a wolf in sheep's clothing with some quite harmful ideas about people.  I've seen criticisms levelled at this show for its hands-off neutrality in this regard, but personally I think that's a big part of what makes it so compelling; if this show were to spend its runtime explicitly denouncing Goldman, it'd be rather shallow and unnecessary, and maybe even mean.  But because Goldman's story and ideas are stitched together into a complex whole with the information that conflicts with it, it works as a show that captures a lot of the nuances of the story itself and the people behind it, and Woliner trusts the audience to figure out for themselves how exactly to feel about all of it.  This show wasn't really like anything I'd ever seen before, and the strange re-enactments and twists made for a really memorable and shocking experience.

COMEDY BANG! BANG! (Seasons 1-5, 2012-2016)

2023 was the year that I contracted a serious case of Scott Aukermania, which I guess technically started when I was watching Mr. Show but which really kicked into high gear with Comedy Bang! Bang!, and has yet to show any signs of clearing up.  Before this year I'd only known Scott Aukerman as a behind-the-scenes figure involved with some things I'd enjoyed (e.g. directing Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special and Between Two Ferns: the Movie), but it's become clear to me lately that his particular brand of comedy is exactly the kind I really love.  And Comedy Bang! Bang! functions as a loving-yet-irreverent tribute to comedy itself, spoofing and referencing countless pieces of film and television from throughout the history of pop culture.  It's a sort of anti-talk-show endlessly fucking with the form of late-night television, not unlike The Eric Andre Show or Space Ghost Coast to Coast, but silly and ridiculous rather than exhaustingly surreal.  No opportunity for a quick gag is ever missed.  It's dense and clever and wacky and features appearances from incredible talents in the worlds of comedy, film and music (e.g. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips is the guest on one episode!!), and it's just so much fun to watch.  Oh, and there are sketches too, and those are also really hilarious.  I spent a lot of my time watching this show sort of in awe, which is kind of an odd thing to say about it but it's true.

JOE PERA TALKS WITH YOU (Seasons 1-3, 2018-2021)

I've heard it said before that all comedy is based on misery, or something to that effect.  Joe Pera Talks With You is a comedy series, and it's very funny, but there's nothing miserable about it.  In fact, it's quite wholesome, though not in the trite way where it's like going out of its way to be really performatively sweet or anything.  Rather, it just feels good in a way comedy doesn't usually feel.  Joe Pera's persona has always been that of an old man in a young man's body, and this show is largely about Pera appreciating the beauty in the small and mundane things in life in a very midwestern sort of way.  And his onscreen chemistry with costar Jo Firestone is delightful.  As someone who often finds myself feeling like an old person waiting to happen, there's something I find rather true and relatable about the characters on this show and the way they think about things.  Also, I don't mean to give the impression that this show is totally edgeless - part of the fun comes when Pera's understated demeanour is balanced out with more brash or boisterous characters, most especially Conner O'Malley's frequent appearances as a neighbour of Pera's.  Joe Pera Talks With You touches on something I haven't really seen explored in any other works of contemporary comedy, and I love it to pieces for that, and also the church announcements episode is one of the greatest things to ever air in the history of TV.

WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS (Season 1, 2023)

I mentioned when I included the movie Dick on 2022's list that I've always thought of Watergate as a historical event with a lot of comedic potential to it, but actually forget potential, there's quite a lot of comedy (of errors) already inherent to it.  White House Plumbers portrays the working relationship of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President, including the many Watergate break-in attempts and operations intended to plug leaks, and it seems to be from what I can tell pretty historically accurate (down to Liddy's idolatry of Hitler), but more importantly, it's really, really funny.  Justin Theroux's performance is hysterical and the show manages to get a lot of comedic mileage out of not just quick gags, but also the actual absurdity of the history being used as source material.  It's satirical, yes, but not a lot needs to be added to the reality of how much of a bitterly hilarious shambles the whole operation was to begin with to make an entertaining series, at least for someone like myself who finds this stuff interesting.  And there's something sort of nice to the whole Watergate thing as well, the way I see it: if we're to have a highly corrupt and unethical government, I'd like it to be one where the crooks behind it are brought to justice after tripping over their own dicks.

ENLIGHTENED (Seasons 1-2, 2011-2013)

Enlightened is Mike White's previous major television series project as writer/director before The White Lotus, co-created by and starring Laura Dern, and it shares many themes and strengths with White's other work.  As with The White Lotus, Enlightened's writing is carefully nuanced and has a strong basis in realism, and Dern's character Amy Jellicoe is quite self-righteous but emotionally dysfunctional, a combination not dissimilar to certain White Lotus characters.  Though I find its standard linear storytelling with only one central character to be perhaps less interesting than The White Lotus, and its uncomfortable nature sometimes hard to watch, the writing, character depth and realistic dialogue are very nearly as good, and one could argue Enlightened is the more emotionally powerful show.  I found it to be naught but further proof that Mike White is a master of his craft and certainly amongst the best TV writers in history, and Laura Dern is a fantastic actor.

SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF (Season 1, 2023)

The Scott Pilgrim franchise has pervaded an impressive number of media, from its graphic-novel origins to film (and its soundtracks) to a video game (and its soundtrack), an unplayably convoluted board game and more.  Both the film and the graphic novels are among my favourite things in the world, so this new animated series seems almost unnecessary - why bother trying to retell a story which was already told perfectly the first two times?  But in fact, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is quite the worthy addition to the canon.  Its story is a totally new take on the original (and it probably only really works if you're already familiar with the original, but I suspect most viewers are/were), wherein the title character actually spends a significant amount of time offscreen in favour of several more Ramona-centric episodes, and I think this new storyline was not only an interesting and creative decision but also probably a necessary one to keep the series from feeling redundant.  Also, the animation is pretty amazing, building off of stylistic elements from both the books and movie with some particularly great facial expressions.  Best of all, the entire cast from the film returned to do the voices for this series, which is great because it's one of the most ridiculously and notoriously great casts in the history of cinema (I think).  But even beyond that, this series felt weirdly tailor-made to me and me in particular, not just in how I was immediately excited to find there was going to be an animated S. Pilgrim show featuring the return of the entire cast, but also because in the new additions exclusive to this show were what felt like a confluence of a bunch of other sort of niche things I'm obsessed with.  This includes very prominent usage of Liam Lynch's "United States of Whatever", which has long been one of my favourite songs (no, really), but also guest voice appearances from Kevin McDonald of the Kids in the Hall and Will Forte.  There's even a bit of dialogue that explicitly quotes a line from the MacGruber movie.  This show was made for me, I swear.  It's the best.

RESERVATION DOGS (Season 3, 2023)

Besides all the other terrible stuff happening constantly, one of the great tragedies of 2023 was the conclusion of Reservation Dogs.  Though I know it wouldn't be reasonable to expect this show to last forever, it was truly one of the smartest, funniest and most affecting shows in the history of its medium (as far as I'm concerned) and I think it's the first TV show to make me feel sad upon finishing the series finale.  As with the second season, this season experimented a lot with episode structure and focal characters and such, and there are even a couple episodes set partially or entirely during previous generations.  One thing I really appreciate about Reservation Dogs is its large and memorable cast and its sense of a truly tight-knit community, and I like the way that this creates the groundwork for the show to sometimes work as sort of a loose-concept set of disparate short stories rather than always sticking to its greater running narrative.  Every episode feels important and fresh and sort of unpredictable, and the characters are really strong and fleshed-out, well-written and well-acted.  On top of that, Reservation Dogs had a lot to say, and its perspective(s) was/were unique and, I think, necessary within the ever-expanding universe of mainstream content being perpetually produced.  This was a really special show and I hope it's remembered as a masterpiece and a work of great significance in the future.

STAND-UP SPECIALS (which I suppose can have their own section)

HANNAH GADSBY - SOMETHING SPECIAL (2023)

Hannah Gadsby is one of my absolute favourite comedians, and their previous special, Douglas, is likely my favourite special I've ever seen.  Something Special is declared by Gadsby to be a 'feel-good show', implicitly in contrast to their previous works, and thus takes on a noticeably lighter tone than Douglas and Nanette (especially the latter).  Fortunately, though, this set retains Gadsby's excellent, layered writing style and proclivity for lacing dark themes into stand-up (two different stories in this show involve grisly rabbit deaths).  And they are a pretty unique voice and a rare talent in the comedy world and I love all of their stuff.  Two other things I particularly appreciate about this special: 1) it is the only comedy set I've ever seen feature a nonlinear narrative, and 2) the opening music is 'Birdhouse in Your Soul' by They Might Be Giants.

GARY GULMAN - THE GREAT DEPRESH (2019)

I initially found out about Gary Gulman via his classic 'state abbreviations' bit, and subsequently watched and/or listened to various other recordings of his stand-up routines (including In This Economy?), enjoying many of them; the bits that were good could be really, really amazing, but I didn't totally love all of them.  On the other hand, I loved The Great Depresh all the way through.  It is a 'concept special' (does that term exist?), centred entirely around the topic of Gulman's life with depression, consisting of mostly stand-up (which is why it's in this section of the list, go figure) but also including occasional documentary segments.  I found it to be quite touching!  Gulman's material deals with very serious subject matter in a way that's at once compassionate and deeply funny.  The bit on antidepressant side effects exemplifies this for me in a way I can barely explain; really, it's little more than a serious of silly jokes, but it's also so empathetic and smart in a way that suicide jokes so seldom are, and I think that's why it's stuck with me throughout the year.  This special is a masterclass in spinning trauma into gold.  Thank you, Gary Gulman, for making us laugh about despair... again.

JOHN MULANEY - BABY J (2023)

Hey, it's another 'concept special'!  Actually, I think all three of these are!  (Although there were other specials I enjoyed this year [Kyle Kinane's Shocks and Struts, for instance], these are the only ones about which I have anything to say.)  John Mulaney's recent years have been the subject of a lot of discussion and murmuration.  Although Mulaney was never really a 'clean comedian', he was often seen as kind of a wholesome one, for rather basic things such as saying on stage how much he loved his wife, rather than doing the classic stand-up thing of complaining about how much you can't stand your spouse-lady.  He also did the John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch children's TV special, and so because of these things I think the reputation he had was of a very positive force in the comedy world.  However, things kind of changed in that respect when the news broke that Mulaney had had a drug relapse in late 2020 and gone to rehab, and separated from his then-wife and later filed for divorce in 2021.  Even if you didn't know what to make of the situation, it certainly broke the illusion of Mulaney's wholesomeness to a lot of the fans and people invested in that.

Whether or not Mulaney's personal life is any of my business (or yours), these events (or specifically the relapse and rehabilitation [his divorce is, I think, only mentioned in passing once during the whole thing and that's probably for the best]) are the background for the 2023 Baby J special.  It's a show that makes great use of Mulaney's onstage charm and wit, and that's important, because Baby J is more or less a confession to just how detestable as a human being Mulaney can be (and was, not very long ago).  His anecdotes are occasionally silly and benign, but often disturbing (e.g. Mulaney's account of the quack doctor he sought out for illegitimate prescriptions) and/or kind of loathsome (e.g. the bit about elaborately stealing money from himself to buy cocaine, after which Mulaney points out 'and that's just one of the ones [stories] I'm willing to tell you [the audience].').  There is occasionally a little bit of a winking, 'I'm-a-bad-widdle-boy' tone to it, but much more often the show is (as far as I can tell) kind of devastatingly frank, and also unbelievably hilarious.  I've watched this special three times, and each time I reach the final segment wherein Mulaney reads to the audience an interview that he gave while on drugs, my face hurts from laughter.  As a pretty big fan of John Mulaney, this is certainly my favourite work of his yet, and though I'd rather the next special isn't anything like it (for his sake), being able to recover from being such a total mess and in the process produce such an amazing piece of comedy is kind of a nice feat to achieve.  

FILMS

A SERIOUS MAN (2009) / THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (2001)

These were the final two Coen Brothers films I hadn't yet seen at the start of 2023 (except The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, but nobody really seems to like those), and they're two of their trickiest films, I think.  These movies are the Coens on hard mode.  They lack the immediacy and accessibility of The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona or even Fargo, really, but they're still truly excellent works in their own right, I believe.

A Serious Man in particular is a tough movie to really get a read on; it's kind of subtle and kind of slow and kind of bizarre and full of weird semi-plot-threads and red herrings, and it doesn't exactly end so much as it eventually yields to the credits.  It doesn't adhere to any particular genre.  There are two different extended scenes of this movie (The cold-open with the dybbuk, and the segment about the goy's teeth) that are arguably barely pertinent to the story if not deliberately confusing.  It's a movie that asks a lot of big questions and goes out of its way not to give them a satisfying answer.  However, I think it's kind of brilliant.  It's a film about floundering to make sense of life and coping with seemingly uncontrollable and unpredictable events and wondering what kind of plan Hashem could possibly have for you.  I remember hearing somewhere that the Coens considered this to be their most personal film, and I think that's true, both due to its deep roots in Midwestern and Jewish culture, but it's very stylistic in a specifically Coen-bros. way.  The dialogue and direction and themes and story structure all radiate the duo's certain je ne sais quoi; humorous and existential and slightly absurd, but I can hardly describe it.  It's stronger here than anywhere else.  And this movie has several truly amazing moments, particularly the aforementioned 'goy's teeth' excursus, which is maybe one of my favourite scenes in film history.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the Coens' stab at grim, Tracer Bullet-esque noir.  Though it's a lot less difficult to pin down or understand than A Serious Man, it's still kind of a difficult film in how slow and morose it is.  It drags its way through nearly two lugubrious hours, but it feels significantly longer than that to me, and seems to start drawing to a close once or twice when it hasn't.  I still think it's excellent, though, maybe even because of these things; the story is compelling and Jon Polito's performance is amazing, and there's still some great Coenesque humour to be found in the film despite its brooding tone.  It's very effective and creative with the genre it's adopted for itself, and so it never really feels like a put-on or a pastiche, it's just a very well-made crime drama.  Point being, I guess, the Coen bros. are unbelievably good filmmakers and I love pretty much everything they've made.

GOODFELLAS (1990)

This is the kind of list item I dread writing about: the ultrapopular Stone Cold Classic.  I'm not a staunch contrarian, and I'm glad I totally get why everyone loves this movie, it's just: what on Earth kind of unique insight might I possibly have regarding GoodFellas??  You know, one of the most acclaimed films ever screened?  I don't think there's any interesting way I could say 'hey, this Martin Scorsese guy is a real good director, isn't he?' or 'gosh, Robert De Niro sure can act'.  Even this, what I've ended up doing, is a pretty played-out schtick in and of itself, eh?  Let's just move on.

THE WIND RISES (2013)

I've been a hardcore Hayao Miyazaki fan since as far back as my memories go.  Kiki's Delivery Service is my favourite movie ever made (easily) and Spirited Away is a respectable second place.  I have a photo of myself at age five cosplaying as Mimiko from Panda! Go Panda!  But I never managed to complete his filmographie until this year, when I finally experienced The Wind Rises for the first time.  It's incredible!  

Like every other Miyazaki film, The Wind Rises is really, deeply beautiful, visually and otherwise.  It also revisits a theme present in a lot of Miyazaki's works, which is his preoccupation with flight (Kiki had Kiki's broom and the dirigible, Porco Rosso heavily featured WWI-era aircraft, Howl's Moving Castle, Laputa & Nausicaä have various steampunk airships, etc).  However, it's a very unusual film for him in other respects; for example, the whimsical and fantastical elements of his other films are gone in lieu of a more dramatic and historical story.  The film concerns an ambitious designer of aircraft in Japan in WWII, torn between his love of aviation and disillusionment with having to put his talents towards the war effort.  This is, I think, a semi-autobiographical reflection of Miyazaki's own conflicting ideas regarding his fascination with drawing planes and tanks and the like and his own anti-war leanings, and even on a larger scale The Wind Rises is by far his most mature and personal film ever.  It's also his most tragic, but it's certainly not a pessimistic film, determined to find beauty and joy and hope in even horrific circumstances, something some of my favourite films do (e.g. In This Corner of the World).  This was for a while intended to be Miyazaki's final film, and though thankfully he has come out of retirement, what a profound and beautiful closing statement this would have been to his career!

FRANCES HA (2012)

It so happened that three of my favourite things I watched this year involved collaboration between Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, starting with this movie.  Frances Ha is a black-and-white slice-of-life drama, and one that took its time really embedding itself in my system, but by half-an-hour in I was fully engrossed in it.  At turns funny and sad, sometimes both, this film really plainly and realistically displays the feeling of imagining and expecting a future with someone important to you, one which ends up never happening, and the aimlessness, frustration, and whatnot that result.  This is a very common occurrence in life (my life, at least) and yet I can't recall seeing it so honestly captured in a film (or any medium) before this; perhaps this is because it's usually more examined in context of a romantic relationship, whereas Frances Ha concerns a close friendship.  I found this film to be touching and sweet, and for me it was a lovely introduction to the sharp acting skill of Greta Gerwig (whose other work w/ which I was familiar was all behind the camera).

PARASITE (2019)

Parasite is a rare example of a film where every single aspect is executed flawlessly, as far as I'm concerned.  The acting is clearly fantastic (even for a movie whose dialogue I have to read); the script is amazing; the directing is on point; the set design, cinematography, editing, colour grading... Parasite is the kind of film that really makes me feel truly aware of how many elements of the filmmaking process it's possible to do extraordinarily well.  I found its suspense to be gripping beyond that of just about any thriller or horror film I've encountered, and the characters are written with a satirical edge but also genuine dimensions and nuance.  Watching the story unfurl for the first time was an unbelievably exhilarating experience, but rewatching it was still incredibly exciting.  It's a brilliant story told in a brilliant way, and also just one of the best looking films I've ever seen, visually speaking.  Despite the dark and violent elements to the film, merely thinking about this movie brings an unconscious smile to my face, just because of how much fun it is to watch.

BARBIE (2023)

The movie I was looking forward to the most during the year was Barbie, not just because of my long-standing crush on Ryan Gosling but also because the very idea of Greta Gerwig directing a Barbie movie was hard for me to fully wrap my head around.  I had no idea if it was going to be a kind of light, reverent tribute to the brand, or a thorough feminist deconstruction of it, or a spoof, or what.  As it turns out, it's kind of all three, and as a result Barbie is the postmodern identity-crisis of a film that I was hoping, but not totally expecting, it would be.  I've heard both defenses and criticisms of this movie that seem to evaluate it less as a film and more as a gender-studies thesis, and that's fair - Gerwig certainly goes there - but though I enjoy this movie precisely for its critical satire of gender-norms and contemporary society, I can't pretend this is much more than a big-budget comedy, and by those standards I think Barbie is undeniably hilarious, entertaining and razor-sharp.  And, y'know, maybe Greta Gerwig should at least be nominated for an Oscar for this thing, eh?  I don't know.

One thing I really was not expecting was for this movie to be the humongous phenomenon it was - it's as of this writing the 14th-highest-grossing film of all time (and the highest-grossing film from a female director ever, by a lot)!!  I work at a Korean restaurant right across the street from a movie theatre, and we were consistently way busier than normal for the entire first month or two that Barbie was in theatres.  A dentist told me people were asking for significantly more pink toothbrushes than usual.  I ended up seeing it pretty soon after it opened, in a packed theatre, in which everyone was laughing really hard the whole time.  It was some of the most fun I've had watching a movie in and of itself, and the crowd also seemed to be mostly middle-aged or older people, and being able to collectively laugh at the patriarchy with them was kind of satisfying.  Seeing this film become a world-conquering event was, I think, really nice, both because it was my favourite film of 2023 but also because even if it's not the most radical-left thing in existence, I do think it could maybe set some heartening precedents.  I hope.  I don't think Barbie is going to change the world or anything on its own, but yeah.  It's a great movie, I thought.

BLUE VELVET (1986)

David Lynch's work has been a pretty major blind spot for me as someone who tends to gravitate towards kind of experimental and surreal media, so I've taken the first small step in rectifying that issue by watching Blue Velvet, which I've come to understand is a decent indicator of the style of his larger oeuvre.  I actually think (here he is again) (no, he isn't the reason I decided to watch this) David Foster Wallace put it best when pointing out that Blue Velvet is not a film about finding the disturbing, perverted underbelly of a seemingly wholesome, sanitized environment, but rather a film about discovering and recognizing the darkness within oneself; 'It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff, encoded in it'.  It's a very curious movie in this respect.  It's one of the most uncomfortable experiences I've had with a movie (and I wasn't even watching it with anyone else); it features a lot of sinister and depraved elements and behaviour, yet there's no moral, no grand narrative agenda.  The protagonist isn't a monument to justice any more than Frank Booth is, in spite of what a familiarity with narrative structure and film tropes would have a viewer expect via the way the story initially develops.  Amidst the warped and slightly surreal aspects of the film, there's something that feels eerily true in its own way about the movie, for that reason, and I think that's what makes this a genuinely fascinating film and not just some tasteless exploitation flick.  Also, Frank Booth is the role Dennis Hopper was born to play.

WHITE NOISE (2022)

I've already indicated that there was one more Gerwig/Baumbach film still to come on this list, and I've also already included Don DeLillo's White Noise in the literature section of the list, so perhaps predictably, Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise, starring Gerwig, is that film.  Though maybe it isn't that predictable - apparently this is a pretty divisive movie, and I get it, but I think it's excellent.  The screenplay is pretty faithful to the story and dialogue of the novel, and though the dialogue is odd on the page its idiosyncrasies become especially apparent on camera.  In some respects I think the film is more effective than the book, even, especially in achieving the titular white-noise information-overload effect and in the way the dialogue piles up and crowds a scene.  I think the pacing and editing are fantastic as well; there are a few moments where the film really takes its time and focuses on the small details (particularly the fateful[/fatal?] stopping-to-get-gas scene), and those are especially well-done and stand out in the movie where they didn't quite as much in the book, though of course I love the book as well.  Greta Gerwig is excellent, as is Adam Driver, and Don Cheadle for that matter, and actually even the child actors do a terrific job, and I think Baumbach shows tremendous skill and creativity in the way he adapts the story.  It's an undeniably weird and heavily stylized film, and probably a rather confounding watch to someone who hasn't read the novel, but I thought it was really inspired and well-executed and I can't think of anything to complain about.  Even the LCD Soundsystem song during the credits isn't bad, and I can't stand LCD Soundsystem!  That's how good this movie is!

ONLY YESTERDAY (1991)

Near the end of the year I tried to watch every Studio Ghibli movie I hadn't yet seen (and several I already had), and of those few, Only Yesterday was certainly my favourite.  This is another one of the few Ghibli films with no supernatural or fantastical elements at all, focusing on a woman as she travels from the city to spend a summer harvesting safflowers in the country and revisits childhood memories.  It's a very introspective movie, one about trying to access your childhood self while also remembering the struggles of being that person.  The animation is exquisite even by Ghibli standards; the colours and style are extremely pretty and truly bring the story and settings to life.  The story, tone and characters all won me over right away as well.  A touching personal drama set in rural Japan by Studio Ghibli is so obviously something I'd fall in love with that I have no idea how this movie flew under my radar for so long, but I'm glad to have seen it now because it's magnificent.

In conclusion: that's the list!