We’ve been asking artists to make us lists of their favorite music of 2023, and Connecticut dance-punks Perennial took a unique approach. The band, who put out an EP of reworked material this year, picked their favorite album, song, EP, reissue, and compilation, with a review of each one followed by honorable mentions in each category. Take it away, Perennial…
Best Album: The Hives – The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons
The greatest live band on earth returns with the best punk album of 2023. As catchy and expertly-crafted as Veni Vidi Vicious, as adventurously produced as The Black and White Album, as sharp and focused as Tyrannosaurus Hives (the best garage punk album of the century so far), The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons is a bombastic, propulsive marvel. You could convince me it’s their best record; the sound of five seasoned experts showing off impeccable sonic taste for 30 minutes. Every song is instantly memorable (we saw The Hives this past month together as a band and the half-dozen selections from The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons fit seamlessly alongside their already impressive slate of hits), every turn of phrase characteristically Hives esque, every riff ruthlessly paired down. It’s heartening to see a band this hungry, this inspired, this fun after more than 30 years at work. It’s the record we listened to most in 2023. I’ll probably put on “Bogus Operandi” the moment I finish writing this sentence. The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons is the kind of record you aspire to; the sort of LP from which you excitedly point out different highlight moments, different novel production quirks, new fuzzed-out bits of brilliance that happen to grab you any given time around. What an album. What a band. The Hives.
Also:
Shabazz Palaces – Robed In Rareness
Labrador – Hold The Door For Strangers
Minus Points – Never Again For Now
Best Song: Belle & Sebastian – “Give A Little Time”
Their once wry nerviness has gently faded into a warmly humanist poetry (which, truth be told, was always there in between the barbs of even their most biting moments), but Belle & Sebastian remain indie pop’s most accomplished architects. There isn’t a band in the world I trust more with an electric piano and a Thin Lizzy riff. Late Developers, their newest LP, is their best in years, and “Give A Little Time” is the album’s ebullient highlight. The song boasts the kind of Motown by-way-of 70s power pop effusiveness that marked the best moments of Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit (for my money, still the band’s two best LPs), a homemade wall of sound equal parts sun bleached and pleasantly overcast. But this being Belle & Sebastian, there’s wit and irony shading all the major key warmth. “Destroy your correspondence, you read it back, it’s nonsense / Old letters, feed them to the shredder; you can let the past be silent.” The sounds might have the glow of AM pop radio nostalgia, but the lyrics offer something more nuanced, more poignant. Hard-won wisdom from a band who’ve sound-tracked a hundred kinds of heartbreak.
Also:
The Hives – “Bogus Operandi”
Chime School – “Coming To Your Town”
Blur – “The Ballad”
Best EP: Lightheaded – Good Good Great!
A quarter hour of impressionistic basement pop that rewards all the re-listens that you’ll inevitably devote to it, Lightheaded’s Good Good Great is perfect. Every clever production flourish (the vocals pivoting from right to left headphones in the first verse of “The Garden”; the stacking of “Be My Baby” triplets and lilting synthesizers in “Love Is Overrated”; the richly layered baroque pop of “The Garden”) underlines a band with real imagination and the knack for applying all that pocket symphony know-how to tuneful three-minute gems. Currently available on cassette, it’s the kind of record you’d leave in your tape deck and let the auto-reverse loop the tracks over and again as you while away your afternoon. Slumberland Records has been on a tear lately (Chime School! Peel Dream Magazine! The Umbrellas!) and Lightheaded’s new EP is an unmistakable highlight.
Best Reissue: The Dream Syndicate – The Days Of Wine And Roses
The minimalist vinyl re-press might be the au courant reissue format of the day (see: the recent fantastic half-speed masters of The Who’s early output), but my favorite version of the anniversary re-release will always be the overstuffed multi-CD bonanza. And the expanded edition of The Dream Syndicate’s psychedelic pop classic The Days Of Wine And Roses is a perfect model. A tasteful remastering of the original record, plus all the contemporaneous B-sides and EP tracks, demos, alternate versions and live stuff. It’s comprehensive and beautifully packaged: a definitive artifact of a band’s definitive work, with all the material that led to that breakthrough and blossomed up in the months to follow. Consider it the perfect antidote to all the ways in which the streaming experience remains unsatisfying and shallow. Four discs of Velvet Underground-inflected bedroom pop with which to spend a few pleasantly hazy hours.
Also:
De La Soul – 3 Feet High And Rising
The Who – Who’s Next / Lifehouse
R.E.M. – Up
Best Compilation: V/A – Come Together: Adventures On The Indie Dancefloor 1989-1992
Similar to the “everything in the vaults”-style expanded reissue, there’s a certain charm to the era/genre-specific boxset compilation. A time and a place, impressionistically committed to disc and perfectly shaped for the glovebox of your car. Precisely the sort of thing that Cherry Red Records has made their bread and butter (our van is full of garage and mod compilations via the UK label). Come Together: Adventures On The Indie Dancefloor 1989-1992 is a lovely example of the genre, four discs of kaleidoscopic dance music featuring both bands you probably know (The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, The Charlatans) and bands you might not, and celebrating a particularly adventurous moment in underground music, where electronica, psychedelic pop, soul, funk, mod revival, dub, and post-punk were all main ingredients. Plenty of late ’80s/early ’90s hallmarks bubble up (yes, Paul Oakenfeld’s remix of Happy Mondays’ “W.F.L” does in fact earn its “Think About The Future” subtitle via a sample of Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman), but the layered, expansive aesthetic of the scene as sampled here ends up feeling a lot more vivid and kinetic than just a nostalgic souvenir of a past moment.
Also:
Sonny Rollins – Go West! The Contemporary Records Albums
Black Eyes – Speaking In Tongues: Black Eyes 2001 – 2004
The Beatles – 1962-1966 (2023 Edition)
