I receive a notification here a few days back (not quite a dozen) that I registered this blog twelve years ago. That’s quite a while ago though my current lapsed-blogger status means that there isn’t quite the multitude of posts that duration would normally indicate.

With both these facts in mind and that I didn’t get around to adding to the plethora of ‘Best of 2023’ lists that hurtled around December and early Jan, I thought I’d use this as an occasion to mix things up a little and share a dozen things within this blog’s wheelhouse that stood out in those twelve months of last year.

I’ll kick off with live music as the first point. Catching My Morning Jacket live, on the first show of their European tour and first in the UK for something like a decade, was an absolutely joyous experience. Live albums and their reputation as a great live act built the expectations and they thoroughly delivered. A belter of a Z-heavy set that kicked off with ‘Gideon’ and circled favourites like ‘Anytime’ and ‘Holdin’ on to Black Metal’ as well as ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt.2’ made it magical on many levels but chief amongst them was that it was a rare date night with my wife and it’s a song that has a lot of personal connections (If you’re interested I chatted to the wonderful Geoff Stephen about just that).

If I think of films across 2023 my thoughts turn to those that I’ve added to the ‘to watch’ list but haven’t gotten round to. It’s safe to say that it’s more down to finding time – ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ looks like the mutt’s nuts but finding time for that or ‘Oppenheimer’, for example. I did start ‘The Poor Things’ but that didn’t sit well with me and I’ve yet to return to it a month on. The same, sadly, can be said for ‘Asteroid City’. Then again, of the couple I caught at the cinema rather than the couch, a real stand out was ‘The Boy and the Heron’. I fucking love a Studio Ghibli film and while it’s just over two hours long it’s just gorgeous in so many ways. I adore ‘The Wind Rises’ and thought that a beautiful ‘farewell’ from Hayao Miyazaki but if this is a thing to behold even if it isn’t his final film afterall.

We also caught Seth Rogen’s take on those heroes in a half shell ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ – a cool visual style and a great slab of nostalgia but the really cool stand out point for me was the soundtrack and how it leaned into that great ’90s hip hop era of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and its efforts to introduce these to a younger generation of ears meant my son has been requesting them so the turntable will often be occupied by just that.

It’ll come as no surprise that I listened to a good chunk of post-rock in 2023 and it was also the year of much-anticipated new music from two acts within that genre so, counting for two of these twelve points were the new albums from Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós, both of which followed lengthy gaps between studio efforts. While very different to each other, both End (for which the preceding announcement of End Tour caused many a concern that they EITS were calling it quits) and Átta (it’s Icelandic for ‘8’ as this is Sigur Rós’ eighth album) were well worth the weight and delivered what makes each of them great in spades.

I’ve slowed my reading of late, tackling heavier and heftier books that take a bit longer to chew through so I’m averaging maybe 25 in a year. On the fiction front a couple of stand out points were both books I was drawn to at random. Natsuo Krino’s Out is a slab of Japanese crime fiction that’s both familiar and yet like nothing I’ve read before. It’s the story of four women with hard lives that work the graveyard shift at a bento factory and how a random act of violence – one of them kills her husband – and the subsequent involvement of the others to dispose of the body and hide the crime. It’s an absolutely brilliant contemporary novel and I’m keen to find more of her work.

2023 was a year of more travel then in previous years, all of it aided by boat. I took (and take) as much advantage of the ease and cheapness (a return crossing in the car costing less than a return for three to London) of getting over in the ferry and where you can be within an hour or so of driving. However, while on a cruise in the Med and having finished the books I’d taken with me I found myself staring at the cover of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in the ship’s library. How this hadn’t cropped up in my reading to date or at uni all those years (ok, decades now) ago I will never know but holy-fuck what a book. As the blurb says “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.” I hadn’t finished it when we arrive back in the UK so drove into town the next day and picked up a new copy from the bookshop so I could do so asap.

Sticking with books(ish) for point 8 of these 12… I found myself with an itch to find out more about the Vietnam War last year. After finding they’d been removed from Netflix I located episodes of Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’ elsewhere and proceeded to reabsorb. But that wasn’t enough to scratch that itch. In a couple of bookshops in Oxford I picked up a few books I’d been on the hunt for. As with the WW2 books in my library’s history section, I’ve found it’s the personal accounts that make the most enlightening and gripping of reads but I really can’t abide those ‘guts and glory’ takes. So, along with the brilliant If I Die In A Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, I picked up and hungrily devoured Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk and it’s that which is the standout point for me in the year’s non-fiction reading. More than ‘just’ a helicopter pilot’s diary this is an eye-opening account of what it’s like to fly over 1,000 assault missions in what was a clusterfuck-after-clusterfuck of a war and the devastating impact it can have told by a man that’s got a gift for detail and narrative. I know he’s got a follow-up out there and if I can get my hands on it at a decent price I’ll do just that.

Thanks to those aforementioned ‘Best of 2023’ lists there were a couple of late-year discoveries in what I guess was once the ‘Americana’ bucket that I’m oft inclined to look in, both from the same magazine’s CD of the year’s highlights and both from artists that have been around a while but never in my ears to that point. However, both Israel Nash and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s 2023 albums got plenty a listen to as a result. Nash’s Ozarker and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s Weathervanes combine what I like about that genre – great storytelling and a certain kind of heartland, big-sky vibe and, in both cases here, underpinned by some fucking tasty guitar work.

While I’ve mentioned a couple of stand out post-rock albums it’s worth giving a shout to some of those other albums of 2023 that got plenty a spin and stood out from the flock – there were quite a few great albums last year.

Slowdive’s Everything Is Alive was a real heavy-rotation holder. The second album of their comeback and while 2017’s self-titled album felt like a real victory-lap and celebration, Everything Is Alive pushes further into the electronic vibe that they’d left off with on 1995’s Pygmalion but with a warmer, lush sound aided by Shawn Everett (who’s engineered the likes of The War On Drugs) though it sounds like a key part of his job was in convincing Neil Halstead when to stop tinkering.

Blondshell – the musical project of Sabrina Teitelbaum – dropped her self-titled debut in the early part of the year and it got a lot of spins here even if its first-quarter release meant it got left off some of those end of year lists. Brisk and to the point (frustratingly she’d issue an expanded version later in the year with four new songs), Blondshell‘s nine tunes harken back to that ’90s angst and bite of Hole and PJ Harvey yet feel more like a contemporary reinvention of the vibe rather than an outright lifting of it.

The final point that I’ll make is perhaps surprising but then it was also that it was a surprise in itself that one of the albums I listened to most in 2023 was a new Foo Fighters record. I remember upon hearing of Taylor Hawkins’ passing that I figured the only way the band could go on would be with Dave sitting on the drums for albums and with a fucking good session player joining for live. Actually ‘replacing’ Taylor would’ve been unthinkable.

What I couldn’t have predicted would be just how fucking good But Here We Are turned out to be and how addictive I’ve found it. It’s not an occasion anyone would want to step up to but the Foos did just that and then some – Grohl lyrically wrestling with questions of grief, mortality and the big ‘what now?’ in the face of losing two people close to him against some of the most compelling and, frankly, brilliant tunes of their career. I’ve prattled enough about this album in a rare (for here) review so won’t do so again but having recently added both The Colour and the Shape and Wasting Light to my vinyl collection I’d say that this sits with those as one of the best they’ve made.