The older I get, the harder it gets to put together a year-end list. Not because I’m becoming more musically discriminating in my dotage. Quite the opposite. Every year, I find countless new (and old) artists, albums and genres to add to my ever-expanding playlist — and it becomes increasingly difficult to narrow down my choices to anything approaching a reasonable number. This massive, multi-part list of 123 albums is as close as I could get this year. It’s far from definitive, but it’s the best I can do. To read more about these albums, click on the cover art or check out the Tinnitist TV page, where I interviewed plenty of these acts. See you in 2024.
The Third Mind
The Third Mind 2
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Starting four years ago as a wishful music fantasy, The Third Mind have now become a powerful and thrilling sonic reality. This same extraordinary cast of like-minded musicians who recorded their self-titled debut album return for The Third Mind 2. Formed by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter/guitarist Dave Alvin on electric guitar and bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker), they have since gleaned drummer Michael Jerome (Richard Thompson, John Cale, Blind Boys of Alabama) and guitarist David Immerglück (Counting Crows, Camper Van Beethoven, John Hiatt). Jesse Sykes, who has made several acclaimed albums with her Seattle group The Sweet Hereafter, joined this stellar lineup on vocals and acoustic guitar. With the release of The Third Mind 2, the band have developed into a cohesive and eclectic ensemble while retaining their original concept of recording spontaneous group improvisations. For many years, Krummenacher and Alvin had discussed trying to make an album outside of their comfort zone, using the free-form studio techniques pioneered by Miles Davis on albums like Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson. This meant no rehearsals and no preconceived arrangements, just agree on key, turn on the tape machine and see what happens.”
Tijuana Bibles
Free Milk
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tijuana Bibles — brothers Tony and Danny Costello, James Brannigan and Mikey Dornan — are poised to mainline their alluring all-killer hooks and chaotic discontent once more. Fascinated with life beyond their hometown of Coatbridge, the Scottish band’s unique alchemy and charisma has charmed audiences around the world, making for an impressive touring history. Sold-out U.K. shows culminating in a two-night residency at Glasgow’s King Tuts Wah Hut became infamous and soon, the four-piece were welcome faces in the dark basements venues of Berlin, Paris and Poznan. Festival appearances were punctuated by guerrilla gigs on the streets of their travels, en route to Reading & Leeds, Isle Of Wight, Spain’s Kutxa Kultur, Germany’s Reeperbahn and SXSW festivals. Re-emerging, clutching their manifesto, their new material is propulsive, volatile and unencumbered by any expectation of what fans may have come to expect. This is the sound of modern dystopia.”
Titus Andronicus
Basement Brainstorm
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Revered rock institution Titus Andronicus have released Basement Brainstorm, a compilation album of essential rarities intended to illuminate the painstaking creative process which resulted in last year’s acclaimed studio album The Will To Live. The album is available now digitally and on the first officially sanctioned Titus Andronicus audio cassette tape, via the long-dormant vanity imprint Titus Andronicus Records. The surprise release is accompanied by a music video for I Can Not Be Satisfied (Patrick’s Version), directed by stalwart Titus Andronicus collaborator Ray Concepcion, which takes a light-hearted look back at the maddening isolation of the peak-pandemic era. Watch singer-songwriter Patrick Stickles “shelter in place” at the rock band’s subterranean rehearsal space, while trying his hand at foreign instruments such as drums and keyboards.”
Waco Brothers
The Men That God Forgot
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Shaking off the plague days like a snake sheds its skin, The Waco Brothers stumble out of the empty, burning desert with a fierce thirst and an epic new album: The Men That God Forgot. It’s the first collection of original Waco tunes since 2016’s Going Down In History and comes to you via their own label. The Waco Brothers got together in Chicago in the mid-’90s; battle-weary punk musicians who wanted nothing more than to play classic country covers for free beer in their adopted home city. Their residencies at local bars became legendary for the sheer volume, speed and energy they brought to this task. After an early and particularly deranged appearance at SXSW, one wag dubbed the Wacos “Clash meets Cash.” They responded by unleashing a fistful of ferocious albums and endlessly entertaining live gigs that defined the insurgent country movement.”
M. Ward
Supernatural Thing
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Renowned singer-songwriter M. Ward’s new studio album Supernatural Thing is his first release in three years. Its title track lives in a liminal space in which Elvis Presley comes to him with a message: ‘You can go anywhere you please.’ “Well, all my songs depend on dream-imagery to some extent,” Ward explained, “and this was an actual dream I had about Elvis, when he came to me and said that. I don’t know if it’s pandemic-related or not.” Summing up the emotional tone of the record, Ward sings on this track: “You feel the line is growing thin / between beautiful and strange.” If that isn’t interesting enough for you, the album’s guest stars — First Aid Kit, Shovels & Rope, Scott McMicken, Neko Case, Jim James and others — enliven the album with more surprises. Eight of the album’s 10 songs are Ward originals, but there is also an unusual David Bowie cover — I Can’t Give Everything Away from Blackstar — and a live rendition of Daniel Johnston’s Story Of An Artist. “Bowie and Johnston are constant sources of inspiration for me, have been for I don’t know how many years.”
Nick Waterhouse
The Fooler
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “We had a joke in the studio,” says Nick Waterhouse. “Some of the guys were like, ‘Nick, you’re gonna end up at a press conference like Dylan in ’65: ‘Who’s The Fooler?’ ‘I don’t know, man, maybe it’s you! Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m becoming The Fooler right now.’ ” The title of the sixth album from the Californian singer-songwriter is more than just the name of one of its dozen immaculate tracks. The Fooler is both a clue and a red herring. The Fooler is the observed and the observer, narrator and subject, truth and lie. The Fooler is the shadow and reflection of a city the artist knows sufficiently well to wander with his eyes closed, and a place which very possibly never even existed. The Fooler is not so much an unreliable narrator as a constantly shifting perspective. The Fooler is the new album by Nick Waterhouse, and it’s a lot. “Many of the stories in the record come from that feeling of plasticity,” says Waterhouse. “What is memory? What is time? What is love between two human beings like in this imaginary city? It’s Cubist. A listener sees the angles of my life — and inexorably, my career — reflected in this work from all sides at once. I started thinking again about my university days, about modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, Hart Crane, or Ford Maddox Ford; about memory and how it betrays you; what you can see and what you can’t.”
Watch my interview with Nick Waterhouse HERE.
Whitehorse
I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Award-winning Canadian duo Whitehorse — Melissa McClelland and Luke Doucet — were originally planning on recording an EP of ’70s country songs instead of what became their upcoming album I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying. But when the lockdown hit, the pair began churning out new original songs. “Luke was like staying up late every night and writing all the songs about lockdown,” remembers McClelland. “And then he all of a sudden had like this collection of songs about lockdown that was stunning, and so I was like, ‘Oh, OK, I’m going to shift my thinking and start writing thematically.’ ” The first song McClelland penned during these sessions was If The Loneliness Don’t Kill Me, a Telecaster and pedal steel-driven two-step embodying McClelland’s original idea for the song’s refrain: “If the loneliness don’t kill me, then the good times surely will.”
Watch my interview with Whitehorse HERE.
Lucinda Williams
Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Lucinda Williams’ music has gotten her through her darkest days. It’s been that way since growing up amid family chaos in the Deep South, as she recounts in her candid new memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I told You. Over the past two years, it’s been the force driving her recovery from a debilitating stroke she suffered on Nov. 17, 2020, at age 67. And her masterful, Grammy-winning songwriting has not deserted her. Her stunning 16th studio album, Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart, brims over with some of the best work of her career. And though Williams can no longer play her beloved guitar — a constant companion since age 12 — her distinctive vocals sound better than ever. Since the beginning of her celebrated four-decade career, Williams has always written her songs on guitar. With that capability halted, she had to alter her songwriting process and lean on those close to her for help fulfilling her vision. She began writing with her husband and manager Tom Overby, as first documented on her Grammy-nominated 2020 album Good Souls Better Angels. On Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart, Williams teamed up with singer-songwriter and dear friend Jesse Malin — now dealing with a health crisis of his own after suffering a spinal stroke that has left him paralyzed from the waist down. Malin co-wrote three tracks on the album and helped her flush out some of the melodies on guitar. Williams also looked to her longtime road manager Travis Stephens, a veteran guitarist and songwriter, to bring her ideas to life as he co-wrote six songs on the album.”
Wreckless Eric
Leisureland
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction — he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it’s been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. As Eric Goulden it’s a little more complicated — a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn’t like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he’d been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release 20-some albums in 40-some years under various names — The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby — before finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric. His new album Leisureland marks a return to his more ramshackle world of recording — guitars and temperamentally unpredictable analogue keyboards, beatboxes and loops in conjunction with a real drummer, Sam Shepherd, who Eric met in a local coffee shop near his home in Catskill, N.Y. The recording methodology may have been Contemporary American but the subject matter is almost entirely British. It also contains more instrumentals than any of his previous albums.”
Watch my interview with Wreckless Eric HERE.
Yo La Tengo
This Stupid World
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Time keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ticking clock. This music is not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” guitarist Ira Kaplan sings in Fallout. “Reach back, unwind.” Part of how Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener Sinatra Drive Breakdown. In the séance-like Until it Happens, Kaplan intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time — bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later. “Look away from the hands of time.”
Frank Zappa
Funky Nothingness
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In 1969, after The Mothers of Invention disbanded, Frank Zappa released his groundbreaking solo debut Hot Rats. Fusing jazz and rock, the innovative album became one of the artist’s bestselling releases, thanks to classic tracks like Peaches En Regalia and Willie The Pimp. Over the following year, in between various projects (including producing Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, and hosting Belgium’s Festival Actuel, where Zappa met British drummer Aynsley Dunbar), he assembled a core group to lay down tracks at L.A.’s recently opened Record Plant. The sessions, which took place primarily in February and March 1970 at the studio, featured Zappa once again in the producer’s chair and joined by several of the musicians that played on Hot Rats, including Mothers member Ian Underwood (keyboard, saxophone, rhythm guitar), violinist and vocalist Don “Sugarcane” Harris, and Wrecking Crew bassist Max Bennett. The band was rounded out by Dunbar, who had just relocated to Los Angeles and moved in with Zappa following his invite to join the band. Together the group recorded hours of original compositions, inspired covers and extended improvisations that drew from Zappa’s R&B and blues roots, while blending influences of the emerging jazz fusion scene. Largely instrumental, these recordings showcased the guitarist’s virtuosity, while offering what could have easily been the sequel to Hot Rats, had it ever been released.”
Frank Zappa
Zappa ’80: Mudd Club / Munich
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Zappa 80: Mudd Club / Munich, the latest exciting live collection to be released from Frank Zappa’s legendary Vault, offers fans an opportunity to hear two blistering shows recorded in two distinct settings: The intimate 240-capacity Mudd Club in New York City and the massive 12,000-seat German arena Olympiahalle in Munich. Produced by Ahmet Zappa and Zappa Vaultmeister Joe Travers, this historically significant release marks the first time that full concerts have ever been released featuring the 1980 lineup — Zappa leading the five-strong band which included the dual vocal attack of Ike Willis and Ray White, Arthur Barrow on bass, Tommy Mars on keyboards, and newcomer David Logeman on drums. Additionally, this is the first posthumous release of this distinct but brief lineup, as Logeman — who replaced drummer Vinnie Colaiuta — would end up leaving when Colaiuta returned to the band. Previously only two tracks from these shows — Love Of My Life from Mudd Club and You Didn’t Try To Call Me from Munich — were released by Zappa on his CD live series, You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore.”
