The Daily Spin
January 2023 Rundown
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023. We’ve made it to our first big milestone - our first monthly recap! 31 albums down - that’s a lot of music to talk about.
I’ll be joined by Eli on this one, as he’s been with me reviewing these albums the whole way. Additionally, Preston Pack of The Wild Pitch will have a recap up with their opinions, since they’ve been with us too.
Additionally: a big thing! Here’s the playlist I mentioned yesterday, containing my favorite song from each of the albums I’ve reviewed in January. Each day, going forward, it’ll be updated with my favorite track from that day’s album until we’ve got a full portfolio of 365.
Fear not, your regularly scheduled album review will go live later today. Double dosage today.
The Story So Far
D: I think what this project has taught me, above anything else, is just how much good music there is? My central reason behind wanting to do this was twofold: one, so I could share the music I love with people, and two, so I could discover more music - because as much as I do adore it, it’s very easy to fall into that comfort zone of familiarity, and forcing myself out of his has been an adventure, but one I’ve really enjoyed. I’m realizing how unfamiliar I am with certain artists - of 30 artists we reviewed in January (not counting The Oh Hellos twice), I think a solid third are new to me entirely.
What I love is that I’ve been listening to so much more music and doing so in a manner that allows me to not only share it with people (you, beloved reader), but I get to take suggestions from people and it creates so many new opportunities for conversation. Even Eli and Preston, who I’ve been close with for ages - we talk so much more often daily about music, and it’s a piece of my afternoon that I look forward to without fail.
E: When David announced he was doing this, I didn’t originally plan on listening along with him. I’m doing my own daily calendar already and it’s a lot of work. I couldn’t imagine doing two! Then Preston got in on it and, well, I couldn’t not do it. I got FOMO. I’m glad I joined. The chance to talk music on a regular basis with two of my best friends is one I don’t take for granted.
Since I got my master’s degree and left school in 2021, my supply of new music has fallen a little stagnant. Normally, I’d find new music in the wild or through friends or friends of friends, but given I was still not really leaving my apartment at that time, there wasn’t much coming in that I wasn’t actively seeking out myself. This project changed that and I’m incredibly grateful for it.
My favorite music reviewer, YouTuber Todd in the Shadows, has said in the past that he tries to listen to a new album every day to keep himself sharp and in the know. I hadn’t really realized the benefits this can provide until I tried to do it myself, but after just one month, I can’t imagine not doing it. There’s so much good music in the world and I’m gonna listen to as much of it as I can.
Making The Grade
In the process of listening to music and grading albums, nothing is perfect, and as such, we’ve all elected to make some adjustments to our grading.
D: I’ve got a fair few adjustments I’d like to make. One thing I regret not planning more is what I envisioned my scale looking like, so that I had a more concrete framework. I also think, taking myself out of certain emotional headspaces, certain albums look a little different.
Objectively, a 5.0 should be the midpoint, but I don’t quite think that’s accurate - one, we have great taste, so it’d skew regardless, but I also think that music by default slides to the high end of a scale when you try to examine it purely numerically. Rather, 5 is a thoroughly “meh” listening experience, while I try to set my midpoint around the 7.0-7.2 mark. If something sits above a 9, that’s an outstanding musical experience, while a pure 10 is reserved for the absolute pinnacle - what, in my eyes, is a perfect album.
Some of us (cough cough) like a 10-point scale, but I think the nuance of, say, a 7.2 to a 7.5 to a 7.9 is better, allowing me to highlight minor differences in a more pronounced sense. It also makes grading literal hell. Ups and downs.
Following the above adjustments, my average album grade was a 7.4 - right about where I think I’d want it to be. I’m happy with things, even if I do occasionally get things a little wrong.
E: I’m doing this correctly and only rating albums on a 10-point scale, not 100, so my ratings act as a sort of tierlist. Logically, music that’s “average” should get a 5, but the simple truth is that most music is good, so giving an album a 5 for simply failing to rise above the pack seems incorrect.
Instead, I’m giving an album a 5 if I think it does just as much right as it does wrong. It’s an absolute scale, not a relative one. Because most music is at least a little good, it’s pretty hard for anything to score below a 6. A few albums did and I’ll get into them later. I’m also very stingy in giving out 10s as, given the absolute nature of the scale, a 10 denotes an album I believe to be “perfect”. I don’t round up here. Either you’re perfect or you’re not.
Most of y’all had no way of knowing that I gave this album a 6 when I originally reviewed it, so this is for exactly one person. You’re welcome, Leah.
I’ll Give You The Best
D: Though no album made 10 for me, 5 were at or above a 9.0, and even then, we sat above what I had previously mentioned I consider my midpoint for music rating. Pleased to report that as a whole, January’s albums were definitely Good Taste.
Passion Pit’s Manners remains a personal favorite - hence why it got picked for Favorite Friday (on a Monday!). Same situation with Madeon, M83, and Hozier, so I’m not really going to dive into those - but that leaves a handful of albums that were outstandings in their own right.
We had a really good run from January 19-23, with five top 10 albums in sequence from Metric’s Pagans in Vegas through to Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE. I’ve talked at length about what I loved about these albums, but some of them in particular deserve highlighting - Screen Violence, from Scottish pop trio CHVRCHES, scratched an electronica-heavy indie-pop influence that I’d been desperately craving for some time, and being reminded how much I enjoyed that album took me right back to listening to them for the first time on FIFA 14’s soundtrack. In a similar vein, Tennis hit heavy and hit well with Swimmer, a very Vampire Weekend-like half-hour that’s pleasant enough to leave on loop for an entire work day without blinking - and I can say that because it’s quite literally what I did. Denzel Curry reminds us all that rap is far more varied and ferocious than the public eye may give it credit for with TA13OO, powerful and vengeful but never unnecessarily so.
I also want to specifically mention “Glendale” off of Clans’ Chapter One, a track that at first glance, didn’t really leave an impression, but sank in and immediately became the month’s biggest earworm. Off of an album that didn’t quite crack a 7, I thought that was a pretty impressive achievement and testament to the underlying talent possessed by that group.
E: I only gave one January album a 10: Radiohead’s In Rainbows, an all-time classic that needs no introduction or explanation.
I was generally high on the music we listened to this month and gave several albums a 9. A few of them (Arlo Parks, CHVRCHES, Metric, Wolf Alice) were albums I recommended for the project in the first place, so discarding those, my favorites were Junk by M83 and Finally Woken by Jem. I’m a sucker for a good hook, what can I say? I can excuse a lot of trite songwriting and musical structure if your tunes rock, and a lot of the tunes we’ve listened to do indeed rock.
As for individual tracks, I’ve enjoyed quite a lot, but a select few have been blaring on repeat from my office for the past month. I wasn’t a big fan of Will Wood’s “In case I make it,” overall, but the closer “White Noise” is excellent, perhaps my favorite track of the entire month. “Moon Crystal” from M83’s Junk sounds like it was ripped straight from a Jon Bois video and I couldn’t get enough of it. Since I left high school and stopped living with my younger brother, most hip hop outside the immediate mainstream has become a bit of a blindspot for me, so this was the first time I’d listened to Denzel Curry’s TA13OO and heard “CLOUT CO13AIN”, a powerful track with an even more powerful music video. If I have to pick one track from Jem’s Finally Woken, I gotta go with “24”: a completely and totally overproduced rock track about making amends on the last day of your life that I can’t help but love for how much it hypes me up when I listen to it.
How To Disappoint Completely
D: I was really let down by Mac DeMarco’s latest record. As I said in my review - it just felt directionless and tired, and that’s about the last thing I associate with the open road. I know I was the outlier on that one - it was my biggest variance to the average for the entire month, but as someone who generally enjoys Mac’s music, I think I wanted something different and felt a little let down.
We’ve all touched on it a bit, but I think Bad Omens just need to be able to take their foot off the gas. I found myself metaphorically looking around corners for the next screaming bout, and that’s just… not what I want to listen to music for. It’s why that was the sole album to score below 4 so far, placing it comfortably 31st (average 4.8, 30th is I Rest My Case at a 6.2).
E: This is sacrilege in the indie sphere, I think, but I almost couldn’t even make it through the Ethel Cain album. I think Preacher’s Daughter is boring as hell and about a half hour too long, even after reading the boatloads of positive reviews it received when it was released. Sorry! I wasn’t really huge on the Evangelicals album that’s basically a bootleg wannabe Flaming Lips record; I grew up with The Flaming Lips and The Evening Descends almost felt like an insult to their style. The Death of Peace of Mind was a miss with me, too, but I’m definitely not in the minority there. Bad Omens are good musicians but they don’t really seem interested in turning themselves down any notches at any time. Which…good for y’all; it’s just not for me.
Shock Value
D: I’m glad that Eli makes mention of Ants from Up There, because this was probably my biggest letdown of the month. Not to say it’s a bad album - it checks in just outside of the bottom 5 on my rankings so far, so not great, but far from bottom of the totem pole. I, however, came in with significantly elevated expectations because everything and everyone had been ranting about it, and I left feeling as though none of those lauded superlatives fit the record in any way.
The other album I want to mention here is Mongolian rock outfit The Hu’s The Gereg - the trepidation I admittedly felt going in was quickly assuaged and I was really, genuinely, pleasantly surprised at how well that entire venture was put together. For someone who’s got a bit of a blind spot when it comes to metal, particularly the heavier elements of it, I felt as though The Hu did a lot of excellent work to make their album accessible to a wider audience, and I loved it.
E: Some albums I came into with high expectations and they disappointed; others I came into with low expectations and they became pleasant surprises. One stands out to me from each side.
On the disappointing side, I’d heard so much hype for Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There that I was expecting it to be a lot more than the fairly rote breakup album that it is. I’m fairly certain the wide majority of the praise came from the album’s sudden double-meaning provided by the band’s frontman leaving the band four days before it was released. Without that context, it’s pretty blah music. I gave it a 6. I think most prestige publications agree with me in hindsight, too. Pitchfork gave this album an 8.4 Best New Music when it released in January; when they put their Best Albums of 2022 list together 11 months later, it was all the way down at #49. It didn’t make the top 50 list for NPR or even the top 100 list for Rolling Stone.
On the pleasantly surprising side, David’s review of Mac DeMarco’s Five Easy Hot Dogs released before I listened through it, and he was rather low on it. Our music tastes are fairly similar, so admittedly this made me go into the album with lowered expectations. This wasn’t helped by the fact that, when you look at this album on Spotify, the individual play counts at the top are a little over a million and they just gradually decrease as the album goes on. To me, this usually signifies a bad, bland album that progressively more people couldn’t make it through with each passing track. Despite all this, I actually loved this album. I gave it a 9. I don’t hear a listless, aimless compilation of instrumentals written while tired and bored on a road trip. I hear a tacit appreciation for the serenity these trips, and many other time-consuming but largely mundane tasks, can provide. They’re therapeutic, and so was this album.
And there you have it!
February 1st’s review will be along later tonight. Thanks, as always for tuning in.
Thanks, Eli!!!