Gorilla vs. Bear's Favorite Albums from the First Half of 2023

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

Anyone who’s liked Avalon Emerson’s club music should find the sparkling indie pop of *& the Charm* appealing. The beats are light, the feel is dreamy, and her writing and vocal performance capture the conversational directness that makes great indie pop so casually disarming (“Tell me I got more time/When all my friends are having daughters/Beautiful just like them, of course,” she sings on “Sandrail Silhouette”). But the album’s deeper strength is her ability to explore airy moods through music planted firmly on the ground, whether it’s the midtempo disco of “Astrology Poisoning” or the jazzy swirl of “A Dam Will Always Divide.” Sweet, oxygenating, and genuine.

RIFT is an opening, a gate… RIFT Two is the second installment in the RIFT compilation series. The artists selected stand out as voices of the future, unafraid to push into the unknown. Disregarding genre, the tracklist makes unlikely partners of the songs, delighting in the rhymes that arise in the sounds of strangers. YEAR0001’s share of the revenue from the compilation will be donated to Ingen människa är illegal, a Swedish organization that supports refugees and undocumented immigrants in obtaining permanent residence.

Eliza Bagg leads a complex musical life: working as a classical opera singer, she has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, performed in Meredith Monk’s opera at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and toured Europe with the legendary John Zorn. While making her own music under the guise of art-pop solo act Lisel, she’s also collaborated as a vocalist with some of the most renowned experimental artists, including Ben Frost, esperanza spalding, Nico Muhly, Julianna Barwick, David Lang, Lyra Pramuk, Daniel Wohl, and Bryce Dessner, all while playing indie rock venues and lovably dingy basements. One day, it’s Lincoln Center or The Kitchen, the next it’s an outdoor LA ambient series. She was always torn between her two worlds, and it wasn’t until she began work on Patterns for Auto-tuned Voices and Delay that she discovered a way to merge them together. Patterns comes out of Bagg’s experience as a vocalist singing Renaissance and Baroque music along with the work of modern-day minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. “I developed a vocal processing system that allowed me to change the idea of what my instrument is,” Bagg says of the album's genesis, a system that combines her virtuosic singing with autotune and delay effects to create a melding of human and machine. After years of using her voice in highly specialized ways (as in singing the music of Caroline Shaw with Roomful of Teeth), Bagg wanted to explore what that level of vocal technicality can do when combined with technology. What results is a full spectrum sound journey through the potential of the human voice; the new Lisel album explores a world of singing that maintains melody as it pushes boundaries. “I rely on my body as an object and resonant instrument,” she says. “Now, what begins inside my body and continues on the computer is one process, and the ideas that result from it are my instrument.” Sure, she’ll admit it. “I’m a sci-fi nerd,” she says, with a laugh. "I’m a Blade Runner and Battlestar person. I love things that explore how society interacts with machines.” Recently, her thoughts have focused on the hovering feeling of apocalypse along with the question of our own obsolescence. It was only a matter of time before she absorbed the capabilities of technology into her own music. Through experiments with Ableton, she realized she was making music that was more expressive of humanity, not less. “We are tempted to see rapid technological change as an impediment to the traditions that ground us. But I feel our connection to ancient forms can be amplified and transformed by this new reality, not lost.” Bagg says. While making Patterns, she dove first into Renaissance polyphony and chant. The music of Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Tallis, and Carlo Gesualdo is a familiar world to her. Starting with Renaissance and Medieval singing styles and idioms, she added processing and electronic world-building to bring out new, expressive qualities of those styles. From there, she improvised in these styles, fed the performances into Ableton, and incorporated modern day hyperpop (like SOPHIE) and ambient electric sounds and aesthetics - as she says, “I am going for a maximalist sound, but my sources of inspiration also include minimalists.” From Philip Glass to Charli XCX, Carl Stone to Grimes, Patterns makes radical connections. Yet, it was important for Bagg to maintain the spiritual origins of these vocal techniques. As she describes it, “The album uses layered singing as a pathway to spirituality, as it has been throughout history.” Patterns for Auto-tuned Voices and Delay stands within those traditions, using voices to transcend the cerebral and overwhelm the listener, all while evoking a unique set of references that span 500 years.

‘Blue Car’ is a collection of songs from Joanne's archive of unreleased solo recordings, similar to ‘Painting Stupid Girls’, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. The dates she wrote these songs is unknown, they span roughly a ten year period.

Whether as Fever Ray or with her brother Olof in The Knife, the Swedish electro-pop artist Karin Dreijer has always used alien-sounding music to evoke primitive human states. It isn’t just *Radical Romantics*’ metaphors that scan as sexual (the surrender of “Shiver,” the dominance-and-revenge fantasies of “Even It Out”); it’s the way their squishy synths and herky-jerky club beats conjure the messy ecstasy of our biological selves. And then there’s Dreijer’s voice, which through expert playacting and the miracle of modern technology creates a spectrum of characters, from temptress to horror-show to big daddy and little girl.

The new solo offering by Jonnine takes its title from her mother’s maiden name – “the most haunted word I know” The collection’s eight songs deploy an eclectic array of scavenged instruments: bass guitar, a broken Swiss metronome, an oddly tuned wooden stringed instrument, sparing use of recorder, Halloween charm bracelets and a homemade glockenspiel found at “an abandoned high school in the hills” Released by DJ Sundae’s Idle Press imprint, Maritz captures a versatile artist at a widening crossroads. Night flights, torn up photos, psychic spiders spinning webs like talismans – the world of these songs is imagistic and unrequited, attuned to absences and afterlifes. limited edition vinyl LP here via Idle Press idlepress.bandcamp.com/album/maritz Jonnine - I Put a Little Thing In Your Pocket www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3IXuzBvwTc Jonnine - Three Spider Bites www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKnnsz86W_4

In the early days of MEGO prior to it’s transformation into Editions MEGO a most unexpected release appeared amongst the radical roster. Out of all the twisted hard drive activity from PITA, General Magic, Farmers Manual etc appeared a very different kind of release. One made from a computer, but one with a softer atmosphere, cloud-like in sonic shape and even containing discernible melodies (!). This was the debut release from Japanese artist Tujiko Noriko which not only launched her career to a larger audience but opened the doors of Editions Mego to a broader range of experimental musical forms. Noriko’s particular synthesis of electronic abstraction, melody, voice and atmosphere has few peers as sound gently circles her mystical words morphing into a succession of emotive aural experiments framed as songs. Noriko’s evolution since her debut Mego release has seen further solo works alongside collaborations as well as a shift into cinema, both acting and as director. On Crépuscule one can hear the influence the film medium has had on her music as visual insignia are invoked in the evocative audio at hand. Instrumental interludes further conjure a film landscape alongside the titles which also reiterate the cinematic form. This is synthetic music with a deep human presence. The mind of a human captured wandering the fantastic realms of the internal sphere is exquisitely rendered through machines which usually prompt one to disfigure such humanistic tendencies. The warmth, serenity and dream-like environment that Noriko conjures from her tools is what makes her such a unique and outstanding artist and Crépuscule is an epic testament to these powers. The title Crépuscule perfectly encapsulates the somnambulant nature of the music where the nocturnal shifts evoke a broad sense of calm. Crépuscule I features a selection of shorter ‘songs’ whilst Crépuscule II allows more room for these songs / moods to breathe with only three songs running at broader longer duration. Crépuscule allows the listener to view the world through Noriko’s eyes. With her cunning ability to humanise machines a world of calm wonder is allowed to take focus in the frame. Available as 2CD, digital and double-cassette. The later format by request of Noriko as it was this format she flung her debut mego demo onto Peter in Tokyo many moons ago.

The first song on Lil Yachty’s *Let’s Start Here.* is nearly seven minutes long and features breathy singing from Yachty, a freewheeling guitar solo, and a mostly instrumental second half that calls to mind TV depictions of astral projecting. “the BLACK seminole.” is an extremely fulfilling listen, but is this the same guy who just a few months earlier delivered the beautifully off-kilter and instantly viral “Poland”? Better yet, is this the guy who not long before that embedded himself with Detroit hip-hop culture to the point of a soft rebrand as *Michigan Boy Boat*? Sure is. It’s just that, as he puts it on “the BLACK seminole.,” he’s got “No time to joke around/The kid is now a man/And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds.” We could call the silence he’s referring to the years since his last studio album, 2020’s *Lil Boat 3*, but he’s only been slightly less visible than we’re used to, having released the aforementioned *Michigan Boy Boat* mixtape while also lending his discerning production ear to Drake and 21 Savage’s ground-shaking album *Her Loss*. Collaboration, though, is the name of the game across *Let’s Start Here.*, an album deeply indebted to some as yet undisclosed psych-rock influences, with repeated production contributions from onetime blog-rock darlings Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Patrick Wimberly, as well as multiple appearances from Diana Gordon, a Queens, New York-hailing singer who made a noise during the earliest parts of her career as Wynter Gordon. Also present are R&B singer Fousheé and Beaumont, Texas, rap weirdo Teezo Touchdown, though rapping is infrequent. In fact, none of what Yachty presents here—which includes dalliances with Parliament-indebted acid funk (“running out of time”), ’80s synthwave (“sAy sOMETHINg,” “paint THE sky”), disco (“drive ME crazy!”), symphonic prog rock (“REACH THE SUNSHINE.”), and a heady monologue called “:(failure(:”—is in any way reflective of any of Yachty’s previous output. Which begs the question, where did all of this come from? You needn’t worry about that, says Yachty on the “the ride-,” singing sternly: “Don’t ask no questions on the ride.”