Long-delayed due to a hectic schedule (and an unplanned sickness), but it’s finally here—my last year-in-review post! I can finally leave 2022 behind just like the rest of y’all did last November.
I’ve thinking of revamping and rebranding around here this 2023 to give myself more flexibility to explore the kind of writing I find myself wanting to do, rather than restrict myself to topical lists and reviews (although knowing me, there will still be a fair amount of lists and reviews, which are my main modes of expression). If that’s of any interest to you at all, do hit that subscribe button below!
During last year’s year-in-review salvo, this is where I had my big end-of-year reflection, because my relationship with music tends to be more personal than critical, and hopelessly inextricable from whatever is going on in my broader life. I am not a music critic—simply an enthusiast trying to stay curious despite growing more “kids these days” with each passing year—and so rather than position my annual albums list as authoritative in any way, I like to build them around broader themes that have preoccupied my over the calendar year.
After all, if music is what we use to decorate time, then what better medium do we have through which to understand a stretch of time than the set dressing we chose for it?
(In case you missed it, my theme for the year was loneliness. 2021’s was grief. Obviously I’m a very happy, well-adjusted person.)
I was speaking with a fellow critic friend a few weeks ago, as he was also preparing his own list of favorite 2022 albums. When I told him the record I’d chosen as my Album of the Year—after a fair amount of deliberation, unlike last year’s clear winner—he seemed a little surprised. He said he loved the album too and that it would likely be on his list, but that he couldn’t place it at #1 because he recognized that there were a few better records out there.
Perhaps that’s true, but no record from 2022 felt more like a talisman for my year than this one, to the point that it feels like a minor miracle that it came out at this precise time in my life. I almost feel like it discovered me, and not the other way around.
And that is why I am not a music critic.
The album of the year
The Loneliest Time, Carly Rae Jepsen
“So I’ve been trying hard to open up,” Carly Rae Jepsen begins on “Surrender My Heart”, which opens The Loneliest Time, her first collection of music recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a disarming admission. If you’ve followed Jepsen’s post-”Call Me Maybe” career at all, you’d know her entire oeuvre is a masterclass on opening up. Each of her records represents a new variation on intimacy: The ruinous and rapturous effects we can have on each other’s bodies and souls. Listening to her songs, you’d think opening up would be to her what breathing was to us mere mortals.
Of course, that effortlessness can only come by way of rigorous craft (this is also her most lyrically mature album), and while her previous albums have largely been about moments of combustion—the complex series of chemical reactions that occur when two people collide—in The Loneliest Time, Jepsen points her microscope inward at the alchemy occurring within ourselves that spurs us towards wanting to be set ablaze. Across 13 glistening pop tracks, she charts out the peaks and valleys of loneliness to arrive at something close to a mission statement: Let your loneliness make you brave.
For Carly Rae Jepsen, the most reckless and necessary thing you can do is to allow yourself to fall in love again. I can think of no better sentiment to take away from a year that felt like a long and winding journey towards rediscovery and re-encounter: A persistent knock on one’s door, just like before, waiting for a response in kind.
For your (further) consideration
In alphabetical order.
And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, Weyes Blood
Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) had a rough pandemic too. Emerging out of a three-year hiatus after her remarkable 2019 gothic-folk record Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood revisits familiar terrain on And In the Darkness…, yet I can think of no other artist who could, through both her lyricism and music, capture so precisely the exquisite agony of understanding all that we’d lost of ourselves in isolation, and the mercy we would have to muster for ourselves and each other if we hope to regain some of it.
Bad Mode, Hikaru Utada
In the year’s finest “crying-in-the-club” album, Hikaru Utada’s first bilingual album sees the J-Pop superstar pair their usual emotional wanderlust with the cathartic thrums of your neighborhood discotheque. Journeying through disco, house, and dance music with the abandon of someone searching for either solace or answers, Utada builds a crystalline mirror-ball evoking the kind of feelings we come to clubs to try and leave behind, before having them reflect and refract and fill in the spaces left by the beat.
Big Time, Angel Olsen
Angel Olsen has undergone many metamorphoses throughout her career, from the lo-fi folk of Burn Your Fire for No Witness to the bombastic guitar-rock of MY WOMAN and the crystalline chamber pop of All Mirrors, but perhaps none of her turns have zagged more than Big Time, which sees one of indie rock’s pre-eminent sad-girls try her hand at…country? Yet it all works, and like all great chameleons, Olsen finds a way to bend the motifs of her latest genre into the unmistakable shape of her sound, her iconic voice sounding just as at home on the range as it did in opera houses and dark cafes.
Boat Songs, MJ Lenderman
You’d swear you’ve heard every song on MJ Lenderman’s Boat Songs before, even as a closer listen reveals just how original his wry, observational, and often deceptively moving lyricism is. His songs immediately feel like modern folk standards, mining contemporary Americana into something timeless and resonant. When a track about pro-wrestling segues into a line like “All our heroes now are dead” and makes it work, you prick up and listen.
Bronco, Orville Peck
Cross Marty Robbins with Harry Styles, and you might get within the area code of explaining Orville Peck: A perpetually-masked cowboy with a voice like Sinatra singing lyrics about how it’s alright for men to cry. Already a darling of the nascent alternative country scene, Peck achieves a stylistic peak on Bronco, a daring yet keenly realized album that leverages the genre’s masculine iconography and musical trappings towards a distinctly queer bent.
CAZIMI, Caitlin Rose
Author of the best 2010s album (almost) no one has heard of, country songwriter Caitlin Rose spent a long time in the wilderness prior to CAZIMI, remaining mostly dormant since her excellent 2013 record The Stand-In. Nine years later, her comeback sees her bringing back her sharp eye for the push-pull difficulties of negotiating intimacy, but this time pairing it with a more neon-tinged brand of yeehaw-tronica that would make Beth Orton shed a tear. If there is any justice in the world, she won’t be Nashville’s best-kept secret for long.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Big Thief
Death, taxes, and the new Big Thief record being among the year’s best albums: These are the certainties of life. Confined to the studio due to the pandemic, the band set about putting together their first double album, but instead of the gloriously scattershot indulgence the format often promotes, Dragon New Warm Mountain sees one of indie music’s most storied groups at the peak of their powers, firing on all cylinders to produce yet another unimpeachable collection of somber, idiosyncratic, and well-observed tracks, all set to Adrienne Lenker’s always-dulcet tones. You’d almost begrudge them their consistency if they weren’t so good.
How to Let Go, Sigrid
Ever since ABBA won Eurovision with “Waterloo”, Nordic pop girls have been the most reliable champions of the hallowed “crying-in-the-club” genre, and Norwegian singer-songwriter Sigrid is the future of that proud tradition. Her second album after 2019’s excellent Sucker Punch, How to Let Go couples irresistible beats and soaring melodies with Sigrid’s Robyn-adjacent lilt and achingly yearning lyricism to form a sophomore outing that thrills both as a standalone and as a harbinger of sad-girl pop to come. Pitched somewhere between chamber music and dance, it’s a record that manages to feel intimate yet expansive, akin to the feeling of communing with a sky full of stars.
I Love You Jennifer B, Jockstrap
It’s been a while since I’ve heard anything as delightfully weird as Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B, a slippery and sonically eclectic collection that seems to be tied together only by its stubborn insistence on not quite sounding like anything else you’ve heard before. Simultaneously as haunting as chamber pop and as invigorating as dance, it’s a refreshing reminder that after all this time, some albums can still sneak up on you and surprise you.
I Walked With You a Ways, Plains
The defining quality of Katie Crutchfield’s 2020s output thus far has always been its clarity. From Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud onwards, she’s managed to bottle an affect of hard-won wisdom in both her lyricism and musicality, crafting a brand of sun-kissed radical optimism that feels nonetheless grounded in very real love and very real hurt. In Plains with the also-stellar Jess Williamson, she’s found a perfect collaborator on a record that’s quintessential Crutchfield: Peppered with keenly written observations that add up to something that’s simultaneously a travelogue of quarter-life malaise and a testament to survival through female solidarity.
Keep a Tender Distance, Eleri Ward
One might question the inclusion of any sort of covers album on an end-of-year list—let alone one composed of acoustic renditions of Sondheim tunes—but Eleri Ward’s rearrangements feel more like an act of reimagination, drawing out the oblique undertones of melancholy from a genre not known for its subtlety. In her capable hands, it feels as if these songs were always meant to be played this way: Stripped bare and in a room with an abundance of echo, sung by a theater kid communing with a titan of the form, that one-to-one conversation between spirits that the very best art seems to foster.
Nicole, NIKI
Made up of songs she’d originally written when she was 16, NIKI’s Nicole is a record that exists in a space of eternal retrospective, as the Indonesian singer-songwriter looks back on formative high-school relationships with the over-articulate lyricism of someone just realizing that memory could mean both so much and so little at the same time. What differentiates it from the rest of its (very healthy) cohort of Gen-Z bildungsroman albums is both its liberal-arts turn of phrase (catnip for me, a liberal arts college graduate) and its oblique manner of remembering someone through the negative space they left behind. If I had this record when I was in college and at the peak of my sad-boy powers, it’d have been over for y’all.
Honorable Mentions
Blue Rev, Alvvays
Giving the World Away, Hatchie
Hold On Baby, King Princess
Home, before and after, Regina Spektor
IM NAYEON, NAYEON
Laurel Hell, Mitski
MUNA, MUNA
Natural Brown Prom Queen, Sudan Archives
PAINLESS, Nilufer Yanya
Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain
SOS, SZA
Weather Alive, Beth Orton
Singles Corner
This section is meant to highlight songs I really liked from this year that weren’t released on any album that qualified for my list. I did, however, make a full Top 50 Songs of 2022 playlist on Spotify, which you can find here.
“Welcome to My Island”, Caroline Polachek
I could’ve chosen any of Caroline Polachek’s three excellent 2022 singles from Desire, I Want to Turn Into You and been happy with my decision, but “Welcome To My Island” captures best the quantum leap her experimentation has taken since her (already great) solo debut Pang in 2019. It is an exhilarating mishmash of musical styles that takes full advantage of Polachek’s peerless voice to cram both a soaring, opera-esque chorus and a Debbie Harry-type spoken-word bridge into one song. For most artists, this song would be a career highlight; from the artist who also dropped a cover of an honest-to-god aria this year, this is just another day in the office.
“Casual”, Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan is hardly new to those in the know—”Pink Pony Club” is still a banger two years hence—but her run of musically fascinating, sexually frank, and wryly melancholic singles this year has solidified her as the next great indie-pop sad-girl. None of her tracks exemplifies this better than “Casual”, a self-chiding ode to those among us with a tendency to fall too hard too fast for mixed signals. Accompanied by lush strings and a rattling beat, it gradually builds from a whisper to a scream: A proper lament for the ordeals of modern love.
“The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom”, Jens Lekman
We love a good call-back here at La Loma Film Review almost as much as we love yeehaw music, and Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman revisiting his “A Postcard For Nina”—perhaps my favorite song of the 2000s—both lyrically and musically with “The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom” feels tailor-made for me, as a loving portrait of a relationship remembered. There’s always a degree of bravery involved in admitted you’re thinking of someone and that you miss them; in fact, that’s the sort of bravery that tinges so much of art: This desire to preserve through song what can never last in life. I have been thinking about that bravery this 2022, and so this feels like the perfect place to end: With Jens, remembering.
And we are done with 2022 here on La Loma Film Review! Have a recommendation for me? Do drop a comment below if so, and see you in 2023!