The Best Albums of 2022

I often load my best of albums list into the introduction to a regular review, but I’m going to break with tradition this year and give it an entry all its own. This year will also have the excitement of links to songs so you can have an immediate sampling of just what I’m so damned excited about.

If you like it, please check out the artist’s entire record, and if you like that, please buy it. That’s how artists get paid. Or stream it a whole bunch of times. That also works.

I listened to an untold number of records released in 2022 and found 80 of them worth buying. Of those I have successfully bought 66 (still searching for the rest) and gotten rid of 4 (errors). Still on the hunt for 14 more, some of which made the list regardless.

After considerable soul searching, here is the best of the best. I reserve the right to change my mind as I dig into each of these (and others) deeper, but for now, this is it. For those records I’ve already reviewed, I’ve embedded a link:

10 Ghost – Impera (reviewed at Disc 1592)

• Hard rock/metal from Sweden, Ghost has long enjoyed pretending they really love Satan, but don’t be concerned. It is just pretend.Here’s a track about their favourite subject called “Call Me Little Sunshine”. 

9 Julia Jacklin – Pre Pleasure

• Jacklin just keeps getting better. 2019’s Crushing was good, but I think this is even better. For the sake of balance with the previous record, let’s go with “Lydia Wears a Cross”.  

8 The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

• More great music from the Beths. Here’s the title track as a sampler: 

7 Danger Mouse and Black Thoughts – Cheat Codes

• I find Danger Mouse hit and miss but combining him with hip hop mastery of Black Thoughts and the many guest stars on this record is inspiring. Here’s one called "Strangers" with some Run the Jewels guest starring.

6 Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

• If you like the band The Hold Steady you’ll already know its lead singer Craig Finn. If you like that, I think you’ll like this just as much. I liked it even more, but you have to be OK with listening to the lyrics, because Finn tells a hell of a story, but you gotta pay attention. Here’s "The Amarillo Kid". 

5 Dropkick Murphys – This Machine Still Kills Fascists

• Woody Guthrie lyrics have been set to music by Wilco and Billy Bragg previously, and the latest collaboration is with the Dropkick Murphys. I think it may be the best yet. Here’s “The Last One”. 

4 Kevin Morby – This is a Photograph

• Just an all-around great record that is half chill, half-anxiety, all awesome. All the tracks are good, but I’m picking this one because I like the tone of the banjo and it features Erin Rae, who I also discovered this year. Her 2022 album is Lighten Up and it is good, even though it didn’t make this list. Here’s “Bittersweet”.

3 Mattiel – Georgia Gothic

• Mattiel’s 2019 album Satis Factory is one of my favourite records of all time. Georgia Gothic is good enough for #3 in 2022. Here’s “On the Run”.

2 Ezra Furman – All of Us Flames

• Brilliant, anthemic, and emotionally overwhelming, Furman is a wave you want to both catch and have crash over you. Here’s “Forever in Sunset".

1 Grace Cummings – Storm Queen (reviewed at Disc 1573)

• Listening to Grace Cummings is like being transfixed by the keening of a ghost as she warbles her fell and beautiful secrets to you from the underworld. Here’s “Up in Flames”:  I also strongly recommend “Heaven” if for no other reason than the arresting quality of Cummings eyes as she stares right at you in the video.

Honourable Mention – all great, but I could only pick 10. Here are 5 more in no particular order in the event you want even more great music to choose from 2022:

• Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway – Crooked Tree; CMAT – If My Wife New I’d Be Dead; Ethel Cain – Preacher’s Daughter; Wet Leg – Self-Titled; Angel Olsen – Big Time

CD Odyssey Disc 1545: Angel Olsen

I’m back from a lovely holiday in Vancouver celebrating my wedding anniversary! We shopped, ate good food, and had a series of wonderful visits with a selection of dear friends, every one of whom I wish I saw more often.

I would have listened to this album while I was travelling, but somehow forgot to upload it to my portable device, and so was left with [gasp] random music. I decided to make a note of everything I heard on the flight each way.

Fittingly, the first two songs were by bands (Blue Rodeo, Blue Oyster Cult) that Sheila and I introduced to each other when we were first dating. Then I got Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”, and a song by Tom Petty side project Mudcrutch (“Beautiful World”) before things got decidedly folksy with a run of Patty Griffin, Watkins Family Hour, David Francey and Mandolin Orange.

The flight back was cancelled, so no playlist resulted. Instead, I read a book while taking the slow boat home, via BC Ferries.

Disc 1545 is…. My Woman

Artist: Angel Olsen

Year of Release: 2016

What’s up with the Cover? Angel stares off into the distance, looking mildly perturbed about something.

How I Came To Know It: I had heard about Angel Olsen here and there, but it wasn’t until this record came out and I read a review that I decided to give her a listen. I was instantly smitten and have since bought most of her available records, but “My Woman” was the first.

How It Stacks Up: I now have five Angel Olsen records (two more since I last reviewed one). Of those five, I put “My Woman” in at #2.

Ratings: 4 stars

Angel Olsen’s music has a haunting nostalgic quality to it, like she’s the ghost of some lost soul inhabiting a young artist’s body.  On earlier records she channels early Leonard Cohen, but on “My Woman” her music is more a combination of the jangle folk-pop of the Byrds and the sweet soulful rock of the Shangri-Las.

The production has a high echo to it throughout, which gives the music a patina, like you’re listening to something recorded originally in mono. It could have easily drawn to a tinny sound, but instead it just feels like an old movie, filmed in grainy Technicolor but so awesome you prefer it that way.

Olsen’s vocals are equally adept at telling a story and just painting a soundscape, and on most tracks she does a bit of both. She has a breathy head voice that cuts with a deceptive power, like a fast-moving current close to the surface of the water. This stuff can pull you under if you’re not careful, but even if you succumbed to the tide, it feels like it would be a beautiful ending.

The album opens with the collapsing dream of “Intern”, a song filled with struggle and uncertainty. It feels like a sixties art film theme where some Mia Farrow or Jean Seberg type twirls her way whimsically through the streets of Paris in a white mini-dress and stylish brightly coloured flats. This is followed by “Never Be Mine,” a classic unrequited love song from the same movie. Maybe near the end where our heroine has decided to move to Prague having learned the man she was pursuing was a bit of a cad. But I digress…

The second half of the record has much slower pace, with dreamy mood pieces like “Heart Shaped Face”. That swirling current of pop is still in her voice, but it now comes to you a bit slower and more diffuse. Despite the slow wind-down quality to the record, I never felt like things were dragging, even with two songs (“Sister” and “Woman”) approaching eight minutes each. “Sister” is a mini-epic all to itself, with multiple movements that build, then collapse, then morph into a reverb back-of-the-mix guitar solo.

Despite its pop sensibilities, “My Woman” is not immediately accessible, and it took a few runs for me to feel fully immersed. However, it is well worth the time, mixing basic pop hooks with songs that are artfully constructed and intricately arranged. Despite all these thoughtful decisions, the record never feels pretentious or self-aware.

Best tracks: Intern, Never Be Mine, Shut Up Kiss Me, Heart-Shaped Face, Sister

CD Odyssey Disc 1477: Alex Cameron

Apologies for the longer interlude between reviews, Gentle Reader. A long weekend reduced the amount of music listening time I had to meet the conditions of Rule #4.

Disc 1477 is…. Forced Witness

Artist: Alex Cameron

Year of Release: 2017

What’s up with the Cover? Alex Cameron looks like a skeevy street dealer here. Of course he won’t be selling any drugs with all those people filming him through the window. You might want to take your business down a deserted side alley, Alex. There’s a reason they do that.

How I Came To Know It: I got into Alex Cameron through his 2019 album, “Miami Memory” and this was just me drilling backward through his catalogue.

How It Stacks Up: I have three Alex Cameron albums. Of the three, I put “Forced Witness” in at #2, just a hair behind “Miami Memory” (reviewed at Disc 1462).

Ratings: 4 stars

“Forced Witness” represents a transition in Alex Cameron’s sound. He is beginning to leave behind the synth/organ approach on his first record but has not fully transitioned to the fuller instrumentation of 2019’s “Miami Memory”. The result is a delightful blend of electronica and seventies stadium rock, with a side of funk, disco, and a healthy dose of eighties pop.

Cameron has an ear for a pop hook, and the ones on “Forced Witness” have an anthemic quality that is amplified by the organ-forward arrangements. It is danceable, and fun and even though the subject matter is often dark and gritty, the music has a celebratory quality that will fool you otherwise.

The tunes also feature a lot of collaborator Roy Molloy’s saxophone. With the pop undercurrent to these tunes that saxophone risks running into painful eighties solos, but Cameron rarely lets that happen. Sure, it gets a bit much on “Stranger’s Kiss” but that song is rescued by virtue of being a duet with Angel Olsen, whose brilliance more than makes up for saxophone that – if I’m being fair – only goes on for maybe a bar too long, and only does so twice. Elsewhere on the record, Molloy’s sax shows a few flashes here and there, but only enough to make the songs feel more noble.

I’ve read that before Alex Cameron bared his soul on “Miami Memory” his albums tended to be written in the persona of a marginally employable musician of dubious moral character. While the line between Cameron and this character can feel fuzzy to the uninformed listener, there is definitely a whole lot of this greaseball character on “Forced Witness.” Listeners should enjoy these songs as stories, not autobiographies.

Cameron’s alter ego may appear obvious on the surface, but he hints at a lot of nuance underneath. The songs that were most “persona forward” had me wanting to see a movie loosely based on them. The character has the soul of poet, but the mind of a sexual deviant and the impulse control of a criminal.

Even when this guy is riding an emotional high, Cameron peppers the songs with imagery that suggests a lot of his victories will be fleeting or pyrrhic at best, with the potential to end in jail time. “Runnin’ Outta Luck” features a chorus with a rising celebratory melody, but with lyrics like:

“I'm a man on a mission, you're a stripper out of luck
And we're good in the back seat but we're better up front
And there's blood on my knuckles 'cause there's money in the trunk”

…you know that some combination of sirens and flashing lights are in their future. Still, I appreciate that oddly romantic “we’re better up front.” Something bad has happened, but the narrator and that stripper? Hey – they’re true partners.

I also love the oblivious bravado of a song like “Marlon Brando” where our anti-hero claims he feels like “Marlon Brando, circa 1999” and delivers less than reassuring pickup lines like “I'm pretty cooked but my shit is far from dead” while threatening the woman’s current boyfriend with physical violence. It left me hoping that the “stripper out of luck” from earlier comes to her senses at the next gas station.

The album is replete with clever turns of phrase, but even after multiple listens it didn’t get old and tired as sometimes happens. This is because the album isn’t kitschy, and while the main character in all of this is a total putz, he’s a damned interesting putz. He gets in pointless fights, surfs a whole lot of porn, and consistently thinks he’s way more awesome than he is.

Yet, Cameron lets you see this guy from the vantage point of inside his head; a warped perspective of the world behind rose coloured glasses and bloodshot eyes. Or as he narrates on “Politics of Love”, “The thought of this being wrong/Never had crossed my mind.” The result of this oblivious douchebaggery is a surprisingly compelling train wreck, attached to some genuinely catchy tunes.

Best tracks: Candy May, Country Figs, Runnin’ Outta Luck, Marlon Brando, Politics of Love

CD Odyssey Disc 1014: Angel Olsen

I’m on holidays this week and trying to enjoy every minute of it. But I’m not trying too hard. Trying too hard to enjoy yourself is like paddling against the current; you’re just gonna get tired before you ever get far enough out to make a difference.

Instead, you gotta relax and let that free time wash over you. Let it lift you up, like the tide coming in.

Disc 1014 is…Burn Your Fire For No Witness

Artist: Angel Olsen

Year of Release: 2014

What’s up with the Cover? This drawing made me think of a bunch of women in 1920s bathing suits. According to the liner notes, the artist is Kreh Mellick. I could impress you all by looking up information to share about Kreh Mellick, but I’m just not keen enough on this picture to bother.

How I Came To Know It: I read a review for Angel Olsen’ 2016 “My Woman” and later bought the album. I liked it a lot, and it inspired me to drill back through her earlier work.

How It Stacks Up:  I now have all three of Angel Olsen’s full length studio albums (I don’t waste time once I like an artist). All of them are excellent, with very little to separate them. So much so I spent a while to just listen to the other two and have them fresh in my head before I decided. After all this groundwork, I’m going to say “Burn Your Fire For No Witness” is the best of the bunch.

Ratings: 4 stars but almost 5

Take a splash of Leonard Cohen, a dash of Patti Smith and a little Liz Phair, and give them all the singing voice of a sixties pop star, and you’ve got something approximating the brilliance that is Angel Olsen.

After releasing the artfully understated alt-folk album “Half Way Home” in 2012, Olsen begins to experiment in earnest with her sound on her sophomore effort, “Burn Your Fire…” adding more rock elements and an almost symphonic sound that provides a nice foil to lyrics that are introspective and insightful.

This is a record that summons up a ball of moody darkness, fully immerses you in it, and then fires complex soundscapes across it to give all that negative space purpose. The result is a thick, echoing sound, across which Olsen’s high, evocative vocals cut through, giving us comfort. The lyrics may be more about doubt than certainty, but sometimes just knowing someone else is out there doubting is certainty enough.

The album’s opening track introduces this concept immediately. Even the song title, “Unfucktheworld,” suggests the combined concept of something that is wrong, but also that it can be fixed. While “Unfucktheworld” could easily be a larger geopolitical message, with Olsen’s intimate delivery, minor key and single resonant acoustic guitar, it feels much more intensely personal. Olsen evokes early Liz Phair here, albeit with more quaver and power in her voice. When she sings “I wanted nothing but for this to be the end” she sounds like a widowed bird, beautiful and tragic as it sings its grief.

This is immediately followed by the fuzz-rocked “Forgiven/Forgotten,” a rock anthem that channels the early sixties and then washes it in the dirty water of early nineties grunge. Olsen sings “I don’t know anything” over and over with a desperate questing urgency that shows that while she may be lost, she’s not giving up.

With its haunting guitar riff, and descending melody “White Fire” reminded me strongly of Leonard Cohen around his “Songs of Love and Hate” period; stark and introspective. Here, Olsen shows her vocal acumen through restraint, singing in a half-whisper, low and breathy and full of doubt.

A lot of the songs on “Burn Your Fire…” have simple guitar riffs that would be nothing notable on their own, but Olsen knows how to combine them with bass, a bit of feedback and a vocal style that fills already thoughtful lyrics with even more gravitas.

Halfway through the album, “Lights Out” is the hopeful anthem you need to sustain your spirits for the rest of the journey; a shaft of light into the darkness right when you aren’t sure which way to turn. This is a song about putting aside your self-loathing, finding whatever strength you’ve got left, and building around it. Or as Olsen sings it:

“Just when you thought you would turn all your lights out, it shines

Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind.”

“Lights Out” is quiet in places, but this quiet deliberate pace only serves to further highlight the inspirational message as Olsen’s voice climbs up the melody, strong and vulnerable.

This theme is revisited at the end of the record with “Windows,” an uplifting number of hope and support. Olsen’s vocals are ethereal and haunting as she gently chides us to open a window sometime, repeating the simple and insistent question “what’s so wrong with the light?” until you feel foolish that you ever chose the dark in the first place.

I often think that having a positive outlook is a lot like choosing to turn the light on before finding your way around a room. With the lights on, all the furniture becomes obvious and easy to navigate around. Things you are looking for are easily found. Leave that light off, and you will instead stumble into things in the dark, skinning your knees, and grope blindly for things that are already easily within reach.

You can’t make people turn on that light and you shouldn’t judge those that haven’t done it too harshly, because it’s a hard thing to do. I know because I’ve lived with it off too, and finding that damned light switch can be the hardest search of all. I’m not sure you can teach people to find it, but a song like “Windows” is about as good a clue as you’ll find. Just open your heart and let Angel Olsen’s voice guide you there. Such is the power of great music.

“Burn Your Fire For No Witness” is a subtle record that requires a close listen. If you want to have music to gab over while you play Parcheesi this isn’t the album for you. Instead do yourself a favour, and give this one a listen on headphones in a darkened room. Then, get up, let in the light, and get on with your day.

Best tracks: Unfucktheworld, Forgiven/Forgotten, High & Wild, Lights Out, Stars, Windows