Album of the year
#1
Black Country – New Road

Ants From Up There is best consumed whole, in a dark room, with some good speakers. Don’t pre-assume, don’t judge, just let it wash over you. And when you are done, pray a little that lead singer Isaac Wood will recover readily from his mental health issues, both for his sake and so this show will never end.

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #Rock #Experimental #Prog #Indie #ChamberPop #BlackCountryNewRoad

It was down to the wire, but I managed to put together a #BestOf2022 list with a few hours to go before 2023. Here are my favorite #2022Albums by #Oakland musicians. Enjoy! http://billchapin.net/allthecitylights/2022/12/rankstravaganza-five-great-2022-albums-two-eps-by-oakland-east-bay-musicians/

There's some #CountrySoul, #RetroSoul, #IndieFolk, #PowerPop & #Chillwave represented (though I made a big deal about how futile it is to pigeonhole these artists).

#MikoMarks
#TheCaliforniaHoneydrops
#MikaylaMcVey
#TheByeByeBlackbirds
#ToroYMoi

#BestAlbums2022
#5Albums22
#AOTY22
#music
#sfbamusic

Album of the year
#2
Anais Mitchell – Anais Mitchell

2022 seems like a year when so many musical heavyweights have come out to shine a quiet mirror on our lives, so meaningful for what we have recently endured. Anais Mitchell’s self-titled album is among the best. Such great little inner monologues she weaves, layer upon layer of beautiful poetic observations on the inner mind’s perspective on living this life.

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #Rock #Folk #Pop

Album of the year
#3
Kevin Morby – This is a Photograph

Morby’s best work to date, which is saying a whole lot.

“Loving can hurt, loving can hurt sometimes
But it's the only thing that I know
When it gets hard, you know it can get hard sometimes
It is the only thing makes us feel alive

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Hearts are never broken
And time's forever frozen, still"

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #Folk #Indie

Album of the year
#4
Beth Orton – Weather Alive

Weather Alive is, truly no pun intended, an Atmospheric masterpiece. It is a place where our choices, our memories, our ghosts, and our emotions inhabit the world side by side. And Orton’s voice, at once fragile and well worn, like a more ethereal Lucinda Williams, is all in.

"You lay on your back under spider-spun trees
Hallucinated on fractals of green
And thought about living with nothing to lose"

#AOTY22 #AlbumOfTheYear #Rock #BethOrton

Album of the year
#5
Big Thief -- Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Another year passed another fantastic Big Thief album. There is no band in the world creating as consistently great music as Big Thief, and prolifically so. Their best songs have that worn in of the earth Americana feel, like they have always just existed, unearthed by Big Thief for our pleasure. Dragon New Warm Mountain… is no exception.

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #Rock #Alt #Folk #BigThief

Album of the year
#6
Angel Olsen – Big Time

It feels that with every Angel Olsen album she has gifted us a piece of her soul, all the more so with Big Time. Pared back country soul songs with a touch of strings and twang, Big Time is Angel Olsen at her most emotionally bare. Instant Classic.

"To love without boundary and put it to use
To remember the ghost who exists in the past
But be freed from the longing for one moment to last"

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #AltCountry #CountryMusic

Album of the year
#7
Bill Callahan – YTI⅃AƎЯ

Put Reality to a mirror, and what you see back is YTI⅃AƎЯ, Bill Callahan’s unique allegoric world full of symbolism on overdrive. Callahan is like the village shaman who sees things the rest of us close our eyes to, and he is happy to show up once a year and share his findings with us. And we are all the better for it. YTI⅃AƎЯ is like pealing an onion and finding a peach, so many layers, so many jewels inside.

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #Rock

Album of the year
#8
Wilco – Cruel Country

Perhaps Wilco's best album since The Whole Love, Cruel Country is full of post-Trump post-pandemic observations about living in a cruel yet beautiful country. This dichotomy has long been on bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s mind, yet has never been so directly confronted. Instant classics, Bird Without a Tail, The Universe, and Many Worlds are some of Wilco’s most beautiful work.

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #AltCountry #Rock #Indie #Folk #Wilco

Album of the year
#9
Nilüfer Yanya – Painless

Yanya’s Sophomore offering, Painless, is an emotionally dark synaptic pop joyride. A tight rhythm section, electronic bloops and bleeps, and Yanya’s rhythmic guitar are all subservient to her nearly Jazz inflected vocal leanings. Hers is a voice meant for pulling the listener relentlessly in to her world, dark though her world might be on this album.

"Troubled don't count the way's I'm broken""

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #IndiePop #R&B

Album of the year
#10
Soccer Mommy -- Sometimes, Forever

Sometimes, Forever is such a good album. Tension filled lyrics with loads of great imagery, and one well earned melody after another. Who knew bleak could ever sound to good.

"So I wanna drive out for where the sun shines
Drown out the noise and the way I feel
But even the light is so temporary
And I see the dark at the back of my heels"

#SoccerMommy #Sometimes,Forever #AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #AltRock #LofFi #Indie #2022Music

I'll be posting my top 20 Albums of the Year over the next few days. Here are 11-20.

11. Laura Viers - Found Light
12. Walter Martin - The Bear
13. Daniel Rossen - You Belong There
14. Plains - I Walked with You a Ways
15. Cate Le Bon - Pompeii
16. The Sadie’s - Colder Streams
17. Rosalia - Motomami
18. Bjork - Fossora
19. Fountains D.C .- Skinty Fia
20. Horsegirl - Version of Modern Performance

#AOTY22 #AOTY #AlbumOfTheYear #2022Music