Alvvays – Blue Rev

I talked about Alvvays’s Blue Rev on a semi-recent podcast, so I don’t need to go into it too deeply, but it’s worth sparing a few words for since it is undoubtedly one of my favorite albums of the year. This has been a bit of a surprise since I once unfairly wrote Alvvays off as nothing more than another very good mid-’00s indie-pop band during an era when such a thing was starting to feel less and less essential. However, five years and a pandemic later, they’ve dropped this absolute stunner of an album that has all of the things that made this band so likable in the past, and yet there’s a newfound boldness mixed with an open-hearted sincerity that makes the album both affecting and highly listenable at the same time. Continue reading →

Plains – I Walked with You a Ways

Speaking of albums that walk (heh) the line between alt-country and indie rock, here’s the debut album from Plains, a collaboration between singer-songwriter Jess Williamson and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. I did not go to many live music shows in 2022, but Plains was one of them, despite being a group that has existed for barely a year. This is because there were several instances where I wanted to see Waxahatchee on her oft-delayed tour in support of one of my favorite albums of the past few years, St. Cloud. However, every time she came to town (or even a nearby city like Wilmington) I was somehow in another part of the country. Fortunately, Plains did play a few St. Cloud tracks when I saw them, and even more fortunately, the interplay between these two recently unified collaborators was a delight to witness. Continue reading →

Caitlin Rose – CAZIMI

As is the case with past years on this blog, I’ll be using the last month of the year to write short reviews of albums I enjoyed over the year, but never got around to reviewing. However, in 2022 I stayed pretty on top of talking about albums I liked with my monthly and seasonal recaps of my recent listening trends. So for the most part, the albums I’ll be writing about this December will be ones that came out during the past few months.

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but CAZIMI by Caitlin Rose was undoubtedly my most anticipated album of 2022. Or at least, it would have been if I’d had any preconceived notion that Caitlin Rose would be releasing an album this year, as I’d more or less resigned to the fact that she’d never release another album again. After all, she’s not an artist with the highest profile and the fact of the matter is, making a living as a musician these days wasn’t easy before COVID hit, and now it’s even worse. So I really couldn’t fault Rose if she chose to pack it in. Continue reading →