This Week’s Theme: Best of 2022 (So Far)

This week’s Faux Show is a classic countdown list. I have included several different Best of the Year selections followed by a Top 10 albums countdown. These are all albums released through June, 2022. At the end of the year I will create a final Best of the Year show with a Top 20 albums list, so it will be interesting to see how many of these early contenders make the final cut. The playlist includes two tracks from the Top 10 albums, plus one track from each of the Best Of categories and a few additional tracks from albums that would probably make my Top 20 at this point in the year.

Rap Album of the Year

Precipice by Dalek

I’ve been listening to Dalek for about twenty years and it is great to see this experimental hip hop duo still going strong. Instead of caving in and attempting to adjust to the new sound of rap, their new album Precipice holds true to form and contains ten tracks of their trademark noise-based sampling and drum heavy beats. The lyrics are still just as confrontational as ever, so they have plenty to say in the middle of all of the shit going on in the world today. This is rap that makes you listen and think. Dancing is optional and extremely difficult.

Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die

The Tipping Point by Tears for Fears

It has been eighteen years since the last Tears For Fears album so who would have thought they had another one in them. If you love Tears for Fears, this album does not disappoint.

Metal Album Of The Year

Impera by Ghost

Impera is the fifth album in twelve years for Ghost, a Swedish metal band. They are on the lighter side of metal relative to a lot of other bands out there nowadays, but they aren’t Winger. They can be pretty heavy when they need to be, but they are strong on the melody and always come up with a decent riff. Their stage shows are very theatrical, and this new record based on the rise and fall of empires provides plenty of material for them to flex their creative muscles on stage. This is possibly their best received album to date, at least for mainstream critics. Metal critics have never really accepted the band as true metal, but I don’t care. It rocks and makes me think of Ratt and Iron Maiden, which is never a bad thing for a forty-plus year fan of the genre.

Funk Album Of The Year

Electric Cowboy: Born In Carolina Mud by Boulevards

Over the last eight years, Boulevards has evolved from an ’80s funk sound (a la Rick James) and a ’90s groove (a la R Kelly) into a funk band focused on ’70s soul and ’60s psych-funk (a la Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone). This is definitely my favorite of their albums yet.

Song Of The Year

“Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg

This was my selection for Song of the Year in 2021, but the band’s full length debut was not released until this year. For now, this song will retain the title until a new, better song is released in 2022.

And now, my Top 10 albums of the year, so far…

Number 10: YAYA KIM

a.k.a. YAYA

I am not sure that this album will remain on this list by the end of the year, but every time I listen to it I am increasingly intrigued by the variety of experimentation YAYA KIM has produced. Kim is a South Korean artist who does not work in the field of K-Pop. After being trained early in her life to be a standard entertainer, she instead broke away to study art design, production, and classical composition. The end result is a mix of jazz, blues, avant-garde, experimentation, and psychedelic music. She composes, arranges, and records all of her own songs, and also creates the art design, cover design, and videos. This is 21st century avant-garde pop music unlike most anything else out there, and especially unlike any other music you will find coming out of South Korea.

Number 9: Spoon

Lucifer On The Sofa

Full disclosure: I love Spoon. I’ve been a fan for over twenty years. That is not to say that every new Spoon album is my favorite for the year, but I do think most of their albums are consistently good. This one, however, surprised me in just how good it is. There aren’t any instant classics like “Underdog” or “The Way We Get By” on this one, but there isn’t a weak track throughout. If you like Spoon, you are sure to like this. If you don’t know Spoon, I actually think this isn’t a bad place to start. It isn’t their best, and if you like it you would be smart to go listen to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Gimme Fiction, or Kill The Moonlight, but it is a solid offering from arguably the best indie rock band of their generation.

Number 8: The Weather Station

How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

I know very little about The Weather Station. From what I can tell, they started out as an alt-country group and released several well-received records during their first ten years or so. Then, in 2021, they released an album that owes as much to post-rock Talk Talk as to any country or folk artists. That album, Ignorance, slipped past me last year or it would have made my Top 20 at the end of the year. Amazingly for this day and age, the band released another album less than one year later, and it is just as good, if not better. Much like Talk Talk’s evolution, the band appears to be moving further away from their origins with each release, and are getting quieter and more subtle as they do so. This new album is gorgeous in its simplicity. Each listen reveals new depth of emotion and new layers of complexity, all within the confines of a very minimal songwriting aesthetic. Beautiful.

Number 7: The Smile

A Light For Attracting Attention

Radiohead are the most important rock band of the 21st century. They foreshadowed the decades to come with their 1997 masterpiece OK Computer and heralded a new age with their 2000 album Kid A. They haven’t broken up, but they are no longer a full-time band, with their members spending the last seven years working on solo and side projects, and releasing the occasional special editions of their old albums. The Smile is a new side project for Radiohead co-founders Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and is as close to sounding like a full-fledged Radiohead album as it gets. If you are a Radiohead fan, this record is a breath of fresh air. If you don’t care about any of this then may god have mercy on your soul.

Number 6: Beach House

Once Twice Melody

Beach House have been around since 2006 and I have not paid much attention. That was apparently a mistake. This duo play a blend of dream pop, shoegaze, lo-fi, electronic music. This latest album sounds like Stereolab meets Low. It is wonderful. I will definitely be investigating their back catalog.

Number 5: Wet Leg

Wet Leg

The female duo Wet Leg burst out of the Isle of Wight and onto the scene last year with their amazing single “Chaise Longue.” They followed that with the amazing single “Wet Dream.” Now they have released their debut album. It contains those two singles along with ten other tracks, only one of which falls short. This is a great debut.

Number 4: Black Country, New Road

Ants From Up There

Black Country, New Road released their fantastic debut album, For The First Time, in 2021 and one year later released this second album. It picks up where their first record left off, and provides their amazing blend of jazz, rock, noise, prog, and post-punk. They are cut from the same cloth as Black Midi, but don’t veer quit as far into the sonic spectrum. This is a fantastic recording and will definitely be in my Top 10 at the end of the year. Days prior to its release, their lead vocalist Isaac Wood left the band due to mental health issues. They cancelled their US tour, but have announced that when they do tour again they will not perform these songs out of deference to Wood. Instead, they have left an open invitation to Wood to rejoin if he ever feels ready to do so. In the meantime, Wood and the rest of the band have given us two of the best albums of the 2020s, and the band has announced that they plan to branch out on their next recording by working with a symphony orchestra. I am down with that.

Number 3: Big Thief

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You

This album is the fifth for Big Thief in the last seven years. Like Beach House, I know very little about this band prior to this year, but this album keeps getting better each time I listen to it. It is like if a young Emmylou Harris joined early Wilco and were produced by Sea Change-era Beck.

Number 2: Stromae

Multitude

Stromae was the Artist of the Week on Radio Faux Show Volume 2, Number 14. The theme of that show was new music, and this album has continued to stick with me as one of the year’s best since discovering it while researching that show. Stromae is an international superstar from Belgium and his mix of hip hop, dance music, and folk music is incredible.

Number 1: Mitski

Laurel Hell

Mitski began her professional career in 2012 with some self-produced piano/vocal albums recorded while attending music school. She has evolved throughout her career, and this sixth album now finds her as a master songwriter of modern vocal pop music. The songs veer from powerful, emotional, and angry to beautiful, introspective, and moving. Above all else, Mitski has become a master storyteller who can use few words to elicit deep meaning within her songs. This album has been my favorite of the year since I first heard it and after dozens of listens that has not changed.

Thanks for listening (and reading)!

Track List

Track	Artist	Song
1	Black Country, New Road	Intro
2	Stromae	Sante
3	Smile, The	The Opposite
4	Spoon	Wild
5	Beach House	Once Twice Melody
6	Mitski	Working For The Knife
7	Big Thief	Change
8	Weather Station, The	Marsh
9	YAYA KIM	For Dogs And Pigs…
10	Wet Leg	Ur Mom
11	Nilufer Yanya	The Dealer
12	Wombats	If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You
13	Ibibio Sound Machine	17 18 19
14	Sure Fire Ensemble	Time To Rebuild
15	Joss Stone	Never Forget My Love
16	Boulevards	Turn
17	Charles Goold	Tell Me Something When
18	Alison Shearer	Celestial
19	Dalek	Decimation (Dis Nation)
20	Stromae	Fils De Joie
21	Tears For Fears	My Demons
22	Smile, The	The Smoke
23	Mitski	The Only Heartbreaker
24	Wet Leg	I Don’t Wanna Go Out
25	Black Country, New Road	Concorde
26	Beach House	New Romance
27	Spoon	On The Road Again
28	Crows	Only Time
29	Sharon Van Etten	I’ll Try
30	YAYA KIM	Tonight Is Mine
31	Big Thief	Spud Infinity
32	Weather Station, The	To Talk About
33	Ghost	Hunter’s Moon

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