It’s time once again to write a year-end round up for my own amusement. Pardon me if I’m not scoring high on the excitement meter because I’m finding it difficult to be excited about anything lately. The old They Might Be Giants lyric keeps going through my head: “Now it’s over, I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want / Or I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do.” Them TMBG boys used to make some great albums… Speaking of “used to”, two highly-cherished bands released albums in 2022 after (in one case) decades of silence and both were just kind of “meh”. If my temperament was better then I might have found these albums as enjoyable as many others seem to have found them.
One surprising new band that blew my socks of is Frost… in 2006. Their Milliontown album was phenomenal, and their follow-up was almost as good. Eight years later they released a disappointing collection of songs and in 2022, five years later, they released Day And Age. I didn’t have high hopes and I wasn’t disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm. It was a decent album but I haven’t found myself wanting to listen to it since it was released, meaning my score of 7 is probably spot on.
But five years between album releases ain’t nuthin! How about fourteen? Can it really have been fourteen years since King’s X released XV? While this band’s first five albums rank them as one of my favorite bands of all time, everything after 1994’s Dogman have been inconsistent. Some I liked, some grew on me, some don’t get much play. It was not with much anticipation that I listened to Three Sides of One and it’s… decent. Right now I have it at an 8 and it’s still in my vehicle, hoping that it will grow on me.
But fourteen years between album releases ain’t nuthin! How about THIRTY ONE?!?!? Yes, the original Chagall Guevara album came out in 1991 and I still listen to it now and then. I tempered my hopes and backed their Kickstarted and waited. And waited. And so on. Eventually the album came out and… well? Two songs had been released before during the previous decades (and one of these was a cover), leaving a mere seven original songs. Some of these are quite strong, but I can’t help feeling like I got the short end of the stick. It gets a 7, being docked one point for being a glorified EP.
What else is there to complain about? Hmmm… the much hyped Troika is pretty good (7) but not deserving of all the gushing people heaped on it. I very much enjoyed stumbling upon Prehensile Tales by Pattern Seeking Animals (8), which is a variation of late-era Spock’s Beard with solid songwriting. I’m looking forward to investigating their other two albums. I finally listened to the first Knifeworld album (8) and found it unusual and interesting. Shades by Ty Tabor (7.5) was nice, a bit better than his last album, to my ears at least.
I also caught up on some older albums. I tried Frosting on the Beater by The Posies a few years back and nothing happened. Fortunately I tried again and found most of the songs thoroughly enjoyable, a solid 9! Sometimes it’s not the music but where you are in life. All Right Here by Sara Groves was also highly enjoyable, but the other two early albums of hers I listened to in 2022 were not nearly as satisfying.
And then there’s Matt Bisonette. He’s currently a touring bass player for some big, big names (in the 70s) but in his past he’s played in Jughead and Mustard Seeds, two Christian-leaning bands I’ve dearly loved. So I was very glad to find that Spot (7) and Raising Lazarus (9) fall very much in their style of upbeat, positive, carefree, distorti-power pop and that he is, in fact, a practicing Christian… practicing more than in just empty words. He has quite a few more solo albums which I’ll explore over the next year or two.
In my reading life 2023 was the year of Clifford Simak. I read 14 novels and 9 non-fiction books (for a whopping total of 23, the same number that I read in 2022, but far less than my peak of 50 in 2007). Half of the novels were my Simak.
Lemma tell ya… when this guy is at his A game he comes up with some imaginative stuff! His book City is considered a sci-fi classic, and for good reason. It is a bittersweet, timeless story of a world that’s gone to the dogs. Literally. Mankind bred dogs to be able to talk and created self-replicating robotic arms for them before slipping off to Saturn and other dimensions, leaving dogs to argue if this ancient myth of “mankind” is actually based on reality.
Goblin Station was a wacky comic book, with a well-read cave man, the ghost of William Shakespeare, maybe a wolfman? It was pretty madcap, but not zany. But even better was another classic, the lonely The Way Station (I’ll be reading that one again) and Ring Around The Sun, which was an early novel based on Simak’s themes of alternate dimensions and the economy. Yes, the economy. I should also add that most of his writings have rural settings. Based on a few pages in Ring Around the Sun I’m pretty sure Simak was a fellow INFJ. So wonderfully unique… so uniquely unable to ever fit in with 99.99% of the worlds population.
In the early summer I enjoyed Amish Zombies from Space by Kerry Nietz, the sequel to Amish Vampires in Space. He kept it PG, even with the violence, like a good Christian author. I’ve been waiting for 2023 to read the final book in the series: Amish Werewolves of Space (what? You were expecting Amish garden gnomes?)
I received the Mike Lindell autobiography What Are The Odds as a gag gift from my kids but I like reading autobiographies so the jokes on them. It was a great read… about as fun as it gets these days. I re-read Perelandra by C.S. Lewis after a three+ decade break. Some people love this book but not me. The first 2/3 of the book is fairly decent but the last third has no action of any kid and is pretty much a long allegory with few guideposts to help the reader along. The Jewish Gospel of John by Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg was an excellent interpretation of this meaty gospel, postulation that its original audience was the Samaritans, which would explain many of the “problems” people have had with it over the centuries.
I guess my 2022 reading time was pretty enjoyable… another thing to be thankful for!
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