2023 Musical Highlights, Pt. 2: A Few Good Laughs
With so much popular music investing in self-seriousness, angst, and — worst of all — frivolous egomania, it's always a relief to find musicians who understand the value of laughter.
Here’s the second batch of albums I’m revisiting as I prepare my “Favorite Recordings of 2023,” the annual ranked list I post at LookingCloser.org.
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This year, I really, really needed some good laughs. In every area of my life in 2023, heartbreak has been headline news, and that doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon. So I need good comedy. Reliable sources report that the Devil hates good, healthy laughter — and is, in fact, even weakened by such. Good, healthy laughter is founded on the idea that, as ridiculous and awful as things might get, “This too shall pass.” Joy is possible in spite of the darkness because the darkness will not overcome the light — not in the grand scheme of things.
Anne and I leaned into comedy on television and podcasts this year. We enjoyed a steady diet of British comedy like Taskmaster, Would I Lie to You?, and the 28-season radio game show The Unbelievable Truth. At the movies, I was particularly grateful for the occasional comedy that actually made me laugh — like Theater Camp and Barbie.
I’ve always valued improv comedy in music. In college, I was in an improv comedy band called The Garbage Chute Flyboys, and over the many years since then we recorded — for our own enjoyment, not for audiences — close to 2,000 songs full of “You Had to Be There” mishaps and moments of inspired wit that make us laugh. I have more than 1,000 of them on my phone, and I shuffle that massive archive of laugh-out-loud songs on a regular basis. It’s good medicine.
Almost every year, I’ll find at least one album that has something of the same crazy spirit as the music of the Flyboys. Often it’s a release by They Might Giants. I really miss the band Ween; they knew how to make incredible music while celebrating a spirit of relentless surprise and inspired absurdity. And one of my best 2023 discoveries was the series of albums by John Lurie recorded under the name Marvin Pontiac, records packed with songs that sound like they might be Garbage Chute Flyboys covers!
This year, most of the songs that made me laugh showed up in movies: Barbie’s too-good-to-be-true “I’m Just Ken,” with Ryan Gosling, and the hilarious comedy highs of Theater Camp.
But when it comes to recording artists outside of the movie theater, the big winner for me this year was a band I hadn’t encountered before…
100 Gecs — 10,000 Gecs
At AllMusic.com, Fred Thomas writes,
Somehow 100 gecs take things even more over the top on 10,000 Gecs than they did on their already mind-boggling debut. The very nature of the group's hyperbolic and perpetually exploding design means they're still inherently polarizing, love-it-or-hate-it kind of music. For those who love it, 10,000 Gecs offers more -- so much more, always more -- to love.
At Slant, Paul Attard writes, “[W]hile the twosome’s rambunctious revelry may appear wholly flippant upon first listen, their music, and 10,000 gecs as a whole, is far more sophisticated than it seems.”
At Variety, Jem Aswad raves about my favorite track on the record:
The duo romp through 10 songs in 23 and a half minutes — but there’s so much going on that the album feels considerably longer than it actually is. The longest song, the preposterous “I Got My Tooth Removed” — about exactly that — goes from off-key power ballad to ska pastiche to hyper-punk to anguished autotuned power ballad and back, adding and shedding musical elements every couple of seconds.
100 Gecs pack more ideas into 23 minutes than most artists who release 70+-minute-long albums. With 10,000 Gecs, the duo has reached a South Park level of brilliant absurdity.
While it’s not at all a comedy-focused album, Kurt Vile’s Back to Moon Beach is a rewarding EP for several reasons. For example: His guitar-playing, which always holds my attention for its inspired turns and surprises; and his lyrics, which are poetic and powerfully crafted when he wants them to be, and at other times merely playful and seemingly spontaneous in ways that I enjoy). But his sense of humor is a consistently a feature of his personality, often relieving pressure when his mopey melancholy gets the better of him.
Some of that sly wit comes through on “Tom Petty’s Gone (But Tell Him I Asked For Him” here, as Vile reflects on the loss of a rock-and-roll giant who influenced him, and as this loss spurs him to wonder what would happen if he were ever to meet Bob Dylan before the legend passes.
This EP, which features a few covers, has one that feels jarringly out of place — but I enjoy it on its own. He brings in his daughters to sing with him on a cover of the classic “Must Be Santa,” which no less a genius than Bob Dylan covered on his own Christmas album. (This track was originally recorded for a 2022 Spotify Holiday Collection. You can read all about it at Pitchfork.)
In case you’ve somehow missed it, here’s the great Ryan Gosling ensuring himself a place in pop history:
This post has just been Part Two.
Did you miss Part One? It’s still here for you!
Coming soon: PJ Harvey, Lowland Hum, Sufjan Stevens, Lucinda Williams, Mitski, and more!