Music Suitcase — Final Edition

10 min readDec 1, 2023

Favorite Albums of October & November 2023

Let’s sing it and rhyme
Let’s give it one more time
Let’s show the kids how to do it fine, fine, fine

After 6 years, it’s time to wrap up my monthly blog and move onto new creative projects. It’s been a wonderful ride, and I exit this column with resounding gratitude to anyone who ever read it, said a kind word about it, or checked out music because of it that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Here’s one last rundown for October and November — along with a massive, 80-song highlights playlist — then I’ll be back in a few weeks to give you my Top 100 of 2023; I’ll probably still do big re-caps like that now and then, but I’m not up for the monthly commitment anymore.

In the meantime, we’re going out with a high note, because this is an especially dynamic batch of albums, and the first album here is one of the very best records 2023 has to offer!

Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond

On their second album the Austin duo sharpens the contrast between the the key elements of soul and psych rock at the center of their sound, giving the band further definition while adding in a bunch of new tricks. Rich and colorful both sonically and thematically, this is easily the brightest and most uplifting album of 2023’s highest highlights, ending a year full of ambitious, often challenging music with a strong, unexpectedly exultant, pep-in-your-step sort of finish! Highlights: “Ice Cream (Pay Phone),” “Gemini Sun,” “Chronicles of a Diamond,” “Tomorrow”

Aesop Rock, Integrated Tech Solutions

His most personal to date, the Brooklyn rapper’s tenth album tempers the all-out lyrical athleticism a bit for a more personal approach, with clear themes and lucid stories from his own life. The flow and the rhymes are still impressive; but more so is this new willingness to show himself — after two decades of spitting left-field mic drops like an alien genius — as human. Highlights: “Pigeonometry,” “Bermuda,” “Vititus”

Mon Laferte, Autopoiética

A celebrated Chilean-born singer/songwriter based in Mexico for many years now, Mon Laferte’s 9th album celebrates her musical dexterity. For outsiders it’ll sound like every kind of Latin music you’ve ever heard fused together seamlessly, with both modern and classic flourishes. Those who know the specific musical references she draws from will admire the scope and breadth of the album, and geek out even as the groove carries them away. Highlights: “Metamorfosis,” “Casta Diva,” “Préndele Fuego”

Sufjan Stevens, Javelin

Sufjan’s latest is a return to the deceptively simple acoustic indie folk aesthetic he began with, and also to the ambitiousness with which he continuously turns that practiced softness on his head by way of colorful extrapolations and artful adventurism. It’s beautiful, often gentle music, but it’s never boring. Highlights: “Will Anybody Every Love Me?,” “My Red Little Fox,” “Shit Talk”

Angie McMahon, Light, Dark, Light Again

It’s easy to tell — for better or worse — when an artist devotes her music to the audacious task of enriching her listeners’ lives with empowering messages. I personally like it when I’m so caught up in the melodies they’ve crafted that it takes me a little while to realize that‘s happening — then I can set my mind aside enough to fully let the music in, message and all. This album does that really, really well. Highlights: “Saturn Returning, “Divine Fault Line,” “Serotonin”

Cabezadenego, Mbé & Leyblack, Mimosa

A celebration of Black Brazilian music by three producers who met during a mutual residency in Spain, Mimosa’s mostly upbeat mixture of electronically and analogically sourced dance music revels in Afro-Brazilian rhythms along a spectrum of genres — samba, terreira, hip hop and funk among them — and is just ridiculously infectious. Highlights: “Roda,” “Matuta,” “Chora”

André 3000, New Blue Sun

I’m sure you’ve already heard about the surprising return of the Outkast emcee 17 years later, but “flute instrumentals” doesn’t really cover it. This is an album of ambient jazz compositions with a diverse array of instrumentation. As a side bonus, it’s powerful enough (and/or strange enough) that it is somehow freaking out religious conservatives too! Highlights: Tracks 3, 6, and 1.

CMAT, Crazymad, For Me

A dramatically improved second album from Irish singer/songwriter who’s learned she is funnier when she lets her humor simmer in the sauce of her songcraft, rather than lead with it. That lesson pays off big time on an album with a sharp wit, an endearing confessional streak, and first-rate pop hooks. Highlights: “California,” “Whatever’s Inconvenient,” “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?”

Marina Herlop, Nekkuja

Deliciously peculiar art pop blessed with an ethereal avant-folk aesthetic, this Barcelona-based artist welds chaos and whimsy into an otherworldly but infectious third album sung primarily in her native Catalan, with bursts of south Indian konnakol syllabic vocal percussion, and her own made-up language. Highlights: “La Alhambra,” “Reina Mora,” “Cosset”

Chouk Bwa & the Ångströmers, Somanti

Building the bridge between ceremonial vodou music and EDM you didn’t know you needed, Haitian bandleader Chouk Bwa and Belgian electronica producers The Ångströmers’ second collaboration is both more vital and even more enjoyable than the first. Highlights: “Sala,” “Somanti,” “Viyaya Keke”

Jamila Woods, Water Made Us

The Chicago neo-soul singer’s third LP is an album’s worth of ruminations on love and partnership and what it takes to make it work. As cohesive and intentional an exploration as her previous works, it’s the depth and nuance of Woods’s inquiry that keep this from being just another R&B album about romantic love. Highlights: “Tiny Garden,” “Practice,” “Send A Dove”

Beirut, Hadsel

Sweet and soothing sonically even when it’s moody and mournful, Zach Condon and crew’s latest envelops in its songs in a lush, warm blanket of sound. Lifted gracefully by charming horns, synths, pipes and strings, it delights in the hallmarks of Beirut’s singature sound and it’s a beautiful return to form. Highlights: “Stokmarknes,” “January 18th,” “Hadsel”

Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee, Los Angeles

One of the great producers of the modern era teams up with the original drummers of the Cure and the Banshees, respectfully, for a surprising collaboration which straddles post-punk and electronica and enlists the help of numerous guests for a meaty album about life in LA. Highlights: “Los Angeles,” “Uh Oh,” “Bodies”

Sampha, Lahai

The album cover represents the vibe pretty well here. Sophisticated, emotive neo-soul from London, Sampha’s second full-length album deftly weaves elegant melodies and ambitious rhythms together in service to an atmospheric and often transcendent whole, with a host of talented collaborators. Highlights: “Stereo Color Cloud,” “Evidence,” “Suspended”

The Wanton Bishops, Under The Sun

Debuting with a straight-up Delta blues album 9 years ago and then beginning to incorporating the sounds of their native Lebanon on an EP the following year, Nader Mansour and his band return after that long absence with an all out, amped up synthesis of those elements as a wonderfully realized vision statement. Highlights: “Ya Habibi,” “God’s Own Remedy,” “We Are One”

Danny Brown, Quaranta

With a voice that comes off as particularly swaggering even in the hip hop world, the Detroit rapper subverts expectations on his 6th LP with a vulnerable, down-to-earth, largely confessional album about the trials and tribulations of his relatively extensive time in the rap game. Highlights: “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation,” “Celibate,” “Bass Jam”

The Bug Club, Rare Birds: Hour of Song

By turns raucous, jaunty and hilariously absurd, this sprawling fourth album from a still young and increasingly confident multi-vocalist Welsh indie rock band features frequent, delightful spoken interludes that retain their charm on repeat listens, and boasts a bevy of delightful songs too. Highlights: “Marriage,” “Blues Magician,” “Samuel Was Beautiful Tonight”

Michael Franti and Spearhead, Big Big Love

Returning from last year’s foray into a sleeker, shorter version of his heart-centered campfire gospel of peace and love, Franti returns to his homebase: A free-wheeling, generous helping of unassailably good-natured anthems designed to lift the spirits of anybody who’s open to it. Highlights: “Vibe Check (My Kinda Party),” “Big Big Love,” “Out in the Sun”

Guided By Voices, Nowhere To Go But Up

Returning to their prog trajectory after a brief side-step, the indie veterans’ third album this year continues the Robert Pollard and company’s trend toward elaborate song structures and engaging change-ups that play well against the band’s famously lo-fi, fast and loose approach to music making. Highlights: “How Did He Get Up There?,” “Jack of Legs,” “For the Home”

Allah-Las, Zuma 85

Forever driven by a love of easy-going grooves and playful experimentation, the LA-based rockers’ 5th album bounces nimbly from one idea to the next. It’s mostly mid-tempo indie rock but beyond that there’s no formula: Just a bunch of solid tunes with hooks in all the right places. Highlights: “Right On Time,” “Sky Club,” “La Rue”

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, The Silver Cord

The unlikely sister album to PetroDragonic Apocalypse — the progressive thrash record the Australian rockers released earlier this year — the band’s deep dive into electronica retains the dystopian vision, and often even hard-driving aggro vocal stylings of that album, but with some ethereal moments and a ray of hope here that seems new for the band. Highlights: “Swan Song,” “Gilgamesh,” “Chang’e”

Music Suitcase is traditionally a monthly column, and I’d have included a handful of other albums from each of the last two months if I’d done it that way. Among the the best picks I left off this list to save space are the new albums by Goat, Chris Stapleton, Bombay Bicycle Club, Jolie Holland, Pip Blom, Mike Reed, Sofia Kourtesis, María José Llergo, Tkay Maidza, the Mountain Goats, Earl Sweatshirt, Ana Frango Elétrico, and Smoke Faeries. So if you’ve still got the time and bandwidth after all these, check out those too!

You can find highlights from those extra albums, as well as my favorite songs from all the above albums, on my Best of October + November playlist!

Wanna stay connected? Join the Music Suitcase Facebook group to be notified of future posts and link up with a community of some of my favorite music nerds in the world. You can also subscribe to here on Medium and get my blog delivered right to your e-mail inbox.

While we’re here…

Did you enjoy this article? Awesome! It was written by someone privileged enough to have time listen to like 40 albums every month and write a blog as a passion project, for free.

If you are white and you are also are privileged enough to have some time on your hands, or some money to donate, please check out some anti-racism resources and help fight the good fight.

Nerding out over music is fun, but let’s not forget that we live in a burning world that needs our help! Black Lives Matter.