As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries — which I’m well aware should be posted nearer the beginning of a calendar year as opposed to the end of the subsequent — I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My weird hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. I don’t splurge too much because it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky, and as my favorite acts of yesteryear die, stop recording, or turn toward musical directions that take them beyond my zones of interest. That usually means missing out on what the majority loves, thus further dragging me down the long plummet into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website a couple times per week.

With the specter of COVID in our rear-view mirrors, or at least lurking in an off-road blind spot and plotting its next sinister mutation, 2022 ended up my biggest CD-shopping year since the 1990s. Of the ten acts represented here, two are bands with passionate voices I only recently discovered for myself by paying closer attention to Pitchfork over the past couple years. (In my defense, one of them is a debut album from a new act. As for the other one: I’ve simply been missing out.) The other eight are established pros preexisting in my collection, many of whom emerged from pandemic hibernation to reveal how they spent all that quarantined free time. Of those same eight, three average 40-plus in age like me. But I don’t like them just because they’re old. I’ve given up on plenty of now-elderly acts who, like, used to be cool.

The following list comprises all the CDs I acquired last year that were 2022 releases (meaning none of my dusty record-shop finds) in top-to-bottom order. You’ll figure out the reason for the reverse-Kasem at the end, and maybe understand why I sat on this entry for eleven months. First I had to make sure no one was following this site anymore.

On with the countdown!

1. Jack White, Fear of the Dawn. Long story why, but one of my offline pandemic pastimes was (and remains) listening to hard rock and metal albums from the ’60s to the ’90s that I’d never tried before. The more I sorted through the various sub- and subsubgenres, the more I found myself appreciating the staunchly retro White oeuvre, in the White Stripes as well as his solo work, from the lo-fi blues throwbacks to the near-electrocuting effects-pedaled stomps. Among other tiny miracles, I love that his riffcentric six-string revivalism eschews the sweaty horndog machismo that used to be a mandatory entrance to the RAWK world. I’m perfectly okay with the sort of almost gender-neutral ferocity that doesn’t catcall his own audience or use beer as a cologne.

White released two such collections in 2022, originally intended as a double album but split up due to vinyl shortage. (Remember when supply-chain issues kept ruining random aspects of everyday life? Ah, memories.) Of the two, Fear stuck with me longer and had the advantage of carrying one of my favorite tunes from the previous year, “Taking Me Back”. The hard-driving, distortion-happy nostalgia rant was featured in an ad for a video game I’ll never play, thundered through my very being and kept me hitting Replay again and again and again.

2. The Linda Lindas, The Linda Lindas. With family roots in Reel Big Fish and Giant Robot, the all-female, all-under-21 power-pop quartet are among the thousands of reasons why online “nepo-baby” conversations are stupid. The one-at-a-time entrance banger “Oh!” captures the all-ages angst of obsessively dwelling on your mistakes, followed by the optimistic found-sisterhood outlook of the pogo-infectious title track, and the hits keep strutting along on subjects great and small. In between ruminations on various insecurities, they agree “fine” is a useless word and there’s a tribute to someone’s cat, but lest anyone think them preciously kawaii, as if being signed to Epitaph Records weren’t punk-cred enough in itself, the finale “Racist, Sexist Boy” feigns lyrically youthful innocence while taking an L7 sledgehammer to all the male pigs out there. Don’t expect these young ladies to show up on Radio Disney, and maybe don’t reductively label them “young ladies”. They aren’t here to be your dinner-party showpieces smiling on command.

3. Bloc Party, Alpha Games. Seven years after the vague spirituality and muddled electronics of Hymns (the same year I saw them live), the Brit-rock aces get back to form in their sixth outing as Russell Lissack’s licks resurface in full effect, the rhythm section of Louise Bartle and Justin Harris get comfier and more raucous in their sophomore groove, and a recharged Kele Okereke sets about deflating pretensions, undermining facades, and in particular skewering insufferable male superiority in unreliably narrated come-ons like “Traps”, which creepily dials up the throbbing from inside a PUA’s one-dimensional headspace until the sudden stop grants a merciful exit, though that lingering hypnotic beat threatens to lure you back in.

4. Jack White, Entering Heaven Alive. And here’s the other half, docked a few points only because it averaged slightly fewer decibels. Longtime MCC followers know slow jams and coffeehouse lullabies are an uphill battle for me, which is why Sturgeon’s Lawyer shuts down 90% of Pitchfork’s recommendations in my inbox. White’s done acoustic numbers and piano-driven singles before (cf. “My Doorbell”), so maybe he’s the Jack-of-all-rocks guru who can lead me into my 60s with a deeper appreciation for subtlety in lower volumes. As you can imagine, the hootenanny version of “Taking Me Back” was not my thing and sounds ready-made for a nonexistent Bioshock sequel, but I can’t help smiling at “Help Me Along”, a plaintive love ditty that somehow melds Schoolhouse Rock band-class tinkling with a grandly marshaled Beatles string section. If anyone this side of They Might Be Giants can hybridize so wantonly without a license, Mr. White can.

5. John Mellencamp, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack. I held an imaginary lighter aloft back in the era when Indiana’s own onetime pop-chart topper bucked his major-label overlords and evolved into a candidly cranky rocker with enviable creative control. He held a highly esteemed place in my tape and CD collections for years until sometime after 2003’s Trouble No More, when his muse kept leading him further down the roads of country and folk — predictable moves given his longtime Farm Aid association, but I wasn’t ready to let him age or change guitars. I’m older now, as is Mellencamp assuredly, his cartons-a-day smoking voice descended in timbre from small-town Tastee-Freez romantic to Mississippi Delta curmudgeon. He’s still got an ear for picking the perfect backing band, who serve him well as he explores his personal regrets and his disappointments with the world-at-large. I can relate — some things are harder to overlook the older you get, and it’s like a blood-pressure release to at least grumble about it aloud, if not rant top-volume at whoever’s closest. That said, he comes most alive on three tracks featuring fellow iconic relic Bruce Springsteen, especially when yesteryear’s workingman poets rejuvenate each other on “Did You Say Such a Thing”, and it hurts so good when they’re thinking ’bout glory days.

6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down. In the exact decade that’s passed since their last album Mosquito, Karen O has collaborated with others, Nick Zinner achieved guitar godhood through Mad Max: Fury Road, and the drummer…well, I’m sure he found things to do. Reunited at last, their fifth album confirms Ms. O can still reach those grandiose highs and Zinner is far more interested in exploring other instrumental textures and sonic dimensions beyond the guitar world. The single that everyone ostensibly loved, “Spitting at the Edge of the World” featuring special guest Perfume Genius, kept popping into my periphery at odd times, crying for my attention with a bittersavory symphony looking down upon a broken world like Rorschach sneering at cold-war NYC, but its stiff-necked grandeur and Pitchfork’s undying love for Mr. Genius left me cold. I can appreciate ditching the obsolete and meaningless “alt-rock” non-label in favor of more thoughtful compositions, but my ears pricked up more for “Wolf”, which imagines Siouxsie Sioux fronting Depeche Mode to reinterpret Duran Duran’s feral lust into an angelic downward spiral.

7. Titus Andronicus, The Will to Live. I was unfashionably late to their longtime New Jersey everything-sucks rock party, but Pitchfork nudged my radar toward them with the 2019 single “I Blame Society”, which worked sincerely and ironically with muscularly Average-Joe-shaming results. Four years later comes a sort-of concept album with halcyon hard-rock squalls and arena-keyed prog-swells as if they spent the pandemic rereading the same Chuck Eddy book I did. Some of it sounds a bit too AOR-inspired — some despairingly hookless, some raving anti-religiously with all the verve of a college-entrance essay excerpt, some instrumental-filler-y, some settling for bar-band hand-clap comfort-jamming. Maybe that’s how they weathered the pandemic (not to mention the death of a member), but the best distilled punk here is “(I’m) Screwed”, an efficient three-minute saber-rattling wall-shaker with REO piano flourishes and old-school superfluous title parentheses that would drive Eddy up a wall.

8. Eels, Extreme Witchcraft. Whenever I fear I might not buy enough new music in a given year to merit one of these countdowns, my reflex response is to check on Mark Everett. Sure enough, we can reuse the same descriptor that’s served me every other year: “As with the better Eels albums of old, his raspy melancholy holds a peculiar allure for the ponderous introverted listener even on low-speed settings, but interspersed between those musings are a few interludes of deceptively jaunty ditties that could pass for pop summer singles if that was a thing he cared about anymore.” Except this time I felt like a fired A&R man mumbling “I don’t hear a single,” though at least “Steam Engine” tries something different in answering a question no one asked: “What if there were more Motown blues numbers about riding the rails?”

9. Elvis Costello & The Imposters, The Boy Named If. I’ve never cared for the ex-punk stateman’s cross-genre dalliances, so I have to wait every 10-15 years for his mood to swing back to rock. Nothing he does will ever recapture the riled-up magic of those first several albums, back when his postures were snottier and his teeth were visibly Thatcher-era, but I feel occasionally obligated to check in on him and the last two Attractions. Sure enough, the old man still has a pulse, but I can’t say I got strong aural impressions from his mildly recriminating anecdotes about women on the outskirts of Eleanor Rigby’s dialling code, though at least the self-aware snideness of “Magnificent Hurt” got a cute puppet video paying slight homage to his old, basic music videos.

10. Taylor Swift, Midnights. Wait, I can explain. You won’t buy it, but I can explain.

I’m not among her hundreds of millions of hardcore unconditionally devoted legions, but I was enormously fond of 1989 and thought highly of her re-recording of Red. I begged off her pandemic-era albums because critics kept describing them with synonyms of “slow” and “acoustic”, and as a rule across the board I’m too shallow and impatient for balladic set lists. (The one Foo Fighters album I never owned prior to 2023? The all-acoustic one.)

I reconsidered on the strength of “Anti-Hero”, a righteously biting satire of hate-following music-journos and listeners-at-large who make hobbies and/or income out of sneering and gossiping about her using the same two or three zingers ad nauseum. Alas, the rest of this midnight-themed concept album resembles electronically processed Top-40 pop that I tend to avoid, with more than a few tracks sounding as if she drew sonic inspiration from Lorde’s Pure Heroine spun on Repeat. The sustained ambiance of disenchantment is also anchored with more F-bombs than the other nine albums on this list combined as if that were a certifying token of Serious Art. She’s under no obligation to be perfunctorily nice or even smile for the rest of her life, but such vitriol sounds more authentic at punk speed, volume, and budget than it does as a self-made millionaire’s luxuriously crafted folk-pop. This is the sort of “screw-ALL-of-you” album that a lesser, ordinary act would turn in just to fulfill their recording contract before retreating to misanthropic off-charts exile. Regardless, I’m still excited about picking up 1989 (Taylor’s Version) at some point.

…and that’s the musical year that was. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, see you next year, by which I mean “a couple months from now”. Maybe I can just stop buying CDs for the rest of 2023 and thereby give myself less to write about. That’s a silly, selfish reason not to support cool bands, though.