Yorkshire Post albums of the year

Despite strong competition from the likes of boygenius, Madness, Young Fathers, The Lilac Time, Dot Allison and Everything But The Girl, Lisa O’Neill’s fifth album All Of This Is Chance was the record that I returned to most often this year. A mesmerising collection of eight songs inspired by everything from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem The Great Hunger to birdlife and a journey on the London Underground, its centrepiece Old Note is an eerie six-minute meditation on the wall we’ve built between ourselves and the natural world, with O’Neill’s extraordinary voice floating over drones and violin. In another highlight, If I Was a Painter, she reflects plaintively: “I found out when I listened/Love is received from love”. An outstanding record that’s set to endure for years to come.

Duncan Seaman

The Gaslight Anthem – History Books

Nine years since their last record, the New Jersey heartland rockers may not possess the commercial clout of their heyday, but have nevertheless maturated their anthemic songcraft on their sixth album, further stepping out of the shadow of their classic influences, even as Bruce Springsteen himself haunts the title track. Lead single Positive Charge and the rollicking Little Fires stoke the old flames of rampant heart-on-sleeve runaways, but it is in the wistful melancholy of Michigan, 1975 and the slouched violence of I Live in the Room Above Her – a bourbon-soaked vampire murder ballad more ambiguous than it sounds – that Brian Fallon’s soft-focus skills come into their own following four solo albums in the interim. A worthy return.

Andrew Steel

Anna B Savage – inFLUX

A self-professed therapy record, in|Flux is as brutally honest and explosively sad as you’d expect. One of the things that sets Anna B Savage’s second album apart from other confessionals is that the London-born, Dublin-based musician can also have a laugh at herself. Fake orgasms and hair rock screams find their way into the rich, baroque settings conjured by producer Mike Lindsay (Tunng). These, in turn, are countered by shuddering electronics that mimic the emotional tension within the tracks. With a delivery that intimately blends the operatic with the blues, she carries the listener on a journey towards self-acceptance that ends with the Wendy-Cope-inspired The Orange. Conceding, “I think I’m gonna be fine,” she creates a mantra for these troubled times.

Susan Darlington

Scott Wainwright – Dark Money

2023 saw the latest studio album from the Yorkshire acoustic troubadour Scott Wainwright.

A folk-country album that wears its Dylan and Donovan influences firmly in its stirrups, Dark Money rides on the aforementioned artists trail but finds its own pace and breed of brooding beast the deeper you travel.

Last Exit Blues is my highlight from the off. Scott's Americana twang betrays any notion of his local dialect, with a deep whiskey-soaked wanderers late night storyteller tone. A longing for a lost soul, a one-man hitchhike through the emotions.

Throughout, Dark Money is a road trip delight. Drop a needle on a copy and lose yourself in the wilderness as Scott opens the ranch to his best work to date.

Tom Newton

Califone – Villagers

Harp, Sufjan Stevens, Julie Byrne, Hiss Golden Messenger, Meg Baird, Craven Faults, Bobby Lee, London Brew, Setting, Lankum, Dead Sea Apes: 2023 has not been short of consistently compelling albums. Return from veteran Chicago outfit Califone might just have proven most thrillingly unexpected.

For 20 years, multi-instrumentalist Tim Rutili’s loose outfit has specialised in spectral, scratchy homespun soundscapes and fragile, fractured Americana. Villagers offered more of the same, but with the addition of emotionally resonant, often deeply beautiful songs that combined severe pop nous with arrangements that may have been cobbled together with choice junkyard findings. Culminating in the wounded ache of Sweetly which found Rutili ditching his trademark gnomic utterances for direct unfiltered heartbreak, Villagers occasionally brought to mind another Chicago institution Wilco at their most unpredictably adventurous – yet still tuneful – past peaks.

Janne Oinonen

Grian Chatten – Chaos for the Fly

The lead singer of Fontaines DC channels his energy through a calmer, more subdued vein on his debut solo album. It’s no less powerful, the poetry of the lyrics still resonates, Chatten’s vocals duetting beautiful with his fiancé Georgie Jesson on Bob’s Casino and I Am So Far. It’s astonishingly accomplished work, post punk guitars replaced with their acoustic equivalent, overlaid by strings and synths but no less impactful. Chatten effortlessly moves from spitting out the words to an almost nonchalant, irreverent style on tracks that would be as equally at home being sung in the corner of a pub as they would an arena.

David Hodgson