2023 — A Musical Retrospective

2024-01-09 - Louis-Philippe Véronneau

I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :)

Albums

In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection — nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them.

I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available.

Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly Oï!) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montréal Skinhead/Punk concert scene.

Nansarunai - Ruins of the Moonlight Temple

Aurora - All My Demons Greeting Me As a Friend

High Command - Eclipse of the Dual Moons

FROZEN DAWN - The Decline of the Enlightened Gods

Komitern Sect - Des jours plus durs que d'autres

Coven - Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls

Los Tabascos - Sous lacrymos et les pavés

V A N I S H I N G K I D S - Miracle of Death

Fire in the Distance - Air Not Meant For Us

Concerts

A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month...

Here are the concerts I went to in 2023:

March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
April 11th: Alexandra Stréliski
April 12th: Bikini Kill
April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the Hill
May 3rd: First Fragment
May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
May 13th: Aeternam
June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
July 9th: Richard Galliano
August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
September 14th: Jinjer
September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety

Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montréal underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :)

That's it for 2023!

music