Indie. Indie pop. Folk pop. Indie folk.
Folks, clear genres are a bit hard to discern these days, but we’re doing our best with this first round of our favorite Bay Area albums of 2023. From Madeline Kenney to Spellling, the artists on this list weave together the sweet and lovely sounds of mellow keyboards, soulful voices, ardent jams, and more.
The Breathing Room – The Breathing Room
“A lot of our friends are in such amazing local bands that we feel very lucky to be able to be part of a scene like this and be fans of our friends’ music. Plus, the Bay is a place that encourages open-mindedness, which has really helped to shape our music.”
Sun hats. Guitars. Smiles. Anything else we need for our trip to the waterfall? Oh! The perfect album to listen on the drive up. Just press play on The Breathing Room.
The super chill Berkeley psych rockers their full-length debut album in 2023 and White Crate had the honor of premiering the music video from the album’s opening track, “Love Lost.” Filmed by the band’s drummer Tori Leonhardt, the vintage-styled video captures the band and friends frolicking in one of Earth’s beautiful places, conveying the sunshine ease of romance, platonic love, and sweet, carefree days. It reflects the personal nature of the full album, which the band says serves as an ode to the place where they first lived and made music together. And it’s only the opening to the rest of the album, just the thing for a drive to and from paradise.
— Ronny Kerr
Read our full interview with The Breathing Room →
In the Store – The Lost Days
“After meeting at a memorial for a mutual friend, Tony Molina and Sarah Rose Janko started spending nights into mornings playing guitar and singing their hearts out to an audience of empty wine bottles in the East Oakland warehouse where Sarah lived […] The days were marked in trips to Jackson’s Liquor store, the same spot Tony frequented while recording with his band Ovens a decade earlier.”
Tony Molina records live forever. As the Lost Days, Tony Molina (Ovens) and Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding, now based in New Orleans) form a silvery duet, strumming and singing together these jangly ditties born from heartbreak, depression, and the intricacies of loss and love. In the Store is a grey album but not a depressing one, rolling along with nourishing melodies and ardent rhythms inspired by the work of Cleveland musician Bill Fox and 1960s folk rock pioneers The Byrds. Released by Speakeasy Studios SF, they’re calling it a full-length album even though its 10 tracks end in 13 minutes, but it somehow feels more expansive than that. Kind of like those late nights and early mornings where the jam sessions started, it’s a deeply sad yet profoundly hopeful liminal space, where the rest of the universe disappears, and the present company is all that matters.
— Ronny Kerr
Mirror – Dani Offline
“I’ve always been really interested in self-perception and seeing myself through somebody’s eyes. That’s one of the greatest things about falling in love.”
Dani Offline
Soundchecking at the Lower Grand Radio studio before her show with White Crate, Dani Offline casually swirled her hands across the keyboard, pouring out the Van Heusen & Burke jazz standard “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”. Yours truly, working the mixing board, was briefly stunned. But understanding that background and capability immediately made clear where Dani’s music comes from, body and soul.
With verses and hooks as irresistible as Solange and soul jazz inflections shared with Sade, the multi-talented singer, songwriter, and producer this year released Mirror, her first EP since 2019’s Water Signs. Across seven tracks featuring full band arrangements, Dani Offline puts her voice front and center, cooing ponderous musings on the toughness and softness of love, reflected and refracted through self-perception and (sometimes) self-deception. No answers; just observation, improvisation.
— Ronny Kerr
Listen to an interview and performance by Dani Offline on Lower Grand Radio.
A New Reality Mind – Madeline Kenney
Ya know, sometimes a record is so good you don’t really have anything to say about it. But out of respect for Oakland’s beloved Madeline Kenney, I’m gonna try: Her 2023 album, A New Reality Mind, is an absolutely stop-you-in-your-tracks, bowl-you-over masterwork.
The first thing that stuns is how she’s able to keep topping herself. After a decade-long career in the Bay Area, you’d think she’d be tapped out. But A New Reality Mind showcases an incredible next step for the artist. The product of a breakup, the album sets its somber tone quickly, opening with mournful synth sounds and remaining emotionally stirring, but in a way that never feels tiring or overwrought. Speaking of synths, they’re all over this album, but that shouldn’t put off people who came to Kenney through her work that blended them with more traditional rock instruments like guitars, bass, and drums. She applies a light touch, constructing entire songs out of electronic chirps and swarms of sound but avoiding any sense of campiness. Rather than a cheeky nod to the past, it all sounds new.
It is an enduring taboo amongst music writers to use the word “ethereal” (that and “turn it up to 11”) so I will say this album is otherworldly, transporting, floats on air and will make you feel as such. Not that you ever would, but don’t take your eyes off Madeline Kenney. Astoundingly, she still has so much more to give us.
— Jody Amable
six – Credit Electric
There are some songs we wish would go on forever. For me, “ghost pine eyes” is one of those songs. Every time my ears reach the end of those three-and-a-half minutes, I feel my body wondering with hope, “Is this one of those false pauses? It must be. The song will continue again.” But no, all things end.
That’s just to speak of the third track on six, the third full-length album by Credit Electric, a tough-to-categorize group from the Bay Area led by Ryan LoPilato. Many of the songs are twangy as heck and blessed with pedal steel, so we have to call it country. But it’s also got this melancholy indie sound, like slowcore composed in solitude at the seashore. Sometimes, it’s nearly ambient. Or at least downtempo. It’s a little bit machine-like and yet completely alive. It’s the work of a single mind yet also the melding of several, including contributions by Lanéya Billingsley (Billie 0cean) and Eva Goodman (Nighttime). It’s quiet, present, reflective. Personal? Yes. Perhaps, in a world where bombs and murder still reign, that’s what makes it essential.
Why the number six? LoPilato explains:
“There are six elements of tragedy. I’m not really a theater person at all but I appreciate the original intention of tragedy: pain awakening pleasure. Other synchronicities also provoked the title. In the Quran and in the book of Genesis the heavens and earth were created in six days. There are six lines in a hexagram, found in cosmological diagrams in Hinduism and Buddhism. There are six points in the seal of Solomon and the star of David. Saxophones have six tone holes, guitars have six strings.
Most of the bass and keyboard used on the record was made by Yamaha, which has six letters. Yamaha means ‘mountain blade’ which is a reflection of a samurai’s legacy. Six is a military term for what is behind you. It takes about six months to recover from the breakup of a long term relationship. The album carries a theme of being present in reflection.
— Ronny Kerr
CA – Canaan Amber
“Tracked in the decade after Duster went on hiatus, Canaan Amber’s debut solo EP CA demonstrates the California-born guitarist’s affection for San Francisco jangle and Santa Cruz surf.”
One problem with desert/surf rock (besides it being unclear the difference between rock made in a place without water versus a place with a literal ocean) is that it often edges up against smooth easy listening. (No offense it’s that your thing.) But that’s not what you get on Canaan Amber’s solo EP CA, originally released in 2010 when their Santa Cruz slowcore band Duster was in the middle of its two-decade hiatus. Just re-released on Chicago label Numero Group with seven demos added to the EP’s original five, the off-kilter, dazed, jagged tunes here wander along with a dour look in the face, minimal, entrancing, a little uneasy. Check out highlights “No Way”, “Everything Is All in One Place”, and “Wander Off”.
— Ronny Kerr
Soft Like an Apricot – Marika Christine
“I’m soft like an apricot
My mind is my enemy
And I bruise easily”
This year I had the best birthday ever. I ate a bagel with cream cheese and lox stacked to heaven. I rode a ferry and saw a cute turtle swimming in a pond. I witnessed a wild, haunting dance performance. And, on top of everything, Marika Christine released her debut album Soft Like an Apricot. Gentle, breezy, poetic, the new work arrived like an announcement of summertime (which also happens to be stone fruit season). But it’s not all good times and sweet juice, as Christine reminds us on “Music and Heart” with the chorus “it’s hard to be young in San Francisco.” Tender voice-led folk rock arrangements, there may not be anything supremely innovative here, but maybe that’s the point. There’s nothing supremely innovative about a turtle gliding underwater through a pond, but is there anything more charming?
— Ronny Kerr
SPELLLING & the Mystery School – SPELLLING
I don’t remember what year it was.
I don’t remember who she was opening for.
But I remember the night I first saw Spellling live. Do I remember what she sang? No. Do I even really remember what it sounded like? No. All I remember is what I felt — light; like I had been lifted to another part of space. In reality, I was upstairs at Starline Social Club, but I felt like I had slipped into a trance.
Spellling’s 2023 record, Spellling & the Mystery School, will still take you places, but it will probably be somewhere a little heavier. What sets this one apart from previous work is that this seems a noisier, fuller affair – which makes sense, as she’s backed by a full band on this one. But it’s still the same old Spellling Oakland knows and loves.
Spellling & the Mystery School is made up of reinvigorated versions of old tracks, stretching back to Pantheon of Me, the full-length that put her on the local map. Everything’s just got a little more oomph this time around: “Haunted Water” from 2019’s Mazy Fly, beats a little faster, while “Under the Sun” sounds almost totally different, trading the original synths for live instruments in some spots. “Boys at School,” now packed tightly with more instrumental layers, becomes even bigger than before.
— Jody Amable
Water Words – Asha Wells
“Mood Indigo” sounds like a classic folk rock song circa 1976. Is it, or isn’t it? It shares a name with a jazz standard by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard, but no, it’s as original as the rest of this mellow, bluish work. Water Words is the debut album by Oakland artist Asha Wells, who returned to San Francisco after traveling around Central and South America. The travels inspired them to “experiment with open guitar tunings and atmospheric textures,” which manifest in the 11 soothing, meditative pieces here. The album exists within a single tempo and tone—let’s call it “drifting”—but like any watery surface, this allows the artist to reflect and refract the infinity complexity of the world that surrounds them. A welcome place of rest.
— Ronny Kerr
