2023 Q3 Review and Analysis
The year is nearly over!
I like to review where things stand every few months, once all of the reviews are in for March, June, and September. The Q1 sum-up never got copied over to this platform, but you can find this year’s Q2 Review here.
If you’re a new reader, you can find an overview of the bucket scoring system I utilize here.
Please remember that you can always sort any and all of Versatone’s reviews by a large number of tags, including many niche subgenres, on the Compendium of Tags page. You can also listen along to the albums I’ve covered through the playlist links on the Playlists page.
Special discussions, such as these Quarterly Reviews, Release Radars, and special non-review discussions, such as posts discussing projects like the Metallica Blacklist1 and Taylor Swift’s re-recordings,2 will still hit inboxes, too.
Now, to start talking numbers…
Volume
To date, I’ve scored 120 albums this year, and that’s everything that was on my list for the end of September. It’s mid-October, and I have yet to post anything from the first two weeks of Pumpkin Month.
But that’s because I ended up with 26 albums either on my list or getting referred to me during September, and only four or five of those were available in the first two weeks of the month.
Looking at Q3 as a whole, 50 reviews have been completed as part of the third quarter of 2023; September was half of those (plus one) on its own. Here are the numbers for Q3 so far:
The percentages here show the percentage of that ranking as part of the Quarter’s total, except of course, for the percentage in white at the bottom. That shows that nearly 42% of this year’s reviews fall under Q3. Compare these numbers to those of the first half of the year:
I’m definitely on pace to eclipse last year’s total, needing only 18 more to draw even with the 138 mark. Currently, there are 11 more albums pending review which have already released, and at least 8 more coming after that.
But I don’t believe, at this point, that we’re going to hit the “conservative” estimate of 175 that I made in the Q2 review. That made sense by the numbers, but not for my capacity to actually complete that many reviews in the time allotted.
That was silly.
Quality
This year is noticeably down on quality at the moment.
Only two Purples thus far, and half as many Blues as the final count last year. The eagle-eyed among you might notice that the numbers are pretty close to 2021’s in most categories, despite the huge difference in totals. That’s because there are currently 35 albums sitting in the Teal bucket. Before the year is out, that bucket will be systematically emptied into Blue and Green.
Historically, about 1/3 get upgraded into Blue. With that being the case, if no more albums are reviewed, we would currently be looking at five to seven Green albums making the Top 40 list.
Eight green albums made the Top 40 in 2021, but the additional quantity in 2022 meant we had five Blue albums that missed the list.
The prospect of outshining 2022 in quantity and still allowing Green albums to hit the list definitely marks this as a down year in quality metrics. The same three-year rundown, in percentages, currently looks like this:
Most buckets look like they’ll probably end up pretty similar. But the combination of Blue and Purple will likely be down, overall, this year.
Recap
Even with the downtrend in overall quality, there are still a lot of good albums. See below for the full list of Purple- and Blue-rated albums from this year.
Purple
Blue
Gracie Abrams - Good Riddance Haken - Fauna Isole - Anesidora Elysion - Bring Out Your Dead Floor Jansen - Paragon Melanie Martinez - Portals NF - Hope The Ocean - Holocene OK Goodnight - The Fox and the Bird Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Weathervanes The Revivalists - Pour It Out Into The Night Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead Soen - Memorial The Paper Kites - At the Roadhouse Ice Giant - Ghost of Humanity Cody Fry - The End Olivia Rodrigo - Guts Kylie Minogue - Tension
Looking Forward
We really only have two months of releases left: October (which is half over) and November (which is one of the lightest months of the year). So, basically, there won’t be a lot more releases this year. Currently, I’ve got about 19 currently on my list that have either already released or have dates announced. Of these:
Metric is an excellent Shoegaze band, but I’m concerned about the quality of the album, given that it’s an Evermore release.
Within Temptation is reliably amazing, but the album they have coming on 10/20 wasn’t really conceived of as a singular unit, so I don’t expect it to be incredibly cohesive; it isn’t likely to give us a third Purple.
Chris Stapleton is our most likely Purple, given everybody left on the list; his style of bluesy Country, following in the sonic footsteps of Travis Tritt really works reliably well, and he’s typically a pretty clever songwriter.
Once I’m all caught up, probably around the first full week of November, I’ll start sifting through my checklist of artists to see who I haven’t heard anything from this year. Many artists’ releases fly beneath the radar, so they must be sought out. This process will likely take most of November to complete, and I’ll review and post those albums as I find them.
Another benefit of how I do things here is that I can pick up albums that sound good from other outlets’ end-of-year lists. These will be the only reviews posting in December.
With the year nearly over, I just want one or two more albums to make the fight at the top interesting. That’s all. So, please, if you have any recommendations, send them my way.
Good times. I would love another release which properly captures that kind of energy and excitement.
Look for the discussion on 1989 (Taylor’s Version) coming sometime in early November; the album will be out on 10/27!
Talk nerdy to me. ♡