If I have an Album of the Year for 2023, it's Unreal Unearth by Hozier. Unreal Unearth is one of those albums that I wasn't really sure about the first time I listened to it, but I did know right from the beginning of the first track that there was some really good music in there. Over subsequent listens, I found myself connecting with the album on a level that I don't feel very often.
The album opens with De Selby pt. 1 and De Selby pt. 2, which work together to set the tone for the album. The soundscape feels intensely intimate, especially in part one. It's hard to get any more intimate than a singer and a single acoustic guitar, but that intimacy is maintained throughout the album even as the arrangement grows in scope. De Selby pt. 2, while much louder and bolder, maintains that very personal feeling even with a completely different context for it. This continues throughout the album- Hozier's lead vocals are always soloistic, virtuosic, and incredibly emotionally potent whether he's singing softly over one or two instruments or singing over a full rock band mix. De Selby parts 1 and 2 show off both styles, and the rest of the album builds on those initial tracks.
Personally, I have some history with Hozier. In high school, I was unwillingly subjected to his 2013 single "Take Me to Church" with distressing frequency, as is the custom of top 40 radio. I didn't have the context of the album it came from (now a favorite of mine as well). I also probably wasn't really ready to appreciate the song's lyrical content. I just knew that it was another overplayed pop song that didn't have a place in my rotation of Taylor Swift, Owl City, and Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators albums. My friends at the time, in particular my longtime collaborator and dear friend Denaie, tried to get me to see the light, but I wasn't ready, so I let Hozier pass me by in high school, confident that I wasn't missing much.
But of course, times have changed. Owl City's music since The Midsummer Station has been hit or miss for me. I can't even listen to Taylor Swift anymore because I'm too annoyed by her as a person. And Hozier has wound up at the top of my rotation as one of my favorite artists and in the year 2024 I own all of his albums on CD. How did that happen?
Well, another one of my friends finished the work Denaie started. I'd like to thank Soleil (who made a Hozier cover with me!) for convincing me to listen to Unreal Unearth, which I did with initially low expectations. I've listened to other albums on their suggestion, with mixed results. I'm pretty picky when it comes to music so that's no insult to Sol's taste. But at any rate, I put Unreal Unearth on one night before bed, and gave it a listen. I didn't really get it, but I could tell that it was good stuff, the kind of good stuff that I wouldn't be able to fully identify on the first listen. There's this incredibly pretentious academic term called "high information music", which is basically the idea that some music is just better because it has more music happening in it than other music. I don't like that as a concept because it seems more likely to be used to belittle music that academics don't like rather than elevate music that your average music listener does, but I'm going to commandeer the term for that purpose here. Unreal Unearth is high information music that has a lot going on and it wasn't easy for me to tease out all that nuance and value the first time around, but I could identify that it was there. That's why I gave it a second listen, and a third, and a fourth... and the next thing you know I'm going to a Hozier concert and buying his CDs and putting them on every time I get in the car.
Unreal Unearth has some incredible individual songs, such as De Selby pt. 2, First Time, Francesca, Eat Your Young, Damage Gets Done, and First Light. But my favorite part of the album isn't any individual song or group of songs. It's the overall experience of listening to the album, from start to finish, where you can feel yourself being taken on a journey beginning with the descent into hell and ending with the emergence back into the light at the end. Unreal Unearth is a masterpiece in album sequencing, pacing, and storytelling without explicitly saying anything about the story. I'm a big fan of listening to albums from start to finish, and this is an amazing album for that purpose. There are songs on this album that are not satisfying at all when listened to out of context, but feel like important moments of arrival when encountered in the course of a full album listen- one example being Son of Nyx.
The climax of the album, and one of the best songs, is the song First Light. It represents the conclusion of the journey; the return to where it started. The entire album comes to a head here, and to describe it in too much detail would only do it a disservice, so I'll keep it short and just say that this song, when heard at the end of the album after an hour of music, is incredible. It's one of the best album closers I've ever heard, a fitting compliment to the De Selbys, which together are one of the best album openers I've ever heard. It's a satisfying conclusion to an amazing arc that you would never experience if you only ever listened to #1 hits. Maybe high school me was right all along: one Hozier song out of context isn't all that great. But now that I've heard the album and understood the context, all of the individual songs are elevated. That's true of the singles from Unreal Unearth, and it's doubly true for Hozier's debut album that I panned all those years ago- perhaps that will be the subject for a future album review.
Before concluding, I need to take a moment to talk about the textures and instrumentation of Unreal Unearth. The sustained intimacy of this album despite its dynamic highs and lows is only possible because of the instrumentation. Unreal Unearth employs a dark sound comprised of very human instruments- acoustic pianos and guitars, a string section, and choirs all give the album a distinctly human touch. When things get more intense, we hear a rhythm section consisting of a bass guitar dripping with personality, tight drumming on a funk-sounding kit that I can't get enough of, electric piano and simple synth patches that mostly stay out of the way of the arrangement, and electric guitar sounds that could have come out of the 70s- and I love it. Hozier's use of fuzz and overdrives in a way that don't overpower the sound aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are refreshing. As a guitarist myself, I love the rich layers of acoustic and electric guitars that create the spacier sounds on this album, and I love the tight rhythm playing that locks in with the rest of the rhythm section so well. In particular, the guitars on Anything But are layered so densely and yet the overall sound is so light and airy. Whatever the intensity level of the music is, it's being played in a way that makes it apparent that real people are the ones doing it, and I love it.
All this talk and I've barely even mentioned the lyrical themes of the album, but that's not exactly what I listen to Unreal Unearth for. The lyrics are genius of course, and I appreciate them, but I'm here for the music. I'm here for the soundscapes. I'm here for the grooves, and I'm here for the stellar vocal performance that reminds me the voice is an instrument too, and it can be infinitely nuanced and expressive. What he's saying with that voice is profound and deeply interesting, but it's not what I'm primarily here for.
Unreal Unearth was easily my favorite album of 2023, beating out competition from Metallica's 72 Seasons and Olivia Rodrigo's GUTS, both of which I've enjoyed thoroughly since they came out. It's hard to pick a favorite song from Unreal Unearth, but if I had to pick, I'd go with the first song that I really loved from this album- my favorite track is De Selby pt. 2.
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