Twenty Best Albums of 2016
- petsch6787
- Jan 10, 2017
- 17 min read
2017 is upon us! This year is sure to be a big-time disaster, if only because of whatever mayhem is going to ensue in our nation's fine capital city. But with that terrible fate also comes some good. For instance, a burger place called Burger Hub opened a block from my apartment, and this place serves horseshoes and poutine. And they have a poutine horseshoe! It's amazing. There is hope for this country after all. (BTW, if you don't know what either poutine or a horseshoe are, google it. Educate yourself.) But before we move onto, what I have now convinced myself, can only be the amazing 2017, we must take one final look back at the dumpster fire that was 2016 (Cubs WS notwithstanding) so I can tell you of my favorite albums of 2016!
Technical Side Note: I included a song from each album at the bottom of each review, so you can listen to it if you like, but if there is a video and you want to watch it in full screen (which is turned off in my actual blog) just click on the YouTube button on the frame of that video and it'll open up in a new tab on actual YouTube.
20. Wye Oak - Tween
Wye Oak makes a lot of noise for just two people. At any given time, there is only one guitar being played but it's constantly swirling around. This album is populated of castoffs from Wye Oak's two previous albums, Civilian and Shriek, but sound cohesive as a set because the duo revisited each song and reconstructed them. The instrumental opener, Out of Nowhere, sounds like a guitar riff played in space. Too Right is constructed around a guitar riff that never ends, and appropriately so. Sometimes I hear a guitar riff and I feel disappointed when it ends, because I want to bathe in it for as long as possible, and Too Right is the perfect example of how great it can be when a band just gives me that same churning guitar over and over. (Jimmy Eat World's Goodbye Sky Harbor is another good example.) A good set of songs that give us a glimpse of Wye Oak roads not taken.
Song: Too Right
19. James Blake - The Colour In Anything
It's fitting that James Blake and Frank Ocean are homies because they are basically two sides of the same heartbreak-ballad coin, Blake coming at it from the sad British crooner, Ocean, the Black American perspective. But both put their voice first and then lay down simple beats behind. I think this is Blake's best album, so far, and that's because he ups the production, his singing was never a problem. I tend to gravitate towards Blake's dancier beats and Timeless has the best beat on the album, for the second half breaking into a frenzied high pitch scramble, while Blake remains composed in the foreground. It is the song that I most frequently have to turn off of my headphones on the train because I am afraid people will hate me for being disruptive. Also the back to back tracks, Put That Away And Talk To Me and I Hope My Life, are Blake at his best: simple, dry, devastating.
Song: Timeless
18. Mannequin Pussy - Romantic
This album is brutal. Eleven songs that clock in at just above seventeen minutes, this album flies by but leaves an imprint. The opener Kiss smacks you in the face, and then they slow it down for two minutes on Romantic, before the seizure of Ten. Singer Marisa Dabice fluctuates from a raucous yell, to a sweet lull, to a high pitched shriek in the span of five minutes. Pledge goes from being a 90's Veruca Salt song to patches of hardcore sludge and back again. Every time I listen to this album, I like it more. I can't believe it's only seventeen minutes long.
Song: Anything
17. Lambchop - FLOTUS
In Care of 8675309, the twelve minute opening track of FLOTUS, plays out like a folk tune being played under the stars outside a ranch by an android cowboy, one whose voice constantly fluctuates from country crooner to auto-tuned lilts. The music of this album mostly gravitates around a kind of groovy folk, but Kurt Wagner's voice is auto-tuned throughout. His vocals sometimes take the forefront, like on most of the opener, but on tracks such as Directions to the Can, Wagner's voice drifts in and out, warped and twisted so that you can here the repeated refrain "Take it on the chin" but the rest of the vocals are just a high pitched cry for help, more background music than vocals at all. It's like indie-folk being played over skittering r&b drum machine hits. It's extremely peaceful. (Side Note: FLOTUS stands for For Love Often Turns Us Still)
Song: NIV
16. Frank Ocean - Blond(e)
First off, why does everyone call this album Blonde, when both of the album covers that Frank Ocean released for this album, it's spelled as Blond? Did everyone get some memo that I'm missing out on? Confusing! Released a day after the visual album Endless, Blond is viewed by most as the follow-up proper to Channel Orange, and it holds the weight of those expectations pretty deftly. At first listen, this album can seem hollow, stark, because there is so little instrumentation behind Ocean's voice, but after repeated listens, the small flourishes present themselves, and the heartbreak of Ocean's narrative really hits harder. Ivy is just Ocean singing over a gentle bass line and a meandering guitar, no drums. Then he switches it up on the next track, Pink and White, throwing back to the Channel Orange formula of a drum beat, bass, and a piano melody. Ocean succeeds on both songs, due both to his advanced producer's instincts and because his lyrics are so easy to relate to. We've all felt the failed relationship of Ivy caused by not showing your full self to someone who was willing to be that open. Ocean has said that a lot of this album was influenced by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, which makes sense, not only because The Beatles have songwriting credits on two of Blond's tracks (Ocean interpolated Here, There, and Everywhere on White Ferrari, and Siegfried samples the mellotron flurries at the end of Beatles instrumental Flying as the background) or the clear Beach Boys influence on Skyline To, but also in the simple beauty Ocean creates from well crafted melodies.
Song: Ivy (That's a fan video for Ivy, but it was literally the only version I could get to embed properly. Mr. Ocean had all his stuff removed from YouTube)
15. Kanye West - The Life of Pablo
I'm just going to say two things: 1) This is not Kanye West's best album, and 2) When I play this album I skip Ultralight Beam, listen to the both parts of Father Stretch My Hands, skip Famous, listen to Feedback, Low Lights, and Highlights, skip Freestyle 4 and I Love Kanye, then listen to the rest of the album, stopping after Fade and not bothering with Saint Pablo. So that's a total of five tracks (and if we're being honest I usually skip Wolves through the Silver Surfer Intermission), including two of the singles. I say these two things to express how good the rest of this album is, that despite all that, I still have it ranked fifteen on this list. That's all I need to say about that.
Song: Lowlights
14. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
Straight up honesty, this album kind of starts at track three for me. The first two songs, Burn the Witch and Daydreaming, just don't sit well with the rest of the album. That's not to say that I don't like those two songs, they're both great. It's just that Burn the Witch is too upbeat (in speed not in attitude) for the wandering dreary angst of the rest of the album. Daydreaming is also a wondrous sprawling epic, but when I am in the mood to listen to that song, I'm rarely in the mood to listen to the rest of the album. However, once we get to Decks Dark, the album begins to coalesce. The rest of the album is a mix of acoustic guitar, piano, and Johnny Greenwood's lush orchestral backdrops, all as a gentle land for Thom Yorke's voice to dance around in. This album comes after Yorke broke up with his partner of twenty years, and the heartache permeates through all of the album. Radiohead always exists within a certain realm of despair but what was once directed at the injustices of the world is now directed at the injustices of human emotion. It's just as powerful as anything Radiohead has created and is the perfect album to listen to on a rainy day of self reflection.
Song: Decks Dark (Again, couldn't find a proper streaming option for this one, so you get this weird fan video of driving)
13. Deftones - Gore
Contrary to what one might think with an album called Gore, this is not the Deftones' heaviest record, actually closer to the least. Saturday Night Wrist was their last album that was this light on brain rattling riffs.; that album compensated by being weird, seeing the band try a bunch of new sounds, inviting a ton of guests into the studio and seeing what stuck. The year after that album was released, their bassist fell into a motorcycle accident induced coma and when the band eventually came back together to record, they turned to a heavier sound for their twin perfect albums Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan. Gore compensates for the downturn in heaviness by experimenting with different effects and creating interesting atmospheric sounds to fill in the gaps. Deftones haven't been strangers to atmospherics since adding keyboardist/turntableist (a word?) Frank Delgado to their roster full time for White Pony and his work takes front stage here, providing the lush background for each track. During the refrains on Acid Hologram, singer Chino Moreno's vocals sound like they've been left in the dryer too long; randomly spotty, full of holes. I love the Deftones because even on an album that will not go down as their greatest (at least in my humble opinion), it's still full of great songs that I love. They keep making albums I like and moving into new interesting areas of sonic aggression at the same rate as they explore the quieter aspects of themselves as musicians. They rattle my brain in the most interesting way.
Song: (L)MIRL
12. Kero Kero Bonito - Bonito Generation
Have you ever wondered what it would sound like if an N64 took a bunch of Ecstasy and then composed a bunch of songs for Yo Gabba Gabba? If you answered yes to that question, then the second album from British trio Kero Kero Bonito should be right in your wheelhouse. Some of the songs steal beats straight from N64 games, others like Big City simply sound like a cruise through one of those cities that were in the distance that you drove towards in Cruis'n USA. Where their last album was pretty DIY, the production has definitely improved on Bonito Generation. Vocalist Sarah Midori Perry switches between English and Japanese, sometimes mid-statement, but as she sings on Try Me "I speak different languages/And people get what I mean." This album also contains my favorite song of 2016, second single Lipslap. The video for it is below, I love this song. This band is like Cartoon-Trap music. Let me give you a couple of lines here, also from Try Me, that explain KKB perfectly, "Try me! Try me! Did you know I can do anything? Just witness this impressive list of my activities: Business! Dancing! Throwing a party...with you!"
Song: Lipslap
11. Pet Shop Boys - Super
Pet Shop Boys' thirteenth studio album, Super hits the electro-beats hard. Pet Shop Boys have been making music longer than I have been alive, and yet they still bring high quality pop-electro-dance along with Neil Tennant's storytelling songwriting. This album has a song about life in your twenties. It has a song about the depression inherent in being a robot. There's a song that tells the worldview of a depressed Kim Jong-Il-esque dictator, just as ready to give up his power as his people are to take it from him. Pazzo! is like an Italian explosion of disco beats. As Tennant sings on Burn, after all these years they'e "going to burn this disco down before the morning comes." I saw PSB live in August and the light show was one of the best that I have ever seen. It was crazy.
Song: Pazzo!
10. Goblin Cock - Necronomidonkeykongimicon
Goblin Cock is the metal side project of Rob Crow (formerly? of Pinback. I'm not exactly sure what the current status of Pinback is). While the name of the band may seem intimidating, the real keystone to this band is the fact that tucked away into the title of this album is everyone's favorite video game monkey, Donkey Kong. Goblin Cock was created by Crow with the intention of bringing some fun into the metal genre, and they do so by inserting light-hearted lyrics into stoner rock songs. Still the same baller riffs you hope for, but full of lines like this one from album standout Montrossor, "Oh Montrossor, we have floated above many oceans tonight upon your brown wings, Oh Montrossor, we will crush the oppressive intentions of all that would cheapen our love." This album wails on every track, from bruising instrumental Youth Pastoral to the water slide themed Flume. But while some of these song topics may sound silly (The Undeer is about a zombie deer), if you didn't know the names of the songs and you didn't look up the lyrics, you'd have no idea because the music rocks so hard, especially Crow's unforgiving, churning guitar. There may be fun at heart, but there's still metal deep at the soul. Side Note: This album is very good at drowning out the roar of the Blue Line. That train is so old, it sounds like it's being driven by some kind of Hey Arnold ghost.
Song: Montrossor
09. White Lung - Paradise
Canadian band White Lung's newest album traffics in something along the lines of hardcore-punk. Every aspect of this band is vicious, from singer Mish Way-Barber's snarl (as well as her being a straight up badass).......(seriously, click on that link, it will make you love rocker women as much as I do) to guitarist Kenneth William's spiraling licks. They can slow it down if they want to (Below is basically a Paramore song if not for the way-too-awesome guitar solo at the end), but White Lung really excels when they are setting the world aflame and then making the ashes vibrate into the air from the power of their speakers. This is all before we even get to Way-Barber's lyrics, for instance there's this gem from Kiss Me When I Bleed, "I will give birth in a trailer, huffing the gas in the air, baby's born in molasses, like I would even care." This album is 29 minutes of fury. Paradise kind of reminds me of the soundtrack of the game that came with our Playstation 2, ATV Offroad Fury 2. That lineup might seem weird to compare, but my siblings will know what I'm talking about.
Song: Demented
08. Wall of Death - Loveland
Wall of Death are the modern incarnation of Pink Floyd, possibly crossed with The Horrors. Every song builds up to a psychedelic climax. How Many Kinds churns along gloomily through a haunted french observatory before busting out the most Doors-like keyboards ever. Blow the Cloud sounds like a ride through the stratosphere on a magic carpet. Dreamland sounds like it's underwater, especially with the surfer guitar that ends the song. Chainless Man fluctuates between shrill keyboards and crunching guitars, the album's most aggressive song, but even it melts into a liquid haze for portions. The album ends with the ten plus minute epic Memory Pt. 1 & Pt. 2, easily the best track. It starts with a slinky guitar riff that repeats while slowly other electronics are layered in, the keyboard first, then thirty seconds later the rhythm section. Eventually the vocals come in like droning chants, before giving way to a dizzying synth line. This is all only three minutes into the song.
Song: Memory Pt. 1 & Pt. 2
07. The Coathangers - Nosebleed Weekend
I've seen The Coathangers twice. The first time was at 10:30 AM as the first band playing on the stage that No Doubt was playing on at Riot Fest in 2015. I missed the first half of their set because Riot Fest opened the South Gate a half hour after they opened the North Gate (Fucking Bullshit!). The second was at 10:30 PM at Beat Kitchen (in Chicago, in case you don't know where I call my residence). The second show was like nothing I'd ever seen. It was so loud, in such a small space, that if I didn't already know the lyrics to all the songs, I would not have known which songs were which. It was amazing. Nosebleed Weekend sees the ladies polish up their studio presence while still maintaining their edge and black spit. On Squeeki Tiki, Julia Kugel plays a squeaky toy instead of a guitar, and the song still maintains it's malice. Kugel's high-pitched vocals are the perfect foil for drummer Stephanie Luke's gravel pipes. These chicks came to party and to punch you in the face, so just go with it.
Song: Nosebleed Weekend
06. Warpaint - Heads Up
Warpaint has often traveled the path of the girl rock band playing slinky rock music that could be played in a dark bar filled with lingering cigarette smoke, but they've always had a little bit of dance in them. It usually manifests itself in instrumental dance breakdowns. Heads Up is made of the same components except that their priorities have switched, the dancier beats taking the forefront. By Your Side sounds like a panic attack on a dance floor except that the narrator's "got my girls, I'm not alone." While this album has more pep in its step than Warpaint's previous work, Heads Up is still led first and foremost by Jenny Lee Lindberg's steady, funky bass lines, while the rest of the instrumentation spirals around. This album sounds like a Goth Girl making a version of a hip hop album: there are dancy beats, but they are so slow that you could only dance to them by slowly swaying your body back and forth. I feel a certain sadness that I have yet to see Warpaint live. They only tour right after albums come out and it's just never worked out for me. Soon, Warpaint, soon!
Song: Whiteout
05. Badbadnotgood - IV
You may have noticed that there are not a lot of instrumental jazz albums on this list. Badbadnotgood is so cool that they have bucked the trend. These guys make songs that are begging to be sampled, and it's no secret: their last album, Sour Soul, was a collaboration album with Ghostface Killah. They produced a song on Earl Sweatshirt's breakthrough album Doris and performed with him on Jimmy Kimmel (Check out that performance, it was eerily quiet, oh nevermind, apparently Jimmy Kimmel's YouTube account removed the videos. What the holy hell Jimmy Kimmel?!? Leave that shit posted!). The opening song on this album, And That, Too is hypnotic, pairing perfectly with the next track, Speaking Gently: a flurry of keyboard lines and saxophones, before settling down a bit for Time Moves Slow, a beautiful collab with Future Islands singer Samuel Herring. Confessions Pt. II is freaking madness, guest Colin Stetson playing two types of saxophone, his bass sax laying down the beat in the background to open the song before bassist Chester Hansen takes over the beat and the tenor sax emerges to take control. Lavender features the smooth beats of Kaytranada easily intermingling with Badbadnotgood's laidback sound. Usually if I'm on the train and I turn down my music it's because I feel like someone can hear some loud dance beats or female screaming; only with this album do I turn it down because I'm afraid I'll ruin someone's day with saxophones.
Song: And That, Too
04. Fear of Men - Fall Forever
The first line that singer Jess Weiss sings on Fall Forever is "I want to build a world with you" but, despite the fact that we are only five seconds into the song, you know it didn't work out because that line immediately follows a huge wallowing synth note. Fall Forever is missing all of the upbeat jangle of Fear of Men's last album, Loom, but it doesn't suffer for it. This album is just a very realistic break-up themed version of the previous, with a slightly heavier lean on synthesizers to create the landscape, rather than indie guitar, and it creates an album of longing. On Island, Weiss starts strong, " I’m like an island, I don’t need to feel your arms around me" only to go back during the chorus, "You tell me impossible things that break me, You tell me impossible things that shake me to my core." Fall Forever is the musical embodiment of wanting someone but knowing that person is toxic to you, so you try to tell yourself you don't want them because it's good for you, but inside stilling knowing that you do and you probably always will. The two middle tracks of the album, Until You and Ruins, are Portishead-lite: Portishead in the nature of the beat, but lite in that they push it to the background so that Weiss's vocals are still the focus. On Trauma, she realizes "You're not a mirror to me, you're not a mirror at all." On Sane, Weiss talks us through the familiar steps of the final argument that breaks the camels back, "It’s in your eyes when you’re perfectly sane, It’s in your blood when you can’t bear these heavy thoughts again" and then the end of final track Onsra is a repeat of this set of lines "Fall forever, fall together, I don’t need you, I don’t need you, Fall forever, fall together, I don’t need you but I want you so much." The lesson here: Breakups are rough.
Song: Undine
03. Perfume - Cosmic Explorer
Perfume is a Japanese trio of female singers. All of their songs are created by producer Yasutaka Nakata, who is also a member of electronic duo Capsule. Nakata creates big electronic beats, and the girls (known by their stage names, Nocchi, Kashiyuka, A-chan) twirl through them, their voices auto-tuned to the dickens. Actually, I take that back, Cosmic Explorer is definitely the least auto-tuned we have seen Perfume, but even when they are super auto-tuned, it doesn't really matter to me because I don't speak Japanese, so the 90% of their lyrics that aren't in English are really just another instrument to my foreign ears. Regardless of all that, this album is one big electronic explosion. The first two tracks (intro Navigate and the title track) sound like blasting off into space and the rest of the album sounds like star crossed lovers traversing the inky great beyond. Story is one big dance party, with the ladies taking the background and only appearing in between the massive dance breakdowns. Even the slow songs are great; Star Train is a gentle ballad about the power of music in one's life. I saw Perfume play at The Vic Theater in August, and it was great. They performed pretty much the entire new album (including Story, which surprised me since they have so few lines in that song, but they spent the whole time dancing), a couple of oldies, sang an all English version of Baby Face, a great light show, they started right at Eight and were done by Ten, there was a Pokemon Go bit. It was all great, hopefully they get a chance to come back to Chicago.
Song: Tokimeki Lights
02. Wild Nothing - Life of Pause
Gotta love an album that starts with forty seconds of rising atmosphere followed by a marimba. I have a hard time describing this album as a genre, I want to say between Dream Pop and Chillwave, but I think I am throwing Chillwave in because Life of Pause reminds me of a more polished Era Extraña, Neon Indian's second album. Wild Nothing in recorded form is mostly just frontman Jack Tatum, since he writes all the songs and performs all of the instruments on the album except for drums. The guitar changes from super grungy on Japanese Alice (which, if you told me that song was by Pains of Being Pure at Heart, I would believe it) to the surfer guitar of Adore or to the slow stabs of Alien which gives the feel of floating. The title track sounds like a keyboard ballad sung in space. Basically it's a pretty spacey album. To Know You is like a cast off from an old Cars album, all eighties keyboard and fuzzy bass lines. I love chillwave, always have, always will, and this is a really great chillwave album.
Song: Lady Blue
01. Rob Crow's Gloomy Place - You're Doomed. Be Nice.
In 2015, Rob Crow retired from music. He claimed it had no longer become financially responsible for him to be making music when his family was about to lose their house (they didn't end up losing the house). Luckily, that didn't stick because his first reemergence was with this solo album and it is the perfect evolution from everything that I love about his (former?) band, Pinback; a heavier version of that poppy math rock, simple drums, Crow's guitar and voice. But this album is fuller than Pinback's last release. Oh, the Sadmakers opens the album with a poppy upbeat guitar line and Crow's voice much more understandable than before (he drifts back into his usual tone by the end of the song) and that song ends with a viciously loud guitar riff. On This Distance, he sings about trying to forget someone, "Wading through these days til you're just forgotten, I still find time to miss you." Paper Doll Parts sounds like it could have been pulled from one of the early Pinback albums. Quit Being Dicks is this album's mission statement, in which he asks everyone to quit being dicks but also admit that he suffers from fears that could lead to being a dick, "I’m always depressed, I’m burnt of the soul, Bereft of another one to talk away from home, I’m jealous of faith, I know that I’m right, but that doesn’t help me to get to sleep at night." This was a banner year for Mr. Rob Crow in my opinion, as he has taken both my ten spot (for his metal side project, Goblin Cock) and my number one spot! Welcome back, Rob! Thank you for not quitting music!
Song: What We've Been Doing While You Were Away
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