(Every January, the talented songwriter/ music journalist Tris McCall conducts a detailed survey of his music-geek acquaintanceship about the year in music just passed. Starting with best albums, and best singles, he proceeds to a wide array of categories more specific — best singing, best concert, best liner notes, etc… — and often more potentially snotty, from “song that would drive you craziest on infinite repeat” to “hoary old bastard who ought to spare us all and retire”. He encourages not just votes but explanations, rants, and jokes.
The following is part one of my ballot, which turned out to be the most informational and least over-excitable. It’s simply my favorite albums of 2016, first a list, then paragraphs of description / discussion below to cover anyone I didn’t end up discussing at length later in the ballot. For each album I’ve linked to a song I consider representative of its strengths.)
Album of the Year
1. Esperanza Spalding, Emily’s D+Evolution
2. Shearwater, Jet Plane and Oxbow
3. Deerhoof, the Magic
4. Saul Williams, Martyr Loser King
5. Emma Pollock, In Search of Harperfield
6. David Bowie, Blackstar
7. Regina Spektor, Remember Us to Life
8. Aesop Rock, the Impossible Kid
9. Mike Keneally, Scambot 2
10. Tribe Called Quest, We Got It from Here
Album honorable mention(s)
Crying, Beyond the Fleeting Gales
Dear Hunter, Hymns with the Devil in Confessional
Dowling Poole, One Hyde Park
Edensong, Years in the Garden of Years
Everything Everything, Get to Heaven
Field Music, Commontime
Kayo Dot, Plastic House on Base of Sky
King Gizzard + the Lizard Wizard, Nonagon Infinity
Knifeworld, Bottled out of Eden
Kiran Leonard, Grapefruit
Jon Lindsay, Cities and Schools
Mamma non Piangere, N.3
Melt Yourself Down, Last Evenings on Earth
Anna Meredith, Varmints
Minotaurs, Weird Waves
Overlord, the Well-Tempered Overlord
Renaldo + the Loaf, Gurdy Hurding
Dawn Richard, Redemption
Right Hand Left Hand, S/T
Xenia Rubinos, Black Terry Cat
Shamblemaths, S/T
Sleigh Bells, Jessica Rabbit
Elza Soares, a Mulher do Fim do Mundo
Strength of Materials, Inclusive Fitness
Thank You Scientist, Stranger Heads Prevail
Tonedeff, Polymer
Kanye West, the Life of Pablo
This is probably the first time I’ve had three hip-hop albums in my top ten list. A fourth, Tonedeff’s Polymer — which has the year’s best hip-hop singing, most impressive rhyme schemes, and most impressive musical variety — didn’t miss by much; its main drawback is structural, putting Tonedeff’s braggadocio tracks before the thoughtful and diaristic tracks that tell us about his family and motivational quests and psych meds, and give us any reason to care what his “competitive nature” is up to. Kanye’s Life of Pablo, easily 2016's best and most dedicated album about what it's like to be Kanye West and to think all the time about Kanye West, is erratic but often stunning, and the brief a-cappella auto-tribute "I Love Kanye" is almost as funny as his last album's "I am a God".
A Tribe Called Quest were a surprise for me, as I don’t recall liking their original albums (granting I only a college kid back then), and unlike a lot of my favorite hip-hop, they can’t in any sensible way be re-interpreted as an offshoot of rock. The bit where they’re an offshoot of Gene Wilder’s turn as Willy Wonka is damn hard to resist, though. Aesop Rock’s excellence is the opposite of a surprise, except that it’s nice to learn he doesn’t lose any of his poetic power by scaling back the density of his references.
I have no idea why Saul Williams keeps getting overlooked in critic polls, though: powerful deep voice, inventively urgent rhythms, cogent political lyrics that leave room for him to emerge as a character (I love his own casual drag-wear in the lyrics of the pro-transgender anthem “Think Like They Book Say”). Is it a problem that he’s worked so much with Nine Inch Nails? Aesop and Kanye haven’t been hurt by sampling Emerson-Lake-Palmer or King Crimson. I don’t get it.
Shearwater’s Jet Plane and Oxbow is a candidate for my favorite U2 album now, advancing the textures and spaciousness of the Joshua Tree while infusing the drive of their debut Boy. Except that reductionism doesn’t work, of course: Bono wasn’t and isn’t a careful, reserved, poetry-writing ornithologist, either as a frontman or in his songs. Shearwater as a band can’t *quite* throw themselves into full anthem mode; I don’t need them to, and it wouldn’t work with leader Jonathan Meiburg’s worldview anyway.
As for David Bowie, well… in 2014, my mom died of cancer. She’d moved into a grandmother apartment attached to our house, and it devastated me watching her decline: first losing the ability to garden, then to take her several-mile walks in the morning, then to buy her own groceries, then to read any book that wasn’t a light romance novel, finally to even utter sentences related to reality instead of hallucination. My mom was one of the smartest, funniest, kindest people I ever knew: I trust the nurses when they tell me she handled her decline with unusual grace and panache. David Bowie handled his by releasing the most daring, inventive, sui-generis, *best* album of his career. I’m sad he died, but holy crap what a way to go.
Emma Pollock and Regina Spektor made the year’s two prettiest pop-song records. It was also an excellent year for energetic, Beatles/ Cars/ Blur-defined pop-song records as well: Everything Everything, Overlord, Jon Lindsay. Sleigh Bells added some thump and some canniness from hair-metal and current radio pop. Crying felt centered in mid-90s alternative guitar rock, but then, on the best tracks, the New Wave keyboard hooks would kick in. Anna Meredith mixed propulsive synth-pop into an album also consisting of galumphing classical music and graceful electronic instrumentals.
Also energetic and poppy, Field Music vie with the Dowling Poole for Best Historical Recreation. Field Music do Todd Rundgren’s early 1970s soul-pop (although with bits of Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder and More Songs about Buildings and Food attached), and Dowling Poole inhabit the jolly musical-hall psychedelia of XTC’s spinoff Dukes of Stratosphear project. I admit I preferred the first Dowling Poole album Bleak Strategies, which suggested all different eras of XTC at once, mingling in the spikier experimental bits; in retrospect one of my top three albums of 2014. But there’s nothing wrong with new great songs in pre-explored territory that was only ever lightly settled.
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Progressive rock had an excellent year for me too. If we assume “progressive” is any rock where excellent musicians incorporate ambitious new sounds and structures, then we can file Esperanza Spalding, David Bowie, and Deerhoof into the genre. The Magic is Deerhoof’s 17th album, each of them bounding ahead with squeaky, angular approaches to songwriting; yet somehow, braced by new garage-rock impulses and some flashes of sheer genius, it’s their masterpiece (I want to say their Great Leap Forward except history has now assigned that phrase the meaning of “leaving millions of dead bodies in its path”). Kiran Leonard’s Grapefruit would be a Prog-Rock highlight too with its digressively weird and in-your-face chamber-pop, and Elza Soares’s Mulher do Fim do Mundo with a bunch of avant-Brazilian musicians co-writing feminist punk songs with a smart, cranky septugenarian. Xenia Rubinos gives us rap, rock, brass, adventurous vocal theatrics, and triumphantly bizarre drumming. The Minotaurs are filed under jazz (and strikingly pleasant jazz at that), but they play with time signatures and they sing songs, some of them 7+ minutes each, so can they be prog too? I’d mean it only as a compliment.
But even if we limit the label — conservatively! — to bands who are usually considered Progressive, there was a lot to enjoy. Mike Keneally and Thank You Scientist featured slickly-produced melodic guitar rock, jazz leanings, and complex song structures. Dear Hunter seem to be prog most because of their storytelling ambition, leveraged over several albums, but also for a genre mix that handles orchestral, choir, and classical guitar music as easily as strutting rock, big band jazz, and heavy metal. Knifeworld give us expansive rock in love with unlikely chord changes and impressionistic, subtly touching-or-creepy lyrics. Edensong have a 1973 first-wave feel, but including the old exploratory spirit enough to not actually sound like any of the old prog bands. Although the flute player’s really into Ian Anderson’s early work.
Mamma non Piangere’s N.3 is from the Slapp Happy/ Henry Cow inheritance of progressive rock, short theatrical songs with strange women singing difficult and improbable melodies that a few of us learn to adore. Renaldo and the Loaf, reuniting for their first album since 1987, pursue the Residents / early Tall Dwarfs path of making up strange, naggingly off-kilter textures, tunes, and vocals that they drive home with rhythmic emphasis until a listener either goes “aaack!” or decides they’re hooky. With the Residents, frankly, I usually side with “aack!”; Renaldo this year did a lot to make me smile. Kayo Dot, meanwhile, essentially made dark synth-pop this year, but an exceptionally dense, layered, rhythmically complex sort.
As for Shamblemaths’ self-titled debut, it serves as a 3-track, 50-minute whirlwind tour of these facets of prog-rock history and more. As a teacher, I'm a huge fan in theory of introductory overviews, but as art goes, they're the kind of efforts that leave an impression if and only if a band writes well enough to make something new and worthy in each style. Which is a ridiculous and improbable standard. Which Shamblemaths meet.
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Not remotely prog: King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizzard gather nonstop fuzz-rock momentum with stabs of synthesizer — Conquering Robots of the Stone Age — over the course of nine songs that all sound the same, thus all sound equally good. Melt Yourself Down pull a similar trick with horns and rigidly percussive ethnic folk-rock; I hadn't consciously realized until putting this together that both bands open their albums with stomping anthems in 7/8 time, but sometimes arty notions like that are best made with sledgehammers. (I suppose the comedian Gallagher tried to tell me that long ago.) Right Hand Left Hand have a similar appeal their with ominous, groove-based instrumental rock.
Dawn Richard, whose Blackheart was in my top ten last year, returned with the almost-as-excellent Redemption. In some ways joining the lush commercial R+B style of Frank Ocean and James Blake, and Beyonce’s downtempo moods — maybe even the trip-hop of Portishead — she’s also as busy experimenting with abstract electronics as Low-era Bowie, and the ways they can interact with the human voice as Holly Herndon or Jenny Hval. Somehow I find her combinations more gorgeous and head-spinning than any of theirs.
Oh, and Ford Pier, Canadian record-store clerk and one of my favorite lyricists — especially in the categories of “philosophical musings” and “snotty one-liners” — released an all spoken-word-and-bowed-strings album, Inclusive Fitness, under the new band name Strength Of Materials. I like that he's changing direction -- his last two albums with the Ford Pier Vengeance Trio had ignored his classical training and soundtrack expertise in favor of semi-pure (although excellent) punk rock. I'm not sure what I think about the equally specific narrowness of his new focus yet. But I enjoy it enough that I’ll give it lots of listens to help convince me.
(Continue to part 2)
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