Amph Your top albums of 2016

in any case to pimp was 2015!

 

oh man you gotta listen to the new tribe. you're gonna love it.

 

Four (five) musical offerings from the old guard...

1. Blackstar, David Bowie

The album gets an unfairly bright halo after Bowie's passing, though the excellent title track and "Lazarus" are among his best latter-day songs. The reviews, as could be expected, are hilarious and worth looking up (I took these samples from Wikipedia):

Rolling Stone's David Fricke writes the album is "a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing", which makes a good album sound like a piece of crap. Andy Gill of the Independent has never heard Low or Outside, or in fact must be unfamiliar with Bowie's entire career, and writes that "Blackstar is as far as he's strayed from pop." Michael Rancic of Exclaim! writes that Blackstar is "a defining statement from someone who isn't interested in living in the past," and you wonder if he's talking about the same David Bowie that released some 20+ compilation albums, an astronomical number of retrospectives when you compare it to, say, Paul McCartney's four compilations since 1970. (Blackstar's "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" appeared in a different version on Nothing Has Changed and went by virtually unnoticed.) Listen to Bowie's intriguing 2003 song "Bring Me the Disco King" (the final song on Reality, and for a long time Bowie's final word) to provide yourself with some necessary context.

2. You Want It Darker, Leonard Cohen

Like Blackstar, Cohen's final album (the cover seems to be a negative of Songs from a Room) attracted eagerly generous five-star reviews, though it's harder to listen to, mainly because Cohen's voice had gone way past the point of serviceable. It's a spoken word album, basically, underscored with a Casio keyboard. It has its moments, as a kind of mood piece, and I understand that many music fans long for some "old world" authenticity in an age of American Idol and YouTube starlets, but YWID is no The Future, which is perhaps Cohen's last great album.

3. Blue & Lonesome, The Rolling Stones

There's something funny, and cynical, isn't there, about four old men, multi-millionnaires with houses in the South of France and on Mustique, aligning their corporate schedules so they can record some blues together and the critics hailing the result as "authentic". It's all standard "Blues Night at Joe's Caf" stuff; but then The Stones were always a good party band, with Mick Jagger mimicking Howlin' Wolf and Keith Richards doing his best Chuck Berry impression.

4. Fallen Angels, Bob Dylan

Another covers album, but unlike 2015's Shadows in the Night, which I loved as a kind of late night record, it outstays its welcome quite quickly. Highlights are, perhaps, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams", "Skylark", and "Melancholy Mood", though no one in his right mind would call these in any way must-listens. One for the shelf.

5. Ethel & Ernest (OST Soundtrack)

Paul McCartney wrote a song for the soundtrack to this lovely film, called "In The Blink of an Eye". It's typical McCartney in craftsman mode, which means the song is not very memorable but sweet and pleasant enough to evoke some indistinct feelings of nostalgia.

 

tom, 15 seconds into "We The People"... I'm hooked. Those beats.

 

This whole album is amazing so far. Why did I not know about this?

 

I'm probably going to miss a lot since I went to a ton of concerts this year and there's been some great releases. But for my personal favorites/most listened

Pig - The Gospel
Legendary Pink Dots - Pages of Aquarius
Rome - The Hyperion Machine
Aurora - All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend

I don't have a #5 but I'll throw Snog's Compliance on there, which was technically a 2015 release but toured for it in 2016 for the album so I waited until then to listen.

 

No Drake fans? Kind of refreshing. He's pretty overrated, though I can't speak directly to Views. Hotline Bling was way overrated, I know that.

 

I just realized that I apparently only have two albums that were released in 2016, so far anyway:




I'll probably get some other 2016 albums at some point, such as the final Dillinger Escape Plan album.

 

add this album to my list.

https://soundcloud.com/jamilawoods/sets/heavn