Favorite 10 Albums of 2016

Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, 2016.

Well, this has been a hell of a year, hasn't it?

After the deaths of Bowie and Prince, within a few weeks of each other, I told myself I'd make more of an effort to listen to the artists who are, in the spirit of Bowie and Prince, challenging themselves and their audiences in a quest to make music that sounds like no one else's. I thought of writing about PJ Harvey, Bat for Lashes, Anohni, Radiohead and Jenny Hval, all of whom released ambitious new material in 2016, but, to be honest, none of these albums did much for me.

When compiling a yearly list, you have to play the cards you're dealt. There were a lot of good albums this year by artists who don't try to break the mold. Hell, even Weezer put out a pretty good album in 2016 ... No, wait, I can top that: Even the Monkees put out a pretty good album this year.

One theme really sticks out when I look over my list: women. I fell in love this year with songs by Angel Olsen, Haley Bonar, Margaret Glaspy, Lydia Loveless, Mitski and other women singer-songwriters whose work is grounded in the reality of women's lives. In an election year that was all about a misogynistic con artist running against a flawed but highly qualified woman, even love ballads sounded like protest anthems.

As usual, a few caveats: There were a hell of a lot of records released this year, and I haven't heard all of them. This year was a big one for politically charged hip-hop, but there are a lot of people better qualified than me to write about those records. My tastes are idiosyncratic, and this is an idiosyncratic list.

(Most of the links on album titles below go to the website of the great Minnesota record store Electric Fetus.)

David Bowie, "Blackstar"

When Bowie released "The Next Day" in 2013, it was his first album in 10 years. In the lead-up to the release of "Blackstar," on January 8, Bowie's 69th birthday, the hook was that this would be his "jazz album." As we all know now, the hook of "Blackstar" changed dramatically two days after the album's release, when news broke of his death from the cancer that he had long fought, but kept secret from his fans. Suddenly, all the death-haunted imagery in the lyrics and, especially, the videos for "Lazarus" and "Blackstar" were impossible to see as anything other than as Bowie's reflections on his life as he was facing his imminent mortality. The

news hook of "The Next Day" wore off after a while (for me anyway, it became just another pretty good Bowie album) but the hook for "Blackstar" has not worn off at all. A lot of the imagery in those videos I mentioned (the dead astronaut, the striped leotard) are specific to Bowie, but each of us has our own mortality to face, and lyrics like "I've got scars that can't be seen" can mean something very personal to all of us.

It turns out this  isn't a jazz album so much as a rock album performed with musicians who are better known for playing jazz. (Remember that Bowie's musical education started off with him trying to play jazz sax.)  Still, it sounds different from Bowie's other albums in a way that will always set it apart, even for people who discover "Blackstar" in the future and don't have first-hand experience of the link between its release and his death.

Lucy Dacus, "No Burden"

Richmond, Virginia, singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus released "No Burden" in February on the tiny record label EggHunt, and the veteran indie rock label Matador re-released it in August after it had gathered heavy buzz. Dacus told Pitchfork she chose Matador after considering offers from 19 other labels. One listen to the lead-off track, "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" and you'll hear why. Her voice is strong but intimate, amazing without her being show-offy about it. Even when the songs are fast (well ... mid tempo) her voice seems to take its time. Her lyrics are smart ("I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" manages to tackle the concept of performative femininity without being pretentious about it) and the musicianship sharp, but the songs are simple enough to be accessible to just about anyone. It's familiar -- at times she calls to mind Sharon Van Etten, Beth Orton or Jolie Holland -- but Dacus doesn't sound quite like anyone else. "Without you I am surely the last of our kind," she sings on the songs "Dream State" and "Familiar Place," and the repetition of that phrase makes it sound like something more than a post-breakup lament.

Katy Goodman and Greta Morgan, "Take it, it's Yours"

If I just describe this album to you, it won't sound like much: A couple women from current indie pop bands sing songs from the punk era, and perform them in a quiet and contemplative style. Ho-hum, right? But I ended up listening to this album many times this year. In particular I love the version of the Gun Club's  "Sex Beat." Katy Goodman (Vivian Girls, La Sera) and Greta Morgan (Summer Carnivore) put the emphasis on the lyrics, bringing out poetry I never fully appreciated in the original. The album title comes from the Replacements' "Bastards of Young," which has some of my favorite lyrics of all time, but Goodman and Morgan's voices add a new shade of meaning when they sing what was, for Paul Westerberg, little more than the last line in the refrain: "We are the sons of no one / Bastards of young / The daughters and the sons." And even on songs that aren't particularly poetic, like the Misfits' "Where Eagles Dare," it's funny to hear them sing, "I ain't no goddamn son of a bitch / You better think about it baby!"

Summer Cannibals, "Full of It"

Don't let Greta Morgan and Katy Goodman give you the impression that women can't sing loud punk songs in 2016. Summer Cannibals (no relation to Springtime Carnivore)  is a young Portland, Oregon, band that combines distorted guitars, breakneck drums and snarling vocals in a way that calls to mind the heyday of alternative rock in the '90s without sounding like a pastiche. Gives me hope, somehow. Check out the roaring title track. Turn it up!

Charles Bradley, "Changes"

The great New York record label Daptone Records is devoted to appreciating the sounds and style of funk, soul and related music from the 1960s and '70s, but it has also staked its reputation on reviving the careers of singers from that era who didn't get a fair shake when they were young. The two most prominent of these have been Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley. Sadly, Jones died in November after a long battle with cancer. Bradley announced this fall that he is getting off the road while he battles stomach cancer. I was fortunate enough to see him in concert this spring, and he presented such a loving, positive force onstage that it made me feel good just to be in the same room as him.

Bradley once billed himself as a James Brown impersonator, and his voice is more grunting and squealing than cooing or wailing. But he conveys real emotion. Backed up by the excellent Menahan Street Band, he begins the album singing, "God Bless America," but soon he's agonizing, "I'm go---ing through cha--anges." It's a cover of a Black Sabbath song -- as a friend called it, the worst Black Sabbath song -- but it feels so beautiful, so Charles Bradley and so America 2016 that it just hurts.

Quilt, "Plaza"

I don't usually go for retro-hippie stuff or freak-folk or whatever you call it, but these longhairs sing lovely vocal harmonies over psychedelic jams with cool touches like buzzing organs, Eastern-
sounding guitar melodies and off-kilter string arrangements. There's definitely a '60s vibe going on here, but it sounds like something fresher than a pastiche. Check out the video for "Roller," the most modern-sounding track on the album and my favorite.

Terry Malts, "Lost at the Party"

Terry Malts is a California three-piece whose noisy guitars and stentorian vocals can't mask the fact that their songs are so melodic and funny that you want to sing along the first time you hear them. On their third album, "Lost at the Party," they turn down the feedback, take the tempo down a notch and add very '80s sounding melodic guitar hooks, combined with lyrics that are more concerned with romance and regret than, say, zombies at J. Crew.
Listen to "Gentle Eyes" and tell me that wouldn't have gone on every mix tape you made in 1987. Is this the kind of music we needed in 2016? I don't know, but I love it.

Laure Briard, "Sur la Piste de Danse"

My fascination with retro sounds this year was not limited to English-language music. "Sur la Piste de Danse" ("on the dance floor") is a psychedelic record in the vein of Serge Gainsbourg's classic 1960s-70s work. The strings are lush and just a little weird. The female vocals are not what anyone would call vitruosic, but have a lot of character. When I heard the title track, I ordered my copy from France. For some reason, it was delivered to the house of a neighbor I didn't know, and so a nice old lady went around door to door on my block trying to find me before leaving it at my side door. That scene would make a pretty good music video.  

Savages, "Adore Life"

There was a lot of buzz about this London all-female band when their debut album came out in 2013, and the hype for their follow-up early this year was intense, but to be honest, I had all but forgotten about the album until I started looking back over this year's releases. Listening to it again, I stumbled on the line "I need something new in my ears," from the song "I Need Something New." Yeah, I thought, I need to hear some new music too! And then I listened a little more closely and realized Jehnny Beth was talking about something else. Wow, is she singing what I think she's singing? Yes. I listened to the song "Adore" again and, in my post-election depression and fear, these lines really spoke to me: 

I know evil when I see it

 I know good and I just do it 

If I hadn't been so starved 

Is it human to adore life?

Maybe I shouldn't concentrate on lyrics so much in a list like this one, but I'm writing this while the recent death of Leonard Cohen, one of the music world's greatest poets, is weighing on me. I'm not saying Savages are in his league, but when I think of Cohen, I think there's more to the Bowie/Prince spirit than simply not sounding like anyone else; you've got to have something to say, too.

 Various Artists, "Continental Drift"

I'm bending the usual rules here by including a compilation album. This is a collection of eight songs by four bands, put together by the U.S. indie label Slumberland Records in conjunction with the great, UK indie label Fortuna Pop! These two labels have put out some of my favorite records in recent years. Fortuna Pop! announced that it's closing shop soon, so now's a good time to celebrate the label.

It's also a good time to celebrate what I like about indie pop. This is a scene that developed largely as a way for women and gentle men to create a space for themselves amid the aggression of the punk and post-punk scenes: You couldn't mosh, stage-dive or start fights to Beat Happening, so the aggro kids stayed away and made room for kids in sweaters to dance and flirt with each other. Among the four bands represented here, you'll find more female than male vocalists, and I'm gonna guess all the men wear glasses and spend their evenings reading.

With the political winds changing in the U.S. and the U.K., it looks like things are going to get a lot harder for the kinds of women and gentle men who find a home in indie pop, but I hope the bands on "Continental Drift" can keep going. I can't wait to hear a full album from Philadelphia's Mercury Girls, and Scotland's Spook School is a lot of fun. Baltimore's Wildhoney is a cool find: The band straddles the line between indie pop and shoegaze in a way that I haven't heard since, I don't know Rocketship or Velocity Girl. The shoegaze scene tends to produce inwardly-focused and apolitical music, but indie pop, though sometimes derided as "bedsit music," tends to recognize that the personal is political. So, the mixture of the two can get interesting. After our recent disaster of a presidential election, Wildhoney announced the following on its Bandcamp page:

***We will be making all of our catalog, including this release, available for pay-what-you-want download for the rest of 2016 with all proceeds benefiting each organization below equally.
Planned Parenthood Action
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
The Trevor Project
Black lives matter. LGBTQIA lives matter. Women and their choices over their bodies matter. People of color matter.***

Maybe the indie pop kids are going to be OK, after all.