#what a line up for a day at Way Out West with PJ Harvey too damn

[timedontgiveashit]

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[todaysbiggesthits]

Odds, Ends

The Leftovers

TBH Era:

Nasty’s 16-20

16. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories 17. Chromatics - Kill for Love 18. A$AP Rocky - Live. Love. ASAP 19. Yeasayer - Odd Blood 20. Action Bronson - Blue Chips 1 & 2

Larson’s 16-20

16. Lizzo - Cuz I Love You 17. Taylor Swift - Lover 18. Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm 19. tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L 20. The Weeknd - Beauty Behind the Madness

BC’s 16-20

16. Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation 17. Disclosure - Settle 18. Kurt Vile - b’lieve i’m goin down 19. Lotus Plaza - Spooky Action at a Distance 20. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Bronco’s 16-28

16. High on Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis 17. Violent Soho - Violent Soho 18. Moontooth - Chromaparagon 19. Thou - Rhea Sylvia 20. Alien Weaponry - Tu 21. Elder - Reflections of a Floating World 22. Inter Arma - The Cavern 23. Windhand - Eternal Return 24. MAKE - The Golden Veil 25. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity 26. Slugdge - Esoteric Malacology 27. Monoliths - Monoliths 28. Violent Soho - Hungry Ghosts

Code’s 16-26

16. Robyn – Body Talk 17. Colleen Green – Sock it to Me 18. Colleen Green – I Want to Grow Up 19. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy 20. Washer – All Aboard 21. Spook Houses – Trying 22. Alien Boy – Sleeping Lessons 23. EMA – Exile in the Outer Ring 24. PAWS – Cokefloat! 25. Snooty Garbagemen – Snooty Garbagemen 26. All Dogs - All Dogs

Chap’s 16-33

16. Tomberlin - At Weddings 17. Dan Deacon - America 18. Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory 19. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell! 20. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming 21. Jessica Pratt - Quiet Signs 22. Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear 23. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree 24. Lost Under Heaven - Spiritual Songs for Lovers to Sing 25. Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Tragedy 26. Kanye West - Yeezus 27. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake 28. Girls - Broken Dreams Club 29. Robyn - Body Talk 30. No Age - Everything In Between 31. The National - Trouble Will Find Me 32. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost 33. Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation

JD’s 16-57

16. Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour 17. Animal Collective - Centipede Hz 18. DIIV - Oshin 19. Ariel Pink - Pom Pom 20. Beach House - Depression Cherry 21. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains 22. Kanye West - The Life of Pablo 23. Panda Bear - Tomboy 24. Death Grips - The Money Store 25. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake! 26. Slowdive - Slowdive 27. Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell! 28. Radiohead - The King of Limbs 29. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening 30. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest 31. Destroyer - Kaputt 32. Grouper - Ruins 33. Parquet Courts - Sunbathing Animal 34. Jessica Pratt - Quiet Signs 35. Joanna Newsom - Divers 36. Nine Inch Nails - 3 EPs 37. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs 38. The Strokes - Angles 39. William Basinski - A Shadow in Time 40. Todd Terje - It’s Album Time! 41. The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year 42. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica 43. Julianna Barwick - Will 44. Eleanor Friedberger - Rebound 45. LCD Soundsystem - American Dream 46. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City 47. Panda Bear - Buoys 48. No Age - Snares Like a Haircut 49. Dirty Beaches - Badlands 50. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Before Today 51. Underworld - Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future 52. Frankie Cosmos - Zentropy 53. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree 54. The Voidz - Virtue 55. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - The Social Network Soundtrack 56. Pantha du Prince - Black Noise 57. Colleen Green - Sock it to Me

‘19:

Laser’s 16-20

16. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest 17. The Black Keys - “Let’s Rock” 18. Electric Guest - KIN 19. Stella Donnelly - Beware of the Dogs 20. Tegan and Sara - Hey, I’m Just Like You

Bronco’s 16-20

16. Blackwater Holylight - Veils of Winter 17. Year of the Cobra - Ash and Dust 18. Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race 19. sunn O))) - Pyroclasts 20. Baroness - Gold & Grey

Chap’s 16-20

16. Field Medic - fade into the dawn 17. Brittany Howard - Jaime 18. Mannequin Pussy - Patience 19. The National - I Am Easy to Find 20. Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride

JD’s 16-24

16. Sui Zhen - Losing, Linda 17. Empath - Active Listening: Night on Earth 18. Gesaffelstein - Novo Sonic System 19. Earl Sweatshirt - Feet of Clay 20. No Age - A Cassette of a Live Ambient Performance 21. Paul Maroon - A Two Song 45 I Bought On Etsy 22. Denzel Curry - ZUU 23. Avey Tare - Cows on Hourglass Pond 24. Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride

From the Desk of

Bronco’s Brettnacher-Certified Attendance Report

2019: A Broncospective

This was a year of waiting. Waiting for Tool. And I feel like I treated the rest of the year's music up until that point as thumb-twiddling whilst waiting for the big payoff. This year seemed to be filled with passable hold-over music. And a sense of dread as the months ticked by, that dread that comes with the unattainable expectations I've come to experience as I've grown older. Waiting for something awesome to happen, and then it happens, and it's not nearly as awesome as you hoped it to be. I've come to equate anticipation with dread now...to the point that I do my damnedest to avoid anticipation by pushing everything future out of my mind. So I live in the present now, and I feel totally unprepared every single day. Weekends come and I have no idea what's happening. I really should rethink this strategy and maybe just try not to build up my expectations. Fuck it. Either way, I was dreading the new Tool album. There's no way it could live up to a 13 year wait. Then it came. And it was good. Not redefine my life and realign my soul good, just perfect. It was what we all needed, those of us who have been waiting. One album that definitely wasn't a time-killer during the great Tool wait of nine deen was King Gizzard's 'Infest the Rats Nest.' That easily would have been my number one album this year had it not landed in the same year as Fear Innoculum. I actually had a hard time deciding which one was my number one, but in the end had to place Rat's Nest second. I know these guys have pumped out so many records in the past few years, but I was pleasantly surprised at their ability to sound like themselves while at the same time ripping out a proper metal album.  The subject matter, the riffs, all of it is great. And it's accessible to non-metal folks who want to hear some tasty licks. Lastly, I listened to a lot of hardcore this year too. Unlike any other year, something about it spoke to me. I don't know if it's our current political climate or what, but the indecipherable doomy sludgly stonery spacey lyrics of the stuff I'm usually in to felt like a nondescript blob of meaninglessness (not that I care what their meaning is at any other time). But the hardcore scene felt important. Like something topical was being said (or screamed), and said hard. The sheer anger in the music, I think, reflects the way I feel on a daily basis as I'm inundated with political shit from NYT, WashPo, CNN, etc. etc. etc. News about no news, filler designed to get me pissed off about shit that's out of my control, and designed to push me over the edge when the eventual outcome of all of this outrage is just more outrage that none of the original outrage mattered at all. That feeling of not being heard, the voice of reason being smothered by a sweat stained pillow owned by some bible thumping hypocrite child fucker, is maddening. To the point that all you want to do is scream until you're heard...like Sara Connor at the chainlink fence before Judgement Day destroys the playground and melts her skin off her body. That's what some of these acts have sounded like. And it's scratching an itch. Probably not going to be my jam for an extended period of time, I don't see myself pivoting to this corner of the genre, but like a good enima, this stuff has cleared my brain's bowels for the better this year. Here's to the next chapter, the next decade, and the next Tool album in 2035. Hail Satan, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New (Wave of British Heavy Metal) Year to you all.

From the Bin Bin

Nasty’s Best Rap of the Decade

Nasty’s Video of the Year

Da Baby - “BOP on Broadway”

JD's Silver Screen Video Staff Recommendations: Long Form Shelf

Solange - When I Get Home

Earl Sweatshirt - Nowhere, Nobody

Thom Yorke - Anima

New to Code in 2019

Colleen Green - Dude Ranch (cover of full album) Ganser - Odd Talk Felt - Forever Breathes the Lonely Word Duster - Capsule Losing Contact Dungen - 4 Alien Boy - Sleeping Lessons Charmer - Charmer Michael Cera Palin - I Don't Konw How to Explain It

Interloper’s Corner

Fergwad’s 1-10 of the Decade

1. Tame Impala - Lonerism 2. Tame Impala - Currents 3. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City 4. Beach House - Bloom 5. Kanye West - Yeezus 6. Real Estate - Days 7. Beach House - Teen Dream 8. No Age - Everything in Between 9. Deerhunter - Hacyon Digest 10. Vampire Weekend - Contra

Ferg’s 10 “Call the Fire Department” Songs of the Decade

Tammy Rooney’s 1-10 of ‘19

1. Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride 2. Cass McCombs - Tip of the Sphere 3. William Tyler - Goes West 4. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains 5. Bon Iver - i, i 6. Strand of Oaks - Eraserland 7. Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow 8. Thom Yorke - Anima 9. Deerhunter - Why Hasn't Everything Disappeared Already 10. Hiss Golden Messenger - Terms of Surrender

From the Desk of Code’s Pal Jon Wotman

Artists spend an entire career and oceans of money in an effort to *shimmer.* I Wonder: shrug, yeah I shimmer so what. It’s not hard. -This, and the lines below, taken from an imagined documentary called “'I Wonder' Speaks” Somehow, despite the fact that in its initial release the recording sounds like a construction project nailed hastily in a tin lean-to (and the hammering was also included in the mix)... I Wonder: you take ecstasy and it’s not like everything drops away clean. There’s blood in there, there’s all the memory and old feelings and shit in your brain that that drugs have to sweep out and they don’t want to leave. It’s messy and I made it messy on purpose. You wanna make something really good, it’s got to feel messy even if it’s got the 90 degree bones of a skyscraper underneath. [Handclap.] It’s not hard. “When I look over my shoulder, I know who’ll be on the other side” effortlessly combines gesture, solidity, and faith in what must be the most romantic line of the decade. I Wonder: Everyone thinks writing about this stuff is hard. It’s not. “… and things’ll get trashy when we get to my place… “ presents sex as both without forethought and deeply premeditated, but, in both cases, without judgement… it’s the most erotic line of the decade. I Wonder: I’m not punning. No fucking way. And shame on your for putting me in this position. There’s some judgment for you. Any closing thoughts? I Wonder: Y’know. 

[ricardosousalemos]

Portishead: Dummy

In the UK, a dummy isn’t just a mannequin or an idiot; it’s also what Americans would call a pacifier. Savor the irony in the title of Portishead’s debut album. The album may suggest coziness, sonic swaddling, the gentle soundtrack to a raver’s comedown—and in 1994, ravers were plenty familiar with pacifiers. But Dummy doesn’t coddle, it unsettles. It tastes not like warm milk but coppery and bitter, like blood. Despite its two-plus decades spent soundtracking makeout sessions, it cradles a terrible loneliness in its heart. Despite its reputation as dinner-party music, it is straight-up discomfort food: curl-up-and-die music, head-under-the-covers music. It’s dark, dank, and quintessentially Bristol, mingling a chilling harbor fog with the resin of a thousand spliffs left to burn down in a haze.

With the exception of two UK singles released shortly before the album, there was no advance warning of the wind blowing in from the West Country. Portishead weren’t a gigging band; they only began playing live after the album started selling the kind of numbers that no one, at least no one in the band, expected it to. They were barely a band at all, in the traditional sense of the word. Their core lineup consisted of Geoff Barrow, a 22-year-old hip-hop fan obsessed with turntable alchemy; Adrian Utley, a 37-year old jazz guitarist looking for a way out of the 20th century; and Beth Gibbons, a 29-year-old singer who’d grown up on a farm and, prior to Portishead, had “probably done more singing in her bedroom than on stage,” Barrow reckoned. Yet there isn’t a sound or a syllable out of place on Dummy. For 50 minutes, the album sustains a single, all-enveloping mood; its tracklist is a 10-sided die where every roll comes up some variation of despair.

Today, Portishead are regarded with a certain inevitability—their sound so perfectly executed, so in tune with the tenor of its times—that belies the sheer weirdness of how it probably sounded when you first heard it. It’s true that Dummy carries echoes of many landmark albums of the preceding years: the wistful narcosis of Mazzy Star and Cocteau Twins, the skeletal hip-hop of Eric B. & Rakim, the ethereal torch songs of Julee Cruise. PJ Harvey flits through its margins; so do the Orb’s stoned swirl and Seefeel’s dubby undercurrents. By 1994, Dummy’s after-hours vibe was already familiar from dozens of albums meant primarily for horizontal consumption, such as the KLF’s Chill Out, though Barrow downplayed any link to that scene. “Ambient music has never particularly appealed to me: Push ‘Go’ on a synthesizer, make some noise, put some delay on it and put a couple of sheep noises on it,” he sniffed to Melody Maker in 1995, in a barely disguised dig at Chill Out’s wooly livestock samples.

As much as Portishead’s sound was part of electronic music’s widespread mellowing, the musicians themselves had little truck with the rave scene; their own roots were closer to the dub and breakbeat traditions that had long been cornerstones of multicultural Bristol. Dummy’s closest antecedent was Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and not by coincidence: Barrow had worked as an errand boy and tape op in Bristol’s Coach House Studios while that record was being made.

But Dummy is too idiosyncratic to feel like a calculated response to its predecessors. Its obsessions are too specific, and too doggedly pursued: the spy-movie twang of the guitars, the ripple of the Hammond organs and Leslie cabinets—if anything, its vintage signifiers feel out of step with that era’s rush of pre-millennium tension. Bristol’s junglists were carving new routes to the future in every chopped-up breakbeat, while Portishead were drizzling on muted trumpet solos like so much curdled milk. Where most of the decade’s cutting-edge electronic music was zealous about its agenda, Dummy pledged allegiance only to a mood.

The broad outlines of Portishead’s music are not particularly hard to decipher. They like their tempos slow, their drums crisp, their keyboards velvety. Gibbons sings with a smoky intensity that’s evocative of Billie Holiday and Sandy Denny without stooping to imitation. In the midst of an all-pervasive gloom, key details—tremolo-soaked guitar licks, turntable scratches, an unexpected sample of jazz fusioners Weather Report—glisten like peacock feathers under a blacklight.

They favor sounds imprinted with a host of associations, many of them filmic. Utley’s riffs come straight from John Barry’s James Bond theme; the woozy sine waves of “Mysterons” echo sci-fi soundtracks like The Day the Earth Stood Still; and “Sour Times” loops an extended sample of Lalo Schifrin’s music for Mission: Impossible. Their cinematic inclinations are borne out in the fact that they made an actual short film, To Kill a Dead Man, before the album itself. The 10-minute, black-and-white film is not particularly consequential, but it is notable for the way it visually remixes many of the same influences that make the album feel so instantly familiar. Fortunately, they proved to be far more adept at translating those moods and devices into music.

Like film noir, with its fondness for Venetian blinds and ceiling fans, Dummy thrives on mixing light and dark, hard and soft, positive and negative space. In “Strangers,” clean-toned jazz guitar morphs into a nervous dial-tone buzz. The galumphing rhythm feels like a heavy burlap bag being dragged over railroad ties, but Gibbons’ voice—a home-recorded demo that made the final edit—is a slender thread pulled taut. The metallic rattle at the center of “Sour Times,” an extended Lalo Schifrin sample, might be an alarm clock bouncing across the surface of a trampoline. Expert diggers, they know a nugget when they find it: Flipping Eric Burdon and War’s “Magic Mountain,” they take a sample that De La Soul had put to jubilant use in “Potholes in My Lawn” and turn it seasick and queasy. Even more remarkable is how they treat Johnnie Ray’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on “Biscuit,” slowing its refrain down to 16 RPM and turning a sticky-sweet wad of ’50s bubblegum into a druggy dirge.

Their sense of contrast is particularly noticeable in the album’s rhythms. Barrow’s lickety-split vinyl scratching helps counterbalance the uniformly sluggish tempos, but the real action is in their breakbeats. In “Mysterons,” the looped snare rolls sound like a steel trap snapping shut and being pried back open in quick succession. The “Sour Times” beat resembles James Brown’s iconic “Funky Drummer” break, but transposed for a planet with only half of Earth’s gravity. “Wandering Star” and “Numb,” on the other hand, push forward as though running underwater, every beat a struggle against an overwhelming force. Track after track, the album toggles between crisp steppers and deadweight friction, between ping-ponging ricochets and Sisyphus’ last stand.

This groove was their invention, and theirs alone. Unlike most of their peers, Portishead didn’t rely on the same hoary Ultimate Breaks and Beats bootlegs that fueled the majority of the era’s club tracks. Their music may sound like the work of a couple of obsessive vinyl connoisseurs, but the irony is that they made most of it themselves. Some musicians speak of soundtracks to imaginary films; they created an imaginary soundtrack to use as their source material. Assisted by the drummer Clive Deamer, Barrow and Utley would jam in the studio, creating their own approximations of the ’60s music that inspired them. Once they had their songs engineered on 24-track tape, they'd take the final product and feed it back into their samplers; some material they even pressed onto vinyl dubplates, to manipulate the way a hip-hop producer would cut up breakbeats. Not quite a band, hardly a strictly electronic project, they had to invent their own kind of virtuosity, one that encompassed musicianship, technology, and aura. “It’s the air around the thing,” Barrow told The Wire. “What we are trying to do is create this air, this atmosphere: It’s the stuff that’s in between the hi-hat and the snare that you can’t hear, but if it wasn’t there you would notice it, it would be wrong.”

This air was the medium through which Gibbons’ voice soared. Would Portishead have been one-tenth the band they turned out to be had Barrow and Utley contented themselves with instrumentals, or hired session singers to lend a soulful patina at freelance rates? Not on your life. Gibbons’ voice is the center of the music; she elevates the recordings from tracks to songs, from mere head-nodders to forlorn lullabies.

She follows the contours of her voice along its breathy edge, cutting sharply through the meat of a glissando, falling back on the catch in her throat. Despite her convincing air of sorrow, she’s a knowing, playful singer, capable of shifting emotional registers on a dime, cycling through moods—jazzy and coquettish, grimly resigned, wild with grief—like a housefly tracing squares in empty space. In “Wandering Star,” her tone sounds almost flirtatious, despite the overwhelming vastness of her subject matter: “Wandering stars/For whom it is reserved/The blackness, the darkness, forever.” In the closing “Glory Box,” on the other hand, she is as incendiary as Utley’s overdriven guitar riffs, and when she sings, “This is the beginning/Of forever and ever, oh,” her sigh feels like a hole torn in the fabric of the universe.

And her occasional obliqueness frequently gives way to the album's real emotional payoff: out-and-out dejection. Some lines stand out as clearly as dog-eared diary entries: “Give me a reason to love you/Give me a reason to be a woman”; “Nobody loves me, it’s true/Not like you do”; “How can it feel this wrong?” When her words are hazy, her diction tricky, it might as well be part of a grand and treacherous strategy, like a boxer’s footwork catching you off guard before the knockout punch lands.

Without a public persona to measure Gibbons’ performance against, her presence within the songs was, and remains, that much more formidable. Pop fans typically like to know who is singing to them and why, even if it's an invented character. But that central mystery only makes Dummy that much more compelling. Who is this lovelorn woman marching off to war on “Roads,” her broken pleas part sigh, part icicle? Who will she become on the far side of forever and ever—the promised land of “Glory Box,” an uncharted territory that she makes sound both liberating and terrifying? Dummy arrived at a moment when young people were craving soundtracks for the comedown—but what happens when you follow Portishead all the way down, as far as they want to take us? These questions keep you coming back, trying to puzzle out its intimidating balance between bleakness and blankness.

It’s possible to hear in Dummy a collection of gratifyingly sad-but-sexy gestures, and plenty of Portishead’s followers—Lamb, Morcheeba, Olive, Alpha, Mono, Hooverphonic, Sneaker Pimps, and dozens of other acts forever lost to the cut-out bin of history—did just that. Whole retail empires flourished and collapsed while Portishead and their ilk were piped through the in-store speakers. Is Dummy stylish? Of course it is; you don’t evoke ’60s spy flicks without some deep-seated feelings about aesthetics, panache, the proper cut of a suit. But style, stylishness, is only the beginning. None of Portishead’s imitators understood that it’s not the blue notes or the mood lighting that make it tick—it’s the pockets of emptiness inside. Like Barrow once said, it’s the air.

[shuabert]

Top 50 Albums of 2016

Despite all the ways 2016 was terrible (Brexit, the Syrian humanitarian crisis, extremist violence worldwide, Donald Trump, the deaths of so many of our heroes), one area where 2016 was a success was in terms of the quality of music released. Many of this year’s best albums were a direct response to the state of the world, some angry, some resolved, and some comforting. And others just allowed us to tune it all out and get lost in the sounds. Here is my 2016 year in review. 

Best Soundtrack/Score: Stranger Things Soundtrack (Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein)

Best Soundtrack/Compilation: Jack White - Acoustic Recordings: 1998-2016 (runner up goes to Carly Rae Jepsen for Emotion Side B, which is catchier than any b-sides record should be)

Best Live Album: (It was probably that massive Kate Bush box set, but I didn’t listen to that yet, so let’s go with...) Lissie - Live at Union Chapel

Best EP: Dan Mangan - Unmake

Worst Comeback Attempt: Blink-182 - California

The Carly Rae Jepsen Emotion Award for Most Bangers for your Buck: The Weeknd - Starboy (runners up: Kaytranada - 99.9% and Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman)

And, my top 50 albums of the year (out of the 134 I listened to)

50 - 41

50. Savages - Adore Life 49. Sarah Neufeld - The Ridge 48. Loretta Lynn – Full Circle 47. Låpsley - Long Way Home 46. Kendrick Lamar – Untitled.Unmastered 45. Crystal Castles - Amnesty (I) 44. Car Seat Headrest – Teens of Denial 43. James Blake - The Colour in Anything 42. Swans - The Glowing Man 41. Swet Shop Boys - Cashmere

40 - 31

40. Mitski – Puberty 2 39. Laser - Night Driver 38. PJ Harvey - The Hope Six Demolition Project 37. River Tiber - Indigo 36. Dolly Parton - Pure & Simple 35. Jessy Lanza - Oh No 34. Drake – VIEWS 33. Angel Olsen – My Woman 32. Gord Downie -  Secret Path 31. Andy Shauf -  The Party

30 - 21

30. Santigold - 99¢ 29. Wintersleep -  The Great Detachment 28. Michael Kiwanuka -  Love & Hate 27. Majid Jordan - Majid Jordan 26. Blood Orange – Freetown Sound 25. Rihanna - Anti 24. Danny Brown -  Atrocity Exhibition 23. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool 22. Lissie - My Wild West 21. Alicia Keys - Here

20 - 11

20. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 3 19. Pup - The Dream Is Over 18. Case/Lang/Viers - Case/Lang/Viers  17. Kanye West - The Life of Pablo 16. Kaytranada - 99.9% 15. Hannah Georgas - For Evelyn 14. A Tribe Called Red - We Are the Halluci Nation 13. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree 12. Solange - A Seat at the Table 11. The Weeknd - Starboy

10 - 01

10. Anohni – Hopelessness

“I wanna burn the sky, I wanna burn the breeze / I wanna see the animals die in the trees / Ooh, let’s go, let’s go, it’s only four degrees”

Lines like “Let me be the one…you choose from above,” sound painfully romantic until they come in a song about drone warfare. And that’s only one example of the way Anohni’s Hopelessness blends the beautiful and the horrific. The album reads as the love letter to state-sanctioned violence (geopolitical, environmental, physical) that most of us won’t admit we’re living. Ahnohni’s dizzy croons over blissful electronics are more beautiful than something called “Hopelessness” has any right to be. 

09. A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service

“You bastards overlooking street art / Better yet, street smarts, but you keep us off the charts / So motherfuck your numbers and your statisticians / Fuck y’all know about true competition?”

This never-expected final album from ATCQ exemplifies the phrase, “rolling in their graves,” like a legend resurrected (literally, in the case of Phife Dawg, who appears here posthumously) by a dark present. Making explicit reference to the campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump (even going as far as to sample the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka), the album was timed as a middle finger to a candidate expected to lose. That he won makes it is a necessary balm to the political lesions of the next term. Effortless and full of life, We Got It… shows a group that feels like they never left at all. Legends never die.  

08. Leonard Cohen -  You Want It Darker

“I heard the snake was baffled by his sin / He shed his scales to find the snake within / But born again is born without a skin / The poison enters into everything”

The opening title track on Leonard Cohen’s final album feels prescient, a potent exploration of God and death from a poet who saw both on the horizon. “Hineni, Hineni, I’m ready my Lord,” he sings wearily, but it feels ambivalent. Shit, who wouldn’t be? The instrumentations from Cohen’s son Adam act as a guide for Cohen’s minimalist vocals, here at their most powerful and tired. The blending of romance and religion, the physical and the spiritual are classic Cohen. “I’m leaving the table / I’m out of the game” he says on “Leaving the Table.” You can’t help imagine him tip that iconic fedora with a subtle grin on the way out. You Want It Darker is a stellar album to cap off an unassailable legacy. 

07. Thrice - To Be Everywhere Is to be Nowhere 

“Would you stay with me / if you thought the war was over / and everything made right? / Would you still believe in us? / And would your love for me grow colder / with no one left to fight?”

Thrice’s first album in five years after announcing an indefinite hiatus in 2012 couldn’t have come at a better time. Steeped in politics and apocalyptic imagery, TBEITBN recalls some of the band’s best work while sounding like a perfect encapsulation of the tumult and fear of the past 18 months. With songs about drone bombing, whistleblowing, and foreign policy, this is an album wholly concerned with the state of geopolitics today, though not without its songs of love and hope, however tenuous. It is a blues-rock-meets-post-hardcore manifesto exploring reluctant complicity in state-sanctioned terror, abuse of power, and the fear of self-destruction. All of this with the tight creative energy of a band of best friends who have played together for almost two decades. 

06. David Bowie - Blackstar

“Just like that bluebird / oh, I’ll be free / Ain’t that just like me?”

It is difficult to separate Blackstar from David Bowie’s death, because the album was calibrated and timed so much to be a part of it, a final confrontation to mortality and the legacy of fame. For the first few days it almost felt like his alleged death might be part of some grand performance art piece — that’s so Bowie. A year later Blackstar feels, as it should, like a David Bowie album, full of cryptic imagery, bewildering lyrics, inspired musical flourishes, and emotional resonance. “Blackstar” is the best Radiohead song of the year, jazz inflections and unexpected absurdist turns of lyrical phrase demand repeated, concentrated listening, and the haunting “Lazarus” perfectly  denotes the way in which Bowie’s consistent reinvention has made him an artist outside of time and beyond death. “Everybody knows me now,” he sings on Lazarus. And they always will. 

05. White Lung - Paradise

“I’ve got a basic need / Kiss me when I bleed / They say I split my pride in two / when I became a bride for you / But what do they know?” 

 As deliriously melodic and powerful a punk rock racket as you’ll ever find, Paradise finds Vancouver’s White Lung sharpening their skills and their teeth. Mish Barber-Way’s vocals are more refined but no less sneeringly powerful as she spits over meticulously-arranged and elegantly-produced instrumentations that average under 3 minutes in length. Clocking in at 28 minutes, “Paradise” is the tightest and most purposeful rock record of the year, which is impressive considering how deeply the record explores the body horror inherent in being a woman in a patriarchal society. 

04. Frank Ocean - Blonde

“You showed me love / Glory from above / Regard, my dear / it’s all downhill from here.” 

 Frank Ocean’s long-anticipated follow up to Channel Orange is a challenging first listen, less immediate and more thoughtful than its predecessor. “RIP Trayvon. That nigga look just like me,” Ocean sings on the album opener “Nikes,” a disarmingly down-tempo number whose bittersweetness creeps up and sets the tone for a contemplative and deeply personal album of tonal lethargy and spare instrumentations. References to “pink and white” skies and “black and yellow” streets are prescriptive: this is an album for the fading days of summer, the fading hours of the day, when a twilight drive brings pains of nostalgia and regret to light. 

03. Beyonce - Lemonade

“They say true love’s the greatest weapon / to win the war caused by pain / But every diamond has imperfections / But my love’s too pure to watch it chip away”

Lemonade is the stuff of great drama, a kitchen sink story by way of an epic as it spins out a relationship story without a neat conclusion. It is a master-work of rage and heartbreak and, ultimately, hope, blind as it may be. But that pain is more alive for how Lemonade makes the personal political. This is about more than just Beyoncé and Jay Z, it is about fathers making their daughters tough and setting them up to be betrayed by men just like them. It is about survival and resilience in a world that doesn't care about you. It is a testament to the vision and production that Lemonade mines so many disparate genres (pop, blues, country, r&b, reggae) yet feels so cohesive. Beyoncé was a career milestone, a pop album about the thrills and joy of marriage, but Lemonade is transcendent, a genre-defying album about betrayal and the challenges of marriage as a metaphor for the ways relationships of all kinds destroy and sustain us. 

02. Tanya Tagaq - Retribution

“Sacrifice / Our blood goes back into the earth / In. Out. Womb. Core.” 

 If Mother Earth groaned in pain on Tanya Tagaq’s 2014 album, Animism, then she delights in the destruction of humanity on Retribution, an album that finds the Inuk throat singer croon with a trickster’s smirk that “Gaia likes it cold.” Here, at her most metal, she asserts that “the retribution will be swift” if humanity continues down a path of ecological devastation. Her most sonically-diverse album in vocal and collaborative terms (featuring producer Jesse Zubot’s haunting strings, Christine Duncan and the Element Choir, a cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me” and a collaboration with rapper Shad), Retribution is a career milestone and the most stunning work of Indigenous art of the year. 

01. Chance the Rapper - Coloring Book

“I don’t make songs for free, I make ‘em for freedom.”

Coloring Book plays like the kind of album that could only have been written by someone experiencing the life-changing miracle of childbirth for the first time. Gospel choirs and horns back an album of ebullient joy that in sound and title suggests a blank space full of possibility. The religious fervor of Chance’s unabashed positivity was just what we needed in 2016. Chance’s desire to “give Satan a swirlie” reminded us not to take ourselves too seriously while fighting evil, and “All Night” might be the year’s hardest banger this side of Drake’s “One Dance.” Coloring Book was like a big hug in the face of a cruel year, an invitation for us all to be with family, to remember the good times and to help one another through the bad. By the time the album closes with the refrain “are you ready for your blessings; are you ready for your miracle?” it feels like both a challenge and a plea. Bring on 2017.