2016 albums of the year
Well, this is embarrassingly late.
At the end of every year I like to take stock of what I’ve listened to and declare some kind of outright favourite. What constitutes the ‘best’ album every year is a nebulous concept, but it’s always whatever I’ve enjoyed the most at that given time.
At the end of 2016… I wasn’t writing much. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about much beyond work and the day-to-day of everyday life. I’d listened to a lot of music, but I was listening without conscious critique.
Not having a record of what I was enjoying seems wrong. So here, eight months into the following year, are a list of four albums that were great in 2016 and are still great now.
I’ve been enchanted by two British albums, both released early in the year and both feeling spritely and springlike despite their subject matter being anything but.
Emma Pollock continues her post-Delgado run of brilliant solo pop with In Search of Harperfield. Emma’s solo work has always felt calmer and more reflective than her work with her former bandmates, and this is very true here. Sure, there’s the odd full band pop banger like Parks and Recreation, but most of the songs are stripped back and built around a stringed instrument or two. A string quartet floats over many of the tracks, but Emma’s clever enough to vary the production on every song so it never feels that this is An Acoustic Album, or A Pop Album. That’s a remarkable feat, especially as it still feels like a single cohesive piece of work. Even more remarkable that it’s so multi-tonal when much of the album is about loss, the death of her parents, and nostalgia. It’s one of those rare albums that seems so simple on first listen but reveals new facets on every listen.
The opposite is true for Field Music’s Commontime.
Just like everything they’ve done, Commontime is an album of complex production that sounds like a million experiments performed by fun early seventies McCartney if he was having more fun. It’s a build on their previous work Plumb, taking much of the same style but dispensing with the scrapbook-like nature in favour of fourteen discrete and very different tracks.
And those tracks are jawdropping. So many of them could have been singles, and it baffles the mind why the ones that were didn’t dominate the playlist of every single station. They’re a great band – clever, focused, and, I’ll say it again, outright fun. And this is them at the top of their game. They know what works for them, but they’re still experimenting. It’s such a contradiction: each song’s so different, but there’s a definite, almost indefinable Field Music style to everything they do.
Did I mention how fun they are? They’re fun. Argh, just the thought makes me want to listen to 'Disappointed' eighteen times in succession.
By comparison, Casino Drone by the oddly-titled Mike Adams At His Honest Weight is an album of singular style: uncomplicated midwestern mid-naughties power pop. It feels like a warm homecoming hug, immediately nostalgic but about the everyday life of someone with responsibilities, a job, a family. It’s that combination of sounding so much like an album-of-youth but with lyrics that are sometimes every day, sometimes melancholy, sometimes witty.
It’s an almost entirely unfashionable album in every sense, but it’s a confident collection of songs that just doesn’t care. It feels like an album created in snatches while the family does other things on weekend afternoons, and it should be a self-indulgent ramshackle mess. It is everything but.
A common theme amongst all these albums is nostalgia. Perhaps I’m at that age. It’s a bit of a cliché for annual best-of lists to have a ‘best reissue’ too and I’m loathe to follow type (hello, eight month late post!), but this year it feels apt.
Who on earth were Boots for Dancing? Why did this early eighties Scottish post-punk outfit record just a few singles before fading away? How come they’re now totally unknown?
So many questions. (Inevitably) a compilation of every scrap of material they produced including flawless radio sessions, these fourteen tracks breeze along with a sheen that belies the very short life of the band. All the frantic pace of punk with all the cheery style of pop. They should have a reputation like Orange Juice and a catalogue as extensive as Talking Heads. They don’t. Perhaps that’s good, and the splendour of these few wonderful tracks aren’t exhausted.
Splendid they are. Consider this release essential.
Albums of the year 2016 (in no particular order):
- Boots for Dancing – The Undisco Kidds
- Field Music – Commontime
- Emma Pollock – In Search of Harperfield
- Mike Adams At His Honest Weight – Casino Drone