2016: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
As we all know, 2016 was by any objective standard a shit-stain of a year and hardly one that merits any more contemplation now that it’s firmly if not distantly in the rearview mirror. And yet here I am and here this is, not just wholly unnecessary but ungodly late as well. Why? Partly because it wasn’t that long ago that I was churning out over 365 missives on music a year, and if I can’t even do one now just a few years on, then that’s just sad. And if I miss a year now, I’ll probably never write a damned thing again and while that actually might not be such a bad thing, I’m not there just yet.
And also because, on a purely selfish level, 2016 wasn’t that bad for me. Getting engaged at the end of 2015 was the first domino in a series of massive life changes, not the least of which was braving the toughest Toronto housing market in forever to buy a house that’s way better than we could have ever expected to land. This meant, of course, finally leaving the downtown condo and ’hood I’ve lived in for the last 17 years, but the transition has been less traumatic than I’d expected and the houseowner life is actually pretty good, save for really missing having covered parking now that Winter has set in.
Musically, my pace of gig-going continued to decelerate from those peak years I now fondly refer to as the “nothing better to do” era. I still managed to cross another one off the bucket list, though, heading back to New York last Summer to finally see The Stone Roses at Madison Square Garden and learn that Ian Brown can indeed sing in key if he absolutely has to, although his ability to follow his bandmates’ cues still needs some work. And also, John Squire a) has not aged and b) is still a 6-string god.
On the recorded front, it was a dark year — mortality and angst permeating pretty much everything — but darkness can make for great art and a lot of legends delivered some of their best, and in a few sad cases their final, works. I can’t say it was a year of great musical exploration on my part what with me mainly waiting for old favourites to deliver new works — and for the most part they delivered large — but that may well change with 2017, now that I’ve finally gotten on board with streaming services.
Why didn’t anyone tell me that their offline listening features was a damn sight easier than managing a bloated MP3 library and dragging and dropping files onto my phone? So yeah, something of a sea change in how I interact with music over the last couple months. Now, anything I care to actually own will exist on wax, and everything else can live on Spotify’s servers. In any case, it’s nice to be able to easily hear the artists that I read about without having to make much of an effort; maybe I’ll finally find out what this Beyonce person is all about. We’ll see how that all works out next year, but for this year, here’s last year.
It’s hard to believe there’s any kind of line, straight or otherwise, that runs through the works of Dev Hynes. Even putting aside his multiple identities and focusing on his current incarnation, his evolution from the bedroom laptop composer of Coastal Grooves to the widescreen soul svengali of Freetown Sound is astonishing. Hynes contemplates his own black, immigrant life matters, but filters the experience through multiple voices in addition to his own to achieve an intensely personal sort of universality.
Of all the victims of the great musical reaping of 2016, the first was by far the most painful. Having only become a real disciple of the Thin White Duke over the last few years, I was delighted to have been able to experience his creative return a few years ago in real time. I also feel privileged that having heard an advance rip and gotten a copy of Blackstar on the day of release, I was able to enjoy his 25th studio album as what it had originally been billed as — a experimental jazz-based counterpoint to 2011’s relatively straight-rock comeback The Next Day — before the news guy wept and told us that morning of January 10. After that, of course, it became something else entirely; his final work, his cryptic farewell, his parting gift to his fans. But even without that context, as hard as it is to separate, Blackstar is still a masterpiece.
Death has been a constant theme in Nick Cave’s work, but even though writing was underway before his son Arthur died in an accident, the sorrow of his passing permeates every note of Skeleton Tree, with every mourning character wearing Cave’s heartbroken countenance. And yet for all the darkness, there’s a glimmer of light that fights its way to the surface by record’s end, representative of one who has endured the unimaginable and somehow, unfathomably, found a way to carry on.
Farewells and regrets have long been a favourite theme of Leonard Cohen, so it’s hard to say if his final album was crafted under any heavier spectre of mortality than his others (though given what’s become known about the state of his health in his last days, it probably was). But if his desire was to go out on an album that somehow captured his essence across his entire storied career, he succeeded. Darker is at points grim and elegiac and others sentimental and wistful, all the while maintaining an appropriately stark production aesthetic graced with just the right amount of sonic ornamentation and echoes of the past.
Emma-Lee Moss has never shied away from drawing on her diary for her songwriting, but now three albums into her career as Emmy The Great it’s interesting to examine their autobiographical arc — both the youthful precociousness of First Love and emotional scars of Virtue functioned as portraits of the artist at their given points in time. The gleaming, synth-friendly yet unfailingly melodic Second Love catches up with Moss as she travels the world as a digital citizen, seeking to maintain human connection through technology while staying in constant motion.
The most punk rock entry on this list — sorry, Mogwai — comes from a rather unexpected artist, one Mitski Miyawaki. Though new to me, Puberty 2 is her fourth album and while I may prefer some of the songs on its predecessor Bury Me At Makeout Creek, there’s no arguing the perfect balance of deadpan detachment and nails-out rage that bookend the emotional range of Puberty 2’s contemplation of matters of desire, identity and belonging. It may have been the last record to make this list, but with each listen it further affirms I made the right choice and Miyawaki made a great record.
Mogwai’s soundtracks have always fit comfortably alongside yet stood distinct from their own studio work. The latter could easily score a film built on unease and ultra-violence, but their formal cinematic commissions have leaned more towards the atmospheric and textural; that those two halves should come together beautifully on a soundtrack for an experimental film about the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima seems only right. Given that the film eschews traditional documentary structure in favour of assembling footage on the subject from newsreels and other film sources, the soundtrack is tasked with tying the visuals together into a cohesive whole and it does this by crafting some of the band’s most gorgeous guitar and keyboard tones into something equally monolithic, triumphant, and ominous.
Every time The Radio Dept. broadcasts anew from wherever they hide out in Sweden (actually it’s Lund, near Malmo), I spend some time coming to terms with how much I think they’ve changed, sonically, since their last album and how I feel about it. Then I realized they haven’t changed that much at all and I love it and I continue on, happy that the trio have — despite not seeming to like the business of being in a band at all — gifted us with another album. The Radio Dept have never been shy about wrapping their exquisitely forlorn melodic gifts around pointed social commentary and as befit our times, Running Out Of Love is a darker, more pessimistic affair than the relatively shiny Clinging To A Scheme. Yet at the same time, it showcases the band’s recent forays into more rhythmic territory; perhaps the message here being if you can’t beat ’em, dance.
Shearwater has long been a fixture of my year-end lists, thanks largely to their ambitious art-rock “Island Trilogy” albums, but since coming back to shore and opting to further indulge their rockier tendencies, I’ve somehow grown to love them even more. Case in point, Jet Plane and Oxbow, which was offered up as a protest record in theme and an ’80s throwback in production. Whatever their intentions going into the studio they came out with arguably their best record yet, an unashamedly anthemic swarm of buzzing synths and atmospheric guitars that’s musically somehow a match for Jonathan Meiburg’s always-astonishing vocal range.
Add to this the band’s decision to not only cover David Bowie’s underappreciated Lodger in its entirety on tour — a decision made before his passing — but to record it to video live for the AV Club and even release it as an album, and you’ve got a band who had a hell of a year.
Since first hearing their debut EP Exquisite Corpse back in 2008, I was certain Los Angeles’ Warpaint would be one of my very favourite bands for a long time. And yet neither of their full-lengths The Fool or Warpaint seemed to deliver on that promise with me, each featuring a few high points but on the whole let down by a lack of focus. So colour me very surprised and happy that Heads Up finally delivers the blend of hooky psych/art/jam rock that I’d initially hoped for. Hell, if they’d only released “New Song” as a single it’d still be a contender for this list, but they added ten more songs that just about measure up to it. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve gone back and re-evaluated the first two records and while they’re not as good as this one, they’re better than I’d originally thought.
