Well it is that time again, time for my year-end review of my favorite music! These roll around so fast, it really is a marker for me for how fast time goes! This year, however, since I am very crunched for free time, it will be a very abbreviated entry, but trust me that I have thought about this long and hard. I start thinking about my year-end music list sometime around March, and throughout the year roughly 6 or 7 albums at one point in time are poised to take my #1 spot, so I am always thinking about it, but the entries will be short and sweet this year. (If you are interested in seeing how the lists of previous years went, you can see them here: 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , 2010 , 2009 ). I would also like to say up front that Neil Young recently released an album which unfortunately I have not been able to listen to as of this writing. Also if you are used to getting a year-end mix disc from me, that will still be coming, they are going out in a few days. If you don’t get these discs but would like to get them, send me a message! I love sending them. So without further ado, the list:
But first! haha. Some honorable mentions that didn’t make the top ten. Honorable mentions:
Fleet Foxes, Crack Up, Willis Earl Beal, Turn, The Shins, Heartworms, Tori Amos, Native Invader, St. Vincent, Masseduction, Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, James McCallister, Plantarium, El Ten Eleven, Unusable Love, Iron and Wine, Beast Epic, and a major shout out to Sufjan Stevens’ live album of Carrie and Lowell songs, which as a live album was released this year, but the songs were from a few years ago, but it was by far one of my favorite things this year.
Now, the top ten:
10. Grizzly Bear, “Painted Ruins”
Grizzly finally, finally live up to the blissed-out art rock potential the showed on their early releases.
9. The National, “Sleep Well Beast”
I love the National, and I love this album, but I was expecting it to vie for the top spot, but instead I only love it and am not obsessed with it. I want to see them evolve more.
8. Run the Jewels, “Run the Jewels 3”
Ok so this albums was released in December 2016 but the PHYSICAL copies weren’t released until 2017, so I’m backdooring it. Hey, if you aren’t listening to RTJ, you literally don’t know what’s going on.
7. Father John Misty, “Pure Comedy”
A few of the songs on “Pure Comedy” are so good they’re practically transcendent; on the strength of those 4-6 songs, this album deserve all the accolades it is getting. Next time, though, we need less fluff.
6. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Luciferian Towers”
End-times post-rock for the new world; instrumental dirge music that manages to be hyper political. Godspeed is never less than earnestly terrifying, and they haven’t lose their edge.
5. Mogwai, “Every Country’s Sun”
It’s a rare year for me when out of the two post rock bands on my list, anyone beats Godspeed, but Mogwai’s new album is a leap forward for them (which is saying something, since they have been around for like 20 years). It is tender, and brutal, and irreverent.
4. Real Estate, “In Mind”
This band’s entire aesthetic is about being understated and melodic. Here they’ve cracked the code for how to do that and be dramatic, too. Each song crackles. Your nerves feel this album.
3. Prophets of Rage, “Prophets of Rage”
This album has taken a lot of flack, and yes, it is far from perfect. But the bright spots–“Who Owns Who”, “Living on the 110”, “Unfuck the World”, “Strength in Numbers”, aming a few others–are so glorious (especially after repeat listens) that the downsides of this project should get a pass. Could they have done better? Sure. But who else is even doing anything like this? It truly is a soundtrack for the revolution. Please give it some spins.
2. The War on Drugs, “A Deeper Understanding”
In all my years making year-end music lists, I’ve never had a harder time deciding between two albums for the top spot. This album is astonishing. Rather than try to do it justice, I want to quote from a review of this album in Pitchfork which I found not only perfectly encapsulated my thoughts on the album, but was itself an amazing piece of writing:
“The band’s lyricist Adam Granduciel doesn’t create fully-drawn characters (other people are phantoms or wishes or memories in his lyrics) but there’s always a desire for connection, and he lets in just enough light to make it seem possible. The album’s first single was the epic 11-minute travelogue “Thinking of a Place,” with a glowing synth swell reminiscent of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and a patient tempo that suggests a slow walk through the woods in the dark, the kind where you keep your hands out in front of you, feeling for branches. It turned out to be an appropriate introduction to this record because “thinking of a place”—somewhere where you can lose yourself, get out of your own head, somewhere else—is what the whole record is ultimately about. A different songwriter—someone like Neil Young, say—might sketch out what this place looks like, tell us about who we might find there. But Granduciel can’t, or doesn’t want to. And that lack of articulation, that inability to identify the source of pain and the path to redemption, becomes another of the record’s themes. But all that happens beneath the surface, almost subliminally; it’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.”
I mean, yes.
1. Arcade Fire, “Everything Now”
This album has taken a lot of flack in the press, mostly because (I think) it’s not what anyone expected. It is markedly different than their previous albums, much shorter, and veers into pop sound. But the fact is, it is just so good. There was a point where the CD stayed in my car stereo for over three straight weeks. The songs are catchy but artistically sound, the theme of the album well-thought out, important, and brilliantly executed. Yes, there are two clunkers, but the rest of the songs are absolute solid gold. Time’s going to bear out that “Everything Now” is, in fact, a rock classic.
Notes From the Fire 