Top 10 Albums of 2016

Crikey, this was a hard list to make. So many ace albums had to be left off - I considered doing an 'honourable mentions' list as a way of recognising the albums that fell just barely outside my top 10, but that list could easily have included another 20 albums and I probably STILL would have had a crisis of conscience over any I missed out.

So instead of going down that road, I'd simply like to present my top 10 albums of 2016. These are the cream of the cream of the crop, and interestingly, two of them weren't represented at all in my Songs of 2016 list. Just goes to show that the whole is sometimes stronger than the sum of its parts, eh?

Once you've finished reading, feel free to tell me how wrong my opinions are on Twitter.

10) Still Valid by MJ Hibbett & The Validators

To call Still Valid a light-hearted album would perhaps be a touch misleading, given that it contains songs like Burn it Down & Start Again (about corrupt politicians) and The 1980s How it Was (about the hairspray whitewashing of a decade primarily characterised by poverty and nuclear terror). Still, MJ Hibbett's sense of humour always shines through, even - especially - when he's worrying about his age on tracks like Can We Be Friends? and That Guy. In fact, as I mentioned in my (and my mum's) review of Still Valid, Hibbett's lyrics have really helped me to stop worrying about the fact that I'm no longer in my early 20s.

Best Tracks: Can We Be Friends? // That Guy // We Did It Anyway

9) Adult Teen by Lisa Prank

Father/Daughter Records became one of my favourite record labels this year, and Lisa Prank's album Adult Teen is a big part of why (although I would also strongly recommend Air Guitar by Sat. Nite Duets). It's a pretty straightforward set of songs - each track consists of little more than a vocal, an electric guitar track, and a synthetic drum machine beat - but the album's attitude, breakneck delivery, and acute understanding of how messy the transition from teenager to grown-up can be make for a great listening experience. It's flippin' catchy, too. Read my review of Adult Teen here.

Best Tracks: Drive Anywhere // Take it All // Heart 2 Heart

Top 20 Songs of 2016 (10-1)

My top 10 songs of 2016 are listed below. Be sure to read numbers 20 through 11 first!

10) Drive Anywhere by Lisa Prank

(from Adult Teen)

The sound of your life hurtling headlong into the jaws of adulthood like a car speeding towards the edge of a cliff. A rushing thrill of a song with a kernel of time-waits-for-no-man melancholy hidden somewhere in the middle.

Top 20 Songs of 2016 (20-11)

Christmas is less than seven days away, and so it's list week here on The Album Wall! Here's what to expect between now and the weekend:

• Monday 19 December: Top 20 Songs of 2016 (20-11)
• Wednesday 21 December: Top 20 Songs of 2016 (10-1)
• Friday 23 December: Top 10 Albums of 2016

Below is the first half of my 'Songs of 2016' countdown. All of these songs (to the best of my knowledge) were released on full-length albums for the first time this year; some selections, such as #17, were available on singles/EPs prior to 2016, but as this is primarily a blog about albums I'm using the release date of each song's parent album in order to determine eligibility for this list.

(The above rule does mean that a few great songs are sadly absent from this top 20. Most notable are Phoebe's Lips by CHUCK, which first appeared on Happy New Years Babe in 2015 and was re-released as part of the My Band is a Computer compilation this year, and Fuck the Government, I Love You, which was the second track on Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom's Don't Believe the Hyperreal several months before it was the third track on The Burning Hell's Public Library. Fuck the Government was actually my 19th favourite song of 2015, so it would be kind of weird to include it in the 2016 list too.)

Without further small print, then, here are my top 20 songs of 2016 (part one):

20) Attached to the Lamp by Sat. Nite Duets

(from Air Guitar)

This is one heck of an opening track. I love the chugging pace, and I love how the words and the tune fit together like two pieces of K'Nex. "Maybe we could go back to Cleveland and play for the sound guy and the other band..." Playing a gig to an empty room never sounded like so much fun.

Don't Believe the Hyperreal

Don't Believe the Hyperreal by Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom was one of my favourite albums of 2015, but oddly enough I never really wrote anything about it here on the blog. One year on from its release, I'd like very much to rectify that state of affairs.

Airel Sharratt and Mathias Kom are both members of The Burning Hell, but sometime towards the end of 2015, they took a break from their day job and recorded a collection of duets called Don't Believe the Hyperreal. The album's artwork is a collage of famous couples such as Princess Leia/Han Solo, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, and Rachel Green/Ross Geller, and most of the songs here are pretty lovey-dovey in theme (Sharratt and Kom are themselves an item), but as love songs go, these ones do a really good job of being sweet without ever being sickly. Fuck the Government, I Love You chronicles Mathias and Ariel's first meeting with arch humour instead of gooey 'love at first sight' hyperbole, while the likes of Your Military and What You Want show how perfectly these two complete each other but do so in an off-kilter sort of way that tugs at the heartstrings but never makes you want to roll your eyes.

No roses or chocolates here - just lines about druids and broken stereo speakers. There is a Princess Bride reference, but they don't even compare themselves to Buttercup and Westley; instead, Sharratt likens herself to Inigo Montoya, and her lover to the six-fingered man who slew Inigo's father. I Got You Babe it ain't.

My Favourite Albums of 2016 So Far

2016 is just about half-over, the last six months having rocketed past with the velocity of a drumstick that the guy on the stool wasn't gripping properly. Today, I thought I'd share ten of my favourite albums from the first half of the year, so that's exactly what I've done: find them all listed below (in alphabetical order, just in case these turn out to be the best albums of 2016 overall - I want to preserve a little bit of mystery for my end-of-year list!)

Adore Life - Savages

"Thrillingly confrontational...almost scarily compelling"

Standout Tracks: Evil // I Need Something New // T.I.W.Y.G.

Read More: Savage Orders

Amen & Goodbye - Yeasayer

"A colourful cornucopia of bouncy pop and blissed-out psychedelia"

Standout Tracks: Silly Me // Dead Sea Scrolls // Cold Night

Read More: A Track-by-Track Analysis of Amen & Goodbye

Flux Capacitor vs. Painted Shut

Last summer, I discovered a wonderful album called Flux Capacitor by a wonderful band called The Burning Hell. Regular readers (if in fact I have any) may remember that I wrote a blog post around that time all about Flux Capacitor and how its characters repeatedly manage to find power in powerlessness.

More recently, I acquired an album called Painted Shut by Hop Along. Those hypothetical regular readers will no doubt have already heard the album's standout track - the spectacular Waitress - in my May playlist, but here it is again for everyone else:

"COMMON KIIIIND, COMMON KI-I-I-I-IND IT'S A VERY COMMON KIND"

While it managed to escape my attention until only a few weeks ago, Painted Shut actually came out last year. Shortly before its release, Hop Along gave an interview with Stereogum, and Frances Quinlan - owner of that tremendous voice you were hopefully just listening to - stated that the album was "about power and lack thereof...it's about powerlessness".

I came across that Stereogum interview just the other day (having already had Painted Shut on heavy rotation for a week or two) and Quinlan's description of her album's key theme sent me straight back to Flux Capacitor. Since then, I've been listening to both albums and thinking hard about the different ways that these songs and the characters within them respond to situations that make them feel powerless.

April Playlist: Shut Your Dirty Mouth

Another month has come to an end, and that means it's time for another month-end playlist. Here are 10 tracks that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to in April:

1. By the Throat - Laurence Made Me Cry

(from Titans' Daughters)

The first track from Jo Whitby's new EP signals a darkening of tone and a raising of stakes. Read my review of Titans' Daughters here.

Twisting in the Public Library

As Burning Hell frontman Mathias Kom recently revealed, Public Library (his band's new album, released last week and available here), was basically written to spite a critic who took issue with the wordiness of Kom's songs:

"At some point, I read a negative review...that criticised me for being too verbose. I'm pretty sure the writer used the word 'clever' in an uncomplimentary way as well, the way you would use it when speaking about your friend's obnoxious six-year-old. And, just like an obnoxious six-year-old, my response was to start writing songs that exaggerated the verbiage of People [Public Library's predecessor, released in 2013] into downright logorrhea."

The resulting LP is kind of like a musical adaptation of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler: eight short stories covering eight different genres, each one paired with a fab pop/rock/indie accompaniment. The Road is a music biography with a splash of magical realism; Nonfiction is a romance novel, albeit one delivered with a good deal more subtlety than that genre is perhaps accustomed to. The album's lead single, Men Without Hats, is a kind of coming-of-age story about becoming obsessed with music for the first time, an experience to which I'm sure most of the people reading this can relate:

Backchat: Mathias Kom on The Burning Hell's Back Catalogue

I love discovering great new bands, but I love it even more when those great new bands turn out to have been making music for years, giving me a whole backlog of albums to dive into. Exploring an artist's back catalogue is a thrill that can last for months if not years, and it's even better when that artist is still recording new material that's up to the same high standard as their older stuff.

Backchat is a new feature for The Album Wall. Every so often, I'll be asking an artist to walk us through their discography to date, opening up a deep pocket of ace music that you may not have ever discovered otherwise. And even if you're already familiar with the albums being discussed, I'm hoping that you'll find the artist's insights interesting nevertheless!

Today, we're looking at the back catalogue of The Burning Hell, a Canadian outfit led by verbose, beard-toting songwriter Mathias Kom.

Photo by Jonathan Briggins. Mathias is the guy on the right.

Name for a religious pamphlet that Kom was handed on the streets of Toronto, The Burning Hell have released six albums (not including EPs, singles, side projects, live albums, etc.) over the last ten years. A seventh, Public Library, is due out next month, but before we get to that, here's Mathias to take us through the story so far:

Tick Tock (2007)

Mathias Kom: I made this record ten years ago in my friend Jill Staveley's bedroom, with a whole cast of wonderful Peterborough folks, long before I ever thought that I would end up playing my songs for living human beings. It's certainly a bit lo-fi and rough around the edges, but it also contains some songs that I still think are okay, and one or two that people actually seem to like. Overall the songs on Tick Tock are simple things, and I think they retain some of that special aura that only comes with writing and recording material without ever imagining it might one day have an audience.

2016: What's in Store?

With a whole year of new music ahead, here are the upcoming album releases I'm most excited for...

The Waiting Room by Tindersticks

The first all-new Tindersticks album since 2012's The Something Rain is due out on the 22nd of January. I wasn't a huge fan of The Something Rain, and I'm afraid I didn't bother with Across Six Leap Years, the retrospective thingy that came out in 2013 (six of its ten tracks are already in my iTunes library anyway); for my part, I'm hoping that The Waiting Room will be a return to the more colourful, dramatic likes of Falling Down a Mountain (2010) and The Hungry Saw (2008).

Confessions of a Romance Novelist by The Anchoress
A 'revenge pop' concept album produced by former Mansun frontman Paul Draper? Sign me the heck up. Oh, and speaking of Mansun...

December Playlist: Something New Going On

And so here we are: the last blog post of the last month of 2016. Truth be told, I've spent most of December listening to crappy Christmas music, but I did find time for some other stuff too. Here's the cream of what I've been subjecting my ears to these last 30 days:

1. Hi How Are You - Addie Pray

(from Screentime)

A slacker-rock anthem for staying up too late and watching crap on your laptop. "And I'm not getting enough rest/'Cause I can't stop watching Top Chef!"

Top 10 Albums of 2015

2015 has been an excellent year for new music, and selecting just 10 outstanding albums from the riches lately lavished upon my ears was no easy task. Several deserving LPs have cruelly been excluded here, but rules is rules (even if I made them up) and only 10 records can make the final cut.

So here they are: The Album Wall's Top 10 Albums of 2015. How many have you heard?

10) The Sovereign Self by Trembling Bells

This is a glorious folk-proggy mess of an album. The Sovereign Self finds Trembling Bells straddling the river of history, dipping a big net in the water, and throwing everything they catch into the pot. Straightahead krautrock, medieval ballads, psychedelic hard rock...it's all here, bubbling noisily away, and the resulting stew is quite remarkable indeed.

Best Tracks: I is Someone Else // Killing Time in London Fields // Sweet Death Polka

Top 20 Songs of 2015 (Part 2)

Here we go, then - the cream of the cream of the crop. Here are my Top 10 Songs of 2015 (if you missed the first half of this list, click here to read it before continuing):

10) Eugene & Maurice by Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom

(from Don't Believe the Hyperreal)

Eugene & Maurice is a bit of an oddity on Don't Believe the Hyperreal, which is - for the most part - an album of duets. However, this song (the album's closer) is sung by Ariel and Ariel alone, lending a sad, lonely feeling to a song that frankly would have been heartbreaking enough anyway. Eugene & Maurice tells the true story of author Maurice Sendak and his partner Dr Eugene Glynn; since both men are now (spoiler alert!) deceased, I suppose this biography was never going to have a happy ending, but Sharratt's splendidly sad and decidely Anway-esque delivery somehow makes the whole thing even more devastating.

Top 20 Songs of 2015 (Part 1)

It's that time of year again! Time to take stock, to look back, to make a big list of the year's best music and put it all into some sort of order. Here's a rough schedule for The Album Wall's End of Year Week 2015:

• Today: Top 20 Songs of the Year (20-11)
• Wednesday: Top 20 Songs of the Year (10-1)
• Friday: Top 10 Albums of the Year

It's been a heck of a year, musically speaking, and we've got a lot to get through between now and Black Friday, so let's jump right in. Here's the first half of my 'Songs of 2016' list:

20) Wish Upon a Bar by Frog

(from Kind of Blah)

Verbose, slow-building indie rock? Slurry wordplay on a Disney classic? The sense - implied by the warm, glowing sound and made explicit by the second verse - that all of this is happening around Christmastime? It's like this song was made for me.

My Albums of the Year (from Other Years)

Next week, I'll be compiling a list of what I feel to be the best albums released this year. Which artists will make my top ten? Which outstanding LP will follow in the hallowed footsteps of MEN by Quiet Marauder and Days of Abandon by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart? Will Sun Kil Moon's Universal Themes do as well as Benji did last year?

These questions will be answered next Friday (although Mark Kozelek, if he's reading this, probably shouldn't hold his breath on that last one). In the meantime, I have a different sort of list to share with y'all: a list of superb albums that weren't released in 2015.

You see, my CD-buying budget isn't exclusively reserved for brand new releases, and many of the albums that touched my soul this year were released...y'know, in the past. The five records listed below would be ineligible for any self-respecting 'Best of 2015' list worth its salt, but they've nonetheless brought me a lot of enjoyment this year, and I feel that this deserves to be recognised in itself.

So, without further ado, here are my Top 5 Albums of 2015 (That Weren't Released in 2015):

5. Wishmaster by Nightwish

Released May 2000

I was given this album as a Christmas present back in 2013, but I only really discovered the full extent of its brilliance this year. I particularly love Bare Grace Misery, which should have been the theme for Gladiators, and FantasMic, a mind-blowing multi-part metal odyssey about, um, Disney movies. Trust me, it's far more epic than I've just made it sound.

September Playlist: Come What May

Blimey, another month over - this place will be filled with Christmas music before long!

In the meantime, here are 10 of the tracks that have been tickling my fancy over the last 30 days. Click here for last month's playlist.

1. Grown-Ups - The Burning Hell

(from People)
I spent roughly 700 words analysing this album's closing track last week. Today, I'd like to draw your attention to the equally ace opening track - from the awesome first line ("You were a Nazi hunter...") to the wistfully ambiguous ending ("By the time you read this..."), Grown-Ups is the perfect representation of what it's like to not be a kid any more.

Industrialists and Other People

Industrialists is the ninth and final track on People, an album by The Burning Hell (you may remember that I wrote some words about Flux Capacitor, another LP of theirs, a couple of months ago). The song, which clocks in at precisely 7 minutes, takes the form of a eulogy, posthumously telling the story of a young man who...well, did a lot things. Over the course of the track's 420 seconds, he tames a wild horse, starts his own company at the age of ten, buys a property in Mexico, duels a man for his wife, and brings her back to America along with 400 immigrant labourers, whom he then instructs to build a golden pyramid. Oh, and then he's found dead, presumably - although it's not explicitly stated - murdered by a disgruntled employee who was sick of neglecting his family to slave away on some guy's pyramid.

#

It's quite a tale.

The central character of Industrialists is never named, but we do know that, prior to his gruesome death (he was coated, Goldfinger-style, in the molten gold that the labourers were using to construct his office building), he was fond of reciting this mantra, which also gives the song its chorus and the album its title:

"It takes all kinds of people to make a world,

It takes all kinds of people to make a world,

From the farmer in the field to the spaceman in space,

Everybody has a reason, a purpose and place."

These words are effectively a mission statement for People as a whole: each of the record's nine songs has a title that refers to a specific group of people (e.g. Travel Writers, Barbarians, Amateur Rappers), and by singing about all these different kinds of people, Mathias Kom and his musical mates do indeed "make a world" - or, at the very least, a pretty great album, populated with keenly-developed characters and fun vignettes from their lives.

Running vs. Sprinting

A couple of weeks ago, I told you all about The Burning Hell and their unique knack for finding power in powerlessness. Shortly after that blog post went up, I realised that said knack wasn't unique at all - in fact, there's at least one other album in my current rotation that pulls the exact same trick.

Sprinter is the second album by Torres, a.k.a. Mackenzie Scott from Macon, Georgia. It was one of my Top 5 Albums of 2015 So Far, and it's another great example of that 'power from powerlessness' thing that I mentioned a fortnight ago.

Get Powerless with The Burning Hell!

Here's an album that I've been wanting to tell you all about for quite a while. I discovered Canadian indie funsters The Burning Hell at a gig in Cardiff last month (I was mainly there to see support act Quiet Marauder), and so rad were their jams that I was compelled to buy one of their CDs.

The CD that I bought was Flux Capacitor, and friends, it truly is a rare gem. Great tunes, fantastic and frequently hilarious lyrics, fab brass/wind arrangements...this one has it all. I've never known another album to be so beautifully sad and yet so joyously celebratory at the same time.

June Playlist: Set the Silverware Shaking

Another month has come and gone, which means that it's time for another monthly digest playlist thing! Here are ten of the songs that kept me boppin' last month...

1. The Stranger Fair - Jack Hayter and Ralegh Long

(from Songs About Albums: Volume 1)

I could have chosen any of the ten tracks from Songs About Albums for this month's playlist, but this beautiful tribute to Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights seemed like a wonderful way to kick things off. If you haven't downloaded the compilation yet, go here now - it's free!