Albums of 2016: 3 to Look Forward To

About a month ago, I shared my ten favourite albums of the first half of 2016. The big question now, of course, is how many of those albums will stick with me long enough to make my proper end-of-year list in December.

To be fair, I've already heard some albums that would've made my halfway list in June had I heard them in time - Mitski's superb Puberty 2, for one. But today, I'd like to look ahead to the coming months and focus on a trio of forthcoming albums that I'm very excited to hear. Don't be surprised if all of these end up in my final countdown come December - if the ten artists who made the list last month are wondering who they ought to be worried about, I'd suggest that these are the top three contenders:

Away by Okkervil River

Release Date: 9th of September

 I love Okkervil River. I have loved them since my first year of university, but I've fallen even deeper even love with them recently, mostly thanks to the release of The Silver Gymnasium (which I spent a whole week blogging about) in 2013 and my belated discovery of the even better Down the River of Golden Dreams early last year. Now they've got a new record on the way - I already adore it for its gorgeous cover art (above), and the two songs they've released so far are very promising indeed. Check out nostalgic heartstring-tugger The Industry below.

Green: The People's Favourite R.E.M. Album

Last week, I ran a series of polls on Twitter to determine once and for all which of R.E.M.'s 15 albums (and one EP) people like best. I called it the 'World Cup of R.E.M. Albums' and it worked in much the same way as an international football tournament, with a group stage followed by a series of head-to-head knockout rounds. 

There were lots of surprises over the course of the tournament. For example, Murmur - the debut album that Rolling Stone named 'Best Album of 1983' ahead of Michael Jackson's Thriller - sensationally crashed out in the group stage after failing to amass more votes than either Lifes Rich Pageant or Automatic for the People. Quite a few people weren't best pleased with this result.

The eventual winner was also something of a surprise. It wasn't Out of Time (the one with Losing My Religion), and it wasn't Automatic for the People (the one that's sold something like 18 million copies to date), and it sadly wasn't Fables of the Reconstruction (my personal favourite) either. Nope - it was actually 1988's Green that emerged victorious after beating its immediate predecessor, Document, in the grand final with 56% of the overall vote.

So what is it about Green that resonates and elevates it above all else in the eyes of the many R.E.M. fans who voted for it? Certainly, many of the album's tracks are quite politically-driven, and it's not hard to see how that might appeal to weary liberals in 2016, the year of Trump and Brexit and goodness knows what else. World Leader Pretend in particular sounds almost prophetic, what with all its talk of walls and stuff.

Other examples of Green's appetite for tackling big issues abound: the title of Orange Crush is a reference to Agent Orange, a chemical weapon utilised by US forces during the Vietnam War, while Pop Song 89 politely asks if we ought to talk about subjects like climate change ("the weather") and the government more candidly. I Remember California sounds like an ominous vision of nuclear apocalypse on the Pacific Coast, although admittedly that may be because the phrase 'Trident submarines' carries certain associations here in the UK.

In Eyeland

You may remember The Low Anthem as that band who recorded their albums in an abandoned pasta sauce factory. They specialised in rickety folkish music; songs like Charlie Darwin and Matter of Time were gorgeously affecting, and yet so fragile that you worried you'd break them simply by listening to them. That empty pasta sauce factory was a hugely important part of The Low Anthem's whole deal, lending their recordings a cavernous sound that made you feel as if you'd stumbled across a beautiful, glistening gem in a dusty corner of an old, derelict building. I saw them on the main stage at the Green Man Festival in 2011, and their performance that evening sticks in my memory for the way that, by some strange alchemy, they managed to make a large natural amphitheatre situated in the shadow of a mountain feel cosy and achingly intimate. 2008's Oh My God, Charlie Darwin was their breakthrough album, but its successor, Smart Flesh, remains their crowning masterpiece in my opinion.

After a five-year hiatus, The Low Anthem released a new album last month. It's called Eyeland, and if you remember The Low Anthem as those quiet weirdos who would hang out in abandoned buildings and sing old-fashioned songs about apothecaries and ticket-takers...well, prepare to have your preconceptions shattered.

20 Things I Hate

Inspired by this blog post. Mine's far shorter and a bit more music-specific than Fourfoot's, though. And unlike Fourfoot, I haven't bothered to put mine in any particular order.

1. People who use the phrase 'real music' (e.g. 'Now Led Zeppelin, that was real music, not like your modern electronic nonsense where all you have to do is press a button.') Please stop talking to me and go away.


2. Oasis. 


3. People who dislike Oasis 'except for Definitely Maybe, that was a classic debut'. Not it wasn't. It was rubbish.


4. 'UK tours' that don't include any dates in Wales. The bridge isn't that expensive, guys.


5. Bands who reward you for showing up to their gigs by ordering you about (e.g. 'Come and stand closer to the stage! You are allowed to dance, you know!')


6. The song Don't Stop Believin' by Journey.


7. The fact that I can't listen to a Busted album without remembering that they publicly endorsed the Conservative Party in 2004.


8. The fact that I can't listen to a Meat Loaf album without remembering that he publicly endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012.


9. My own very irritating tendency to let a musician's political views affect my enjoyment of their music.


10. The fact that you have to log into Spotify in order to listen to a Spotify playlist that's embedded in a blog post/article. SoundCloud doesn't fuck us about like this, and SoundCloud LOVES fucking people about, I'm told.


11. Hidden tracks that are separated from the actual listed track by 5 or 10 minutes of silence. Bonus hate if the hidden track is actually any good (I'm looking at you, Jarvis Cocker's Cunts are Still Running the World) because I might have wanted to put it in a playlist or a mix or something, y'know?


12. Drummers who insist on using a jillion different cymbals, toms, et cetera, even if the song doesn't really call for it (and no song really calls for it). You know what impresses me? Drummers who can take a knackered snare drum, a knackered floor tom, and a knackered crash cymbal and make it work nevertheless. Surrounding yourself with unnecessary add-ons just reminds me of that spoilt fucker I knew in high school who was given a very large, very expensive drumkit that he had no idea how to play.


13. Vinyl records. Granted, they're sexier than CDs, and maybe the sound quality is slightly better, but neither of those perks compensate for the format's many shortcomings. Vinyl costs more, takes up more space, damages with infuriating ease, and can't be ripped to your computer unless you invest in a certain piece of hardware. Oh, and you have to get up and flip the record over if you want to listen to a whole album. Nuts to vinyl.


14. The way everyone fawns over The Beatles. Never did all that much for me. Ticket to Ride is good, I guess. And I like some of the tracks on Abbey Road. But I don't see why they're still - decades later - held up as The Best Band of All Time.


15. Bands who pander to the 'real music' people I mentioned earlier and make a killing with their 'save rock 'n' roll!' rhetoric and their ho-hum, nothing-to-say rock songs that people blindly lap up because they were made with electric guitars instead of laptops.


16. The presence of Pet Sounds near the top of every 'best albums' list I've ever read. I remember listening to it a few times and just finding it so absurdly dull.


17. That moist clicking sound that you can hear on some records because the singer stood too close to the microphone and it picked up every tiny noise their mouth was making. It feels like you're pouring yesterday's gravy in my ear - please stop.


18. Band apparel nazis. 'That girl's wearing a Ramones T-shirt! I bet she's never even listened to the Ramones!' Fuck off.


19. The almost entirely meaningless 5-star scoring system beloved of so many music publications. 


20. People who start petitions just because an artist they don't like is headlining a music festival.

Smash Hits: Helen Love's Pop Scrapbook

When I was little, I had a friend named John who kept a scrapbook of all his favourite things. Its pages were filled with drawings of the Power Rangers, stats about Liverpool Football Club, pictures of his favourite wrestlers, and all sorts of other stuff like that. It was basically a physical document of everything that was going on in his seven-year-old boy brain.

Helen Love's new album, Smash Hits, came out a few weeks ago on Alcopop! Records, and brilliantly enough it seems to have been written and recorded via much the same approach as John used when he was compiling his scrapbook. The cover art is a gaudy collage of stars and guitars and goodness knows what else, with the band members pulling their coolest and most punkily aloof faces in the middle of it all.

This image is the perfect representation of what Smash Hits actually sounds like. This album is simply twelve tracks of punky cut-and-paste pop par excellence. Euphoric opener First Girl from Wales in New York samples a plethora of famous NYC artists like Chic and the Ramones, while You Can't Beat a Boy Who Loves the Ramones (they're a bit obsessed with the Ramones, this lot) features snippets from Ghostbusters and Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero.