Total Pageviews

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Hype Starts Here's Top 50 Albums of 2016 (50-41)


50. Stranger to Stranger by Paul Simon 
        Now in his seventh decade of creating music, Paul Simon can't help but keep reinventing and recreating. His latest is top heavy with energetic, trippy tracks the give eventually give way to the disc's subdued, lovely emotional core.

49. Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
        2016's most purely devastated musical experience, Skeleton Tree's all-encompassing somberness seems the anticipate the real-life tragedies that came to define the album, the minimal production providing the perfectly dense fog underneath Cave's broken laments.

48. The Colour in Anything by James Blake
        A melancholic opus that stretches across 17 tracks and over 75 minutes, The Colour in Anything is an overwhelming offering that is deeply steeped in sadness, and powered Blake's awe-inspiring voice.

47. Chetah by Aphex Twin
        Electronic legend Richard D. James' latest is modest not only in length, but also in density of sound, but the lack of his characteristic bombast allows these deep, bass-driven groves to sink deeply into your bones.

46. The Follower by The Field
        The Field has always been one of the modern patron saints of repetition, but The Follower takes this creed to a whole new level, consisting of six electronically engineered tracks that run between 9 to 13 minutes in length, swirling and enveloping your eardrums until it feels like escape is all but impossible.

45. False Readings On by Eluvium
        Like The Field ranked right behind him, Matthew Cooper's newest release takes all the practices that Eluvium has always been known for to whole new extremes, his billowy, formless sound-worlds expanding out further than ever before, almost mistakable for white noise if not for all that unrepentant loveliness.

44. Amen & Goodbye by Yeasayer
        Now that the tribal elements of Yeasayer's sound have been completely stripped away, these three weirdos are allowed to focus every ounce of energy on creating glossy, bizarro 80's jams, and their newest LP runs cover to cover with varied sounds that somehow manage to constitute a whole.

43. Varmints by Anna Meredith
        Varmints provides the perfect solution for anyone who can't decide wether to pursue their electronic instincts or their singer-songwriter talents by alternating styles with each new track, Meredith's immense skill in both departments navigating past any possible sense of whiplash.

42. Painting With by Animal Collective
        With no fewer than four stone-cold classics in their back pocket, Animal Collective to continue to push past the previously conceived boundaries of just how high pop music is allowed to let its freak flag fly, continuing the marry the unwieldy with the melodic like only they can.

41. California by Blink-182
        There's absolutely no point in explaining this one at all; Blink-182 is (to my ears, anyway) basically the purest form of guilty pleasure, and unlike their previous release, California actually makes these Neverland residents sound like the bratty punk pop masters they once were.

Hype Starts Here's Top 50 Albums of 2016

Hype Starts Here's Top 100 Songs of 2016

No comments:

Post a Comment