To round off our Best Of 2016 series, some of Live4ever’s writers have picked out their own favourite albums from the past year, ranging from the return electronic of legends after over a decade away to one of the year’s brand new collaborations.
You can revisit our entire Best Of 2016 series below – all the best from everyone at Live4ever for 2017!
Matt Humphrey: Richard Ashcroft – These People
This year saw the long-awaited return of Richard Ashcroft with the album These People, which taught us two things: he still has something to say, and he hasn’t lost the knack of penning a killer melody.
These People offered a mix of classic-sounding, staple Ashcroft cuts with some experimental endeavours. They Don’t Own Me haunts back to the Verve, channelling Lucky Man’s grandeur. Out Of My Body showcases the album’s impressive production with its dance influences – refreshing to hear at this stage of Richard’s solo career. It’s not a perfect record, but ‘dad rock’ it is not.
Richard still has the fire in his belly, and These People hints at more greatness to come – we’ve already been teased with the prospect of a quick follow-up. The music industry lacks formidable characters like Richard and 2016, arguably a lacklustre year for indie music, has been all the better for his return.
Dylan Llewellyn-Nunes: Kevin Morby – Singing Saw
Some records stand apart. Alone, with a place in your heart and psyche all their own. 2016 has had so many great albums, but for me, at every point Kevin Morby’s Singing Saw was just running on its own set of rails and heading somewhere else.
It’s where he’s more Morby that it truly elevates itself above anything else released this year. There’s songs like I Have Been to the Mountain and the title track which really build atmosphere and add to the albums laconic heart.
It’s an album of wonderful simplicity and beauty, full of symbolism and lyricism. It’s an album that’s mysterious and disorientating, full of lush musicality and tender sentimentality. But most of all it’s an album of brilliant songs, full of passion and poise. And that’s enough to make it the best album of the year without question.
Andy Peterson: Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam – I Had a Dream That You Were Mine
Whilst their respective bands are frequently cited as a pair of America’s most loved outsiders, this collaboration between The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij’s came with some awkward bromance and alpha male strings attached; gin-soaked hangovers and the whiff of trying too hard, it almost felt like the story might well be more diverting than the product. How wrong could we have been?
Firstly Leithauser is in his element, his voice intermittently stretched to a screeching, blues-drenched howl, the soulful croak of a hopeless romantic or sometimes the plaintive, fractured quiet of one of life’s broken. Batmanglij’s production ekes out gems such as the spaghetti-Western monochrome of In A Black Out, or closer 1959’s period schmaltz from a surprisingly modern box of tricks.
I Had A Dream That You Were Mine pivots though on The Bride’s Dad, its fulcrum wrapped around another man flattened by life but now dancing like a stranger at his own daughter’s wedding, a punch drunk uninvited guest waltzing by himself to hostility and ridicule in equal measure. Like the rest of the characters here in this lovely, eroded rogues gallery he’s impossible not to love – and both in spirit and texture, it helps underline that this is a fine, fine record, one that friendship built, but inspiration blessed.
Trey Tyler: The Avalanches – Wildflower
At the turn of the millennium, The Avalanches’ lone signature masterpiece, Since I Left You, came out to mass critical praise. It was instantly hailed as one of the landmark albums of the plunderphonic genre. Since I Left You is, and was, so perfect that for the next sixteen years the Australian electric outfit disappeared into the ether. 2016 was crazy enough, so it only makes sense that this is the year we finally got a new record.
After a journey of cartoonish giggles and hazy coughs, Wildflower reaches an emotional crux at ‘Sunshine’. Revolving around a brimming soul loop, the duo capsizes the narrative halfway through the song to reveal a stormy sense of melancholia. It is here where the quintessence of the album’s themes reside.
There’s joy, love, heartbreak, nostalgia and ultimately some sort of reconciliation found on the chugging closure Saturday Night Inside Out, but one thing is certain: it is rare to find a record that succeeds in as many different ways as Wildflower does.
Steven White: Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
For most of their career now, Radiohead have stayed close to listeners’ hearts by being as aloof as Thom Yorke’s stare. The rigid rhythms of their last studio album King Of Limbs, in 2011, was the furthest away the band had ever been. This year’s A Moon Shaped Pool pulled them back so close you could almost eat the unguarded emotion off songs like Glass Eyes and Daydreaming.
Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral arrangements played no small part on the record as both jagged trimmings (Burn The Witch) and pacifying fastener (The Numbers) either. And after a 20-odd year delay, True Love Waits finally saw an official version in the most weightless and uncluttered of ways.
In fact, the album’s spine came from a number of tracks that had already been in circuit for years, but you never once felt duped. More gracious that they bothered to look back while still shouldering on forwards, leaving you with a frighteningly strong knot of songs to tie yourself up in until their (usually) sudden call comes again.
Ben Willmott: DJ Shadow – The Mountain Will Fall
There have always been two sides to DJ Shadow. The San Franciscan has always loved hip-hop, of that there’s no doubt. It’s where he came from.
Yet he made his name by circumnavigating the need for MCs on his work, with singles like Inlfux and Lost and Found, and of course the seismic debut album Entroducing all relying on instrumental dexterity to paint the pictures he wanted to create.
Since then, he’s been caught between the two stools, dabbling in hip-hop projects here, instrumental work there and never quite seeming to make the whole thing meld coherently. Until now. The Mountain Will Fall is, in this reviewer’s eyes anyway, the first time Shadow has scaled the heights of his debut long player. Part of that is down to some of the bravest, most out there soundscapes he’s ever assembled.
Add to that a handful of notable ‘pure’ hip-hop affairs, with the confrontational style of Run The Jewels making Nobody Speak a particular highlight, and you’ve got an album that’s a true testament to the tension and anxiety that were hanging over the US in the run up to Trump’s election. It’s a mountainous achievement for sure.
