Silicon Valleywood

Best of 2016: Music December 23, 2016

Photo credit:  flickr user Ryan Atkins

Just like last year, I’m doing this barely in time for stocking stuffers. Following are my 10 favorite new releases from 2016:

• Radiohead “A Moon Shaped Pool” – this is a low-flying panic attack.
• Parquet Courts “Human Performance” – slacker punks take a step forward in song-writing depth. And guitar solos!
• David Bowie “Blackstar” – sad, wise, haunting, experimental. Way to make an exit by one of the all-time greats.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Skeleton Tree” – absolutely wrenching.
• Sturgill Simpson “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth” – outlaw country meets orchestra, hot horns section, and “In Bloom,” and somehow it all makes weird sense.
• Angel Olsen “My Woman” – folky singer-songwriter rocks harder, does a little pop, still goes deep.
• Paul Simon “Stranger to Stranger” – whoulda thunk? Still catchy after all these years.
• Iggy Pop “Post Pop Depression” – still snarling after all these years.
• P.J. Harvey “The Hope Six Demolition Project” – just as angry as Iggy.
• A Tribe Called Quest “We Got it from Here…Thank You 4 Your Service” – thou shalt not say “old school.”

Possibly, the gloom and sadness and anger of this list matched my mood for the year.

It didn’t quite make the Top 10, but honorable mention goes Car Seat Headrest’s “Teens of Denial,” hooky indie rock that’s way more rock than mope, even if its lyrics aren’t quite as clever as Pitchfork thinks. And the Stones showed they could still play the blues on “Blue & Lonesome,” but we knew that already. Metallica showed they could still be metal on “Hardwired…to Self-Destruct” where maybe we weren’t so sure.

Not being modern, I still buy albums – 28 this year, 8 from the back catalog, very similar to last year. I like that Amazon will sell me a CD with instant download often for the same price – physical and cloud backup. Some of this behavior is because I want to pay artists better than Spotify does, and some of it’s because I listen to downloads on my phone and an old iPod, rather than streaming my data plan away.

I’m what we used to call back in the Jupiter Research days a “digital music aficionado” (digital user, high spender), so I love the streaming services to experiment and dive deep. But I also agree with Mark Mulligan that $10 per month isn’t a mainstream consumer product, regardless of whether it screws artists worse than their labels used to.