Books of 2016 Part 3: 30-21

30. The Shipping News – Annie Proulx

#Library

This is quite a charming portrait of an idiosyncratic small town (Killick Claw, Newfoundland) and its small towny characters doing small towny things. At the end of it I was a little mystified as to the point of it though; it’s mostly just a mix of odd anecdotes, with a little causality between them but that are otherwise unconnected (except in a small towny way). I also found the characters somewhat stock and also somewhat blank, yet ultimately likeable. The thing that probably distanced me a bit too far is that Proulx's prose like this. No verbs in sentence. Sometimes no subject. Gets annoying. It didn't amaze me, but it was a perfectly sound story and an enjoyable read. Note I haven’t seen the film adaptation of this, so this wasn’t one of those occasions of going back to the source material.

29. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel GarcíaMárquez

#Borrowed

This is a funny one to sort, because the last page gave me chills – so in terms of recency effect I should be better disposed to this. But throughout the rest of the novel, Márquez is so ambiguous and elusive, even. The characters are somewhat ambivalent, and all driven by such disparate forces that seem to be quite flighty. At its heart it's just a dissection of love, but very much a particularly Latin, hot-blooded kind of love (probably connected with machismo, which we will get to again in a few books). The prose is dense yet free-flowing, so it really requires close attention. The rewards are there though as it’s peppered throughout with sly jokes. It’s interesting to look back at Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (op cit, my number 1 book of 2014) in light of this because the plot structure of both is very similar but where this is heartfelt, philosophical, and poetic, that other book was cynical, dry, ruthlessly sardonic. So naturally I loved the other more, even in its own surrealism there's something so vibrantly beating. This is a very well-written and beautiful book, but just not quite speaking to me.

28. Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

#BookGroup

This was a much beloved book among our book group cohorts but it left me quite mixed. It took a long time to get into, because with its choppy, episodic narrative, and skipping backwards and forwards in time it's hard to discern the plot, at least in the sense of feeling where it's going. Then you get used to the choppy record-skipping nature, and in its place Atkinson launches into a long story passage which seems to drag because you haven't yet gotten a grip on the characters or their story. That all said, while it took me a while, I grew to enjoy the conceit of the story (our main protagonist has an ability to revert in time to avoid circumstances that lead to her death) quite a lot. I was particularly engaged with the idea, as it’s depicted generally as being about simply avoiding situations, rather than acting with different agency, which I think is an interesting statement. And apart from the conceit, the only real narrative arc involves the protagonist Ursula’s journey (across space and time) from an indeterministic character believing only in free will and choice (a dialogue between her and Eva Braun regarding their mutual acquaintance Adolf: “Eva: ‘he’s always been a politician. He was born a politician’ No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become”) to espousing a more fatalistic viewpoint, apparently once she’s finally decided herself what the right path through history is (later in the book, she says “amor fati… It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose”). But all my closer-than-usual reading aside, the story overall was a bit haphazard and dragged a bit just for bringing out a philosophical and thought-provoking framing device.

27. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

#Library

The final book I read this year, and the only one that I’m writing up live into this blog, because I didn’t have time between finishing it and starting these posts to write my notes. This was a heavy-going but ultimately very fascinating read, about a devout Baptist minister who takes his wife and four daughters on a mission to the Congo and the resultant dissolution of the family unit when the culture and nature of Africa butts heads with their westernised belief in changing or taking ownership. The heteroglossia of Kingsolver’s narrative, told as it is by each of the females of the family in turn, is an interesting device but it gives maybe a bit too much psychology and less narrative, to the point where it does feel a little too long at times. The character of the father viewed through these lenses is also intriguing as it devolves from respect or blind faith to complete disdain and disbelief as he digs his heels further and further into the mud. The latter chapters after they all go their separate ways feel like a completely separate story and they get a little self-indulgent as a sort of sequence of narrative essays on why colonisation is wrong (which has otherwise been aptly demonstrated already), but with the multi-faceted perspective it’s still an interesting, well-rounded read.

26. The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene

#Library

This has a curiously similar premise to Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (for those who don’t remember, my number 72 book of last year [out of 72 books]). Curious, because while it seemed a fairly high concept story, which then took itself in the most clumsily facile soap operatic directions, it was also published many, many years after this was. So despite being a shit book, it wasn't even a pioneering premise. Here, a group of Paraguayan terrorists attempt to kidnap the American ambassador to Argentina and mistakenly instead capture an alcoholic honorary British consul, and as such are unable to work the same level of political pressure as they'd hoped. In Greene's hands you know you can trust the story to be not only not trite and facile, but even compelling and interesting. Our central character here is a half-English doctor who becomes an accomplice of the kidnappers in order to get his own Paraguayan father sprung from prison. He embodies Greene's key theme of interest here: the contrast between South American male machismo (see above) and the English reserve, both forces of which are at play for him internally. Greene is also making a cursory return to South American Catholicism, and a lapsed priest, so covering similar territory to The Power and the Glory. I don't think his Catholic explorations are as fully-fleshed out here as in his greatest works, nor is the machismo really elucidated in a big way – just discussed among the characters - but as with any Greene story, the themes can ultimately be sidelined to telling a compelling narrative of internal and external conflict.

25. Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens

#BookShelf #OneDickensPerYear

It seems to me that in Dickens' world - or at least the world of this book - there are no shades of character. People are either entirely good nature and charity or they are completely miserly and selfish. There is undoubtedly something seductive about this from a narrative point of view: you want to keep reading in the hopes of seeing the villains get their comeuppance and the heroes their deliverance. But it does mean that upon first meeting a villain vs hero we know everything we need to know about them and their character won't develop beyond that, they're either one of us (good) or one of them (evil). The most interesting character in this book is therefore probably Mrs Nickleby, because she's all goodness at heart, but is so naïve and foolish that she ends up enabling the bad guys on more than one occasion. The good/evil dichotomy has an almost fantastical quality which brings to mind the fact that Ralph Nickleby as chief antagonist has a very similar story arc to another prototypical villain, that of Saruman in Lord of the Rings. He begins powerful, and insofar as this story goes, he has an early choice between following the righteous path and the path of malevolence, and chooses wrongly. He then becomes an all-powerful mighty force for evil, but as the heroes continue to foil his wicked schemes and his grasp on power diminishes he resorts to increasingly desperate, spiteful and petty schemes for revenge before his final humiliation. I did have issues with this book, though: Smike's death is an irritating narrative convenience, basically because his presence creates an unbalance in the number of eligible male/female suitors in the piece, so with him disposed of everybody’s free to marry their beloved. Some story threads seem completely peripheral and maybe redundant, since the book could ultimately have been shorter and I’d have been OK with that. It was also an undeniable slog to get through, as is all Dickens and why I only read one a year. Having said that, there were lots of characters here, but because of Dickens’ plainness of speaking and distinctive naming, I didn't really need the character list for reference.

24. A Father's Story – Lionel Dahmer

#BookShelf

So I bought this memoir from Jeffrey Dahmer’s father as a carefree graduate who was going through a phase of fascination with serial killers and Dahmer in particular, and on a recommendation from my honours supervisor. It then took a while to arrive and I’d somewhat moved on. So then I had the amazingly sensationally intelligent and rational idea to pick it up and read it with a 4-month old son at home. While this has coverage of Dahmer's pathology similar to Brian Masters’ The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, it's also just a horrifying account of how it was to raise a perfectly ordinary child who turned into an inhuman monster - and learning, confronting and having to accept that truth (again, not good reading when you have a perfectly ordinary 4-month-old son at home). More than the obvious though, Lionel's account is a very warts-and-all confession, as he tries to examine his own shortcomings as a father, and ultimately confronts the fact that many of the impulses and dark thoughts in Jeffrey's psychology had their equivalents in his own, and but for a different choice here and there he could have gone to a similarly dark place, or possibly if he’d realised it earlier, Jeffrey and all his victims could have been saved. It's a fascinating narrative, due to the nature of the unreliable narrator. Lionel is not shy, nor does he make excuses for Jeffrey or himself, but you can't help but wonder at times if there are certain points of view that are put forward more than others and facts that might be omitted due to his own trying to make personal sense of the events. I trust him as a narrator but it's all told with a great deal of hindsight. Intriguingly he, like Masters, views Jeffrey's hernia operation as a young boy as a 'turning point' in his heretofore innocent life, but Lionel sees it only as a crux, whereas Masters viewed it in his summary as entirely the inciting incident. We'll never really get to the very bottom of what caused Jeffrey Dahmer, as his particular psychology feels so unprecedented, but Lionel lays bare the clearest picture of how naiveté and analytical detachment can be the most dangerous enablers, and the whole memoir acts as a chilling warning of how the most unlikely things could happen to anyone.

23. The Hours – Michael Cunningham

#Library

This book feels like ‘award bait’ in the way that the film adaptation, which I saw when it was all the rage in 2002, was such Oscars bait. But this is actually much better than the film (which I also liked, but in that Oscars baity way that you forget it as soon as it doesn’t win very much), in that there's so much internally going on that can’t be captured in film. It feels like the film was just a visualisation that would be best appreciated by those who had already read the book. There's an odd asymmetry to these stories; the link of "Mrs Dalloway" is kind of tenuous, but then there's the link of suicide, which does in some sense happen in each. More pertinent and stimulating though is the common theme of queer identity throughout the ages. We go from Virginia Woolf and her decision to invoke a repressed lesbian desire in Mrs Dalloway, to Laura Brown and her need to repress her desire for her neighbour in order to be a good housewife and mother, to modern-day New York and Clarissa Vaughan (AKA “Mrs Dalloway”) where people are lauded - lionised, even - for the suffering they go through in coming to terms with their sexuality. Although the link is tenuous, the story is quite evocative (more so Brown and Vaughan than Woolf, who is used more as a narrative device than an especially engaging character, to my mind). Anyway, I liked this more than I expected, and found it far more interesting than the film.

22. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

#BookShelf 

Yes, I finally succumbed. To be honest I was more embarrassed reading this populist trash on the train than I would be reading “101 tips for overcoming incontinence” by Felicia D’Nera. It's hard to admit, but even going in with all my defences up, looking to find flaws, it's hard not to get swept up by it. The fact is, it's shamelessly manipulative, the way it keeps hammering home the idea of Katniss as an underdog, the way "District 12" is repeatedly said with derision and all the flashbacks to home and family. Yet after the training sequence, when she's given a score of 11 even I felt myself just getting a tingle of excitement, so even though I knew I was being manipulated, it still works. Far be it from me to criticise the writer of one of the best-selling, popularly and critically acclaimed series of the last 20 years too, but as a devotee of dystopias I felt a trick was missed here by using first person narrative, firstly because the past-tense first person is itself a spoiler: yes you don’t know the circumstances under which Katniss will survive, but she logically must. It does feel too, to my non-YA-reading eyes, a bit too YA, as we're supposed to identify with and see the world through the eyes of this teenage girl, but I was quite interested in more of the world than I got from this narrow lens and wanted to know what was going on in the capital and in the viewing audience from a more omniscient narrator. I might get that if I get to the sequels (and understand whether I’m supposed to be #TeamJacob or #TeamObiWan) but I did feel it was just a shortcoming of an otherwise really engaging and entertaining read. Obviously at #22 I’m still not a full convert, but I have to admit that this book was actually a gift to Bec, who hasn’t read it, and I found myself joining the cohorts of people recommending she read it, because I do think she would enjoy it as a devotee of kickass heroines.

21. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo

#Library

A short, sharp, and dreamy work from DeLillo. Possibly his most surreal book too; the whole narrative explores a pair of relationships with communication/dialogue that is stilted at best and full of complete non sequiturs at worst. But there's also a vivid sense of unreality, where our titular body artist merges her internal and external realities - or does she? It's not clear. The internalised prose is very vivid and descriptive, and feels actually quite Didionesque - only there's also a sweet sentimentality to the work rather than it being a repressed nightmare, which is frankly as out of character for DeLillo as it would be from Didion. I was left a little bit puzzled in the end, but in a wonderful way where I’ve been deeply engrossed in everything I’ve read but there’s still plenty more to deconstruct. It's an ambiguous and really quite poetic work and the best from DeLillo I've read for a long time.

Books of 2016 Part 2: 40-31

40. A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami

#Library

Typical surreal Murakami stuff; a weird kind of book for sure, but one that is sort of engaging through its elliptical mysteriousness - through what it isn't saying - but it only gets really good once it's effectively all over, and even then we're left with plenty of mystery. I still feel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the most effective combination of Murakami's surrealism and his interest in personal reckoning. Here our narrator, dispensing with names (at one point there is a dialogue about his disdain for names) and having a cloudy past, is a little too detached to affect the emotional side of the narrative, and the only drawcard is the slightly bizarre narrative whereby he is searching remote Hokkaido for a non-existent sheep that commandeers people's bodies and brains for its own purposes. It's all maybe a bit too weird, without enough grounding in reality, and I think the choice of sheep as the driving part of the narrative seems quite arbitrary, when it doesn't follow any great sheep-like trajectory or imagery. It's a diverting read but ultimately a bit hollow as well.

39. 'Salem's Lot – Stephen King

#Library

So this was my second taste of King; after not particularly caring for Cujo last year I decided to give another of his better-known works a go, and it did pay off. This is a much Better book than Cujo: a more complete horror story and more in the niche that King is known for (Cujo, for all its gore, could just be retitled "a series of unfortunate events"). Character is a huge weakness for King, there are no interesting individuals and everybody exists purely to service the plot. What he does write well though is small-town New England. The town of Jerusalem's Lot is the main character here; the gossip, the mistrust of outsiders, the automatism of daily life that due to its stubbornness in accepting diversion or change is doomed to - almost literally - cannibalise itself. The book didn't out and out ‘scare’ me - I got more neck shivers from the opening chapter of Cujo in fact, which is an outlier from the rest of the story in being downright creepy - but it’s an effectively told thriller all the same.

38. Living – Henry Green

#BookShelf

Henry Green is a really curious writer. His style is distinctly his own, but it also just has a guttural working-class dialect quality to it, with its liberal dropping of consonants and casual nicknaming of characters and the very rare, seemingly random application of articles (definite or otherwise). It really takes a while to wrap your head around this, as well as the motley crew populating the book. Once it hits its strides though, like Loving (his TIME entry and the reason I have this as it’s part two of a collection of three novels), it’s an upstairs-downstairs chronicle of sorts, this time of an iron foundry in the midlands. There really is a very down-to-earth affability about it, as his upstairs supervisors and foundry owners live in their trivial little bubbles and play with the livelihoods of those working under them, while all the grunts on the floor struggle to get by and live in gentle resentment of the privileged few. It's not a free-flowing read, but there's something very poignant and thoughtful shining through the grimey workaday world Green paints.

37. Armageddon in Retrospect – Kurt Vonnegut

#Library

I have to admit I do like how Vonnegut writes, but I wonder if I'll reach a stage in my life when he no longer does it for me – and in fact if I’ll look back on my enjoyment of his work as a ‘phase’ in my life. This smattering collage of Vonnegut offcuts and snippets is really only going to work if you also enjoy the way he writes, because the stories are quite similar, or cover very similar themes: Dresden, the end of the war, and things that happen in war that you can only live to regret. The best tales in here are those that diverge from this norm a bit, but generally they're all interesting, thoughtful and of course entertaining. I’ll continue to seek out Vonnegut until I turn old and no longer ‘get’ him – perhaps.

36. The Buried Giant – Kazuo Ishiguro

#Library

Pretty rare for me to read a book so contemporaneously, and I picked this up on the back end of the whole controversy where Ishiguro belittled the fantasy genre after using its tropes for this novel. In truth I feel like Ishiguro was trapped in genre for a large part of the book; no real Ishiguroan language flair but every aspect of the story is inserted in the service of generic tropes. It also didn't really work for me as fantasy; it seemed like a standard adventure story with some fantastical elements. Knowing that there is a dark mystery underlying this, it’s less subtle about the dark mystery than Never Let Me Go, so it doesn’t have quite the same impact, nor does it trap you with a big reveal. At the same time, reading it as fantasy I found it a particularly engaging example of a genre I don’t love, as it uses the tropes to raise a philosophical question - and a cruelly cynical one at that - about the nature of community. The final chapter, once the fantasy narrative is over, is beautiful: nostalgic and meditative melancholy. It’s like Ishiguro is free from the fetters of the genre and he can write with his usual thoughtful panache once liberated. It makes for a big peak end from an otherwise fine, but not outstanding, book.

35. The Last Thing He Wanted – Joan Didion

#Library

Didion's coy, mysterious style takes a long time to get into. Once I did, in this case, I was definitely in for the ride. At the same time, she remains coy, teasing out details piecemeal and it remains honestly a little infuriating. It's a good story, though, about an unknown 'incident' in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra affair and the woman who plays a mysterious central role in it. It's well told, but Didion’s writing takes centre stage a bit self-consciously and a different writer may have made the story come to life a bit more – even if they couldn’t engage me as well with the elliptical mystery. I found it exciting, at times funny, and ultimately heart-breaking, but I'm still not quite sure what to make of Didion.

34. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

#Library

This is one of a few novels I read this year based on my appreciation of the film adaptations. To be honest, I don't remember that much about the film, but I feel it suffers from what I would call the ‘Hazlitt’ syndrome (Sorry I can’t just toss that term I just invented off casually, I’ll need to explain. This is after the critic William Hazlitt’s postulation that King Lear loses all its power when it’s performed; that you can’t properly capture the overwhelming ‘superflux’ of tragedy in Shakespeare’s writing in any visual or dramatic form): there's definitely a taste of ‘superflux’ in this messy, complex tragedy that can't translate to simple passive entertainment. What’s most intriguing about this book is the narratorial voice: it’s an unnamed "we", the boys of the neighbourhood who speak collectively even while individual boys are named.  It gives it all the tinge of suburbia and gossip that it relies so heavily on. While that’s effective, it’s all hearsay and little psychology. I feel like the lack of psychology vis à vis the Lisbon sisters is important for leaving the mystery of their collective suicide (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the fucking title) linger, but I would have liked more understanding of other characters: the boys, why were they so fixated on the Lisbon sisters? What drove the Lisbon parents' bizarre decision making and reactions? An engaging story, but not fully  engaging with the overarching themes as a result.

33. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne

#BookShelf

Even though I’m removed by a hundred years of language evolution (or devolution amirite?) [yes my use of the neologism ‘amirite’ is deliberate here, stop distracting me], I find Hawthorne a very engaging writer. And that's essential here, because the overall substance of this narrative is kind of dull. His narrator has that hopeless lack of agency that so often infuriates me, only here it works because his (via Hawthorne) narrative is very eloquent and, while not concise, it's very clear and relatable in the feelings he expresses. It also brings me back to my old confusion about what a "romance" is, because it concerns itself with the whole transcendentalist (‘romantic’) return to a simpler (Utopian, is mentioned at one point) existence on the land, yet it eventually turns into a very anthropocentric tale of love, betrayal and tragedy. And so where's the ‘romance’? Is it ironic or is it part of that evolution of language? It seems to me like the core theme here is not a return to nature or even an attempt to embrace nature which cannot be tamed (à la the romantic poets) but rather an attempt to embrace nature that is interfered with by the fact that people suck. Is that a romance? I don't know. The structure of the narrative and prose are the key benefits to this work, but the story itself is fairly familiar and not too exciting. I quite enjoyed reading this but I don't feel overly enlightened at the back end of it.

32. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch

#BoughtToRead #ReadAllTheMurdoch

This, like Murdoch books generally, but similar to The Book and the Brotherhood (my number 22 book of 2015) and An Accidental Man (my number ?? of 2016 – wait and see) is a big ensemble piece, with loads of characters with their own story arcs. The main difference is that in Accidental, a lot of the plot rested on the idea of gossip and methods of communication, so it sort of worked by using cocktail party chatter and letters as narrative framing devices. Here I feel it's too crowded, and Murdoch would have fared better by cutting out or cutting dramatically down the narratives of a bunch of peripheral characters - Barbie, Theo, Paula/Eric, etc. and instead focused on Ducane, the suicide investigation and the Kate/Jessica love triangle. It's a quibble though, because I always feel in safe hands with Murdoch that she will deliver engaging, relatable characters, implausible situations and a lot of comic irony about the way people live and treat each other. The fact is though, she works best when peripheral characters are kept on the periphery and the main narrative has a sharper focus - as in The Sea, The Sea (my number 1 book of 2014) and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (my number 5 book of 2015). It just loses its ability to bite hard when there's just so much going on.

31. A Hologram for the King – Dave Eggers

#Library

Bec originally got this from the library because she enjoyed Eggers’ The Circle more than me, and eventually I picked it up to read. I liked it more than The Circle but I had a sort of hate-hate relationship with the latter (in the sense that I hated it, but hated the fact that I hated it). This is various flavours of narrative. The relationship between our protagonist Alan and his young Saudi driver-cum-local-guide Yousef reminded me a lot of the driver-narrator relationship in Everything is Illuminated. Then the whole underlying story, of Alan and his young colleagues waiting for an audience with the Saudi King to demonstrate their IT credentials, could feasibly be called "Waiting for Abdullah", while the reminiscences of past mistakes, self-reflection of a self-aggrandising (but not self-unaware) loser is very Franzenesque. Yet the whole thing has just a culture clash tragicomic kind of vibe. What’s more, with Eggers’ unpolished style behind the page, it feels a bit rushed at the end, like Eggers was spinning this interminable Kafkaesque plot, and would have been perfectly happy to have kept spinning this whole fish-out-of-water American salesman in Saudi Arabia story, and his missteps. But instead he opts to suddenly wrap it up in a way that's kind of upsetting but also just inevitable. He does leave the narrative inconclusive, but it still felt sort of rushed through.

Books of 2016 Part 1: 50-41

Yes it's that time of year again. The end, where one can make retrospective summaries of said year. To that end, it's time to look back on my year in reading as I do every year. This year I somehow managed to read a total of 66 books, despite having a son right in the middle of the year, and the world ending! For some reason I thought this was more than I did last year, but of course it wasn't, which makes sense. I had no guiding principles to my reading this year beyond hangovers from previous years (award winner lists, authors I've enjoyed in the past) so instead of my usual hashtags for 'reasons read' I'm just going to list my 'source' which is predominantly the local #Library but sometimes my own #BookShelf if I didn't have time to visit the library. 

And I'll be posting one write-up per day until I go back to work. As per usual I'll start by counting down to just outside my top ten, then I'll post my bottom 16 before reverting back to finish with the top ten.

Oh and one final footnote, unfortunately it seems my usual linking destination, qbd.com.au, has downsized their range dramatically, so this year I'll be all conformist, and link to goodreads instead.

So let's kick things off with...

50. The Will to Knowledge (History of SexualityI) – Michel Foucault

#Bookshelf

Oh, what a way to start the write-ups. My main takeout from this is that Foucault writes so painfully academically. You're writing about sex, you could have a bit more fun with it. He really is interested more in ‘sex as discourse’ than ‘sex as act’; maybe I’m just bringing an overly post-Foucauldian perspective on sex to this and before he wrote this, sex was actually something people talked about rather than did. Some of his arguments are more compelling than others, and he becomes most engaging when talking about the medicalisation of sexuality, than actually when he delves into his pet topic of power and control. It almost seems like a shoehorning in of his favourite topic, to be honest. Still, it is what it is, a long essay on sexuality that is basically as sexy as "Freud on Humour" is funny.

49. No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy

#Library

This makes me feel even more strongly (than I already did) that There will be Blood was robbed at the Oscars, mainly because the film version of this is almost a page-by-page recount of this book, and I feel like little to no creative licence was taken in its adaptation (possibly the only creative decision made was Javier Bardem's hairdo). This is naturally symptomatic of McCarthy being such a visual, blood-spattering writer though, so I can see the appeal of adapting him, as well as the temptation to remain hopelessly faithful to the source material. I'm still waiting on the Coen-helmed adaptation of Blood Meridian, incidentally. But coming to read this after seeing the film frankly doesn't add really anything to the story or the mythology of it at all. McCarthy's characters generally don't have interiors, so there's not much on the page that can't be easily translated to the screen. And it was well translated to the screen, to the point where I feel the source material has become kind of redundant.

48. Carry on Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

#Bookshelf

In a similar vein to above, I feel that reading this after Thank you, Jeeves (my number 21 book of 2015) is a less rewarding and kind of redundant experience, because as a collection of short stories it tends to establish and then repeat a tried and true formula of "Jeeves helps Bertie and his useless friends through some kind of clever subterfuge". It's still wryly amusing throughout, but I felt it gets old fairly quickly, and the full story of Thank you, Jeeves is not only the same formula, but it’s a fully-drawn, bigger pandemonium which leads to bigger laughs and entertainment. No surprise that the final story in this collection, written from Jeeves' POV, is a refreshing highlight as it's basically Jeeves playing Bertie for his own shits and giggles, rather than saving one of his useless friends. It would have been a better read overall with more of this kind of variation.

47. A Town like Alice – Nevile Shute

#Library

Probably the most anticipated book of 2016, coming as it did off Shute getting my number 1 spot in 2015 with On the Beach. It’s a bit odd to come to after On the Beach, because they’re utterly different reading experiences, but I feel going the other way would be far odder. This is quite a Dickensian novel; a lot of coincidences, with characters and their pasts intermingling. It’s a good story but I found it at times a bit too twee, a bit over-romantic. It seems to have an overall English-romanticising-Australia vibe to it, which seems in line with Shute's view of the world. Relationships seem to be Shute’s forte, with the people of different worlds finding common ground underneath it all, like Jean and Joe here, or Dwight and Moira in On the Beach. Let’s face it though, I just found myself craving more of that heart rending cynicism of On the Beach and I was never really going to get it here.

46. Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

#BookGroup

I didn’t get around to this before our actual book group meeting, but I decided to pick it up purely because I learnt during that meeting that Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (my number 1 film of… I dunno, 2013 I think?) was based on it. The premise is similar, an expedition into a mysterious and dangerous ‘zone’, but from the premise on is pretty much where the common paths diverge. There is a question of humanity, and humanity's relationship to the universe, common to both, but I feel like Tarkovsky explored both the premise and themes with far more gravity, as well as subtlety. There's a confusion here in sympathies, and it's difficult to know whether I'm supposed to like Redrick, or Noonan, or anyone. It suffers from the same fate, too, as Snow Crash or Neuromancer in that it's often obfuscating, and the science part of sci-fi takes a sideline to some catchy sequences, while character and even plot in this case get muddled in the ensuing chaos.

45. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernières

#Bookshelf

This was a really odd read, and it’s down this low because I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I thought of it. I had a bit of fun with it at first, because it seems like an amusing little satire, with Señor Vivo having a sequence of lucky escapes from death that are riddled with dramatic irony and a certain magical realism that’s quite charming. But then the middle section became very meandering, and way too tied up in meaningless mythology. The middle section does have a payoff in the end, but there was a story bookending it that was happening and quite engaging and these seemed like unrelated subplots. Mainly, though, the really very horrific events of the last few chapters felt like emotional muggings, because the tone of levity from the rest of the book belied the graphic violence that resulted, and while it was effective in jolting me upright, it just felt like such a violent juxtaposition that it was almost a betrayal of the reader-writer relationship. I guess in that sense it was a similar feeling to the penultimate chapter of Rabbit, Run by John Updike – except that this was told so matter-of-factly as if it should have been expected rather than the rude shock it was. It just touched a nerve rather than building and engaging my feelings properly or honestly. It just made me feel empty, in the end, even though the characters from the satirical tone are not that fully formed so I shouldn't have really been invested in them. I don’t think I was, in fact, but rather I was invested in my expectations of a diverting payoff from the parodical tone and instead got stabbed in the guts.

44. The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain

#Library

Yeah, it's a harmless bit of fun, this, even though I was completely incensed by the fact that my edition of this completely removed the porpoise from the story. It works for the most part as your typical mistaken identity farce; Twain's writing is jocular in tone but otherwise feels a little dated and clunky at times, as he's writing in the 19^th century style, but taking the voice of the Tudor period. It's ultimately a farcical bit of storytelling and it's light-hearted, so it's likeable but the writing takes a bit of effort to get through, without ultimately having a huge amount of substance.

43. Nocturnes – Kazuo Ishiguro

#Library

This is a very frustrating book. Some of the stories reach a nice rounded conclusion, and I appreciate the thematic links between them all, as they all deal with themes of music, talent and recognition, as well as love and friendship. But then some of them - in particular Malvern Hills and Come Rain or Come Shine - just stop at what I'd consider really crucial points, that leave a storm of ambiguity behind. And then when a later story (Nocturne) features one character from an earlier story (Crooner) - indeed it's sort of a 'what happened after this' in some ways - I'd hoped that there may be a revisit to those unfinished tales or a closing of the loop of all the stories (a la Kiezlowski's Three Colours trilogy) but alas, fuck you reader, puzzle it out for yourself. Because it doesn't do anything clever with them, I also left feeling this is a bit of a shallow offering from a writer of Ishiguro's calibre. There's well-worked humour, even farce, throughout, but it doesn't drill down to the heart of the matter like his best works do. Instead it just leaves the surface a little chipped and dented.

42. Solar – Ian McEwan

#Library

McEwan, you will see, has had a bit of a topsy-turvy year (also my most-read author of the year - yes even more than Iris Murdoch this year), and this was one of his lesser efforts. It’s a bit languorous in the prose, and not deeply engaging as a result – actually gets quite rambly. The protagonist of Michael Beard is unsympathetic, but it’s more his behaviour that’s unsympathetic and we don’t really get a good sense of his psychology and no insight into his motivation. It has McEwan’s trademark misanthropy, but I had anticipated an amusing payoff in the end and I actually didn't really get the ending or what its point was. Maybe if I could get my head around it (or get it explained to me) I’d develop a better appreciation for it, but it just fell a bit flat for me in the end.

41. A Man in Full – Tom Wolfe

#Library

So in one fell swoop, we demolish my top two authors of 2015: obviously I picked this up due to my fondness for Bonfire of the Vanities (number 2 of 2015). Wolfe is again here concerned with masculinity and masculine identity, but more overtly. In Bonfire it's more about established, confident 80s masculinity and what happens when that clashes, or is misguided. Here it's more about people who are uncertain, unconfident about their masculine identity. It's a far more 90s narrative. Wolfe’s own masculinity is also his detriment: he's unapologetically, or at least unconsciously, a shameless misogynist, with his female characters having no voice, identity or consciousness outside of the men in their life. In Bonfire it was an incidental omission because the story was so engaging, but here there are tokenistic female narratives that serve only to add more depth to the male narratives. That's not his concern or his milieu, but I feel the effort could be dispensed with as they don't necessarily add anything new or interesting to the story. Because this is his particular niche/specialty, it's more a conversation about representativeness in literature rather than a concern about Wolfe though, but it helped to underline the relative flimsiness of this story and the characters, and the bloated nature of the narrative which is just overlong.

#1000Albums: My Top 25 Albums of 2016

So (hopefully, if I get this written yesterday, i.e. today for me now but I’m in the past whooo spooky) to coincide with Jez’s top 30 albums post, I’m going to do a brief (hopefully by anyone’s standards, not just by mine) write-up of my top 25 albums. I didn’t do as rigorous a sort for this, but when I longlisted all the albums that I liked – and/or had given an Album of the Week, or Runner-Up Album of the Week award to – they slotted quite nicely into four tiers: 

the ‘dregs’ (I’ll do a dump of these later – they’re obviously all good, but they didn’t make that cut);

the ‘third tier’ – really good albums that I enjoyed but not quite enough; 

the ‘second tier’ – these are albums that have really made a difference to me this year, either in my personal taste or in terms of completely changing my lifestyle and world outlook (none of which has happened yet because I’m just being facetious. By the by, what is the only other word in the English language (besides facetious) that has five different vowels in alphabetical order?). 

Then above that, we have not the ‘top tier’ or ‘first tier’ but what I’ve come to know as the ‘elite six’ – my top six albums were really another step above because these were albums that have throughout their life in the music project have really meant something to me personally. And the hardest part was putting that elite six in order.

So hopefully my verbosity is out of the way now and I can treat you to more succinct writing; writing that is deliberately and nutritiously unadorned, without repetition or unnecessary elaboration, in order to hold the reader’s attention for longer and not sidetrack them in meandering sentences with words that don’t make sense thrown in to try and catch people who aren’t paying attention due to the pointlessly long and

25. “Wiped Out” by Mooryc (Polish Folk)

I mentioned in my write-up of “We were Ready” by Mooryc that this guy reminds me a bit of Sufjan Stevens in his sound. You really need the full album to get a handle on his inventiveness; all pretty low-key stuff but really effectively simple.

24. “Sleepin’ Rough” by the Rumjacks (Australian Folk Punk)

Don’t think I wrote up any of these guys songs, but “Kathleen” and “A Fistful of Roses” were probably on my 100-51 dump. There’s literally nothing not to like about a bit of raucous Irish-flavoured folk punk. I love pretty much every example of the subgenre, and these guys are no exception. We were pleased to discover they were Aussies and do a lot of live gigs too, because I reckon these guys would be very much worth seeing.

23. “Loud Hailer” by Jeff Beck (Blues Rock)

With a new Eric Clapton album out this year as well, it’s surprising that Jeff Beck, from whom I’d never heard anything ,gets the blues rock spot in my top 25. But this was quite a revelation: really oldskool gutsy blues vibes, great guitar work and some really catchy hooks. I listened to this album as I walked up and down Missenden Road in the first days of my son’s life, fetching things for Bec and the baby who were locked up in the hospital.

22. “Mothership” by Dance Gavin Dance (Post-Hardcore)

This was another, really surprising, revelation. Throughout the album I kept wondering why they needed the unclean vocalist yelling at me, when their music was otherwise so beautifully orchestrated and constructed. In the end though, the beautiful orchestration won out and won me over, because for a big shouty album this is particularly musical and intricate.

21. “Preternatural” by the Moulettes (Indie Pop)

This is an album that could well have been higher (and I suspect it will be higher on Jez’s list). For whatever reason, despite the really clever sonic construction and really sweet, very catchy tunes, I end up sort of appreciating this music objectively rather than it really getting under my skin (with the exception of “Pufferfish Love”, a top 20 song) so even though it’s brilliant and everybody should listen to it, it just doesn’t enter that upper personal echelon.

20. “Beardtown” by Sheelanagig (Balkan Folk)

You’ll be getting a lot of folk-with-a-modern-twist in this write-up, following on from the Rumjacks and now this (and yes, Jez is well aware there’s another one coming). This album is a great deal of fun from its opening title track that mocks hipsters and social media (in a Balkan folk musical setting) to its more stirring instrumental tracks like “Hassid” and “Sad Ken”. It also really delivers that sense that the musicians are really enjoying themselves in a big way.

19. “Until the Horror Goes” by John Congleton & the Nighty Nite (Experimental Rock)

While all my attention was focused on “Your Temporary Custodian”, my number 33 song of the year, this whole album is a fascinating concept work that just plays crazy games with harmonies and different instruments to create a really absorbing and unsettling experience. There’s plenty of accessible tunes in here as well but for the most part it’s just a wonderful head-trip.

18. “Blackstar” by David Bowie (Glam Rock)

What can I say about this that hasn’t already been said by literally everyone writing about 2016 music in any capacity? Oh, I know, that it’s terrible, and a bad legacy for David Bowie to leave. The reason nobody’s said that of course is because it’s not in any way true. This was a very poignant listen in retrospect, because as I was listening the first time I was just marvelling at how successfully Bowie built longevity by constantly reinventing himself and using the musical zeitgeist to inform new directions. At times this album is even a little too avant-garde but it’s ultimately very Bowie and very brilliant.

17. “Royal Blues” by Dragonette (Synthpop)

This is a fun collection of peppy, boppy songs, all very catchy with good synth backing tracks and positive message vibes being broadcast out. It’s always going to occupy a comfortable position in my sweet spot, and the only reason it’s not in a higher position is it was a fairly late release and I haven’t spent very long with it yet.

16. “Eat the Light” by Lotus (Eclectic Pop)

I talked in my write-up of “Anti-Gravity” (my number 21 song of the year) that this album did something really amazing to me. I put it on as my first album of the week when I felt totally shitty and pissed off at the world, and about ten minutes in I was like “This is really good”. It remained really good, with a good bit of eclecticism but holding a common thread of really positive, upbeat music. It’s no small feat to lift me out of a gloomy mood through music alone; I’ve even gone so far as recommending this album to a renowned music journalist for that reason (I got no response, if you’re wondering).

15. “True Sadness” by the Avett Brothers (Country Folk)

So we’re now entering what I called at the top my “second tier” of albums, and this one in particular could have been a bit higher in theory but realistically it’s here because of two or three songs that I really, really loved (including of course my number 6 song of the year, “No Hard Feelings”). The rest of the album probably falls down for me by being more on the country side of folk, even though I’m much more on board with that blend when it’s done this well.

14. “Hit me Baby…” by the Baseballs (Rockabilly Covers)

This is probably the album that objectively doesn’t belong on a top 20 list, but it can be justified on mine through pure arithmetic. If you sum the following things that I love: rockabilly music, genre-bending cover versions, and iconic pop songs from the 90s, then the sum of all of those things together is a surefire hit. But the Baseballs are actually more than a novelty joke for me: they don’t just do rockabilly covers of well-known pop songs and assume the job is done, they actually do it really well, with some really clever arrangements to make it sound as if it were an original. And the tracks on this album that I don’t know (there’s a Selena Gomez song, for instance) work on their own and not just as an amusing twist on something very familiar. I just had enormous fun with this album.

13. “Thor & Friends” by Thor & Friends (Ambient Chamber Pop)

Yes I’m very much in the gimmicky phase of my top 25 here, following on from the Baseballs with this collection of ambient chamber percussion music. There’s very little really here to pull out (although “Jordan’s Song” is on my 207-song longlist) but it’s just a really thoughtful, curious dreamscape of music here, with everything driven by Thor Harris on his vibraphone and his two friends backing up with marimba and various other-worldly sounds, all of which I generally love.

12. “Paradise” by White Lung (Punk Rock)

I could do another arithmetic game here: while I don’t love punk rock as a rule, I love kickass female vocalists, I love synth sounds being introduced in more hardcore music, and not exclusive to punk rock, I do like angry, raucous music. So this album has all of those things and does them all really well. There are some songs that hit the high notes more than others (including of course “Narcoleptic”, my number 10 song of the year) but the whole album is a great bit of provocative and furious energy.

11. “Album” by the Sun Days (Indie Pop Rock)

This is a funny album because it was completely and utterly everything to me the week it came out, but for whatever reason that initial hot pulsating love eventually mellowed out a bit. I can’t deny though that this has everything I like: it’s hugely infectious, sunny-vibed music, with catchy riffs and a general sense of positivity. Maybe the reason it’s slipped out of my top ten is just because it is a bit over-the-top with its happy vibes; I should like it more but my natural cynical grouchiness can’t accept this much sunshine in. My grouchiness likes it a lot while it’s shining but upon reflection it just keeps it at arm’s length. Still, go listen to this album.

10. “Red Sky” by Moon Hooch (Psychojazz)

Perhaps a bit more accessible to my grouchy self is this, because although this whole album is just an orgy of fun sounds, driving energy and just over-the-top silliness, there’s a certain filthy irreverence to it that really sits comfortably with me. There’s not a lot of complexity to the idea here although there are many layers to the music: it’s a group of guys blaring saxophones and other horns in really fun, chaotic ways. Its only potential flaw is that it does get a bit samey, but I love every minute of it.

9. “It Calls on Me” by Doug Tuttle (Psych Rock)

As much as I rhapsodize about this album’s master stroke, the two-sided dreamy rockscape that is “Saturday-Sunday”, the whole album is a brilliant collection of oldskool psych rock music, really thought-provoking with a great composition. It’s also one of the best concept albums of the year, with the songs all bleeding into each other to take you on a fascinating journey through melancholic and sometimes just trippy places. It’s potentially just a great bit of 70s nostalgia (which I don’t have, personally) but it’s particularly well done.

8. “Dolls of Highland” by Kyle Craft (Glam Rock)

I’d call this the most underappreciated album of the year. Kyle Craft has a great voice as well as a wonderful theatricality, with his songs ranging from gloomy and thoughtful to really outlandish fantastical storytelling (the best example of which, “Jane Beat the Reaper”, got my number 11 song of the year spot). The only reason that this album is outside my elite six is because it just falls outside my personal sweet spot, but I genuinely respect and admire Craft’s prodigious talent in songwriting and performance. If I were compiling a list of ‘best’ albums rather than ‘favourite’ albums, this would probably be top three. And joining it in that illustrious company (outside my sweet spot) would be…

7. “Teens of Denial” by Car Seat Headrest (Indie Rock)

This is basically the top of my second tier, before you enter my elite six. This album, in a similar vein to Lotus, achieved the unachievable: it changed my opinion from hating it at first to completely loving it. I maintain that the song “Vincent”, which All Songs Considered chose to showcase what a brilliant artist this guy is, was a poor choice, simply because it’s quite conventional and doesn’t really showcase Car Seat Headrest’s range and brilliance. The two clear standouts to me (“The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” and “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”) I’ve already written up as individual songs, but there’s a really grandiose sense to everything on this album. It’s a slow burn, as well, because he’s playing with very familiar sounds and vibes, but he arranges them in really clever ways while pushing that ‘disaffected youth’ persona in really cutting and satirical ways. There’s a lot of subtle variations and effects going on in the music here, whose subtlety is the main reason why it took me a while to get on board with this, because on the surface it can just be enjoyed as a guitar rock album (not really my thing generally) but there’s plenty of layers underneath that I still feel I haven’t quite fathomed.

6. “City Sun Eater in the River of Light” by Woods (Folk Rock)

So the first entry in my elite six is probably the most conventional and predictable, given how much I’ve already talked about Woods. This album also makes my elite six just due to the sheer number of great songs on it that I loved throughout the year, and it finds itself at the bottom of my elite six simply because of the ‘other’ songs on here, I’m not all that enamoured. But I generally love the sound that Woods have, straddling the border between indie rock, folk Americana and even dipping into country, blues and funk territory at times. At the end of the day it’s just really sweet, comforting listening for its runtime, and when you combine the beauty of “Morning Light” with “Can’t See At All”, “Politics of Free” and “The Other Side”, mathematically alone it’s going to be catapulted into my top echelon even if I find some other songs less effecting.

5. “The Space Between” by Jamie Smith’s Mabon (Folk)

For most of the music project this album was considered the benchmark that others were compared to, because it really was the first to make a really big impression. This is that other folk-with-a-twist album I was talking about earlier, based largely around accordion and strings work but with really curious modern interpretations that push it into different directions. I spoke about the silliness that is “The Accordionist’s Despair” but there’s plenty of other variations on the idea including the slightly menacing “Frank’s Reels” and the more upbeat Latino-influenced “48 in Ortigueira”. There’s a lot of fun to be had with this album, and it feels like a really challenging exploration of very traditional Celtic folk sounds.

4. “Brave Enough” by Lindsey Stirling (Classical Pop Crossover)

The funny thing about Lindsey Stirling is that later in the year this became an immediate frontrunner for album of the year simply because of the sheer volume of songs from it that I loved. I think if you acknowledge that I love string music generally, and I love upbeat electronic pop music, then you’ll understand that this was what I called at the time a “musical bomb of Hiroshima proportions” that was dropped on me. It’s a long album, of 20-odd songs, but almost every single one got my attention because it infuses Stirling’s gorgeous electric violin work with some sunny pop vibes as well as some curiously dirty and squelchy electronica music at times. Strangely enough though, I love her whole package but it’s only here in the number 4 spot, because despite being a thorough collection of excellent songs, not one of those songs I loved enough to put in my top 50, and as an album it doesn’t do more than just deliver a bunch of different versions of the same premise, even though that premise is fantastic.

3. “Sonderlust” by Kishi Bashi (Classical Pop Crossover)

On the other hand, and sneaking into the top three ahead of a similarly-themed album is this masterpiece from Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist Kishi Bashi. In many ways this album explores similar themes to Lindsey Stirling, but the reason he pips his musical cousin is simply because of the sheer intellectual complexity that he brings to his pop music. Where Stirling feels at times like she’s playing violin over the top of electropop music, Kishi Bashi weaves his violin work seamlessly into the fabric of the songs, and as such they sound like no other music in either of the crossover genres but instead like their own species. I rhapsodize about my number 4 song of the year from this album “Can’t Let Go, Juno” but there’s far too much variety in here to isolate the genius in one bit of music. It might ultimately be still just a few variations on a theme but it expands and stretches that theme in so many different ways.

2. “Nostalgia for Infinity” by Sound of Ceres (Dreampop)

My runner-up album of the year, and unlike the preceding few, this is far more than just a collection of songs. In fact, I found my sentiment towards this album cooling as the year went on, as my relistening and reappraisals tended to veer more towards listening to individual songs, and the fact is that this album doesn’t work if you chop and change the order. The whole thing, like Dark Side of the Moon, requires listening in order to get the full effect. Sound of Ceres’ sound is unlike any other: a surreal, breathy dreamscape populated by strange-noises-made-musical, huge rises and falls in mood and tone, and it all culminates in the best song and perhaps the only one that works just as well as a standalone song, “Dagger Only Run” (my number 24 song of the year) which brings a shuffling pop beat to drive the ethereal music home. There’s no doubt the first criticism that would come its way is that it’s utterly pretentious, but if it works for you as it does for me, it’s an other-worldly masterwork.

1. “Cabaret Noir” by Mr Yéyé (Electrorock)

So that leaves us with just one, and after my talk about ‘collections of songs’ vs the whole complete album-ness that is Nostalgia for Infinity, what is it that brings this hour of electropop-infused French hard rock to the top of the pile? As I was relistening to my elite six and agonising over the order, I’d left this one to last, because I regarded it very much as the ‘dark horse’ to take out album of the year. The reason? I had a bunch of songs from this album on my playlist throughout the year and I enjoyed them all very much, but at the back of my mind I had a niggling thought that told me those songs were ultimately quite arbitrary choices, and practically anything on this album deserved a relisten. So when I approached it for relistening I was assessing it on those terms: had I been overestimating it all year? It turned out I hadn’t, and though I went into my elite six expecting I’d put Sonderlust or Nostalgia for Infinity on the top, there was an endless array of enormous fun and positive energy to be extracted from this album. There’s a wide variety of sounds produced from song to song, with differing levels of electro-influence, different paces, certainly different moods and energy, but always resonating in a really visceral kind of rock. But beyond the eclecticism and range the album displays, the fact is that every single song on this album sounds like a potential hit single, and every song could happily occupy a spot on my playlist of favourites; in a year where I listened to more than 1000 albums, and when you’re as grumpy and cynical as me, it’s an absolutely stellar experience to find an album where every song hits your sweet spot. The main reason, though, that this tops the pile and the filter that I tried to apply to make those final agonising decisions, was “who would I be most excited about a new release from?”. And while Mr Yéyé is prolific enough that I already selected follow-up singles from and featuring him later in the #1000albums project, the fact is that I’ll watch for every little bit of rock that he puts out.

So although I should finish at the top of the pile, here are some other strongly considered albums that didn’t make the top 25 but should definitely be considered worth listening to as well (in alphabetical order by second letter of the artist’s name, which is as good an order as any other):

“void beats/invocation trex” by Cavern of Anti-Matter (Cosmic Post-Krautrock Groove)

“Optimist in Black” by Daphne Guinness (Art Pop)

“Soul Rasta” by Fantan Mojah (Reggae)

“Odze Odze” by the Jagger Botchway Group (Afrofunk)

“Empire Builder” by Laura Gibson (Indie Pop)

“99c” by Santigold (Indie Pop)

“Notion” by Tash Sultana (Indie Rock)

“Rosetta” by Vangelis (Neo-Synth-Classical)

“Winter” by Oceans of Slumber (Doom Rock)

“Do Hollywood” by the Lemon Twigs (Throwback Pop Rock)

“Leslie Odom Jr” by Leslie Odom Jr (Vocal Jazz)

“Cosmic Explorer” by Perfume (J-Pop)

“Our Puram” by Pfarmers (Experimental Pop Rock)

“Everything in Between” by Ugly Heroes (Hip-Hop)

“Growth” by Chalk (Hip-Hop)

“Latina” by Thalia (Brazilian Pop)

“Dirge for the Archons” by Diabulus in Musica (Symphonic Metal)

“Eternally Even” by Jim James (Psych-Rock)

“[happy_robot]” by Sim Gretina (Synthpop)

“How to be a Human Being” by Glass Animals (Indie Pop)

“DNCE” by DNCE (Pop)

“Home” by the Boxtones (Indie Rock)

“Afterlife” by No Zu (Instrumental Afrorock)

“Neon Grave” by Zomboy (Dubstep)

“I Still Do” by Eric Clapton (Blues Rock)

“X-Communicate” by Kristin Kontrol (Noir Pop)

“Heiterefahne” by Trauffer (Swiss Folk)

“Air” by Astronoid (Metalgaze)

“Back from the Rave: The Album” by Avro (Breaks)

Songs of 2016: Top 20

So into my top 20 songs of the year; I won't have much preamble but read the previous two posts (if you haven't already, Mother) to get an idea of the sort of things I generally respond well to because these 20 have them in spades.

20. “Roll Up” by Fitz and the Tantrums (Indie Pop)

Kicking off my top 20 is the king of what I called “feel good” week (see my write-up of TNT in the previous post). I was a little mixed on Fitz and the Tantrums’ self-titled album, but this happy track with loads of good catchy vibes was an instant winner, and has stayed right at the top of beloved song list. A good measure of whether something will crack my top 20 – apart from meaning something to me personally – is if it has a low chance of me skipping it on my playlist (I can be very fickle). This one hasn’t meant anything to me personally but it absolutely never gets skipped.

19. “UGH!” by The 1975 (Pop)

This was a pick of mine from just about the first week of 2016, and while this was technically released in 2015, it was a lead single from a 2016 album. The album itself was actually a bit of a let-down following this track, although I feel I’m at odds with most people in thinking that – since most found the album amusingly diverse, and this just standard stuff from the 1975. It’s an incredibly daggy boy-band song, but I’m a guy who digs incredibly daggy stuff (see the next two songs, plus about 70% of everything so far) and this is just fantastically catchy and feel good.

18. “Greedy” by Ariana Grande (Pop)

Set daggy factor to extreme. If you’d asked me before we started the #1000albums project, to state some of the LEAST likely outcomes, I may well have put “Sam becomes an Ariana Grande fan” on that list. But having said that, I’d never heard any of her music until this year, and this song in particular was a real revelation. Again, it’s nothing profoundly affecting, but it’s an excellently-produced pop song that makes full use of Ariana’s well-toned voice and just generates all those feel-good, daggy vibes that I love so much. I also enjoyed the over-played “Into You” (it’s also on my songs of the year longlist) but this is a significantly better song in my opinion.

17. “Youth without Love” by Har Mar Superstar (Synthpop)

OK, so I’ve just broken the daggy-meter. I have absolutely no idea why this is my number 17 song of the year. If someone can listen to it, and explain why I haven’t been able to shake it or get it out of my head, or even skip it when it comes up on my playlist, for the past seven or so months, I’d love to hear it. This is just a really dumb, likeable song – it has daggy feel-good vibes and also makes use of that trope I mentioned yesterday, “strange noises made musical”. There’s also plenty of things wrong with it (like the way the dude strains to hit high notes in the chorus), but sometimes I just think flaws build personality. And whatever this song lacks in quality it more than makes up for in personality. That said, number 17 song of the year. It’s like that puppy dog that shits in your shoes and carries on making noise all night but you can’t help but adore it because it’s so cute and stupid (I call that puppy dog “Bec”) – that’s how I feel about this song.

16. “Pufferfish Love” by Moulettes (Indie Pop)

Hooray, out of daggy territory and into intelligent, beautifully orchestrated pop music. The whole Moulettes album Preternatural is an underrated gem (even possibly by me) but for some reason it was this song and no other that really floated (it’s a pun because pufferfish) to the top in my estimation. Having relistened to the whole album, it feels a little arbitrary now because any one of these clever, inviting and carefully crafted pieces of pop music could easily have become the standout. But I have gone back to this song over and over again, and I think it’s mainly the “strange noises made musical” here that inflate it (Get it because PUFFERFISH? AAAAAAAHHHH) so much.

15. “Here in Spirit” by Jim James (Psych-Rock)

This is a thoughtful, chills-inducing bit of music, slightly psych-rock sounding but with a plaintive piano riff over the top, and the message of the chorus “If you don’t speak out / we can’t hear it” was a very timely release given that this came out the same week the whole world imploded into stupid sometime in November. I love songs that tell a story, and this song has a hell of a lot to say.

14. “Saturday-Sunday” by Doug Tuttle (Psych-Rock)

So we’ve basically paired my two favourite psych-rock tracks of the year. Doug Tuttle’s brilliant album “It Calls on Me” was a huge highlight for me earlier in the year, and this odd little song that marks its apex, has been a favourite all year. I love Tuttle’s dreamy vocals on top of the languorous organ riff for the first “Saturday” part, and where the song transitions into its livelier, more upbeat “Sunday” instrumental section is an abrupt about-face that has so much great 70s nostalgia. The whole ‘finish a song with a long instrumental section’ motif is criminally underused these days and this is a great example of it very well done.

13. “You can’t make me make up my mind” by The Sun Days (Pop Rock)

Wow, so apparently I haven’t evenmentioned the Sun Days yet. There’s plenty more of them on my song of the year longlist but apparently this was the only one to crack the top 100. You’ll definitely hear more about the album (called “Album”) in my top 25 albums write-up tomorrow. Anyway, there should be very little mystery as to why this cracked my top 20; it’s chock full of bright, sunny vibes, frenetic guitar energy and some strange-noises-made-musical pop sounds over the top. If there’s a bit of a disconnect between me and the Sun Days that presents this being higher, it’s basically that their lyrics seem somewhat darker and more angry than their music indicates. But then I don’t often pay attention to lyrics, so in this case I mostly just overlook them.

12. “The Accordionist’s Despair” by Jamie Smith’s Mabon (Folk)

Yes, here we are – it’s my highest-rated JSM song. What I loved most about Jamie Smith’s Mabon and the album “The Space Between” was how it took familiar folkish tropes and totally revolutionised them. This is why the title track of the album, which follows a far more conventional folk-song structure, was relegated out of my top 50, and why this extremely silly piece of music finds itself my number 12 song of the year.  Basically this is a frenetically-paced instrumental track where the titular accordionist seemingly attempts to play a thousand notes a minute for four and a half minutes, with 16 seconds of interludes. It’s structured like a dirty electronica song (fast-paced, driving, repetitive) but created using hilariously anachronistic instruments. It also very much does what I talked about in my previous post with “Psychotubes” by Moon Hooch. You can tell these guys are having a load of fun with this, even just because it’s such a ridiculously silly concept.

11. “Jane Beat the Reaper” by Kyle Craft (Glam Rock)

I have this eerie feeling I may have just lost Jez, or at least this is probably the last track on my countdown that we’ll agree on (peeking ahead, yep it pretty much is). In my previous post, I spoke of Kyle Craft’s theatrical style which reaches the peak of its powers in this wonderfully sassy piece of rock operatic beauty. It’s also Craft’s most tightly honed and orchestrated song, with the guitar work, lyrics (and the story they tell) and his vocals with all their affectation and volatile intonation all working superbly together to create this bit of musical genius. If there’s one thing that could make this song even better, it’d be basically a vocal-free version that I could sing karaoke to, because my God that would be fun for all involved.

10. “Narcoleptic” by White Lung (Punk Rock)

Into the top 10 (AKA “The 10 songs that Jez and I most disagree about except maybe his top 10”) and the first entry in the elite few is this fantastic bit of raw aggressive energy from Canadian punk rockers White Lung. This song blew out of the tracks when I picked the album “Paradise” earlier in the year and has stayed right in my sweet spot for the rest of the year. One thing in particular I enjoyed this year (and enjoy generally) is female vocalists in aggressive genres (like punk rock, or metal), I don’t believe for any reason other than that I just love a good kickass woman, and Mish Way’s raw but charismatic vocal style is perfect for this music. I also like the slight electronica twist on the music here but otherwise it’s just pounding drums and chords that drive a furious bit of cathartic music home, with bonus abrupt ending (why give a fuck about ending a song properly).

9. “Cake by the Ocean” by DNCE (Pop)

Ooh yeah, more unbelievable silliness cracking the top 10 this time (and not the last, that’s for sure). This was a very late charge to the top of my list, coming from an album only released in mid-November, but an inevitable one. Leaving aside the fact that this is happy-vibed pop funk with an insanely silly set of lyrics, the fact is that I love – LOVE – without exception songs that have “cake” in the title. This includes the 2014 Latvian entry at Eurovision, “Cake to Bake” by Aarzemnieki, the 2014 Belarussian entry at Eurovision, “Cheesecake” by Teo, as well as other songs from the music project – “Fruitcake” by Brain Tentacles, “Bake me a Cake” by One Trick Pony – and going back with a bit of a stretch to the masterwork of the cake genre, Macarthur Park. Some might say it’s just correlation, but 100% correlation is generally a pretty compelling statistic. But let’s leave my own silliness there, and revel in just how much fun this song is, because it’s catchy as fuck.

8. “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” by Car Seat Headrest (Indie Rock)

Along with “Narcoleptic”, this is one of two entries into my top 10 that didn’t win either my song or my runner-up song of the week it was included in our project. This track in particular was a very, very slow burn that ended up blazing up when I realised just how brilliantly orchestrated the song is. As I implied in my write-up of the Ballad of the Costa Conchordia in my previous post, Car Seat Headrest is a musical and lyrical genius, and I think this song, which takes a sort of two-parted flip form, beginning with lyrics about drunk drivers and finishing with a chorus about killer whales (where the three syllables of the two phrases are harmonically mirrored sequences of notes). It’s just got this poetic symmetry and balanced progression that feels like it’s taken me on this surreal journey through a drunken mindscape while at the same time staying grounded in a piercing social commentary – which Car Seat Headrest does so well in his songs (“We are not a proud race / it’s not a race at all / we’re just trying, I’m only trying to get home”). As I mentioned, this is never the sort of music that immediately hits my sweet spot, hence why this masterpiece is only at number 8, but it’s hard for me to dispute the artistic merit of this particular track, which is why it's here despite my initial misgivings.

7. “Youth” by Glass Animals (Indie Pop)

This is probably more than most tracks on here going to make Jez raise an eyebrow, and I’m not sure if I can necessarily draw a compelling argument for why this is my number 7 song of the year (and also, incidentally, the highest-ranked “Runner-Up” song of the week of its release), but I’ll try. While Glass Animals also fall into that territory (with Miike Snow) of really painfully indie pop, with their slightly twee vocals, mostly incomprehensible lyrics and unusual, idiosyncratic musical tracks, this song just has an infectious beauty about it, helped into my top 10 by the overall happy vibes and the flute twills (which fall under the “strange noises made musical” heading). Regardless of all the objective quality, every time this came up on my playlist I kind of thought of it as a very underrated song, even by me, and so I hope to make amends for that with its ultimate recognition here.

6. “No Hard Feelings” by the Avett Brothers (Countryish Folk)

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the Avett Brothers are sort of an anomaly, because they’d comfortably fall into sort of country territory, but it’s country-ish music that I really respond to, and that’s nowhere more true than this sweet, sentimental ballad about facing mortality and tying up loose ends. It’s also got that most effective of musical motifs that always gets me, songs that build and tell a story. And when the strings (stirring strings, another of my favourite motifs) kick in during the final verse it just gets me right in the feels. I find this song very affecting in the best possible way, because it’s sad and slow but ultimately really affirming and uplifting.

5. “Giant” by Banks & Steelz (Hip-HopTronica)

This is almost certainly the top ten entry that Jez in particular never saw coming, and it probably feels like a bit of an anomaly given the things that generally qualify songs for this elite list. The fact is, that despite the lack on my list (and spoiler alert: this will apply to albums too) of Kanye West’s nothing album, or Chance the Rapper’s dull, incoherent mixtape, or all the other hip-hop mainstays of everybody else’s top 20, I actually really like hip-hop/rap, at least in theory. But I don’t respond to messages or lyrics or ‘objective importance’ of the music. What I respond to is what this fantastic track has in spades: a good, driving beat and really hard-hitting vocal work, with personality and a real permeating sense of anger. This won’t make it onto anybody else’s list because it doesn’t make an important enough statement, but it’s the most enjoyable bit of rap that I encountered this year. It’s also worth noting that my highest-ranked “runner-up” song of the week, Glass Animals’ “Youth” was second to this song in the week of release. So apparently that was a pretty great week for me.

4. “Can’t Let Go, Juno” by Kishi Bashi (Chamber SynthPop)

Kishi Bashi has already had two references in these write-ups, but both songs were part of my 100-51 dump so I haven’t yet had a chance to rhapsodise about his brilliance. His album “Sonderlust” was quite a late release in the year but within a couple of weeks this particular track – my song of that week – had already amassed a number of plays to rival my song of the year, to come. It feels perhaps a little arbitrary that this particular song became the highlight on the album, because it’s just one of many examples of clever, brilliantly produced pop music that blend stirring strings (there we are again) with fun electronica notes and Kishi Bashi’s eruditely lyrical vocal work. There’s also just a superbly engineered and orchestrated precision to this dude’s music, that draws out really positive feeling in strange and inventive ways. Whatever it was that really drew me to this song, it continues to draw me into its quirky and wonderful magic.

3. “Can’t Get Enough of Myself” by Santigold ft. BC (Indie Pop)

From exquisitely precise pop music to silly, bouncy pop music. I know that this track isn’t on anybody else’s radar because it’s not available for hottest 100 voting (although other, far lesser Santigold releases are) and that’s a shame, but perhaps understandable, because this song isn’t particularly respectable and certainly not ‘important’ but it’s right in my wheelhouse of joyous, cheesy fun. From its upbeat beginnings to its sassy and witty lyrics, it’s just a big fluffy ball of good times. It has some of the funniest lyrics I’ve enjoyed in 2016 (“All I wanna do is what I do well / Ain’t a gambler, but honey I’d put money on myself / All I wanna do is bottle it to sell / ‘cos my brand of vainglory is much better for your health”) and it’s always just infected me with its boppiness. What’s more, this song came up often enough on my playlist in the car that it got under Bec’s skin too, to the point where she asked me to put this on her labour playlist. We didn’t end up getting around to it, but there was the chance my son would have been born to this song (instead of some random Ali Farka Touré song I don’t know the name of).

2. “Morning Light” by Woods (Folk Rock)

Ah, Woods. We knew more of this was coming, I assume. This is very much the top of the pile in a superb album of music, that blends sweet pop rock with folkish sounds and even a tinge of country. And oddly enough I think this track is probably the most country-infused song on here, and yet despite my general disdain of country vibes, this finds itself my runner-up song of the year. It’s just got a really sweet tune, with Jeremy Earl’s beautiful counter-tenor lilting over the sprawling 12-string twang that just gets all of that pure Americana vibe into an ultimately simple, very unpretentious package. Whatever else it does technically or through its composition, when Earl sings “I love you” it just gets me in the right spot. I also remember it getting Bec in the right spot, too, during the latter stages of her pregnancy, and I think of it fondly for that reason, too.

1. “Runaway” by Aurora (Indie Pop)

So my song of the year combines a couple of elements from my previous two songs – it’s a song that’s on nobody else’s radar (despite plenty of airtime given to this artist) and it gets me smack bang in the right spot, every time. What’s funny though is that this doesn’t really contain any of my more distinctive favourite motifs – in fact this is a very low-key and sparse bit of music. But the Sam-pleasing motif it does play on – the ‘build’ – is something that was practically pioneered by this song, at least in terms of my realisation that this was something I responded to. When I first listened to this my exact words were “the way it builds is fucking magic” and I haven’t had any pause to reconsider that initial impression. From its beginning with Aurora’s sweet, slightly Celtic-sounding vocals it slowly swells (with smart, dramatic retreats) in its instrumentation to where it peels out to a haunting chorus that just conjures up a starlit night sky to me, wide open and gorgeous and terrifying at the same time. The lyrics are not immensely complicated but this allows the simple story, of a runaway girl who is longing to return, to pair with that sparse and haunting soundscape and create an emotional heft that sends chills down my spine every time I hear it. As with the Santigold, I think it’s a shame that Aurora’s slightly more conventional pop hits got all the attention, because this is, to me at least, as perfect as pop music gets. 

As I mentioned at the start of the countdown, now that I've finished my own personal 'hottest 100', the full longlist for consideration is available as a public playlist and with a GPM account you can listen to the full thing here: https://play.google.com/music/playlist/AMaBXynh7k0YcRqioaD9GpqnJW4K67LgmSEDFnjs3W2dPi7J5WamFbRzOu5otOKuM-HVzRqMpJBA9suFvDwcHbxnv1kpOTaipA==