Glide's 20 Best Albums of 2016

Aaron Lee Tasjan fell over and broke his wrist. “It could have been much worse” he said. “I could have broken my guitar”. This man is interested in his guitar and his music more than anything else. Even girls. Well, maybe not. I come not to tell you how incredible Aaron Lee Tasjan is but seeing this is his album I suppose I should make some sort of effort. After all, he’s my dear friend and he’s made three cool albums with me, he and I together and not too untogether on the mushrooms, either. And he came up with that great guitar riff that Jack White plays on my I Believe In Elvis Presley record. Aaron rides into town with his guitar and his little amp and a bag full of gizmos and a wild suit that would make Lefty Frizzell wince. He’s got the tunes, he’s got the verbal, he’s got the humour and the heartbreak and the hat. “There must be some way outta here” as Bob said. And there is. ALT by name and altitude by nature. Like Dan Penn and Neil Young, this is white soul that is beyond colour and full of colour, heart to art and vice versa, the voice authentic with the dust of the road. Songs of pain and redemption, of loss and longing and toleration and elucidation and maybe elevation, which way is up? And d’you mind if we have a laugh along the way? The geography: born in Ohio, now in Nashville via Boston then New York and a spell with its Dolls. Aaron would make me proud to be American if I was American but I’m not so forgive me mentioning it. He’s a liberal, forward-thinking chap who takes digs at himself with a smile and a simile and wouldn’t mind saving the world while he’s at it. Aaron is an American in the best way. Let’s not kid ourselves here. It’s a strange world and Aaron’s a strange chap and therein lies the beauty of it. The cat’s songwriting is treble mega in a lineage that embraces The Fabs to Willie and the driest wryness since John Lennon. Ah, and that ALT guitaring: one moment the finger-prints of the acoustic finger-picking of John Fahey on Owsley, then that ferocious six-string electric twang that leads from lunacy to salvation and beyond. I mean, dig the brilliant bonkers one-note-guitar/piano solo here on the aptly-titled ‘Out Of My Mind’ which is worth the price of admission alone, with our hero sanguinely singing “When I get in my own head I go out of my mind… why is it so quiet when I think aloud..?” Muddy had an album titled Hard Again. The first song here on Silver Tears is It’s A Hard Life. One iconic, one ironic. The ALT choogle is good, even when he’s hurting or having a go at himself. That’s what great artists do – they’re their own fall-down guys. Unless it’s a bit of bombast of course and then Aaron can out-twang Neil Young Live Rust using only his big toe well no that’s a lie but you get my drift. Be careful of believing this troubadour all the time. The way he often sings it, he’s mostly stoned out of his tree and more drunk than Hank (who turns up in the song ‘Ready To Die’, fact fans). Whatever the medicine is, dear pal, keep taking it because it suits you. Either that or at times the greatest songwriters are the ones who tell redemptive lies. Like The Beatles with Tamla Motown, The Stones and their fascination for Chess Records, Dylan’s love first for Little Richard and then for Woody Guthrie, ALT too has his influences – the fab Georgics of the contagious ‘Dime,’ the maybe kneel to Neil of the heart-wrenching ‘Refugee Blues’ where “your conscience becomes thinner than the soles of worn out shoes”. You can imagine Gram having a lonesome warble through ‘On Your Side’ and Mavis kissing the heavens with the benedictions of ‘Where The Road Begins And Ends’. And Aaron could’ve been a Wilbury just fine. Rock’n’roll, is it simply showbiz or is it ultra mega boogaloo where Gods walk among us, plugged in & shakin’ out the achin’? I believe in Aaron Lee Tasjan. – BP Fallon, New York City 2016

Rapper/singer Anderson .Paak’s third album—and first since his star turn on Dr. Dre’s *Compton*—is a warm, wide-angle look at the sweep of his life. A former church drummer trained in gospel music, Paak is as expressive a singer as he is a rapper, sliding effortlessly between the reportorial grit of hip-hop (“Come Down”) and the emotional catharsis of soul and R&B (“The Season/Carry Me”), live-instrument grooves and studio production—a blend that puts him in league with other roots-conscious artists like Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar.

After the lonesome folk and skeletal roadhouse soul of her debut album, 2012’s *Half Way Home*, Angel Olsen turned up the intensity on *Burn Your Fire for No Witness*, and she does it again on *MY WOMAN*. The title’s in all caps for a reason: The St. Louis, Missouri, native’s third album is bigger in both the acrobatic feats of her always-agile voice and the widescreen, hi-fi sound that Olsen and co-producer Justin Raisen bring to the table. With the very first song, “Intern,” it’s clear that Olsen has taken us somewhere new. A slow dance in a dive bar at last call, it might be familiar turf were it not for the synthesizers that cast an eerie glow across the song’s red-velvet backdrop. “Never Be Mine” harnesses the anguish of ’60s girl groups in jangling guitar and crisp backbeats; “Shut Up Kiss Me” couches desire in terms so heated the mic practically melts beneath Olsen’s yelp. Mindful of its ancestry but never expressly retro, the album is a triumph of rock ’n’ roll pathos, an exquisite dissertation on the poetry of twang and tremolo. And even if “There is nothing new/Under the sun,” as Olsen sings on the fateful “Heart Shaped Face,” she is forever finding ways to file down everyday truths to a finer point, drawing blood with every new prick. As she sighs over watery piano and fathomless reverb on the heartbreaking closer, “Pops,” “It hurts to start dreaming/Dreaming again.” But that pain is precisely what makes *MY WOMAN* so unforgettable, and so true.

Anyone reckless enough to have typecast Angel Olsen according to 2013’s ‘Burn Your Fire For No Witness’ is in for a sizable surprise with her third album, ‘MY WOMAN’. The crunchier, blown-out production of the former is gone, but that fire is now burning wilder. Her disarming, timeless voice is even more front-and-centre than before, and the overall production is lighter. Yet the strange, raw power and slowly unspooling incantations of her previous efforts remain, so anyone who might attempt to pigeonhole Olsen as either an elliptical outsider or a pop personality is going to be wrong whichever way they choose - Olsen continues to reign over the land between the two with a haunting obliqueness and sophisticated grace. Given its title, and track names like ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’, it would be easy to read a gender-specific message into ‘MY WOMAN’, but Olsen has never played her lyrical content straight. She explains: “I’m definitely using scenes that I’ve replayed in my head, in the same way that I might write a script and manipulate a memory to get it to fit. But I think it’s important that people can interpret things the way that they want to.” That said, Olsen concedes that if she could locate any theme, whether in the funny, synth-laden ‘Intern’ or the sadder songs which are collected on the record’s latter half, “then it’s maybe the complicated mess of being a woman and wanting to stand up for yourself, while also knowing that there are things you are expected to ignore, almost, for the sake of loving a man. I’m not trying to make a feminist statement with every single record, just because I’m a woman. But I do feel like there are some themes that relate to that, without it being the complete picture.” Over her two previous albums, she’s given us reverb-shrouded poetic swoons, shadowy folk, grunge-pop band workouts and haunting, finger-picked epics. ‘MY WOMAN’ is an exhilarating complement to her past work, and one for which Olsen recalibrated her writing/recording approach and methods to enter a new music-making phase. She wrote some songs on the piano she’d bought at the end of the previous album tour, but she later switched it out for synth and/or Mellotron on a few of them, such as the aforementioned ‘Intern’. ‘MY WOMAN’ is lovingly put together as a proper A-side and a B-side, featuring the punchier, more pop/rock-oriented songs up front, and the longer, more reflective tracks towards the end. The rollicking ‘Shut Up Kiss Me’, for example, appears early on - its nervy grunge quality belying a subtle desperation, as befits any song about the exhaustion point of an impassioned argument. Another crowning moment comes in the form of the melancholic and Velvets-esque ‘Heart-shaped Face’, while the compelling ‘Sister’ and ‘Woman’ are the only songs not sung live. They also both run well over the seven-minute mark: the first being a triumph of reverb-splashed, ’70s country rock, cast along Fleetwood Mac lines with a Neil Young caged-tiger guitar solo to cap it off. The latter is a wonderful essay in vintage electronic pop and languid, psychedelic soul. Because her new songs demanded a plurality of voices, Olsen sings in a much broader range of styles on the album, and she brought in guest guitarist Seth Kauffman to augment her regular band of bass player Emily Elhaj, drummer Joshua Jaeger and guitarist Stewart Bronaugh. As for a producer, Olsen took to Justin Raisen, who’s known for his work with Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira and Santigold, as well as opting to record live to tape at LA’s historic Vox Studios. As the record evolves, you get the sense that the “My Woman” of the title is Olsen herself - absolutely in command, but also willing to bend with the influence of collaborators and circumstances. If ever there was any pressure in the recording process, it’s totally undetectable in the result. An intuitively smart, warmly communicative and fearlessly generous record, ‘MY WOMAN’ speaks to everyone. That it might confound expectation is just another of its strengths.

You have no right to be depressed You haven’t tried hard enough to like it There are two kinds of great lyrics. The first is the banger/anthem catch phrase: "Normal life is borin' / but superstardom is close to post-mortem." The second is more complex (and more rarely found): "Like a bird on a wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free" — with ideas, themes, and personae unfolding over the course of songs, contradicting each other, confronting the listeners' preconceptions, like Pete Townsend, Morrissey, or Kendrick Lamar. Will Toledo, the singer/songwriter/visionary of Car Seat Headrest, is adept at both, having developed them over the course of his eleven college-recorded Bandcamp albums and his retrospective collection last fall, Teens of Style. With Teens of Denial, his first real "studio" album with an actual band, Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic-rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. "I’m so sick of / (Fill in the blank)" or "It’s more than you bargained for / But it's a little less than what you paid for" are more than smart, edgy slogans. Over the course of Teens of Denial's 11 songs, Will narrates a journey with his mysterious companion/alter-ego Joe that addresses big themes (personal responsibility, existential despair, the nature of identity, the Bible, heaven) and small ones (Air Jordans, cops, whether to have one more beer, why he lost his backpack). By turns tender and caustic, empathetic and solipsistic, literary and vernacular, profound and profane, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, he conjures a specifically 21st century mindset, a product of information overload, the loneliness it can foster, and the escape music can provide. “Fill in The Blank,” the mission statement of the album, kicks things off — it’s a fist-pumping anthem about feeling lousy in an ill-defined way, the fear of settling into a routine of futility, and not wanting to deal with it. Although it’s oddly joyful sounding, Toledo considers it the introduction to his angriest record yet. In that vein, “Vincent,” “Hippie Powers,” and “Connect The Dots” are about both fighting to hold your place in the crowd and to hold your drink, as well as DIY college house shows, and having no one to dance with, respectively. Initially similar, "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” veers off in surprising directions, each piece flush with huge, irony-free hooks. At the heart of the album sits the 11:32 "Ballad of the Costa Concordia," which has more musical ideas than most whole albums (and at that length, it uses them all). Horns, keyboards, and elegant instrumental interludes set off art-garage moments; vivid vocal harmonies follow punk frenzy. The selfish captain of the capsized cruise liner in the Mediterranean in 2013 becomes a metaphor for struggles of the individual in society, as experienced by one hungover young man on the verge of adulthood. Teens of Denial refracts Toledo's particular, personal story of one difficult year through cultural touchstones such as the biography of Frank Sinatra, the evolution of the Me Generation as seen in Mad Men and elsewhere, plus elements of eastern and western theology. The whole thing flaunts a kind of conceptual, lyrical, and musical ambition that has been missing from far too much 21st-century music. I won’t go down with this shit I will put my hands up and surrender there will be no more flags above my door I have lost, and always will be There are two kinds of great lyricists. The first kind is one one you find in books, canonized by time and a lifetime of expression. The second has it all in front of him. Meet Will Toledo. Or at least one version of him.

Play it on infinite loop.

Brooklyn art-rockers Parquet Courts have sometimes obscured their warmth under a cover of discord, challenging song structures and sardonic detachment. Their fifth album simplifies and purifies their sound to thrilling effect though. Whether they’re dovetailing or duelling, Andrew Savage and Austin Brown’s punchy riffs sublimate into the band’s poppiest hooks yet. There’s emotional engagement too, with Savage opening up his heartache and isolation on the bittersweet “Human Performance” and “Berlin Got Blurry”’s collision of thrumming post-punk and surf guitar licks.

Recorded over the course of a year against a backdrop of personal instability, "Human Performance" massively expands the idea of what a Parquet Courts record can be. They've been one of the most critically acclaimed bands of the last 5 years; this is the record that backs all those words up. “Every day it starts, anxiety,” began the first song on 2014’s "Content Nausea." Those were essentially the song’s only lyrics, but "Human Performance" picks up where that thought left off, picking apart the anxieties of modern life: “The unavoidable noise of NYC that can be maddening, the kind of the impossible struggle against clutter, whether it's physical or mental or social,” says singer, guitarist and "Human Performance" producer/mixer Austin Brown. There has always been the emotional side of Parquet Courts, which has always had an important balance with the more discussed cerebral side, but Savage sees "Human Performance" as a redistribution of weight in that balance. "I began to question my humanity, and if it was always as sincere as I thought, or if it was a performance,” says Savage. “I felt like a sort of malfunctioning apparatus,” he says. “Like a machine programmed to be human showing signs of defect.” The sonic diversity, time, and existential effort that went into its creation makes "Human Performance" Parquet Courts' most ambitious record to date. It's a work of incredible creative vision born of seemingly insurmountable adversity. It is also their most accessible record yet.

Let Me Get By is the third studio album from blues-rock group Tedeschi Trucks Band, released in 2016.

The Australian group finally returns with its long-rumored follow-up to *Since I Left You*, the 2000 album that earned them a ravenous following. *Wildflower* is a continuous mix of the wild and weird, another hallucinogenic collage of samples ranging from R&B to orchestral pop. From the calypso-klezmer \"Frankie Sinatra,\" featuring Danny Brown, to Biz Markie chomping over a Beatles sample on \"Noisy Eater,” it’s the tour de force soundtrack to music\'s past and present.

The Queens-based outfit’s debut feels like a trove of undiscovered Studio One gems. Aside from their feel for the organic low-fidelity magic of mid-‘60s rocksteady, these simple, twinkling songs strike something raw. In the unforgettable “Dispute,” modest but precisely executed instrumentation leaves plenty of room for singer Dan Klein, whose nakedly yearning vocals become a vessel for tenderness and tragedy.