Top-10 Albums of 2016: Part III (of III)
Here’s the final installment of my top-10 albums of the year. You can find Part I here, and Part II here. Thanks for reading!
3. Drive-By Truckers—American Band
At this point, we’re getting into the albums that I really loved. There’s a pretty big gap between albums 4 and 3, and American Band had a reasonable chance of being my favorite album for the entire year.
I love this album, primarily, because of the lyrics. While the instrumentation is good, and the melodies interesting, it’s the words themselves that give American Band so much power. I can’t imagine an album that is more politically relevant at the end of 2016, and the songs here explore social issues in beautiful depth.
“What It Means” is a perfect example of the issues within this album, as it dives into racial issues around America. With lines like:
I mean Barack Obama won
And you can choose where to eat
But you don’t see too many white kids
Lying bleeding on the street
And,
And that guy who killed that kid
Down in Florida standing ground
Is free to beat up on his girlfriend
And wave his brand new gun around
While some kid is dead and buried
And laying in the ground
With a pocket full of skittles
the band drives home the importance of the racial struggles and issues in America. There are multiple songs that explore issues in a great depth and detail, but “What It Means” is perhaps the most powerful. This is a fantastic album from top to bottom, and one that I highly recommend.
2. House of Heroes—Colors
Colors is a hugely ambitious project. Funded by a kickstarter campaign, it is written as a concept album that explores a story written by the band. If that sounds horribly cheesy or foolish, I completely understand. That being said, though, House of Heroes absolutely nails it. Much of this album’s success hinges on the story that each song tells a part of, and (as weird as it seems to say) the characters and plot are both interesting.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to explain how an entire album about one story can actually be worthwhile, and the reason that I keep coming back to is this: each song explores themes that everyone faces, and addresses them in ways that would fit in any other album. So while the story here is unique, the songs aren’t that far off from what you might find on a “normal” album.
Beyond the concept of this entire project, all the component pieces (lyrics, musicianship, overall sound) are all great as well. House of Heroes has been around for a while, and the independent nature of this release really allowed the group to write songs however they wanted to. I don’t know how much longer this band will be around, but I hope they create several more albums like this one.
- Bon Iver—22, A Million
After I listened to this album for the third or fourth time, I knew it was going to fall somewhere in the top-three of this list. This probably speaks more to my lack of connection to the music industry than to the secrecy of the release, but I had no idea that Bon Iver was recording a new album until it showed up on Spotify.
22, A Million is hauntingly beautiful. Even though the lyrics are often so vague as to be often inscrutable, Justin Vernon has created a deeply moving album that often left me feeling somewhat melancholy without really knowing why. Even though specific lines of the lyrics are often unclear, Vernon sings about the same themes of loss and longing that permeate his other works, addressing them in a new style but with the same brilliance.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, this album is simply beautiful. While I like many albums on this list, and love some of them, Bon Iver’s latest release is easily the best album I listened to in 2016.
