Metamatic Forums Socialising The Green Room Top 10 Albums of 2016

Here is my list:-

1. Hannah Peel - Awake but always Dreaming
2. John Foxx & The Maths - The Bunker Tapes
3. David Bowie - Black Star
4. Kate Bush - Before the Dawn Live
5. Jean Michel Jarre - Electronica 2:The heart of noise
6. The Magnetic North - Prospect of Skelmersdale
7. Rusty Egan - Welcome to the Dance floor
8. Wrangler - White Glue
9. Beyond the Wizards Sleeve - The Soft Bounce
10. Ladyhawke - Wild Things

Brian

Bowie = album of the year for me
closely followed by

Anhoni - Hopelessness

others I like:

Michael Tanner and Alison Cotton - Alison Cotton and Michael Tanner
Hannah Peel - Awake But Always Dreaming
Gazelle Twin - Fleshed Out

Various - Close To the Noise Floor is the best compilation album I have heard for years

A strange year for music as there seems to be quite a lot of stagnancy about and far too many of those 'greatest hits' type albums. But here's a list of my faves anyway:

1. Station to Station - David Bowie
- he seems to have left his Ziggy Stardust years well and truly behind. A bit of a mish mash of long and shorter tracks but most of them are ace! Looking forward to the next one already which is apparently going to be made in Switzerland.

2. Timeless Flight - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel
No hits à la Come Up and See Me.. on this one but it's a grower. Didn't like their Beatles cover much though (not on here).

3. Blue For You - Status Quo
The Quo were on top form for this one and Rain should've got to no. 1. Pity I spilled a whole bottle of patchuli over the sleeve that night...Stinks a bit now. Might have to get the 8-track for the car.

4. Wings At the Speed of Sound - Wings (duh!)
Another corker from Macca and Linda and their mates, even though the singles were a bit soppy. Apparently he called round to Lennon's flat in NY in April but it didn't come to much cos Lennon was too busy looking after the baby.

5. Manfred Man's Earth Band - Roaring Silence
Wow .. just check out the full length version of Blinded By the Light!! It'll just blow your mind, man! That stupid punk rock rubbish will never be any better than this. Or the Quo.

6. A New World Record - ELO
Jeff Lynne and his orchestra just get better and better. They need to do a double album I reckon. In space.

7. Boxed - Mike Oldfield
It's a box set (geddit?) of his previous studio albums and some extra stuff but it's all been re-mixed in (wait for it) QUAD SOUND! This is the future, man. (Pity nobody's got a quadraphonic record player yet)

8. A Day at the Races - Queen
Their little gig in Hyde Park last summer must have been a real blast, and it certainly pulled a bigger crowd than that stupid Punk Rock festival in OXford Street or whatever. This new album is top stuff too. Somebody to Love was a great single but check out the opener Tie Your Mother Down...yeah!

9. Arrival - ABBA
OK, OK, ...Quo, ELO or Queen it ain't but these saucy Swedes can kick out a good tune when they want to (except for that Fernando single which was cr*p and thankfully not included here). Opening track: 'When I Kissed the Teacher' ! Naughty! (Check out those white boiler suits...phwooar!) Nice helicopter too.

10. Oxygene - Jean Michel Jarre (French import)
Some nice, spacey electronic music LP my cousin brought back from Paris cos he said it was all the rage over there. It'll never catch on here though - no songs, no lyrics...and it's French!


Well, that was my 2016 ... hope you had a good one guys. Looking forward to 1977 already.

Can I get back in the Tardis now?

Much to my chagrin I didn't listen to anything new in 2016 But Ivan's gonna get down with the kids in 2017. This cat rocks and his lyrics are miles better than Springsteen's !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXwkWVEIIw

I didn't get to anything new either. I bought maybe 20 albums?, but the only one I heard (and just the once) was Tindersticks' "The Waiting Room". I was looking forward to "Blackstar" until Bowie's passing after which I wanted to give it some time. This set a pattern for the year for me, until when autumn came I decided to deliberately write off the whole year. I would expect that one day my albums of 2016 will include the latest Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Bat For Lashes, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, John Cale, along with the last Leonard Cohen and the self-imposed final Piano Magic album (technically out properly this month but arrived December). Hopeful this year for The Flaming Lips due this month and maybe even Roger Waters at long last ...

I join the line of oldtimers who listen to sounds that once were called new musik, heh - I stopped listening to radio after 1980's. Top one album is David Bowie's "Blackstar", no opinions of other albums, but this is top ten of what I listened most 2016:
1. Di Leva (Sweden)
2. Erasure
3. Ladytron
4. Devo
5. Organ (Finland)
6. David Bowie
7. John Foxx & Louis Gordon
8. Kerli (Estonia)
9. OMD
10. Tom Verlaine

95% of my purchases are often decades old, so I can't play this game. But Bowie owned that year as of January 8, 2016. "Blackstar" dominated my listening for the first third of 2016. It was wonderful to hear Bowie finally progressing again only to lose him three days later. Talk about shocking. I was never more glad I purchased an album on the day of release that with "Blackstar" as it allowed me to experience it as something other than the last Bowie album for 64 hours.