The 2015 Ho Media Awards

This list is more about posterity than about writing convincing arguments imploring you to try these albums. I'm already later than I'd planned and time isn't getting any freer, so it's time to spit it out and get on with everything else!

Remember when I said that last year? When I evidently (somehow) had even more time to write than I have today? Ah, the good old days. So! Same rules apply.

2015 had both better quantity and quality when compared to 2014. I came up with a list of 20 albums off the top of my head that were new in '15, not including albums that were released earlier than that but found for the first time in the last 12 months. Let's recap.

Chasing Daylight
What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World
How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
Strange Trails
My Favourite Faded Fantasy
Did I Sleep And Miss The Border
Beneath The Skin
These Changing Skies

Vestiges And Claws
Curio Cities
Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance
Kintsugi
No No No
The Great Unknown
Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
Drones
Star Wars
Echolocations: Canyon
Wilder Mind
Bonxie

When an album was good this year, it was GOOD. The first group of albums above were all standouts. It's great to have a year that explores a variety of sounds too - it would be hard to pair any of those two albums together in the same "mood." It also marks the first time I've made a foray into bluegrass, with Elephant Revival's These Changing Skies being the best thing I've heard in the genre this year. Altogether, I've still got to hand it to Noel - stepping away and doing his own thing without Sardy at the helm in the studio was the best thing for him and it shows in Chasing Daylight, the 2015 Record of the Year.

While the video is a total copout for the greatest track on the album, it's still the best track of 2015:



As mentioned earlier, I've spent enough time sitting outside of moonshine distilleries in the Gatlinburg to want a little bluegrass in the other 51 weeks of the year I spend here in Indiana, so I've started listening to some folk/Americana/bluegrass bands like Elephant Revival (my Discovery Artist of the Year for 2015), Mandolin Orange, The SteelDrivers, and Trampled By Turtles.

In printed matter, by a slim margin, The Book of Strange New Things gets the tip of my hat for its softcore sci-fi layer over a story of a long-distance relationship that may or may not make it through the apocalypse. The Martian was hilarious and I'm looking forward to finally seeing the movie when it comes out. Stevenson's Seveneves was indeed much better than REAMDE, although the second half was a little short; I'm one of those people who actually wish the book had been longer so that we could have spent more time with the second cast of characters. Sanderson's next entry in the Mistborn saga actually put a knife in my heart - I didn't think he could do that! And David Mitchell's door-stopping The Bone Clocks ticked every box except one for me, so I'll definitely be digging into his back-catalog in 2016. Right now I'm finally reading The Last Unicorn and enjoying it thoroughly.

My brainy homies on the internet have finally got a baller with a real show, who takes the prize for Website of the Year:



I expect 2016 to be fairly quiet as far as new musical releases go. Snow Patrol is still overdue. Due to their late 2015 releases, Guy Garvey, Adele, and Coldplay weren't eligible for this year's rankings, so they'll likely fall onto next year's list. We get one more Mistborn book out of Sanderson before he goes into hardcore Stormlight 3 mode. Other release possibilities are out there, but so unlikely that they're not worth mentioning.

Feed your brains something good in 2016!