The 2016 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.

Remember when I said that last year, referencing the year before? Same rules apply again.

This year started off amazingly, with four albums in a row coming out within a month or so of each other - Painting of a Panic Attack, Are You Serious, Petals, and Jet Plane & Oxbow (though JP&O technically came out in January, it wasn't until I ordered Frightened Rabbit's album that I saw that this new Shearwater album had finally dropped).

Jet Plane & Oxbow
A Moon Shaped Pool
Painting of a Panic Attack
Courting the Squall
25
Are You Serious
The Colour In Anything

Everything At Once
The Getaway
Total Depravity
Petals
Sunlit Youth

Cleopatra
A Head Full of Dreams
Lost Property
More Rain
Lighter in the Dark

2015 was very black and white - either an album was really good or an album was really not.  2016 had a few more shades of grey, but roughly broke down into the three categories above - outstanding, good, and average (top to bottom).  And seriously, those top seven are all fantastic.  My hat tip for best of the best goes to Shearwater for Jet Plane & Oxbow, this year's Album of the Year.

For a change, the best track of the year does not come from the best album.  Frightened Rabbit's "Lump Street" had tough competition from most of the Shearwater and Radiohead tracks on the albums above (as well as from the other tracks on Painting of a Panic Attack), but it bags the Song of the Year award.

Here's an important thing I learned this year:  James Blake is not the same person as James Blunt.  One writes and plays pedestrian piano pop.  The other writes and plays something he calls slow dubstep.  In reading about Radiohead's latest, someone mentioned how similar Blake's newest album sounds.  Since I was really digging AMSP at the time, I decided to give this random person's opinion a shot.  Thus did I become acquainted with my Discovery Artist of the Year for 2016.

Hugh Howey's Silo Trilogy is mixing up the Book of the Year award a little bit this year, since I feel like I need to hand it to that whole trilogy.  The post-apocalyptic cliche was wearing a little thin, but this felt different enough to keep me reading excitedly.  While a tad predictable at times, I didn't feel like that distracted in any meaningful way from the story.  Sanderson's The Bands of Mourning was a quick, fun read, but crammed almost too many revelations into one book.  Stavely's Unhewn Throne trilogy was really good, but I felt like the ending felt a bit rushed and incomplete.  I made it through several others that were so unremarkable that I can't recall their full titles or authors, so they're not worth mentioning.  I haven't had a chance to get to Priest's The Gradual or Kay's Children of Earth and Sky yet, but I expect Priest to continue to bend my mind and Kay to write the most beautiful prose possible.

Side note:  Radiohead's super deluxe AMSP book is gorgeous and, to me, absolutely worth the $80. Great album, great book, great presentation.  If there was a category for this sort of thing, it would win.  The deluxe reissue of Be Here Now lacks a bit in presentation, but the bonus discs fill out the history of the album with b-sides and Noel-sung demos that triple-down on what I believe to be their greatest album ever.

Website of the Year is going unawarded this year.  Step up your game, Internet!

2017 outlook?  Sounds like Oathbringer might just make it in CY17, but probably not in time for me to get through it before the end of the year.  Scholes' Hymne might finally hit the shelves, although it's had enough setbacks already that I'm not holding my breath (same for Lynch's next Gentleman Bastards novel).  Musically, I have no idea who might be in the studio in 2017, since almost everyone I follow has released something in the last 18-24 months.  Elbow has one on the way - that's all I've got.

Find something to expand your horizons in 2017!