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Alex Borkowski writesCHIRP Radio Best of 2016: Alex Borkowski
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Throughout December, CHIRP Radio presents its volunteers’ top albums of 2016. Our next list is from volunteer Alex Borkowski. 2016 is an auspicious year, because although I thought nothing could top the pure I-Feel-Like-Shit-O-Meter like 2013–14, a year I spent getting screamed at by entitled dickheads at a Gold Coast Starbucks and pining after uninterested women, 2016 proved to me that things can always get worse. It was year marked by me earning zero dollars, the dissolution of most of my close post-graduate friendships and a long slow spiral into hopelessness with relation to my already atrophied writerly ambitions, but some good punk rock that got released this year, so what the hell! Who cares! Screw it! It bears keeping in mind that although I've requested this list to appear ranked it only really matters that Jeff Rosenstock's album appears as my number one pick. The rest of the albums on this list are so disparate that it seems preposterous to rank them objectively and it seemed inappropriate to purport otherwise. |
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#1 WORRY. by Jeff Rosenstock (SideOneDummy) |
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#2 Blisters In The Pit Of My Heart by Martha (Fortuna Pop!/Dirtnap Records) |
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#3 The Dream Is Over by PUP (Royal Mountain Records/SideOneDummy) |
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#4 Impossible Animals by ROAR (Felt Forest) |
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#5 Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast (Dead Oceans) |
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#6 Beyond The Fleeting Gales by Crying (Run For Cover Records) |
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#7 Jurassic Punk by T-Rextasy (Miscreant Records) |
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#8 Hella Personal Film Festival by Open Mike Eagle and Paul White (Mello Music Group) |
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#9 Only Ghosts by Red Fang (Relapse Records) |
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#10 Xtreme Now by Prince Rama (Carpark Records) |
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Honorable Mentions |
Throughout 2016, I felt like I was being kicked in the head 24/7 by a particularly ornery septuagenarian—since he had brittle bones and no core strength it didn't hurt, but it was a constant reminder that someone wished me ill and would stop at nothing to see their will done in the waking world. Much like Bomb The Music Industry!'s catalog did for me while I was slowly breaking up with somebody while abroad in college, Jeff Rosenstock's WORRY. proved to me that even *I* was not beyond saving even with my shitty opinions and general intractability—no matter how worthless and awful I felt about myself by the end of 2016. Like his previous two solo releases, WORRY. sees Rosenstock musing about the things he gave up to pursue music, the inherent hopelessness that comes with there being no path forward and reminiscing on being younger and more foolish than you are now, but his view of these things has matured, and is no longer subject to as much of the ironic detachment and bitterness as his previous work. Instead, WORRY. became one of my favorite albums because so much of it is steeped in love and genuine worry for others—the entire back half of the album is about telling people that you love and care about that you love and care about them because they're not going to be around forever. It also absolutely rips from start to finish, but the first track has a special place in my heart. I'd talk about this album for the whole column if they'd let me, but for now let's leave it at that.
When you're from the town of Pity Me, Durham in England, it sort of seems like you've got no choice but to make a punk band, and that's exactly what Martha did. Although they sing "I've never been any good at poetry" in "Chekhov's Hangnail", they immediately follow up with "Tempted by a hangnail I once flayed my middle finger / Butchered cuticles, stain the page like wine / Count the digits. How unsuitable are mine?" so obviously that's not the case at all. Blisters In The Pit Of My Heart stands out by sheer lyrical prowess and manic energy, even in the first half of "Ice Cream and Sunscreen," which slows the pace of the album considerably but in a way that's consistent with the earnestness of everything that's come before. Although continuously self-deprecating with lyrics like "I know you wish for fireworks to light your July sky / I was the dampest box of matches you could ever hope to find" and "And when it came time to check-out / You stood beside my til / I said 'retail is the pits' / And then I scanned your anxiety pills," Blisters In The Pit Of My Heart lit a fire in my belly during the autumn with its humor and cleverness, and I'm still riding on it months later.
From the moment PUP debuted "DVP" on their Audiotree set, I knew that whatever was next for those good good shout boys was going to blow my mind, and if anything Stefan Babcock has become even MORE committed to yelling in the wake of his doctor's diagnosis that "the dream is over" on account of his destroyed vocal cords. PUP's sophomore release doubles down on the gallows humor and ironic distance that made their debut album such a standout in 2014. "The Dream Is Over" suggests no answers, and in fact revels in its absolute hopelessness, from the repeated insistences of bodily harm in "If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will" to the self-deprecation of "Familiar Patterns" where Babcock calls out the phoniness that makes him sick while admitting "didn't even see the humor / with the situation I was in / knockin' back Jell-O shooters / 'til I puked in the kitchen." The disgust for modern life is cleverly couched in embarrassment in one's own complacency in it. Hence, there's a reason why I played this album full-blast on my stereo after some complete ass clown in a Hyundai Sonata opted to take right-of-way on a left hand turn and screamed at me the entire time he was doing it while I was just trying to walk to Potbelly's to get a sandwich.
The description for "Impossible Animals" glibly states "only took me four years," and for fans of Owen Evans's Wall Of Sound-styled pop group, we feared we'd never hear the follow-up to 2012's "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" EP teased in the Free Record Store Day version of "Hope" he teased on his Bandcamp in July of last year. However, "Impossible Animals" proves that Evans is just as adroit a songwriter as he was in 2012, deftly singing lines like "I don't need a god to punish me, / I'm perfectly capable of doing it on my own" and "your monologue was such a mess, / a reprehensible pretense." Every song ROAR has written is like getting a glimpse into a heartbreak you've yet to experience, coming at you with the inevitability of a freight train while your foot is clamped firmly in a railroad switch—it's impossible to look away since your doom is coming at you with a beauty you didn't think you were worthy of feeling in your mundane existence up until that point.
Although I've never listened to Michelle Zauner's band Little Big League, "Psychopomp" broke my heart into a thousand little fragments and months later I'm still picking up the pieces. Every song on that album is stripped down and raw, which makes sense given that she wrote it while caring for her mother in hospice. Zauner's vocal range is on full display here, whether she's singing a fairly traditional rock song in the form of "Rugged Country" or the floaty ambience of "Triple Seven," Japanese Breakfast's debut is full of quiet sadness and somber mediation, and can be hard to listen to all the way through. But if you can muster the emotional strength to do so, you'll come out different than you went in. "Psychopomp" is a record where someone bares their innermost thoughts and feelings, and we should be lucky that Zauner shared them with the lot of us, because Lord knows we don't deserve feelings so sublimely sad.
In the wake of their double EP "Get Olde/Second Wind," it would have been easy for Crying to keep pursuing the technicolor chiptune trail that Anamanaguchi had trailblazed a few years earlier, but they opted to go a different route, and it's to all our benefit that they didn't. "Beyond The Fleeting Gales" cribs from the best 80s glam rock and is replete with virtuoso guitar licks and incredible synth lines that lifted me up in an unironic joy that little else made me feel in this hellpit of a year. From "Origin" in the album's first half to the driving finale of "The Curve" that makes me throw up devil horns wherever I am because it rips so damn hard, Crying is a band that makes me proud to wear a shirt with a mashup of Sonic the Hedgehog and 'My Neighbor Totoro' on it, even if it's dubbed "perverted" by the band's own admission. You can 
The first time my friend Teddy sent me T-Rextasy's demo for "I Wanna Be A Punk Rocker," I was...annoyed. Their lead singer didn't seem like she'd ever heard the English language spoken aloud before, and had a, how shall we say, idiosyncratic way of pronouncing everything from "daughter dearest" to "Temple Emanuel" (apparently a famous temple in NYC). But the lyrics grew on me, because it was a song about lady punk rockers RIPPING all over in 2016, and "Jurassic Punk" is eight songs of irreverent punk rock that we didn't deserve but should be thankful to receive all the same. From the uproariously bawdy "Yellow Jacket Boy" where Lyris Faron sings "I want you darling boy to stick your stinger inside my honey pot" to the outrageously fun and cutting sendoff to that very special class of Wesleyan (and other small liberal arts college *cough* KENYON *cough*) fuckboys in "Gap Yr Boiz," T-Rextasy ended up cutting one of the most fun punk albums of 2016, and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for them.
Okay, so between Kanye's "The Life Of Pablo," Frank Ocean's "Blonde" and "Endless," Anderson .Paak's "Malibu," and (duh) Chance The Rapper's "Coloring Book," it was, to put it bluntly, a good year for rap and R&B. But I don't want to talk about any of those, I want to talk about Chicago's own Open Mike Eagle and his album "Hella Personal Film Festival," produced by England's Paul White. Eagle manages to channel an old school sound à la an MF Doom album, and superimposes that on decidedly 21st century concerns, perhaps best highlighted in "The Curse Of Hypervigilance (In Politics, Romance, and Cohabitation)" and "Smiling (QuiRerky Race Doc)." The latter deserves special mention for rhyming the words "most part" and "ghost fart" and letting me have a reaction to that other than "what, come ON," which is a feat in of itself.
Portland, OR metal scions Red Fang return to the studio after 3 years of touring to create a new album that both underscores what I've loved about Red Fang's previous releases while evolving their formula in a way that gives me new things to appreciate about them. To the ponderous and meditative "The Smell Of The Sound" to the more traditionally ominous "Dumb Guy" and "I Am A Ghost," Red Fang shows that even after 11 years together, they haven't forgotten how to write music that just fucking rocks, and are more than happy to share that with anyone willing to listen. Plus the music video for "Shadows" is literally a love-letter to 80s testosterone flick "Predator," and how cool (or uncool) is that?
Shortly after "Xtreme Now" dropped and I saw Prince Rama live, I remarked on Facebook, "Honestly...just give Prince Rama all your damn money because whatever you're doing with it probably isn't nearly as important as funding the creative endeavors of a bunch of literal musical space goddesses" and I stand by that. Founded by three members of a Hare Krishna Florida community, Prince Rama brings an outrageous spiritualism and refreshing oddity to psychedelic pop, and from the opening bars of "Bahia" to the closing notes of "Shitopia," Prince Rama gives listeners an exhilarating journey through the Astral Plane that's yet to be emulated even by some of my favorite electronica artists. "Xtreme Now" also contains some absolute jams like "Believe In Something Fun" and "Now Is The Time Of Emotion," and even if everyone was tired of me talking about how amazing and unique Prince Rama's sound was by the time the glow of their live show had worn off, I've returned to the album numerous times because it's just so fascinating to listen to.Next entry: CHIRP Radio Best of 2016: Matt Garman
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