video review: 'FIBS' by anna meredith

Well, this was concentrated wonderful - Billboard BREAKDOWN up later tonight, enjoy!

album review: 'FIBS' by anna meredith

When I first covered Anna Meredith back in 2016, I had no idea what to expect. I had been in a bit of a dry spell when it came to album releases at that point in the year, and here comes a classical composer with a few associations with James Blake but rapidly making a strident name of her own with a project that seemed to win over every critic that heard it... and yeah, I was one of them. I still hold that project Varmints as damn near ground-breaking in its usage of morphing syncopation and groove with classical bombast and twisted electronics, and when you paired it with solid writing, it wound up as one of the best albums of that year.

And ever since then, it seemed like Meredith's trajectory accelerated: she provided the score for Bo Burnham's feature film Eighth Grade - which rightly deserved all the critical acclaim it got - and that same year she also released the project Anno, an extended interpolation of Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons suite that may have felt a little too beholden to the original composition to truly take off, but still wound up being pretty damn potent all the same. But with a new project of original material - and with the expectation that I'd probably be the only one covering her on this platform yet again - I really wanted to get ahead of this, so how was FIBS?

album reviews: 'anno: four seasons' by anna meredith & antonio vivaldi ft. scottish ensemble / 'your queen is a reptile' by sons of kemet / 'in praise of darkness' by shades (VACATION)

This was a fun one to put together too - definitely happy with this. Enjoy!

the top 25 best albums of 2016 (VIDEO)

And here's the final list of my favourite records of 2016 - took too long to post this here, but man, it was worth it. Enjoy!

the top 25 best albums of 2016

And now, the final list, the one that always gives me the most anxiety but also the one that I'm always happy to have finalized by the end of the year - or by the first few days of next year, I'm going on vacation for the first week of January and I'm in a bit of a rush to get packed and ready on time, so this video might be a day or two late. 

But in an odd way that's kind of representative of 2016's albums as a whole, as I've definitely not seen a lot of common consensus surrounding picks - and fair warning, that'll be very true with these as well. Great records in 2016 came in fits and spurts, with a lot of big returns that didn't quite impress me, some debuts that blew me out of the water, and a predominant theme of endings that ran through a lot of albums that I covered and loved this year. I'm not quite sure if it's reflecting the tempo of the times or my personal feelings surrounding the year, but this list really feels all over the place, all albums I loved but coming from radically different locations, styles, and genres than I expected. In other words, there are albums that you will not recognize on this list, and a few major exclusions.

But it also runs deeper than that: for instance, this is the first year I've ever given out a perfect score on this channel - and then I did it twice. I'll get more into this when I talk about the albums at length, but I would recommend you consider my top two choices as interchangeable at best, I flip back and forth with them every day. There's also a whole bunch of albums that narrowly missed the cut, from punk veterans like Against Me!, White Lung and Jeff Rosenstock, to metal and experimental rock like Swans, Savages, Epica and Tarja to hip-hop powerhouses like clipping., Ka, LMNO, Elzhi, and Denzel Curry. And as I've mentioned a number of times, country had one of its best years in recent memory, and that led to some extremely painful cuts, from the superb pop country of Jennifer Nettles to the neotraditional tones of Cody Jinks and Mark Chesnutt to the stripped back indie starlets like Karen Jonas and Dori Freeman. Everyone I just mentioned dropped albums this year you can consider honourable mentions that I couldn't rank if I wanted to and are all worth your time, but now it's time for the list proper, starting with...

the top albums/songs of the midyear - 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, this video was a ton of fun to make. Took me less time than I expected too, but it's always one of my favourites every year.

Next up... look, I've never had any interest in Blink-182, so I kind of want to cover the Weval record or Blood Orange... but we are coming up to my third year anniversary, and you all should remember what that means, so stay tuned!

the top albums/songs of the midyear - 2016

There will be a lot of headlines that suggest that 2016 has not been a good year for music - and if you follow the mainstream between the losses of several legends and a haphazard set of releases that slide between underwhelming and disappointing, that's easy to believe.

Of course, that view is not really reflective of reality, because if you look away from the Billboard Hot 100 - which I would advise, it's been a rough six months there - there is quality here. I think the big issue comes in that there have been fewer than normal outright smashes and instant classics as there were at the midyear of 2015, which was really frontloaded with incredible records. 2016 has been more scattershot, with a lot of great records that don't quite rise to the level of immediate classics, and also a fair bit more diverse. Country and folk, for one, have been a great year across subgenres, underground hip-hop has been pretty solid, and there's some great R&B, metal, and rock music that I've liked a fair bit. And that's before you get the genre-bending stuff that sticks the landing incredibly well, and I'd argue we've seen a lot of that thus far.

What this means is that it's been excruciating trying to narrow this down to my usual top twelve, in that the top half was very straightforward but the bottom half is a lot harder to cut. So while I almost chose to open things up to a top fifteen albums of the mid year, I figured I might as well stick with tradition and keep it at twelve, which meant some painful cuts - some of which I think will surprise you. So without further ado, let's start with...

video review: 'varmints' by anna meredith

Holy God, this review was so damn difficult to write, but so worth it, fantastic release.

Next up, Flatbush Zombies... but of course, Billboard BREAKDOWN first, so stay tuned!

album review: 'varmints' by anna meredith

So on the topic of musical genres I've been neglecting, I haven't covered as much electronic music as I'd like this year. And again, I wouldn't say all of this is my fault - there hasn't been any records from that space in 2016 where the hype has blown me out of the water, outside of that Kygo record that keeps getting delayed. So I figured I'd go back into the indie scene to find something...

And here's where we hit a bit of a snag. See, there's been some buzz surrounding the long-awaited debut album from British producer and composer Anna Meredith, who has performed alongside James Blake and who has been making big splashes in music over the past ten years... in classical music. And this makes more sense than you'd expect - in recent years there has been a surprising amount of crossover between classical music and the electronic scene, especially on the avant-garde where melodic experimentation is much more prevalent. 

And here's where I have to confess that despite having a classical background in theory and piano, the more I delve into classical music and opera the more I keep discovering how woefully incomplete my knowledge is. That's one reason I've always shied away from covering more jazz records - as much as I'm coming to like and appreciate it, I feel there is so much more history and albums I need to absorb before I can consider myself a credible critic of that genre. I'll confess to having a little more knowledge built up over the past two years with electronic music, but I didn't expect Anna Meredith to make things easy - this is a woman who has written operas and orchestral arrangements, if she was going into electronic music, we could be getting some out-there material.

But might as well have a challenge, so I dug into her debut album Varmints - what did we get?