Opener Ultralight Beam is widely regarded as one of the best tracks of the year, and sits alongside the spiteful Famous and the gritty Real Friends. Continuing to display West’s notorious candour, the record deliberately shocks in its lyrical content and inspires in its soaring sounds.
Ending in suspected exhaustion, 2016 started with the release of his huge The Life Of Pablo. It’s been a complicated year for hip-hop maestro Kanye West. The record is deliberately jarring, laying down heavy industrial sounds over Justin Vernon’s angelic tones, and the result is anything but messy.
As his sophomore album Bon Iver, Bon Iver occasionally played with experimental sounds, 22, A Million dives head first into unpredictability. When Bon Iver dropped the extended versions of album openers 22 (OVER S∞∞N) and 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠, it signaled a drastic new direction for the former stripped back singer-songwriter. The result is more complex than much of what has come before, continuing their clear understanding of funk and their obvious musical prowess. The eleventh studio album by American rock icons and this year’s Reading and Leeds Festival headliners Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Getaway sees the band take a subtle change in direction by employing producer Danger Mouse over their long-time collaborator Rick Rubin. From the sheer beauty of Best To You to the unashamed 80s vibe on E.V.P., Hynes uses retro sounds to push a particularly current message. The attitude is mirrored in the sound, which employs heavy funk influences and groove-laden R&B to create a truly dynamic record. Opening with a powerful spoken word poem by Ashlee Haze tackling the under-representation of black women in popular culture, Blood Orange, AKA British singer-songwriter and producer Dev Hynes, builds Freetown Sound around empowerment. Its pop subtleties lie quietly under the surface, giving A Seat At The Table a minimalist edge despite its complex themes. Gliding through a narrative of contemporary black womanhood, the means in which it is delivered sits between understated beauty and reserved ferocity. The second Knowles sister at the very top of our list, Solange (that’s Beyoncé’s sister, in case you were unaware), took an altogether more soulful tact. Whether the overlying tale of relationship strife is sourced from a true place, or whether it’s a piece of extremely clever storytelling, one thing is clear: When life gives Beyoncé lemons, she goes and makes the best album of the year. Both gritty and immeasurably sassy, Lemonade celebrates a poignant urgency and welcome commentary, something that dominates many key releases in 2016.
Radio silence james blake lyrics full#
You can feel everything to it or nothing at all.Accompanied by a full visual album, Beyoncé comparably unexpected release sees her continue to fully embrace her heritage, whilst combining a visceral anger that merely bubbled under the surface on previous records. You get the impression of a beautiful alien creature rehearsing human emotions in a mirror. It is strange music, emotionally, somehow warming and numbing, comforting and discomfiting. Many of his songs are built around a repeated mantra, something yearning and brokenhearted, and on “Radio Silence” it is "I can’t believe this, you don’t wanna see me/I’m sorry I don’t know how you feel.” You could easily imagine those words being delivered as a scream, or a sob, or with acrid disdain, but Blake sends them fluttering up into his arrangements, like balloons loosed into a grey sky. This clinical precision sometimes gives the extravagant sadness of his voice a distant feel. This is partly what people like Beyoncé (who gave James Blake his own track on Lemonade) and Drake (who reportedly put up a copy of James Blake’s self-titled in the studio when he was making Take Care) see in him his arrangement of items in space, his voice and the drums and the synths like three primary-color chairs in a white room with no windows. The sharp, hollow knock of “Radio Silence,” the opening track on his surprise new album The Colour In Anything, has so much character that you could lose yourself in it, just counting it off. There is something about James Blake’s chilly, exacting touch with drum hits they feel like you could run your finger over them.