Best albums of 2016

Clockwise from left: Beyonce (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIDAL); David Bowie (Jimmy King); Noname (Bryan Allen Lamb); Pinegrove (David Greenwald/The Oregonian)

(Theo Wargo/Getty Images for TIDA)

If 2016 was an annus horribilis, a year of international catastrophe, domestic terror, mass shootings, burning buildings, and an election which refuses to end, music was there for us. This year, it stood as a response to the world and an escape from it: a source of grief and acceptance, anger and joy, protest and introspection. The very best music absorbed all of that like a melting pot, intersecting opposites into art that made heartbreak feel political and climate change a matter of love.

From Anohni to Beyonce to the Radio Dept., it was the fiercest year in recent memory for protest songs. From David Bowie to Charles Bradley, it was an astounding moment to reflect on life and legacy. Pinegrove captured the angst and epiphanies--realizing stuff, as Kylie Jenner would say--of coming of age, even as Nada Surf, two decades ahead of them, proved the process never stops. A humble Chicago MC called Noname and her friends made a better rap album than Drake's blockbuster "Views." And for every streaming-exclusive event record or well-publicized indie star, there were unknown treasures hiding on new music hubs such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

Before my albums list, here are three things I know now that I didn't 12 months ago:

1. Protest music is not just the expression of anger and injustice. Self-care is a protest, as Solange taught us on the reflective "A Seat at the Table." The delivery of songs such as "Don't Touch My Hair" and "Mad" is so much more graceful than the systemic abuse they respond to deserves: the Michelle Obama sound of going high over going low. But Solange knows she can only control so much, as she lays down on the bittersweet "Cranes in the Sky," a bullet-journal list of distractions and productions that fail to build over the pain. At a time grace and beauty was sorely needed, artists from Noname to Chance the Rapper joined Solange in giving it.

2. The line between authentic expression and carefully fabricated appeal was messier than ever in 2016. Taylor Swift was seemingly revealed as a liar in a Kim Kardashian West Snapchat of a conversation between Swift and Kanye West about the song "Famous": Swift released her own response on Instagram. Was this a publicity stunt, a miscommunication, a new feud or a long-running one flaring back up? We are all reality stars now, signaling to our squads and haters on social media, living for the Snap and the Gram and the story instead of the moment: what is real and what is upside-down has become a deepening disorientation, another reality bubble to join Facebook fake news and partisan divisions. Leave it to Kanye to release the perfect song for the occasion, "Real Friends"--a cold soliloquy about hard they are to find, and the most honest, human moment of his flawed "The Life of Pablo."

3. Maybe there's a bright spot in the scary progress of Apple killing the headphone jack and joining Spotify to put our music libraries on month-to-month leases. I spent a good six months this year saving tracks from Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, which serves up individualized music picks every Monday before I was derailed by having a baby. As a lifelong music discovery machine myself, I was wary of the algorithm and to an extent, I was vindicated: its batting average was worse than Michael Jordan's. But a few great new songs a week is significantly better than nothing, and over six months, the service turned me on to over 100 unfamiliar bands.

In February, it sent me a song that changed my life: the Innocence Mission's "Washington Field Trip," a piano ballad so gorgeous and compelling I ordered the album without thinking. That album, folk-pop winter hug "Hello I Feel the Same," released in October 2015, became my real but unofficial favorite album of 2016. It was the first album I played for my daughter, cradling her in my arms with my phone next to us at the hospital, exhausted and happy. The Innocence Mission has been making this music for over 30 years, and somehow it took an app to let me know.

Here are my 40 favorite albums of 2016. Because there is always some confusion about what it means to do a year-end list, these albums, mixtapes, EPs and other projects are ranked strictly, simply, by how much I liked and wanted to listen to them. There were albums I didn't hear, praised releases I didn't connect with, and some underdogs I think deserve your attention instead. This is what my year sounded like: I hope you find a soundtrack of your own here.

1. Beyonce - "Lemonade"

There are so many reasons to call "Lemonade" the album of the year, from the electricity of seeing one of the world's biggest pop stars take up the mantle of civil rights to the audaciousness of its rock 'n' country-conquering sound. But most of all, "Lemonade"--as a body of music and, in its definitive, superior form, as a visual album buttressed by the poetry of Warsan Shire--is an emotional lightning bolt.

Its narrative of romantic betrayal, separation and redemption is deepened by curiosity ("Becky with the long hair"?) and history ("Daddy Lessons"), the songs inseparable from the searing images of Beyonce merrily crushing car windows with a baseball bat or enveloped in Southern sisterhood in "Formation." It's "Formation" where Beyonce, at the height of her swagger, brags "'Cause I slay." By the time that song arrives to turn the lights off on "Lemonade," I'm powerless to disagree.

2. Noname - "Telefone"

Chicago MC Noname raps in a rapid, conversational way, a monologue without any um's. Her verbal movements seem as precise and effortless as a gymnast's: we know the years and sweat it takes to make superhuman motion look easy. Her talent is magnetic, but her stories are traumatic. "Casket Pretty," a song about hoping her friends make it home alive in the arbitrary terror of a Chicago night, is so casually delivered--so far past any stage of grief--that it packs a feather's knockout punch. The first chorus once nearly made me cry at my desk. The final track, "Shadow Man," imagines her own funeral.

"Telefone" bathes all this iceberg-deep frustration in R&B sunbeams, applying neo-soul's vinyl-warm sensibility to crisp, modern beat-making. It's sensuous and enveloping music, made richer by the voices of guests on nearly every song, though the spotlight never leaves Noname. Across the project, she repeats "Everything is Everything," a line that has to come from Lauryn Hill. The two have their differences stylistically, but there haven't been many releases since Hill's landmark "Miseducation" that shift so easily from rhymes to hooks, from bars to balladry. That album sold millions of copies: this one is a free mixtape. To paraphrase Rihanna, don't mistake her kindness for weakness, or anything less than brilliance.

3. David Bowie - "Blackstar"

Even before the rock icon's death in January, "Blackstar" felt like a masterpiece. But after, it gained clarity: a last letter from an artist grappling with death, with cancer, with the banal and transcendent. The presence of jazz group the Donny McCaslin Quartet and the influence of Kendrick Lamar painted that emotional landscape with fresh colors, but ultimately it's Bowie, mourning that he "can't give everything away" after decades of sharing so much, that makes "Blackstar" a uniquely affecting farewell.

4. Pinegrove - "Cardinal"

So long as Fender still makes instruments that aren't laptops, there will be young people turning to rock catharsis to cut their way to wisdom through youth's dizzying emotional confusion. In 2016, those young people were New Jersey band Pinegrove, whose "Cardinal" is a little bit country, a whole lot emo, and 100 percent cathartic.

5. Frank Ocean - "Blonde"

After pushing "Blonde" and companion album "Endless" back for over a year, the acclaimed Ocean gave himself an impossible standard to rise to: "Blonde" evades it. A nocturnal, internal collection of songs with ambient, experimental textures, Ocean treats his own presence as a collage, filtering his voice, quoting Elliott Smith, and looking for answers his own heart can't provide. It is at once revealingly intimate and a lighthouse in fog. Brave the waves and find your way to it.

6. Fruit Bats - "Absolute Loser"

7. A Tribe Called Quest - "We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service"

8. Warm Amps - "Mental Fitness" EP

9. Diners - "Three"

10. Charles Bradley - "Changes"

11. Johanna Warren - "Gemini I"

12. Carly Rae Jepsen - "Emotion Side B"

13. Nada Surf - "You Know Who You Are"

14. Drake - "Views"

15. case/lang/veirs - "case/lang/veirs"

16. Eluvium - "False Readings On"

17. Rihanna - "ANTI"

18. Courtney Marie Andrews - "Honest Life"

19. Solange - "A Seat at the Table"

20. Shura - "Nothing's Real"

21. The Radio Dept. - "Running Out of Love"

22. Sunflower Bean - "Human Ceremony"

23. Eleanor Friedberger - "New View"

24. Chairlift - "Moth"

25. Tancred - "Out of the Garden"

26. Lucy Dacus - "No Burden"

27. Into It. Over It. - "Standards"

28. Soccer Mommy - "For Young Hearts"

29. The 1975 - "I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It"

30. M83 - "Junk"

31. Kanye West - "The Life of Pablo"

32. Michael Nau - "Mowing"

33. ARMS - "Patterns"

34. Chance the Rapper - "Coloring Book"

35. Memoryhouse - "Soft Hate"

36. Joyce Manor - "Cody"

37. Muncie Girls - "From Caplan to Belsize"

38. From Indian Lakes - "Everything Feels Better Now"

39. Black Marble - "It's Immaterial"

40. Japanese Breakfast - "Psychopomp"

-- David Greenwald

dgreenwald@oregonian.com

503-294-7625; @davidegreenwald

Instagram: Oregonianmusic