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2016 has been a miserable year if you gauge your years based on external pop culture and news events that have no effect on your actual life. But for music, it's been the best year I've ever listened to. Sturgill Simpson, Modern Baseball, The Hotelier, Radiohead, Weezer, Band of Horses, Kendrick Lamar (B-Sides), Car Seat Headrest, Pinegrove, Brian Fallon, Deftones, Kanye, Dinosuar Jr, and Schoolboy Q all put out great albums. Later this year, Joyce Manor (Kanye West is better than John Steinbeck), The Menzingers, AJJ, Chris Farren, Against Me!, and Beach Slang will release albums. The Spotify subscription I signed up for back in January has been the best $80 I ever spent.
Of all the great music this year, PUP put out the best and my favorite album this year. It's ten tracks of relentless thrashing that leaves you rough and raw. The first two songs, "If This Tour Doesn't Kill You, I Will," and "DVP" (my favorite song of the year) feed into each other like a two-headed snake sucking down the same mouse. "My Life is Over and I Couldn't Be Happier" just sounds like something that needs to be on NHL 2017. The two slower songs are heartbreaking and act as the eye of a heavy metal hurricane. They are perfect bridges to accentuate the other eight ear-ringing alligator death rolls.
Additionally, it hits on all three things I learned from punk music this year. Everyone misses their exes, being on tour isn't as much fun as it's made out to be, and feeling miserable can be charming. The last of those three is where PUP really gets it. You'll never have more fun screaming about crap luck, sleeping on floors instead of hanging with the riff-raff, having nothing at all, not being good at anything except for messing up and ruining everything, and enjoying a bleak future. It takes a dour subject, a hapless and meaningless twenty-something existence, and flips it into raucous pandemonium.
If you haven't, listen to this album. The best setting is to play it as loud as possible while doing a bunch of dead lifts or driving really fast. If you don't like dead lifts or driving fast, that's fine. Just make sure to play it loud.
Anyways, that's all I got for tonight. The floor is yours. Thank you for making BRB the thing that it is and have fun listening to The Dream is Over.
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