2016's Year End Compilation

2016. A warm August day. I'm at school and see that a new Porter Robinson song released during one of my classes. Later that night I'm in a Best Buy parking lot, the person I was dating at the time (who is now my partner) is in the car with me. I say "hey, a new Porter song came out today", we listen to it in the car on the ride back home.

Still to this day, that song is on repeat.

Honestly this must be how a couple of generations before me felt the first time they heard some song that still gets played on the radio and brought up at parties today, like Bon Jovi's "Piano Man", or Journeys "Don't Stop Believing".

Saying that this song means a lot and has played an integral role in many of my personal life events would be nothing short of an understatement.

I saw Porter and Madeon live in 2016, they played this song live! They showed Rin from the animation on the screen behind them and the crowd went insane.

I saw Porter Robinson live in 2024, he played Shelter live! He said "You are at a Porter Robinson concert right now, and Shelter is playing! Let's fucking go!"

It indeed was playing and I indeed did fucking go.

God. I love this song.

If you haven't seen it, definitely check out the officially licensed anime music video by A-1 pictures for this song!

2016 was not only the year that I saw Porter & Madeon, but I also saw Miku Expo! and Anamanaguchi opened for them!

Truthfully, Anamanaguchi wasn't a band that I knew a whole lot about at the time, I had heard a couple of their more recent singles, such as "Pop It!" but beyond that I was going in blind.

This may come as a shock to you, dear reader, but I had not even heard their Miku Expo 2016 single "Miku" yet!

Seeing them live was a lot of fun and it was only after that time that I started listening to their full length record "Endless Fantasy" and enjoying it!

This is the opener from that project and while it's not my favourite song on that record, they did open with this one live and it left a lasting impression that I wanted to remember with this capsule.

Hadn't event seen Scott Pilgrim at the time!

Miku!?

If it wasn't totally obvious from reading the above blurb, yeah this one is on here, too!

Not anywhere near the best Miku song ever, but it maybe is the best Miku song by the same title.

Anamanaguchi came out for the show encore to play this one live at 2016 Miku Expo which was a hype moment, I hadn't even heard that song before then!

This was a really cute gimmick for Miku's first time through North America on a big tour and I'm kind of sad they didn't keep up with this for later tours.

I think that getting nerdy "internet famous" musicians to make songs to hype up the tour and play some songs with Miku on stage would have been a lot of fun.

My interest in REOL at this time was due almost entirely in thanks to the overlap with Giga-P's "No Title" project where there were two versions released, one with Vocaloids singing and one with Reol doing the singing.

Reol also had a number of Vocaloid covers back in the day, from the good ol' "utaite" (I tried singing!) NicoNicoDouga video trends for Vocaloid music. I wonder if those are still a thing!

The sound of this particular song is definitely on par with that mid 2010's "lush" sound that sort of propegated it's way through a lot of popular music.

All in all, this is a good song and I still do have a soft spot for anything that REOL and Giga are involved in, even if Vocaloid and Utaite stuff is well past it's golden years.

Keeping true with the lush pop sound in this era of music, we need look no further than the album "Every Open Eye" from CHVRCHES.

I think I found this one through a Porter Robinson pipeline, if I remember correctly there was some mashup on soundcloud or from a porter set that mixed "The Mother We Share" with one of Porter's songs?

Dear reader, I hope you will appreciate that I did try to do some digging in this respect but came up short - I seriously can't find the origin of how I found this one!

Wait! Scratch that above, it was Forza Horizon 3. September 2016. That would do it! I'm still a sucker for those games and the Horizon Pulse radio station has been my most-listened station through three until five.

Kero Kero Bonito really made some waves on the internet during the rollout of "Bonito Generation" - and those waves found their way into my heart.

I absolutely adore this record, almost every single song on here is a hit for me and I know the lyrics - even the japanese ones!

Heard a Song really strikes a chord with me with the sort of spoken-word/lightly melodic verses from Sarah, and the simple beat is just a lot of fun on this one.

The "A kid ran up" portion I find to be a big highlight of this song, great creative thinking including that lyrical switch up!

It's a bit like childrens music, which is a comment that my partner makes whenever I turn on a Kero tune, which yeah - this record definitely does, but I think that's for the better.

I think this particular song was the first single that I had heard when Kero was rolling out this record on the internet, at the time I had unknowingly heard Sarah in a few other projects, most notably Macross82-99's "A Million Miles Away" record where she sang the lyrics on "Horsey".

This song is such a perfect highlight of this childish charm that blended euro-pop, soundcloud/internet music, and japanese culture at this super opportune period in time. The Japanese rap break in this one flows so well and the well it moves back into English I find very audibly satisfying.

Whenever this one comes on in the car, it gets the full length, and I am always belting out the lyrics.

Again, Bonito Generation is such a highlight record of the 2010s for me and this is THE song that I would still pick today to try and show someone what the record is all about in a single song.

If you couldn't already tell, internet music and soundcloud scene stuff was kind of "my thing" during this year, if you were around in that circle of the internet at that time and also into japanese anime stuff, you've most likely heard this one.

I don't think that the rap section has aged too well these days, which is something I'm sure the reader can appreciate upon listening to this one.

Beyond that, GUMI english still to this day isn't used very much, and this was a very good early example of that voice bank being used really well.

It really breaks the mold of "vocaloid" music which has a tendency to lean towards jpop stuff, so this track is a lot of fun for that.

It still has that mid 2010's filter house/lush pop feel, even though it's more in the hip-hop circle.

I really liked this song back in the day, hence why there's a remix of the song included on here as well.

If there's one thing I love: it's smart remixes, and this remix is SMART.

It takes the stems and samples from the original song and totally flips them on their head, the remix is still lush and with a satisfying driving beat, but the house synths and nes plucks add so much here.

I'm especially smitten with the re-using of the rap break portion as a sort of arp driver in the back half of the remix, I think that's just such a fun way to use a stem and it's something I feel like I don't hear very often.

Out of all of the songs on this compilation (besides Shelter), this one may be my favourite.

FusQ made waves with the Lost Station Record that this song was on back in the day.

The overall vibe of this song is yeah, still filtery and lush ala mid 2010's, which I clearly was very into at the time, but I think the sample choppiness of this one is something you still hear a lot of.

Maybe I'm being hyperbolic when saying this but what Underscore's "fishmonger" was to hyperpop in 2021, this short EP from FusQ was to soundcloud filter house in 2016.

Ghost Data was another internet musician that I had found this year, having struck a chord with fans of Porter Robinson at the time.

Very filtery, very lush, very reverbed.

To be honest, this isn't a song I'm very fond of anymore, but I would be lying if I didn't say that I obsessively listened to Ghost Data and everything they put out back in the day.

The original version of this song is a song by a small shoegaze band, that I believe is local to GHOST DATA, about a Legend of Zelda character

Unsure of the significance of that, but I liked the way that this songs pluck synths reverberate out for a long time, it definitely feels shoegaze without being performed live.

Not much to say about this one beyond that I just like it on a technical level.

For those who do not know, this was the opening song to the Studio TRIGGER-produced anime "Kiznaiver"

While this was prominently featured in this anime and most people know it from that, the song was actually written because the lead singer of the group had terminal brain cancer, and this was meant to be a farewell song to their child.

Boom Boom Satellites made a really powerful, emotional song and this song always makes me stop and consider my own mortality to some degree every time I Hear it.

Rest in peace, Kawashima. You and your group made the world a better place by making your music. You are, and will continue to be missed.

I remember driving to my families summer home with my partner during this years summer. We had gotten there and didn't know what to do and I had just seen Space Patrol Luluco and I wanted them to enjoy it. I put it on. We watched the whole thing.

Very special memory to me. I've watched this one three or four times with a bunch of friends, too.

Man 2016 was lushy and reverbed. What was up with that?

My partner and I also watched Jojo. This one is groovy! that's why it's on here.

I don't really like Jojos anymore. Sorry about that.

Rock and Metal music is something I do quite enjoy, especially melodic and heavy stuff such as this one and the next two tracks that come after this one.

Although, this kind of music doesn't make it on here enough because I don't really inhabit many spaces online that have a lot of Metal enjoyers, so it's a genre that I only receive cursory glances into via reposts, or strokes of luck on Bandcamp crate digs or soundcloud recommendations.

This entire is record is good, but I love the world that this song paints a picture of.

This whole record has a sense of mystery or orther-worldliness to it that makes it really stand apart.

Scampi has a really great, almost nasally singing voice and I'm a big fan of that sort of thing - I mean this endearingly!

Not a fast song, but really a great listen and I implore you to check out the rest of the record, too!

Hail The Sun was a short-lived "edgy" love of mine, and Human Target Practice is definitely the song I bring up when I talk about this era of musical love.

Now, don't get me wrong - Hail The Sun is a technically impressive band and this record is nothing short of a technical accomplishment.

It's got a bit of Linkin Park, a bit of Rage Against The Machine, and a bit of The All American Rejects in it's DNA and that makes this perfect intersection of edge and musical interest.

I still do really really like this song, but this isn't necessarily a genre I keep up with, even within my subset of rock and metal interest.

Donovan Melero is a fantastic vocalist and his ability to both sing and scream on these tracks works very well for building up and releasing emotional tension.

Interestingly enough, I found this band from the next and final track on this compilation.

Donovan Melero is the lead singer of Sianvar here on this record, and this band is something of a "Dream Team" of a specific sub set of bands from this era.

This record featured talents from Hail The Sun, Dance Gavin Dance, Chiodos, and A Lot Like Birds.

Sianvar has unfortunately never gotten back together for another go at a record, but if Stay Lost is the one and only album from this particular group of people, then it's a shining example of how to do a collaboration effort.

Wish I had this one on vinyl, very genuinely good record from front to back and all of this talent coming together for this just has every single part of the music shining like it ought to.