E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

2016 has been more bad news than beach....

But in the midst of the worst times, popular culture, at least these past 100 years or so, in league with profit-oriented impulses, has managed to precision tool craft, emotion, structure, style, skill and pathos into a heady mix of song, dance, film, that has often seemed to surpass the moment, and ease some of the pangs and traumas.  No one in WW2, for instance, would begrudge the singers who gave the homes, bomb shelters and troop tents some measure of gladness in the dark. War is good for the entertainment business, as is economic struggle, and trouble in general.  The darker it gets, the better the songs. As if in keeping with that general idea, 2016 appears to be a masterclass in top flight popular music. Here are the 8 tracks - some top 40, others decidedly indie - that most got us dancing, toe tapping, or swooning, on the sunny sad and sifting days of this most challenging of recent years.  IN NO ORDER - IT IS ALL GOOD.

1. PILLOW TALK -…

Eyewear, the blog, loves to recommend new songs for you, our loyal and scattered readers, residing in various places across this wondrous globe. Erm, anyway, it has been a shit few weeks (again) in terms of the Year 2016 - a crap rubbish low year, which is killing more beloved celebrity musicians, film-makers, writers, boxers, actors, etc, than ever before.

Someone should call time on 2016 - can we vote again for 2015? Anyway, the musical year is top notch - I cannot recall when more major artists brought out new material in such proximity - and it keeps coming (Radiohead, Tegan and Sara, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Drake, Rihanna, etc).

Perversely, as always, these are not on the list below, which is actually simply songs that currently form what we in our office would call Earworm Brexitania.

These are songs we turn to, in this awful dire chaos of the sun, and listen to a lot, because they are cool, and we like them. The tracks below, in alphabetic order of artist, are not the best, the…

The American New Wave moment had some weird and off-genre (power po, and indie-rock) bands in it - all great in their own ways - think Devo, The Cars, The B-52s, Talking Heads, Blondie, Cheap Trick, The Ramones, and even ZZ Top - curated by an eclectic and hungry MTV that could make Huey Lewis appear avant-garde at first.

Meanwhile, try and name a truly great American rock band to rival AC/DC, The Who, Led Zep, The Beatles, The Stones, T-Rex, ELO, - The Doors? Foreigner? The Stooges? The Eagles? Fleetwood Mac? Tom Petty's lads? The Beach Boys? Guns 'N Roses? Aerosmith? Glass Tiger? Rush? (the last two Canadian) - The Band (last three). The Doors, and The Beach Boys, and Stooges, for sure, but hardly in the same league, really, as The Beatles or The Stones.  Which is where Cheap Trick come in.

Improbably, these late 70s power pop oddballs (most famous for 'Dream Police' and 'The Flame' - quintessential high-school dance fixtures) have just recently been accepted i…

2016 has already been noted as a bit of a Shit Show, in terms of the many beloved musical geniuses who have upped and died. In that way, the year has posted a glum moratorium on joyful appreciation of its bounty. However, every wicked year yields great art and entertainment - the depths of WWII giving us Citizen Kane and Casablanca, for instance, as well as The Four Quartets. It is not obscene to note beauty, skill and accomplishment even amidst the rubble and collapse; it may even be important to do so - to dance during the Blitz. The human spirit needs its creative outlets to seek humanity in the inhumanity and the loss, which is legion.

Looked at this way, 2016 is a great year, for music, so far.  In an astonishing array, the year's releases so far include career bests from PJ Harvey, David Bowie, Kanye West, and noteworthy new songs from Turin Brakes, DIIV, The Pet Shop Boys, Weezer, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Primal Scream, Suede, Kylie, The Crookes,Tindersticks, Gwen Stefani, to na…

M. Ward is a Portland-based singer-songwriter - a description that will either worry you, or not. Eyewear, the blog thinks he may have just under-the-radar delivered one of the best albums of 2016, already. Ward is known to his fans, and has been making albums like this, more or less, for 15 years; this time, he is accompanied, as all reviews elsewhere also note, with subtle support from Neko Case, Peter Buck and k.d lang - and indeed the overall effect is a bit like a languorous twangy lang album, or the quietest R.E.M. LP ever.

With effortless charm and aplomb, More Rain manages to capture precisely what made albums by Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, The Blue Nile, and more recently Boy & Bear so impactful - the holy trinity of superb vocals with a hint of doo-wop, expertly deployed Americana melodies just shy of early Smiths (with some country echo-chamber), and whip-smart lyrics easily the equal of prime Elvis Costello.

With simple but effective production that balances a sense…

It's so typical of me to talk about myself..Adele's great song 'Hello' sums up the Selfie age, perfectly, and also Eyewear's BLOG, which has always been of the digital age - self-important, fluid, ephemeral, fashion-aware, ubiquitous, curious, seeking, innovating, changeable, and deeply trivial. Tis the season, again, of lists and we love them here but know them to be of course profoundly personal - and so what? Here are the fifteen tracks we played most this year at Eyewear HQ, and loved the most - though a few nearly got through, including songs by Madonna and Lana del Rey.... indeed, you know the year is rich beyond belief when we cannot even fit in critical darlings Julia Holter, Diiv, David Bowie, Ezra Furman, Everything Everything, Petite Meller, Peaches, Sleaford Mods,Grimes, Mark Ronson, Sia, Beck, Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift, or Deerhunter, to name just a few. 15 for 2015, get it?  Silly but it helps us to cut down the writing. And, if you made this as a list at…

Readers of Eyewear, the blog, know we love to recommend new tracks, as we find them on Spotify.

It's been a good year for pop, rock and indie music, with The Darkness back, and Brandon Flowers, and Carly Rae Jepsen and even Chic and Moroder, but here are the ten key songs of the moment we find essential for summer listening. Put another way, these are the ten best songs of the year, so far, judged solely in terms of the love swoon factor:

1. 'SPRINTER' - TORRES - Torres is a young woman now based in Brooklyn whose second album this title track hails from.  With assistance from persons associated with PJ Harvey, the sound is avant-indie, with intense lyrics, and emotive vocals. I love the lyrics, which explore a young Baptist girl's relationship with her pastor, a good man brought low by pornography - "there's freedom to, and freedom from" - it has several transcendent moments (in the classic soft/loud mode) and a soaring sense of theology and feminism inter…

Readers of Eyewear blog will know that one of the things we have been doing obsessively for ten years is to every so often single out a number of popular music tracks for readers to enjoy. So long as critical evaluation keeps its hands where you can see them, it seems a legitimate act to perform - indeed, critical offerings of support to artists and potential listeners can be seen as a generous sharing, or at least a friendly gesture - a sort of passing of those old orange foam Walkmen headphones - here, check this out.

What we offer today is a first-third (January 1-May 1) list of the 11 2015 tracks (all available online at places like Spotify and of course as digital downloads to purchase) from artists across a variety of genres, but all of whom create popular music that you can dance to, or listen to on the radio, or, care about in an isolated indie way. Some are big, others obscure. Now, there's no Madonna or Mark Ronson here (all were on the longlist) and no Sufjan Stevens, Bl…