My Top Albums 2017

Last year was a again a good year in music and I have listened a lot of music. Thanks to a bluetooth connection between my smartphone and my car hi-fi I can finally even scrobble my listens while driving my car. I also needed to find a good combination of Android apps to allow this scrobbling. I tried several this year from Phonograph to foobar2000 before settling on MediaMonkey with the Simple Last.fm Scrobbler in the background.

Top 10 Albums of 2017

I use Last.fm which despite its shortcomings is still my choice. One of its weaknesses are the lack of unambiguous identification of homonymous entities, especially artists. The other one is that the number of tracks counts independent of track length. It will thus put an advantage to short tracks over long tracks. So one may listen to an album of ten three-minute songs followed by an album featuring one single track running a full hour: despite the much shorter run time of the first album (half an hour instead of one hour), it will top the second album in every count as most listened artist and most listened album.

But despite this systematic error I’ll use Last.fm to give you my top ten albums of 2017.

1. Divergent

   by Pandora’s Black Book
   
   
   
   Originally released in 2012 on Raumklang Music, James Church’s industrial IDM kinda slipped into my top ten list, almost unnoticed.

2. Oil, Steel & Rhythm

   by Komor Kommando
   
   
   
   Sebastian Komor was quite ubiquitous in 2000s industrial music with Komor Kommando being his only project bearing his name. Originally released in 2001 on Alfa Matrix.

3. 3-D The Catalogue

   by Kraftwerk
   
   
   
   Technically 3D The Catalogue is a live album but the complete lack of any live sound makes this eight-CD collection rather a remix album.

4. 8:58

   by 8:58
   
   
   
   Paul Hartnoll of Orbital fame released his second solo album under the moniker 8:58. The Deluxe Edition features the whole album in instrumental glory which I definitely prefer.

5. Born in Ruins

   by Blac Kolor
   
   Released in 2016 on Basic Unit Productions, Hendrick Grothe crafts wonderful industrial IDM. Also available here.

6. New World March

   by Haujobb
   
   
   
   Haujobb, whose label brought us Born in Ruins, also appear on this list with their 2011 album.

7. RR7349

   by S U R V I V E
   
   
   
   Among the discoveries that I have made when finding the label Relapse Records thanks to Zombi was S U R V I V E. Deeply steeped in 1980s music, two of its members later became famous in their own right when they created the music to a popular Netflix series.

8. Blade Runner 2049

   by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch
   
   
   
   Proclaiming that the music isn’t as good as the original by Vangelis is an easy thing to say but doesn’t do the music justice. Of course it is more than just a bit reminiscent but after all that was the aim. The big disadvanted of the vinyl is of course that it is difficult to leave out those tracks by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley as they disrupt the atmospheric flow of the music.

9. Mayhem

   by Steve Moore
   
   
   
   Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra of the band Zombi have easily become two of my favorite artists during the last year. Mayhem is the latest solo outing of Steve Moore.

10. Stranger Things, Vol. 1

    by Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
    
    
    
    Stranger Things was enormously big last year on Netflix and it part also thanks to its music. While the music is perfect for the series and thus incited me to listen to it upon purchasing the album, as stand-alone music it falls a bit flat.