Using a spreadsheet dating all the way back to 2010, the Scene has once again managed to conquer the tedious task of entering data and navigating algorithms to calculate our annual list of the 10 best local albums of the year. These results are based on ballot submissions from our crack braintrust of ace music writers. While it’s not surprising to see poll-makers from previous years like Sturgill Simpson and William Tyler make the cut, there are about as many 2016 local breakout acts, including winner Margo Price and Scene cover girl Adia Victoria. We can safely guarantee it’s the only year-end albums list out there to include releases from both Natural Child and Miranda Lambert.
1. Margo Price, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter (Third Man)
Margo Price was no stranger in Nashville before 2016. The rural-Illinois native spent 12 years taking hard licks in Music City — and developing a modest local following with her former band, Buffalo Clover — and was down on her luck when she shopped her self-financed Sun Studio-recorded solo debut to Jack White’s Third Man Records, the only label in town that didn’t pass on it. That’s Music Row’s loss. With songs like “This Town Gets Around” (a honky-tonk-shufflin’ indictment of Nashville power brokers who expect singers to sleep their way to the top), “Hurtin’ on the Bottle” (a greasy country-blues tune about getting blind drunk in order to see), and “Hands of Time” (an autobiographical Roy Orbison-worthy grand weeper about the cruel world that forced her father to sell the family farm and take a job as a prison guard), Price tells her pedal-steel-punctuated story with a showcase of vocal chops and emotion that twist the knife with every devastating line. But what is perhaps most important about Midwest Farmer’s Daughter is that it — along with many of the entries on this list — is exactly the kind of record that people who say records don’t matter anymore need to hear. Each one of these songs builds on the one that precedes it, and it’s the strength of the whole set that has sparked massive buzz among critics and led to SNL bookings and Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson duets, all well-deserved. The album might have been inexplicably snubbed by both the CMAs and the Grammys this year, but it’s merely the opening salvo from a career artist who’s just getting started. ADAM GOLD
2. Sturgill Simpson, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (Atlantic)
Much ado was made of the fact that country outsider Sturgill Simpson was overlooked at this year’s CMA Awards. But it’s likely that the very same outside-the-box elements that kept the prone-to-playing-it-safe Country Music Association from nominating A Sailor’s Guide to Earth were also what got the record nominated for two Grammys — and earned it a spot on the Scene’s local albums poll. Written as an open letter to Simpson’s young son, Sailor’s Guide is peppered with lyrical gems like, “Don’t turn mailboxes into baseballs / Don’t get busted selling at 17” and rife with horn-bolstered, funk-infused country-blues. Between its tender string arrangements and mean psych-country freak-outs, Simpson’s third LP runs the gamut both sonically and emotionally — it’s among the most dynamic records released in 2016, local or otherwise. D. PATRICK RODGERS
3. Adia Victoria, Beyond the Bloodhounds (Canvasback/Atlantic)
Described by the artist herself as a “literary record,” Adia Victoria’s Beyond the Bloodhounds is an uncommonly focused and fully formed debut. Featuring elements of blues, garage rock, R&B, shoegaze and trip-hop, Bloodhounds is riddled with Southern Gothic imagery and idiosyncratic vocal performances. Sometimes brooding and dark, sometimes nervy and playful, Victoria’s songs are consistently creative and singular, aided largely by Roger Moutenot’s lush, well-rounded production. The album took nearly three years to make, but if the end result is any indication, that’s exactly the right amount of incubation time for an artist with ideas as grand as Victoria’s. D. PATRICK RODGERS
4. William Tyler, Modern Country (Merge)
On Modern Country, Nashville ace guitarist William Tyler distills the entirety of country music’s time-honored history of storytelling into a high-gravity cosmic pool of pastoral, cinematic instrumental Americana. The sparse solo acoustic guitar of his previous albums is replaced here with spacey synths and dreamy pedal steel unfurling underneath Tyler’s existential tinkering. The result is an immersive, unwinding diorama of the places between destinations, the thoughts between ideas, and the emotions we feel between moods. These rich, complex and expansive arrangements are a wordless self-described “love letter to what we are losing in America” that are tinged with a grim sense of loss, but also glimmer with much-needed hope. SETH GRAVES
5. Aaron Lee Tasjan, Silver Tears (New West)
Aaron Lee Tasjan’s dry-humor-brimming, ’70s-pop-indebted singer-songwriter record might be the most quotable album of the year, but it’s no mere assembly of navel-gazing pith. Lines like, “There’s a redneck bummer / In an H2 Hummer / And he sure does hate the queers / I guess some life choices are cries for help / That nobody ever hears” couldn’t be drawn from anything less strange than real life. Like all the best songwriting, it’s enough to make you wonder how you lucked into being a part of something so vital, vibrant and heartbreaking. STEPHEN TRAGESER
6. Lambchop, FLOTUS (Merge)
Lambchop is a band in constant flux. For Love Often Turns Us Still — a sprawling, sighing, grooving snapshot of the group’s evolution that rides on percussion loops and smeared vocals — is as much the product of frontman Kurt Wagner’s unassuming genius as it is of the past 20 years of developments in Nashville electronic music. Too bad, then, that this double album marks the end of Ryan Norris’ (Hands Off Cuba, Coupler, 2015’s dance-centric Lambchop side project HeCTA and many more) tenure in Wagner’s orbit, for the time being. But as FLOTUS itself suggests, maybe it’s the transient things that bring the most joy. STEPHEN TRAGESER
7. Diarrhea Planet, Turn to Gold (Dine Alone/Infinity Cat)
Let’s face it: For years, it was pretty impossible to truly get the the Diarrhea Planet phenom without seeing them live. And though the band’s crowd-surfer-inspiring shows are marked by airtight, acrobatic performances, they’re as grand and communal as they are because DP’s expertly memorable, tidal-wave-sized shout-along anthems have never sounded as big on record as they do onstage. On Turn to Gold, the band’s third full-length, they finally captured their momentous power in the studio. Much of that is thanks to producer Vance Powell, a Grammy-winning engineer whose credits include Jack White, JEFF the Brotherhood and Chris Stapleton. And much of it is thanks to the band churning out life-affirming, arena-rock-ready gems like “Life Pass,” the bordering-on-dance-poppy “Headband,” the amazingly titled “Ain’t a Sin to Win” and the even more amazingly titled “Bob Dylan’s Grandma” — standouts that sound like a Thin Lizzy-gone-punk soundtrack to your best gold-filtered Instagram photos. ADAM GOLD
8. (TIE) Natural Child, Okey Dokey (Natural Child Records & Tapes)
Six years after they started blasting out some of the wildest riff rock Nashville has ever produced, Natural Child finally reaches the apex of their Grateful Deadification. On the band’s latest full-length, Okey Dokey, the once-rowdy guitar bangers have been replaced by stream-of-consciousness grooves straight off the soundtrack to Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. Their vibes have a lot more in common with Country Joe and the Fish or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young than they do the Music City DIY scene that birthed early NC releases. But even if you you’re a little scared of homemade tie-dye jams, there are still enough pop hooks, krautrock bounce and Hawkwind psych to keep it from feeling too much like a bad trip at the H.O.R.D.E. Festival. P.J. KINZER
8. (TIE) Western Medication, The Entertainers’ Secret (Death of 78)
The members of Western Medication were born too late to catch the college-radio gilded age of the ’80s. But on their self-released debut album, The Entertainers’ Secret, they have proven why they fit right in opening for acts like Echo and the Bunnymen, The Church and Hüsker Dü/Sugar mastermind Bob Mould. While their collage of psychedelic post-punk takes a lot of cues from the Euro-trash indie scene of 30 years ago, the Wes-Med crew has used those influences as a launch pad to create something entirely their own. Be sure to catch these locals live, because I’m betting on 2017 being a big year for Western Medication. P.J. KINZER
10. Miranda Lambert, The Weight of These Wings (RCA Nashville)
Like the great record-maker she is, Miranda Lambert creates a super-advanced pop-country amalgam during the first half of her ambitious two-disc full-length The Weight of These Wings. Whether or not you hear it as an account of her breakup with country superstar Blake Shelton, Wings goes places most modern country-pop music only surveys from a distance. Lambert synthesizes Tom Petty and post-Hejira Joni Mitchell on such amazing tracks as “Smoking Jacket” and “Gateway Driver.” The second disc switches between experimental pop and equally experimental folk-country. Wings is like a radio station beaming sounds that previously existed only in Miranda Lambert’s heated imagination. EDD HURT
