Well friends, Q1 results were fairly decent. I wouldn’t say I was blown away with the content produced during these first few months, but I can’t really complain either. At the very least, there’s certainly been a wide variety of great tunes produced this motley quarter. There were several new faces in the crowd, while other bands like The 1975, Leon Bridges, Lake Street Dive, and Matt Corby reemerged as stars of the new alternative world.

Leon Bridges came back strong with a deluxe version of his album “Coming Home” (#2 on my top 10 albums of 2015) which featured 5 new songs including the perfect old school slow dance song “Here in My Arms.” Lake Street Dive had a lot of critical acclamation for their new album although I found a lot of it to be too reminiscent to their past work. “Mistakes” was the lone exception where I found their careful separation of instruments in letting the trumpet, the singer, and the bass stand alone at times was a marvelously slow and simple progression from their old stuff.

Rostam is an interesting and generally new artist who had been a member of Vampire weekend prior to his solo work, while also having a short stint with the band Discovery. Whitney is in a similar boat as the members of this band were previously part of Smith Westerns before Cullen Omori, aka the lead singer of Smith Westerns, decided to disband from the group and start making solo work. In seriousness it was probably a poor move by Cullen, as the band members he left have produced several singles in their short existence that have gained much more rave reviews than his solo work.

I could go on an on in reviewing these songs, but in the end its your natural reception that counts, so I’ll just stop there for now! As always, I have to put the disclaimer that these songs are not i any particular order, and that there are dozens more songs that are great that didn’t make this short list. Towards the end of the year when I make my best of 2016 playlists, stay tuned to see many of these songs show their face.

If you want to let me know of any songs you loved that you thought should have been on this list, still feel free to leave a comment or send me a message!