Year In ReView: Our favorite Boston-ish songs of 2017

It's December 21, and we're just finally getting around to our annual list of favorite songs to come out of Boston in 2017. Two conclusions can be drawn from this -- first, the year was so packed that our Year End obligations were pushed back to the very last minute, and secondly, we kind of hate these posts. Through our New Sounds features and pages of Boston News posts, it's virtually impossible to come up with a full portrait of Boston's year in music. We hope that our dedicated coverage from January to December acts as our compass of what's good around town; this list here can be best described as a loose collection of our "faves." It's in no order, it's by no preference; these tracks stuck with us over the course of the calendar, and if you missed one or two when released, perhaps it can help fill in some blanks. Because it was a crazy good year for Boston music, and 2018 feels as promising as ever.

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Lifestyle, “Human Error”

It’s easy to react to autumn’s Lifestyle album without even hearing it. That’s a result of its portmanteau title, the wonderfully crafted Regretro, which in eight letters both captures the times’ fixation on revisionist history and undue romanticism of the past as well as the sense of absolute dread and horror each of us carry with us as we traverse emotionally and psychologically through our days. The LP sparkles out of the gate with the synth cascade of “Human Error,” a song chief Lifestyle protagonist Sean Drinkwater said theorizes “that what we consider to be love is really just dopamine and endorphins, but that there may be comfort in this in the sense that we don’t really choose those processes. People choose to excuse their insane mistakes temporarily because they’re probably chemically driven and automated. It’s a cop-out, of course.”

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