Unlike last year when I neglected it in favour of embarking on a musical walkabout through music's past, digging through discographies and genres that I hadn't previously explored adequately or had simply missed, this year I was just tired, man.
That's because 2015 saw the arrival of my baby daughter, Poppy, who even now, 11 months on, still hasn't quite mastered the art of sleeping through the bloody night.
It's no exaggeration to say that I've spent most of the year sleepwalking through the day in a vacant, exhausted, slightly grumpy haze. At this point I'm more caffeine than man.
My musical spirit quest had concluded at the only place it could. Revelling in the tricksy, twisty pomp of prog rock. Once you hit a genre where capes are considered acceptable attire, well, that's when you know you've reached the end of the road.
I had to get back to the future. Fittingly, I got there via the past.
I discovered synthwave through the usually overlooked "recommended" sidebar on YouTube. An ultra-stylised photo of a classic 1980s Ferrari linked to a song called King of the Streets by a fellow named LazerHawk.
This caught my imagination so I clicked play and everything changed.
It sounded like a lost track from an awesome '80s action flick, with driving synth bass, a simple yet dramatic chord progression and electric guitar chugging out hard rockin' power chords. I didn't know what I was listening to but I knew I liked it. I had just got hooked on the brand new retro sound of synthwave. At its most basic, it sounds like '80s movie montage music. Enthusiastic, energetic and lively. Everything I haven't been.
I quickly discovered that I could be drudging through the most mindless task and spinning a synthwave album gave it an epic sense of dramatic urgency.
So taking home my prestigious Album of the Year: 2015 is Swedish synthwave producer Robert Parker for his exceptional album Money Talks.
This record's masterful embrace and encapsulation of gross '80s greed, matched with the perfectly recreated sounds of pure optimism, fast cars, faster women and high livin' excess never failed to amp me up and got me through many a bleary-eyed slump. Well, that and bucketloads of coffee. But I digress ...
If, musically speaking, synthwave took me up, then it was vapourwave that brought me down. The former is bursting with unbridled energy, the latter is the aural equivalent of listening to valium while popping valium and aimlessly drifting through a mall.
Vapourwave is hazy and lazy and hard to make sense of. It began as a pop-art comment and warped celebration of our soulless consumerist society. It did this by nicking snippets of music from '90s television commercials, obscure Japanese soft jazz and forgotten funk tunes, mashing them together, slowing everything right down then drenching the result in reverb and adding a sleepy, groovy beat.
It prized aesthetic over content, coupling corporate logos with renaissance statues and bright '90s desktop computer renderings.
If that sounds awful, well, yeah ... I get that. But its wafty, drifting sound, its mall jazz emptiness that constantly hints at forgotten memories, and the funkily repetitive half-speed drones all work to create the perfect listening choice for an exhausted father running on fumes.
Like any genre there's dross, but at its best vapourwave pushes sampling and nostalgia into strange new territory. Subsequently our two runner-ups for Album of the Year both hail from this genre.
The first runner-up is LA producer Neuroport for his quadrilogy Neuroport I-IV which he's been prodigiously releasing throughout the year, while the second runner-up goes to Pocari for the funky, vapourwave stylings of the album Brandson Car.
At the end of 2014 I was in the midst of exploring the music of the past. Now, as 2015 draws to a close I find myself diving headfirst into the retro music of the future. What a difference a year makes, eh?
