ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011 No.19 - JONATHAN WILSON, Gentle Spirit

This is one of the big revelation albums of 2011. A record that opens up to full bloom slowly and gently, revealing as it does wave upon wave of melodious, textural, layered beauty and warmth. A proper album, at double LP length on vinyl that you can lose yourself to under the headphones, on a spaced out evening or melt into on a hot summers’ afternoon. Best of all, it rewards the repeated listens time and again. The only problem, and I mean the only problem, is that its cultural reference points are so strong that it has at times been swamped by comparisons to them. I mean Wilson lived and recorded large chunks of the record in Laurel Canyon, he’s used a 1972 analogue recording console and a 1969 guitar, he’s performed with David Crosby, Graham Nash and Jackson Browne this past year and even appeared on TV backing Robbie Robertson so he’s hardly shying away from the connections. The similarities in sound on the opening bars of ‘Can We Really Party Today’ to the general laid back vibe of Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’ album are incredible.

The point surely is though, that none of that matters a jot. Just as the current crop of Retro Soul purveyors are following that vintage path because it expresses what they want to do with their music the best, so too an artist like Wilson naturally settles on a period from Rock history when free flowing instrumental excursions, solos and dreamy reflective lyrical tangents were the norm. It’s not limiting because this music feels boundless in its scope. His current workmates are pretty significant too, for people like Andy and Otto of Vetiver (who both feature here) and the Fleet Foxes are amongst the most exciting of America’s current crop of acoustic, Folk-Rock friendly bands. One other flavour that I think comes through quite heavily is Elliott Smith; he’s floating in there somewhere amongst the breathy vocals and melancholy acoustic picking. With this first official debut album (there was an earlier recording in 2007 that didn’t get a proper release) Jonathan Wilson has given us a gift glimmering with the rays of a golden age in music that isn’t for one moment wishing it was 1969. Instead it searches for hope, peace and love in the modern world with the ready acknowledgement that all is not right with the way things are; in doing so he has delivered a wonderful, timeless and extensive piece to cherish forever.

Free music - Gentle Spirit

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011 No.20 - CAROLINE FAUCHET, Piano

I'll admit that I came to this album because I quite liked the look of the cover, something about it said that this would be less an album about studied reverence and far more a vibrant musician artist looking to express herself through these pieces. Really it's only the Chopin Nocturne that opens here that could be said to be an obvious route for a solo pianist to take, the journey's a pretty radical one after that and all the more thrilling for it. Little is known about Fauchet, it would appear she is 26 and her Mother was a violinist, her Father a pianist and she found her way into music by following them around on concert tours. It appears she took some time working out which particular instrument to settle on before ultimately making the piano her font; an obvious choice it can be said with hindsight for her playing is impossibly sensitive to the feel of the compositions. I guarantee once you zone in on the flow of these pieces the spell will not be snapped until the last note fades away (or crashes to a thunderous halt as is actually the case here). She certainly saves the best to last, with a trio of lively and lush pieces by the under-valued 20th Century Argentine composer Alberto Ginestera. The Latin American flavours at the core of these pieces shine brightly and reveal Fauchet to be a pianist of some considerable flare. I for one want to find out and hear a lot more. Have a listen to this wonderful record through the link below:

Free music - Caroline Fauchet - Piano

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011

As promised exactly 12 months ago today, if our end of year Top 20 failed to hit the spot last year we would return again for another attempt, so here it is. Starting tomorrow, our 20 favourite albums of the year will be highlighted daily, in the order of our choosing, building up to the big reveal of the winner on New Years Day. There's no change to the judging criteria, these are the albums that we've enjoyed the most deciphered by the trusty method of just listening to lots of music as much as is humanly possible. Where the system gets a tad skewed is when, as has just occured, two of our top 20 albums are released in the month of December. I mean it's a safe bet that the top two records, both of which have received regular plays for most of the year, are assured placings but when there's only been a few days the potential for lessening appeal with repeated plays is still very real. That said, the two records I'm thinking of here are so fine that the only real danger is in twelve months time I might feel they should have appeared higher up the chart. Hey ho, there you go...

Musically 2011 has often seen more brilliant albums coming out than a mere top 20 countdown can adequately convey. Still my feelings when tuning into almost anything mainstream radio or TV are putting out is invariably despair. I know I'm beating on an old drum with this one, but I can't comprehend what's happening with the blanket use of Autotune on pop records. There's a tune doing the rounds at the moment where a quite lovely Lily Allen vocal is juxtaposed with another Autotune treated voice that for me renders the whole track unlistenable. It's just heartbreaking, you know, because I love a bit of great Pop, I've got no issue with Rap and great Dance music is invariably more life affirmingly joyous than anything the Indie set ever come up with. Yet it's almost as if three or four years ago a private dare went around the worlds recording studios to see who could get away with sprinkling the shittest vocal effect on records before anyone noticed and so far nobody has, and the joke just keeps getting ever more ridiculous. The idea that a top producer could make me a backing track so I enter the studio for five minutes, hung over and nauseous, only able to vomit the word "huey" into a bucket and he could turn that into a workable Autotune treated vocal should only really endure for a couple of minutes on a 'One Show' factual featurette. It shouldn't be the basis on which the entire pop recording industry works around.

Still there has been some great Pop this year with Adele's record being top of that particular tree. Of course it's a traditionalist's formula but how it works; write some great songs and get a great voice to sing them, good production and market it with the music centre stage. I regret that Adele didn't make our Top 20 but I'll rest assured she won't care much! Then there's the other end of the mainstream spectrum; the big money major label release whose dire content is masked by the promotional circus that circles it's every move. That'll be Coldplay then. I know people of the 1960s generation who'll make a blanket decision on whether a new band are any good or not by how much they move on stage. It's that idea of if they're staring at their feet the whole time they're not all that because they've got to concentrate too much whereas if you're jumping around and playing you've got to have a bit about you. I go for the opposite position with Coldplay, I think the more Chris Martin pogos about on stage the more he's over compensating for the lack of creative spark in the content of his music. I've seen Chris Martin do an awful lot of bouncing around on stage this past year. His bands music has an abundance of "whoa oh oah oooh's" floating about, the first calling port for any uninspired stadium band fearing for their reach in the cavernous arenas they're about to spend two years playing to. Oh and lastly, I sincerely wish that indie bands would stop sounding like the 80s Human League or Talk Talk or A Flock Of Seagulls etc etc. This is because the 80s were crap for music; I thought that fact was long established?!

So onto the good stuff. Here are a few that just missed the leaders pack, number 20 in our chart will be revealed tomorrow:
THE BLACK LIPS, Arabia Mountain
TORI AMOS, Night Of Hunters
ZEE AVI, Ghostbird
RANDY NEWMAN, Songbook Vol.2
TRUMMOR & ORGEL, Out Of Bounds
LUCINDA WILLIAMS, Blessed
JONNY, Jonny
BABY WOODROSE, Mindblowing Seeds...

Finally three musical departures left their mark on us this year. One awfully tragic, another sadly inevitable and the third a blessed relief. For Amy Winehouse there's little I can say other than what a terrible loss and a massive blow for 21st Century music. She really should have had a lot more in her, gone too soon doesn't even begin to cover it. With Bert Jansch I've been feeling his absence quite intensely this winter but sad to say, I was shocked by his sunken appearance at this summer's Cambridge Folk Festival playing with Pentangle and feared he may not be long for this world. Then on a more positive note R.E.M. knocked it on the head this Autumn. Did they read my pleading with them to call it a day on this blog and decide enough was enough? I think they might have. The great thing for me though was this; the moment they were no more I could once again enjoy their back catalogue free from the fear that they would keep testing my love for them.

R.E.M. - Life's Rich Pageant (2011 Deluxe Edition)

When first released in 1986, ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’ kick started a run of five peerless classic R.E.M. albums up to 1992’s ‘Automatic For The People’. They didn’t lose it then either; ‘Monster’ may have been a forced grunge-rock effort to build a tour around but it still hit the mark most of the time. ‘Hi-Fi’ nearly kept the creative spirit alive by gestating on tour while ‘Up’ cleverly stepped into Beach Boys sonics at the exact moment a key band member jumped ship. 2001’s ‘Reveal’ is inaccurately flagged as the start of a real decline and that’s a shame, its’ gorgeous summer feeling vibes simply melt all over you. Even ‘Around The Sun’ had a couple of moments even though it’s fairly identified as a low point; yet with the stirring touring of their ‘Best Of’ in 2003 few could convincingly argue that R.E.M. were finished at that point. Even 2008’s ‘Accelerate’ mostly re-captured the energy of their earlier college-radio form. Maybe though I’ve been willing to give them too much rope during the leaner times; duped by that incredible sequence of records from ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’ onwards. In 2011 however, over 30 years into their career lest we forget (does anyone seriously think The Beatles would have still put out great albums in 1992?), I have finally found myself wishing R.E.M. would call it a day.

This years’ ‘Collapse Into Now’ seemed to get charitable reviews written by people desperate for a kind word to say about a cherished act. While nobody I read hailed it a master work; nor did any go as far as to dismiss it as a stinker. But someone should have, because it’s a rotten work put together by a collective with absolutely no glue left as a unit. I found it hard to listen a second time, sitting through a turgid new release by a band passing off their old ideas for want of anything new. There’s one-hit-wonder Patti Smith (yes I know, punk icon blah blah blah) with an identikit offering of her original R.E.M. cameo from 1996. There’s the one that sounds exactly like ‘Drive’, the one that sounds exactly like ‘Country Feedback’ although neither come close to the magic of the songs they emulate, intentionally or otherwise. A sense of tokenism lingers around other guest slots, probably at the behest of Stipe networking at some exhibition or other, from Peaches and Eddie Vedder. They even have the nerve to align one song, ‘Me Marlon Brando Marlon Brando and Me’, with Neil Young’s classic ‘Pocahontas’. The front of them!

In 1998 R.E.M. announced there would be no tour around the release of ‘Up’. That albums’ reception and sales were rather lukewarm and the band quickly u-turned on the no tour idea; they knew they had a half decent record to push. I don’t think ‘Collapse Into Now’ will inspire a similar change of heart, instead within a matter of months camp R.E.M. are selling us this deluxe edition of ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’, a staggering reminder of how great they once were. Here was a band in the Beatles mould, where each of the four members brought a vital element to the table. For the next ten years they would stand at the head of planet Rock, representing all that was good. U2 blatantly took stagecraft notes from the ‘Green’ tour; Nirvana remained vocal to the end in admiration for the songcraft. This album is the dawn of their golden age; to some the college-rock urgency still at the core qualifies this is as the actual peak. It’s a record to cherish undoubtedly (not so the deluxe edition bonus tracks, inessential demo icing mostly that offers little in the way of enlightenment). So R.E.M. will you please knock it on the head now?! Rest your reputation on essential albums like ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’. There’s no shame in being dried up as a creative unit after three decades. The Kinks and The Beach Boys both petered out naturally after a similar length of time. The Rolling Stones may tumble on but honestly, the public don’t exactly hit fever pitch at the announcement of a new album do they? Come back in ten years and tour the hits if you want. The UK will welcome you with open arms; we’ll marvel at how Stipe hasn’t aged, laugh at Buck’s attempted OAP scissor kicks and cringe at Mills’ geeky stage patter just like before. And no one will have to pretend that 2011’s ‘Collapse Into Now’ was any good.

Essex Boy Rating: 9/10

Free music - Life's Rich Pageant (Deluxe Edition)

RICHARD THOMPSON - Live At The BBC (2011 Box Set)

Covering nearly 40 years of radio sessions and live broadcasts for the BBC, it’s clear that Richard Thompson has never been short of a champion or two in Broadcasting House. Add the sizeable Fairport Convention sessions Thompson took part in before the boundaries of this set commence and that’s a significant avenue of an artists’ career covered by the BBC. This is entirely correct, he is after all the UKs most credible answer to Bob Dylan or Neil Young and yet notoriously undervalued by a wider audience on native soil. Fortunately, amongst the hardcore clued up, an enviable spread of top name DJs have maintained their faith. Wisely so for Thompsons’ solo interpreting of any work, whether his own or otherwise, is always so much more than a lack-lustre strum-a-long masquerading as rootsy. His guitar work is so far ahead of the acoustic pack that only the long time initiated would believe it to be the playing of no more than one pair of hands. Richard Thompsons’ one-man sessions are master classes of song craft, guitar playing, feel, soul, restraint and ability. When captured live in concert with a band he’ll regularly ignite that elusive nirvana rock flame sought nightly by every master of the arena; Costello, Morrison, Wilco...you name them, Thompson can source that moment they strive for at will, simply by excelling at what he does.

Playing live on air, in recent years it’s been Radio 2 and 6Music mostly inviting Richard in and there’s some essential 2008 Bob Harris session tracks included here promoting the ‘1000 Years Of Popular Music’ project. Tom Robinson continued to spread the word when long time fan Andy Kershaw was forced off the airwaves a few years back. Kershaw had treated these sessions as an annual cornerstone from his shows’ Radio 1 days but nothing changed when Radio 3 picked up on the specialist World Music potpourri, the Thompson live work kept returning. Clearly there’s more Kershaw stuff in the archives than could fit this set but the mid-eighties period focused on here is illuminating, breathing fresh life into material not always best captured on the studio albums. How many national DJs would give an artist a nine-song solo platform as Kershaw did in 1985? Naturally Thompson repays in full, not just airing new LP tracks but also trying out a then-unreleased ‘Turning Of The Tide’ before dipping into the Richard & Linda back catalogue three times. Then right back at the start of the Richard & Linda duo years there’s John Peel, maintaining a loyalty long since established with Fairport Convention. It might appear from this release that Peels’ love of Thompson waned later on but that’s simply not the case. There were further Peel Sessions not on this set and even in 2004 he played the re-issue of ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’ on Radio 1 and urged “anyone with an interest in music” to buy it. Some of those 1973 tracks sound like they’re sourced direct from a cassette recording of the actual radio broadcast. That’s not such a bad thing, Peel always liked a bit of distortion or surface noise and besides it gives the tracks an authentic ‘on air’ sort of vibe.

Richard Thompsons’ work has already been heavily anthologised and the archive actively plundered. Career retrospectives were generously doused with live tracks and rarities while the 5 disc box set ‘Life & Music Of Richard Thompson’ consisted entirely of previously unavailable recordings. Despite this, ‘Live At The BBC’ is a welcome addition to the catalogue, uncovering a multitude of lost gems from his post-Fairport years. Amongst these, ‘A Heart Needs A Home’ shines anew; punctuated with some warm-soul piano chords that wrap themselves exquisitely around Linda Thompson’s aching vocal. Richard Thompson writing about love as Linda sang it was as fine a musical marriage as Simon & Garfunkel. Captured in concert at The Paris Theatre on the wireless in 1982, the time of their actual separation, it’s not so much the tension between the couple that you feel (although Linda does seem to enunciate “my dreams have withered and died” with a touch more force) but the push and pull of Richards’ rock and folk sensibilities. He’s clearly scratching some burning desire to crank it up and slam his foot on the odd gizmo during obscure instrumental ‘New Fangled Flogging Reel / Kerry Reel’ and, from the same gig, ‘A Man In Need’ is loose as a goose! You may miss the electric rumble on ‘Shoot Out The Lights’ in session for Kershaw in 1985, but Richard was surely having fun picking and bending those solo acoustic notes in the lingering instrumental section. Any gripes are minor and the domain of the Thompson aficionado; perhaps some may have hoped that the wealth of eighties sessions could turn up a solo take on ‘Al Bowly’s In Heaven’ and there’s the odd debatable omission; for instance a Peel set around 1988 that included ‘The Killerman Gold Posse’ from the French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson album. There’s little sense in nit-picking a collection like this though, it’s compiled with care and sequenced to great effect. ‘Dimming Of The Day’ as the penultimate disc one track suitably announces the closing of the Richard & Linda years and the final track of all, a 2009 version of Richard’s first Fairport classic ‘Meet On The Ledge’, neatly completes the circle on a remarkable alternative career overview. Please use the link below to listen to the whole 3-disc set.

Essex Boy Rating: 9/10

Free music - Live At The BBC

30 Days of Dylan #30: Tangled Up In Blue

May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...

Tangled Up In Blue (1974)

And in the end we’ll enjoy an out-and-out Bob Dylan classic, complete with record company approved video footage. It has been a bit galling, I must say, the heavy handed restrictions that Bob’s people seem to have imposed on his music across internet streaming services. I know Bob can pretty much do as he wishes but I personally feel it’s a shame that this is one way in which he hasn’t moved with the times. I mean, I’m someone who ten years ago was a committed record & CD collector looking towards a future where I’d probably need to build seventeen sheds just to house my music collection but nowadays I don’t know if I’ll ever buy music in a physical format ever again. For music fans this new model is simply the best thing ever, the sheer accessibility of everything is mouth watering and it’s just a shame that Bob Dylan and The Beatles have so far resisted full immersion into the new environment; it would be a better place for having them around and in time, they definitely will be. I’ll also hold my hands up and admit there were songs that I’d intended for the 30 day rundown that couldn’t be included because of the lack of availability; 1971’s ‘George Jackson’ and the ‘Infidels’ outtake ‘Tell Me’ spring instantly to mind but there were others. Still, I’m not unhappy with the way these 30 days/30 songs have turned out and in many ways it’s been more fun hunting around for a decent cover version when the original Dylan recording I’d set out for wasn’t available. With ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ itself I’d love to offer up the ‘Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3’ version for your enjoyment, which I genuinely believe to be the better take, but it doesn’t really matter, you can’t go far wrong whichever take you prefer. This is a song head and shoulders above normal standards. For me this is Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, I’ve had a twenty year relationship with the song and it still endures, which for a piece of music in essence so basic is incredible. But every time you go back to this song there’s a chance some new nuance could reveal itself. It works like a great abstract work of art, shifting perspectives that mask heart wrenching revelations about the mess of blues Dylan was attempting to illustrate. But then if the details always slightly escape you, maintaining that elusiveness in the dialogue that’s impossible to nail down with the narrator shifting from first to third person, the feel of the piece reveals all.

30 Days of Dylan #29: Sign On The Window

May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...

Sign On The Window (1970)

The whole motivation behind this 30 day trip has been to shed a little light on the less celebrated but no less deserving corners of the Dylan back catalogue. To that end our penultimate offering is a real giant amongst buried treasures. It seems perverse now that there is a hidden masterwork in the man’s back pages but there is and that album is ‘New Morning’. Along with ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and ‘Time Out Of Mind’, this was one of the albums deemed unworthy of inclusion on the remastering project imposed on the Dylan catalogue a few years ago, but fewer people questioned the exclusion of ‘New Morning’. Why so is unclear but you can piece together an idea. It followed a matter of months after the legend airbrushing mystery that was ‘Self Portrait’, so expectations on Bob had been significantly lowered by his own hand at this point. Also, the album lacks a defining signature moment, a landmark statement piece or anything that screams ‘major new Bob Dylan work’ from its’ pages. There are great songs here but their charms are subtle, modestly dressed in a coat of laid back production and musical understatement. And let’s not forget, Bob stayed underground almost totally until 1974 without tours or new albums (other than the ‘Pat Garrett’ soundtrack) so the ‘New Morning’ record just kind of got lost amidst the wilderness years that were Bob’s early 70s. It was as if both he and his audience needed a few years grace to properly digest everything that had gone down in the 60s. But important work it is. There are great songs such as ‘If Not For You’ and ‘Time Passes Slowly’ and the rocking ‘Man In Me’; only really appreciated by more than a handful of Bobcats after it featured heavily at the start of the film ‘The Big Lebowski’. And there’s the sound of the album too; all muddy analogue soul, eloquently picked George Harrison guitar parts and pounding Bob piano chords that sound like they’re being bashed on a slightly out-of-tune village hall upright. That’s the 1970-71 sound in essence actually, you hear it on everything from Paul McCartney’s solo debut to Neil Young’s ‘After The Gold Rush’ and this is a period piece to match any of those great records. Then there’s Bob’s voice, huskier again apparently thanks to a heavy cold he was suffering during sessions, but a welcome return after the unsettling country-croon adopted in 1968. And of course the albums centre piece (although you need to live with the record a while before it shows itself to be the centrepiece) is ‘Sign On The Window’, where you can hear the extent of his throat strain on a line like “Brighton girls are like the moon”. Again we’re talking about a restrained little number, one of the few instances on record where Bob’s piano playing takes the lead. Initially we’re dealing with alienation, then an arrival and awakening in the big city. But the songs curveball is in where it ends up, with Dylan concluding that living the rural and domestic idyll with a wife and bunch of kids is really what life is all about. Crucially, at the time it would appear, that’s exactly what it was all about for Bob and in typical fashion he manages to capture that fleeting state of mind magnificently in song.

Free music - Sign On The Window