review

Music of 2011

Dec 30th, 2011

As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to look at the best music released in the last twelve months.

I think it’s been a pretty good year, overall. I’ve bought 14 new albums released in 2011 and attended 9 live events, and none of them were particularly disappointing. I’m not going to try to review them all, but here are my top five albums of 2011…

#1 – My Morning Jacket, “Circuital”

My Morning Jacket are a band I’ve been following at a moderate distance for some time. Their breakthrough success Z and 2008′s Evil Urges were already among my favourite albums ever so I was very excited about this year’s release. Turns out it surpassed all my expectations and earns its place at the top of my list this year.

Circuital is a very diverse, but very consistent, record. The building repetitive power of Victory Dance leads into MMJ’s best song to date, the wonderful 7-minute Circuital, and then through many musical styles telling the story of letting go in various ways, including the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek Holdin’ On to Black Metal.

I also got the chance to see the Jacket live this year for the first time, and their set was a real crowd-pleaser: almost no hits left out.

If you’ve not heard Circuital yet, be sure to get yourself a free copy of the awesome title track by signing up for the MMJ mailing list at their web site.

#2 – Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”

I reviewed this album for this blog back in May, and it continues to be one of my absolute favourites of this year. I got to see them perform to a sold-out Leeds Academy in December and they sound just as amazing live as they do on the record.

The Shrine/An Argument was the standout track from the beginning but it just gets better and better on every listen. I’m sure this album will still be spinning on my playlist in ten years’ time.

#3 – The Decemberists, “The King Is Dead”

My top three this year are all by bands I got to see live for the first time in 2011, but I’m quite certain that’s just a coincidence.

The latest offering by The Decemberists is a return to their Americana-influenced pop after their epic and dramatic previous two albums (including The Hazards of Love, one of my all-time favourites by anyone). The songs are catchy, humorous and – most importantly – of the highest quality. Lead single Down by the Water isn’t just influenced by 80s REM, it actually features REM guitarist Peter Buck!

Extra special mention here goes to Calamity Song: the cheeriest song about the end of the world I’ve ever heard…

#4 – Radiohead, “The King of Limbs”

The ever-brilliant Radiohead can’t release an album any year and escape my top 5.

This year’s The King of Limbs was a surprise release from nowhere. It’s only a very short album (under 40 minutes) but it manages to pack in a tight and well concocted sound that shows Radiohead have no plans to jack it in any time soon.

Best track by far is the time-signature-messing Codex, which sounds like an answer to Amnesiac‘s standout track Pyramid Song.

And also, let’s not forget the new video to Lotus Flower gave rise to a whole series of Thom Yorke dancing mashups, including these 31 seconds of genius.

#5 – Kate Bush, “50 Words for Snow”

I’ve only owned this album for 5 days and it’s already made its way into my top five. This is the second album for Kate Bush this year (Director’s Cut is reviewed elsewhere on this blog) after a six-year absence and it is typically beautifully crafted.

On 50 Words, Kate strips the music almost down to just her voice and piano, and drums by session legend Steve Gadd, with the usual stellar cast mostly lending their voices – guest vocals are provided by Elton John, Stephen Fry and Kate’s son Albert amongst others – and every track has a wintery theme. Like many of her albums, it plays more as a single long track than as a series of songs.

Kate’s more mature voice is less shrill than people who know her earlier albums might expect, and for once she has produced an album that is both artistically brilliant and also suitable to have on in the background at a party. Preferably with a winter theme.

This brief summary hasn’t given me chance to talk about the brilliant new albums by Guillemots, Gruff Rhys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bright Eyes and more, but there’s only room for five in a top five!

What are your favourite albums of 2011?

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Dr Richard Stallman — For a Free Digital Society

Aug 27th, 2011

by Rich.

2 comments

You know what they say about coming face to face with your heroes. It’s all true; at least in this case.

As a die-hard ultra-liberal by persuasion and a software engineer by trade, it stands to reason that my ideologies lie somewhere in the free software movement. Imagine my delight when I discovered that none other than the movement’s founder, Dr Richard Stallman, was coming to give a lecture to the people of Leeds.

Dr Stallman’s lecture title was “For a Free Digital Society” and the subject matter was about protecting our freedom in a world where things like surveillance and restrictions on ownership of content are easy for governments and megacorps to implement. Great: so far, so good. Those are things I’m worried about too and I’m looking forward to some solutions…

Except what comes out of Dr Stallman’s mouth doesn’t sound like well-reasoned answers to difficult political questions. It sounds like opinionated, poorly-researched, accusatory diatribe.

He begins by convincing us he’s a member of the tinfoil hat brigade (I don’t have a cellular phone because they’re tracking me!) He’s right, of course, but his argument comes across simply as “freedom beats convenience in all cases” with no room for manoeuvrability. One wonders how he got to the UK to deliver this lecture without first giving his fingerprints to the US government in exchange for a passport.

He goes on to attack those of us who make a living from commercial software or SaaS platforms, saying our employers are pure evil and working for them is unethical. His solution to how people should continue making a living is “almost all software development is for individual customers so work for a company that does this.”

I personally believe in software freedom and I’m aware of the questionable practices of commercial software developers but I see my job as a necessary evil in the pre-free world we live in and I like to think I’m making a difference from the inside.

I also respect the rights of other people to hold opposing economic views to me without resorting to tarring them all with the same brush; something Dr Stallman has no trouble doing.

Later, he concludes that, since the music publishing industry is corrupt and restricting freedom, everyone should start breaking their country’s copyright laws instead of challenging them democratically.

The really frustrating thing about all this is that I concur with most, if not all, of Dr Stallman’s fears about restriction of freedom — having read sensible reasoned arguments in the past — but a whole cross-section of his audience (I discover from talking to them afterwards) had not done so and left the lecture completely jaded by the ideas due to Dr Stallman’s “Batshit Messiah” persona.

Dr Stallman is not representative of the movement he created, thankfully, and I’d encourage anyone who attended his lecture to take the time to read more reasonable literature on the subject by the FSF and also wider-reaching groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Liberty.

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Review: Bright Eyes at Leeds O2 Academy

Jul 14th, 2011

by Rich.

2 comments

Rubbish phone picture of Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis

If Conor Oberst can be summed up in one word, it must be prolific. The Nebraska songwriter has released 22 albums under various names already, and he’s only 31!

Last night’s performance opened with a set by Jenny & Johnny, the latest project of Rilo Kiley singer Jenny Lewis who is a long-time collaborator of Oberst’s¹. As if to flaunt the inbredness of the US music scene, their drummer was Jason Boesel, perhaps best known now as a key member of Oberst’s project The Mystic Valley Band. Jenny & Johnny started out as a sort of electrified country outfit but by the end were cranking out some very original indie-rock tunes that definitely made me want to check out their album.

Bright Eyes came on about 8.45 and played for a full 2 hours and 20 minutes. And yet, I got the feeling even this wasn’t enough for Oberst. He simply loves playing his own music and this was evident throughout the performance. When songs rock, he rocks. Like a madman. When songs are sad, you can feel the pain. When songs are memorable, he loves his audience singing along. He even dived from the stage into the crowd and continued to sing during the finale performance of One For You, One For Me. He did, however, demonstrate a horrific lack of understanding of British geography and cultural rivalries (“London’s in the middle somewhere”, “I’m more of a Wales man”).

I can’t pretend to know all of Oberst’s back catalogue, but I enjoyed every minute of this very varied performance. Tracks from the new album like Shell Games and Jejune Stars work much better in a live setting than on the recording because they’re all about the big, loud sound, but they are perfectly complemented by the folk-rock of tracks from I’m Wide Awake it’s Morning and Cassadaga and the electronic sound of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Another highlight was an older track, Lover I Don’t Have to Love, which had been adapted into the style of the latest album.

The encore included a cover of a Gillian Welch song performed alongside Jenny & Johnny, with Boesel increasing the number of drummers on stage to three. Jenny Lewis joined in to increase that number to four for the very extended version of Road to Joy that now incorporates an experimental “nightmare sequence” that was unsettling but brilliant.

And I got a new appreciation for his lyrics, especially those of Landlocked Blues.

A five-star performance. I urge all my readers to see Oberst under whatever name he’s performing whenever the opportunity presents itself!

Update: The full setlist has been posted at setlist.fm.

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To me, for my sins, she’s most familiar as the other vocalist on Hard Enough by Killers singer Brandon Flowers. [↩]

Reviews: Flaming Lips and Kate Bush

Jun 3rd, 2011

by Rich.

No comments yet

Another two albums to review today, both based around a “reinvention” theme, and both bought for me by my brother Jon for my birthday last weekend.

The Flaming Lips (et al.) – The Dark Side of the Moon

I know I’m a bit behind the curve here — this album came out about 18 months ago — but it has only just made it into my collection and it fits well with the theme.

For reasons known only to themselves, Oklahoma psychedelic nutters The Flaming Lips have teamed up with singer Wayne’s brother’s band Stardeath & White Dwarfs to record a complete end-to-end cover of Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon.

On a first listen to this, I was horrified! A band I respect had taken one of my favourite musical masterworks and turned it into something wholly different. Out have gone the intricate melodic guitar riffs, samples of ringing alarm clocks and Clare Torry’s infinitely influential wordless vocals on The Great Gig in the Sky and in come heavy two-tone effects-pedal-ridden riffs, klaxons and the vocoder screeching of electro-diva Peaches. My first feeling was that this wasn’t a tribute, it was a desecration.

But it was their version of On The Run that got me listening again. An instrumental in both its forms, the Lips had seized the opportunity to take only the basic themes from the original and to completely rework them into a modern piece that is clearly their own. A Variation on a Theme of Pink Floyd, if you will.

Then I quickly realized that this is exactly what they had done throughout. This album is not a tribute to Pink Floyd. It’s a 21st-century prog rock record, made by The Flaming Lips, that has the same words and chord progressions as its 1973 namesake. As soon as I was able to accept this album for what it was, I instantly began to enjoy it.

The heavy-rock sound of Breathe (which makes its classic reprise at the end of Time) is a particular favourite and, I must say despite the screeching, Peaches’s version of The Great Gig is very enjoyable; she’s obviously a massive fan of the original too, and this shines through. The decision to record all of the original interview samples from the record using veteran punk singer Henry Rollins was great too.

This is definitely not a five-star album, and die-hard fans of the original are going to be left very unimpressed. But stick with it and you’ll see it’s a bit of a gem in its own right.

: (c) 2011 Fish People

Kate Bush – Director’s Cut

One thing you can never say about Kate Bush is that she’s unoriginal. In the last six years, she’s not been off recording new material; no, she’s been off recording old material.

Director’s Cut is Kate’s answer to her decades of disappointment with how her 1989 album The Sensual World and 1993′s The Red Shoes turned out. She’s taken her favourite tracks from each, and rerecorded them into a single album as a kind of director’s cut of the originals.

As a big fan of the original albums, it is hard for me to understand exactly why someone would go to all this effort, but Kate is known for her extreme perfectionism, and she has gone to great lengths to make sometimes-subtle-sometimes-radical changes to these tracks and their production.

The album opens with Flower of the Mountain, which is the new title for the track The Sensual World with its original lyrics restored. Because Kate’s original version borrowed heavily from James Joyce’s Ulysses, she was initially forced to change the lyrics but has now acquired the right to use the original words.

Highlights for me include the modernized rock sound of Lily and Rubberband Girl, both of which suffered from that late-80s-early-90s jangliness in their original forms, and the new versions of Song of Solomon and This Woman’s Work, which are only slightly but noticeably different from their original recordings.

On the other hand, she has taken my favourite track from this era, Moments of Pleasure, and stripped it right down from its original orchestral sound to just a piano and her voice. I understand why she’s done this — it’s a very intimate song and a full orchestra could (although not in my opinion) be seen to be taking away from some of the meaning — but the problem is that the undeniable sadness in her voice in the original — as she sings the names of people close to her who have died — is absent on the new recording. I know this is her intention: the song is supposed to remind listeners of all the happy times they shared with those they’d lost, but I liked having my heartstrings pulled!

I think a lot of Kate Bush fans will greet this album thinking “what’s the point?” But then, I think those people miss the whole ethos of this woman’s work. She makes music for herself, and for her son, and she invites us to join her.

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Reviews: Guillemots and Fleet Foxes

May 11th, 2011

by Rich.

1 comment

Guillemots – Walk the River

The multi-national, multi-instrumentalist, multi-talented Guillemots have a lot to live up to. Their 2006 debut Through the Windowpane was a seminal masterpiece that proudly boasts my favourite song ever (São Paulo). The followup EP Of the Night and subsequent album Red showcased the whole band’s songwriting and experimentation with every popular music style under the sun, alienating most of their fanbase in the process but creating a smorgasbord record with great repeat-listen value for those of us who chose to stick with it. Lead singer Fyfe’s solo album made him a brief bigtime personality when his Billy Joel cover was used on a John Lewis advert that made the nation cry.

The new offering, Walk the River, takes the multi-genre hotchpotch of Red and applies a more consistent formula of darkness and sadness marked by Fyfe’s powerful and dark lyrics. The album speeds up and slows down, swells and mellows, makes you move your feet and makes you drift into meditation, but nevertheless throughout it feels like they’re all components of one longer consistent work, which is what you want from an album. Experienced critics would use terms like “mature sound” here.

As usual, the real talent in Guillemots’ music is the instrumentation, and this album might be the best yet. Just try to pick out how many instruments are used in seemingly-simple-at-first opener Walk the River, or listen to the slowly building sound of nine-minute epic Sometimes I Remember Wrong to see what I mean.

This album is not going to be a hit, and is unlikely to be remembered as a modern classic like their debut, but it’s a powerful, consistent and experimental work and it’s been on my playlist solidly since its release.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

Seattle’s Fleet Foxes have been an unexpected huge success in the UK ever since they first appeared on the scene in 2008. Their brand of 60s-style folk rock with a modern twist was an instant hit with young and old music fans alike.

On first listen, Helplessness Blues sounds like more of the same, and certainly the fans lapped it up — it went straight to #2 in the charts. More of the same would have been fun but ultimately kind of boring, like a bonus disc to the first album.¹

But this album is different. OK, there are classic Foxes sounds like beautiful lead single Helplessness Blues, but then we see things like the Eastern-inspired high-speed guitaring at the end of Sim Sala Bim and what can only be described as folk rock opera in the form of eight-minute The Shrine/An Argument, easily the standout track on the album after a few listens. Hell, they even drop the medieval vocal harmonies on a track or two!

This second offering from our beloved Foxes is the sound of a band that knows it’s already found its niche, but is successfully spreading its wings within that space looking for the perfect sound. I can’t wait for number three!

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