Review of 2011: Music - 10 Favourite Albums

2011 turned out to be a year in which the majority of my most beloved artists put out an album (or even two). This meant that I didn’t end up making many new musical discoveries this year - and still have many 2011 releases to catch up on (Ryan Adams, M83, St. Vincent, Metronomy, Camille... I'll get to you). But it did offer the very great compensatory pleasure of finding old favourites continuing to surprise, delight and inspire by producing some of their best-ever work. What’s more, in their attention to structure, transitions, pace and song-by-song flow, most of the records featured here prove conclusively that there’s plenty of life in the album-as-art-form yet, despite claims to the contrary. To quote the venerable Mr. Sexsmith: “This ain’t no random shuffle/There’s reason in these rhymes …”



Night of Hunters, Tori Amos

Tides and waves. Fires and storms. A relationship hitting the rocks. A 3,000 year flashback.  Epiphanies. Imperatives. Blood by your thorn. A fox, a fire muse, and a constellation show the way. Adapting classical pieces by composers including Schubert, Granados, Bach and Satie and recruiting a select band of collaborators to help realise her vision (including the phenomenonal Apollon Musagete Quartett, currently ripping it up with her on tour every night), Amos’s latest opus of empowerment is a stunning  thing: by turns dramatic and delicate,  full of grit and grace. One of her finest achievements, it's an exquisite long night’s journey into day - and one that might just have created a few new classical music converts as well.  Full album review here. Live review here.



Ashore, June Tabor



Ragged Kingdom, June Tabor and Oysterband

"If you don’t like June Tabor then you should just stop listening to music," advised Elvis Costello. A little over-zealous, perhaps, but 2011 certainly proved to be a rather good year to be a Tabor fan. An appropriately immersive experience, Ashore, Tabor’s brilliant album on maritime themes, requires and deeply rewards the listener’s commitment. The choice of material is superb (a seamless mix of the political and the personal, the ancient and the contemporary, the intimate and the epic), the singing characteristically sublime, and the spacious arrangements so richly evocative that you may feel the need to bundle up in a big cuddly warm jumper every time you put this album on. If I had to pick just one song for the ages it would be the dolorous, windswept take on Cyril Tawney’s “The Oggie Man,” an indelible vision of human transience compressed into a chorus and two crisp verses. But from the stately re-visiting of  “Finisterre” to the  widescreen 11-minute close of “Across the Wide Ocean,” Les Barker's great song about the Highland Clearances,  there are no weak links on this ship. Ditto for Tabor’s long-anticipated second collaboration album with Oysterband, a vibrant reunion that even exceeded the glories of Freedom and Rain (1990) for me. Full reviews here and here.

Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009, Tindersticks

Another place to set up home, this one. I wasn’t fortunate enough to see Tindersticks perform live this year but this six-CD collection of their stunning soundtracks for Denis’s films was compensation enough. Full review here.

The People's Key, Bright Eyes

“You got a soul? Use it.” Catchy but contemplative, sketching both tough and redemptive times on the way to the Apocalypse, the songs on The People’s Key are some of the sharpest and most substantial that Conor Oberst has written.  The sound is cohesive yet diverse. Check out the thrilling stabby guitar-work in “Jejune Stars,” the heavy chug of “Haile Sellassie,” the steely crawl of “Approximate Sunlight,” the beautiful echoy piano intimacy of “Ladder Song,” and, especially, the utterly gorgeous electro-rock exuberance of  “Triple Spiral.”  Even the portentous Malick-ish spoken word segments - musings on time, the universe, and the whole damn thing - have grown on me by this stage. I sincerely hope that this isn’t, as has been claimed, the last Bright Eyes album. But if it so proves then Oberst, Mogis and Walcott have gone out on a high with this great offering.

Hard Bargain, Emmylou Harris

The Harrow & the Harvest, Gillian Welch

Three of the most loved and respected artists in contemporary country music (aka the O Brother Sireens) released new albums this year. As usual Alison Krauss’s record with Union Station didn’t get far beyond the “pleasant” box, for me, and wasn’t an album that I felt compelled to return to that often. But Emmylou Harris’s Hard Bargain and Gillian Welch’s The Harrow & the Harvest have continued to absorb and beguile throughout the year. The artists’ approach seems similarly minimalist, with just two musicians accompanying Harris on Hard Bargain and Welch and David Rawlings returning to their patented duo format for The Harrow… after the more expansive sound developed on their recent work. But the results couldn’t be more different: the underrated Hard Bargain turned out to be Harris’s most ambient and fullest-sounding release in some time, its clear-eyed confessions and poignant remembrances cloaked in lovely sonic layers, while The Harrow & the Harvest was quiet and hushed, offering a series of distilled hard-luck tales that combined the mythic and the everyday with consummate ease. Americana classics, both. And two very cool album covers, to boot. Full reviews here and here.



Bon Iver, Bon Iver

“Wake up to your starboard breath”? “Sat down in the soup”? Surely not? As readers of this blog might be aware, I’m a fan of “bad” diction - when it comes to singing, at least. And the fact that I can barely make out a word that Justin Vernon is intoning on Bon Iver - an effect accentuated by the recourse to over-dubbing -only adds to the fascination and beauty of its haunting, gauzy songs to me. A gorgeously atmospheric work; very special. "Towers" is favourite.

Suck It and See, Arctic Monkeys

What’s always set Arctic Monkeys apart from the (many, many) guitar bands who appeared in the noughties  is Alex Turner’s particular lyrical genius. (I’d nominate Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not [2006] as one of the best-written rock albums ever.) There’s less of that genius on display on Suck It and See, it must be said : recorded in the States (like its predessor, the brawnier Josh Homme-helmed Humbug [2009]) this album bleaches some of the gorgeous Britishness out of Turner’s lyrics and out of the band’s sound which is smoother and slicker here. Still, the stand-out moments - “She’s Thunderstorms,” “Black Treacle,” “Library Pictures,” “Piledriver Waltz,” and “Love is a Laserquest” - convince me that this is a band I’ll always have a soft spot for.

Cinderella's Eyes, Nicola Roberts

A list book-ended by redheads, therefore. A stronger singer might give the surprisingly sparky lyrics the punch they deserve. But for the most part Ms. Roberts acquits herself admirably on this very enjoyable solo debut, an album that contains several of my favourite pop songs of the year. Rhian Jones, of Wears the Trousers, sums up the album's appeal best: “It’s like finding extracts from The Bell Jar slipped inside a copy of Heat.” Cream of the crop: "Gladiator."

Honourable mentions: Don’t Stop Singing (Thea Gilmore), Let England Shake (PJ Harvey), Long Player, Late Bloomer (Ron Sexsmith), American Folk Songbook (Suzy Bogguss), Horses and High Heels (Marianne Faithfull), Walk (Israel Cannan), 50 Words For Snow (Kate Bush). And, from 2010, but not heard until this year Olympia (Bryan Ferry) (oh, “Alphaville”!) and Have One On Me (Joanna Newsom). (With thanks to moviesandsongs365 for finally convincing me on the Newsom front.)

CD Review: The Harrow & The Harvest by Gillian Welch

“You know, some girls are bright as the morning/And some have a dark turn of mind,” croons Gillian Welch on the sublime second track on her long-awaited new album, The Harrow & the Harvest. It’s a wryly self-reflexive lyric, for those with even only a nodding acquaintance with Welch’s work will know exactly which kind of girl Welch and partner David Rawlings find it more rewarding to write and sing about. The bleak bent of Welch and Rawlings’s music is perhaps its most defining characteristic: the four albums that the pair have released under Welch’s name since their 1996 debut Revival have focused unflinchingly on themes of loss and loneliness, death and addiction, homesickness and hardship, with the occasional revisionist murder ballad thrown in to the mix. This lyrical subject matter has been matched by mostly stark musical settings that have drawn on country, blues, bluegrass, gospel and other folk forms to forge a highly distinctive kind of American Primitive music, one that reached its apex on 2001’s classic Time (The Revelator), a record widely regarded as the duo’s finest hour.

But crafting tales of whiskey girls and nowhere men, farmers, morphine addicts and miners is hard work, evidently, and Welch and Rawlings hit something of a creative dry spell since the release of 2003’s Soul Journey, a louder, looser offering that expanded their signature sound to included thwacked drums, fiddle and electric guitar and bass, edging some of the tracks towards a Band-era Dylan aesthetic. Nonetheless, Welch and Rawlings have kept up a solid touring schedule in the meantime, as well as guesting on several other records, and in 2009 they finally put out a new album, Friend of a Friend, under the Dave Rawlings Machine moniker. This was a thoroughly charming if somewhat less substantial release that reversed the usual set-up by allocating lead vocal duties to Rawlings, and that also included boisterous contributions from his protégés Old Crow Medicine Show.

It might have been anticipated that Welch and Rawlings would continue the progressive broadening and lightening up of their sound on their new record. But instead The Harrow & the Harvest - a title that rather brilliantly alludes to the album’s rural contexts, its emotional content and its troubled genesis all at once - goes right back to basics, returning the duo to the stripped-down, self-absorbed sound of the earlier work and placing their symbiotic vocal and instrumental interplay front and centre. (The mood is so hushed that when Rawlings wheezes in on harmonica on a couple of the later tracks, it almost sounds like overstatement.) The result, quite simply, is one of the year’s finest albums: at once fresh and familiar, warmer-toned and more immediately accessible than Time (The Revelator), the record boasts beguiling melodies, superb singing, consistently strong song-writing and very cool cover art - adding up to a release that sounds like an instant Americana classic.

The Old, Weird America evoked and excavated in Welch’s work has often felt as much like a metaphorical as a literal or physical space. The new album’s ten tracks are beautifully distilled expressions of that ethos, situated between the ancient and the modern, the mythic and the everyday. Pitching up melodically between Hell Among the Yearlings’ “Caleb Meyer” and “One Morning,” the brisk opener “Scarlet Town” deposits its narrator in a cheerless environment of social inequality and romantic torment, suggesting that good times are not in store. But the song’s bleakness is mitigated, against the odds, by the aforementioned second track, “Dark Turn of Mind,” a gorgeous, spare ballad that’s as invigorating as a night-time stroll and on which Welch’s worldly-wise narrator welcomes in the balm of dark, not day.

Indeed, from limited means, the album achieves a wonderful diversity of tone as it progresses from the sublime, rolling gait of “The Way It Goes,” with its elliptical snapshots of protagonists at pivotal moments of crisis or enquiry, through the heart-warming and redemptive “Hard Times” to the marvellously moody “Tennessee,” a bad-girl-gone-worse ballad that can one can easily imagine turning up on a Marianne Faithfull album very soon. “Of all the little ways I’ve found to hurt myself/You might be my favourite one of all,” Welch’s infatuated narrator intones, the song leaving the protagonist wiser, perhaps, but unrepentant. Complemented by Rawlings’s soft, reedy tenor and meandering guitar lines, Welch sings more expressively than ever throughout the album and her vocal on this track - an intoxicating mixture of the sultry and the austere - is particularly sublime.

Another highlight is the hypnotic “The Way It Will Be,” a song that Welch and Rawlings have been performing live for a number of years now, and whose trance-like ambience evokes that of several Time (The Revelator) tracks, crawling quietly under the skin in a way that’s creepy and comforting by turns. On the nostalgic “Down Along the Dixie Line,” meanwhile, the protagonist’s despair at finding their route home blocked is cloaked in the gentlest, most enticing of melodies, while “Silver Dagger” (a new song, not the traditional track popularised by Joan Baez) twinkles so fetchingly that it’s only after a few listens that the darkness of the lyrical content becomes apparent. Finally, “The Way the Whole Thing Ends” (have you noticed a pattern developing with some of these song titles yet?) closes the album not with the grand gesture of a track like “I Dream A Highway” but rather with a wry, insouciant shoulder-shrug of acceptance as Welch’s narrator recognises that “That’s the way the cornbread crumbles/That’s the way the whole thing ends.”

As consistently brilliant as it is, The Harrow & the Harvest may still not assuage the doubters who find Welch and Rawlings’s music to be a contrivance: roots music minus the “real” country roots. But, for most, questions of “authenticity” will soon pale when listening to this superb album, a record that, once again, demonstrates Welch and Rawlings’s love and respect for the musical traditions they’ve immersed themselves in. In an era of empty excess, in which an artist's light show can merit more comment than their music, the unadorned, austere approach of Welch and Rawlings’s work feels both bracing and brave. And this deceptively modest yet entirely magnificent new album builds on their past achievements while taking their music forward with impeccable subtlety and grace. Essential.

Reviewed for Wears the Trousers.