It's been a year since...

Time for an end of the year round up, and it's also a year since I started the blog. Thank you for reading, and it seems people are (if I believe Google's figures), so what have I discovered in 2017, in case you care.

 

Disappointment of the year... 

Elbow - Little Fictions. Has not stood up well to repeated plays, certainly nowhere near the album that "The Take Off and Landing of Everything" was.

Best of the year...

One problem here is that I seem to have bought very little new music in 2017 so this list is almost self selecting.

Sparks - Hippopotamus. There is no such thing as a bad Sparks album, only degrees of wonderfulness. This one is among the best, up there with "Exotic Creatures of the Deep" and "Number One In Heaven" If you don't know Sparks this is the perfect album to try. The combination of good tunes and a sense of humour is irresistable for me.

Black Country Communion - BCCIV The quintessential rock band come back after the quarreling surrounding "Afterglow". This is as good as BCC 2. Glenn Hughes voice is working well, and the simpler arrangements make for an album that wins the best music to sit in a queue on the M6 to award.

Kim Seviour -  Recovery Is Learning Kim's singing was always the best thing about Touchstone. With better material she is now flying. As a fellow ME sufferer I get the title song and the cover. Call To Action is the song to try if you haven't heard the album. John Mitchell provides his signature "modern Prog" production, which means it sounds like the Lonely Robot album, no bad thing. And she is a local.

Bill Nelson - Tripping The Light Fantastic A Bill Nelson live album would be great in itself, but that it documents a show where he played many of my favourites 'I Always Knew You Would Find Me', 'The Raindrop Collector', 'Gloria Mundae' amongst them makes it doubly so.

Nolwenn Leroy - Gemme. A new purchase at the very end of the year. After the diversions in Celtic music this is her best "Pop"album since Histores Naturelles. Nolwenn will be part of a post on French Music that is in development hell at present. Watch this space.

And the rest is old stuff.

I caught up with Lonely Robot's "Please Come Home" through listening to Kim's album. Pop enough to have tunes, Prog enough to challenge the listener.  Seeing Over The Rhine live in April was a highlight and sent me back to the albums yet again. Ozric Tentacles most recent live album appeared on Bandcamp. I love them, but recognise that you might not. More good music for long car journeys though, and I do plenty of them. I found London Grammar's first album "If You Wait" and should really catch up with the next one. 

Oh and 2017 was the year I rediscovered Jazz. You have been warned...

eMusic - An Update

I have just published an update on my August rant about eMusic. Find it on Linkedin HERE

It's just not cricket, no wait it is...

I started listening to radio seriously in about 1978. Lots of things were to blame for moving me on from basic Radio 1. "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" introduced Radio 4, and a bout of Chickenpox, particularly nasty as a teenager, left me twiddling the dial in May. So I discovered cricket, or more exactly cricket commentary.

I don't do sport really, I have no interest in Football or Rugby, but the lyrical description of this game that seems to seep into whoever is on air at Test Match Special is as enticing as any music. Now I'm not the first to mention this, but it has coloured my radio and podcast listening. Over time I have got a bit more interested in the game, learnt the fielding positions and so on. Quick aside; I was finally put off any real interest in sport by a rainy school games lesson when we were all sat on the floor and shown fielding positions rather than playing. You weren't allowed to wear glasses for games so I couldn't see a thing. I asked to go back for them, was told no put up with it, and decided on the spot to give up on anything "taught" like that.

I do a lot of miles in the course of business and Audiobooks help the motorway slide by easier. I listen to music books, as you may have noticed in previous pieces, but I seem to have a fair few cricket books as well. No surprise that cricket commentators are good Audiobook narrators but it seems that the game is just ideally suited to spoken word. All this was prompted by Henry Blofeld's memoirs appearing on Audible recently. It turns out to be a good listen, and Henry to have a clear sense of his role on air. Jonathan Agnew is far and away the best at the Cricket Audiobook. His anthology of cricket writing is a good place to start, but not all at one sitting at 19 hours long. He has also done an excellent tribute to Brian Johnson which mixes anecdote with history, although I could care less if I never heard their "Leg Over" incident again.

In common with most high paid "professional" sportsmen cricketers have a greatly inflated sense of their own importance. As I write this in December 2017, the England team have all had to be grounded because they can't have a drink without headbutting each other. Consequently I have avoided autobiographies of players, partly because they have a tendancy to be written too close to their careers to have any perspective, be a least a little self serving and frankly pretty dull. I would recommend however Jonny Bairstow's memoir "A Clear Blue Sky", the positive tone of a book that could have turned into a rant about his early tragedies makes for an incisive story.

Cricket podcasts? The BBC's "Stumped" is the best, the rest tend to be attempts to replicate the natural tone of Test Match Special and come across as forced. Someone more interested in the game than the narration may tell you different...

Then there is "The Duckworth Lewis Method". As well as the cricket version of the offside rule, it is a project from Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and Thomas Walsh of the excellent Pugwash. The history is here and I would say that even if you don't like cricket at all, the mix of gentle whimsical lyrics and E.L.O.pastiches is irresistable. Get the albums, both of them, you won't regret it. They have also been taken to heart by the Cricket world, even appearing on TMS..

I didn't know Pugwash before the DLM albums, but don't wait, their new album "Silverlake" is as good as anything they have done. Also get their compilation A Rose In A Garden Of Weeds as a way into their beguiling catchy songs. Try "What Are You Like" from the new album

Artist Choice: Karen Lawrence

"It was 1994:'s Karen Lawrence who gave the others the choice of being second best or giving up" (Geoff Barton in Sounds)

Every so often a great album or a truly talented artist spends their entire career toiling away just below the awareness of all but a lucky few who find them. One such is Karen Lawrence. She has produced some good music, one genuinely great album, wrote a platinum hit record and seems to have been on the receiving end of more music industry rubbish than most.

She started out in a band called L.A. Jets. Hard to find much about them online (swamped by the football team), but the one video I can find shows a mid 70s pop rock band with no distinguishing features. After round one of music industry hassles most of the L.A. Jets popped up again as 1994: (the colon is meant to be there) and had money and attention lavished on them, including producer Jack Douglas (Aerosmith), by A&M records. The result in my view is the best hard rock album of the 70's, if you don't believe me, then critic Geoff Barton called it "The best female fronted record of all time". Available as a brilliant expanded edition from Rock Candy Records if you have even a passing interest in loud rock music you need to hear this album. Nine perfectly formed songs with Karen's voice competing with Steve Schiff's soloing and Bill Rhodes inventive solid bass playing for top billing. Still one of my most played albums. I found 1994: thanks to an article in Sounds by Mr Barton highlighting then recent, 1979, US import albums*. He was talking about the follow up 'Please Stand By' but was so fulsome in his praise of the debut that I had to have it. £1.99 in the same cut out bin that I found Bruford's One Of A Kind in, quite a day that!


Later work includes Rip and Tear a cracking solo album still available digitally, and blues band Blue By Nature, and since 2000 silence. Seek her out and wonder why, like Kim Edgar in my recent post you haven't heard her before.

The sleeve notes for the Rock Candy reissues give the 1994: story as well as anywhere, and make an extra reason for buying them.

A very informative interview with Karen is here


* If anyone ever comes across this article online let me know, I discovered the band Storm there as well and would love to re read it as I'm sure other gems are waiting to be unearthed.