SOUL SURMISE

RHIANNON GIDDENS - FREEDOM HIGHWAY

Kye’s was the last question. Fr Martin Magill and I had been in the Midwest of America for 10 days speaking at various Colleges and Churches. Our topic was Peace and Reconciliation and we were aware that our Northern Irish experience was resonating more with young American students than it had before. 

Kye was a young black girl, so slight of frame that she had spent the seminar hidden from us behind some bulkier young white men. we were done for the day, and indeed the ten days, when her hand went up and she asked, “How long do you take the tear gas before you have to fight back? Because it seems after 50 years that it hasn’t worked.” Wow! It was a truly deep and heart wrenching question.

Rhiannon Giddens is THE voice in modern music. From her time in banjo driven string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops to joining T-Bone Burnett’s Dylan collaborating The New Basement Tapes with Mumford, Costello, Goldsmith and James to her debut album Tomorrow Is My Turn Giddens has been building her legend. 

The purity of the voice. The artistic blending of folk, jazz, country, blues and pop. The way she then uses such resources to say something more. Freedom Highway is her most varied set yet and at the same time the one eyed. It’s her masterpiece. 

On Freedom Highway, Giddens takes Kye’s question to us at Calvin and lives inside it for twelve songs. She goes back further than the 50 years Kye mentions and also brings it right up to the now. She uses that voice to be the voice for justice by becoming the voice of many characters who have lived the history of the injustice!

The opening song At The Purchasers Option is set way back in the world of black slavery. Giddens has explained that she found a newspaper advertisement from the 19th century. The ad about the sale of a woman was bad enough but the last line included a nine-month-old baby, available "at the purchaser's option." That dehumanising hit Giddens hard as it should all of us.

Birmingham Sunday is the song here that hit me hardest. It was written by Richard Fariña whose sister-in-law Joan Baez has covered it too. It is about the Ku Klux Klan bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 when four young girls were killed. I have visited Birmingham a few times and the Church. A few years ago I read While The World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry, friend of the four dead girls and only a few yards away when he bomb went off. 

Better Get It Right The First Time is for Kye’s generation. It is the most contemporary sound on a record with a wide myriad of musical soundscapes. It even includes a rap and can only be seen as a radio friendly anthem for the #BlackLivesMatters generation. 

Answers to Kye are maybe not explicit on Freedom Highway but hope and advice for the struggle is, all over the grim realities of how white America has treated their African American brothers and sisters. This is a history lesson and a relevant message right now. It is an album that we need.

“You can take my body,

You can take my bones,

You can take my blood,

But not my soul.”

DAN DONOVAN - 12_12 ACOUSTIC SESSIONS

Dan Donovan, no not the one one from Big Audio Dynamite, but the one from the Fens, whose dad was a Welsh preacher, is an artist of unique imagination. He will openly cite Tom Waits and Bob Dylan as his influence and that is pretty perfect. His voice lands somewhere between the two, Dylan wishes he Donovan’s vocal robustness and Waits would love his tunefulness. Donovan has all Waits’ gruffalo grit but is so much more accessibility. 

12_12 Sessions is a great introduction to Donovan. If you haven’t yet the joys of his twelve records then here you have one song from all of them but reinvented for acoustic arrangement. The band are rough edged, loose but powerful. For those with wider palette David Eugene Edwards from 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand comes to mind; that goth rock harmonica.

There is a book with the album that gives you Donovan’s photography as well as the lyrics. It’s a tasty piece of art in itself. As well as the lyrics Donovan gives a line or two about each song. Underneath my favourite Donovan song, the tender Fragile Flame from 1993’s Dust Shaker record, he writes, “Daily, through the eyes of the media I see brazen toughness twinned with brokenness, we as humans are forever an extreme race. And such is my relationship with humanity.”

I guess this glimpse across Donovan’s recording career and the last 30 years of his life reveals exactly that. Subjectively we find his own love affairs and heartache, his own struggles to fit into his own world. Beyond that there are objective songs about the love and heartbreak of humanity and the struggle to find religion that is not warped too.

For me 12_12 Session had me falling in love, once again, with the songs I was most familiar with from the 90s, the aforementioned Fragile Flame, as well as Blind Lead The Blind, Tick Tock Tim and the great wrestle with God of So Dance but also led me into later Donovan that I sinfully not paid attention to like I Love and Dirdy Day. 

So Dance is worth the price of the ticket on its own. Goodness, the emotion of soul. 

Playing it all the way through I ended in the moment’s silence after thinking that Dylan and Waits had been blended perfectly and come out as a think of blurred beauty. It’s rugged and tough in the most gorgeous of ways. Expect weird artistic noises and dramatic effect too. Dan Donovan is a wonderfully unique voice indeed!

STEPHEN FEARING - EVERY SOUL'S A SAILOR

I have been a Stephen Fearing fan since Janice and my first gig date. It was August 1989. We went to see Gregson & Collister at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at The Royal Festival Hall in London. When this young guitarist from Canada who had lived in Ireland played an instrumental of Be Thou My Vision we decided to have it at our wedding and did, 7 years later! A few of his own songs and a Joni Mitchell cover we were taken and taking home his debut album.

A few years later I got the opportunity to sit beside Fearing in an RTE radio studio for a late night live session. I was with Iain Archer who had just shared a bill with Fearing in Dublin. Archer, co writer of Hold Back The River (James Bay), Lightning Bolt (Jake Bugg) and Run (Snow Patrol), is a very gifted guitarist but as we left the studio that evening Iain was feeling that he wasn’t good enough to string Fearing’s Lowden guitar!

In the twenty five years years since, Fearing has worked with Canadian collaborative Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, another Belfast man Andy White and produced albums for Canadian songwriters Suzie Vinnick and another friend of mine Eric Angus Whyte.

Through it all, in my opinion, Fearing has simply got better and better. His guitar playing acoustic or electric is imaginative, versatile and exquisite. His songwriting is of the highest quality. He has a voice that is warm and draws you in. Once drawn in, he has a rare ability to touch on the soul nerves with pointed truths of love and life.

Take the opening track Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is with a smooth band arrangement and a guitar sound that Mark Knopfler would die for -

 

“You’ve got to find love and compassion, like an old friend, every day

For when love falls out of fashion, and the world is old and grey …”

 

Red Lights In The Rain is a yearning ache of loneliness -

 

Nothing says I’m hungry like a baby

No one says I’m lonely like a train

 

Oh the insightfulness of Gone But Not Forgotten, and its profound insight on love and a cracking literary couplet to tell it: -

 

“Love is the pearl you leave behind

Shining like a secret hidden in between the lines.”

 

Blowhard Nation is the protest of Donald Trump as President around election time -

 

“Well they all line up

For Christ almighty

But there ain’t no spine in the words When they talk the resurrection

They’re thinking the election

It’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

 

The closing title track Every Soul’s a Sailor sounds like a closing hymn in the Church of Fearing gigs for years to come -

 

“Born into creation

Drawn towards the light

With blind imagination we go swimming in the night

And the guiding star of fate shines for our mortality

Every soul’s a sailor

Rolling on the sea”

 

There will few collections of songs released this year as consistently strong, across the record, as Every Soul’s A Sailor. There is a spiritual pearl to Fearing’s songs, hidden secrets, indeed, between the lines. His songs have a soul nurturing quality that is lacking among his peers.

SING STREET - Reviewed

I watch very few movies these days. Four long hauled flights last year and I did not watch one, preferring music and books. It was the music that drew me to watch Sing Street. My friend Lorraine Macintosh tipped me off with a compliment to Gary Clark about the songs in the film.

I have been a Gary Clark fan since Danny Wilson’s Mary’s Prayer following him through solo album to King L and his later songwriting, though his later pop work with the likes of Demi Lovato has more chance of being in my daughters’ playlists than mine!

Anyway, Lorraine had me investigating and when I discovered that Once director John Carney was behind it and it was set in mid 80s’ Dublin I was hooked. The Jam and The Cure were even in the soundtrack, for goodness sake!

Well, I was not disappointed. I loved it. Part Commitments, part Once, Sing Street ends up being a film with serious threads running through a witty musical feel good flick. Family breakdown, school bullying and child abuse are all dealt with as music becomes the powerful weapon to deal with whatever the world throws at you. 

The seeking out “happy sad” songs actually give us the mission statement of the script. Finding happiness, identity, purpose in a world that inevitably throws up its vast array of sadness is what the film’s love birds traverse as they come of age.

The songs are central, hence the compliments to Gary Clark, and the songs are brilliant. Taking some 80s sounds like Duran Duran and Depeche Mode, that I personally ignored at the time, Clark writes songs for the teenage Sing Street band but somehow transcends the 80s to make them catchy and relevant right now. There is just enough of The Jam and The Cure's influence to give weightiness to the content. That a sixteen year old could write such brilliant lyrics and songs as The Riddle Of The Model, Drive It Like You Stole It, Girls or Brown Shoes is a stretch but then Roddy Frame was doing it at 16 so maybe. 

The importance of music in the journey through adolescence has rarely been so well preached. It is sadly unlikely that music has the same influential role in the maturing of teens into adulthood today. What a shame! 

STOCKI FAVOURITE 20 ALBUMS OF 2016 AT A GLANCE

(there are reviews of all of these records from 20 - 1 on Soul Surmise... check them all out...)

1. DAVID C CLEMENTS - THE LONGEST DAY IN HISTORY

 

2.  FOY VANCE - THE WILD SWAN

 

3.  CIARAN LAVERY - LET BAD IN

 

4. MALOJIAN - THIS IS NOWHERE

 

5. DEACON BLUE - BELIEVERS

 

6.  MICHAEL KIWANUKA - LOVE & HATE

 

7. JONATHA BROOKE - MIDNIGHT HALLELUJAH

 

8. LEONARD COHEN - YOU WANT IT DARKER

 

9.  THE HEAD AND THE HEART - SIGNS OF LIGHT

 

10. PAUL SIMON - STRANGER TO STRANGER

 

11. VARIOUS ARTISTS - GOD DON’T NEVER CHANGE; THE SONGS OF BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON 

 

12. GRAHAM NASH - THIS PATH TONIGHT

 

13. VAN MORRISON - KEEP ME SINGING

 

14. THE 4 OF US - SUGAR ISLAND

 

15. STING - 57TH & 9TH

 

16. MUDCRUTCH - MUDCRUTCH 2

 

17. NEEDTOBREATHE - HARD LOVE

 

18. DAVID CROSBY - THE LIGHTHOUSE

 

19. RYAN VEIL - FOR EVERY SILENCE

 

20. BRIAN HOUSTON - SONGS FROM MY FATHER & BEN GLOVER THE EMIGRANT

#1 and MY FAVOURITE ALBUM OF 2016 - DAVID C CLEMENTS' THE LONGEST DAY IN HISTORY

(The layering sounds of this record seep further in to your soul every time you play it. No doubt his amazing gig in Fitzroy two days before Christmas helped its subjective jump to my favourite record of the year... BUT it was actually on Christmas Eve, listening to it on vinyl... when I screamed out the triumphant last lines, "So come on rivers/Take us to the sea,” that I realised its hold on me... 4 Northern Irish albums top my pile... what a year for our wee country...)

 

Back in 2005 when I was a radio DJ with some clout on the Belfast scene someone slipped me a CDR marked Clemo. I was told not to tell anyone. Oh dear I just did! They were demos from Six Star Hotel boy David Clements. I hoked it out last week when David C Clementsreleased his debut solo album, a whole decade later. For a few years people have been telling me that I would love David C Clements.People whose opinion I respect. As I have argued, The Longest Day In History hasn’t been rush job!

This is a mature and carefully constructed piece of work. It is layered in arrangement, in production and in the lyrics. It is a layered testimony to one young man’s life. It is about growing up, leaving naivety behind, discovering that life is not so much about flying on wings as eagles but more a crawling through the muck of a life whose hopes gets battered, faith gets questioned and where love needs hung on to even when you don’t feel like you can.

This week I had the album playing in the car on the school run. As we left the driveway Caitlin said, “Is this Iain?” Our girls know their Iain Archer and are quick to recognise sounds and voices. I don’t think Caitlin got it wrong here. In Clements’ early days making music Iain Archer was the highest standard of Belfast music. If he took time off writing for Jake Bugg, James Bay and Steve Mason then this is the kind of record he might make. 

There are traces of Archer’s Magnetic North and To The Pine Roots here. It is contemporary in its soundscapes. You might think The National or even Sigur Ros in its atmospheric crescendos. Yet, beneath it all, it is more like Jason Isbell; the song is the core of this album’s soul. Gary Lightbody might call Clements’ Belfast’s Springsteen. I stick with Isbell; more contemporary. Yet Archersupersedes them both.

Like Archer and Isbell, David C’s lyrics need time. They are poetic, deep and at times ambiguous. I listened to the record on a car journey on a dark night and the flickers of light in the dark seemed a perfect visual companion. I found myself pondering two things; what these songs are about, line after line, and what my life is about, every line opening up those thoughts. 

There’s a lot of fear, loss and making sense of a future on here and an awful lot of seeking home. I was taken by the first lines of Afraid Of The City

 

“Well I felt that winter on the night before

And I lost my summer and I lost the Lord

I get pain in the back of my head 

When I hear the chord

Don’t want to hear those songs about getting it right

When I keep getting wrong” 

 

I’m Still Alive has the beautiful: -

 

“Sometimes at night

The sound of the forest choir

Echoes through the pine, a song from a different time

Just like after the flood

That came in the form of a dove

Now it's in the tone of your voice

Oh when it called for us

'Cause I can hear the words coming down

They're singing "I'm still alive”

 

And in the end there is hope and love and peace in Hurricane’s epic conclusion:

 

“So we gather up our autumn sins as winter stole our colours

And we put all of our matches to our hearts we kept in boxes

And we watched the colours take our mothers

Sisters may we know what love is

Love us till we're lovers just as fire turns to colours

We observe the streets and rivers as our thoughts turn

To our fathers just as we began to see you flow like rivers to the seas

And we imagine how our father sees our lives as short as day

And we remember all the day could bring

So come on rivers

Take us to the sea”

 

The songs are so strong, the melodies so incessant, the words so stimulating. It has been slow to get out and it is a slow burn that seeps in. Worth the wait!

Back in 2005 when I was a radio DJ with some clout on the Belfast scene someone slipped me a CDR marked Clemo. I was told not to tell anyone. Oh dear I just did! They were demos from Six Star Hotel boy David Clements. I hoked it out last week when David C Clementsreleased his debut solo album, a whole decade later. For a few years people have been telling me that I would love David C Clements.People whose opinion I respect. As I have argued, The Longest Day In History hasn’t been rush job!

This is a mature and carefully constructed piece of work. It is layered in arrangement, in production and in the lyrics. It is a layered testimony to one young man’s life. It is about growing up, leaving naivety behind, discovering that life is not so much about flying on wings as eagles but more a crawling through the muck of a life whose hopes gets battered, faith gets questioned and where love needs hung on to even when you don’t feel like you can.

This week I had the album playing in the car on the school run. As we left the driveway Caitlin said, “Is this Iain?” Our girls know their Iain Archer and are quick to recognise sounds and voices. I don’t think Caitlin got it wrong here. In Clements’ early days making music Iain Archer was the highest standard of Belfast music. If he took time off writing for Jake Bugg, James Bay and Steve Mason then this is the kind of record he might make. 

There are traces of Archer’s Magnetic North and To The Pine Roots here. It is contemporary in its soundscapes. You might think The National or even Sigur Ros in its atmospheric crescendos. Yet, beneath it all, it is more like Jason Isbell; the song is the core of this album’s soul. Gary Lightbody might call Clements’ Belfast’s Springsteen. I stick with Isbell; more contemporary. Yet Archersupersedes them both.

Like Archer and Isbell, David C’s lyrics need time. They are poetic, deep and at times ambiguous. I listened to the record on a car journey on a dark night and the flickers of light in the dark seemed a perfect visual companion. I found myself pondering two things; what these songs are about, line after line, and what my life is about, every line opening up those thoughts. 

There’s a lot of fear, loss and making sense of a future on here and an awful lot of seeking home. I was taken by the first lines of Afraid Of The City

 

“Well I felt that winter on the night before

And I lost my summer and I lost the Lord

I get pain in the back of my head 

When I hear the chord

Don’t want to hear those songs about getting it right

When I keep getting wrong” 

 

I’m Still Alive has the beautiful: -

 

“Sometimes at night

The sound of the forest choir

Echoes through the pine, a song from a different time

Just like after the flood

That came in the form of a dove

Now it's in the tone of your voice

Oh when it called for us

'Cause I can hear the words coming down

They're singing "I'm still alive”

 

And in the end there is hope and love and peace in Hurricane’s epic conclusion:

 

“So we gather up our autumn sins as winter stole our colours

And we put all of our matches to our hearts we kept in boxes

And we watched the colours take our mothers

Sisters may we know what love is

Love us till we're lovers just as fire turns to colours

We observe the streets and rivers as our thoughts turn

To our fathers just as we began to see you flow like rivers to the seas

And we imagine how our father sees our lives as short as day

And we remember all the day could bring

So come on rivers

Take us to the sea”

 

The songs are so strong, the melodies so incessant, the words so stimulating. It has been slow to get out and it is a slow burn that seeps in. Worth the wait!

#2 in STOCKI'S FAV ALBUMS OF 2016 - FOY VANCE'S THE WILD SWAN

Oh my goodness this is so good! At last Foy Vance has fulfilled all that potential. This is one of the great Northern Ireland records and might well lead to Vance becoming one of the great Northern Ireland artists across the world. 

I have blogged before that for me Foy Vance is one of my embarrassments. I was involved in a Belfast music project back in the 90s - Alive In Belfast. I was managing Iain Archer at the time (very amateurishly) that put me in a room with the best of the city’s music at that time - Henry McCullough (he played Woodstock!), Brian Houston, Tiberius Minnows, New Brontés, Disraeli Gears (the last two had Jonny Quinn now of Snow Patrol behind the drums) etc etc… The Soul Truth had Foy Vance as singer. He sounded good but among Archer, Houston and the rest I paid no attention…

…until I heard Indiscriminate Act of Kindness and Gabriel and The Vagabond. Wow, what soul filled songs. Then I saw him with the Ulster Orchestra, that voice just knocked me out and I could not come to terms with how I, so proud of my discovery of new talent, missed this guy!

Let me be honest, however, The Wild Swan is the first record where I think Foy has nailed his sound and fulfilled his promise. His debut record Hope even with such great songs as the aforementioned Indiscriminate Act of Kindness and Gabriel and The Vagabondwas a little too produced. The long awaited Joy Of Nothing, with more incredible songs like You & I (with Bonnie Raitt) and Guiding Light (with Ed Sheeran), was good and got closer but was perhaps a little too earnest for me. 

The Wild Swan finally gets it perfectly. This is Foy at his most effortlessly glorious. From beginning to end you feel that this is a natural waterfall of organic cascading words and melodies. It’s infectious, it is soulful and it will linger deep long after the surface immediacy has become familiar. 

I believe this to be as close to the musical soul of Vance that we have ever gotten. The sound is something like might have happened had Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions Band had been available when Van Morrison was going all rustic up around Woodstock in Ulster County circa Moondance and Tupelo Honey.

Of course, Foy Vance shares a home with Van in the original Ulster. Vance’s hometown is the fertile little rock town of Bangor, Co. Down that Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody has sung about, as has Iain Archer Grammy nominated co-writer of Hold Back The River with James Bay. Vance pays homage to it on Bangor Town and might even have sussed the entire wee country of Northern Ireland with: - 

 

“Our minds are tethered

But our hearts are wild”

 

Not that Van can add Vance to the list of those he calls copycats. Vance takes that organic acoustic sound of late 60s early 70s Morrison and blends Gospel and blues riffs and more The almost rockabilly rock n roll opener Noam Chomsky Is A Soft Revolution he name checks Dr John, Little Richard, James Brown, Willie Nelsonand Aretha Franklin. On the piano led Ziggy Looked Me In The Eyehe channels Bowie and Bolan: - 

 

'We are children of the revolution, 

Never let the Spirit die’

 

The Wild Swan is a stunner, listen after listen. Songs about falling in love, a friend’s daughter, a singer encouraging himself to find his place, philosophers and revolution. It is light in spirit, big in heart and intriguing of mind. It is indeed “upbeat, feels good.” This is the one, Foy - you belong!

#3 in STOCKI'S FAV ALBUMS OF 2016 - MALOJIAN'S THIS IS NOWHERE

From Cat Malojian to just plain Malojian to Malojian with Steve Albini, Stevie Scullion’s musical growth just keeps going. 

Supported by The Northern Ireland Arts Council the trip to Chicago to work with the legendary producer Albini has really paid off. Albini has helped take Scullions songs and give them all a real character and a variety of characters at that. 

This Is Nowhere takes Scullion’s mid Ulster songs out of the folk song default that he started out doing and channels this collection through Beatle and Beach Boy influences and then adds distortion and musical quirk, of the most beautiful and tasteful kind. Oh the harmonies and the jaunty rhythms of the title track before imaginative frazzle of electric guitars remind you that Nirvana’s producer is at the controls. Stunning.

I’ll Be Alright has a Twelfth Day drum beat intro before being driven by acoustic guitars; Whittle Me Down is as delicate introspection as anything you’ll hear this year - “it’s raining in my soul”; The Great Decline with its piano brooding. The lovely love song that is Lean On Me and You’re A Part Of Me are tender love songs and Calling Borneo the most humorous look at tele-sales-people and I’d love every career’s adviser in Northern Irish schools to play Dam Song to their pupils - “Everybody wants to be/Something great until they see/It takes time/These things take time.”  

This is a record with variety in sound and thought. It is an unmitigated success!

#4 in STOCKI'S FAV ALBUMS OF 2016 - CIARAN LAVERY'S LET BAD IN

If great music can come out of a remote wee town in Ulster County, New York State at the end of the 60s (I am reading Small Town Talk about Dylan, The Band and Van up in Woodstock) then we shouldn’t be surprised that Agahagallon, a tiny village on the edge of Lough Neagh in Country Antrim in the province of Ulster could be the fertile place for a cycle of amazing songs.

Ciaran Lavery is yet another brilliant songwriter from Northern Ireland. I keep saying that in sheer depth of songwriter talent we are way ahead of what we should be be producing head per head of our small population.

It is more obvious and not journalistically lazy to set Lavery alongside Foy Vance and even, if you go island wide, Glen Hansard. He has their ability with song craft and that rasp of a voice - oh yes.

I guess if you dug through the surface of the songwriting sonic intrigues of Lavery you might find a Ryan Adams as his bottom line template. Yet, he does with his songs far more interesting things than Adams has done for some time. 

Okkervil River is as close as he gets to Adams but then this distorted brass thing kicks in and takes it in Lavery own particular direction. Though a seamless collection of songs there is much variety, delicate piano of Sonoma, the almost unaccompanied Let Bad In, Wilder’s sweet strings, Failing Light’s beats and his voice gives drama and authority on Train.

The whole thing is constructed around growing up. Bless him but at 29 Lavery thinks he has grown up! Yet, he delves a childhood on the shores of Lough Neagh and asks who he was and what he has become from the nurture he has had. My favourite is the guitar driven Tell Them All where he shares his dad’s wisdom in a May You Never or Forever Young kind of way:- 

 

“Give a hand while you can give it

Give a life where you can live

If you hang it on the string you’ll watch it fall

Never raise a glass to someone’s sorrow

Never talk about tomorrow

And if the hang man comes to have you on the stall

You tell them all”

 

It’s Aghagallon Proverbs on a record that declares a weight emerging talent. 

THE COULD'VE, SHOULD'VE STOCKI FAV ALBUMS OF 2016 THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE 20

BEAR’S DEN - READ EARTH & POURING RAIN

Stephen Orr tipped me off to this one too late for it to get in the 20. This might have been very high in my favs indeed BUT I had heard that they’d gone electric and it had put me off. Electric guitars for sure but only in order to give their sound a shimmer and more even surface. Beautiful stuff in the direction Gary Lightbody goes in when he gathers his Tired Pony.

 

BURNING CODES - HOPE IS OUR LIGHTNING

I wrote in my review… 

“Archer’s brother Iain, who guests on guitar, was up for a Grammy for his co-write with James Bay, Hold Back The River, but if he writes anything more hypnotically beautiful this year than She’s The Only One For Me or Got Love he’ll be a happy songwriter. When Gary Lightbody tries to make amends for stealing his drummer and endorses the album with “Breathtaking it kicks redemptive ass” He ain’t wrong!”

 

PETER CASE - HWY 62

Missed this one in 2015 and though I heard it in 2016 it didn’t qualify for the Fav Chart. It is a blinder of a songwriting project. I wrote… 

“The best way I can describe HWY 20 is that I feel the whole way through it that I am right bang bang in the middle of what Jesus spoke about when he told us that his followers would be visiting prisoners, feeding the hungry etc. Pelican Bay is about the ridiculous amount of people in American prisoners, mostly black. The deep slow blues sadness of Living Water, with one of many sneaky Biblical images, has a 6 year old refugee in front of a judge being turned away from America. These are songs for the least of these.” 

 

THE DARKLING AIR - UNTAMED AND BELOVED

Again, just heard this one slightly too late for it to make its impression. By mid January I think I will be thinking it should have been in there. Michael Keeney’s piano and production and Rachel McCarthy from Farriers conjure a hypnotic beauty of a record. Belfast again producing stunning music.

 

NICK CAVE - SKELETON SKY

I know. How did this one not make it?!?! Hard to define myself. Probably simply as a result of not being able to give the density of the piece enough time to let it seep into my soul. Stripped and haunting lamentation, I will regret it exclusion I am pretty sure!

 

DAWES - WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE

Love Taylor Goldsmith’s songs. Dawes are prolific and usually drop into my annual Top 10s. This didn’t dent my Favs because I didn’t get o give it enough time and it was a little more obtuse in sound than my favourite Dawes template.

 

JOSEPH - I’M ALONE, NO YOU’RE NOT

Sisters from the cool city that is Portland with fabulous harmonies. Very First Aid Kit they add a little spiritual intrigue which draws me in of course. Again… should have been in there!

 

MATTHEW MAYFIELD - RECOIL

Love this young Alabama man’s voice and have followed his musical accomplishments since I met him in Nashville back in 2007. This is the fullest expression of his art since his one major label outing with his former band Moses Mayfield. Matthew is a deep writer. God’s Fault is a gem here.

 

HOTHOUSE FLOWERS - LET’S DO THIS THING

Fabulous to hear these guys back int he studio. This is a long way from their big anthem songs of the late 80s but all their maturity has conjured a tender piece of near meditative rock. Hippy thoughts to gentle vibes. Late night reflective relaxation with a candle on the hearth.

 

WILCO - SCHMILCO

Again, I have no defence for this not being top 10. Jeff Tweedy back in laid back American groove. A few more listens and…

 

CHRISTY MOORE - LILY

Another good collection of folk songs by Ireland’s poet laureate. Maybe not just as convincing as recent albums but always a treat to hear his musings on Irish life. Oblivious does just that with his go at the bankers… “What will it take to make us angry…”

 

ROMANTICA - SHADOWLANDS

Now, you see. This was challenging the No 1 spot… and then they decided to give it an official release in February 2017… so this is the bar that everyone else needs to reach for in the year ahead. Ben Kyle’s songs and acute spiritual observational depth charges on top of that near Whiskeytown sound. Then there are mentions of Belfast… and Shandy Bass! It’s the one to beat…