PLAYLIST 2023

Wau Wau Collectiv, "Mariage" (Sahel Sounds)

Not entirely new, I admit - this splendid album was released in November 2022. However, I've only just discovered it. It's the second from this collection of musicians from Senegal and Sweden. The idea developed organically when Swedish producer Karl Jonas Winqvist (recently involved with the James Yorkston/Nina Persson-LP) ended up in a Senegalese village with a large community of musicians  (and a dance centre) and began to record all sorts of sessions. Thus, we have joyous guitar solos, hip-hop-beats, childrens' singalongs, balafon, kora, synths, flutes - and some fabulously gruff vocals. Sparkling stuff!

One Leg One Eye, "And Take The Black Worm With Me" (Nyahh)

Another belated discovery, this. One Leg One Eye is the solo guise of Ian Lynch, founding member of Dublin's superb experimental folk band Lankum, and this album was released last October. Freed from any outside pressures throughout 2021, Lynch began to explore sounds and song structures that wouldn't fit in with Lankum. Building these massive walls of shimmering, abstract drone from field recordings (in the disused factory where his father once worked, for instance) as well his usual organic instruments and a number of effect pedals, and adding his own more traditional vocals, he has created a deep, dark and mesmerising well of an album.  

Montague Armstrong, "Mini Moods" (Dimple Discs)

Jude Cowan Montague and Matt Armstrong run a gallery in St.Leonards-on-Sea aka nearly-Hastings. Apart from art, they also collect ancient organs of the Hammond sort and other pre-synth elecric music making equipment. Having previously released LPs like "Organ Greats" or "Hammond Hits", this, their Dimple debut, is an EP-sized taster for their next album proper. Using a rainbow of instruments ranging from the conventional (bass, drums, twanging guitars) to the rather more usual (Hammond, for starters), and Jude's vocals, the delightfully excentric results would sit nicely next to Pascal Comelade (with a  hint of Liminanas), Dagmar Krause or Andy Newman. Perhaps not so good with Klaus Wunderlich, though.

Karl Culley, "Stories Save Our Lives" (Loose Wire Records)

Quite a few years ago, Yorkshire-born singer/songwriter Karl Culley followed the call of love to Krakow. For reasons never made quite clear, five years ago he announced his retirement from music. Months later, he thankfully reneged on this threat after the relationship ended and he was diagnosed with OCD.  The subsequent burst of creativity has resulted in this truly gorgeous album. Culley's warm voice and his astonishing guitar-picking are beautifully recorded, and the autobiographical songs are as subtly melodic and lyrically evocative as ever.  

L.T. Leif, "Come Back To Me, But Lightly” (Lost Map) 

Born and raised in Canada, singer/songwriter L.T. Leif spent a few years in Finland before arriving in Glasgow. She has gathered quite a crew of sympathetic musicians around her in the course of her travels, all of whom contribute greatly and subtly to a  beguiling album whose magic begins with constantly surprising arrangements and ends with Leif's quietly expressive voice. The mood mostly hovers in the realms of "chamber folk". "Gentle Moon" and "No Birds" combine shimmering violins with pedal steel, "Pass Back Through" could be the result of a tryst between Suicide and Meg Baird.

Hely, "Plode" (Ronin Rhythm Records)

According to the dictionary, "plode" means "neither implode nor explode".  "While we were working on this record, things got pretty complicated between us," writes pianist Lucca Fries, the only Hely besides drummer Jonas Ruther. "There was a lot of movement, a lot of heated discussions. We are different!" Remarkably, the duo have managed not only to negotiate a path across these turbulences, but also to address the situation musically. Taking as a starting point passages from their previous three albums, they turned the "discussion" into an album that keeps the listener constantly guessing what might happen next, yet never leaves them alone in their uncertainty. Even more remarkably, what might sound "difficult" in a verbal description fizzes with uncomplicated joie de vivre when it hits the stereo.

Spencer Cullum, “Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2” (Full Time Hobby)

Spencer Cullum is a pedal steel guitarist from Romford in East London, of all places, who, having learnt his metier from the incomparable BJ Cole, decamped to Nashville. It turned out that his talents were such that even in the centre of the Country universe they swiftly brought him praise and work with the likes of Kesha, Lambchop and Angel Olsen. His fine solo debut was released in 2020, now comes Vol.  2. Strangely, his own instrumnet of choice plays second fiddle throughout to an orchestra of strings, mandolins, oboes and flutes. The magnificently eccentric, jazz-tinged melange of folk and laid-back parlour music is eeqeually reminiscent of Matthew E. White and Stackridge.

Sparks, "The Girls is Crying in Her Latte" (Island)

This, the brothers Mael's 26th album, is an utter triumph, a joyous celebration of brains, proud eccentricity and killer hooks.  Following on from their FFS collaboration with Franz Ferdinand, Ron (77) and Russell (74) have hit an extraordinary late-career peak. "Hippopotamus" (2017) and "A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip"(2020) were already very good, but "Latte" truly hits the heights. There is not a single filler track in sight, the stylistic range of synth arrangements is amazing, the sheer vitality of the imagination at work with word and sound, astonishing. Not to mention the operatic fervour of Russell's vocal delivery which gives Ron's sardonic reveries about modern life a deliciously disturbing extra layer of meaning.   

Firestations, "Thick Terrain" (Lost Map)

Johnny Lynch's Lost Map Records turns ten this year.  Even if I don't like everything Johnny likes, I can depend on the fact that everything Johnny likes is at least interesting. Firestations are a typical Lost Map band: for ten years, the London quintet has been sailing through the waves of fashion without ever paying attention to the zeitgeist.  The basic ingredients of their muscular and psychedelically tinged dreampop are sonorous guitars that can also be a bit louder, a discreetly powerful bass/drums combination, sunny vocal harmonies, hints of synth here and there  - and all this sprinkled with details that shimmer like the morning dew.

Decisive Pink, "Ticket to Fame" (Fire)

Kate NV's real name is Ekaterina Shilonosova, she comes from Moscow and has already released five solo albums. She plays guitar and various synthesizers and belongs to the rock band Glintshake as well as the Moscow Scratch Orchestra. Angel Deradoorian comes from Los Angeles, plays guitar, keys and flute and was once a member of the Dirty Projectors. The duo's influences are correspondingly diverse. Synths in all sorts of vintage guises - sometimes sounding like balafon, flute or gamelan - characterise the warm sound. The two voices slip into each other like hand in glove, and a couple of instrumental tracks provide additional variety. The results are as clever as they are pleasurable.

Teenage Fan Club , "Nothing Lasts Forever" (Merge)

33 years later, the Scottish janglers and harmonisers show no sign of losing their mysteriously simple and yet so difficult art of combining chiming guitars with vocal melodies to gorgeous effect.  A simple song like "I Left a Light On" won't be written by anyone else. Recorded in ten days at Rockfield, this is the second album since the departure of Gerard Love, and the second with Euros Childs (ex-Gorky's Zygotic Mynci) on keyboards. The results are the work of a unit patently comfortable in its skin. They've all grown rounder and greyer but they lack neither desire nor hunger, strings or uplifting melodies.

Lenhart Tapes, "Dens" (Glitterbeat)

Even the cover is brilliant: four traditionally and yet somehow futuristically clad figures unrolling a tape reel on what looks like a coffee table. It describes the contents of this joyful album perfectly. Vladimir Lenhart is a Belgrade-based sonic DIY wiz who started scouring fleamarkets for taped recordings he could buy by the pound, treat, and re-assemble in a different musical context. This new album is structured more clearly than anything that's gone before, including the addition of a handful of singers, especially Tijana Stanković who provides the backbone of traditional song to Lenhart's percussive and dissonant clatter, thus linking old with modern, nature and machine, and melody with noise.

Reciprocate, "Soul to Burn" (Gringo)

London trio Reciprocate claim to conceive their songs in the style of quietly funky soul ballads, only to rip them to shreds and turn them into "loud rock'n'roll".  If there is any trace of "soul" to be detected in the end results on this, their second album, it's the intensity of their performance. Reminiscent in spirit of the angular edginess of a certain type of early 80s Brit and NY new wave outfit ,  guitarist Steff Kett steals a lot of the limelight  with a  serpentine vocal style that somehow manages to sing a melody and at the same time sing around it.  However,  explosively unpredictable drums and  bass patterns add their own spice to this fiercely idiosyncratic music.

Marta Del Grandi, "Selva" (Fire)

Like her own past which takes in lengthy spells of life in Kathmandu, China and Belgium , the Milan-born singer/songwriter's musical path has never followed conventional routes. After working  for a decade in a variety of ensembles pegged somewhere between jazz and contemporary chamber music, her fabulous 2021 album «Until We Fossilize» pointed towards a more personal singer/songwriter style which allowed her talent for melodic innovation to thrive. This time round, she has added extra courage to her vision of arrangements. These often appear deceptively minimalist, with multi-layered accappella vocals a frequent feature and plenty of percussive, melodic and ambient surprises dropped in when you least expect them.  Gorgeous.

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- Blur, «The Ballad of Darren»
- Karl Culley, “Stories Save Our Lives”
- Marta del Grandi, “Selva”
- Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know There Was a Tunnel Under the Ocean Boulevard?”
- P.J. Harvey, “I Inside the Old Year Dying”
- Hely, “Plode”
- L.T. Leif, “Come Back to Me Lightly”
- Lankum, «False Lankum»
- Ingrid Lukas, “Elumeloodia”
- Sparks, “The Girl is Crying in her Latte”
- Kassi Valazza, «Knows Nothing»

My re-release of the year: from 1972, "Elephantasia" (Fire/Earth), from the wonderful late folk guitar virtuoso/singer Dave Evans . Extra help from a handful of friends makes this an almost "orchestral" opus, compared to Evans's other, quietly exceptional records.