kagablog

31. Syd Kitchen – Across (No Budget)

- it seems ironic that, at just about the time that Kitchen’s quirky, highly individual but equally highly skilled songwriting appears to be finding a wider audience (a mainstream TV commercial; the much sought after McCabe’s gig in Santa Monica, California; a possible US-made film documentary; the appropriation by a large corporation of his Africa’s Not For Sissies slogan, needless to say without credit or commercial advantage to him, for a T-shirt), arguably his best album ever consists of four long solo acoustic guitar instrumentals named after the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water – each displays exactly the right combination of artistic drift and internal development, referencing, without fuss or fanfare, the numerous musical influences in his life, and together forming a fifth element, (the title of his compilation album notwithstanding) the quintessential Kitchen

32. Ghost – In Stormy Nights (Drag City) / Boris (with Michio Kurihara) – Rainbow (Drag City)

- I have decided, on buying Julian Cope’s book, “Japrocksampler” (a belated successor to his “Krautrocksampler” that I read twice), to spend more time than I have heretofore done investigating the outer limits of Japanese rock (indeed, my exposure to the subject has been such that Japanese rock seems to consist entirely of outer limits, which is just fine with me) – Ghost and Boris (with Ghost’s voice of God guitar player Kurihara) are contemporary bands, not dealt with by Cope – yet the psychedelic spirit so favoured by Saint Julian never leaves them, whether it’s whimsical and folky, like much of Ghost, or darkly menacing, like much of Boris, or ear splitting, brain frying, stomach pummeling experimental noise freak out, like the rest of both - and it’s all fabulous

33. Panda Bear – Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)

- notwithstanding how much you thought you heard this connection before, what is most striking about “Person Pitch”, the Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox’s second album under his Panda Bear moniker, is just how much it sounds like what Brian Wilson did, does and, given that the stylistically quite wide-ranging and thoroughly contemporary production infused with an indie rock sensibility simply means that it sounds like a stylistically quite wide-ranging and thoroughly contemporary Brian Wilson infused with an indie rock sensibility, might yet do – it’s all marvellous, though, especially the vast Bros, which seems to incorporate everything Lennox does best into one 12 minute epic

34. Battles – Mirrored (Warp)

- a quartet out of Don Caballero and Helmet, amongst others, Battles has managed (absolutely and outrightly in some opinions, nearly in mine, which may be coloured by the damage done to my musical psyche by having lived through the grandiloquent schemes and creations of its antecedents), with its first release, to make progrock acceptable – this is some achievement, and the fact that this complex instrumental (with a few vocal sounds for leavening) collection of technological and intellectual trickery does work must be down to the band’s approach (do you call the kind of aggregation that would make his kind of music a band, I wonder), which, though undoubtedly serious, is never pompous and allows all sorts of humorous and even comic book asides into the process

35. Paul Motian / Bill Frisell / Joe Lovano – Time And Time Again (ECM) / Floratone – Floratone (Blue Note)

- this Motian trio is about as sure a guarantee of musical excellence, and even occasional genius, as it’s possible to find in any style, and the fact that they can do this stuff with their eyes closed (a figure of speech, you understand, as many musicians quite literally do what they do with their eyes closed) doesn’t mean either that it’s not worth doing or that they do it any less brilliantly, if arguably a little more abstractly and impressionistically this time – Floratone, a project that focuses musically and titularly on the South (mainly the post-Katrina South), includes drummer Matt Chamberlain as Frisell’s equal partner and features the Frisellian guitar tone, texture and compositional sense in spades, but the fact that both are listed as providing “loops”, and two non-instrumental producers receive equal band credit, says everything about the importance of the overall sound in relation to the actual notes being played

36. Beirut – The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing!)

- Beirut’s 2006 “Gulag Orkestar” had to be a one-off … surely – a 19/20 year old American incorporating authentic-sounding Eastern European folk forms into an indie rock mosaic that spread from the Smiths to the Magnetic Fields and Neutral Milk Hotel … how on earth was he going to repeat that without simply repeating it? – well, he has, by doing much the same thing, only better and with increased maturity, and there are times that I believe I actually prefer this one – I can’t wait to see what he does next, though I’m secretly hoping it’ll be more of the same

37. Chris Letcher – Frieze (2 Feet/Sheer Sound) / David Kilgour – The Far Now (Merge)

- I read a piece written by London-based South African Chris Letcher (also the name of his band, by the way) some years ago about attending a Pavement gig and loving them to distraction – I always thought his work with Urban Creep and his duo with Matthew van der Want, which many South Africans knew, wouldn’t have prepared you for that, though his contribution to the first Lilo offering, which nobody anywhere even heard, may well have – on Frieze, his solo debut and by miles the finest locally related songwriting release of the year, all of that comes together in an intelligent, beautifully crafted, unpretentiously classy, yet slightly quirky rock/pop package on which Special Agents, a clear favourite from the past, is improved without showing up the songwriting quality around it – David Kilgour’s only connection is that he, too, comes from a country better known for rugby players than songwriters, in his case New Zealand – Kilgour is a veteran whose worth has even been formally recognised by his government by way of the Order Of Merit, his contributions to the Clean critical to the birth and development of what became acclaimed in indie rock circles home and away as the Dunedin Sound – but his solo career, too, has been a model of drop in anywhere you like and you won’t be disappointed consistency and understated melodic flair, and “The Far Now” is no exception

38. Rachel Unthank & The Winterset – The Bairns (Rabble Rouser/EMI) / June Tabor – Apples (Topic)

- just in case there’s been any doubt, the sublime Tabor proves, in her sixtieth year, that she is almost certainly the finest interpreter of the English folk tradition and contemporarily written neo-tradition, at least among the women, but maybe overall – as ever, this assessment goes way beyond her magnificent voice to include her choice of material, the real drama with which she invests it, and the way she gels with her restrained but marvellously sympathetic musicians and they with her – Rachel and Becky Unthank are young (their combined age is quite a bit short of Tabor’s) singing sisters plainly and proudly from the Newcastle region who seem already to have inherited a little of Tabor’s willingness for gentle boundary stretching – despite Rachel’s headline billing, the piano centred Winterset is a real collective (with four female voices exquisitely if slightly unusually arranged) prepared to take chances both within (I Wish) and outside (Robert Wyatt’s magnificent Sea Song) the tradition, and it all works

39. Radiohead – In Rainbows (Self released)

- it would be a pity if “In Rainbows” was only remembered as the album that caused a sea change in the way records are marketed (of course, whether or not it does remains to be seen, as an artist probably needs to have achieved a certain level of success to take on the industry juggernaut in the “pay what you think it’s worth” way that Radiohead did), because that might confuse future audiences into overlooking the fact that this is a very good record, perhaps even the band’s best for a decade - I’d have paid full price if I’d had to

40. John Surman – The Spaces In Between (ECM)

- this is the second of Surman’s projects for ECM in which the master of both the baritone sax’s rich sonority and the soprano’s sinuous mystery carefully intersects formal composition and well-directed improvisation, so that it’s often unclear where the one ends and the other begins – Surman, featured here with double bass and string quartet, adopts a lyrical, English compositional feel, yet finds space for both Middle Eastern influence and a revisiting of his own great ‘70s jazz-rock composition, Where Fortune Smiles