kagablog

21. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away (Sub Pop)

- the “Shins will change your life” hype was impossible to live up to, and this third album seemed deliberately to avoid trying to match the “Garden State” fuelled frenzy – yet it entered the US charts at an improbable No 2, and so the Shins became, formally, the great white hope of indie rock – but guitars chime and voices soar in subtler shades of pop dazzle as the more measured performance suggested it might actually take longer to reveal itself and, consequently, longer to fade, which is precisely how it has turned out … in my life, anyway – it never did make No 1, and the glorious single, Phantom Limb, only reached No 87, suggesting that I was right not only about the band but the audience as well

22. Orchestra Baobab – Made In Dakar (World Circuit) / Youssou N’Dour – Rokku Mi Rokka (Nonesuch)

- the fact that these two albums, both recorded in N’Dour’s Senegalese studio, deliver precisely what we’ve come to expect (which is, let’s face it, the very acme of Afropop) should surely be the cause of great celebration, even if we can shut our eyes and imagine how they’re going to sound (with maybe only Neneh Cherry’s rap on Youssou’s Wake Up (It’s Africa Calling) an exception, though we ought to have guessed what a title like that would generate) – so the veteran Orchestra sound like they’ve sounded for decades, comfortable and comforting with biting guitar and mellifluous sax peppering those wonderfully languid vocals and Afro-Cuban rhythms with just enough spice on a set of new songs and new recordings of old, but mainly not previously Baobabed songs – Youssou guests, too – his own record, on the other hand, is a gleaming, modern thing with few surprises (well, perhaps the New Orleans second line rhythm on Sportif , and a telling appearance by West African music’s man of my year, Bassekou Kouyate) but class to burn

23. Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop)

- on Sam Beam’s third proper album, discounting the Calexico collaboration, the somewhat muted tones used to paint the general atmosphere of the first two explode into a comparative riot of production colour, with banjos, slide and steel guitars, funky electric piano, traces of dub and even a hint of Africa jostling for space – there have been clues, some on that Calexico effort, that he might be headed in this kind of direction, but the sonic and stylistic richness of “The Shepherd’s Dog” still surprises – the vocals remain hushed and vaguely conspiratorial, the overall mood melancholy, but there’s so much more to hear!

24. Aman Aman - Musica I Cants Sefardis d’Orient I Occident (Galileo)

- an offshoot of L’Ham de Foc, who featured strongly on this list a couple of years ago, Aman Aman plays exactly what the title tells us … music and songs of the Sephardic Jews of East and West, but that rather prosaic title doesn’t convey even a fraction of the strength and beauty and even excitement, or the sense of exotic time and place, that permeate this album, on which Mara Aranda, a gorgeous singer, and her mainly Spanish musician friends visit Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and elsewhere in search of their originally Iberian Jewish muse

25. Richard Thompson – Sweet Warrior (Proper) / Linda Thompson – Versatile Heart (Decca)

- more than 25 years on from their musical and marital separation, the legacy of the Richard and Linda Thompson partnership still resonates to such a degree that bracketing their individual efforts still seems entirely natural – overall, Linda’s may be even better than her “Fashionably Late” comeback, though the lump in the throat factor has dissipated and though “Versatile Heart” may not have the one or two showstoppers of its predecessor – but the title track’s clever rhyming and boozy horns, the traditional Katie Cruel with its bouncy left-handed Irish guitar and the fabulously nostalgic Whisky, Bob Copper And Me shouldn’t be missed, and she stills sings like a bruised and slightly shop-soiled angel – Richard, on the other hand, just keeps the quality coming, rocking harder this time than most recently, writing a great war in Iraq song, assimilating the tradition as naturally as ever without ever compromising his rock ‘n’ roll heart and, in Take Care The Road You Choose, devising yet another of those devastating rolling ballads he seems to have the copyright on – a prolific family year also disgorged a raggedly powerful Richard & Linda 1975 concert, and son Teddy released “Upfront And Down Low”, an excellent album of classic country covers

26. Ry Cooder – My Name Is Buddy (Nonesuch)

- after two decades of film soundtracks and cross cultural co-operations, Cooder has revived his own catalogue and follows the brilliant “Chavez Ravine” with this, an allegorical tale of a red cat, by colour and political persuasion, and his buddies as they travel through Depression era America – the music is a return to the era’s folk and blues roots that Cooder so expertly engaged on his earliest albums, and there’s Tex-Mex and R&B as well - a supporting cast that includes long time cohorts Bobby King, Terry Evans, Flaco Jimenez and Jim Keltner, as well as pianist Van Dyke Parks, piper Paddy Moloney, folk icon Pete Seeger and his old time music genius half-brother Mike, speaks for both the scope and the quality of music where Three Chords And The Truth describes a songwriting intent and an approach to living you might have thought had died out

27. Grinderman – Grinderman (Mute)

- if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed that, even though Nick Cave has matured over the past couple of decades into one of rock’s great measured songwriters, he has never completely left the love of noisy post-bluespunk that the Birthday Party so comprehensively espoused when he first exploded into view, and the fact that Grinderman, an essentially, though not invariably, gutwrenchingly rowdy quartet featuring three of the Bad Seeds, growls and snarls its way through what was surely the raucous and gloriously ribald, yet still lyrically smart, rock album of the year should not have been a total surprise – whether this is the early beginning of a Cave policy of railing against the dying of his light in the year of his 50th birthday remains to be seen, but it’ll be no bad thing if it is

28. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand (Rounder)

- two things struck me immediately about this record – firstly, the collaboration seemed entirely unlikely even if Plant had sung with Sandy Denny in halcyon Led Zeppelin days, that band had often messed with folk (but hardly ever, if at all, country) forms, and Plant’s post Zep career has been much more musically inclusive - secondly, despite my admiration for both Plant and the queen of bluegrass I’d never been especially attracted to them, yet I loved this album – that may have had (and may still have) something to do with a typically T Bone Burnett production and a wonderful song choice that takes in Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint (as Naomi Neville), the Everly Brothers and Gene Clark (twice), as well as a reference to Sister Rosetta Tharpe in a song by Burnett’s wife Sam Phillips, but mostly I’m pretty sure it’s because they sing so damn well together

29. The National – Boxer (Beggars Banquet)

- I read somewhere that the National reminded some critics of both Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen, connections I wouldn’t have made myself but, having been alerted to them, can see why others might – darkly sturdy urban wasteland songwriting, isolated and melancholic urban wasteland sound … yep, there certainly are tangential similarities, though the National doesn’t actually sound anything like either of those acts – however, “Boxer” does sound a whole lot like its predecessor, “Alligator” … the brooding atmosphere is repeated, along with an overall feel of poetic dread, and I like it just as much – in fact, my response to “Boxer” turns out to be so similar that, on checking, I find that “Alligator” made No 28 on the 2005 version of this list

30. Erdem Helvacioglu – Altered Realities (New Albion) / David Torn – Prezens (ECM)

- maybe the most starkly beautiful album on this list, the Turkish composer’s “Altered Realities” are seven long and exquisitely textured acoustic guitar contemplations overlayed with real time electronics that support, stretch, distort, transfigure and transform the basic notes (despite what you would imagine to be the aural evidence, there was no mixing, editing, overdubbing or post-processing), or, where necessary, leave them alone, which means that all the music can be recreated, live, by a single musician – what is most impressive is that what sounds on the page like an exercise in electronic cleverness translates on record as music beyond your imagination – Torn’s explorations of the possibilities of the guitar relate mainly, though not exclusively, to the electric version, in the company of a fantastic improvisational band drawn from altoist Tim Berne’s Science Fiction group and, while what they do might seem a bit like science fiction to those of a more conservative six string bent, the array of sounds, ideas and, above all, musical, as opposed to merely sonic, invention, where the Delta blues, brutally visceral über-rock and inspired electronic manipulation all fit naturally together, it all fits naturally, if challengingly, together