kagablog

7. Frode Haltli – Passing Images (ECM) / Sinikka Langeland – Starflowers (ECM)

- a couple of extraordinary and spellbinding Norwegian musicians taking chances with their folk tradition (and, at the same time, taking their folk tradition to places it can hardly have imagined possible) – Langeland merges her Finnish table harp, the kantele, and her stunning folk voice with a group of jazz musicians including the outstanding saxophonist Trygve Seim on a series of songs by woodcutter poet Hans Børli; accordionist Haltli adds trumpet, viola and voice where the natural sounds of breath blown, air pumped and horsehair scraped become as riveting and engaging as the non-vocal sounds that sometimes emanate from Maja Ratkje’s throat, lips and tongue, yet these are as beautiful in their own way as the slow, still, folk-inflected tunes that gradually unfurl out of and fold back into Haltli’s remarkable musical imagination

8. Martin Simpson – Prodigal Son (Topic)

- this may be the album, in a long and impressive career, that best represents Simpson’s range – the traditional English folk songs are there, as ever, his radically improved singing no longer playing second fiddle to his remarkable acoustic guitar playing, and so are the American roots influences in which he immersed himself even more completely in his years living in the USA (including a more mature and better considered cover of Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927 than the one on Simpson’s debut, slightly altered to accommodate Katrina), and, of course, the delicate instrumentals, but, perhaps most of all, there’s also a brutally honest, beautifully paced original song about his father, who was never any good with money, yet taught his son a range of small skills he uses every day

9. The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible (Merge)

- the question, of course, was how these sudden yet persistently appealing Canadian indie rock darlings were going to top that amazing debut - they didn’t, quite, as it turned out, but the fact that they got this close is pretty remarkable in itself – Funeral’s sheer unexpectedness is what dazzled everybody, and probably continues to do so – the darker, perhaps more deliberate Neon Bible is not as explicitly ravishing, but it’s still beyond what most bands achieved in 2007

10. Sam Baker – Pretty World (BlueLimeStone)

- Baker, in an apparently endless line of brilliant Texan songwriters, had to re-learn the guitar following injuries sustained in a bomb blast twenty odd years ago, when the guy sitting next to him in a Peruvian railway carriage was killed, and he sings in a halting, slightly stilted fashion as a result of his consequent severe hearing loss, but his songs, packed with small but crucial insights and which might, of course, not otherwise have been written the way they were, don’t need the support of that amazing story to reveal themselves as among the pithiest and most poignant I’ve heard for ages