kagablog

1. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop) / Sun Giant EP (Sub Pop)

- though the Beach Boys and CSN&Y have provided many listeners with convenient reference points for this young folk-into-rock-and-back-again Seattle band (as they always do when a new outfit leans heavily on the vocal harmony, and Fleet Foxes’ is as glorious and reverberant as any you’ll have heard), it’s the introspective sense and texture of later Beach Boys songs like Surf’s Up, and maybe a suggestion of that elusive first David Crosby solo album, that really provide the touchstones – there’s ethereal magic, too, and a widescreen rural vastness and majesty about songs like the gorgeous White Winter Hymnal and Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (and, in fact, the whole album) that precisely demonstrates one advantage a young band with decent ideas will have over its influences – all possible strands and brands of rock may, on the face of it, already have been invented, but they certainly haven’t been used up, and there’s a synthesis of all that classicism now available to those with imagination that may not have been in years gone by - the “Sun Giant” EP that immediately preceded the group’s full length debut is mentioned because it’s hardly any less impressive, and because a new version of the album now includes its tracks

2. Portishead – Third (Island)

- Portishead overcame the difficult third album syndrome by simply not making one for eleven years – yet, when your debut becomes as sonically pervasive as Portishead’s did, and your singer is consequently as identifiable as Beth Gibbons is, the recognition factor can’t be helped, even after such a long break, and even if your album is as calculated an attempt to move on as “Third” clearly is – of course, instant recognition is not necessarily a good thing, but Portishead make it work for them while apparently deliberately eschewing any and everything, besides their musical imagination, that will have had their fans longing for their return – that way they hang on to their crucial strengths, completely avoid any sense of basking in outdated glory and produce a record that sounds like it might have done had they progressed naturally through a series of intervening albums to this point – so “Third” is almost surely an intrinsically better album than “Dummy” or its unfairly underrated successor (it’s certainly musically more widely ranging), and that makes it better than just about anything else around as well

3. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

- following the break-up of his band and his relationship with his girlfriend, Justin Vernon took up residence all alone in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods where he remained sequestered for three or four months, writing, recording and, so the story goes, hunting his own food - and that’s exactly how “For Emma” sounds … stark, desolate, solitary (the occasional assistance that later added external instrumental colour is itself almost spectral), breathtakingly beautiful and timelessly in tune with the concept of its title

4. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! (Mute)

- whether leading his Grinderman project through a maelstrom of about the most red-blooded, raucous rock ‘n’ roll even he has tried since the halcyon days of the Birthday Party, composing with conviction and an impressive sense of style for the Western movies, or fronting the long serving and perhaps long suffering Bad Seeds (it seems the album may be the last original member, Mick Harvey’s, swansong) through his more formal releases, Nick Cave is in a rich vein of form; so much so that, were I to give the matter proper thought, I might even conclude that my gut reaction is correct and that the new and erratically punctuated album (even its artwork sports three different arrangements of the title) is my favourite since “The Boatman’s Call”, and the most gleefully irreverent since “Murder Ballads” – from the lurching title track all the way to the insistently pessimistic closing title, More News From Nowhere (with special mention going to We Call Upon The Author, in which Cave seems to combine literary criticism with a full-throated castigation of the Creator and which, like the previous albums by Okkervil River and the Hold Steady, references poet John Berryman), it’s nothing but the good stuff

5. Bill Frisell – History, Mystery (Nonesuch)

- I’ve never met a Bill Frisell album I didn’t like, but this part live, part instrumental radio ballad double disc, constructed as a kind of 30-part suite where five or six shorter pieces act as repeated and developing themes and motifs holding the work in place, and strongly reminiscent of the superb “This Land” and “Quartet”, is surely among the best by arguably the jazz world’s most sonically distinctive guitarist in an octet of tried, trusted and almost miraculously sympathetic musical compadres, including two horns and three strings – it feels, without standing back or keeping still to do so, like a long view career stock take by an artist who continues effortlessly to push, shift and blur musical boundaries everywhere he goes