BOB DYLAN / TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE
It debuted at Number One in the UK and the US and Top Five in Australia, so what’s the fuss about? I should confess that in spite of spending a year carving “Motorcycle Black Madonna Two Wheeled Gypsy Queen” into my desk in high school and still putting Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde into my all-time greatest albums list, I found most of Bob’s eighties and nineties material disappointing. His “comeback” albums this millennium although an improvement in their investigations into pre-rock’n’roll music forms and dark lyrical power, were voiced in an often indecipherable rheumy rasp that could barely be heard above the effusive praise from his braying acolytes who hail his every half-hearted gesture as genius. But I must admit in spite of my misgivings that I really enjoyed this album. Perhaps because Robert Hunter supplied Bob with the lyrics, it’s a very relaxed meeting between his quintet, featuring accordion and trumpet, and a lazy groove rhythm section and his rumpled voice, it reminds me of The Basement Tapes; the right people in the right room with the right material. It sounds easy but it’s not, the easy rolling often humorous bluesy relaxed playing has taken years of work. To say that he could do it in his sleep misses the point, he’s wide awake.
JUSTIN ADAMS & JULDEH CAMARA / TELL NO LIES
Their debut album together, Soul Science was one of the highlights of last year, recorded after they had just met, the album was a getting-to-know-you musical conversation between British guitarist Adams (Jah Wobble, Sinead O’Connor, Robert Plant) and an African single-string fiddle violin and two-string banjo player. It dug into the common ground of trance blues and this time around they stretch themselves to include a Strummer-style political rocker, an African Hoochie Coochie Man and loud rock raunch. They’ve known each other for a while now and you can hear them stretching and exploring their mojo into a hybrid universal musical language.
LEONARD COHEN / LIVE IN LONDON
Anyone who witnessed his amazing concerts earlier this year can take this 25-track album as the show that they remember including the perfectly-timed rehearsed jokes. Leonard’s voice is an even more mellifluous murmur, the perfectly nuanced mini-orchestra and superior versions of his remarkable repertoire of songs, sounding like an intimate gathering of his friends with 20,000 people in the audience. He has magic.
BUDDY AND JULIE MILLER / WRITTEN IN CHALK
I’m no country fan so I had no idea that this married couple have been making country records individually for 20 years. There is a purity in the song writing, their voices compliment and contrast so naturally and their small band plays like less-is-more, and it is. Heartfelt ballads, foot-stomping rock and a supple blues and jazz groove with friends Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris and Patti Griffin, it’s a celebration of the human spirit.
THE HORRORS / PRIMARY COLOURS
They’ve emerged from the dingy garage of their debut album and into a zone where they meld many of their and our favourite bands into a sound where post-punk and shoegazing-layered guitars meet behind their singer’s newfound singing voice. The eccentric production of a rock band by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow gives the record a sonic identity that lifts the whole thing to another dramatic level. The band is performing above themselves and maybe on their next record their songs will do the same, where everything matches the quality of Sea Within A Sea, when they throb and surge magnificently.
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