My year in music
Now at the end of the year some people published their “my year in music”-site that they got from spotify (www.spotify-yearinmusic.com/). I also let that little app run, but among the top ten of 2014 there were 7 tracks of the soundtrack from “Frozen” - so this is a bit biased by the fact that I have a 5 year old using my account a lot. Top genre was children’s music, followed by indie rock, Freak folk and something called “Stomp and flutter”. So now you know how I roll.
Anyway, these were the musics I enjoyed most over the course of the year:
In springtime I discovered a jazz singer called Mose Allison who published most of his catalogue between the fifties and the seventies. Somewhere between boogie, blues and jazz, he played a kind of easy piano jazz with small combo arrangements. I couldn’t stop listening to this stuff after I had seen a tribute concert for Mose Allison on my birthday when I was in NY for the first time and accidentally fell into a very small jazzclub called (sic) “Smalls Jazzclub”.
Also accidentally by winning a ticket for a concert in the Bowery Ballroom by the rather horrible indierockband “And you will know us by the trail of dead” I got to know a french band who opened at that night: “La Femme”. They played a really great live show: three keyboardists, a singer, guitar, bass, drums who take the essence from Stereolab, Stereo Total and Les Rita Mitsoukou and convert it into hypnotic danceable live music. I would love to play in a band like that.
Later that year I discovered Cate Le Bon, a singer and songwriter from Wales. Her song “Are you with me now” was the song that did not stop to sound in my head all summer. Actually from 2013’s “Mug Museum”, a wonderful album that contains indie guitar pop music that drinks from songwriters as Syd Barret or Kevin Ayers, but maybe I am the only one to find such references.
When one has children he needs to relax and come down all the time, and therefore the dosis of punkrock in my life has diminuished to a near zero level. So the music that sounds most at home is folk. Old folk (Pentangle, Nick Drake, my god, even Peter Paul and Mary sometimes) and new folk (Devendra Banhart etc. ). And new fold is the genre for my album of the year: Tiny Ruins - Brightly Painted One . Tiny ruins is the project of New Zealand songwriter Hollie Fullbrook. With “Brightly Painted One” she made an album that gave me the shivers, the starting track “Me at the museum, you in the wintergardens” should get a remake as a movie. As most of the best music in life, it’s the simple stuff, the three or four chords, the five or six notes from the violin or the organ, and the little bit of silence here and there, that make the difference. “Brightly Painted One” contains it all. I have been listening to this album at home while having dinner, at work, during travel and asleep and it never failed on me. Go and buy this album.
But the most mindblwoing thing was this one: Catalan singer Silvia Perez Cruz and producer Refree published an album called “Granada”. She is probably the best contemporary singer in the world, he is an underrated guitarist. Both work together since a couple of years. I had first heard them together with a version of “Gallo Rojo Gallo Negro” by Chicho Sanchez Ferloso that they had produced for the sampler “Fundacion Robo” (
https://esunrobo.bandcamp.com/track/gallo-rojo-gallo-negro). Their now published album is mostly only guitar and voice, but every song has a very different attitude, arrangement, tonality, language. It made me cry. Literally. This is one of those albums that make you think that it’s not necessary to produce any other music anymore, it has now been done, completed, finished off. Probably no one will understand (but my wife). but this is it. Music. This is why music exists. It’s the most intense and abstract way of communication, of transferring emotions from on to the other. This album is taking it all, from the Kunstlied, to the folksong, from psychedelia to traditional, and back again, from noise to rock to the song that your mother sang to you to make you sleep. Whow.
