Steering Wheel Music 12

Best of 2017

Top Ten Albums

One: Lucy Rose – Somethings Changing. This was a close call. I had said, when reviewing, that this would likely be my number one of the year, but when I recalled David Rawling’s 2017 release, I had momentary second thoughts. Rawlings is always going to be a winner, and when I use my main criteria for judging an album as one I listened to the most, returning again and again, and the impact of the music, for example its newness to me and/or surprise, I confirmed it was this album from Rose. Seeing her live recently has helped in also confirming her fine musicianship as well as songwriting distinctiveness.

Two: Dave Rawlings – Poor David’s Almanac. Well, this can hardly be a revelation. I like in particular its ‘comic’ to West Coast range.

Three: Nguyên Lê & Ngo Hong Quang feat. Paolo Fresu - Hà Noi Duo. The playing on this is exquisite and stunning, but it was the vocal that so often reached such peaks of beauty and blew me away.

Four: Rodney Crowell - Close Ties. A career peak, though being honest I haven’t followed it all that attentively, but it seemed to me a wonderfully mature set of songs in the reflectiveness of the lyrics and in its consistently catchy songcraft. I listened to it often.

Five: Stephen Stills & Judy Collins - Everybody Knows. This and the next are driven by my nostalgic musical impulses and the West Coast anchor of that. A beautiful pairing here, Collins always sublime in her singing, and Stills’ gruff foil being the paradoxical perfect match a foil is designed to be.

Six: David Crosby - Sky Trails. Much of this is jazz-inflected, and wonderfully/typically so, but there are also a few classic Crosby sounds bringing his past excellence as singer/songwriter to its present continuation.

Seven:  Declan O'Rourke - Chronicles of the Great Irish Famine. Beautifully written and performed songs recounting one of the most appalling historical realities of political and social injustice. Stunning and moving.

Eight: Taylor Haskins – Gnosis. That blissful marriage of new and traditional jazz elements.

Nine: Joseph Shabason – Aytche. That blissful marriage of new and traditional jazz elements [yes, I know what I am doing].

Ten: Willie Watson - Folksinger Vol. 2. This surprised me: I like bluegrass/country, this more ‘traditional’ sound, but Watson’s vocal is captivating in both its ‘old-time’ sound yet also equal beauty.

Christmas Music

Topic Records - The Real Sound of Folk Music, album review

That's All Folk

Topic Records – The Real Sound of Folk Music is such a fine collection of songs, many/most classics of this genre by classic artists. Listening tonight on the back of my recent same to current interpreters like Ange Hardy and Chris Woods, it has confirmed my deep love of the more plaintive and lamenting side of the music, whether about human emotion in its own essence or also how it is caused by the external conditions in which it has been, usually, adversely affected. One such on this album is the [have to use again, ‘classic’] song written and performed by Ewan MacColl, Dirty Old Town, and as with the Declan O’Rourke I reviewed here, this relates to a specific time and place yet continues to reverberate aptly and painfully today,

I found my love where the gaslight falls
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed my girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town, dirty old town

Clouds are drifting across the moon
Cats are prowling on their beat
Springs a girl in the streets at night
Dirty old town, dirty old town

I heard her sigh from the decks
Saw a train set the night on fire
Smelled the spring on the smoky wind
Dirty old town, dirty old town

I'm going to take a good sharp ax
Shining steel tempered in the fire
We'll chop you down like an old dead tree
Dirty old town, dirty old town

I’m less inclined to the jig and jaunt of much folk, unless in a receptive, inebriated mood, though in these general cases I am impressed by the musicianship – but here I’ll highlight the prettier if maudlin and/or saddening selection.

Opener Dick Gaughan’s Both Sides the Tweed is made even more potent in its righteous protest by the memorable warble of his vocal delivery, while second, Harry Upton’s 2012 take on Canadee-I-O, is another kind of beautiful. There’s the premier guitar tutorial of Davy Graham’s Angi, and then Martin Simpson displays the results of such tutelage on his Never Any Good. New to me, Andrew Cronshaw’s Wasps in the Woodpile is a jaunt of an instrumental that I do like, even without drink: whistle and slide guitar merging brilliantly; and the rest of the brass and sax.

There’s a live Pentangle on The Time Has Come, and Anne Briggs’ 1971 Blackwater Side matches this folk royalty collected on the album. I hadn’t heard Martin Carthy feat. Dave Swarbrick’s Scarborough Fair before, but pleased I have now and to say it holds its own against the obvious other one. Eliza Carthy’s fiddle-drawn Worcester City bathes us in the dark water of its poisoned despair, hauntingly and gorgeously.

I wasn’t a Joy Division fan [just not my focus at their time] but June Tabor’s 2011 version of Love Will Tear Us Apart makes clear what a powerful song this is. Mike Waterson sings unaccompanied and therefore classically for eleven minutes of an exquisite Tamlyn.

These are my instant favourites, some known and some new to me. There are 24 tracks in all, and not a dud in that. And that’s that, folk.

Butt Music 11

Red Stone Souls - Mother Sky, album review

And that both are two and each of them one?

Gertrude Stein said rose is a rose is a rose is a rose and I say riff is a riff is a riff is a riff and so it is what it is, nothing new but effective ad infinitum in the Black Sabbath law of identity, as with Detroit riff reprobates Red Stone Souls where you know a fuzzed seed was planted back in the day to perpetuate worldwide in the musical sprouting of such retro heavy metalists. 

And that means what it means.

Eye Music 19