No Face Music 63

 

Tempting Permanance

The Temptations Template clones every musical and lyrical cliché from its 60 years of application into this latest, wonderful production. From start to finish, it sways across the aural spectrum with lush harmonies and chorus lines to explode from these like all our yesterdays. If you need the history explaining, the last original member (and producer of the album) Otis Williams narrates it for us, but it is really all there in the songs. Shelley wasn’t entirely accurate in placing the inevitability of change over what once was, yet he wouldn’t have known music from the Temps at any time. And when Smokey drifts through…

 

No Face Music 62

 

Some Awe's Best of 2021

Best of 2021

Ani DiFranco - Revolutionary Love
Bitchin Bajas - Switched On Ra
Black Stone Cherry - The Human Condition
Chelsea Carmichael - The River Doesn't Like Strangers
Del Sol String Quartet - A Dust in Time
Eivind Aarset - Phantasmagoria, or a Different Kind of Journey
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Jackson Browne - Downhill From Everywhere
John Durant - Crossings
John Grant - Boy from Michigan
Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over the Country Club
Low – HEY WHAT
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real - A Few Stars Apart
Maarja Nuut – Hinged
Martha Tilston - The Tape
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolves
Natalie Jane Hill – Solely
Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Barn
Nick Maclean - Can You Hear Me
Nubya Garcia - SOURCE ⧺ WE MOVE
Piers Faccini - Shapes of the Fall
Pino Palladino & Blake Mills – Notes with Attachments
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof
Ryley Walker - Course In Fable
Shelby Lynne - The Servant
Snowpoet - Wait for Me
Steve Earle & The Dukes - JT
The Delta Sound - Things Gonna Change
Toad the Wet Sprocket - Starting Now
Tom Jones - Surrounded By Time
Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend

(If there is a highlight in part or all of an album title above, click on this to read my review).

These selected albums are favourites from releases this year and which I have returned to listen to more than once, and often many times over.

This is the second year of a significant reduction in the amount of music reviews I have written. It doesn’t reflect on the amount of new and old albums listened to – which is as rich, many and varied as ever – but rather my immersion in other writing, for example as revealed in The Big Reveal post of this July that can be read here.

I haven’t selected a top ten (or other amount) but there are three I would single out: i) Low HEY WHAT as a perfection of their caustic/beautiful sound; ii) the Floating Sounds and Pharoah Sanders with the London Symphony Orchestra Promises for its sublime ambient loop and saxophone solo, and iii) Piers Faccini and Shapes of the Fall, perhaps my ultimate favourite of the year, with its widely noted occasional tone and mood of Nick Drake but also the African and Near East sounds as well as broad jazz influences.

Space Music 37

 

Maarja Nuut - Hinged, album review

Layers Over Rhythms

This set of electronic sonics is layered around rhythmic cores, so from noise-constructions to vocal-constructions there is always a prominent pace/measure, from the slow pulse of third Kutse tantsule to the punchiness of opener Hinged. In Kutse, overlays of the vocal/singing build and echo, pushed along by the clapclap of various sounds and a delayed but repeated metallic beat that adds another rhythm – it is lovely. Fourth, Mees, kes aina igatses has a slight loop of violin – Nuut’s usual main instrument, apparently – but again it is the layering of vocals and harmonies that preoccupy, once more beautiful. An analog Vermona organ provides a brooding backdrop for the meditative fifth track Vaheala valgus and the move to this point in the album has been quite choric and pretty. Sixth Subota returns to a more jagged concoction, though again pulsing to the drive of percussive impulses: ending (I’m sure) on the brisk jangle of Christmas bells!). New to me, I must explore her work more, but not until I have enjoyed this further. So often soothing, and you can get it here.

 

Space Music 36