Tag: John Cale

henrik palm and the releases of the year 2024 (with typically lengthy disclaimer!)

Way back in April this year Henrik Palm released an album called Nerd Icon (via Svart Records). It’s very good – 80s-inflected melodic hard rock is as good a description as any, I guess, but it has a very individual personality and none of the pomposity or poser quality of that kind of music (no offence to actual 80s rock, which I love). In fact it’s one of my albums of the year (see short list below somewhere). But thinking about ‘albums of the year’ (yes, I probably whinge about this annually) especially in the context of Henrik Palm’s work makes me think of what a meaningless accolade it is. Not because there isn’t lots of good music produced every year, but just because people who love music don’t generally accumulate favourite albums in a real time, chronological way. The point of recorded music is that it has been recorded and can be therefore enjoyed outside of the time and place that it was made.

To labour the point, if music only moved forwards, with this year’s top 50 (or whatever) albums superseding last year’s and so on, ‘classic albums’ wouldn’t exist and once-obscure artists would remain obscure and people like Nick Drake (obvious example I know) would be only loved by the shockingly tiny handful of living people who bought his work at the time. But even before the internet that wasn’t the case and it still isn’t, so end of year lists end up being as peculiar a time capsule as the top 40 from years ago is. Yes, they are ranked by quality rather than popularity, but as looking back at these things demonstrates, they are no more reliable for that.

Not an album of this year, but an unexpected favourite

But the reason Henrik Palm illustrates this point for me is that in 2020 he released Poverty Metal, I heard it at the time and quite liked it but I don’t think I wrote about it anywhere, though it got a surprised mention in 2022  – and to my continued surprise I still play it fairly often. It’s an album as unassuming and quirky (I mean that is the right word but bleh) as its title – melodic, sometimes kind of 70s-ish, sometimes not, rarely very metal, often quite delicate and always thoughtful. It’s peculiar, but part of what makes it peculiar is how conventional it is – but at the same time, how unusual it is by the standards of those conventions. I guess it has become one of my favourite albums, which I don’t think anything on my actual 2020 ‘albums of the year’ lists did. And after the dust has settled on 2024, it may be that if any album from this year enters my personal pantheon, it could be one that hasn’t really registered with me yet or that I haven’t even heard.

Now that I’ve undermined it in advance, here’s my ‘albums of the year’ feature.

My favourite albums of this year are two which I (obviously) think are great, but for varying reasons I don’t know if they will stick around my personal playlist like Poverty Metal has – but they may.

The first is In Concert by Diamanda Galás (Intravenal Sound Operations).  Live albums are interesting in that many people (including myself) can be slightly dismissive of them (“_____ has a new album coming out! Oh, it’s just a live album“), a strange reaction, because if you’re lucky enough to see your favourite artists live you never think “oh, it was just a live performance.” In the context of home listening, none of the ephemeral magic of a live show – the stuff that’s really about you – is present, but theoretically the most important part is. In comparison with Galás’ recent, brilliantly gruelling work (Broken Gargoyles was my album of the year in 2022) the album is simple, or at least unadorned; just her extraordinary voice and uniquely expressive piano. But that’s quite a ‘just’ – and she plays a set of songs that are urgent, deeply moving, haunting, wise, shockingly relevant and occasionally wickedly funny. What more do you want? It’s about as far removed from a stadium band delivering polished versions of their greatest hits as you can get and though it would no doubt be a fantastic souvenir and reminder if you were lucky enough to see the performance, it’s entirely transporting just as a record. Will it join the Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Litanies of Satan, The Sporting Life and Broken Gargoyles as one of my favourite Diamanda Galás albums? Who knows? Some of her work takes time to really get to know in a way that In Concert doesn’t, and I feel like I’m still ‘working on’ (not the right phrase) some of her older work – what that means for this album I don’t know, but I do know that nothing this year has cut deeper.

Joint album of the year – The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World

My second album of the year is Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Fiction), which I reviewed here, which is just as visceral for me, but for completely different reasons. It is, as an amazing amount of people seem to agree, a superb album, moving and memorable and all of that; but I have been a fan of The Cure since I was seventeen and there hasn’t been any point where I stopped listening to them completely. That doesn’t necessarily mean I was predisposed to like it – their last couple of records didn’t do much for me, though they have their moments – but it is relevant to my personal response to it. Even though by any objective methods of analysis (there aren’t any) Songs of a Lost World is probably as good as anything the band has done, will it join Seventeen Seconds, Disintegration, Japanese Whispers and Pornography as one of my all-time favourite Cure albums? Or even Faith, The Top, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Head on the Door and Boys Don’t Cry as my second-tier, almost-favourite Cure albums? Only time will tell, but in that time I will no longer be the me that was most receptive to their music and the band will have to compete with far more music (old, new, whatever) than they ever did when I obsessively listened to them. Then I had no way of getting their work except by buying it or making tapes from friends who owned it. I definitely think I love music just as much as I ever did, but I don’t obsessively listen to anything the way I did in my teens and early 20s. The older Cure records, even the ones I liked relatively less, like Wish and Kiss Me… are imprinted on my brain in a way that just doesn’t get a chance to happen now. But in a way I feel like Songs of a Lost World addresses and encapsulates all of those feelings, which is one of the reasons it’s so good.

Not sure if it’s coincidental or significant that both of my favourite albums of the year are by artists I’ve been listening to for decades, but it’s interesting either way. So anyway, a wee list of honourable mentions and we’re done with this for another year

Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual

 

Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing here) and love this even more

 

Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it here – for me it doesn’t top my favourite Das Seelenbrechen, but it’s as good as any of his others

 

One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too

 

Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more here

 


Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God (PIAS recordings) – for me a good rather than amazing Nick Cave album, but he’s better than most people so still easily made the list, though I’m not sure I like it more than his old colleague’s work

Aara – Eiger (Debemur Morti Productions) – Superior Swiss black metal, conceptual without being pompous and full of great tunes and atmosphere

 

Claire Rousay – Sentiment (Thrill Jockey) – bracingly sparse and desolate but lovely too

 

Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!

Onwards!

yesterday was crazy; D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

 

Faith A. Pennick
D’Angelo’s Voodoo
33⅓ books

D’Angelo c.2000 by Mark Guthrie

This review may not be fair to writer/filmmaker Faith A. Pennick and her excellent book, not because I didn’t like it – it’s great – but because since I was sent the book (by now onsale), events that don’t need mentioning here have overtaken it a bit. On the plus side, probably more people have more time to read and listen to music than they have in living memory, so maybe it’s not all bad. And Pennick’s book, among other things, is an extended argument for really listening to an album as opposed to just letting it play while you do other things.

 

If you read my review of Glenn Hendler’s Diamond Dogs book you will probably have realised that I have quite a lot to say about Bowie (and in fact one of the few moments of pride in my writing career such as it is, is that I got to write an obituary for Bowie in an actual print magazine – and that, on reading it now I still agree with myself – which is not always the case!), whereas with D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the opposite is true; Hendler was adding to my knowledge of an artist I love, Pennick is telling me about someone who I previously knew almost nothing about. As I mentioned in that previous review, as a music journalist people are never shy about telling you what they essentially want is the music not the writing; but for me, most good writing has an element of Thomas Hardy’s dictum about poetry: “The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own” and in the case of the music writer that means engaging you (or rather me) whether or not one has an interest in the music itself. Here Pennick scores very highly; the narrative of how she came to know and love Voodoo manages to remain direct and personal while also bringing in all of the cultural/historical and musical context necessary to be more than a kind of diary entry.

I came to the book thinking that I didn’t know anything by D’Angelo at all*, and while setting the scene, Pennick invokes a list of artists that is – to my taste in music – both encouraging (Erykah Badu, De La Soul, Angie Stone) and, though admittedly important,  offputting (Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill). But as it turns out, the fact that I didn’t know D’Angelo’s ‘greatest hits’ is not all that surprising; a key point in Pennick’s book is about how D’Angelo’s career was defined, for better or worse, by the video for Untitled (2000) – but that single didn’t chart in the UK and if I was aware of him via osmosis at all, it would have been from the trio of singles from his previous album Brown Sugar, that made the Top 40 here five years earlier.

*in fact, I should have known that his vocals (and sometimes his musicianship) appear on records by people like Q-Tip and The Roots that are more my cup of tea than his own music.

DAngelo in Electric Lady Studios, where Voodoo was recorded

But by 2000, even if Untitled had been a hit here, the chances are I would never have seen that video. Like many people of my generation, I had a pretty good grip on what was in the top 40, whether I liked it or not (and usually I liked it not), up until the mid-90s, when Top of the Pops (TOTP), the UK’s Top 40 music TV show, was moved from its classic Thursday night slot to a Friday. This may seem a little thing, but for background, during my childhood there were only 4 (and pre-1982 only three) TV channels, which meant that, if a family watched TV at all, there was a pretty good chance that they were watching the same things as you were; and most people I knew watched TOTP – so all through school, what was at number one was common knowledge (to be fair it probably still is for school age kids). By the mid 90s (actually, any time after one’s own taste had formed), watching the show was largely a kind of empty ritual or habit but still; it did give, pre social media, a general sense of where pop music and pop culture were at at any given time.

In 2000, when Voodoo was released (I am surprised now to find that TOTP was still on at that time, albeit not in the classic slot and beginning its slow decline that ended in cancellation in 2006), aside from odd bits of experimental hip hop heard through my brother, like Kid Koala’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, classics like The Wu-Tang Clan’s The W and occasional forays into UK indie like Badly Drawn Boy, I was rarely listening to any music recorded after around 1975; Bowie, Funkadelic, Lou Reed, John Cale, early 70s funk, old blues and early Black Sabbath were [probably what I listened to the most. So D’Angelo passed me by; not that I think I would have liked Voodoo much at that time anyway.

But Faith A. Pennick is persuasive; I listened to Voodoo. And she is not wrong; despite lyrics that veer from great to obnoxious (just a personal preference, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song I liked for more than one listen whose theme is how great the performer of that song is), the album is meticulously put together, perfectly played with skill and heart – and to my surprise, with a beautifully organic sound – and in the end the only thing that puts me off of it – while in no way reducing its stature – is D’Angelo’s voice(s). It’s not that he isn’t a great singer, he clearly, demonstrably is; but the album coincides with/crystalises that period when R’n’B vocals tended to consist of multi-layered murmuring and crooning. I didn’t really like it then and it’s still not for me now – although the immediate and noticeable lack of autotune is incredibly refreshing. I used to love robot voices as a kid, but now that the slight whine of autotuned vocals is ubiquitous whenever you turn on the radio, it’s nice to hear someone who can sing, singing. In fact, for me, if you pared the vocals on Voodoo down to one main, direct voice and gave it the clarity of the drums and bass, I’d like the album a lot more; but it wouldn’t be the same album, and that’s my deficiency, not Voodoo’s.

For me, the main strength of D’Angelo’s Voodoo (the book) is in the way that Pennick weaves her own personal relationship with album and artist and the album’s cultural/socio-political background together. Voodoo wouldn’t sound the way it does without Prince or 60s and 70s funk and soul; but neither could it have come from someone without D’Angelo’s own personal background in gospel and the African-American church, and Pennick, as an African-American woman responds to the album in ways that would be inaccessible to a white, male writer in Scotland if not for her book. Why an album sounds the way it does is always personal to the artist, but also specific to the era and culture they come from, and how an audience – on a mass or individual level – responds to that album adds depth to the work and determines its stature. Pennick brings these strands together seamlessly; concise, informal and yet powerful, in its own quiet way the book is a virtuoso performance, just as Voodoo is.