Pop/rock
Thirty years ago, the Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham had some
advice for us: go your own way. It’s a thought that has been taken to heart
by the artists responsible for our top 10 albums of 2006 (who just happen to
include Buckingham himself). It has been one of those refreshing years when
the musical hierarchy was not too clear, when being uncool could be cool,
when nobody was quite sure what would make a hit (countless record labels
heard Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy before anyone noted its potential), when there
was a little more room for artists to breathe. So it’s not too surprising
that our top 10 runs the stylistic gamut, encompassing folk, country, R&B,
hip-hop, Americana, exquisite pop, eccentric rock and the year’s most
unlikely collaboration.
There was no obvious common ground between Isobel Campbell
and Mark Lanegan — the angel-voiced former Belle and
Sebastian singer and the whisky-and-worse-voiced grunge legend — but they
found some and made Ballad of the Broken Seas (V2). Twangy guitars,
world-weary lyrics, the perfect contrast of their two voices, all were
topped off with a Hank Williams cover to help us understand where this
unusual hybrid had its roots.
Anyone who has been following the gradual mellowing of Idlewild won’t have
been too surprised to find their lead singer, Roddy Woomble,
making an out-and-out folk album, My Secret Is My Silence (Pure). Lyrically
and musically stunning, the merging of Woomble and Rod Jones’s
REM-at-their-peak songwriting style with the cream of folk talent (Kate
Rusby, John McCusker and Karine Polwart) is a rare treat.
A line from Woomble’s title track, “You approach land without a harbour, but
find your way home”, offers a perfect description of the Guillemots’
debut, Through the Windowpane (Polydor), a superb example of
throwing out the maps and rule books, then trusting a mixture of English
eccentricity and raw talent to come up with something worthwhile. The
four-piece had the courage to overreach themselves, to gild the lily, to add
strings and dustbin lids to anything that moved, creating complex,
emotionally direct pop.
Fur and Gold (Echo), the debut album from Brighton’s Bat for
Lashes (aka Natasha Khan), was, on the surface, a dippy, Björk- and
Kate Bush-like excursion to the wilder shores of whimsy and experimentalism.
Yet her music and lyrics have rich seams of melody and emotion running
through them, conjuring up an atmosphere of fitful sleep, part dreaming,
part waking, wholly remarkable.
Equally remarkable is Lindsey Buckingham’s continuing
ability, four decades down the line, to make music that sounds like nobody
else, yet is slap-bang in the middle of the mainstream pop tradition.
Reconciling the warring impulses of pure pop and moody eclecticism has been
his burden since he plugged in a guitar. Under the Skin (Reprise), his
fourth solo album, allowed us to eavesdrop on the most fascinating account
yet of his personal battle.
The all-female Canadian band the Organ aren’t quite as
original, but they are at least derivative in an original way, putting
together a pair of influences nobody has combined before and creating
something fresh. Imagine the songs of the Smiths played by Blondie and you
have the intense but poppy sound of their debut, Grab That Gun (Too Pure).
Rilo Kiley’s singer, Jenny Lewis, also sought out an
unusual reference point for her solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat (Rough Trade).
She was, in fact, so taken with Gonna Take a Miracle (Sony), the album that
Laura Nyro made with Labelle, that she even emulated Nyro’s decision to
co-credit her backing singers by giving a cover namecheck to the gospel duo
the Watson Twins. This melodic Americana set even includes an indie
supergroup run-through of the Traveling Wilburys’ Handle with Care.
Philadelphia’s the Roots haven’t always handled their
own career with care — from directionless albums to ones where the bid for a
breakthrough came at the expense of the band’s innate left-fieldism — but
Game Theory (Def Jam) saw them finally perfect the formula. It’s an angry,
polemical but always humorous dissection of contemporary American society,
set to electrifying beats.
The Nashville singer Cortney Tidwell offered us country, but
not as we know it: she followed a sit-up-and-listen mini-album with her
debut proper, Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ever). The year’s most
haunted and haunting release, its skewed-country cadences and visceral
vocals combined for a listening experience close to voyeurism.
The year’s most criminally overlooked album must be Victim of Truth (Four), by Nneka.
On the basis of this stunning mix of soul, reggae and hip-hop, the
25-year-old should be topping the charts, guesting with Massive Attack,
hanging with Jay-Z and working with Danger Mouse. Oddly, none of this seems
to have happened. Victim of Truth is as good as The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill. If you liked that, buy this.
Mark Edwards and Dan Cairns
New bands
Words, as both Lily Allen and Alex Turner discovered in 2006, can get you
into trouble — and trouble can propel you into the charts. The potty-mouthed
Allen, and Turner’s stroppy Sheffield quartet, the Arctic Monkeys, surfed
into contention. For Lily Allen, this took the form of an
album, Alright, Still (Parlophone), that was in danger of becoming almost
incidental. Her status as MySpace queen, her online rants about fellow
musicians and a famous dad won the singer column inches. But Allen’s album
possessed such lyrical originality and chutzpah, and so many undislodgeable
tunes, that it helped define an exceptional new-music year.
The Arctic Monkeys’ Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m
Not (Domino) became the fastest-selling debut in British chart
history. At an awards ceremony where his group had just picked up three
gongs, Turner asked, not unreasonably: “Who else was going to be the best
British band at the moment?” The singer’s cocky public persona divides
opinion, but what is not in doubt is his talent for a pithy turn of phrase,
set to fast and furious music.
Just when it seemed that the concept of the troubadour had been kidnapped for
ever by James Blunt, along came the Dubliner Fionn Regan with
an album, The End of History (Bella Union), to reclaim the territory. His
plaintive voice, lyrics alternately sly and self-conscious, and a succession
of lilting tunes amounted to a triumphant reaffirmation of the
singer-songwriter’s art. The classically trained Australian musician Sophie
Michalitsianos released The Bells of 1 2 (Gronland) under the name Sol
Seppy, and won a small army of fans with her dreamy, melancholic
soundscapes. Finally, the London-based American trio Semifinalists’
wonderful eponymous debut (V2) took a ragbag of references (Mercury Rev, the
Flaming Lips) and ran with it, stopping where they liked and arriving at the
finish with an anarchic, liberating record. DC
Left-field
Scott Walker, the 1960s pin-up turned avant-garde crooner,
released his first album in a decade, The Drift (4AD). Its unpredictable
twists, pulverising atonal intensity, and dead air of dread menace made me
feel confused, frightened, alienated, upset and a little emotionally
overwhelmed. Now it squats on the shelf, a malevolent black thing,
threatening to render all the year’s other releases irrelevant.
Derek Bailey died in Hackney on Christmas Day last year, aged
75, but his passing won’t stop his annual showing in this list for the
foreseeable future. In the mid-1960s, Bailey was the most uncompromising of
the European jazz musicians responding to the American avant-garde, and
never stopped experimenting. To Play (SamadhiSound) collects solo acoustic
and electric-guitar improvisations recorded in 2003 for David Sylvian to
sing over on his album Blemish. Sylvian used three, presented here
unblemished, alongside five other ceaselessly inventive flurries.
Tucson, Arizona’s reliable musical maverick Howe Gelb, formerly of Giant
Sand, jammed with a gospel band this year, a move usually
undertaken by spent auteurs looking for a slab of off-the-peg emotional
power. But on ’Sno Angel Like You (Thrill Jockey), Gelb found a way of
playing stripped-back country rock with Ottawa’s Voices of Praise Gospel
Choir, rather than just alongside them. Palm of Soul (AUM Fidelity), by Kidd
Jordan, Hamid Drake & William Parker, saw the septuagenarian
saxophonist Jordan leave his flooded New Orleans home for New York to honour
a recording commitment, with Katrina fresh in his mind. The result was a
heady mix of free-jazz expressionism and meditative musing. Ohio’s
home-studio visionary Robert Pollard released his first
solo album since disbanding Guided by Voices, after 20 years and 56 albums
of progressive power-pop and mod-ish punk. From a Compound Eye (Must
Destroy) carelessly tossed 26 irresistible melodies and cryptic hooks into a
stew of complex mini-epics and impossibly direct guitar-propelled pop songs.
A great way to discover a superbly individual talent.
Stewart Lee
Jazz
Chicago’s Patricia Barber is a singer-pianist who
always avoids the tried and trusted. She took an even more daring leap into
the unknown on Mythologies (Blue Note), a suite of songs inspired by Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. If that sounds dry and scholarly, don’t be fooled: Barber’s
smoky voice evokes Diana Krall, and she leads the funkiest band around.
()In a fruitful year for singers, Norway’s Solveig Slettahjell
triumphed with Pixiedust (Act), a seductive set of electronica-tinged
originals and standards from her Slow Motion Quintet. Scandinavian soul.
No self-respecting record collection should be without its quota of orange and
black sleeves from the Impulse! label. Tied in with the publication of a
fine book by Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built
(Impulse!) offers a leisurely four-CD stroll through the back catalogue,
finding room for the romance of Ben Webster and the incantations of Albert
Ayler. There was a similar retrospective flavour to the Andy Panayi
Quartet’s News from Blueport (Woodville), an immaculate
home-grown tribute to the music of that baritone master Gerry Mulligan.
Drum’n’bass is not renowned as the most subtle music on the planet, but the
French-Beninese singer Mina Agossi delivers a wholly original acoustic
variant on Well You Needn’t (Candid). A true one-off, she somehow finds a
way of combining bop, soul, hip-hop and a hint of free-jazz mischief without
tying herself in knots.
Clive Davis
World
One of Africa’s great pioneers was silenced this year. Fortunately, Ali
Farka Touré left behind a fitting testament in Savane (World
Circuit), released shortly after his death.
Having retreated to his home in the hinterland of Mali, the guitarist dug deep
within himself to create a series of soundscapes that combine stark beauty
with raw emotion.
When the Barbican played host to the heroes of Brazil’s Tropicalia movement,
the demure singer Gal Costa helped revive memories of Rio’s
swinging Sixties. Proving that she is not content to live in the past, she
came up with Hoje (Trama), her most assured album in a long time. Writing
contributions from the underrated Lokua Kanza gave the bossa-influenced
material even greater depth than usual.
A Frida Kahlo lookalike and former Grateful Dead fan who has transformed
herself into one of the new luminaries of world music, Lila Downs
is on a startlingly strong run of form. La Cantina (EMI/Narada) is another
of her hallucinogenic journeys into the Mexican heartlands. Long before
anyone dreamt up the term “world music”, New Orleans was a city where all
manner of styles and traditions were blended into a wholesome gumbo. With
the city still trying to recover from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, one
of its most famous sons, the songwriter, singer, pianist and all-round ideas
man Allen Toussaint, entered into a collaboration with Elvis
Costello on The River in Reverse (Verve). It’s a glorious,
loose-limbed meeting of two artists.
A useful alternative camping at Womad, Charlie Gillett’s annual compilations
always throw up some exuberant juxtapositions. Although illness has
curtailed his activities, the double album World 2006
(Rhino/Korova) turned out to be his most uplifting selection so far. The
mystery tour rumbles on and on, through Balkan backstreets and French cafes. CD
Classical
With big, round birthdays in 2006, Mozart (250 in January) and Shostakovich
(100 in September) have dominated the classical release schedules with
avalanches of new recordings that would seem to belie the much-aired
“crisis” in the classical sector of the industry. The big multinational
labels may prefer to headline their marketable opera stars — the Mexican
tenor Rolando Villazon and the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko have joined the
charmed circle that already includes Bryn Terfel, Placido Domingo, Renée
Fleming and Cecilia Bartoli — but they have done both composers proud.
Meanwhile, the defection to the independents of formerly high-profile
instrumentalists such as Viktoria Mullova (from Philips to Onyx) and the Takacs
Quartet (from Decca to Hyperion) has encouraged the smaller
companies to venture into more mainstream repertoire of late. The Takacs’
thrilling debut album for Hyperion, a coupling of two late Schubert String
Quartets in A minor and D minor (Death and the Maiden), is a case in point.
My record of the year (from DG) could hardly be more mainstream: Claudio
Abbado’s first recording of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.
Conducted with a sense of youthful wonderment by the 70-year-old, with an
outstanding young cast (Dorothea Röschmann as Pamina, Christoph Strehl as
Tamino, Hanno Müller-Brachmann as Papageno, René Pape as Sarastro), this is
the best Flute on record in a decade.
It has been a great year for Mozart singing on disc, with memorable recitals
by the Swedish soprano Miah Persson and Magdalena Kozena, but the most
remarkable for me was Bryn Terfel’s Tutto Mozart
(DG), with the now Wagnerian Welshman reminding us that he is still the
outstanding Figaro and Leporello of his generation. On my favourite Mozart
choral disc of the year, Natalie Dessay and Véronique Gens are the
luxuriously cast soprano soloists in Louis Langrée’s imposing version of the
great but incomplete C Minor Mass (Virgin).
From the Shostakovich downpour, I have been impressed by
Mariss Jansons’s complete cycle of the 15 symphonies, but most especially by
Semyon Bychkov’s thrilling new reading of the controversial Fourth
Symphony (Avie), with his splendid WDR Sinfonieorchester in
Cologne.
Anna Netrebko’s third solo album for DG, her best to
date, took her back to her Mariinsky Theatre roots — the maestro Gergiev and
his celebrated orchestra, no less, as her accompanists — in a Russian Album.
It explored rarities by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glinka, and gave us a snippet of
her first starring role in London, Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev’s War and
Peace, whetting the appetite for the Tatyana in Yevgeny Onyegin that she is
surely destined to sing.
It’s good, too, to see that complete opera recordings are not yet a thing of
the past on CD. Decca’s live recording, from Pesaro, of a Rossini rarity, Matilde
di Shabran, with Annick Massis enchanting in the title role and
Juan Diego Florez dazzling as the iron-hearted antihero, Corradino, was a
winner. The unexpected issue (by Warner Classics) of Donald Runnicles’s live
one-act-per-concert BBC Symphony Orchestra performances of Tristan
und Isolde, with Christine Brewer as a radiant heroine and John
Treleaven surpassing his Royal Opera Siegfried form as Tristan, won
universal and deserved acclaim.
As Christmas looms, Handel Messiahs have been appearing in
threes, like London buses. Passing over admirable recordings of the original
Dublin version of 1742 and of the unique all-male voices revival of 1751, I
would choose René Jacobs’s controversial but
exciting account of the 1750 version, with the Choir of Clare College and a
fine quintet of soloists disporting themselves in the most virtuosic
Italianate adaptations Handel made of the solos.
Finally, my stocking-filler choice is not strictly classical, but I don’t
think I have listened to any record more frequently this year, and everyone
I have played it to has expressed equal delight: it’s the debut album by the Puppini
Sisters (Universal Music Classics), Betcha Bottom Dollar, in which
a delectable trio of sopranos — not real sisters — take a deliciously camp
walk down memory lane with Irving Berlin’s Sisters, the Chordettes’ Mr
Sandman and favourites by the Andrews and Boswell sisters, and a couple of
more contemporary numbers given twinkle-in-the-eye-and-orchestration
1950s-style arrangements.
Hugh Canning
Contemporary composers
Modern masters loomed large in the year’s releases of contemporary music. The
American Elliott Carter, approaching 100, was represented
by a disc (Bridge) of four concertos from his 10th decade. Boston Concerto
(played here by the BBC Symphony under Oliver Knussen) includes some of his
most memorable invention. The masterly Dialogues (London Sinfonietta under
Knussen, with Nicolas Hodges) is a Mozart piano concerto by other means.
Stockhausen’s recent music may be of questionable worth, but there is no
disputing the might and originality of his early Gruppen,
for three orchestras, a pioneering exploration of “music in space” and the
simultaneous use of different tempi. It is superbly realised on a disc (BMC)
by the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under Peter Eotvos, Arturo Tamayo and
Jacques Mercier.
Milton Babbitt is another grand old man of American music, surpassing even
Carter for complexity of style, yet his reputation as a mathematical
serialist is belied by the bounding energy of his pieces, eight of which are
gathered on a Naxos disc, Soli e Duettini. Homily is a solo
for snare drum, Beaten Paths one for marimba, and Around the Horn comprises
two solos for horn. The title piece is a cool musing for flute and guitar.
Britain’s complexity king is Brian Ferneyhough.
His masque-like opera Shadowtime is all about the
philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin. A recording on NMC of a concert
performance at the London Coliseum by Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the
Nieuw Ensemble, under Jurjen Hempel, allows one to consider the score’s vast
intricacies without drowning in them.
A modern master in the making is Julian Anderson. A disc
(NMC) of pieces he wrote when resident with the City of Birmingham SO
includes Imagin’d Corners, a concerto for horn section, full of the sound of
non-tempered tuning.
Paul Driver
Historic classical/reissues
Ageing opera-lovers have to be on their guard against the myth of a golden
time before the aeroplane ruined the art of singing. Yet how are you to
resist it when you hear the 1955 Siegfried, first
instalment of the complete Ring that was recorded live at Bayreuth by Decca,
but, because of record- industry politics, never issued? These are, truly,
voices from another age. Windgassen’s Siegfried, Varnay’s Brünnhilde,
Hotter’s Wanderer, Neidlinger’s Alberich (superb), Paul Kuen’s Mime — such a
cast would be unheard of today. But we can enjoy them thanks to Testament,
which has issued the whole cycle. Great Verdi casts can still be assembled,
but the 1958 Covent Garden Don Carlo (Royal Opera House)
remains one to prize. Though the work suffers some cuts, it is played and
conducted (by Giulini) with splendid conviction, and the singers — notably
Gré Brouwenstijn, Gobbi, Christoff and, not least, the thrilling Jon Vickers
— confirm the reputation of a revival that was a revelation in its time.
A more recent singer whose voice and artistry are every bit as fine as memory
tells us is Janet Baker. She is on inspired form on an Elgar disc
from the 1960s (EMI), singing Sea Pictures with a sumptuousness and delicacy
of tone, and a beauty of phrasing — aided by Barbirolli’s sensitive
conducting — that redeem the rather paltry verse. On the same disc are the
20-year-old Jacqueline du Pré’s fresh and ardent account of the Cello
Concerto and a lively Cockaigne Overture. Also from the 1960s comes Pierre
Boulez’s masterly survey of the main Debussy orchestral
works, with the New Philharmonia and Cleveland orchestras (Sony). Boulez’s
Debussy was sometimes criticised for being stronger on structure (the bones
of the music) than on colour and texture (the flesh), but the brilliance of
the scoring springs out sharply from these vivid performances. Finally, from
the 1950s, Lili Kraus’s five-disc recording of
Mozart’s solo keyboard works (Music&Arts) offers lucid, vital,
sympathetic interpretations that remind us of the treasures to be found in
this often unregarded aspect of Mozart’s creativity.
David Cairns
