Lucinda Williams - West (Lost Highway records)

Much has been written about this album so I won't say more except to confirm it's all true. A mix of country, blues and rock. Songs of loss and redemption filtered through her gravel-edged voice. Play it three times in a row and it will be firmly set as one of your albums of the year. Highlights for me: Learning How to Live and Where is My Love.

Jerry Lee Lewis - Last Man Standing (Artful Records)

This is one of those "guest artist" albums with the great and the good joining in to shift copies: The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Muddy Waters and more. But unlike many others, this one is at times sensational. He kicks off covering Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll with Jimmy Page on guitar and tears it up like a man possessed. The stage is set, as the album rolls on through some great covers, with amazing flair and energy by any standard, let alone from a man of 72. There's hope for us all.
He started his career with Sun Records alongside Elvis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly and others - but is, as the album says, the last man standing. He's certainly not on his last legs however judging from this. I predict you won't hear a more rockin' album this year. One turkey of a track - skip the "execrable" Honky Tonk Woman cover with Kid Rock (adjective courtesy of Threshold Record's recommendation of the week review. My local music store is right about this as so much else...)

The Mountain Goats – Metro Theatre, Sydney – Saturday, 6 January

It takes quite a nerve for a two-man band confronting the biggest audience they’ve ever attracted (around 1,000) to open the set with a song as intimate and introverted as Wild Sage but it was delivered with such confidence and conviction that the audience was soon hanging on every note.

For this Australian tour, the Goats are John Darnielle (of course) and bassist Peter Hughes, with current producer, John Vanderslice, lending a hand for the closing songs, and also acting as the support act.

That first song swept away all doubts about whether a band whose songs travel such dark and often depressing territory could engage such a big audience. Quite simply, they communicate, though it was sometimes hard to tell whether Darnielle was expressing savage glee or deep torment when he delivered classic lines like “I hope you die/I hope we both die” from the classic No Children or “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me” from This Year.

Either way, it worked, not least because he clearly now has a huge following who embrace the lyrics like old friends. The Goats generate a huge sound from just two guitars and as much emotion and excitement. I’m an even bigger fan now.

The Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love – Nettwork

There seems to be some controversy about how to categorise the music of the Be Good Tanyas, as they’ve been labelled as folk, blues, bluegrass, alt country and Americana. I guess the truth is that there’s something of all these genres in their output, though I remain unsure about the difference between alt country and Americana. Controversy may be too strong a word, come to think of it, as nobody seems too bothered, wisely preferring to listen to the music instead.

But then the music isn’t likely to get you too worked up, either. It’s all slow, dreamy and beautifully played, ranging from the traditional, like What Are They Doing in Heaven Tonight, through John Hurt’s Nobody Cares for Me, on which Jolie Holland makes an appearance as a former band member, to Neil Young’s For the Turnstiles and the Tanyas’ own songs. I think the dreaminess is part of the problem, coupled with their quiet, slurred delivery that makes it hard to make out the words. I’ve enjoyed the album every time I’ve played it, rather like a walk on a familiar beach – you’re glad you went but you didn’t see or hear anything new.

Caroline - Murmurs - TRR97

This CD is another result of the power of whatever's playing in record shops when I walk in has on me. I heard barely two minutes of this album before asking what it was and then buying it! Anyway, Caroline is a Tokyo born singer/songwriter who'll instantly remind you of a slightly poppier and more focussed Bjork, and more modernly will remind you of Imogen Heap. 'Murmurs' is a really pretty 9-track ambient/electronica album set off by Caroline's fragile, restrained yet thoughtful vocals.

It's definitely an album for this reflective winter that's around us, but thankfully has more than enough soul to avoid chill-out/coffee table status. I've still got quite a soft-spot for well written and haunting songs by female singer/songwriters so I'm a little biased, but even though it's a short album there's plenty here to keep you coming back for more, not least the emotional peaks she so often reaches like on 'I'll Leave My Heart Behind'. Highly recommended stuff.

The Beatles - Love (EMI B000JK8OYU)

A new album by the Beatles? This is a collection of their best remixed by George Martin and his son Giles for Cirque de Soleil's Las Vegas spectacular, Love. The tracks are not chronological, contain echoes of other Beatles tunes in the transitions between songs, sometimes brilliantly reworked and run together almost seamlessly. Some tracks are stripped right down, others substantially re-mixed, and they bring out aspects of over familiar songs you might not have remembered. It's a bit like a really good cover version of The Beatles by, um, The Beatles. If you are a Beatles fan, this is a must. If you are slightly nostalgic about them but feel sated by 40 years exposure to their repertoire, this may refresh your palate. In the end, however, it is a very high class, beautifully produced soundtrack to a Vegas spectacular. Perhaps that's inevitably the way music which once changed the world gets laid to rest.

JJ Cale and Eric Clapton - The Road to Escondido (Warners)

I better be moderate in what I say as I wouldn't want to have to make another recantation about the late career recordings of sixties legends. We know that these two fit perfectly together from Clapton's covers of Cocaine and After Midnight. And their voices and guitars work seamlessly together here. Indeed the opening track has a similar riff and the same structure as Cocaine. And later on there's a track with a strong similarity to Call Me The Breeze. This album won't challenge you, but it's high class blues shuffle and very listenable. It feels like snug, cosy fireside blues if you like, comfortable and warm. It's just that I prefer mine out in the wastelands, born in a cross-fire hurricane, and screaming in the teeth of a howling gale (to coin a phrase).

Damien Rice - 9 (14th Floor)

If you liked his debut album O you will like this. It's very much in the same vein - intense, intimate, haunting. For me 9 Crimes and Rootless Tree stand out. It is a class apart from David Gray and other modern acoustic singer songwriters and Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens wouldnt have bothered going back into the studio if he'd heard and thought about this first. A lot of it is about loss and therefore not to everyone's taste ("Does he have to drone on? What a dirge" was the reaction in the car ...) but I think it has moments of great beauty. The concert televised on BBC4 last year was one of the best recorded concerts I've ever seen.

Soweto Kinch - A Life In The Day of B19: Tales of the Tower Block - DUNE CD014

Two years after the multi-award winning 'Conversations With the Unseen' comes Soweto's second album. How's this for a synopsis; it's part one of a two-disc concept package based on the stories of 3 fictional characters living in a run-down flat block in Birmingham. Former Newsreader Moira Stewart acts as a narrator. Oh, and Soweto spends half his time rapping and the other half playing saxophone. Intrigued or put-off? Well, read on anyway.

It does make for quite a baffling read for those who haven't heard his work, just because it's such an ambitious album concept. Kinch is, however a very impressive saxophonist and lets the jazz songs really aquire a certain wistfulness amongst his blistering sax work. Which acts as a total compliment for his impressive narrative-rapping-storytelling style. There's nothing brash about his delivery, just a confidence, uniqueness and grasp of a totally different lyrical content which really sets him apart from anyone in the rap/hip-hop field.

High points for me, if I have to seperate them out are the stunning '10.30 Appointment' in which one of the album's characters, named 'S' visits the benefit office and has a disagreement about jobs with a Brummie employee (both voiced by Soweto himself). Also 'Adrian's Ballad' sticks out, a slow moving mid-life crisis sort of jazz song (come on, we all know them) with a ridiculously catchy sax refrain and the closing groove of 'The House That Love Built'.

It's very different to his previous album; there's more rapping and the jazz songs are a good amount shorter. However, this feels like a definite step up for the man, and quite simply it's a pretty daring, ambitious and incredible record. For sceptics, you can hear 4 songs from the album over at www.myspace.com/sowetokinch.

The Handsome Family - Last Days of Wonder - VJCD166

For days now, the lines "after we shot the grizzly" and "I can still see you there in your grass-stained underwear" have been going round in my head. The former comes from the song of the same name and is set to a particularly jaunty tune which continues along its merry way cataloguing a series of disasters befalling a stranded group of men - airship crashes, madness, disease - culminating in setting to sea on a boat made of skin and bone. And no, things don't get any better, as you might expect. The latter comes from Flapping Your Broken Wings, a tale of the violation of a golf course and possibly more. In their own way, both songs are beautiful and utterly original.

No one in their right minds would expect anything ordinary from The Handsome Family, of course, but, as ever, Brett and Rennie Sparks consistently transform the mundane into the extraordinary, and, in Somewhere Else To Be, the chance encounter into the life-changing event, if only we had the gumption to realise it was a life-changing event, and the nerve to grasp the opportunity. So there's plenty to identify with, even though Rennie, who writes the songs, is clearly blessed with a particularly rich imagination. Hunter Green is an original but could easily be a folk song in its disturbing imagery of a lover's transformation.

She recently gave an interview about the panic attack she suffered when she lost Brett in an airport and there are two songs which presumably draw on that experience. We've all been in similar situations, but who else would conclude that fact that automatic taps fail to see one's hands is a sign that death is imminent? Or, as she puts it, "your last journey has begun." It's a wonderful, haunting album. Watch out for those automatic taps and stray dogs gathering in your yard.

Recantation!

I would like to formally disown my criticisms of Dylan's Modern Times. There is, as the song has it, a thin line between love and hate. And over the last 35 years there are a handful of albums which I have, for one reason or another, started off hating but which have grown to be much loved, definitive, favourites - stronger than those I liked immediately. Modern Times is joining them. Somewhere over the last two weeks it crept under my skin and is now recognised as a work of beauty and genius....

Nostalgia reigns:

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager - B000H30938

God knows what Sam Duckworth, lone Get Cape-er was thinking of when he came up with this moniker, but this homegrown guitarist clearly has his musical heart in the right place at least. Coming across like a modern day acoustic troubadour backed only by his guitar and a laptop (with some sparse strings and a trumpeter in some places), he's definitely a likeable singer/songwriter on paper. And the media attention is warranted to some extent, too; he's got a great ear for melody and doesnt let his lyrics get bogged down in the standard singer/songwriter relationship problems. Makes a bloody nice change, actually.

Sam's not putting on a faux-American accent too, letting his southern English voice come through, if a little harshly for the songs at times like on part 2 of the title track. But his acoustic strumming is well complimented by the electronic drum backing, which simply allows the songs to breathe when they arrive and doesnt constrict them. Like with Halloween Alaska, it's hard to compare him to someone, and whilst he isn't the second coming (experience says no one the British media hypes up will ever be), this is a pretty damn good CD.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad of The Broken Seas - VVR1035822

That’s Isobel Campbell of Belle and Sebastian and Mark Lanegan of Queens of The Stone Age, and my copy of the CD came with a sticker full of one-liners from various reviews claiming that this album would change the course of music as we know it. Of course, they’re wrong but the whole thing does have an intriguing air about it, making you wonder where they’re going to go next, and whether you care.

The duo share the vocals, Campbell’s being light, sweet and breathy. Lanegan, by way of contrast, comes from the Waits/Cohen school of singing (which is not a bad thing in my book). The first track, Deus Ibi Est, is pure Waits in tone and content. Next, Campbell’s Black Mountain is pure folk, reminiscent of Scarborough Fair and with a really annoying refrain of “I choo, I choo.” The third track, The False Husband, is Tom Waits meets Enrico Moricone, as Sara described it. Baffled by all this? I was.

Then, thank goodness, they produce something of themselves in the title track, lapse briefly back into The Waits Land in Ramblin' Man, complete with Mark Ribot-style guitar, and finally settle into a pleasant country-rock groove with the two voices playing off against each other. There are two rather pointless instrumental tracks before the album closes with a piece of pure Springsteen, The Circus is Leaving Town. It’s all rather pleasant and beautifully played, but I don’t think it’s going to change anything. Of course, there's no need for the album to change anything but you might decide to listen to the real thing, or things, instead.

The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely - 4AD 2614

Well, we'd better (see below) have a review of The Goats' latest album then. John Darnielle, who is The Goats, has never been one for shying away from emotional trauma. As RS and Iwan noted, The Sunset Street was all about his relationship with his abusive stepfather. In Tallahassee, which is still his best album for my money, he explored the what it was like to be in a relationship that was on the rocks in the visceral No Children. In Get Lonely, he goes a step further and explores the aftermath of the departure of a partner.

If you don't like albums of sad songs, then this is clearly not for you because these songs are really sad. He expresses perfectly the desolation, the loss of purpose, the grief, and the futile attempts to find distraction in a succession of perfectly turned and beautifully played songs, rather more lavishly orchestrated than in previous offerings. He ranges from the mundane consequences - making coffee for two out of habit and drinking it all because she didn't like waste - to the cosmic - "an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space." At best, relief comes only for a minute. He takes refuge in memories until they become too vivid to bear.

So, it's not going to send you skipping down the street exactly but the attraction comes because we've all been there and everything he describes is instantly recognisable, expressed clearly and poetically, and seamlessly combined with his music. The good news is that he's touring Australia in the near future and playing Sydney in January. I'm going

Razorlight (Mercury) + The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree

Two clicks on iTunes and two Indie albums later...
The Mountain Goats was released last year (and properly reviewed at the time by Iwan) but I have only just caught up with it. And it's definitely a case of better late than never. John Darnielle writes autobiographically of growing up in California with an abusive step father (to whom the album is dedicated). It captures teenage angst, sorrow, anger and more put to compulsive often joyful tunes. "This Year" with it's refrain ("I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me") and salvation through a girl called Kathy ("two high maintenance machines") is the best track for me - but there is much to admire and sing along to. Catharsis through pop. Worth a second review if it encourages someone else to discover it!

Razorlight's second album lives up to the promise of their first. For me they are the best of the new indie bands sweeping the festivals in the UK over the last couple of years. "Somewhere Else" was a great single last year. The new one, from this album, is just as good: America, "All my life, Watching America, All my life, There's panic in America"...but other tracks like Who Needs Love and Before I Fall To Pieces are just as strong. Lead singer Johnny Borrell's arrogance irritates some - but if you're 26 years old with a great band and some great songs, that's as it should be. And the fact that Pete Docherty decided to physically attack him only to be floored by Borrell endears him to me even more.

Bob Dylan - Modern Times (Columbia)

"Epic", "another masterwork", "his best in decades" ran some of the reviews. It isn't. It's not bad - but we've come to hope for more after 40 years of innovation and turning expectation on its head. And that's my real problem with the album. Once you've started, it's predictable. Rolling Stone magazine said in its review: "This music is relaxed; it has nothing to prove. It is music of accumulated knowledge, it knows every move, anticipates every step before you take it." I would sum that up in one word: tired.
In a series of slow waltzes and blues shuffles, Dylan sounds like the pensioner he is, taking another turn around the tea dance floor. He says the band is the best he has ever worked with. They are tight - but you can anticipate every turn of musical phrase bars ahead and they never defy your expectation. Is this, as some suggest, an homage to tradition, their blues folk roots, or is it, as I fear, just a failure of imagination?
Someday Baby and Workingman's Blues 2 lift their heads and show what might have been and the final track Ain't Talkin' has a trace of the old menace. But for the most part the songs, like his voice, sound frail. I shall return to Desire, Blood on The Tracks and even Time Out of Mind, but not often to his view of Modern Times I fear.

Ali Farka Toure - Savane - WCD075

This was the last album he made before his death and, like its predecessor In The Heart Of The Moon, it was recorded in the Hotel Mande in Bamako. Many were disappointed with that album: it was undeniably beautiful but perhaps too intimate, Toure and Toumani Diabate too involved in each other’s skill and musical cultures to draw in the listener. Well, this one is different.

It’s a return to the plaintive, driving, dry-as-dust desert blues of his early albums, played with even more assurance and beautifully recorded, and really feels as though it was recorded for an audience. It’s becoming hard to find a mainstream African album without an itinerant Westerner or two popping up on a few tracks, not always to good effect. Here we have Pee Wee Ellis, who has been playing with many Malian musicians, but I’m glad to say his sax doesn’t sound too out of place and adds to the atmosphere on Bato.

More effective is the harmonica of Little George Sueref, Cardiff-born, and now based and playing clubs in London. As far as I know, he’s released only one album of his own and it’s splendid. He sounds perfectly in place and, hopefully, this collaboration means we’ll hear more of him.

Even so, the unadorned title track really can’t be beaten. The whole album is wonderful. Can’t recommend it enough.

Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You - ANTI 86788-2

I thought the enigmatic RS would have reviewed this as he’s a big fan of Ms Holland and introduced me to her music but he’s clearly too busy reliving his mis-spent youth. Musically, that is. For newcomers, I suppose I should start with her voice, which I know some find irritating. The unkind might describe it as fey or overly winsome but you could equally describe it as beguiling and, anyway, if you feel her voice lacks substance, the songs more than make up for it.

The first track, Crush In The Ghetto, is a pop ballad describing how her neighbourhood seems to be transformed after a night with new lover. There is one dubious line about ants and pants, but we’ll pass over that. At the other end of the affair, Please Don’t ends with the line “don’t tell ’em what you know about me,” a common fear at the end of intimacy and neatly summed up. In between, she swings from blues to country through jazz, with a variety of accompaniment from baritone horn to cello. It’s a feast.

Strangely Strange but Oddly Normal - An Island Anthology (Island 9822950)

Back in the very early 70s teenage boys were often to be seen walking around ostentatiously carrying "samplers" of island records - the two best known beng El Pea and Bumpers. Indeed Bumpers was my introduction to "progressive" music. The best of five years of island records is now available on this anthology - and may have been for some time but i have only just discovered it How the years melt away. It was a remarkable five year period from 1967 to 1972 showcasing new acts like Free, Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention, John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, ELP, Traffic, and others less well remembered like Dr Strangely Strange, Quintessance, Clouds and more. WIth 48 songs this is a generous collection which recaptures the time admirably - and much of it still stands up well (although may be propped up by nostalgia.) It was a period of innocence and creativity, long past, but fondly remembered. If you grew your hair 35 years ago, wore loons and quivered when Sandy Denny sang, indulge yourself in this.

Ursula Rucker - Supa Sister !K7 106CD; Silver or Lead !K7 153CD; !K7 194CD

I heard about Ursula Rucker last month and, in the last couple of weeks, have bought all three of her CDs. Ursula Rucker is a member of Philadelphia’s Hip Hop community. But saying that in no way conveys how unique she is. She is so far off the beaten track that she has to record for a German company, since what she does is of no value to the US entertainment industry. Ursula Rucker shows how far other rappers, even the best of them, fall short of creating beautiful music.

It is argued, cogently, that life in the ghetto is anything but beautiful and that Rap reflects that. But there have been musicians such as Lester Young, Mingus, Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, who have been able to draw from the ugliness transcendent beauty. The difference is that Ursula Rucker does this, not with the abstraction that is music, but with concrete words; words that WILL NOT LET YOU ESCAPE THE REALITY. And yet, through these inescapable words, accompanied by intelligent, sympathetic, music, the miracle of beauty arises; I’m not sure how.

Some of it stems from her delivery. She is no MC, standing in front of a turntable basher, yelling into a mike. She delivers her extremely uncomfortable messages in a calm, controlled, fury. And this delivery, too, makes it impossible to escape the message through not hearing the words clearly.

Much of it stems from her articulacy. Her messages are deeply felt, carefully thought out, and clearly expressed in uncompromising language that makes no concessions to “dumbing down”.

Her messages are mainly described as dealing with “women’s issues”; an attempt at a brush-off, if I ever saw one. She sees things from a woman’s perspective, it’s true, which doesn’t invalidate the message in any way. And perhaps because of that, she also sees things in a way that understands motivations, without condoning anything. And expresses herself in a way that communicates her fury to the listener. Everyone in the world ought to listen to Ursula Rucker. Her work is beautiful but it isn’t, even slightly, entertaining.

Amazon is the best place to buy her CDs – they are expensive but there are bargains at Amazon, I should imagine because so many people have found her too uncomfortable to live with - AM