‘If you liked that, why not try this?’ Such tempting words, so hard to resist. I love the idea that some immeasurably complex computer algorithm, lovingly created by nerds, can sift through the teeming piles of new music out there and find something for me that I didn’t know I was going to like. One day this glorious state of affairs may even come to pass. For the moment, though, these links always lead you to (i) music you already own and enjoy, (ii) music that sounds a bit like the music you already own and enjoy but isn’t as good, and (iii) music you wouldn’t touch with a bargepole attached to another bargepole. For me it’s always little Jamie Cullum or Michael Bublé. If you listen to anything vaguely jazzy, the algorithm always sends you to Michael Bleeding Bublé. Even nerds aren’t completely incorruptible. I can imagine that brown envelopes full of used notes, carefully placed, would constitute a sensible investment in these hard times. They might even be tax-deductible.
Forget algorithms. Serendipity remains the music-lover’s best friend. You never know where you are going to find the next great album. I have been looking back at my log of music played this year, and if we discount that damaging Bee Gees phase, and the rediscovery of several old favourites, there are three newish albums that appear to have been played to death. They are not the three I would have predicted, because I bought all three with relatively low expectations. Not one is from this year. That’s not to say that nothing any good was released in 2012: it’s just that I haven’t heard it yet. Or maybe I haven’t realised how good it is yet. The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow, and ears don’t necessarily go much faster.
The Avett Brothers’ I And Love And You (American), for example, is a mere three years old, although it has a timeless quality that could place it at any moment in the past 30. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, their sound combines ‘the heavy sadness of Townes Van Zandt, the light pop concision of Buddy Holly, the tuneful jangle of the Beatles [and] the raw energy of the Ramones’, which sounds like one of those lists you write when the deadline is looming and you’re getting desperate.
Scott and Seth Avett are indeed brothers, from North Carolina, who have been playing together since childhood and recording for a decade, but this album, produced by the ancient hairball Rick Rubin, is their commercial breakthrough and a thoroughly impressive collection of tunes. Mainly piano-based, with a few bluegrass stylings and some good tactical use of banjo, their songs remind me of Ben Folds (without the whimsy) and a little of Neil Young, and their vocals, rough and ready but oddly heartfelt, are what the Proclaimers might have sounded like if they had grown up in the boondocks and hadn’t worn enormous glasses.
If you liked that, why not try John Hiatt’s Same Old Man (New West), the umpteenth album by the old growler, released in 2008. He may even have made another one since. But with an old-school songwriter like Hiatt, who has been working his small country-rock patch for decades, you know roughly what you’re going to get: it’s just a matter of whether he is on form this year. His voice, never a thing of beauty, is cracking a little at the edges these days, and perfectly suits these sharp lyrics and rather plaintive, mid-tempo tunes. I originally bought the album because of the song ‘Hurt My Baby’, very powerful, intense, a simple idea brilliantly done, but the rest of it matches up, and I seem to have played it 20 times without quite realising it: never a bad sign.
My album of the year, though, is Diamond Mine by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins (Domino). Creosote is Kenny Anderson, a Scottish singer-songwriter, Hopkins is an English electronica type who has worked with Brian Eno, and their collaboration presents Anderson’s desperately sad songs in a sonic landscape that manages to be both bleak and incredibly rich at the same time. It’s barely half an hour long, but they took seven years, on and off, to get it right, and it absolutely shows. It is that rare and beautiful thing, a perfectly realised record, and a classic in the making.
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