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Best “New To You” of 2017 – music edition

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As a companion to the Top 20 Albums Of 2017 thread, please share here the older music you’ve discovered this year. Whether second hand or new reissues, what are your musical highlights of the last twelve months?

Mine follow in the comments.

2

Comments

  1. I’ve bought roughly 400 LPs, CDs, 78, 12”s and 7”s this year, but here are the ones that come to mind most readily, aided by my notebook:

    Things got off to a good start on January the 7th when I found The FLK’s most excellent and trippy folk/electronica project We Know Where The Time Goes in a charity shop for fifty pence. You can hear me banging on about it and playing an excerpt on the episode of Charity Shop Classics I did in the summer, which might be the only way of hearing it as I don’t think it’s on Youtube or streaming services.

    A couple of weeks later I hit a rich seam of jazz CDs including Miles Davis, Bill Evans, The Modern Jazz Quartet and Stan Getz, and this kind of got my jazz radar switched on, so the rest of the year saw me spotting lots more bargains including some 50p Miles and Brubeck on vinyl, more Evans, some Monk, Diz, Bird and lots more, some of which I’m still getting my head round. Plus I fell for the jazz stylings of the diminutive Dudley Moore – what a guy.

    The cheapness of CDs in charity shops and at car boots enabled a lot of back catalogue filling-in for acts like REM, the White Stripes, Macca and the PSBs, some of which were worth it, and some not so much, while standout vinyl finds were Bobby Womack’s flop country soul album BW Goes C&W, Nina Simone’s To Love Somebody, Eno & Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, several Laughing Len albums, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On (PHEW!) and I Want You, and one that I wasn’t at all sure it would be my cup of tea, but to hell with it for two quid: John Martyn’s Solid Air. Bloody gorgeous.

    The Easy Listening gods have bestowed many a chazza gift, which led to new (new!) purchases including Martin Denny, the Space Age Pop series, Esquivel and The Britxotica Box. A fave chazza find in that area was an album by the Frank Barber Percussion Ensemble, and you can hear me play a track off that on the Charity Shop Classics thing too, between wanging on about the Singing Postman and fairground organs.

    Ooh, organs! There have been a lot of those this year too, mostly Hammond cheese (a favourite flavour Chez Breakfast), but also Lowry, theatre and pipe organs. I’ve come to love Harry Stoneham, whose style tends to oscillate wildly between ‘Jimmy Smith’ and ‘Phoenix Nights’. Marvellous.

    Other miscellaneous faves are a CD compilation called Soul Gospel sent very kindly to me by @Carolina (thanks again!), the Rainbow LP of course, which I’d been hoping to find for AGES, and a couple of Hi-NRG mixed comp LPs from the 80s, the best of which is called Euro Beat and is impossible to sit still to. I finally got over my aversion to the voice of the singer in Alt-J, when I forgot why I’d avoided An Awesome Wave when it came out and picked up a car boot copy for pennies. I enjoyed the musical part of it so much that after a few listens his affected singing style now grates an awful lot less. Hurrah.

    Top reissues or new-old are Neil’s Hitchhiker, Dusty Springfield’s Complete Philadelphia Sessions, the Sgt. Pepper’s double reissue and Radiohead’s OKNOTOK. I’ve also won some new-old in a couple of competitions, but we don’t talk about that…

    Top of the bargains/ker-ching! list are Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man and Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes on vinyl that were inexplicably both 50p, a beautiful mono US first pressing of Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman (£2), a vinyl comp of weird German electronic stuff called Hammermusik 2 (£2), a couple of Libertines 7”s (75p), a 12″ Bees Gees promo that’s apparently worth forty quid (£2) and the aforementioned FLK CD.

    If you’re really bored, my episode of Charity Shop Classics can be found on my mixcloud page here, where you can also hear lots of other stuff found this year on the CBVD shows:

  4. This springs to mind. Not only one of the best ‘old-new’ things I heard this year, but one of the best things I’ve ever heard. I first heard it earlier this year played on the Jamie Cullum jazz show on radio 2 – it was chosen by his guest, but I can’t remember who picked it! I was entranced and I still am each time I hear it.
    Alice Coltrane – Journey In Satchidananda

    https://youtu.be/TQtEFdyhgdE

    • I think a lot of people discovered that track this year when it popped up on Spotify’s Discover Weekly. That’s where I heard it (and yes it is terrific). I do wonder how unique these recommendations are (it’s supposed to be based on algorithms and stuff) because that’s happened to me a few times this year, where a track that came up on my Spotify then crops up somewhere else.

      Kind of depressing actually. Feels like we are all cogs in a big computerised wheel.

      Sorry for being a downer. It’s my speciality.

  6. I wrote about it on the blog earlier this year – GZA’s Liquid Swords. Utterly breathtaking.
    Also new to me this year were Childish Gambino’s Awaken My Love and Solange’s Seat At The Table from 2016.

  7. The Fall, up to and including Room to Live. I’m going further into the Brix era next year. Call it the surrend-ah!

    Pentangle’s The Time Has Come box – very agreeable. Surprisingly funky in places – seems virtually all musicians working in the UK in the 1960s were frustrated jazzers, no matter what genre they ended up working in.

    Live Rust. I’m not a big Neil fan but that’s a cracker.

    The Circle & The Square by Red Box – what an endearingly odd record. Great tunes.

    A Lee Perry compo that threw up this utterly alarming track that caused my eyebrows to break the sound barrier.

    https://youtu.be/nv2qLimUSNk

  8. I spent the first part of the year snapping up everything I could find by Progressive-House duo Blue Amazon. Their 1997 album, ‘The Javelin’, is a proper lost classic, if you ask me.

  9. Thankfully someone here pointed me in the direction of ‘I often dream of trains’ by Robyn Hitchcock earlier this year. I blummin’ love it and plan to look out for more of his work. I also got John Cale’s Paris 1919 this year (which I think I mentioned on another thread) and that really has been it for the outstanding stuff. Otherwise, loads of other good things, but they’re the two I would recommend to others if they asked (and they rarely do).

  10. One particular album blew my socks off this year; it’s called Five In The Afternoon, and it’s by Dr. Robert and P.P. Arnold, and it’s ruddy great. The title track is worth the price of admission alone.

  12. Really enjoyed the Zaire 74 release, which covered the live performances of the African acts at the Rumble in the Jungle Festival. Had seen clips before, but previous releases have focussed on the American acts who travelled out. It’s joyous music, albeit tempered by the knowledge that roughly a third of the songs are tributes to President Mobutu. Not the sort of guy you’d want to get on the wrong side of.

  15. Had never paid that much attention to XTC bar owning The Big Express, which I didn’t love.

    Really enjoyed the documentary on Sky Arts about them recently and has had me delving into the archives, starting with Skylarking and Wasp Star – both mainly very good. Any other recommendations gladly accepted.

    I’m ashamed to say it took Tom Petty’s death to remind me how much I liked a few of his albums as a kid.

  16. Here’s ten from me:

    1. Scientist – Dub From The Ghetto (One to get the BIG speakers out for)
    2. Junjo Presents: Big Showdown (2 cd) (More Scientist!)
    3. William Onyeabor – Box Set (alas, only the 37 track download version. This time last year I’d never even heard of this fella – awful that it was his death that brought him to my attention. If Santa could bring him or herself to surprise me with the big box….)
    4. Harry Mudie Meets King Tubby’s In Dub Conference and
    5. Augustus Pablo – El Rockers (as recommended by duco1)
    6. The Essential Ann Peebles (excellent comp as part of Hi’s catalogue rejuvenation. “Old Man With Young Ideas” would be the perfect tune for the AW Xmas party)
    7. The Complete Quiet Elegance (had been looking for this or similar for a long time)
    8. Soul Jazz Presents: Boombox 2 (Old Skoooooooooooool!)
    9. Little Jackie: Queen Of Prospect Park (Just a mighty pop record I missed on release)

  17. Oops! One fell down the back of the sofa (actually Countrymen by The Twinkle Brothers ), but we could make it a delightful dozen with The Country Side Of Esther and From A Whisper To A Scream.

  18. When I saw Whitney Rose in May, she sang ‘Analog’ from her mini album. I would have been disappointed if she hadn’t as it’s easily my favourite track. She introduced it as a song written by Brennen Leigh so I investigated further. I’m now a big Brennen Leigh fan. I have no idea how well known she is but she’s just what I want from country music.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5IkBO57M5I

  19. Ending 2016 by listening to Teenage Fanclub’s “Here” over and over again made me remember that Gerry Love has always written their greatest songs. A bit of googling told me that he had released an album under the name of Lightships in 2012. Lovely, melodic music which kept me happy as winter turned into spring.

    More recently I realised that as I agree with The Lodestone on so many things (Taylor Swift, Ryan Adams etc) it was also time to listen to Lorde. Melodrama was genius. I’m now listening to Pure Heroine on rotation, several years too late. It may be even better.

  20. Anyone seen that Spotify thing that’s come up today and summarises your music of the year? Brave enough to share your top 100? It’s a fascinating and frequently unexpected snapshot of what you actually listened to. Here’s mine. My top song was Gospel (lovely funky marching band tune that I first heard in Monsters University!) and my top band was Can.

  21. I have ‘discovered’ and loved the following albums this year, mostly as part of my ongoing aim to listen to those 1001 albums before I start pinining for the fjords.

    1. Nick Drake – Five Years Left (I already own the other two, but for some reason this just passed me by for years)
    2. Laura Nyro – Eli and The Thirteenth Confession
    3. Scott Walker – 2 and 4
    4. The Grateful Dead – American Beauty (not what I was expecting at all after listening to Live/Dead earlier in the book)
    5. Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang Clan (36 Chambers)
    6. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Cosmo’s Factory
    7. Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul
    8. Sly and the Family Stone – Stand!
    9. Big Brother and the Holding Company – Cheap Thrills
    10. Pentangle – Basket of Light
    11. Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking/Liege and Leaf
    12. Traffic – Traffic
    13. Derek and the Dominoes – Layla et al.
    14. Cream – Disraeli Gears
    15. The Kinks – Arthur etc

    As a comparison, I have chosen not to ‘discover’ the following:

    1. The Bee Gees – Odessa
    2. The Beau Bummels – Triangle
    3. Tim Buckley – Happy Sad
    4. QMS – Happy Trails
    5. Donovan – Sunshine Superman
    6. Deep Purple – In Rock
    7. MC5 – Kick out the Jams
    8. Jeff Beck – Truth
    9. Dr John – Gris, Gris
    10. Skip Spence – Oar

    • Another up for Truth – flippin’ marvellous! Sunshine Superman is a stone cold classic – DONOVAN’S finest by a country mile, and do give Happy Sad a try.

      • I’m only giving these albums one or two listens, so they’re very much spur of the moment opinions. Some have grabbed me instantly within the first few bars (e.g Laura Nyro) and some I’ve just had to stop half-way through (e.g Bee Gees). I just remember being particularly unimpressed with Donovan for whatever reason.

        I’ve got Soft Machine up next, which I hear may be a challenge.

        • Funnily enough, I have heard several of these albums for the first time this year, after picking them out of the same book, and have come to the same conclusion as you on Oar, Happy Trails and Gris Gris. Wasn’t that impressed with Truth either or Layla and didn’t like Cheap Thrills at all. Although I also heard Beck’s version of Oar for the first time too, and it makes Skip Spence’s version sound like a masterpiece.

          I like Traffic and Cosmo’s Factory though, and Liege and Lief is much better than I expected it to be. The real discovery was Grateful Dead and it was American Beauty that I first listened to. I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get round to listening to them properly. Someone taped me Workingmen’s Dead about 25 years ago and I quite liked it, but never followed it up. The only other album I’d heard was Dylan and the Dead, which perhaps isn’t the album to instigate a love affair with the band. I took an instant liking to American Beauty though, and quickly followed it up with several more. Who knew they were that good?

          I have Stand! at the top of my ‘to listen to’ pile, so I’ll be getting to that this weekend some time. I would be interested to know what you think about Soft Machine. I downloaded Third and regretted it. It’s the vocals. I know Robert Wyatt has a lot of fans, but it sounded like they’d run down the pub and grabbed the first bloke they came across. It pretty much made the album unlistenable for me.

  22. I have a load of old on their virgin passage recently, courtesy various sources, and have been delighted recently by:
    Countrypolitan Favourites: Southern Culture on the Skids
    The Ballads of Peckham Rye: Blue Rose Code
    Starry Eyed and Laughing
    Grave New World and
    From the Witchwood: Strawbs
    The Sound: Toots Thielemans
    I like a bit of variety, me.

    • Starry Eyed! Saw them play aeons ago; they were a band before their time really – doing Byrdsy covers and originals in the UK. If they’d emerged 30 years later at the re-dawn of Americana, I suspect they’d have been a massive success.

      Glad you found time to explore the Strawbs; Witchwood is good – with Wakeman on board still – and as for Grave New World – what a belter that is.

      • Yeah, I have been meaning to. I preferred GNW if I am honest, having fewer skipby tracks, a problem I had with my only other exposure to the PotUHMs. Probably not enough to entice me to their support slot on the Steeleye tour I was considering a trip to. (Decided against, as they seem to be a heavy presence, Span, over the summer festival circuit.

  24. My highlights? These are all vinyl, mostly secondhand.

    Santana – Lotus, secondhand vinyl. I also got the third album. Santana I find often hits the spot on those nights when I have the flat to myself. These days I appreciate more and more instrumental, group workouts that are extended, improvised pieces not unsimilar to jazz. The singing I can do without, it’s something to get through before the more interesting parts.

    Diana Ross – Diana. Well of course I know the singles but it’s a fine album in it’s own right. The Chic touch gave Diana her biggest selling album, despite her being unsure of the sound of the record.

    Beach Boys – Holland. The good thing that comes with hunting old vinyl is that you want to come away with something from the visit and a lot of records are cheap, but the range is limited, so you tend to end up with things you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of getting, just so you have something to add to the collection. This was one I’d heard was worth hearing and I must say it’s great. Funky Pretty is superb.

    Beatles ’65. This is the American release which is Beatles For Sale with some tracks missing and others added, like I’ll Be Back, She’s A Woman and I Feel Fine. Those three are a knockout combination one after the other but She’s A Woman wins.

    I also picked up The Frontline, a reggae sample from the label, Tangerine Dream Sorcerer soundtrack, Fleetwood Mac Tango In The Night (a ubiquitous secondhand item but a great album), Roxy Music Siren and Viva! (live), Simple Minds Sister Feelings Call, Hendrix Rainbow Bridge and Jeff Beck Blow By Blow. All of these have delivered.

    One old that was new, rather than secondhand, was Television Live at The Old Waldorf from 1978. I already have The Blow-Up live album. This one has no audience sound. The sound of the band is pretty good. You can hear all the inventive improvisations on the drums. There’s plenty of guitar heaven here to thrill to. It is stupendous.

    Finally, I got Radiohead Moon-Shaped Pool. It took a while to get into properly. Burn The Witch is actually not one of the best tracks. It lacks the subtlety of the best ones. True Love Waits is the kind of lovely, mournful Radiohead-type ballad I really don’t care for. Full Stop is it though. Quite something. The album is 3/4 brilliant maybe.

    • I gave the Diana Ross album a go this year for the first time too. Can’t remember why, but I’d read something about it somewhere, maybe that 1001 Albums book again. It’s really good though isn’t it. Especially as she is partly responsible for the worst ‘new’ old album I’ve hear this year, The Supremes’ ‘A Bit Of Liverpool’ covers album. Good golly, it’s rubbish.

      I’ve been a fan of 60s girl groups since my early teens, but never progressed further than their big hits, much preferring the less polished sound of bands like the Shirelles, Chiffons and Marvelettes. But several months ago I listened through all their 60s albums. Their first album actually sounds more like the sound of the Shirelles and Chiffons, before they found the formula that made them famous. But after their breakthrough second album, Where Did Our Love Go, that also features Baby Love, they released the Liverpool album. Well, they call it A Bit Of Liverpool, but only half of the songs are ones released by Scouse bands and one of those was You Really Got A Hold Of Me, so bizarrely it’s a Motown group covering a British group covering a Motown song!

      It really is an awful album though. They make a right old mess of the intro to I Want To Hold Your Hand for starters. Then again, they went on to release a country influenced album next, followed by an album of Sam Cooke songs, before getting back on track with a string of great albums, with a minor hiccup with their album of Rodgers and Hart songs. But this is then followed by a couple of crackers in Reflections and Love Child. So I’ve certainly finished the year with much more of an appreciation of Diana Ross than I started the year with. I still haven’t managed to work out how she looked 20 years older in the sixties than she did in the 80s though…

    • I have that Television as well. It’s really good, much better than the more widely available Blow Up. I say “have”, but it’s just a collection of ones and zeros on a hard drive that I, er, ‘acquired’ one day. I’ve never seen a copy in the flesh, but I’d love to have one.

      • There are more tracks available and I would have liked to have them but they won’t fit on the vinly format. I also have the Blow Up and like it a lot as well but it’s a different experience, with people in the crowd whooping it up when the songs reach a climactic point. Yes the sound is inferior, but it does have an excitement to it with it’s frenzied atmosphere, plus you get two pretty good covers in Knockin’ On Heavens Door and Satisfaction.

  26. Old, but new to me…

    Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn.
    Robbie Fulks, John Hiatt and John Prine.
    Allman Brothers – Don’t judge me.

    There are probably others, but these stuck out for me. I find myself going backwards in music and finding myself enriched by older, what my son would call ‘classic’ music.

    • As far as John Prine is concerned, dive right in, there’s not a bad album in his canon, the man’s a stone cold song-writing genius. Have you tried his 2005 album Fair & Square yet? That’s a solid gold classic, and that’s a recent one!

  28. Liane Carroll – “Ballads” and “Seaside”. A really great jazz singer/pianist. Fantastic live.

    Magma’s “Köhnzert Zünd” box. 12 Cds of live prog craziness.

    Mike Westbrook – “Glad Day Live – The Poetry Of William Blake”. Mix of spoken word, choral and solo/duo singing and chamber jazz.

    Xenia Pestova – “Shadow Piano”. Music for piano / toy piano & electronics by contemporary composers.

    Clifford Brown – “13 Classic Albums”. A 6-CD set in the cheap-as-chips “Enlightenment” series of jazz re-releases. Treasure trove. Immensely-talented clean-living young jazz trumpeter, who was killed in a car crash at the age of 25.

    BJ Cole/Emily Burridge – “Into The Blue – Duets For Pedal Steel Guitar and Cello”.

    “The Gary McFarland Orchestra With Special Guest Soloist Bill Evans”. Progressive big-band jazz from the early ’60s.

    Charles Mingus – “Oh Yeah”. Plugged a gap in my collection.

    Jeanne Lee with Ran Blake – “The Newest Sound Around”. Jazz vocal/piano duetting par excellence. Another jazz oldie discovery.

    Lee Morgan – “Complete Recordings 1956-1962”. Another 6-CD set in the cheap “Enlightenment” re-release series.

    Neil Ardley & The New Jazz Orchestra – On The Radio: BBC Sessions 1971″. Large-band UK jazz-rock.

    Go Go Penguin – “Man Made Object”. Excellent modern prog-jazz.

    Kamasi Washington – “The Epic”. Triple album of solid funk-jazz.

    Neil Campbell – “Through The Looking Glass”. Astonishingly good acoustic guitarist, mainly classical-style but also employing loops occasionally.

    Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin – “Live”. A double CD of “Minimalist Zen Funk”, on ECM. Quintet that features keyboards, bass clarinet/alto sax, bass, drums and percussion.

    There were also numerous “unofficial” live recordings by interesting artists that I found.
    One such artist discovery was American jazz guitarist Emily Remler, who died in 1990. Her 7 official albums and 2 retrospective compilations are all highly-rated but currently either unavailable or rather too expensive for me.

    • That’s quite a list, Mike. Clifford Brown had a beautiful, warm, expressive tone. Such a nimble, inventive player. Had he lived longer, he might have managed to outshine Miles, at least as a player. I’m not sure he would been as creative conceptually and sound wise but we will never know.

      Oh Yeah is indisputably brilliant, though.

  30. I’m not sure where to post my favourite twenty historical/reissues. Is here OK?

    Bill Evans Trio – Another Time: The Hilversum Concert
    Alice Coltrane – World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
    The Beatles – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Remix
    Neil Young – Hitchhiker
    Thelonious Monk – Les Liaisons Dangereuse 1960
    Various Artists – Dancing Down Orange Street
    The Beach Boys – 1967 Sunshine Tomorrow
    Minnie Ripperton – Perfect Angel
    Prince – Purple Rain Deluxe Expanded
    Ray Charles – Zurich 1961: Swiss Radio Days Vol 41
    Roy Orbison And Friends – A Black & White Night
    David Bowie – Lodger (Tony Visconti Remix) from A New Career In A New Town Box Set
    Lee Perry & The Upsetters – The Trojan Albums Collection, 1971 to 1973
    Lal & Mike Waterson – Bright Phoebus
    PP Arnold – The Turning Tide
    Various Artists – Music From The American Epic Sessions
    Dion – Kickin’ Child: 1965 Columbia Recordings
    The Rolling Stones – On Air
    John Lee Hooker – King Of The Boogie
    Various Artists – Singles (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Deluxe Edition

  32. Like you say @minibreakfast – this is the golden age of CD buying with lots of interesting stuff around for pennies. As for vinyl – not so good…with lots of gripperz argy-bargying and climbing in through the sun roof at car boots to grab stuff. The only highlight was a rare Spriguns of Tolgus record – apparently an acid-folk rarity – which someone gave me £175 for. Not bad for £2.

    I’ve been working my way through crates of classical CDs uncovering some beautiful music and also a big collection of jazz funk and soul I bought. Nice rare stuff in amongst it – including loads of Mark Murphy albums alongside some stunning 80s soul classics. Just need the Peabo Bryson revival to kick in and I can retire.

    Elsewhere, new to me is Eliane Radigue – the French queen of drone. It’s a little like listening to an overactive fridge freezer but sometimes there are moments of real beauty where she shifts up a note. She experimented with early synthesisers but took the decision in later years to go “acoustic” – with a full orchestra settling on a single note for an hour or so.

    Wholly pretentious I’m sure but provides a decent respite for those of us with mild tinnitus.

    Most of her stuff is pricey to buy but there’s plenty on YouTube. This is one of her catchier tunes – kicks up a gear around the 10 minute mark.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RrsiGmLp_E

    Full on “hour-long radio static” experience here.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Tn0JN-pzM

  33. Only a few from me this year.

    Ezra Collective – Chapter 7. Not that old (it only came out last year), but I found it after loving their Juan Pablo EP from this year. It’s excellent modern British jazz, driving and lively, with excursions into dub and rap, and a vocal appearance from Zara McFarlane, beloved of some around these parts.

    Tarantel – From Bone To Satellite. Post-rock stuff from 1999 – if you like Mogwai or Explosions In The Sky, you’ll like this.

    Follakzoid – III. Chilean space rock with a strong krautrock flavour – long tracks with repetitive percussion and massive looping elliptical riffs. Only four songs, but they’re all long ones that build and build and build.

    Epic 45 – May Your Heart Be The Map. Lovely hazy bucolic English rock, operating in a similar emotional territory to Boards Of Canada. I remember picking this up in a record shop years ago, and deciding not to buy it today and putting it back, whereupon it promptly went out of print for ages until being reissued this year.

    • Difficult, or should I say incredibly expensive, to get hold of epic45’s albums. I’ve had to resort to downloading from the shady bit of the internet to get them. They’re well worth it though, but the one you have is the best one, as well as the easiest to find on CD for a reasonable price.

  34. My fave discovery/rediscovery this year was, contrary to an opinion above, “Gris, Gris” by Dr. John, a record that I’d always passed over to play either “Beggar’s Banquet” or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

    £1 – a trim and taut 33 minutes long – 1968 … it was bound to happen.

  35. Been meaning to get back to this thread for a while…

    I’ve been listening to loads of stuff from 2017 this year, probably the most I’ve listened to new music for, like, ever, but I’ll leave all that to the albums of the year thread. I’ve also been exploring some gaps in my library, a big one being stuff from the late 60s/early 70s that I didn’t really know very well. Country rock, blues rock type stuff, that I’d always dismissed as being a bit dull. Some of it I was disappointed with, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good some of the Grateful Dead albums are. I’d only heard Workingman’s Dead previously, and that was about 25 years ago. I’d lumped them in with the Eagles and that kind of stuff, but they’re much, much better.

    I like the Traffic albums too, and a couple of Creedence Clearwater Revival ones and Blind Faith. But a lot of it I still found quite dull I’m afraid. The International Submarine Band’s Safe at Home is great though, but I already knew some of those tracks. And I really like Pay Pack and Follow by John Phillips, which sounds very Exile On Main Street at times, thanks to the presence of the Stones. The Seeds self-titled album was also one that stood out.

    I was already a fan of Dion, both his doo wop stuff and his later work, but I’d never heard his self-titled 1968 album before and it’s just fantastic. Some great interpretations of well known songs like Abraham, Martin and John and The Dolphins. Lovely!

    I didn’t realise that Beck had done so much more than his studio albums. I used to have One Foot In The Grave and Stereopathetic Soulmanure years ago, but I got hold of 17 other albums, some of which were early audition tapes he sent round and some were from his record club, where he and a band try to record a version of a ‘classic’ album in one day. They did Velvet Underground and Nico, Oar, Kick, Songs of Leonard Cohen and Yanni Live at the Acropolis. Great idea, but the results are pretty unlistenable, as is most of the other stuff. Some bits were recognisable Beck, but most of it was a mess. An interesting mess though.

    The big thing for me in 2017 was finalling ‘getting’ a few artists I’d previously struggled to enjoy. I’d always known it was me though, and not the music, so I have kept trying! I’d enjoyed odd bits and bobs of Bjork, The Fall, Tom Waits and Nick Cave, but I’d been going about it all wrong, so I decided to start from the beginning with them all and found it much better. Some of the early Tom Waits stuff is brilliant, but I’d gone diving straight in at Swordfishtrombones, which made much more sense once I listened to the albums chronologically.

    I had never really paid much attention to Bryan Ferry’s solo albums, but was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. Talking of pleasantly surprised, Marianne Faithful did a few cracking albums too that I had never previously bothered with, Broken English and Before The Poison being my favourite two. And I filled the gaps in my Nick Lowe collection, which I enjoyed greatly, Pinker and Prouder Than Previous being the pick of the new ones.

    Gary Numan became this year’s Prince. Last year, sadly just before he died, I started getting back into Prince in a big way, as I had stopped buying his albums around the time he became a symbol and had believed all the people who said his best days ended at that point. So I was astonished to find how good his post-Symbol albums were. I finally finished tracking down all Prince’s albums this year, some of which were quite expensive. This year something led me to listen to Numan’s Splinter album from a few years ago and I was stunned. It’s ruddy fantastic. This led me to listen through all his albums beyond the first few that I already had and there’s lots to like. His new one this year continues an astonishing run of great albums. He’s on in Sheffield in March and I’m looking forward to seeing him. Hit a brick wall trying to convince someone to come with me though!

    More recent artists that I’d not listened to prior to this year, but have enjoyed exploring are Bonobo, The Delgados, Erykah Badu (Baduizm is just fab), Soul II Soul (I’d just dismissed them as chart pop, but the Jazzie B’s 80’s TV show led me to listen to them, and like Baduizm, their first album is fab), Everything But the Girl, Ghostpoet (his new one is one of my albums of the year), Kid Loco, Groove Armada, Husker Du, Luna, Childish Gambino and Shad (inspired by the great Hip Hop Evolution series he did for Netflix).

    Lastly, I happened across a ruddy excellent Pink Floyd bootleg, The Final Cut In The Wall. If you don’t know it, it’s a reworking of The Wall (one of my all time favourite albums), bringing in tracks from The Final Cut, outtakes, music from the film, live versions and so forth, resulting in a 133 minute epic of an album. If you’re a fan of the later Roger Waters period of the band you’ll love it.

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