Top albums of 2016

One of the reasons why there have been fewer blog posts
this year is that I spend a lot of my free time writing music reviews for the online ‘zine Whisperin’ & Hollerin’.

This year I reviewed a grand total of 240 releases and although 2016 was by no means a vintage year there is still plenty of good music around. This, as always, exists on the margins away from the mainstream.

My preferences continue to veer strongly towards weird folk and post rock and the following are the ten albums that I enjoyed the most with links to my reviews:

• JAMBINAI – A Hermitage  Jaminai are a trio from South Korea and I wrote that “The power and intensity of their music taps into the feelings of anger and isolation felt by a new generation suspicious of the conservative forces that seek to control them”.
• YAIR YONA – Sword  Yair Yona is a gifted Israeli musician and this powerful instrumental album “covers universal themes of personal endurance and trauma”.
• MODERN STUDIES – Swell To Great  Ornate and dreamy British folk music from a supergroup of sorts.

Tortoise live: this ain’t no disco

TORTOISE – Locomotic Club, Bologna 19th February 2016 

It’s gonna rain? Tortoise are ready for all weathers.  L-R: John McEntire, Doug McCombs, John Herndon, Dan Bitney & Jeff Parker

“No moving lights please”. This is the polite but firm request made to lighting engineers by Tortoise’s Dan Bitney after the first song.

The message is clear; the beats may sometimes be danceable but this ain’t no disco.

But the question as to how exactly you do begin to categorize the music of Tortoise has been an ongoing challenge for the past 25 years of the Chicago band’s existence.

Calling it post-rock, as many still do, runs the risk of implying that the band are somehow opposed to conventional rock music. In an interview with The Wire in 2001 John McEntire said “As far as I’m concerned all we’ve ever been is a rock band” and on the strength of their brilliant sold out show at Bologna this is clearly still his position.

What makes them less conventional, and thus harder to pigeonhole, is that no-one sings and they are so clearly wide open to sounds and rhythms from other genres. Jazz is an obvious influence but there are also strong elements of funk, soul and R’n’B.

IS POST-ROCK PASSÉ?

In posts for this Blog or, even more frequently, when writing reviews for WhisperinandHollerin, I have been guilty of using the term Post-Rock as a shorthand description of a band’s sound.

This term is generally credited to critic Simon Reynolds, who first used it in writing about the album ‘Hex’ by Bark Psychosis in 1994 and soon after wrote an extended essay on the topic for the Village Voice.

Reynolds wrote of bands “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes” and that the more ‘post’ a band was, the more it was likely to abandon the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure of commercial rock.

The term has been widely used to describe music that draws its influences from other non-rock genres, principally jazz, dub, folk or ambient and often ‘post-rock’ bands will tend to have a group identity rather than being focused on a charismatic front man (or woman!).

Chicago’s Tortoise , Glasgow’s Mogwai and Explosions From The Sky from Texas are regarded as archetypical Post-Rock bands but the , by no means definitive, list on Wikipedia will give an idea of the countless other artists deemed to be equally ‘post’.

GUITAR ABUSE IN A CARNIVAL WORLD (Netmage.11 #2)

The highlight of the Saturday night entertainment package at this year’s Netmage in Bologna was a piece called Paper Mache .

The visuals came from the National archive of amateur film footage – Home Movies – and live music was from an Italian post-rock quartet called In Zaire

The images were edited from colour film shot with an 8mm camera at the  Viareggio street Carnival between 1956 and 1967 by Bolognese cinematographer Alessandro Mantovani.

PUNKS : PAST AND PRESENT

Malcolm McLaren RIP

Punk has always been as much about the spirit as the music – a state of mind, an attitude that you recognise as soon as you see or hear it.

Malcom McLaren was a master manipulator of others who had this Punk spirit – notably Johnny Rotten & Vivienne Westwood – but, personally, I would argue that he was not a bona fide Punk. I see him more as an entertainer – a Svengali-like attention grabber; a Warhol-like self publicist with an ego to match .

His slippery personality means that when you start talking in terms of integrity or honesty his reputation begins to become a little tarnished. Nevertheless, you can’t ignore the fact that, but for him, there would have been no Sex Pistols. His place in history is assured.

On the day he died, Anarchy In The UK was played on the radio both going and returning from a concert in Bologna by present day carriers of the flame, A Silver Mount Zion (SMZ) from Canada.