2019 Albums Of The Year

© Simon Poulter 2019

2019. Quite literally, to paraphrase Mike Smash, 12 months which began on January 1st and come to an end today. As every year, one with plenty of ups and downs, arrivals and departures (not the least of which my dad, who left this world in August, just a few months after his 90th birthday, and the job I left barely two weeks after we'd said our final farewells to him). A year of change and personal reflection, then, while the world around us raged (in the UK, at least), pretty much from start to finish about Brexit. There was more lunacy from Trump, an angry Swedish teenager kicked up dust about climate change, Greggs launched a vegetarian sausage roll, and the British royal family found themselves up to their eyes in car accidents, fraternal discord, media bating and media avoidance.

As ever, music has been a constant soundtrack, and there has been no shortage of it - both live (Doves at the Albert Hall, Paul Weller in Greenwich, Richard Hawley in a church, Kaiser Chiefs in a sweaty old nightclub, a bizarre evening with Roy Harper, the mighty Second Sons in a Raynes Park pub) and on record. So, here goes with my albums of 2019, a list of ten that took some narrowing down to a line-up that has brought pleasure to my ears in a year of mixed blessings personally (happy and sad) and professionally, a year made all the more better by the following:

Album Of The Year 2019 - King Of Madrid by Peter Bruntnell

I was a slow convert to Bruntnell, which is another way of saying I’d missed out on an extensive body if work dating back to 1995, including albums like the acclaimed Normal For Bridgwater. And then, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine invited me up to Tufnell Park to see Bruntnell and his ‘full’ band squeezed onto a basement stage, and after a brilliant set of wry, Americana-tinged jangly guitar pop, I was sold. Only later did I discover that Bruntnell grew up near me and went to my junior and secondary schools, five years ahead of me. Only later still did I discover that his mum knows my my mum. While all of that are, ultimately, nice coincidences, it’s the music, man, that draws me to his brilliance. King Of Madrid, his tenth album in 24 years, encapsulates all that I admire, as well as all that frustrates me about him: from the opener, Broken Wing, Bruntnell expounds on the state of Britain from various perspectives via a collection of ten songs, co-scripted with Canadian writing partner Bill Ritchie. It’s understandable that Bruntnell should get earmarked as an Americana artist, or even 'alt-country', but the likes of National Museum and even the gently lilting title track lend more to the great roots of American guitar music, from Wilco to Tom Petty (with a noted nod to Beatle-esque melodicism, as on Dinosaur). It’s pithy, it’s invigorating, and it hasn’t been out of my car’s CD player since it was released in May. So what is it that frustrates me about Peter Bruntnell? Well, he’s another of my lost causes. Like my childhood friend Steven Wilson (more below on him...), Bruntnell is another local connection to my origins who I’ve come to discover writes and records my kind of music. And yet he is known largely to a cognoscenti of musos. Both Wilson and Bruntnell deserve far greater status than they currently occupy. Wilson is starting to get there, with a new record company (Caroline, part of the Universal Music Group) getting him ever greater exposure, driving ever greater attention including a forthcoming mega-arena tour. Bruntnell, on the other hand, remains resigned to something akin to a cult following, especially in the United States where he tours frequently. It’s a shame, but on the evidence of King Of Madrid he deserves to be better known and better heard. Much, much better. An outstanding album from an outstanding artist.

2. WHO - The Who

It's impossible for the surviving legends of '60s pop - Macca, the Stones, Ray Davies, et al - to maintain their brilliance six decades on without resorting to repetition, self-reference and nodding winks. If you’re Jagger & Co, you have the wealth of classic blues to retread or simply reapply their patent DNA to; Paul McCartney has done well, with his recent efforts, not to overdo the knowing fabness, even to the extent of being quite cool still; and Davies, rather than pursuing a confected version of his particular place in Britpop's original geolocation, has followed his instincts down the path of Americana with his most recent albums. Others from the era - Neil Young springs immediately to mind - continue to show the generation inspired by their era what longevity is about. Paul Weller shows no signs of slowing up, and if he did, he’d be shamed by The Who, who’s surviving members, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend shipped their 12th studio album, WHO in December. The band's first new album in 13 years, it took a decidedly nostalgic path, reflecting on where the 'Orrible 'Oo's surviving members have found themselves looking back, accepting their lack of relevance but also their place in cultural history (exemplified by the album's Peter Blake cover art). This might sound wistful, both lyrically and sonically, but for the most part, it is a wonderfully energetic record, not reliant too much on atypical Who flourishes, but with just enough guitar crashes from Pete Townshend and vocal gymnastics from Roger Daltrey to remind of what took you to the band to begin with. Daltrey himself rates WHO as one amongst their strongest ("our best album since Quadrophenia in 1973") and he's not at all far wrong. Townshend himself is still a fantastic writer, with the majority of WHO's strong songs being good enough to let the sappy I'll Be Back pass without further comment. Who knows if it'll be their last, but if it is, there would be no finer finale.

3. Ghosteen - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Like many artists who've earned near-unconditional adoration throughout their careers, especially those who might be described as being of the left field, it took a punt on Ghosteen for me to be finally won over to the Antipodean with the distinct baritone. But here was an album, seeped in the grief of Cave's teenage son's accidental death in 2015, which appeared a month after my own dad's funeral, which provided a welcome, if moving accompaniment to my journeys around the M25 between south-east and south-west London. Ghosteen's catharsis comes in the form of ethereal landscapes, literally fog-like keyboard beds and sombre piano that underlay Cave's distinct vocals. There's rarely any reason to question who the songs are about, but there's no overt wailing either. If it was intended to be Cave's processing of his son's death, it is never self-indulgent. It is, however, breathtakingly beautiful.

4. Giants Of All Sizes - Elbow

Elbow's eighth album is, according to the band, anything but cuddly, contrary to the somewhat avuncular profile of its frontman, Guy Garvey. Don't, however, take that to mean it's a gloomfest - Giants Of All Sizes is still very much an Elbow album, replete with Garvey's cocoa-warm voice bound to a band experimenting with sounds and instrumentation without going too far - but contained within that experimentation is a darker tonality. From the off,  opener Dexter & Sinister and its disjointed time signatures and non-sequitur breaks addressing a number of things on Garvey's mind, from Brexit to bereavement (including the death of his father) and, in his own words, "the general sense of disaffection you see all-around at the moment". Musically, some might find Giants musically narrow, with a very similar range across its nine songs and a notable lack of a One Day Like This anthem, but this lack of width makes for a better album. It is one that places itself in the company of the more melodic reaches of prog rock (Garvey is a fan), which doesn't mean endless organ solos, but a rich variety of tone and layers, rhythms and storytelling. Like Cave's Ghosteen, Elbow's Giants Of All Sizes also addresses grief and loss, but with what I call "balanced grace", looks for light in the darkness by placing arrivals in the proper perspectively. Some reviewers have (quite rightly) claimed it to be Elbow's best yet and, on reflection, it probably is - brilliantly intriguing, musically, and obliquely reflective, lyrically. One I listened to on repeat for most of the Saturday afternoon after it was released, hearing something new each time, pulling it closer like a warm blanket on a cold, wet October afternoon, a comfort no Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks will ever fulfil.

5. Kiwanuka - Michael Kiwanuka

A late entry in my albums of the year, on account of it being given to me for Christmas by my 18-year-old university student step-daughter, bought with her own money. What a wise young woman she is...and, notably, properly plugged in to what makes me tick, musically. I'm not, however, normally given over to hyperbole. I've habitually given anything a mighty swerve that's been raved about by the cool brigade. So, when Kiwanuka was received in November by The Guardian as "one of the greatest albums of the decade" I was naturally deflected. I'd heard, from reviews of Michael Kiwanuka's first two albums that here we had a musically literate, experimental lab scientist, a soulful Heston Blumenthal making clever musical cocktails, much like the last fusion hero to come along, Thundercat. As smart as all that was, Kiwanuka is way more rewarding. Through subtle textures, rather than brash pronouncements, it serves up reflective soul of the kind Otis Redding rarely got credit for, but with elements of gospel, orchestral grandeur and even shades of Hendrix. There have been plenty of soul pretenders over the decades, including those trying to do soul with a twist. This, finally, delivers all that. Sublime. And thanks Ella x.

6. Further - Richard Hawley

The same friend who introduced me to Peter Bruntnell was on a roll, then, having previously introduced me to Sheffield's pre-eminent crooner, Richard Hawley. A Sunday morning free stream of Hawley's Standing At The Sky's Edge, courtesy of The Observer, introduced me to an album of distortion-drenched psychedelic epics that I listened to exclusively for what seemed like weeks. Two weeks after the Bataclan attack in Paris, where I was living at the time, Hawley's gentle humour and mellifluous songs were, that night, just what Paris needed. A musical arm around the shoulder. Soothing reassurance. With this year's release Further, Hawley returned to the mellifluousness of his earlier, countrified releases, dreamily shimmering with songs like Emilina Says, Galley Girl and My Little Treasures, and the Beatle-esque Doors. Four years after those terrible events in Paris, and in a world more politically febrile than ever, Hawley's songs and engaging lyrics have been a soothing balm in troubled times, and none more so than on this album.

7. Western Stars - Bruce Springsteen

The Boss has been in a reflective mood of late. In the five years between Western Stars and his previous studio album, he released his excellent autobiography, Born To Run, and ran his one-man Springsteen On Broadway for more than a year. All of this became part of a narrative of reflection as Springsteen neared the end of his 60s, recalling in his work the blue collar New Jersey upbringing, the thunderclaps of seeing Elvis and The Beatles' debuts on The Ed Sullivan Show, and his own journey to become America's most earnest rock star. Western Stars, Springsteen's 19th studio album casts a winsome gaze over the cowboy culture of Roy Rogers and the early 1950s television the young Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen was exposed, framing further the America Springsteen has, in one way, shape or another, eulogised throughout his career, but seen now through the prism of it’s most dramatic, some might even say disturbing schism in several generations. Springsteen has been telling his own American Story since Born To Run "sprung from cages out on Highway 9", but in Western Stars he places his America in a context of the deserts and vast scrublands west of the Mississippi for the challenges they present now, and while this may be a reflection on his own, perhaps surprising struggles with mental health, the 'home on the range' expression on Western Stars provides an outlet for the desire for mental freedom as much as traditional American expressions of the frontier spirit.

8. The New Adventures Of...PP Arnold - PP Arnold

There are plenty of artists of a certain vintage whom you could call tardy for the distances that open up between recordings. Peter Gabriel comes straight to mind, for the dilettantism that sends him off in multiple directions without bringing him back to what he does best (his last album of original new songs was Up in 2002 - almost 18 years ago). Patricia Ann Cole - professionally known as PP Arnold - might have a greater claim. In the '60s she became part of the musical fabric: haling from LA's troubled Watts district, she joined Ike and Tina Turner's soul review as an Ikette before remaining in London after a tour with the Rolling Stones, establishing a solo career there that led to work with the Small Faces and other luminaries of late '60s swinging London. Around this time she recorded her standout hits, The First Cut Is the Deepest and Angel of the Morning, and the albums The First Lady Of Immediate in 1967 and Kafunta in 1968. A third album, The Turning Tide was recorded around the turn of that decade, with Barry Gibb and Eric Clapton producing, but it was never finished and the recordings lay dormant until 2017, when Arnold resurrected and released the album. The intervening years hadn't exactly rendered Arnold idle - as a singer-for-hire she worked with people like Clapton and Roger Waters, but the voice that enchanted so many with The First Cut Is The Deepest held a lasting fascination with Paul Weller and his guitarist (and Ocean Colour Scene co-founder) Steve Craddock, who offered Arnold a bunch of their songs. The New Adventures Of... PP Arnold is the product of that offering, produced by Craddock, it showcases the 72-year-old Arnold has still possessing a voice of some beauty, via a mix of the Weller/Craddock material, as well as engaging covers of Sandy Denny's I'm A Dreamer and Mike Nesmith's Different Drum. Coming more than 50 years since she last committed her amazing voice to original material, you can only wonder what we've missed out on in the intervening years.

9. Warm/Warmer - Jeff Tweedy

Wilco crept up on me as a band I should like. Again, put off by hype, there seemed to be just too much gushing about them. And then I came across their Star Wars album in 2015 and, a decade-and-a-half since their Yankee Foxtrot breakthrough, I was kicking myself at what I'd missed. Earlier this year I was kicking myself at having completely missed the release of frontman Jeff Tweedy's 2018 solo album Warm, so when the record was re-released as a double package with the subsequent Warmer I was determined not to make the same mistake again. Recorded together in the same Chicago session, these twin albums find Tweedy in a soothingly laid-back frame of mind, both lyrically and musically. The albums' titles give this away. With Wilco themselves also releasing this year Ode To Joy (see below), there has been a generous doling out of comfort food from Tweedy and his cohorts (which include son Spencer on drums of these two solo releases), applying his wry turn of phrase on tracks like Evergreen and Ten Sentences with his gently abrasive country-folk melodies and a voice that always reminds me of Eels' Mark Everett - slightly gravelly and delightfully claustrophobic without being weird. Warmer's highlight is the sign-of-the-times commentary of Family Ghost, a striking commentary on the divisions of Trump's America and the dangerous empowerment of the right by news outlets like Fox News. Comparing Tweedy with Bruce Springsteen, as some critics have attempted, is a redundant task, but there are more clear parallels between the two than you might at first realise. There is, of course, the liberal earnestness, and you'd even go as saying that they operate in different spheres of the same alt-folk universe. Warm/Warmer, however, prove that even with such deliberately understated material, released more for the fun of Record Store Day than any serious tilt at the charts, that Tweedy is a performer and writer of gifted proportions. And, thankfully, there's a lot more left in him to come.

10. Echo In The Canyon OST

One of my favourite eras of the pop age is the period towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when the wooded canyons north of Los Angeles effectively constituted a large commune of bed-hopping, dope-smoking hippies making love and sweet music at the same time. The definitive written guide to this era - and its principle characters - can be found in Barney Hoskyns' brilliant (if lengthily titled) Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters & Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons. Hoskyns' book recounts the music and the inter-personal relationships of people like Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, The Eagles, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and the record executive David Geffen, as they indulged high in the Hollywood hills during the daytime and played hard in the clubs of Sunset Boulevard in the nights. It was the musical premise of this period that caught my attention when the documentary Echo In The Canyon came out in the US in late 2018, focusing on the extraordinary creativity that came out of LA's Laurel Canyon as folk music met pop and the green shoots of rock with bands like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Mamas and the Papas, drawing on the The Beatles, partly, to create a Californian sound of its own. Drawn into this world were some of the figures covered in Hoskyns' book, but also the likes of Eric Clapton (as his meteoric career pinballed from one band to another, one style to another) as well as younger entrants to the scene, like the aforementioned Browne and Tom Petty. Andrew Slater's Echo In The Canyon delves into the figures that made the Canyon scene, with Bob's son Jakob Dylan fronting the documentary (which I've now managed to see on DVD). Inevitably, such a rich musical subject matter as this produces a fantastic soundtrack, centred around Dylan, and featuring recordings from many of those who feature in the film, including Josh Homme, Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Clapton and Stephen Stills, and Beck, who covers Goin' Back, the Goffin/King song written for Dusty Springfield (and a regular feature in Peter Bruntnell's live sets). It's a celebration of songwriting craft at its best, but a craft that matured delightfully in a particular window in time.

Worthy of mention

• Lost Girls - Bat For Lashes: Welcome return from Natasha Khan, AKA Bat For Lashes, with something of a concept album about a gang of biker women roaming a dystopian Los Angeles. I've probably not done the concept justice here, but the record is exquisite.
• Free - Iggy Pop: Trailed by the delightfully kitsch (and radio-friendly) single James Bond, the Iggster's 18th studio album finds the so-called "Godfather of Punk" in contemplative mood (well, at 72 he had to start calming down sooner or later) as he considers life after the big tours have started to come to an end. With half its tracks written by LA-based guitar wizz Sarah Lipstate, others including one whose lyrics were written by Lou Reed in 1970 and another drawing on the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, it's a calmer Pop record than we've become used to, and with a somewhat improvised feel to it, too. None of which is a bad thing, either.  
• Threads - Sheryl Crow: billed as Crow's final album (she decided that it was no longer worth competing in the age of single-track listens via streaming sites), Threads pairs Crow with a variety of partners from the legend end of rock's executive lounge, with a combination of covers and original songs. And it is mostly fabulous. Collaborations with Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples are sublime, although we could have done without the cover of George Harrison’s Beware Of Darkness featuring Sting and Brandi Carlisle. As an exercise in the application of professional friendships, Threads can’t be faulted, but it is at its best when Crow’s natural songwriting ability around with rock-blues roots comes to the fore and you don’t, actually, care all that much who she’s working with on the track.
• Ode To Joy - Wilco: I've already waxed on above about Jeff Tweedy's twin contribution to the 2018/2019 album story, but at risk of presenting him as a greedy sod, he also managed to get the band together this year to produce Ode To Joy, which it is. It's a somewhat gentle album, but since I would probably, now, rate a Wilco album that was essentially 12 tracks of nails and screws being thrown into a bowl, I've got plenty of bandwidth for an album from them that doesn't tread expected routes. You could even look upon it as a romantic album. There, I said it.
• Anima - Thom Yorke/Flowers At The Scene - Tim Bowness/Love You To Bits - No-Man: I've lumped together my final three new albums at risk of annoying the artists involved. No, they're not identical, but there are behavioural patterns behind those who've made them. Thom Yorke's Anima (a somewhat hoity-toity reference to Carl Jung) is a darkly layered collection of electronic music that, on my first listen while driving around the M25, left me underwhelmed. And slightly unfit to drive on account of its somnambulant dangers. Subsequent listens improved my appreciation considerably, especially tracks like the opener Traffic and the stunning The Axe. Truly a master at work. As is Tim Bowness, the Cheshire musician known perhaps best for his work with Steven Wilson in No-Man (see next), but who has worked with a range of musicians to produce brilliant albums seeped in ambience and depth that, thankfully, defy any definitive labelling. His latest, Flowers At The Scene brought him together with guests like 10cc's Kevin Godley, XTC's Andy Partridge, Peter Hammill and, as co-producer, that man Wilson again, like his compadre's own move towards greater mainstream accessibility, draws together bold strands of pop, soundscapes and confessional lyrics to create one of the year's most engaging records. Which brings us to No-Man's Love You To Bits. Long before Wilson was shifting significant critical acclaim with Porcupine Tree, he and Bowness were, starting in 1987, experimenting with whatever took their fancy with No-Man, first finding attention with their Flowermouth album in 1994 (featuring Robert Fripp, no less) and presenting to the world a showcase for their own hugely eclectic musical tastes - dance music, ambient music, acoustic, electronic. Love You To Bits is Bowness and Wilson's first full album together as No-Man since 2008, and dives headfirst into their mutual love of synth pop. Taking the quintessentially prog approach of spanning the album over, essentially, two tracks - Love You To Bits (Bits 1-5) and Love You To Pieces (Pieces 1-5), Bowness and Wilson resurrected an idea that had been around for a decade or two, of an album that nodded to their love of bands like New Order and Talk Talk, rich in synths and drum machines and the sort of electronic dance music - there, I've said it - that were a core part of their music consumption in the early 1990s. The cover image, of a glitter ball tees up the opening phase of the Love You To Bits side, proper 4-4 disco stomp that, actually goes beyond just guilty pleasure territory, but is genuinely infectious, as is the rest of the album, which, over its two sides, explores the breakup of a relationship from the perspectives of its two principals. The second side opens on a jazzier note - no surprise given its use of Wilson's touring keyboard player, Adam Holtzman, the last ivory tinkler to work for Miles Davis, but spreads out over its five sections into a wonderful stew of trance-like club music. For those who've followed Wilson's career in particular, and who have (wrongly) formed the view that he is a standard-bearer for prog rock, you must remember that the two albums that sparked his interest to begin with were Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon (a Christmas present from his mother to his father) and Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby (a Christmas present from his father to his mother). Both would shape the career of an extraordinary, if still criminally under-rated artist, a description he easily shares with Bowness. 

Back For More

• Abbey Road - The Beatles: Re-released with all the bumper package options to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the basic album alone is worth a re-listen, let alone all the outtakes and curiosities that come with the 'super deluxe edition'. Of course, Abbey Road depicts The Fabs'  last hurrah (yes, yes, I know all about Let It Be...) but also a now-mature rock band seemingly comfortable in its skin and, at times, its own company. Doesn't matter how many copies you own, this is a retread worth every penny.
• London Calling - The Clash: Another anniversary waltz, but even if you bought the 30th anniversary edition, adding another ten years hence, with the accompanying storybook package, is worth your hard-earned for, quite frankly, the best album of the punk era, largely because it wasn't punk at all.
• VH1 Storytellers - David Bowie: Since The Dame's death in 2016 there has been a steady industry of releasing luxurious packages of his cannon, from the complete sequence of studio and live albums to the recent box of his early development. The VH1 Storytellers album originally came out in 2009, ten years after Bowie had actually appeared in VH1's live performance Storytellers series. Dipping into Bowie's career, as far back as Life On Mars, right up to material for the under-appreciated Hours album, the somewhat stripped back sample of the man's work actually serves to highlight just how good he was. Understatement, right?
• Let It Bleed - Rolling Stones: Yes, another nice bone to throw the Stones' pension pots, but why not? Let It Bleed found the Stones at their louche best, with stonkers like Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler and You Can't Always Get What You Want standing out, even despite close-run gems like Country Honk and Monkey Man. Another 50th anniversary release, with all the trimmings that entails in the heritage market, it's one of those Stones albums you simply go out and buy again, and listen as if new.
• Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis: Talk Talk frontman Hollis' death in February this year took the wind out of many's sails, not least of which mine. What compounded that emotion was that Hollis's work was as sparse as the songs he often recorded. And none more so than this, his only solo album, released in 1998 (and again in 2003 as an LP only), but still often forgotten, or even dismissed as being unlistenable due to its achingly hushed material, of the kind cynics might say could only have been heard of by mountain rescue dogs. This new vinyl re-release addresses many of the snarks and even complaints about the sonic dullness of the original, being slightly brightened up in the studio and released as a posthumous curiosity for those who loved all Hollis did with Talk Talk and, even with its obvious limitations, would find interest in now.