Top Ten 2017

These are the albums I've most enjoyed listening to in 2017:

A Tribute To Michael Been: The Call featuring Robert Levon Been - Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club pays tribute to his late father's music with an unforgettable live performance leading his father's legendary band The Call. After The Call disbanded Michael Been served as sound engineer for his son Robert's band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. But while working with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the 2010 Pukkelpop festival in Belgium, Been suffered a heart attack and passed away backstage. Now The Call have captured an incredible live performance, for the first time in over 20 years, with Robert taking over his father's role. He joined Musick, Ferrier, and keyboardist Jim Goodwin at The Troubadour in Los Angeles for this historic and electrifying event. For Robert - who grew up going out on the road with The Call anytime he had a break from school - the performance offered the chance to honour his musical legacy and perform nearly a dozen and a half songs from the band's esteemed catalog. And for the original members, the show allowed the opportunity to honour their friend and their own musical legacy while revisiting a bond they thought was gone forever.

Specter At The Feast: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - The 12 tracks on Specter At The Feast were 'written after the sudden death of their sound engineer, Michael Been – father of bassist Robert Been – and are heavy with loss. Some Kind of Ghost's gospel-voodoo prayer, which has Robert Been vowing, "Sweet Lord, I'm coming home", Been's lost-in-the-woods vocal on Fire Walker, and the funereal organ drone and layered vocals that rise and fall tidally through Sometimes the Light. The dreamy eight-minute finale, Lose Yourself, is a kind of coming-to-terms hymn – a satisfying ending to a fine record.'

Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol.13 / 1979-1983: Bob Dylan - 'Trouble No More practically bulges with irresistibly thrilling performances. For all its other qualities, Dylan’s music has never been particularly funky. That, however, is the only appropriate term to describe the colossal grooves cooked up by bassist Tim Drummond (who used to play with James Brown) and drummer Jim Keltner, certainly the greatest rhythm section this side of The Band’s Levon Help and Rick Danko that Dylan ever shared a stage with. It’s almost impossible to connect the opening double-KO of 1979 live versions of “Slow Train” – lifted ever higher by guitarist Fred Tackett’s stinging riffs - and “Gotta Serve Somebody” with their fine if overly polite studio counterparts on the MOR-hued Slow Train Coming album, nevermind the road-weary, ramshackle vibes of the other two records in Dylan’s Gospel trilogy, Saved (1980) and 1981’s Shot of Love.'

Short Stories Vol 1: Ricky Ross - 'The album, which contains new songs, voice-and-piano versions of two of his greatest works, Raintown and Wages Day, and a lovely take on Carole King’s Goin’ Back, was recorded in Hamburg, with strings added in Glasgow. It continues a resurgence of activity by the band he put together in December 1985. Producer Paul Savage, who worked on Deacon Blue’s last three albums and on Short Stories Vol 1, says, "The thing I always love about what he does, apart from his well-observed lyrics, is the way he chooses a chord and a shift in gears – he's got that down more than most people. Much of the old-fashioned idea of a song is beginning to disappear – there's not a lot of great classic songwriting any more. "You can listen to Ricky's music and the chords, and they'll move you just by emotion, just by the right chord change. There's a drive about him but there's also the talent. Sometimes there's either one or the other but the great artists I have worked with have both." Ross is an under-rated singer as well, says Savage. "I think he doesn't get the recognition he deserves: some of the new songs on the album are incredible."

Cold Snap: Anthony D'Amato - ''Cold Snap' explores the schisms between perception and reality, projection and truth, who we are and how we're seen. Sometimes it's on an internal level—the progressively ominous images of soaring album opener "Oh My Goodness" hint at the costs of living up to (and falling short of) expectations—but elsewhere it's external and political, as on the too-big-to-fail anthem of "Blue Blooded" or the eerie blues of "If You're Gonna Build A Wall," written in the shadow of the current election season but hinting at everything from Ferguson to Flint."What happens when our visions of ourselves or the projections we make onto others start to crack under the weight of reality?" D'Amato asks. "That's the idea behind the album cover, where you're looking into this mirror, but the image is distorted. The fissures between truth and perception are starting to form, and maybe just for a second, you can glimpse both simultaneously. All of the songs on this album take place in moments of realization like that.".'

Songs of Experience: U2 - 'The mounting effect is a charge of dynamic moods and a still-certain mission – the choral-army light of "Get Out of Your Own Way," speared with rusted-blade guitar bravura; the seesaw of punchy-funk riffing and breakneck vocal glory in "Red Flag Day" – set in candid summations of what's been gained, lost and left undone. "American Soul" is a metallic-guitar letter of gratitude to the roots and ideals that drove U2 forward (with a warning-sermon cameo by Kendrick Lamar). Other songs face home and the band's debt to family and fidelity. "I will win and call it losing," Bono pleads through the icy-guitar rain of "Landlady," "if the prize is not for you." Songs of Experience ends like it opens – in a hush; "13 (There Is a Light)" also circles back to Innocence, reprising the chorus of that LP's "Song for Someone." But where the latter was Bono's wide-open love song to his wife, Ali, "13" renews his commitment to the purpose and sustenance he still finds in music, songwriting and performance. If experience has taught U2 anything, it is that a great new song can still feel like the first day of the rest of your life. Songs of Experience is that innocence renewed.'

Lovely Creatures: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - 'Instead of King Arthur or Odysseus, we have Cave, a chain-smoking, gunslinging poet who sees God in the eyes of a woman and bowls of soup; who stalks through Berlin boudoirs with heroin in his veins, daring the devil to take him by the Red Right Hand only to dodge his scythe like a stuntman; who sifts through puddles of blood and piles of money in search of meaning, only to be greeted by the void. “The spiritual quest has many faces–religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex,” he mused, addressing 1998 Vienna Poetry Festival, “but rarely does the search serve God so directly, and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.” *Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years—an unmovable feast, immortalized.'

The Order of Time: Valerie June - 'Valerie June’s acclaimed 2013 debut, Pushin’ Against a Stone, was a crucial stage in a meteoric rise from selling home recordings from a car to supporting the Rolling Stones and winning a fan in Michelle Obama. Her second album finds the Tennessean again blending genres – folk, classic pop, soul and Appalachian bluegrass – into a cohesive whole, thanks to her top-notch songwriting and sublime musicianship. With her sultry ache of a voice, she could presumably sing the phone book and make it quake with feeling. These are further tales of long lonely roads and men who done wrong, and this set adds African rhythms, spacey soundscapes and guest vocals from Norah Jones. The songs run the gamut from Love You Once Made’s organ-blasting bluesy soul and With You’s Nick Drakeish strings to Shakedown, which is like a country Can. It’s an album bursting with standouts, none more so than Astral Plane, which finds June full of childlike wonderment amid a gloriously ethereal atmosphere reminiscent of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Fantastic stuff.'

Soul Of A Woman: Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - 'Jones’s final album, released roughly a year after her death, is a throwback in all the right ways: a vintage soul record that thumbs its nose at the 21st century in favour of era-specific methods and concerns. Recorded on eight-track, with frisky instrumentalists called, for example, Fernando “Bugaloo” Velez, and taking up just a lean, mean 36 minutes of your time, it is not really one of those albums in which a feted – or fated – singer mulls their approaching end, but a record replete with drama and succour that wrestles with the messy business of being alive. The first half of Soul of a Woman skews hard towards upbeat songs, such as the hand-clapping Rumors, full of backing vocalists gossiping away. The second half pulls in organs, forgiveness, orchestral sweeps and, on the self-penned Call on God, the Universal Church of God gospel choir.'

Damage and Joy: The Jesus and Mary Chain – 'Bands aren’t typically reborn when their members are in their mid-fifties. At a certain point, they tend to tread the terrain they staked out for themselves long ago, occasionally coming within eyeshot of sonic frontiers they once fought back or discovering fault lines running beneath their claim that could potentially shake foundations again, but more often than not turning up old stones to find small nuggets embedded in weathered rock. In the case of the Mary Chain, it’s a vast landscape – one that stretches from sweet melodies strangled by barbed wire and drowned in abandoned swimming pools of feedback to glowing, gloomy pop unrolling across an infinite expanse – that left room for later albums like Automatic and Honey’s Dead to roam freely and explore without ever feeling confined. That landscape remains just as vast and beautiful all these years later for Damage and Joy, only the band, song after song, tread the safest possible steps across it.'

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Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Matter of Time.