Music ‘07
Hmm, I guess I should probably do one of these lists, since it’s about that time. I was a very active music sampler in 2007, but unlike last year, I didn’t find a whole lot of stuff to listen to over and over (with the exception of #2, below). Instead, I found a few slow burners on the CD player. Hey, I’ll take ‘em. 2007 was good for music. Since I turn 32 in a few days, I’ll make this a list of 32, with 10 big ones.
1. PJ Harvey, White Chalk. I’ve been a PJH fan since the beginning, but the last couple of albums seem to have sunk out sight quickly. Maybe she thought so, too, because this year she rehired her old producers, ditched the guitar and learned the piano, and pushed her vocals into a higher range.
Sounds gimmicky, maybe… but it worked. Simply put, it’s a batch of simple little piano songs, 11 tracks clocking in at only 33 minutes. I’ve heard it compared to early Tori Amos, but I don’t think so. It’s minimalistic and intimate, almost like Radiohead, though of course nothing like them musically. Call it Harvey’s Amnesiac. Or better, it’s like the between-the-cracks songs on Harvey’s earlier albums (”The River,” “I Think I’m a Mother” and “We Float,” for example). Gives me a new appreciation for those old songs.
I dunno… I wonder if maybe this is what Harvey was meant to do all along. The big question is what she’s going to do next: new PJ, old PJ, or version 3.0?
2. Blonde Redhead, 23. On their last album, Misery Is a Butterfly, Blonde Redhead sounded a little uncomfortable in their skin. They’d just made a major transition from quirky indie-punk to something considerably more big-budgeted and polished, but they didn’t seem ready to fit their unconventional musicianship into the formula. This year they stepped back a bit, self-produced their album, and hired Alan Moulder (who’d previously smoothed over pop transitions for Nine Inch Nails and Curve) to mix. The result is a cohesive pop album with more than its share of standout tracks: “23,” “The Dress,” “SW,” “Silently,” “My Impure Hair.”
I’ve heard comparisons to My Bloody Valentine (another Moulder client), but I think only casual MBV listeners would accept that. Instead, their transformation is more like that of Curve’s Come Clean: the band’s first serious attempt to be both cutting-edge and accessible. Yup, it worked.
3. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand. So much for the death of the album. Here’s yet another example of an album that begs to be heard as a whole because of ambitious yet wise choices underlying the production of the whole thing. In this case, it was producer T-Bone Burnett’s decision to take bluegrass’ strongest quality—minimalism—and emphasize it for dramatic effect. Raising Sand is a simple album of cover songs, but its mood is just a little off-kilter—eerie and bleak in places, like Burnett’s soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?. This is especially true on the plaintive verses sung by only one of the vocalists, such as on “Sister Rosetta,” “Trampled Rose” and “Nothin’.”
Straight bluegrass can get a little dull at times (IMHO), but the production makes this album perfect mood music—oh, and Krauss and Plant are kinda talented, by the way.
4. Radiohead, In Rainbows. You can finally buy this album again: the download experiment ended awhile ago, but New Year’s Day marked the release of the CD.
With all of this self-release craziness, the actual album has been overlooked. That’s a shame, because it’s a really great album with real songs—the experimentation of the past decade has been toned down a little, and what’s left over is mostly, uh, rock (or at least Radiohead’s version of it). Even though it’s their eighth release, this might end up being a good introduction to them. That’s a good thing, because I almost lost track of the band after 2002’s Hail to the Thief, which was solid but a little stagnant.
5. Dot Allison, Exaltation of Larks. Hmm… I’ve read good and bad reviews of this album, and I’m inclined to agree with all of them. The album is good if you consider Allison’s dance-pop background with legendary Scottish group One Dove, as well as her two previous solo albums. It’d be hard to find two back-to-back albums by the same artist that are more different than 2002’s We Are Science (an intentionally geeky dance album) and this collection of stripped-down folk songs. Never much for songwriting, Allison is suddenly paying serious attention to her lyrics and musicianship. In many ways Exaltation of Larks is a creative reawakening for her.
On the other hand, her previous work, musically suspicious as it might have been, was still head and shoulders over 95% of everything else out there, so it’s kind of disappointing to lose it. And this album seems to run out of steam and start sounding a little samey toward the end—so much so that it makes you rethink whether you actually liked it at the beginning. But don’t give up. I think the best plan is just to skip a couple of tracks (I suggest 5, 7 and 9) to keep it from wearing out. Turn it into a really, really good EP. Read the rest of this entry »