With one exception, all the 12 records reviewed here I was either given or bought last year. Not all of them were released in 2024 – in fact, relatively few were – but they were the ones that intrigued me the most or occupied more of my listening time. There is no real pattern to genre or type – I have fairly eclectic tastes – but I consider all of them to be successful in what they set out to achieve. Plus, of course, this is a highly personal list. Nonetheless, I do think that if mainstream ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ or whatever is not for you, you may find something to intrigue here.
- PERE UBU – TROUBLE ON BIG BEAT STREET
In June 2024 a crowd the size of a small city assembled in a field on a farm in Somerset. Their brains left at the gate, their cranial cavity was filled with a nauseating sonic syrup courtesy of Chris Martin and his band Coldplay. Due to an oversight by the promoters, vomit bags were not supplied.
[At this point I shall take the liberty of telling you my Coldplay Story:
Around 15 years ago the mother of a close friend found herself at an upscale cocktail party in London, seated next to Chris Martin’s mother. An exchange between Mrs Martin and an elderly London socialite went something like this:
‘So, Mrs Martin, you have two boys?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And what are their occupations?’
‘Well, one works in the City for a top merchant bank, and the other is the singer in a world-renowned pop group’.
‘Really?’
‘Yes’.
Pause
‘Which bank?’]
Those who found themselves psychologically compromised by exposure to the banker’s brother’s saccharine sludge could gain ready relief by slapping on the turntable Pere Ubu’s most recent album, Trouble on Big Beat Street, released the previous year. Given up for dead, metaphorically if not literally, but also potentially both, David Thomas, poet, philosopher, highly idiosyncratic performer, and a person wholly committed to their art no matter what the cost, takes another dive into his fevered imagination to sing of tortured love, Moss Covered Bondoogles and the history of the blues, among other concerns. In the spoken word introduction to Worried Man Blues he speaks of Robert Johnson allegedly selling his soul to the devil to gain his remarkable talent: ‘Pablo Picasso never sold his soul to the devil but a black guy from the Delta? I guess that’s gotta be the explanation.’ At times Thomas ventures into Captain Beefheart terrain, there are no concessions to zeitgeist trends and this is an album few thought would be made. The added bonus of a cover of the Osmonds’ Crazy Horses neatly summarises the very concept of a Pere Ubu album in 2023.
The CD release features an extra 7 tracks. All essential listening.
2. PHOEBE BRIDGERS – PUNISHER
Eccentric, beguiling, by turns lyrically darkly surreal and playful, Punisher is Phoebe Bridgers’ tribute to her hero Elliott Smith. Subtle, restrained performances from her band are reminiscent of indie-psychonauts Neutral Milk Hotel and nu-Americana acts such as Iron and Wine and Smith himself, with influences reaching back to Nick Drake and the Velvet Underground. Bridgers’ lyrics are by turns surreal, emotionally direct, surreally emotionally direct, and at times just a touch bonkers. Of the title track she says
‘I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, “Alright. This is a simple tribute song.” It’s kind of about the neighborhood [Silver Lake in Los Angeles], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I’m a punisher — that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you’re at Thanksgiving with your wife’s family and she’s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they’re sweet, they’re just talking to you and they don’t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you’re trying to escape: That’s a punisher.’
3. NALA SINEPHPRO – ENDLESSNESS
The title tells all: this is floaty ‘spiritual’ jazz that whirls you away into a meditative space. Swirling strings, bleeping analogue synths, a sense of weightlessness. Perfect for any environment where you want to pause the neurosis of contemporary life and float off into the psychic ether. And not a trace of schmaltz or sentimentality. An excellent cast, including contributions by Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson, British Jazz saxophonist Nubya Garcia and Sons of Kemet percussionist Natcyet Wakili, who all add subtle, unhurried touches. No grandstanding or star solos. The results are mesmerising.
For further listening see Pharaoh Sanders and Floating Points’ wonderful 2021 album Promises.
4. LONDON BREW
Nubya Garcia and 11 British jazz musicians, including members of the Sons of Kemet, also contribute to this highly impressive tribute to Miles Davis’s legendary 1970 release, Bitches Brew. Initially intended to be recorded and performed 50 years later during 2020, the covid pandemic scuppered those plans. Recorded over three days in December 2020 just five days after the lifting of the second covid lockdown, the album channels the spirit of Davis’ groundbreaking original without attempting specific reference points. A double album distilled from over 12 hours of material, the first two tracks are the most dynamic. From there on the energy dissipates somewhat, but the whole is never less than engaging. One of the better Miles tributes and a must-have for enthusiasts of the current wave of British jazz.
5. NADINE SHAH – FILTHY UNDERNEATH
I feel trapped in this stillness
Trapped on this island
Trapped in this dilapidated schizophrenic seaside town
You keep it
UKIP it
You cursed it
I don’t want to hear it
Don’t tell me your secrets
I’m exhausted
A taste of the lyrics from Sad Anonymous Lads, a track from British singer and songwriter Nadine Shah’s fifth album. This is a woman who has been through it all – mental illness, addiction and rehab, the death of her mother, a suicide attempt, the breakdown of her marriage – and who has survived to sing of all this with no trace of self pity and with a wry sense of Geordie humour. At a time when so many female vocalists favour breathless, close-mic’d intimacy, Shah is not afraid to give it some full-bore welly. This is the latest in a run of greatly impressive solo albums and comes highly recommended. Get this, then listen to the rest.
6. VARIOUS ARTISTS – THIS IS FLYING DUTCHMAN 1969-1975
This is a sampler from veteran jazz producer Bob Thiele’s label Flying Dutchman, which featured artists as diverse in their approaches as Lonnie Liston Smith, Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, Ornette Coleman, Gato Barbierie, Gill Scott-Heron, Pete Hamill (the American author, not the Van der Graaf vocalist), Leon Thomas and Duke Ellington. All but Hamill and Ellington are here, and the selection of acts featured includes Thiele’s own band, Emergency, with contributions from Cesar, Esther Marrow, Harold Alexander and Steve Allen. Thiele laid out a direction for Black music to develop as acoustic jazz and Chicago blues waned in popularity (with American audiences, at least), funky soul James Brown-style was on the rise and a new decade approached. Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Whitey On the Moon are an ideal introduction to his work, and these and Liston Smith’s rare groove classic Expansions, and the title track of Ornette Coleman’s album’s Friends and Neighbours are worth the price of admission alone. A great introduction to an exemplary label.
7. PERE UBU – DUB HOUSING
The second Pere Ubu record in this list comes with the confession that I listen to Pere Ubu almost obsessively, but to fill a top dozen albums of the year list solely with a selection of the collected works of David Thomas and his assorted traveling companions would be a bit weird (I am currently working on an extensive overview of the complete works for this august organ, but that’s for another time).
1978’s Dub Housing, along with its predecessor The Modern Dance, established Ubu as one of the greatest American post-punk bands, eclipsing all the competition with the sole exception, perhaps, of Marquee Moon-era Television – with the essential difference being that David Thomas is very funny, an important distinction with music as idiosyncratic as this. Put on the opener, Navvy, to see what I mean. Thomas’s manic warblings were seldom so compelling and the band underscore his eccentric performances with subtle economy; the overall effect being that essentially this is a record, like most Ubu recordings, that stands apart from comparison to other artists’ work.
Dub Housing was Ubu’s second album, and their last of (relatively) straight songs before they wandered off the path of mainstream post-punk to see what lay in more distant pastures, losing in the process much of their audience and the patience of their label. The follow-up, the classic New Picnic Time, began an era of an increasingly experimental approach that would see the band gradually dissolve over the next three albums before a six-year hiatus and their ‘comeback’ ‘pop’ record, The Tenement Year, in 1988. But that’s several more stories.
8. CANNONBALL ADDERLEY – SOMETHIN’ELSE
One of a series of late 50s/early 60s classic jazz reissues at pocket-money prices, this is an essential release for anyone into the ‘cool’ jazz of the time, and with Miles Davis as sideman and uncredited project overseer, and with Art Blakey on drums, what’s not to like? There’s not a duff moment on the album and at around £15, a steal.
9. UWULMASSA – MALAR
This is the only entry in this list not on vinyl. I come from a generation for whom something only ‘exists’ and can be ‘owned’ if you can touch it or hold it in your hand. Downloads – which are only coder, and therefore a bit abstract – don’t count. I don’t really consider CDs a desirable medium – they’re an upgrade of floppy discs – remember them? – and jewel cases are a disgrace – but when there’s nothing else available, I will reluctantly buy therm. This is one such case. I appreciate that vinyl is expensive, can be considered a fetish item, is dependent for production on oil, is not always well pressed and can easily degrade over time if not properly cared for. On the other hand, if a massive electro-magnetic pulse wiped out all the hard drives on the planet, you could at least listen to your LPs ( and, yes, your CDs), and they will still be here long after I am gone.
I came across Uwulmassa on Bandcamp and was intrigued by its mash-up of gamelan and electronic music. Quoting from their Bandcamp page, ‘Uwalmassa is the name with which DIVISI62, arts & music collective from Jakarta, Indonesia, perform and produce music.’ The push-and-pull of acoustic and electronic instruments creates a whole that is hard to define – part an obscure offshoot of dance music, part industrial, all entirely unlike anything else. This isn’t ‘difficult’ experimental music, but it is unconventional in its own discreet way. A hidden gem.
10. Charlie xcx – Brat
Needless to say, I’m the wrong everything for this – age, gender, pronoun-preferences, height, weight, shoe size. This is aimed primarily at people young enough to be my grandchildren. Yet that doesn’t stop this being a brilliant, summer-defining, Kamala Harris-emboldening (sadly to little effect, ultimately) pop album. Snotty, abrasive (Brats smoke cigarettes (to the disapproval of much of mainstream America, of course – that being the point- and exude a fuck-you attitude) – curiously moving in parts, Charlie xcx has positioned herself as one of the most celebrated and influential pop artists of the day, and this album tells you why. Lacking the imperiousness and self-mythologising approach of an artist like Beyonce, Charlie xcx explores what it means to be young, female, self-aware and emotionally and physically vulnerable in a world where social media and the on-going fetishisation of -and hostility towards – young female beauty makes for a potentially highly toxic environment to be young and female in. A brave, beguiling record.
11. The Beatles – 1962-1966 Remixed
There’s little to be said about The Beatles that hasn’t already been said better and countless times before. The reason this release of the Red Album remixes is low on this list is not because I necessarily prefer or rate more highly the entries above it, but because more recent material is notionally of greater interest.
The best way to listen to any album in the Beatles’ catalogue from which these selections are drawn – from Please Please Me to Revolver – is in the original mono. Stereo mixes of everything up to and potentially including Sgt Pepper are pretty dire, with hard separation across the stereo image often leaving a central void. These mixes were only there in the first place because of the burgeoning market for expensive stereo hi-fi in the early to mid 60s. The majority of the band’s key audience – teenagers – would have been listening on a mono Dansette-style record player on their bedroom floor. Stereo mixes were hastily assembled artless crap, which no-one, including the Beatles themselves, really wanted.
The bummer now, however, is that currently available LPs in the band’s back catalogue are only available in these original stereo mixes – even if ‘remastered’ – so to get them in mono, and to hear them as the band originally intended, you have to spend good money on collectors’ editions on ebay.
This (very expensive – two of the band are dead and surely no-one needs the money?) triple album features very clever full-spectrum AI-enabled stereo remixes by Giles Martin which breathe new life into many of these iconic songs, while correcting the disorienting drums-piano-and-handclaps-on-the-left, everything-else-on-the-right stereo originals. And, you get an extra LP of tracks not included on the original release. Reactionary Beatles obsessives decry this, claiming it to be akin to rewriting the bible, but that’s nonsense. The real tragedy is that for the early albums now you have to fork out good money for naff stereo reissues. Someone write in and complain.
12. Miles Davis – LIVE IN LONDON 1969
One of a series of grey-area semi-official releases of Miles and his band reinventing the form for a late-60s rock audience underwhelmed by conventional acoustic jazz. Much has been made of the controversy surrounding Miles’ 1969-75 ‘electric’ period; his recognition that the music world had undergone radical changes, that there was good money being made by Black artists such as Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and that he wanted some of it. Whether you approved of this new direction or not, you’d be hard put to deny that the intensity and at times almost uncanny levels of intuitive communication between the players is highly impressive. This is challenging music, both one assumes to play and certainly at times to listen to, but it avoids the self-indulgence of much of what passes for ‘free’ jazz, and at its best it is utterly rivetting. There’s a lot of this stuff available, both officially and otherwise, and pretty much all if it is worth listening to. If you can grab copies of the ‘complete sessions’ box set editions of In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson and (particularly) On the Corner, your life will almost certainly be enhanced.
Many of Miles’ bandmates would go on in the early 1970s to form their own ‘fusion’ bands, often with depressing results. Whether acceptable to mass taste or not, this period of his career would produce its own genre of music seldom improved upon, including by the man himself.
This recording was made at Ronnie Scott’s. I was living in London at the time and I wish I’d been there. Wondrous stuff.
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Keith Rodway