by Something Else Reviews
Over the last few weeks, this merry band of music lovers has offered its varied take on the Year That Was. Now, we winnow it all down.
First to go were the personal obsessions (Mark: Mary Halvorson; Pico: Greg Ward’s Fitted Shards), and other worthy entries that somehow didn’t gather critical mass (Tom: Field Music; Nick: Neil Young’s Le Noise). No, to make The Official™ SomethingElse! Top 10 for 2010, there had to be two or more of us in agreement as we gathered around the water coolers at SER Towers.
The one we liked the best, the one that appeared on the most lists, was John Mellencamp’s late-career triumph No Better Than This. After that, perhaps expectedly, it got interesting. There are entries from old favorites (Pat Metheny, Buddy Guy, Brian Eno, Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden) as well as some newer obsessions (The Black Keys, Anders Osborne, Carolina Chocolate Drops). It wasn’t easy. Tom, for instance, had to settle the roaring, nearly year-long debate over Nels Cline’s “Dirty Baby” versus “Initiate.”
So, without further ado, we bid a fond adieu to 2010 with our composite must-do listens for the year. (Click through the writer’s name for complete reviews):
Mark Saleski: All of these years have passed since John “Cougar” hit the rock scene, but it seems that Mr. Mellencamp is finally settling into his true self. The writing is direct, raw, and hard to forget.
Nick DeRiso: A steely realism, borne out of disappointment, seems to have welled up inside of John Mellencamp. Even as he’s locked in a desperate struggle to rebuke fame’s dimming heat, Mellencamp can’t get away from every adulthood’s sharp-edged themes: “I’m sick of life, and it’s lost its fun,” he sings in “A Graceful Fall.” “I’ll see you in the next world, if there really is one.” A dark, and disturbing triumph.
Pico: Well, it won’t make you smile but these dusty tunes just might touch your soul. Years past his commercial peak, Mellencamp is at an artistic one.
Mark Saleski: The intimacy of this recording is just phenomenal. Two musicians come together to make a subtle statement of their shared histories.
Pico: In choosing familiar songs, Jarrett once again invites listeners to focus on interpretation of beautiful melodies, and not labor to determine what the melody is. Haden’s playing is always unfussy, stands out with a down home woody tone and a produces a pulse as natural a human heartbeat.
Pico: Brothers goes hard for an analog vibe that summons the time where the 60s turned into the 70s, and to someone who is old enough to remember when that vibe was fresh and new, this record pushes all those old, dusty buttons with me. Richly evocative but manages to stand out on its own, more than anything I’ve heard from the realm of rock this year. Those attributes alone don’t make it a good record, but it’s enough to lift it above a pack of other superb albums.
Tom Johnson: Many will try to place the emphasis on Danger Mouse’s production, bringing the modern touches to the dirt-n-grime blues-rock, but the songs have to be there first. These are great songs.
Nick DeRiso: Singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney return, in many ways, to their template — the blue-eyed soul, the lo-fi atmospherics — but that doesn’t mean these well-known acolytes of the urban mid-century blues cliche have stopped hybridizing black music into modern rock. They’ve just skipped forward a few decades into the 1970s — complete with blaxploitation grooves and ghostly new Curtis Mayfield-esque vocals from Auerbach. It sparks a complete return to form inside Brothers, even while advancing the Black Keys’ core sound.
Pico: Metheny uses a beastly, old-fangled contraption to reveal more of what’s on his musical mind. It reveals the mind of a genius.
Tom Johnson: The concept sounds pretty, well, awful, but were you to just listen to any track without knowing what was going on, you’d be hard pressed to say you weren’t listening to a real, live, human-backed band. That’s only part of the magic here – the rest is Metheny’s music, which is as solid as ever, and in some cases, better.
Mark Saleski: Metheny’s love letter to the history of mechanized music making. Thank goodness for Pat’s Grandfather’s player piano, as it was the (indirect) inspiration.
Nick DeRiso: Easily the Lettsworth, Louisiana, native’s most consistent recording in years, and one that most resembles the liquid-fire aggression of his live performances. Buddy Guy is not disappearing quietly into any good night. In fact, if he ever goes down, this record makes clear that it’ll be swinging.
Pico: Guy looks back at his legendary career by showing everyone precisely what made it so legendary.
Pico: He uses genres interchangeably as a means to an end, avenues of the familiar to create things unfamiliar. His clashing of beauty with abrasion mirrors inner conflicts all people face, giving his music a human element just from its complex demeanor. That’s Nels Cline for you: always probing, shoving aside musical barricades and regardless of where he trespasses, you always know it’s him.
Tom Johnson: Particularly liked disc one, which finds the Singers trio in “modern ’70s Miles mode,” with Nels taking Miles Davis’ position on guitar instead, while bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola drill holes in the floor with the bottom end.
Mark Saleski: Bringing back the tradition of black string bands, the Carolina Chocolate Drops runs through a foot-stomping set of blues, country, and old-timey music. It’s just too much fun.
Pico: Makes early 20th century country blues and folk sound hip.
Nick DeRiso: No need to decry the sad regression of a once-perpetually hip — and, when you think about it, appropriately vampiric — egghead/electro-whiz. After a brief, uncomfortable foray into standard musical structures (lyrics?!) on 2005’s Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno returns both to textured, atmospheric wierdness and to exciting rhythmic experimentation.
Pico: A record by an artist who isn’t content to rest on laurels or is done trying to change the world. The scope of the music in here is reflective of the problems of the scope of the world’s problems, but also reflective of its promise to be a better place to live.
Pico: The possessor of a gritty slide-guitar technique, Osborne started out as a bluesman, then veered toward folky singer-songwriter. But on American Patchwork, he puts it all together, and puts it together so, so well. Every song is either very good or just downright fantastic, and none sound like any of the other ones.
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- Nick DeRiso’s Best of 2015 (Rock + Pop): Death Cab for Cutie, Joe Jackson, Toto + Others - January 18, 2016
- Nick DeRiso’s Best of 2015 (Blues, Jazz + R&B): Boz Scaggs, Gavin Harrison, Alabama Shakes - January 10, 2016
