Nine Feet Underground

Gotta put 2019 behind me!  This will be the final post on last year's music - despite the fact that I keep discovering new things I'd missed (WaqWaq Kingdom, anyone?) and also questioning my final top 10, which admittedly I was doing at the time I compiled the list. Inevitably this will omit many things of note: no doubt I could keep writing until words were written about every album I liked in 2019, but that ain't happening. 2020 is here, and we're all off to hell in a handcart. Looking back is ultimately futile - there is only now and now plus one. It's time to move on, new music is already appearing in 2020 - thank you, Wire, for getting the year off to a great start - gigs are getting booked, starting with Julian Cope, who has a new album, 'Self Civil War', due out in February, and, from what I've heard so far, it's his best in while.  With that in mind, f or the final time then, let's wind the clock back to 2019 and just see what el...

My top 10 albums of 2019 has been a struggle.  Not because there was a shortage of candidates. Far from it.  More because of the sheer impossibility of comparing one piece of music with another, something I've become increasingly bothered by over recent years.  On any given day the albums I might get the most enjoyment from will vary according to my mood and general state of mind.  Not only that, there have been a lot of albums which almost made it into my top 10, and in a few days, if you asked me, I'd probably choose one of them, instead of one in the list (with a few exceptions). Let's also be honest, close up, any year's music is hard to assess. The albums that I'll still be playing a year from now, let alone five years time - and when I say playing, I mean playing in full (I will, of course, still listen, randomly, to tracks from these albums) - may be very different to the ones that provide the most immediate enjoyment now. I've been struggling wi...

A dubious category, if ever there was one: best box sets of 2019? Sounds like something made up as an excuse to shout about some musical peccadillo that doesn't fit into any other category, if you ask me? You betcha, mate! Now, without wishing to start a religious war or equivalent, I have to start by saying that, in general I am resistant to the idea of the box set.  It seems to me it's no different from buying books by the yard to populate a library in a house where none of the books is actually read. The less said about that, the better. Box sets often suffer from two problems. For starters they often collect together everything by an artist, regardless of merit, and let's face it there is no artist, I would argue, that produced album after album of equal brilliance.  (No, not even those four blokes, so leave it out!) The other failing is that they are the musical "five yards of books", a sort of coffee table "look at this, I'm really cool...