All week long here on Melting Pot we’ve been taking a look at the year in music for 2012. Today’s post focuses on the best new releases I heard in 2012. As has been the case the last couple of years, this was the easiest list to put together, with very clear personal favorites (perhaps, thankfully, largely out of step with general consensus favorites) and a slew of other very good records. Thinking about why this might be the case a bit more than previous years, I think being at KPFK definitely has an effect on this. Not having a working library or a highly organized music department has the drawback of not getting a full sense of everything that is out there and it comes out and, especially in one particular case on this list, it means that I’m very late to the party with records that should be on my radar immediately. However, the benefit of having to hustle for each and every single bit of the music you play on the radio is that when I look for music, I really only mess around with the stuff that I think is really good, instead of bowing to industry pressures or the tastes of others. So, with further adieu, here are my top 5 new releases for 2012.
***Honorable Mentions: Kelan Phil Cohran & the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – Kelan Phil Cohran & the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (Honest Jon’s), Sureshot Symphony Solution – Elegant Aggression (Nature Sounds), Allo Darlin’ – Europe (Slumberland), Quantic & Alice Russell with the Combo Barbaro – Look Around The Corner (Tru Thoughts), Menahan Street Band – The Crossing (Dunham/Daptone)
5. Michael Kiwanuka – Home Again – Cherrytree/Polydor/Interscope
Michael Kiwanuka – Any Day Will Do Fine
Michael Kiwanuka was one of several bright young stars to emerge over the past year after the 2011 release of his Tell Me A Tale EP spread like wildfire from across the UK to the States and likely every where else…except to me. I was VERY late on the Kiwanuka train, with my former midnight brethren on KCRW beginning to play him in May 2011, I didn’t hop on board until January of this year. Kiwanuka is a rare talent. A gifted singer and songwriter with a distinctive voice, that is evocative of others, without actually sounding like others. His sound looks to the past for inspiration, but isn’t completely anchored in a single style. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than on “Tell Me A Tale,” which begins with a weightless, breezy sound of flutes, guitars and drums that might remind the listener of Traffic, Astral Weeks era Van Morrison or Nick Cave, until those horns come in which give the song a rougher edge. Then comes the shift, so abrupt it’s as if you just walked into another room of music. It shouldn’t work, but I can’t imagine one side of the song without the other. While “Tale” is an unqualified highlight, it’s not even the best song on the album (which as you’ll find out tomorrow is “Rest”). From start to finish one of the most satisfying and stunning debuts in recent memory.
4. Ana Tijoux – La Bala – Nacional
I might be in the minority in this thinking, but 2012 did not seem like a particularly strong year for Hip-Hop. There were some solid releases, but few standouts that you could put up against the best of years past. Ana Tijoux’s La Bala was an exception, a truly exceptional and varied Spanish language Hip-Hop release that shows growth from an artist who we thought was already on top of her game. Few artists in the history of the genre have as easily balanced social commentary, fierceness, tenderness and lyrical and musical excellence the way that Tijoux has and we are very lucky to bear witness to her seemingly ever rising star.
3. Shintaro Sakamoto – How To Live With A Phantom – Other Music
Shintaro Sakamoto – My Memories Fade
This one was quite a nice surprise. Shintaro Sakamoto’s debut arrived with several other releases, mostly psychedelic and avant-garde soundtrack and reissue work and from the look of it I was expecting something more along those lines. Funny thing is, if I had heard of Sakamoto’s prior band, Yura Yura Teikoku, that’s exactly the style of music I should have been expecting from this artist. Instead Sakamoto threw us a bit of curve ball and produced a record of slinky funk and glamish rock sounds that would be as welcome in the mid-1970s as it would have been at the height of the acid jazz movement in the 1990s. One of the most consistently enjoyable listening experiences of 2012 and this year’s “Don’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover” winner.
2. Dirty Three – Toward The Low Sun – Drag City
Perhaps I’m genetically predisposed to have included Australia’s Dirty Three in this list. As is clear from dedicating my 100th show entirely to the band, they are a very long-time favorite. After 7 entirely too long years there were many directions the band could have gone. After reuniting and performing their legendary album Ocean Songs at a few festivals, they might have produced something a similarly epic and elegiac. Or they could have continued with the trend from their most recent record until this one, 2005’s Cinder which saw them scale things down and incorporate vocalists to a much higher degree. Perhaps, pushed by Warren Ellis’ recent work with Grinderman, they would come out roaring and burn our ears with sonic fury. Toward The Low Sun in some ways achieved all these things, which is not an easy task, bringing together the terrifyingly ferocious (“Furnace Skies”) with the wistfully melancholic “Sometimes I Forget You’re Gone” to the stridently elegant “Rising Below” as well as the majestically rocking (“That Was Was”) and all the way back to the heartbreakingly beautiful (“You Greet Her Ghost” and one of the best songs the band has ever produced, “Ashen Snow”). Here’s to hoping we don’t have to wait another 7 years for more music (or a return trip to Los Angeles!) from this magnificent band.
1.Adrian Younge & Venice Dawn – Something About April – Wax Poetics
Adrian Younge & Venice Dawn – Two Hearts Combine
Something About April was one of the first records I heard in 2012. A lot of times with records that come out at the beginning of the year are lost in the flood of releases that follow, but that was not the case with this record. Overall, Adrian Younge was a presence that was hard to ignore over the past year. In a lot of ways, 2012 was the year of Adrian Younge, as also scored the music for the Black Dynamite animated series, did guest work on several releases (including Gaslamp Killer’s debut Breakthrough and a scintillating EP with Adrian Quesada) and recorded two other full-length records, one with William Hart of the Delfonics and the other backing Ghostface Killan (both to be released here in 2013)! Along with contemporaries on the East Coast in the Daptone family and here on the west coast with groups like Connie Price & the Keystones and Breakestra, Adrian Younge has a very careful attention to sound in presenting his own take on what might be described as “retro-soul.” Using largely vintage equipment helps to get the sound just “right,” but there’s much more at work here than simply attempting to recreate the styles of the past. In a lot of ways Something About April could be described as a “Post Hip-Hop” album. While there are moments, such as “Two Hearts” that to a degree evoke Charles Stepney’s production work with Rotary Connection and others, the crispness of the drums and the open-ness of the breaks speak to someone not only fascinating with the sound of older music, but hearing it through particular ears that have been attuned to listen in particular ways that comes from growing up with Hip-Hop. That sound is the culmination of a man who musical gifts largely emerged out of frustration with the inability of sampling technology to produce what he could hear in his mind, so he taught himself to play many many instruments. When that wasn’t enough he actually created instruments, such as the Celeste, which is kind of like a super-sized (in terms of what it can do) Mellotron. Without a doubt there wasn’t a single new record last year that I listened to more often to, sang along to more often (though I can’t always hit those Loren Oden high notes!), nodded my head to more often or was more responsible for almost snapping my neck just because of how hard and tight those drums were throughout than this one right here. Absolutely the best record of 2012.