Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
It’s telling that, on their 2014 debut LP, Ballad of the Ice, Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi covered Bauhaus’ epic proto-gothic ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The 1979 single, with its incessant shuffle, dubbed-out tape delay and post-punk guitars, straddled the worlds of rock and dance with perfect balance and fine judgment.
The orchestral-electronic sounds which the Erased Tapes label epitomises exist balanced on a knife-edge of extreme tastefulness.
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now.
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately.
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.
In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Posessed of a distinctive, often plaintive voice, to add to the sometimes stark, 80s-influenced production, it is a hugely satisfying listen. There are no stand-outs as such, rather an overwhelming sense of cohesion to the songs which, for the most part, occupy a hinterland somewhere between the home and the club. It’s a collection that it’s very easy to lose oneself in, partly because of the life Autarkic finds in his ice-cold palette of sounds. While the songs boast an incredible degree of craft, this helps them to retain a pleasingly ragged – and human – appeal.
It’s also worth noting that the field this year has been very strong: the release of Gruff Rhys’ soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars was an unexpected delight, Steve Mason gave us his most fully realised solo collection to date, and Xam Duo and The Early Years both made a strong case for Sonic Cathedral to be hailed as label of the year (again) with their respective albums.
Special mention must also go to Hipnotik Tradisi, the extraordinary collision of cultures from George Thompson, otherwise known as Black Merlin. Were it not for the fact that I’d already reviewed it for theartsdesk back in July, it would have been a coin toss to decide which would take the honours for 2016.
Two More Essential albums from 2016
Black Merlin - Hipnotik Tradisi
Gig of the Year
Track of the Year
Vox Low - The Hunt
Overleaf: listen to "The Hunt" by Vox Low
Berlin's electronic music world has been traditionally been very white. Sometimes, as with the inward-looking minimal techno of the 2000s, it could feel painfully so. Obviously a city can't really help the nature of its demographic, but monoculture is rarely healthy for the development of living club scenes – and it certainly needn't be that way.
One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been around the artistic block and back a good few times before achieving his current success. Or Sean Dickson – the singer with Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons, who went from Eighties psychedelic janglers to Nineties baggy-clothed ravers, then faded away.
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous.
“Ooooh, it’s gorgeous!” exclaimed my wife-to-be as we arrived at what had been described as “an oasis in Hertfordshire.” They weren’t kidding, either. The site for the inaugural festival organised by Notting Hill Carnival stalwarts Sancho Panza couldn’t have been more different from West London if it tried. In place of terraced houses there were wall-to-wall trees, the only flyover was the sound of planes headed for Luton across an open sky.