With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that.
Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica.
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
In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.
It seems to be the season for light entertainers to show us their musical chops, with Nick Knowles, Bardley Walsh and Jason Manford all doing their level best to prove that they are All Round Entertainters. Matt Berry, however, provides a rather different twist on the comedian-troubadour trope.
The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.
These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.
Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.
Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is
Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.
Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.
And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.
Overleaf: Seven minute feature about Peter Perrett on Newsnight
Possibly named after a variety of magic mushroom, left-field Glaswegian six-piece Golden Teacher have been turning out their very strange idea of party music since 2013. Initially they did so for local freak-fostering collective Optimo but have since appeared via various outlets, finally ending up on their own eponymous label. Their sound is electronic but also organic, with percussion that rolls and sometimes has a touch of the more polyrhythmic, advanced drum circle about it. Don’t let the words “drum circle” put you off for Golden Teacher are an invigorating proposition.
Heavily stewed in the outer fringes of dub where the likes of On-U Sound Records have resided for decades, Golden Teacher are also unafraid to add layers of further psychedelic echo. In the case of “Diop” and the eight minute title track, tribal percussion designed to untether the mind takes over. A good reference point might be the best moments of Micky Hart’s Rolling Thunder album, if it had been made for Nineties clubbers rather than hippies (he’s the bloke out of The Grateful Dead who liked going cosmic on his bongos). No Luscious Life also has a post-punk sensibility, an edge that recalls New York skronk-dance outfits such as !!! and Outhud.
There are a couple of attempts – sort of – at vocal pop, or at least alt-pop, since it sounds nothing like the tween meme phone-piffle that mostly haunts the current Top 10. “The Kazimier” is Grace Jones by way of The Tom Tom Club and the synth-poppy “Spiritron”, a keys-fuelled ode to the singer’s “cosmitron”, is akin to Fujiya & Miyagi attempting to make P-funk.
There’s a lot of music about that doesn’t attempt anything new. Life is blighted by the stuff. Not Golden Teacher. In an era when it’s hard to do so, they use their imagination to push the boat out. This is head-fry music for freaky dancing. If they weren’t named after that psilocybic fungi, they should have been.
Overleaf: Listen to a four minute edit of Golden Teacher "Sauchiehall Withdrawal"
Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”
Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.