It is December and this year is almost gone. Most of you will probably find the time to have a musical retrospective on what has happened in music in 2017 and choosing your very own charts. So I will do as well. When I did this the last years I selected the most formidable records that passed my ears, add them up and selected 14 to 16 and featured them on this pages. So I did the same a few weeks ago and I suddenly I had more albums that this decade has years so far. I made a lot of thoughts how to manage it, thinking which album to delete from the list. So I deleted a few albums from the list and after a day I thought it would be wrong to delete just this. I did this for a couple of days and I found a solution. I sorted this records by different kind of groups and found a way to feature most of them.
Let us start with part 1 of the series, featuring artists that I just explored for the first time. Japandroids released their second album Near to the wild heart of life in spring and it was one that grew the more I listened to. The songs are built on simple material like guitar, drums and vocals but arranged absolutely perfect. It is pure rock played on a very high level.
Allvays is a Toronto based band and they also released their second album this year called Antisocialites. It is a fresh sound with crisp guitars, effervescent melodies and summery refrains. Someone reviewed it with this words Yet for all the noisy textures and shimmering sing-alongs on Antisocialites, Alvvays seem intent on masking pain while convincing others, and perhaps themselves, that everything’s fine. It’s a tricky balancing act, but that’s what makes this band so damn endearing.
Weather Diaries by Ride was an album that surprised me well. Not another shoegazing record by the boys from Oxford and it seems like they grown up already. It is a reunion that makes sense to me because they had the time to remember their roots and offer us an album filled with jangly guitars and harmonies
And finally for the first part a record I did not expected by Jane Weaver. I combined her as another folk singer from Liverpool but listening to the first songs on her excellent album Modern Kosmology she surprised me with a verz different sound. It seems as she listened long enough to Krautrock especially Can and Neu and arrived in space/rock and psychedelia. I really love their combination of keyboard sounds, the motor driven drums and her ethereous voice. I cannot remember how often I listened to this record this year.
