Somewhere along the way, 2009 became the Year of the Great Live Album.

First, there was Leonard Cohen’s Live in London– a rich, vibrant, and often hilarious album that cherrypicks the best songs from one of the all-time great songwriters, matches them with cheerful stage banter and crisp full-band performances, and ends up being the essential Leonard Cohen album.

Then there was R.E.M.’s Live from the Olympia, a muscular rock and roll set that sticks to lesser-known songs to tell an alternate– but equally fascinating– history of one of our great rock and roll bands.

Just this week, we’re given the late Nirvana and their fabulous Live at Reading set. If you think a new Nirvana compilation is pointless at this point in history, that this new collection couldn’t possibly reveal anything new about the band… well, you’re on your own: According to MetaCritic, the album is currently the fourth highest-rated recording of the decade. I’ll report that it is indeed a highly worthwhile addition to the Nirvana canon, for devoted fans or newbies alike. The performances are vital, and yes, even joyful– especially on Cobain’s end– and the song selection is about as perfect as these things can get.

And the best is still to come. Tom Waits is set to release his exquisite Glitter and Doom later this month, and it’s not just an essential listen– it’s a revelatory one, almost as great a gift to fans as Orphans was in 2006. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any other album from this year that’s as rich in humor, humanity, and inspired weirdness. I’d say more, but the thing is so full of wonderful surprises, I don’t dare spoil any of them. Just believe me that it is indeed the grand, glorious finale of a remarkable string of bang-up live recordings in 2009.

Tony Allen may not be a star, but he is a legend. In a career that spans five decades, the Nigerian-born drummer has quietly, without a flash of ego or a hint of anything self-serving, pioneered: As a sideman for the great Fela Kuti, he essentially created Afrobeat, and his influence looms large even today. If you’ve never heard his name before, well, that might have something to do with his tendency to work with more charismatic musicians like Kuti and Damon Albarn, while Allen himself prefers to sit in the background, behind his drum kit, and work one monster groove after another.

Jimi Tenor, on the other hand… well, where to begin? The Finnish musician, performance artist, and provocateur has made a name for himself based on his keen affinity for kitsch, his avant-techno compositions, his excursions into acid jazz, and his general weirdness. There’s nothing conventional about the man, and it’s hard to imagine him ever accepting a place in the background like Allen does; he may not be a star, but he does things his way, and there’s no one else like him.

Fitting somewhere between these two legacies– and greatly enhancing both of them– is the fourth volume in Strut Records’ Inspiration, Information series. If you’re not following this series, you’re missing some of the most open-ended and forward-thinking music being made today. The series– which takes two artists who have never met before, throws them in a room together, and allows collaboration and improvisation to happen like magic– started off somewhat tentatively but really took flight in early 2009 with the dynamite psychadelic-jazz fusion of Ethiopian master Mulatu Astatke and British troupe the Heliocentrics. But the fourth installment is the series’ best by a mile: Seriously funky and wonderfully weird, #4 summons all of Tenor’s most outlandish qualities and anchors them to Allen’s rocksteady drumming.

The result? A defiantly odd but joyfully fun record that’s pitched somewhere between the conservatory and the dancefloor, experimentation and raw funk, the highbrow and the profane. This is music where a stirring moral treatise is followed by a darkly comedic sex fantasia, where Afrobeat drumming provides the foundation for disco synthesisers and Ron Burgundy-style jazz flute. Tenor tinkers with anything he can get his hands on– vintage keyboards and synths, flutes, sax, skittering hand percussion– while Allen simply drums the hell out of things.

What’s remarkable about this recording is how seamlessly the two personalities integrate, how deftly Tenor’s restless imagination merges with Allen’s funk. Every song here is an experiment, a different sort of side street or dark alley than the one that preceded it, yet every one sounds like it was made for the dancehall.

The set’s opener is a killer, stuttering funk track in which Allen’s circular drumming props up a James Brown horn line. It’s got a sly melody and a killer bass vamp that makes it difficult to sit through, but what knocks it out of the park is the black humor in the rap by vocalist Allonymous, who turns in a winking ode to kinky sex on the dancefloor. The mood of this one is revisited in “The Darker Side of Night,” where Tenor himself sings of sexual pleasure in a way that somehow seems more menacing than seductive, but the flute solo, straight out of 70s-era acid jazz, sweetens the deal.

Cultures clash on a pair of more Afro-centric tracks, but even here, the sound is one of collaboration; there aren’t Allen cuts and Tenor cuts, for it is impossible to imagine any of these songs coming into being without both musicians present. “Sinuwe” is electric blues melded with African drumming and more of those funky horns. A chorus chants lyrics in Nigerian while Tenor tinkers with what sounds like a toy piano and then old analog synths, and Allen lays down a seriously smoldering groove. “Got My Egusi Fix,” meanwhile, is a bilingual track, though it could almost pass for a more traditional Afrobeat number were it not for the jazzy horn section.

Things get topical on a pair of cuts. Allonymous shows up again for a spoken word piece on “Path to Wisdom,” which briefly invokes President Obama before launching into musings on truth and morality in the postmodern age– but it’s not nearly as stuffy as it sounds; thanks to the funky backbeat, the song is a blast, and the words themselves are inspiring rather than overly esoteric or sermonizing. Later, in “Mama England,” gutter poetry and social activism meet in a lowbrow sexual metaphor that lampoons British immigration policy.

But this isn’t an album about politics, or sex, or anything else outside of pure, spontaneous creativity. Each of its nine tracks is a wonder, one that takes some time to wrap your head around but no time at all to get up and start dancing to. My favorite cut? I’d lean toward the slinky reggae of “Selfish Gene,” a wicked-cool ramblin’ song with a mean organ vamp, but I could just as easily point to the thirteen-minute closing epic, “Three Continents” a free-flowing suite that travels the globe without ever leaving the club. Come to think of it, that might be the best way to summarize this sensational recording– this is music that reaches high and far without losing its footing, an album of big ideas but even bigger grooves. It’s a knockout from top to bottom, and it’s almost as fascinating as it is fun.

White Lunar, a compilation of soundtrack compositions by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, comes accompanied by a brief, explanatory note from the artists, identifying the sources of the album’s material: Three feature films, including The Proposition, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and John Hillcoat’s yet-to-be-released The Road, as well as a pair of documentaries from the UK and a selection of unused, archival pieces from the duo. What the brief liner notes don’t explain—and indeed, what is completely absent from the album’s packaging—is exactly how this material is arranged over these two discs: There aren’t even song titles listed, much less an indication of which tracks come from which films, and the casual listener would be forgiven for thinking that all of these compositions come from the same place – which, in a sense, they do.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.

The debut album from Beak> plays out like an eerie flipside to Out of Season, the lone album released by Beth Gibbon and Rustin Man. On that record, Portishead’s lead singer took the band’s confessional slant and their jazzy inclinations in a new direction, making something rustic and organic, a smoky, seductive singer/songwriter album that was all acoustic but still sounded not too far removed from her band’s regular groove. The other half of the Portishead equation is represented by Beak>, led by Gibbons’ partner in crime, Geoff Barrow; this is their experimental side, their moody electronica pushed to the extreme. Taken together, these two albums present a fascinating deconstruction of what makes Portishead tick; apart, they’re entirely different animals, seemingly unrelated if not for the shared banner under which both flags fly.

Gibbons, of course, is the heart and the humanity of the band, and she took those attributes with her into Out of Season. By contrast, Beak> is weird, sinister, and esoteric—vintage Krautrock with a modern flair. It’s low-key and laid-back to the point of being downright creepy: The music is all meandering keyboards over a foundation of skittering drums and throbbing bass. Simple almost to the point of mood music, this stuff is repetitive music that slowly reveals subtle variations over time.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.

I love everything about this movie– which might seem, at first, like an obvious thing to say about one of my favorite films, but it’s particularly meaningful where this one is concerned, for Gosford Park is a movie that attempts so much: It contains multitudes, it juggles an enormous cast of characters and a tangled web of story lines with a greater sophistication than nearly any other movie I know, and it throws equal weight behind everything. There is no character left underdeveloped, no story arc that is not, in some way, rich and resonant.

Altman’s penultimate film– and, in my opinion, his masterpiece– reads very differently in paper than it does on the screen. Technically, one could very truthfully say that this is a traditional British murder mystery, wherein a large number of guests are invited to spend the weekend at a chilly English manor, only to have their holiday shot to hell when their esteemed host– a man whom all of them secretly dislike– is discreetly offed. A bumbling police inspector shows up and comes to the grim conclusion– gasp!– that all of them are suspects.

But the genius of Gosford Park is that the murder plot is almost irrelevant; its significance lies mostly in its use as a structural device, not as the central conflict. The killing doesn’t happen until halfway through the film, and its resolution is deliberately anticlimactic. What makes the movie tick is, well, everything else that happens. And there’s so much happening that it feels like a different film every time I watch. On the first viewing, one tends to be attracted to Helen Mirren’s big revelation at the movie’s end, or perhaps Clive Owen’s dark, brooding secrecy. Subsequently, one might shift focus to Maggie Smith’s hysterical and maddening pretension, or the masked anguish of Kristin Scott Thomas.

I tend to think the key to the movie is Kelly Macdonald: It is through her eyes of innocence and naivete that we see humanity’s cruelty and hypocrisy, but also brief and stirring moments of grace.

And it’s those same eyes– of youthful wonder and close attention– that we are encouraged to watch the movie over and over, for it’s a movie about, ultimately, the things that lie beneath the surface. Class, politics, society, gender, sex, secrets– the film’s themes are many and they are rich, but they are also lurking beneath the surface of this elegant, wise, and witheringly funny movie, one that seems only to grow deeper the more time I spend with it.

#9. Almost Famous (Crowe, 2000)

There have been times when I’ve found it difficult to pick a favorite record for a given year, but 2007 wasn’t one of them. Granted, any time Joe Henry releases a new album, it makes the Album of the Year race fairly tough to call for me, but 2007’s Civilians felt particularly timely and triumphant. Part of it was that the album was the follow-up to Tiny Voices– an album that had by then become my all-time favorite, by Henry or anybody else– and that it had been some four years in the making. But more than that, the album followed on the heels of a particularly turbulent political season and looked ahead to the election cycle that was to come, yet it was not, as Henry has always been quick to point out, a “political album.” Actually, it was a decidedly spiritual one, casting its eye to national affairs but also invoking God’s name on nearly every song and exploring profoundly theological matters– namely, the providence and grace of God, themes it addresses more poetically and richly than any other album I know of, save perhaps Sam Phillips’ A Boot and a Shoe.

Henry was 2007’s true MVP, not only for that album’s superb songwriting but also for his skilled work as a producer, both on Civilians and on a pair of albums he cut for other artists– Loudon Wainwright III’s Strange Weirdos and Mary Gauthier’s Between Daylight and Dark. These three albums are produced immaculately and cut with the same core band, which made them feel, at the time, a bit like a trilogy, though all three have very distinct characteristics. If Henry’s album is about poetry and spiritual exploration, Wainwright’s is about joy and humor, and Gauthier’s about gritty blues. All three are utterly excellent, though, and rank as three of the finest albums from 2007, which I still think of as The Year of Joe Henry.

But if the big story in 2007 was, for me, Joe Henry, it was, for everyone else, Radiohead. In Rainbows appeared from out of the blue at the tail end of the year and made huge waves for its unorthodox release strategy, but, with a little distance, the album is now starting to be celebrated not just for its cutting-edge marketing, but, more importantly, for its standing as a very fine Radiohead album. In fact, it’s become one of my favorites: The sound of it is (comparatively) warm, romantic, and comfortable in its own skin in a way that no other Radiohead album is. When I get a Radiohead itch, it is, more often than not, for In Rainbows.

Another trend: Rock and roll. 2007 was full of great rock, ranging from The White Stripes‘ Icky Thump– their hardest-rocking set, and one of their most peculiar– to Queens of the Stone Age and the loud, nasty, primitive roar of Era Vulgaris. My two favorites might be Arctic Monkeys‘ piledriving rock and roll set Favourite Worst Nightmare and Spoon’s sensational, inspired tribute to pop songcraft, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Rounding out the rock and roll set is Dinosaur Jr. and Beyond, one of the decade’s most thrilling comebacks, an album of great hunger, energy, and roaring rock and roll vigor.

Behind Joe Henry, though, the thing I listened to most in 2007 was The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, a blindingly great pop album for which I hold boundless affection. I’m not sure that anyone else loves the album in quite the same way that I do, but I stand behind it completely: Ritter reshapes American myth and music in his own image, and the album is both heartfelt and incredibly fun. More than anything else, it reminds me of the great Nick Lowe albums of the late 1970s– it’s a jukebox of great songs and styles, but it holds together due to the sheer magnetism of the singer and the consistent nature of the songwriting.

2007 was also the year of what is arguably my favorite soul album of the decade– it’s gotta be either Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me (from 2002) or Bettye LaVette’s The Scene of the Crime. The latter album is an exemplary entry in the genre, for a number of reasons: Not only is it a crash course in the art of song interpretation, with LaVette pulling songs from diverse sources and styles and turning them all into not only soul songs, but soul songs that tell her own, unique story, but it’s also a primer on inspired collaboration; LaVette and her backing band, the Drive-by Truckers, create a speaker-rattling, soul-stirring roadhouse fury, and few soul albums released in the 00s match this one in sure, unhinged fervor or edginess.

And though he didn’t release any album of his own in 2007, Bob Dylan was nevertheless the source– or at least the source material– of one of my very favorite albums from the year, the dynamite two-disc soundtrack to I’m Not There. Dozens of vintage Dylan tunes covered by some of the best artists around, and the whole thing is virtually devoid of clunkers of filler. It’s inspired, and compulsively playable; it still finds its way into my stereo all the time.

And the list goes on and on. Over the Rhine got playful with The Trumpet Child. Maria McKee made her more inspired and colorful album with Late December. Nick Lowe made his best-yet collection of country/rock/R&B gems with the easygoing, romantic At My Age. Arcade Fire mixed politics and religion for the fiery, ferocious Neon Bible. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss got contemplative for the sublime Raising Sand. Patty Griffin turned in another winning set, mixing country and folk and gospel, in Children Running Through. LCD Soundsystem made what might be my favorite dance recording of the decade, Sound of Silver. Nick Cave and some of his Bad Seeds rocked their way through midlife crisis in Grinderman’s self-titled debut. Andrew Bird made one of his most ambitious and provocative works, Armchair Apocrypha. Miranda Lambert gave mainstream country a much-needed dose of rock and roll in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The National turned in working-class poetry with their beautiful album Boxer. And on and on it goes; all told, I’m pretty sure 2007 was my favorite musical year of the decade.

But how about you?

See also: 2000; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; and 2006.

I was a very young rock and roll journalist when this movie– about a very young rock and roll journalist– was released, and I saw enough of myself in this picture to become immediately convinced that I’d just seen my favorite film ever– a movie that seemed to reflect my tastes, my experiences, my values about as well as any film possibly could.

The initial shock of self-recognition has faded, but my love for Almost Famous abides, because, of course, there’s a lot more to the picture than a few eerie glimpses of a younger Josh Hurst. That said, what floors me about this film hasn’t changed much in the past ten years: This is a tight, clear narrative that leaves ample space in which the viewer can find himself. The film is many things– a road movie, a coming-of-age story, a family portrait, an autobiography, a rock and roll picture, a mainstream-ish dramedy that, in an alternate universe, one can easily imagine raking in the Oscars– but what people remember about it aren’t the genre signifieres, but the characters and the little grace notes.

It is also, by the way, a period piece, though, curiously, I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard anyone describe it in these terms. That Crowe renders this world with a journalist’s eye for detail is no surprise, given how closely this movie mirrors his own life experience, but it’s so much more than a recreation of 1970s rock and roll fashion: It is, more crucially, a movie about fashion and the ways in which we transcend it, a story of people engulfed in a culture that’s obsessed with the shallow and the fleeting, people who nevertheless find their way to something true, meaningful, lasting.

That’s the brilliance of Almost Famous: As much as I sincerely love the music and the period detail, the things that stay with me are the ones that ring in my ears as true and universal. There are Penny Lane’s solitary dance, lonely but full of grace; Lester Bangs’ truism about the fleeting nature of popularity and the enduring value of friendship; William Miller’s mother and her conflicted emotions, worrying about him but ultimately trusting that she raised him right.

As for the rock and roll: I still think “Fever Dog” is a kickass song.

#8. Gosford Park (Altman, 2002)
#10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova — who nowadays go by The Swell Season, more or less — are musicians who know the power of small moments. After all, they won fame for their roles in the movie Once, a film that’s about as tiny and intimate as they come, and one of my favorite songs they’ve yet recorded is their cover of Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” a small-scale, acoustic singalong that eschewed the flashy in favor of heart-on-sleeve emotions. Then again, they’re also well-versed in large gestures: Their signature song, “Falling Slowly,” takes very personal expressions and translates them into an anthem of uncommon grandiosity. And who can forget Irglova’s meek acceptance speech at the Oscars — a moment of humility and heartfelt gratitude, amidst Hollywood’s gaudiest display of glitz and razzle-dazzle.

For Strict Joy, their first post-Once collaboration — and their ANTI- Records debut — the duo seeks something of a middle ground. This is a grander production than anything they’ve ever done; There are horns and winds and plenty of production flourishes that take this music well outside the cozy little bedroom from the movie. And yet, this is also an album about little moments, small gestures, human emotions: It’s unashamedly confessional, and it uses the word “feelings” enough to make it clear that this is music about matters of the heart.

Read the rest at Stereo Subversion.

I’ve been a contributing music critic to Christianity Today Magazine for about a year now, and I’ve made an effort to link to some of those CT reviews here when they are posted online. Just today I stumbled across the fact that a handful of my brief, capsule reviews of current releases are available for your perusal. If you’re interested, you can find my quick take on Levon Helm’s Electric Dirt by scrolling to the bottom of this page (or check out the full review here). Additionally, my blurbs about Brian Blade’s Mama Rosa and Madeleine Peyroux’s Bare Bones can be found here.

There’s already been a lot written about the latest Coen Brothers opus, A Serious Man, and I don’t claim the ability or the insight needed to improve on what has been said by my friends Brandon Fibbs, Alissa Wilkinson, and Brett McCracken. I also recommend Roger Ebert’s four-star rave as essential reading on the film.

However, because I’ve written about the Coen Brothers a few times before, and since I make no secret of my great adoration for their work– I generally consider them to be my favorite filmmakers– I wanted to register my general opinions of the new movie.

A Serious Man has been called their most explicitly theological work, which it is, but don’t mistake “explicit” for easy or direct; this is a subtle and sophisticated piece of work. That said, it’s also bold, even aggressive; it doesn’t just consider theological questions under the surface, but shoves our faces into it and demands that we consider its implications. As Wilkinson writes, it’s the most straightforward portrayal of the Coens’ worldview yet– and exactly what that worldview is is very interesting indeed.

The film has been likened, not erroneously, to a modern-day Job story, but it is not a film that simplistically tackles the question of why good things happen to good people (nor is Job, for that matter). The questions raised here are much more complex than that: A Serious Man is about righteousness, justice, and the concept of what we deserve. It’s a film about men and women seeking to earn the favor of a seemingly unsympathizing God, and its final image– a coda equally as abrupt as that of No Country for Old Men– is a chilling picture of the feebleness and insufficiency of our own best efforts at morality.

It’s also a movie about trying to make sense of a world that seems cruelly unfair– though not, vitally, chaotic or random. The Coens are practical nihilists, perhaps, but they don’t deny the presence of order in the universe, or even of a God. Their position seems to be that God does indeed ordain that bad things happen to us, but that we have no hope of making any sense out of it or making things any easier on ourselves. Meanwhile, the film’s thorough skewering of Jewish rabbis gives the clear impression that the Coens have had bad run-ins with organized religion, which is perhaps part of the fire that burns in this, seemingly their most personal and urgent film.

And it is, in many ways, the flipside of No Country for Old Men– a film about the unflinching, unstoppable presence of evil in the world– but it feels like an entirely different animal. No Country had the ring of a film about world events– terrorism, specifically– but this feels like a very personal project in which the brothers ask the questions that are really close to their hearts. And for all its pitch-black comedy, it somehow feels like a film of great compassion, and also openness; one senses that the Coens are sincerely interested in a conversation about these questions, not simply in shooting down traditional Judaism.

In terms of the craft, what is there to say? I have a hard time seeing how this is anything other than their most accomplished and masterful film, flawlessly and audaciously made on every level. It has much of the darkness of No Country and Fargo, the contemplative air of The Man Who Wasn’t There, and the sinister fable-like quality of Barton Fink. Absent is any of the crowd-pleasing frivolity of O Brother, or even the thriller-ish momentum of No Country, though make no mistake: It’s an extremely funny and surprising movie, not a boring or dispiriting one, and in many ways its black humor feels like a more philosophical extension of Burn After Reading.

Which is to say, it’s another entry for the list of Coen classics, a canon that’s almost starting to feel cluttered with great movies. but this one is both quintessential and also very distinct from all the others– a work of moral and spiritual inquiry that is complex and compelling.