A Year of Music

I’m no stranger to loose-limbed freak folk, where songs are more nuclei around which sounds coalesce than any sort of tightly knotted skeins of rhythm, melody and lyric, and perhaps it’s a consequence of spending much of the last week plundering the grand riches of the internet’s many fine MP3 blogs, but Islaja’s Meritie totally disorients me in a way I find very hard to understand or describe. Merja Kokkonen sings her Finnish lyrics in a sweetly meandering voice, engaging with the rest of the music (guitars, piano, various other noisemaking bits) in the way that a bird rides the gusts on a windy day. There’s nothing overtly challenging going on save for the songs’ very free structure, but that lack of structure means these are not songs so much as neatly arranged piles of musical ideas, and Kokkonen’s near-total refusal to engage with typical notions of songcraft lend her songs a hallucinatory, subversive power that makes me giddy and confused in equal measure. I’m not sure it’s beautiful, but it’s certainly sublime.

I love any and all of John Fahey’s guitar playing, but he could really have stood to stay away from using effects. Nothing sounds nastier than 80s digital chorus.

So one of the areas where my preferences intersect with Planet Pitchfork is that I have a serious weakness for the whole freak-folk scene (which is only intensified by my recent discovery of the world of Joe Boyd-produced folk/rock). While I liked Joanna Newsom live back 2004 (when I saw her opening for other freak-folk heavyweights Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and Brightblack Morning Light), I resisted picking up Ys because the reviews made it sound like overindulgent prog wankery (as a side note, I have no idea why I decided that was a bad thing, as I have acres and acres of overindulgent prog wankery in my collection – maybe it was that it was popular, much-hyped prog wankery).

As it turns out, Ys is a meticulously crafted work of genius, and is only overindulgent if you are a frowny-faced fun hater. Its five tracks are overflowing with song, and are almost embarrassingly rich in beautiful melodies and flawless couplets. I’ve listened to it countless times and “Emily” and “Sawdust & Diamonds” still – still – make me tear up every time I hear them. This is not an easy thing to do, people. I was genuinely delighted it when Ys came up on my iPod just now.

Newsom’s masterful poetry (seriously, I think I know good poetry, and for all of Newsom’s four-dollar words, this is as elegant and concrete as poetry gets in 21st century English), distinctively girlish voice (WARNING: her breathy, raw delivery is a deal-breaker for some) and harp playing combines with Van Dyke Parks’ ornate, varied orchestration to create something that has all the subtlety and restraint of a sledgehammer to the forehead. In a good way. Next to this, Joni Mitchell’s experiment in orchestrated folk-pop, Travelogue, is a miserable failure, and the songs on Travelogue are some of the best songs chosen from a 40-plus year career of one of America’s greatest songwriters. I cannot praise this record highly enough.

Choosing to end his Raag Manifestos with a simple old hymn (“Blessed Be the Name of the Lord”) was a good move for Jack Rose. He can produce a storm of sound with two hands and a steel-string guitar, but the uncomplicated rhythms and old-time, major-key vibe of “Blessed Be” sends a sometimes chaotic album out on a sunlit high note. One reason among many why Jack Rose is my favorite of the Fahey-esque folk guitar wizards rambling the backwoods byways of today’s America.

Stuck in head this morning, not for the first time: Fairport Convention's version of "The Deserter", a song so solid, so muscularly present that it permanently changed how I look at "folk-rock". 1969 was an absolutely horrific year for Fairport Convention as a band of musicians, because of a tour van crash that took the life of Richard Thompson's girlfriend Jeannie Franklin and drummer Martin Lamble and put Thompson himself and Simon Hutchings in the hospital. Despite that tragic setback, the band still managed to release 3 of the strongest albums of their career, which would have been a remarkable achievement for any band, at any time: the dense, glancingly prog What We Did On Our Holidays, the effortlessly sophisticated and jazzy Unhalfbricking, and the revolutionary Lief & Liege, their response to The Band's Songs from Big Pink and the album that put electrified English folk on the map.