Clue #1: Uncut Magazine includes a "Best of 2012" CD in their year-end issue, and after listening to it, I was truly, deeply, totally depressed. Really? This is it?? It sounds a) bad, b) derivative, and c) totally nondescript. I was depressed because here it was, proof positive that I was totally out of the loop, ready for my senior discount at the local buffet trough. And yet...and yet. I checked Entertainment Weekly's list, as well as Rolling Stone's. Not one single title from Uncut made it to either list. Understand that Uncut is a British publication, but they fawn over non-Brits like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, so wouldn't there be at least some cross-over? Then I figured it out; it's not a "Best of 2012" so much as a "Best of 2012 That We Could Get The Rights to for Our Free with Purchase CD" -- but that doesn't scan so well, does it?
Clue #2: My son and I have remarked over the years that Rolling Stone reviews don't hold up very well. Take Led Zeppelin, for example. Cut to ribbons in the reviews of their first 2 LPs (not that I don't disagree), but a few years pass, and now Rolling Stone crowns LZ Rock Gods, over and over and.... Umm, rewrite history much? And here we have the "Best of 2012", and it's packed with what originally earned 2 1/2 or 3 stars out of 5 earlier this same year. Hard to compile at "Best of" in a duff year without padding out the team.
My best? I'd have to take a page from Stephen King (yes, yes, I get it) who listed the best books of the year by which ones he's actually read in 2012, so with that caveat, here goes, in no particular order, CDs I purchased in 2012 that I can recommend:
Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban: Mambo Sinuedo
I came late to the party to the whole Buena Vista Social Club thing, but I eventually succumbed. Both BVSC and Ibrahim Ferrer's albums are favorites, but I liked the "Mambo Sinuedo" album because they avoided the museum preservation intent, and just played some tacky surf-Mex K-Mart music out of sheer joy.
Kate Rusby: Sweet Bells
Yorkshire accents, Christmas tunes and local brass band arrangements: total Christmas bliss.
Radiohead: King of Limbs
I'm writing this while listening to Bill Laswell's remix/reconstruction of some Miles Davis tracks, this one is "Rated X/Billy Preston"...and I'd swear Radiohead know this music inside out. "King of Limbs" was a long, long process of assimilation for me -- but then I saw YouTube clips of their live versions and I think I began to grasp the muli-layered inventivesness of their approach -- and by being so inventive (like Miles), they forestalled the whole "play the hits as we remember them" future that encases rock bands in amber.
Next: Fleetwood Mac! Tony Rice! Blue Nile! and, ladies and gentlemen, "Steel Rails Under Thundering Skyes" (their spelling, not mine).
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