The intriguing thing about the process for arriving at my Album of the Year 2012 is that all but one of my long-list to be whittled down to that final selection was a debut effort, and the other came from an artist that I was previously completely unaware of. So could this be an indication of yet another changing of the guard?
I hope so, because if we did anything with our ‘Revolution’ of fifty years ago, it was to lay down a marker that the music scene should never be allowed to become predictable. Neither should it be the domain of what purports these days to be the NME, where anything is simply uncool if produced more than five minutes earlier, or if not made by an artist considered as a legend simply because they have never submitted to a decipherable interview. Continue Reading
I have probably purchased more albumsduring 2011 than for some years and, what’s more, it’s been more difficult than I can remember for many years to select a short list of just the ten. So quite a bounce-back for this, my 49th annual round-up which includes my album of the year 2011 . Hopefully my fiftieth will be just as interesting next year; if not, I guess I can always do a retrospective!
2010 seemed to be a somewhat slow year on the music scene, reflected in the fact that my album purchases were probably the lowest they have been this century; in fact quite a lot of the output seemed to have somewhat of a retrospective air about it, including the influences that inspired possibly half of this year’s selections and the final choice for Album of the Year 2010 .
