Dublin Opinion

My choice for album of the year for 2009, Merriweather Post Pavilion from Animal Collective, was released fairly early in the proceedings; January, in fact. I had thought that the music industry wisdom was not to make new offerings in that month, as nobody is buying after Christmas. Perhaps that memo was rescinded and now, for some reason, January is prime time. In any case, for my money, with 2010 barely into its infancy, there have already been not one, not two, but three great new records in contention for album of the year this year.

It’s been almost five years since Four Tet last released a ‘proper’ album, and this year’s There Is Love in You is a cracker. Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has been plenty busy in the interim with remixes, collaborative work, and side-projects; this new album, however, harks back to the great Rounds album in 2003 but with gliding vocals, dubstep, and a fuller but still very mellow sound. Here’s Plastic People:

I thought I had just lost track of Tindersticks, the way you sometimes lose track of bands when one album bleeds gently one into another, but it turns out that the band had broken up for a number of years. So it wasn’t me, it was them. In any case they are back, in a changed guise, a stripped-down personnel roster (now including our own David Kitt), and with a positively upbeat chipper sound on Falling Down A Mountain. Here’s Black Smoke:

And then, out of the blue we hear that Gil Scott-Heron has a new album out, this week in fact (OK, so it’s now no longer January, but work with me here…). This is really unexpected - Scott-Heron hasn’t really been around for the longest time (he’s been in prison, but his troubles are well documented so we’ll leave that alone). I’m New Here clocks in at an all-too-brief 28 minutes - from many artists this would seem lazy - here, though, it just means you’re going to be hitting ‘repeat’ a bunch of times. It’s beautiful, and while the voice is clearly that of a man pushing on in years, the authority is retained. This is him covering Robert Johnson’s Me And The Devil:

For a while, the entire album is being streamed on his website.

Musically, a great start to the year. The other 11 months have their work cut out for them.