Hits 1999
Rock/Kevin Courtney
Macy Gray: On How Life Is (Sony)
There have been a few good CDs released this year, such as Blur's 13, Basement Jaxx's Remedy, Suede's Head Music and Travis's The Man Who. Only one certifiable classic has emerged, however, and that's the debut album by shy, soft-spoken American singer, Macy Gray. If an album can have across-the-board appeal yet still retain a gritty, street-level authenticity, then On How Life Is fills the requirements to a T. The single, I Try, is just a taster for the delectable soul food on offer here, which includes the lipsmacking funk fare of Why Didn't You Call Me?, Do Something and Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak.
Death In Vegas: The Contino Sessions (Concrete)
Following their fine debut, Dead Elvis, DIV enlist the help of Iggy Pop, Bobby Gillespie and Dot Allison to create a superb, blighted landscape of a record. Richard Fearless and his new partner, Tim Holmes, have upped the ante here, mixing grunged-out electro beats with dark, dustbowl rock'n'roll, and delivering at least one sucker punch with Aisha, the creepy tale of a psycho killer narrated by the Ig.
Super Furry Animals: Guerrilla (Creation)
Both Blur and Suede acquitted themselves well with 13 and Head Music respectively, but SFA's third album wins the Britpop prize for sheer quirk, strangeness and charm. With Catatonia going ga-ga and the Manics getting bloated, the Welsh bubble is about to burst, but the Furries stay ahead of the fad with songs such as Do Or Die, Fire In My Heart and the summery Northern Lights.
Classical/Michael Dervan
Pierre Boulez: Repons; Dialogue de l'ombre double (DG)
It's difficult in Ireland, these days, to stay in touch with what has been going on in the wider world of contemporary music at the end of the 20th century. Deutsche Grammophon's new 20/21 series, preparing for the fact that 20th-century music is all about to become the music of the last century, is a welcome major-label initiative that's charting some of the significant landmarks. Strangely, given the severity of Boulez's reputation, the over-riding impressions here are of play, indulgence and enchantment.
Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated. Marc-Andre Hamelin (piano) (Hyperion)
American Frederic Rzewski may be in the line of virtuoso pianist/composers, but there's really nothing musically tame about his mammoth 1975 variations on the Chilean resistance anthem, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, commissioned to share a programme with Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Free-wheeling eclecticism and daunting technical demands are held together in a tight structure which MarcAndre Hamelin conveys as one of the great original works of our time. Two equally impressive North American Ballads complete the disc.
Reger: Cello Suites. Guido Schiefen (Arte Nova)
It had to happen, and Guido Schiefen turns out to be the man who has done it - he has taken some of the music of the 20th-century and approached it almost from a period performance perspective of an earlier century. The results in the three late cello suites by Max Reger - three of the sparest works in the often dense output of a composer whose reverence for Bach was never more clear than it is here - are magical. At under a fiver, one of the year's great bargains.
Folk/Mic Moroney
Dervish: Midsummer's Night (Whirling Discs)
A stormer from this Sligo-based gang. Now with two new fiddlers (Seamus O'Dowd and Tom Morrow), there's more scope to the crisp, propulsive sets: Shane Mitchell's personable accordion, Liam Kelly's flute scatter over the crunching off-beats of Michael Holmes's bouzouki and Brian McDonough's winkle-picking mandolins. The arrangements are looser around Cathy Jordan's nicely sourced songs, with a drowsy, bluesy feel to her beautifully ornamented tinker's lilt. And the belt she gets out of Bould Doherty will wipe your eye.
Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill: Live in Seattle (Green Linnet)
Hayes's second album with his guitarist partner comes live from his adopted home town. All the trademark touches are intact: the bright dither, the drugged cat's miaow glissandos, but with a great new emotional vigour. Cahill is perfectly pitched, swingcoloured, often minimalist, although he lets a bit of hair down here and there. The highpoint is the 28-minute session, slithering from the haunted Blasket air, Port na bPucai, through an unbroken set of reels, barn dances, jigs and hornpipes before the delirious, gasket-blowing riff on Pachelbel's Canon. Superb.
Christy Moore: Traveller (Sony Music)
Christy's big percussive mutter and hurting naivety is treated to big, bowel-shaking, industrial production here, along with The Edge's pedalscapes, an electronically altered Liam O'Flynn, Donal Lunny, etc. The new cyber-Christy revisits old territory like Raggle Taggle Gypsio and Rocky Road to Dublin - a roaring, atavistic dance classic - and he adds new blood to the spooky fratricidal song, Tell it Unto Me and the disturbing incest/child-murder song, The Well in the Valley, both learnt from the late Mayo Traveller, John Reilly. Best of the lot is Siren's Voice, which excoriates our mealy-minded Irish racism and landlordism ("living off our hard-earned surplus"). When Christy raises a visionary lather like this, he packs an electrifying lash.
Dance/Jim Carroll
Basement Jaxx: Remedy (XL)
Basement Jaxx's Remedy stands tall as the feel-good album of the year. A set with all manner of giddy qualities, it was the carnival sound of Basement boys Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe living a peculiarly south London "vida loca". Their recipe for success was simple. Take generous measures of roughcut ragga, sexy US house and oddly angled hiphop hybrids, add a few level teaspoons of soul and a mighty shaking of old-skool Latin boogie. Blend quickly, bring to the boil and serve. The results, as we could see from Jump & Shout, Rendez-Vous and Yo Yo, were 100 per cent dynamite.
Nightmares On Wax: Carboot Soul (Warp)
When it came to downbeat albums for the wee small hours, George Evelyn and Nightmares On Wax delivered Carboot Soul and we could finally take Smokers' Delight off the turntable. An album which shimmered gently in all the right places, it became a soundtrack for sunrises in Spain and sunsets in Galway not to mention all those quiet hours in between. Taking hip-hop into a slow-motion world where its soulful qualities came to the fore, George Evelyn's vision was perfectly pitched for 1999's summer of slack.
Quannum: Spectrum (Mo Wax)
Hip-Hop and R&B didn't disappoint in 1999 with the likes of Mos Def, Blackalicious, DJ Spinna, TLC, Missy Elliot and Timbaland delivering albums which stood up to repeated listens. Yet few were as warm and welcoming as Quannum's Spectrum. The work of a collective which includes DJ Shadow alongside Jurassic 5, Blackalicious and other US west coast hip-hop heads, Quannum was made for its time. Showing hip-hop's organic and subtle qualities, tracks like Concentration became year long favourites. And there's talk of a new DJ Shadow record in 2000 to whet appetites further.
Jazz/Ray Comiskey
The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973)
Despite a marvellous range of new albums, some reissues were just too important to ignore. The Ellington centenary year dominated jazz reissues with the release of this massive 24-CD set; it includes the great early-1940s band and some brilliant final flourishes in documenting the Duke more thoroughly than ever before.
The Complete Lionel Hampton Quartets and Quintets with Oscar Peterson (Verve: five CDs)
Another reissue set, this is such an exuberant example of joyously competitive swing that it, too, has to be there.
After that
It's take your pick time from any number of outstanding albums; Brad Mehldau's Art of the Trio Four and solo Elegiac Cycle (both Warners); Bill Evans's highly-charged Homecoming (Milestone), made shortly after his beloved brother's suicide; Pee Wee Russell's timelessly great confab with Buck Clayton, Swingin' With Pee Wee (Prestige); Dejan Terzic's Four For One (Naxos), with George Garzone in coruscating form; Dick Morrissey ditto on It's Morrissey MAN! (Redial). But for me it's between Mehldau's Art of the Trio Four, Terence Blanchard's Jazz In Film (Sony) and Florian Ross's Suite for Soprano Sax and Orchestra (Naxos) - both outstanding orchestral albums; Ross tries for more and succeeds, but Blanchard's is so beautifully crafted it's a shame to leave it out. And Mehldau's is now a great trio. I can't decide.
Opera/Arminta Wallace
Andreas Scholl: Ombra Mai Fu (Harmonia Mundi)
Apart from those who collect historical recordings or have travelled to the outer reaches of early music, opera buffs have had a tough time of it this year. Three Tenor Syndrome seems to have transmogrified the recording scene, with the major companies putting all their eggs in MOR crossover baskets - Andrea Bocelli, Leslie Garrett, Charlotte (God help us) Church - and everybody else wondering how to compete. One way to leave the opposition standing is to bring out an intelligent compilation which combines sophisticated programming, snappy presentation and a voice to die for. Andreas Scholl's Ombra Mai Fu did all that, and more: a selection of Handel arias and instrumentals with the Academie fur Alte Musik, it was a stunning demonstration of how to get everything right, and its shimmering purity deservedly catapulted the German countertenor to superstardom.
Jose Cura: Verismo (Erato)
If you can't stand countertenors and hate Handel, you'd do well to flee to the less rarefied operatic atmosphere of e Cura's album Verismo (Erato), with this album, which features the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the Argentinean tenor himself. And if you thought verismo was all yelling, screaming and a man with a smoking gun, this stylish, high-octane selection of pieces by Mascagni, Giordano, Leoncavallo et al will convince you otherwise.
Gian Carlo Menotti: The Consul (Chandos)
But if you want to buy something that will encapsulate the spirit of 1999, go for the new Chandos recording of Menotti's 1950 opera The Consul with the Spoleto Festival Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox and a committed young British cast. A taut, tense asylum-seeker drama with moments of heartrending humour, The Consul gives the lie to the old myth that opera has nothing worthwhile to say about real life, now.
Roots/Joe Breen
Shelby Lynne: I Am Shelby Lynne (Mercury)
This really is the album not to miss. In a year when mainstream country has consolidated its drift from inane to bankably vacuous, this incisive slice of real-life drama, inspired melody and seductive torch singing reminded us just how vital this music can be. When it was released I wrote: "The declamatory nature of the album title is apt. Shelby Lynne is playing this for real. In the process the 30-year-old Virginian with a tragic past has produced one of the albums of the year. This is naked emotion, forged in a cauldron of Memphis soul, Western swing, Spectorish pop, raggedy ass rock and a range of other genres, everything directed by a sure hand and a vivid imagination." I've not changed my mind.
John Prine: In Spite of Ourselves (OhBoy)
On one level this is a very slight effort from one of the foremost country songwriters of his time, a series of old-fashioned country tunes plus one original, the title track. But there is something very special going on here. Prine's cracked pipes are set against the sweet vocals of such as Iris De Ment, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams and our own Dolores Keane, but the 1950s sound they evoke seems frozen in time, nostalgia kitsch of the highest order. Prine's wry sense of humour is evident. However, his versions of these songs are filled with love and respect for the originals.
Compay Segundo: Cien Anos de Son (Warner Bros)
In world music/roots, it was most definitely Cuba's year with the grey-haired stars of Win Wender's evocative movie, The Buena Vista Social Club, releasing a stream of solo albums, of which the best were Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer and this one by the loveable old rogue with the shark-like smile. He may be cruising into his 90s but Segundo is an entertainer to the last, and one who is clearly enjoying his late date with the stars.
Sleeve Notes returns next week.
