My Top 24 of 2024 (#9 - 7)

My year in music involved lots of these guys...

9. Richard Hawley - In This City They Call You Love

South Yorkshire's answer to Roy Orbison returns with his tenth album, his first in half a decade - it's taken that long to get him out of the pub. Worth the wait, as always, with more timeless songs of love and loss from the dark, windswept streets of Sheffield...

Well, I was born and raised by the river
Slowly it flows through this city of knives
Not too far from the mountain that shivers
Folks work so hard and they stay all their lives
And people in this city call us love

8. The Felice Brothers - Valley Of Abandoned Songs

The guys responsible for my second favourite album of 2021 return with a new record... and a disturbing discovery that they released another one late last year, which I hadn't even heard. (To be fair, it's only available on the Camp of Bands, but it's still a cracker.) 

Beautifully languorous tunes, atmospheric storytelling, movie-like imagery, really quite beautiful.

On the Riverside Promenade
The whippoorwills alighting
A prostitute in pastel tights
Through the shadows striding
In her hand is a single flower
More precious than the Eiffel Tower
It’s a terrifyingly eloquent world
New York by moonlight

7. John Grant - The Art Of The Lie

Another repeat offender; it's impossible to imagine John Grant making a bad record. I've even grown to love his curious obsession with 80s synths. As long as he keeps writing such personal, moving and at times snarkily funny songs, he can back them with accordion, stylophone and hurdy gurdy for all I care.

I see that cubbyhole and where we used to eat together

I see the walls you built

The room where I slept as a child

I went downstairs into the basеment

Even though the lights arеn't on

I can hear the Beach Boys singin'

And my brothers playin' pool

And sometimes I just want to run into your arms

And let you hold me once again

I feel ashamed because I couldn't be the man

You always hoped that I would become

And if you prefer, there's a political edge too...

“This album is in part about the lies people espouse and the brokenness it breeds and how we are warped and deformed by these lies”, he says. “For example, the Christian Nationalist movement has formed an alliance with White Supremacist groups and together they have taken over the Republican party and see LGBTQ+ people and non-whites as genetically and even mentally inferior and believe all undesirables must be forced either to convert to Christianity and adhere to the teachings of the Bible as interpreted by them or they must be removed in order that purity be restored to ‘their’ nation. They now believe Democracy is not the way to achieve these goals. Any sort of pretence of tolerance that may have seemed to develop over the past several decades has all but vanished. It feels like the U.S. in is free-fall mode.”