Tag: music

My 2025 Records

Ever since last year, I’ve tried to be meticulous in keeping track of the records I’ve bought, played and liked. Or not. A glance at the 2025 report says to me that I added 134 new titles to the inventory, of which 15 were new releases. Some of these 15 were re-issues of older material, e.g., New Model Army’s The Love of Hopeless Causes, or Lianne La Havas’ Is Your Love Big Enough?, or The Durutti Column’s debut album, The Return of the Durutti Column.

I must say that the 2025 new records have not swept me off my feet. In fact, I’ve been thinking if that’s a matter of becoming older and grumpier: I do find the reissues sections in Record Collector or Uncut more interesting. The mere fact that there are acts that call themselves Bob Vylan is telling enough.

However, I have my 2025 highlights and disappointments and in-betweens.

Solace of the Mind by Amina Claudine Myers is beautiful. Red Hook Records is a label worth collecting, actually. There is a concept and a logic and a style there – even though my exposure to their output has been limited for reasons I won’t go into but they have nothing to do with the label.

Another heavenly record is After the Last Sky by Anouar Brahem, Anja Lechner, Django Bates and Dave Holland. It takes my breath away. And, in the light of Jack DeJohnette’s recent passing, I always remember how fortunate I was to see Anouar Brahem perform live with the same band except that Mr DeJohnette was playing drums in lieu of Anja Lechner’s viola.

Lera Lynn and Blixa Bargeld had a self-released EP each and I loved both of them. Lera Lynn’s original material is art with the confidence of a big artiste and Blixa’s huge personality is enough to not feel awkward in David Bowie’s shoes. I found it genius that Mr Bargeld chose the chamber format of a duo with a pianist to deliver 4 covers of not necessarily obvious material – and Heroes never sounded with a better German. Yet, there are two unmistakable vocal solos that only Blixa is capable of. Actually, I will do a little search to see if anyone else covered Subterraneans (which album is it off, would you know without looking it up :)?)

Weather Station did not cut it for me. A lot of words, a lot of notes not amounting to substance. The previous records were remarkable, this one hasn’t grown on me, and I hope that “yet” is missing in this phrase.

Mogwai’s Bad Fire was one of the in-betweens – I might re-christen it into Purgatory. Allbarone by Baxter Dury was exactly in the way Baxter Dury is for me: a lot of appeal and interest but only before he strikes a pose and takes his jacket off his shoulders to put it back on to drop it off again – and again, finding nothing better to do while the ladies in his band sing the same lines for about fifteen times during a 2 minute 30 seconds piece.

I will mention that Boris Grebenschikov’s Square Root From the Sun has a majestic version of Angel orchestrated by Tony Visconti and a piece of absolute beauty in 5 am. But this beauty is only for the exclusive audience of Russian speakers on the fringes of the war-mongering nation that is rushing towards the open gates of the newly built concentration camp under construction. Amongst the modest benefits this small audience can be happy with is the presence of Tony Visconti, of course – and who wouldn’t be happy about it.

I am.

The Worst Gigs I’ve Been To

I’ve been blessed to have been to some bad gigs. To me, this is a blessing because I might have been to none, had things gone the way they were supposed to early on. Some of the remarkably bad gigs are now faded in memory, like the one my friend Dima and I went on April 1 of some year between 1986 and 1990 in Nizhny Novgorod, which would have been in the Philharmonic Hall in the NN Kremlin. The concert was a compilation of stand up performances in the classical Soviet monologue format delivered by TV people from Vzglyad and a performance by the band Okno, who were famous for a brief moment. However bad the whole thing was, it did not feel like that at the time. There were jokes about police packing a Japanese filming crew believing they were Kazakh, the funny bit contained in the firm Soviet belief that arresting Kazakhstanis was okay (they were us, Soviets) and arresting Japanese was unthinkable (they were them, not us). I believe, there were anecdotes about Nikita Bogoslovsky – or it may have been himself – one being the story of him playing a piano hoisted to the fifth floor and causing a panic attack from the target attempting a morning tea. And then Okno came to play their set that now looks charmingly bad. Charming because I was 15 or 16 at the time and bad because it was simply horrible. But then we walked out into the night and walked all along the embankment in the softest snow that had covered everything and kept on falling. Well worth it, it was.

Same venue hosted a truly monstrous performance by Sergey Manukian, billed as a fantastic jazz pianist. I swear this was the only performance ever where every note was wrong and misplaced. I escaped as soon as the intermission was announced.

The champion of misplaced everything was Patti Smith, performing in Geneva in a small very bourgeois theatre. This was the strangest experience. She came armed with a book and a son. Half of the performance was her reading her novel Just Kids and whenever her reading was not fluent she found nothing better than to state that “Bob Dylan fucks up his lyrics all the time” as if Dylan had any responsibility for her not being able to read. Then the son played the acoustic guitar and she sang a handful of hits with the mandatory Because the Night. And then she concluded with Power to the People, complete with her shaking her fist in solidarity with the people who had no power at the people who actually had the power and on average carried 20 kilos of extra weight and whose cumulative wealth could feed all of the African continent for years. These people had the power already.