Best Of... lists are meaningless, and great fun. The following ten discs have dominated our wee Bose during the year
Gillian Welch: The Harrow and The Harvest (Warner Bros) The third track on this disc, The Way You Made it, is the single best song of 2011, and its nine companions aren't far behind. Ms Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, write songs that are cryptic, opaque and yet with a power that captures you both musically and emotionally. Two voices, two guitars, the whole world. They even make the sound of the banjo tolerable.
Iro Haarla: Vespers (ECM) What a quintet! Ms Harlo on harp and piano, Mathias Eick on trumpet, Trygve Seim on tenor, Uli Krokfors on bass and the great John Christensen on drums weave a chamber jazz palette of astounding emotional power. The promise of their debut, Northbound, is captured, distilled and simplified, making for the best jazz record of the year. Some guys are tempted to call it a Scandinavian ‘Kind Of Blue”, but we aren't those guys.
James Blake: James Blake (A&M) James Blake comes across on stage as a real nice bloke – a very tall, real nice bloke, who might buy you a drink. On record, he comes across as Weirdness Central, but his scarcity with words is handled with poetic power, and his imagery is unforgettable. Remember to play ‘Limit to your Love’ at ear-melting volume, to get the effect.
Elbow: Build A Rocket Boys (Fiction) Popular music's most charming bunch of blokes make another great record about unremarkable things. Everyone's here, everyone's happy.
Kurt Elling: The Gate (Concord) Produced by Don Was, and featuring ‘pop‘ songs by people like Stevie Wonder, EW&F and Joe Jackson, The Gate is pretty perfect. There isn't better singer on the planet than Mr Elling, and the guitar playing of John McLean is outstanding.
Tune-yards: Whokill (4AD) Merrill Garbus is the strangest person on planet pop, and one of the most scorchingly talented. Her voice is a wonder, full of lusty colour and soprano sweetness, and it pulls emotion from the ether and sticks it in the centre of bangin' tunes. Thrilling.
REM: Collapse Into Now (Warner Bros) The best record everyone's best-loved rock band have made in many years, and a good way to end thirty years of making music. Do you remember the first time you heard Murmur, their debut, back in 1983? Yeah, so can we. A truly distinguished career, ending on a highnote.
Giovanna Pessi/Susanna Wallumrod: If Grief Could Wait (ECM) Play and sing a Henry Purcell song from 1692 – The Plaint - then play and sing a Leonard Cohen song from 1974 – Who By Fire. If you can show that there is nothing other than almost 300 years between the two, if you can show that the art of the ballad and the troubadour is constant, then you have made a dic of some genius. The harpist Ms Pessi and the soprano Ms Wallumrod have done just that.
Nils Oklund/Sigbjorn Apeland: Lysoen – Music of Ole Bull (ECM) Some musicians achieve such empathy with each other that the music seems to be not so much played, as released. Oklund and Apeland, on fiddle and keyboards, bring to mind Hayes and Cahill, and Welch and Rawlings, and their versions of Ole Bull's music interspersed with traditional airs is a disc full of sheer wonder at the beauty of sound.
Iarla O Lionaird Foxlight (Real World) Iarla sings – and sings some songs in English – whilst Leo Abrahams takes care of the sounds. Foxlight is quite beautiful, and wildly romantic. It gets under your skin.
