album reviews of stuff bought recent and further

45
SOLOMON BURKE
Don't Give Up On Me ANTI 2002

The premise was ridiculously simple: provide the rotund soul legend with songs from the likes of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello; surround him with skilled, simp tico musicians; press "record" and let it happen. Cut in just four days by producer Joe Henry, Burke's comeback LP set the template for a succession of reclamation projects that paired veteran artists with handpicked material. Warm, immediate.

Bob Dylan
"Love And Theft" Sony 2001

Dylan's first album of the 21st century was a kaleidoscopic engagement with the American songbook in all its vast and energising diversity that could also be heard as a musical autobiography and an informal history of America itself. The pensive gloom of '97's Time Out Of Mind was banished, replaced by a wry, sexy playfulness, and a lot of daft jokes. Stylistically, the album embraced with abundant confidence country, rockabilly, ragtime, vaudeville, languid jazz, hard blues and Western swing. "Love And Theft"'s release on September 11, 2001, added an ominous resonance to its dramatic centrepiece, the apocalyptic "High Water (For Charley Patton)".
utterly free of artifice, these performances brought a human heartbeat to the oscillating ones and zeros of the Pro Tools era

6
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
Raising Sand ROUnder 2007

An album of "dark, sexy Americana" was in every respect the last thing anybody - Jimmy Page, especially, you have to think - expected of Robert Plant. Raising Sand, recorded in Nashville with Grammy-winning bluegrass singer and fiddle player Alison Krauss and producer T-Bone Burnett, was a unilateral triumph, by some distance Plant's best solo work. A regal celebration of the diversity of American roots music, it was also the album that denied the world the Zeppelin reunion it had long demanded, Plant preferring to tour with Krauss and Burnett.


10
FLEET FOXES
Fleet Foxes BELLA UNION 2008

Technically Robin Pecknold and
the Fleet Foxes originated from Seattle, but many listeners to their debut could've been forgiven for imagining they came from a kind of American Arcadia, such was the bucolic magic summoned up by the 11 tracks. Ostensibly another five bearded indie-rockers with a taste for their parents' folk records, Fleet Foxes effortlessly transcended such a stereotype, thanks to Pecknold's calm gifts of melody and their unwavering, beatific harmonies.
19
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
The Rising COLUMBIA 2002

Springsteen's response to 9/11 reunited him with the E Street Band to thrilling effect, and gave him his biggest seller since 1987's Tunnel Of Love. Some of the songs predated the attack on the Twin Towers - "My City Of Ruins" actually celebrated Asbury Park - but they were given sharp new focus by their changed context. "Waitin' On A Sunny Day" in particular was made suddenly ominous. Springsteen's response was a positive rallying call, at its strongest on the hymn-like anthem "Into The Fire".

20
AMY WINEHOUSE
Back To Black Island 2006

Forget the headlines, the hairdo, the ex-husband: it was Amy Winehouse's excellent second album that made her a star. At once comfortably familiar (thanks to co-producer Mark Ronson's warm, knowing retro-soul flourishes) and dangerously confessional (her explicit, diaristic lyrics), it felt like an "instant classic" on release, and soon launched a slew of less-talented copyists. None of whom were capable of singing - or indeed writing - songs as exquisitely melancholy as the title track, or the perfect torch song "Love Is A Losing Game".