FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney/PHOTO CREDIT: Mary McCartney
Essential December Releases
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ALTHOUGH there are fewer big albums out in December…
IN THIS PHOTO: Yungblud/PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Pallant
there are a few coming out just before Christmas that would make for great gifts! There is one particular that has been delayed a week but, arriving just in time to order and arrive for Christmas, it is one of this year’s most-anticipated releases. There are some great albums due on 4th December. I was not aware until recently that Arctic Monkeys had a live album in the vault but, with Arctic Monkeys – Live at the Royal Albert Hall, here is an album you will definitely want to order. If you are not aware of the Sheffield band’s performance, here is some more information:
“Arctic Monkeys and War Child UK are proud to announce the release of ‘Arctic Monkeys - Live At The Royal Albert Hall’ on December 4th 2020. All proceeds from the album will go to War Child UK to help fill what could be up to a £2 million deficit they are facing in 2021, caused by the devastating impact of Covid-19 on their fundraising. These funds are urgently needed to support those who are worst hit by the virus.
“On June 7, 2018 we played a very special show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. All the proceeds from that memorable night were donated to War Child UK in support of the vital work they do protecting, educating and rehabilitating children who have experienced the trauma of conflict and the horror of war. The situation that was bad in 2018 is now desperate and those children and their families need our help more than ever. To enable War Child UK to reduce their funding deficit and continue their valuable work, we are happy to be able to release a live album, recorded that evening at The Royal Albert Hall. All proceeds will go direct to the charity. We thank all our fans in advance for their support of this release and in turn for their support of War Child UK” - Arctic Monkeys.
Recorded at the start of the band’s ‘Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino’ tour, ‘Arctic Monkeys -Live At The Royal Albert Hall’, features 20 of the band’s finest moments to date”.
That is an album that is going to be fascinating to hear and own. The second of four albums from 4th December that you will want to grab is Sigur Rós’ Odin's Raven Magic. The Icelandic band always create very original and beautiful music – their forthcoming album is no exception! You can pre-order it here, but it is a very interesting album with a pretty cool background. Sigur Rós’ Bandcamp page gives us some more information:
“Composed in the 14th or 15th century Odin’s Raven Magic is an Icelandic poem in the ancient Edda tradition (Edda - a term that describes two Icelandic manuscripts which together are the main sources of Norse mythology and Skáldic poetry) its anonymous author clearly had an intimate knowledge of the Edda literature and mythology which alludes to a number of pagan motifs which are now lost. The poem recounts a great banquet held by the gods in Valhalla while they were absorbed in their feasting, ominous signs appeared that could foretell the end of the worlds of the gods and men.
The album 'Odin’s Raven Magic' is an orchestral collaboration between Sigur Rós, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Steindór Andersen and Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir which premiered 18 years ago at the Barbican Centre in London and is now finally almost two decades later being released. The performance honours the poem, dramatic and beautiful, classical and contemporary. A stone marimba was built especially for the performance by Páll Guðmundsson.
Odin’s Raven Magic - the poem - had been relegated from mainstream ancient literature ever since 1867, when Norwegian scholar Sophus Bugge claimed it was a 17th century fabrication. This theory has since been toppled with literary and linguistic arguments and new research has concluded that Odin’s Raven Magic was indeed authentic and has finally been reintroduced to the Edda”.
Yungblud’s Weird! is available to pre-order. It follows his 2018 debut album, 21st Century Liability. This new album is shaping up to be a more complete, ambitious and accomplished work from one of the music’s world’s brightest rising artists. Rough Trade provide us with some information:
“Weird! is Yungblud’s most emotionally complex body of work to date. He recorded it at studios in London and Los Angeles with Cervini, Greatti and another frequent collaborator, Matt Schwartz (Cold War Kids, Bullet For My Valentine, Massive Attack). True to Yungblud’s fierce refusal to box himself in, Weird! embodies a wildly eclectic collage of sound: Queen-inspired harmonies, Beatles-esque chord progressions, elements of dance-punk and glam-rock and hip-hop and metal. Weird! is like an episode of Skins in album form”.
I guess, to an extent, people might have preconceptions about Yungblud from hearing his interviews or seeing publicity photos. I think his songwriting has really come on in the past couple of years and he is able to mix these very confident and electric songs with gentler moments.
Weird! is shaping up to be one of this year’s better releases. I want to bring in a recent interview from The Guardian - where we learn about his hard upbringing and how it has inspired one of the album’s songs:
“Growing up in Doncaster was both “great and fucking awful”. He was bullied remorselessly, even by his teachers who would single him out for his sartorial choices in front of the class. “I had a lot of friends but in a room full of people I would feel totally alone,” he says. “I had my first suicidal thoughts at 13.” His family – whom he describes as “The Waltons meets Peaky Blinders” – were supportive. “My mum used to dye my hair when I was five and my dad was a guitar dealer so he’d seen it all.” It was a household full of music; his grandad (“a fucking nutcase”) performed with T Rex in the 60s, while his maternal grandmother loved Rod Stewart so much she told Harrison he was her boyfriend. “I was kind of in that sensibility of rock’n’roll my whole life,” he smiles.
One of Weird!’s prettier moments, Love Song, touches on the domestic violence he witnessed growing up. “My parents used to fight a lot and it was dark,” he says slowly. “They’d fight and then be friends an hour later. So my idea of love was so skewed.” Escape came via a primal urge to perform. “It was, like, if I don’t belong in this real world I’m going to build a world to belong in. Because I found Gaga, I found [Marilyn] Manson, I found Oasis. That’s all I wanted. I wanted a culture to belong in. I would watch Vivienne Westwood and I would watch the [Sex] Pistols and I would watch fucking Kate Moss, and I would be, like: ‘I need to go to London.’ I needed to get out”.
I will move on to the last album you will want to own on 4th December. I have seen a few U.K. sites say that they will not get this album in stock until 12th February. The album is The White Stripes’ Greatest Hits. You can get it from the Third Man Records store from 4th December, and there are options to ship internationally. With shipping, the vinyl comes in at $50 (£37). You may want to wait until February until it is in stock in the U.K. but, if you are a huge fan like me, you’ll pay a little extra for a real treat! The Third Man site provides some information about the iconic duo’s first greatest hits release:
“In 1997 a brother and sister climbed into the third floor attic of their Southwest Detroit family homestead and bashed out a primitive cover of David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream.” In an alternate reality, it’s all they ever do musically. The brother leads a spartan life as a dutiful upholsterer and the sister finishes culinary school and continues to make heartwarming food.
But that doesn’t happen. Something sparks in both of them. They take their simple guitar-drums-voice approach to a local open mic night on Bastille Day. The performance was just good enough to keep them going. In what feels like a whirlwind, they record and release two 7-inch singles for a local indie label. A not-so-local indie offers to put out a full length album.
They start touring. Another album. More touring. Another album. Folks REALLY start to pay attention. CRAZY touring. More albums, accolades, wildest dream after wildest dream coming true. “World-renowned” becomes an appropriate descriptor as does “long-building overnight sensation.”
It is with extreme reverence that we present to you The White Stripes Greatest Hits.
The first-ever official anthology of recordings from the iconic rock duo, Jack and Meg White, is an essential career-spanning collection highlighting 26 previously released songs. From late Nineties flashes of brilliance through early 2000s underground anthems, masterful MTV Moon Man moments, Grammy-grabbing greatness, and worldwide stadium chants, the songs here are as wide-ranging as you can imagine. In an era of streaming where the idea of a “Greatest Hits” album may seem irrelevant – that an act’s most streamed songs are considered their de facto “hits” – we wholeheartedly believe that great bands deserve “Greatest Hits” and that a large part of Third Man Records’ and The White Stripes’ successes have been built on zigging when the rest of the music business is zagging. Thus, for a great band with great fans, a greatest hits compilation for The White Stripes is not only appropriate, but absolutely necessary”.
That sort of takes care of the albums available from 4th December. It is a bit of a quiet week and, whilst there are a few albums available after 11th December, this is the last week of 2020 where there are quite a few big releases. There are three that I want to recommend people investigate.
Belle and Sebastian’s What to Look for in Summer is available to pre-order - and it is a release that intrigues me:
“Belle and Sebastian present twenty-two live performances featuring songs from across their 25 year career. The recordings showcase the Scottish septet at the height of their power during their 2019 tour, including tracks performed on the band's own Mediterranean cruise, The Boaty Weekender”.
I guess, what with it being the end of the year, we are going to get more live albums and compilations - as there are going to be few studio albums recorded. Actually, I will add in another compilation following on from The White Stirpes’. It is interesting that The White Stripes’ Jack White and The Kills’ Alison Mosshart are bandmates in The Dead Weather; they are both putting out compilation albums in the same month! Unlike The White Stripes’ compilation, one can buy Little Bastards from a U.K. site from 11th December. If you want a bit more detail, Domino have you covered:
“The Kills have compiled an extraordinary career-spanning B-sides and rarities album titled Little Bastards, to be released on Domino on December 11, 2020. The songs date back from the band’s first 7-inch singles in 2002 through to 2009. All of the material has been newly remastered for release on 2 x LP, CD, and digital—marking the first ever vinyl pressing for some of these tracks.
The compilation includes the unreleased and never-before-heard demo “Raise Me” from the 2008-2009 Midnight Boom era. Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince produced and directed a striking new video for the recently excavated song.
Often raw, intimate and zero-budget spontaneous, the album’s title is a wry comment on these excellent recordings’ neglectful fate: in many cases birthed on the fly to fill bonus-track space on CD singles, they’d effectively vanished together with the release format that necessitated their creation. Also: Little Bastard was the affectionate nickname that the pair gave to the drum machine which enabled their initial existence as a band of only two members for the first half of their career. “It was a Roland 880,” says Jamie, “which isn’t strictly a drum machine – it's a sequencer, and an eight-track recorder, with its own drum machine built in, and that’s what we’d record all our beats on.”
Little Bastards is available digitally, and on CD and LP. The deluxe double LP comes on neon yellow vinyl and is housed in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves. Pre-order the album below.
Other LP highlights include “I Call It Art” from the Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited covers compilation, the brilliant Midnight Boom digital bonus track “Night Train,” a blistering performance of “Love Is A Deserter” from an XFM radio session and a handful of classic American roots songs performed with the kind of bruising delivery they’re famous for: Howlin’ Wolfs’ “Forty Four,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell on You” and Dock Boggs’ “Sugar Baby”.
The penultimate album I will highlight is The Avalanches’ We Will Always Love You. The Australian group took sixteen years to follow their phenomenal debut, Since I Left You, with Wildflower in 2016. Their productivity has gone up as, on 11th December, they release their third album! Do make sure you pre-order the album as The Avalanches are always tremendous! The twenty-five track looks set to be a real bonanza that everyone needs to pick up! Rough Trade give us some background to the album:
“Building on the sample-based approach of their classic albums Since I Left You and Wildflower, but stepping boldly into new terrain, We Will Always Love You is the new full length masterpiece from The Avalanches.
Sampling remains at the core of The Avalanches sound, but alongside all of the sample ghosts, We Will Always Love You features an array of living guests who contribute vocals and lyrics: Blood Orange, Rivers Cuomo, Pink Siifu, Jamie xx, CLYPSO, Denzel Curry, Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Sampa the Great, Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyan and more. The Avalanches’s music has always dripped with melody, but because of this expanded role for guest singers and writers, We Will Always Love You is their most song-oriented album yet.
Take Care In Your Dreaming featuring alt-rapper Denzel Curry, Tricky and Melbourne based Zambian rapper-singer Sampa The Great is a song about unrealised dreams and navigating unexpected journeys through life. “The song is a ‘careful what you wish for’ kind of thing.”
Music Makes Me High is truly an up tempo number, this disco-funk tune has a golden glow that simultaneously casts back to tunes like The Whispers’s And The Beat Goes On and to the filter- house echoes of that era such as Stardust Music Feels Better With You and Gusto’s Disco’s Revenge. “There’s a gospel choir on there, but very softly in the mix, singing over the ‘music makes me high’ sample.”
Sparkling with the treble frequencies that made Since I Left You such a dizzy thrill, We Will Always Love You is dedicated to probing “the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit.” But the goal now is elevation rather than intoxication”.
The last album that I want to recommend was due on 11th December but, just recently, it was pushed back to 18th December. Paul McCartney’s McCartney III can be pre-ordered - and I think it is going to be one of this year’s best-received albums! It is going to be a tremendous release and, forty years after McCartney II, the former Beatle completes the tribology! I will finish with an interview from Paul McCartney but, with no single released from the album (as of 25th November), there is a lot of mystery and speculation as to what we might get! Rough Trade provide us with some background:
“A follow-up to his 1970 self-titled solo debut and 1980's McCartney II, the new album features the McCartney playing all the instruments; he wrote and recorded every song.
50 years following the release of his self-titled first solo album McCartney, featuring Paul playing every instrument and writing and recording every song, Paul McCartney will release McCartney III on December 11th. Paul hadn’t planned to release an album in 2020, but in the isolation of Rockdown, he soon found himself fleshing out some existing musical sketches and creating even more new ones. Before long an eclectic collection of spontaneous songs would become McCartney III: a stripped-back, self-produced and, quite literally, solo work marking the opening of a new decade, in the tradition of 1970’s McCartney and 1980’s McCartney II.
Recorded earlier this year in Sussex (UK), McCartney III is mostly built from live takes of Paul on vocals and guitar or piano, overdubbing his bass playing, drumming, etc. atop that foundation. McCartney III spans a vast and intimate range of modes and moods, from soul-searching to wistful, from playful to raucous and all points between — captured with some of the same gear from Paul’s Rude Studio used as far back as 1971 Wings sessions. And Paul's array of vintage instruments he played on the new album have an even more storied history, including Bill Black of Elvis Presley's original trio's double bass alongside Paul's own iconic Hofner violin bass, and a mellotron from Abbey Road Studios used on Beatles recordings, to name but a few. Just as McCartney’s 1970 release marked Paul’s return to basics in the wake of the biggest band break-up in musical history, and the 1980 avant-garde masterpiece McCartney II rose from the ashes of Wings, McCartney III finds Paul back on his own, turning unexpected circumstances into a personal snapshot of a timeless artist at a unique point in history”.
It is a shame the album has been held back but, with only a week’s delay, we can still own a huge album before Christmas! I am impressed that nothing has been leaked and there is a lot of secrecy almost regarding the tone of McCartney III. McCartney has been doing quite a few interviews to promote the album but I want to source from Loud and Quiet, where he was asked about what we can expect from McCartney III:
“At what point did you realise that what you were doing was making McCartney III?
Right at the end of it, I’d just been stockpiling tracks, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of this – I guess I’ll hang onto it,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a McCartney record,’ because I’d played everything and done it in the same manner as McCartney I and II. That was a little light bulb going off, and I thought, ‘Well, at least that makes a point of explaining what I’ve been doing, unbeknownst to me.’
It’s been 40 years since McCartney II – has there ever been a point between then and now that you’ve intended to make number III before?
No. Actually, not at all. I did McCartney right after The Beatles in 1970, McCartney II in 1980, and I did other similar projects, like The Firemen, working with Youth – that was a little bit similar because we’d go in the studio and Youth or I would just have a little bit of an idea, and it was a kind of homemade product, but it never occurred to me to do another McCartney album.
As you say, McCartney I and II followed such seismic shifts in your life and career – in that sense, how does the timing of this new record compare?
The common denominator is that I had a lot of time suddenly. After The Beatles broke up, I suddenly had a lot of time and no particular plan in mind. And then when Wings broke up it was a similar thing. And with me, when I’ve got a lot of time, my go-to situation is, ‘Well, write and record, then – that’s something to do when you’ve got some spare time.’ So this was similar, but it was the pandemic that stopped things. We were due to go on a European tour this year, but very early on Italy got the virus, and gradually all of the other gigs, including Glastonbury, which was going to be the culmination of it, got knocked out. So then it was, ‘Ok, well what am I going to do?’ And that’s my fall-back situation – to write and record.
These are the December-due albums that you will want to own, and it will not be long until many people start listing the albums due next year that are worth your pennies. I am not sure whether any really big albums have been announced for next year, but we will start to hear more over the coming weeks/months. If you are in need of a few Christmas gift ideas in the form of albums, then I hope that the suggestions above…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Kills
WILL help out.