It’s hard to sum up a whole year of cultural input. What does it mean to be best? For me it means, the stuff that moved me most, shook me, made me happy, made me sad, made me feel alive.
It’s been an eventful year. With ups and downs. This post will be “all over the place”, i will put in lists about a lot of things. But let us start with the traditional concert list.
These are the 20 best concerts I attended in 2016: Continue reading “Hallgeir’s 2016 part 1: Best Concerts”
The Rolling Stones released their latest album December 2nd 2016, their first album in over a decade is a return to the blues. It is a great blues album, and a tremendous return to form by The Stones.
The album is fresh and spontaneous and was recorded in just 3 days last December (2015) with co-producer Don Was. It really sounds like band enjoying themselves.
“This album is manifest testament to the purity of their love for making music, and the blues is, for the Stones, the fountainhead of everything they do.”
– Don Was
It’s a very good introduction to the blues, by a band who clearly pours their love into the songs. We’ve included the versions that are closest to the Rolling Stones’s takes on these songs. It isn’t always the original recording.
The entire list part 3, part 2, part 1
Continue reading “Best Album 2016: The Rolling Stones – Blue & Lonesome”
| Released: August 26 , 2016 Producer: Rob Schnapf, Cass McCombs & Dan Horne Label: Anti Records |
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| “Mangy Love makes itself distinct from its predecessors with its outright jazziness and ethereality. Wit’s End was a traipse though the densely forested hills of solitude; Big Wheel and Others was a road trip through odd, nameless American sub-societies,; and Mangy Love is Cass McCombs in outer space.” – Dustin Lowman (Drowned in Sound) |
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| This album really made me listen to the lyrics, I was fooled by the sweet melodies – but the lyrics are tough, hard, rough poems about love,sex, life and death. McCombs knows how to play with words (Switch): Turn you on, you light up the room Turn you off, it’s dark as a tomb– Hallgeir |
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| Best songs: Opposite House, Bum Bum Bum and Switch |
Continue reading “The Best Albums 2016: 20 to 11 (part 2/3)”
As 2015 draws to a close, it’s time to look back on the last 12 months in music and as tradition goes, this involves the unveiling of our 25 Best Albums Of The Year.
– as always, it has been a struggle, we have fought and bled and finally agreed on the 25 best records of 2015. The ones we’ve played most, that has gotten us most excited or are just too good to ignore. We, as you can see, listen most to music in the, so called, roots oriented genres. However, we do listen to all kinds of music, it’s just that there aren’t that many good albums (in our views) in the other “genres” this year.
What did we get wrong? What did we miss? Well, nothing of course, this is THE list. No, just kidding, this is our view of the year in music, and as we have said many times before, we only write about the stuff we like and we can not reach everything.
Click on the covers or the title and see a post on each album.
