16 Dexys - One Day I'm Going To Soar
This is not the Dexys Midnight Runners you became accustomed to, but then you probably expected that. Muscle Shoals soul, more restrainedly folk/countrified than of yore, is the common musical thread around which spin the grandstanding, the vaudeville and above most other things the constant self-examination and soul-baring confessional. Much of this is filtered through Rowland's (relatively) latter-day preoccupation with examining his Irish heritage, a rootless soul searching for a consistent explanatory identity, with a side order narrative of love in a mentally cold climate, by the end resigning himself to loneliness, as if he knows he can take his open emotions no further.
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15 Field Music - Plumb
Finally the Brewis brothers let their inner George Martins (possibly Jeff Lynnes, maybe Todd Rundgrens) free. In no way at all an immediate listen, the shortish - two thirds of its 15 tracks are under three minutes - collage of chamber pop, pastoral psychedelia, production-led maxi-pop, odd funk influences and Beatleisms runs together as almost an extended suite and shifts impermeably through the gears, rooted in a very English suburbanism and disenchantment, placed in whatever obtuse melodies we can call the existing Field Music aesthetic. New highlights emerge with every listen but it's far from a slog, more a showing off of the brothers' consstructivist ideas.
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14 Darren Hayman and the Long Parliament - The Violence
There were at least four concept albums about 16th century witch trials released this year but the increasingly ploughing his own furrow Hayman's double album was the most consistent with the greatest eye for detail and characterisation, delicately coloured in gorgeous often slo-mo melodies with brass and strings in an elaborate chamber-folk setting. It helps the shaded allegorical sketches emerge from themes about suspicion, religious dogma, witch hunts and community bogeymen, the sort of ongoing ideas that lend themselves to first person narratives that while unsparing find levels of personal identification, told dreams and strange beauty in a very dark subject and a foreboding landscape.
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