Top 5 Albums of the Week
Culture Calling's Top 5 albums of the week, an eclectic mix of records from across genres and decades. Come discover weekly albums to bulk out your collection.
By Charlie Walker | Updated Dec 16 2024
João Gilberto - s/t (White Album)(1973)
With a career like Gilberto’s, where it has marked and defined a whole half-centuries worth of a continent’s music, containing about 5 or 6 of the greatest albums of all time, it’s easy for classics to get lost in the noise.
Gilberto’s 1974 self-titled release, known amongst fans as the White Album, is easily one of his best solo efforts, maybe his best, iconically produced by the electronic pioneer Wendy Carlos. It really takes a world-class, pioneering producer to fulfil Gilberto’s demanding requirements for sound quality; by the 70s it had become easier to record the way he wanted, but to capture the moments of solace, the crackle of his voice, so intimate we can almost hear the moisture of his mouth, and the nylon-string played so delicately that it may have not been able to record 20 years prior, is a triumph of producing prowess.
With just Gilberto’s guitar and the most minimal drumming possible, he accesses new definitions of the word ‘dreamlike’, throwing the listener into a sedate trance with this locomotive musical interplay, whereas his other string-heavy or sax-heavy work may bring you off the cloud he puts you on on the White Album. No distractions, no gimmicks, no appealing to current trends even when by this point the bandwagon for Bossa nova had been scrapped for spare parts, just refined Gilberto from the source. And it still sounds so crisp half a century later, a testament to its timeless sound engineering.
Gil Scott-Heron - Reflections (1981)
We’ve talked a lot of poet-musicians in recent weeks, so we saw fit to finally come back to the blueprint for all modern poet-musicians. I can’t really stress how rare it is to find an artist who’s music is as strong as their lyricism, which is as strong as their message and image; it’s the reason why Gil Scott-Heron, despite his stunted recording output and personal failures, is remembered so fondly.
By the 80s, Scott-Heron was mostly off trying to make a living with his words, a long time had passed since his days at the 125th and Lenox, and it became more about the music. The opener, ‘Storm Music’, tapped into the contemporaneous reggae craze, and the hybridised retrospective track ‘Is That Jazz?’ mirrored the early-80s rise in 50s style commercial jazz - par for the course when making a successful album is making songs that people at the time want to listen to - but his real skills shine on the B-side, in the three-track run of ‘Inner City Blues’, an inventive cover of the Gaye original, ‘Gun’, and ‘’B’ Movie’.
He goes full poet mode again, shining in his impassioned diatribe on ‘Inner City Blues’, and his takedowns on Reaganism on ‘’B’ Movie’ that is painfully relevant this year, but it’s ‘Gun’ which may be one of his greatest musical achievements. An actually killer groove that would succeed on its own, even if it hadn’t been driven by lyrics that smartly address the nuanced realities of poverty, and how, despite Heron’s life-long calls for peace, we will sometimes need to resort to violence to keep ourselves safe, but with wit and great humour.
Bluestaeb and S. Fidelity - Underground Canopy (2020)
We talk much about old jazz on Culture Calling, especially as this year has seen many of the great jazz artists pass on, but we make no effort to hide our belief that the best decade for jazz in the last 50 years is probably the current one. This renewed interest in all jazz forms, from modal to free to Afrobeat, has been invigorating, especially in London. The second city leading this new jazz wave is surprisingly not New York or Chicago, but Berlin.
Bluestaeb and S. Fidelity, both Berlin-based artists, sample from the city’s genre-blending underground scene, and their stylistic exploits are highly visible on Underground Canopy, switching freely from hip-hop frameworks to funk and house influences, in a similar stylistic blend to the jazz artists of London’s underground scene like Henry Wu and Saul. Some homages are quite on the nose, with a direct interpolation of OutKast’s ‘So Fresh, So Clean’ on ‘Tony Sendo’ that hits you from out of nowhere, as a reminder of what these artists are about.
A jazz record as diverse as the listening habits of the artist, these new explorations in chill, lounge-oriented jazz almost hit a new genre each track, mirroring the ‘playlist generation’ of artists whose musical influences have never been so diverse. Even the waning guitar in the intro of ‘Danse Doree’ evokes the original sample of MF DOOM’s ‘Potholderz’. The record feels like a look-in to their Spotify Wrapped, incidentally subverting the jazz-to-hip-hop sample pipeline. An absolutely gorgeous record.
Jay Daniel - Tala (2018)
Ever teetering at the edge of genre, you can hear the musical world of Detroit through the blends of Jay Daniel: his diverse musical realms hip-hop, techno, progressive jazz, world music, house, and African traditional mirror the cosmopolitan Motor City, being the newest in queue to advance the city’s musically progressive heritage.
Taking influence from West London’s broken beat movement, as well as the techno and jazz heritage of Detroit, Tala is a largely tranquil journey through an array of dance forms reinvented, with beats often too down-tempo and syncopated to adequately dance to, and hip-hop influence placed front-and-centre (he just loves an off-set clap over a snare).
The stand-out here though is ‘Aja’, a reference to either the Steely Dan album or another reference to religious mythology (most likely the latter as the track titles later on in the album reference figures from Hindu, Sufi, and Jewish mythology), a track that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Ladbroke Grove club circa 2002, more directly dancey than cerebral, a house framework exploited to become jazz, a microcosm of his artistic vision. A very interesting artist to explore. Good luck trying to pigeonhole him.
Mark Kozelek - Sings Christmas Carols (2014)
I feel like I’m obliged to recommend at least one Christmas album here. Tis the season and all. But you’ve heard them all by now surely. There really isn’t another month that we commit to revisiting songs we’ve grown sick of since we were 9. Imagine if every May, the powers at be decided we must indulge in a yearly listening of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. One can only dream.
Anyway, when I was 16 and thought that I was too weary of/too cool to listen to tired Christmas classics, Mark Kozelek, of Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, surprise-released an album of just Christmas covers. Mostly carols, with some from Charlie Brown’s Christmas, and some Christmas pop/rock tracks from the latter half of the 20th century, Kozelek provides the perfect Christmas album for the pop-jaded melancholics who are once a year forced to smile.
But Mark knows how to entice a smile. Evoking Charlie Brown on the opener, saying that Christmas always makes him feeling depressed, an unnamed friend replies, “Mark, you’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Out of all the Mark Kozelek’s I know, you’re the Mark Kozelekiest’.
Despite producing quite beautiful versions of the familiars, his laissez faire joie de vivre enlivens the record with wit and humour, even his little melodic singing part in ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ is enough to eek out a smile from even the hardest of hearts. See, this is a guy who wrote a song about three childhood stories where the story of his grandma dying of cancer was the least sad of the three, so you got no excuse to mope around at Christmas.