By Scott
Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021).
Their album Ragged Glory is one of my all-time favorites, so when I learned about this album—a live recording from 1990 that mostly draws on Ragged Glory—I knew it would end up on my year-end list. This is Neil Young and Crazy Horse in all their shaggy, stumbling glory, and while there’s nothing too surprising about this recording, it’s nice to hear the band stretching out on certain songs.
Sixty Watt Shaman, Ultra Electric (1998).
A great local record store, known for its enormous metal selection, closed down this year, and by the time I got there, the CD stock was pretty much picked over. But I did find this, the debut album from Sixty Watt Shaman, a band I’ve known about for a long time but never really got into. I’m sorry it took so long. (Honorable mention from my last trip to this store goes to the band Horseback, whose stuff—or at least the three very different-sounding albums I got—has been insistently growing on me.)
Fairport Convention, Liege & Lief (1969).
I read Richard Thompson’s memoir, Beeswing, this year, and because it focuses on his early years playing guitar in Fairport Convention, it sent me back to their first five albums (he left the band for a solo career afterwards). Fairport Convention helped invent a type of folk rock that draws on the traditional music of the British Isles, and their sound reached its fullest expression on Liege & Lief, their fourth album. Some people might dismiss this as cheesy, Renaissance faire stuff, but, after reading Thompson’s account of how seriously they took their research and their musicianship, I found myself getting sucked in.
Iron Maiden, Senjutsu (2021).
There’s a direct line between Fairport Convention and the jaunty, folky rocker “The Writing on the Wall,” one of my favorite songs on Iron Maiden’s new album. This is the latest in a series of strong, late-career albums by Maiden—so maybe 2021 wasn’t all bad. They sound a little older, and maybe this could have been a tighter single album as opposed to a double album, but fuck it. The more Maiden the better.
Katatonia, Brave Murder Day (1996).
I’ve loved how Katatonia’s sound has evolved over the years, bringing in elements of prog and hard rock. But this year I returned to their second album, which has more of a stripped down, gloomy atmosphere, and more clearly fulfills their vision of blending melodic death metal with a band like the Cure. The fact that Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt handles the growling vocals here is an added bonus.
Sting, The Bridge (2021).
Attentive readers of this website will know that I am an unapologetic Sting fan, although not an uncritical one. But his best stuff is worth sticking up for, and I think this album is clearly his best straight-up solo release since 1996’s Mercury Falling. (I’m putting two more recent albums in a separate category: The Last Ship, which was the basis for a musical, and If on a Winter’s Night, which I’d describe as a pseudo-Christmas seasonal album.) I prefer Sting when he’s mellow and moody, and that vibe carries through most of this album. It won’t change any minds but, like Bruce Springsteen’s latest, Letter to You, it’s a solid entry in the catalog that feels slightly new but mostly familiar.
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