New Music

I’m not sure whether I am content with what I’ve got or whether I am simply uninspired this year but I seem to have bought surprisingly few new albums. Those that I have bought I have liked, and if I was to pick a  favourite it would probably be Robert Plant’s new album. However, I don’t seem to have bought that much in the way of new music and even though Plant (and also Pink Floyd) have put out new releases he has been around for years. Much of everything else I’ve bought fits into the same mould.

Looking back over my recent purchases there are a good smattering of folk-rock and blues-rock albums, a classical symphony, a solitary jazz album and a couple of heavy rock releases. Most of these are donkey’s years old. The one exception to this is The Last Internationale’s We Will Reign album which I bought on the back of seeing them at the Robert Plant gig. The album is pretty good although sounds far more commercial than I imagined: it comes across as a mainstream rock album rather than the blues-rock sound that they belted out in their live performance.

What appeals to me about The Last Internationale is that they are a full-on protest band, in many ways harking back to the days of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger rather than the more commercial Bonoesque approach, yet still retaining the passion of a full-on rock group. When they are good, they are very, very good and the tracks Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Indian Blood; Killing Fields and Wanted Man as well as the album closer 1968 really capture the essence of their live performance. The other tracks are decent enough but I think the album does suffer from over-production, specifically in terms of dynamic range compression which rather robs the albums quieter tracks of their subtlety. It’s a problem with many modern recordings and something I blame MP3s for.

I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for The Last Internationale as I think they could be huge in a couple of years’ time – certainly most people I know who saw them on the Plant tour would love to see them headlining in the UK. As for my other music listening I possibly need to go back over my already vast array of CDs again. I seem to go through fads of music listening and will often come back to things I haven’t listened to for years before branching off on another tangent.