All right, we’ve got Netflix and Amazon Prime but then I’ve got kids and there’s Ninjago and Paw Patrol and, god help us, Horseland… And The Good Wife, Designated Survivor, Jessica Jones, Touch, Sense 8, but that’s beside the point. I mean, I’ll never subscribe to a music streaming service.
I like to own my music. I like to feel the product in my hand, to run my fingers along the fissures in the brittle jewel cases, to read, braille-like, the indentations in the squidgy cardboard sleeves born in the early-00s. There’s no substitute for battered bits of plastic and paper lying around, their erstwhile contents getting scratched as careless hands replace them in the wrong boxes.
Then my phone provider (EE, to give them a call out), sent me a message inviting me to access Apple Music for free for six months. In the process, not only have they committed me from July 2017 to paying £10 per month to access my music, but they have re-invigorated my interest in “new” music. I say “new” because little of it is truly “new” but rather is those albums that, in the last twenty-years or so, I was never quite ready to splash hard-earned cash on. Those albums that, when faced with in the CD exchange in Wimbledon never quite made it to the top of the list – often leapfrogged by albums I’d never heard of by artists I knew only by association through written reviews in Uncut, the Sunday Times and the Guardian.
So, now I am truly hooked on this nagging Apple drug, here are the top five discoveries I have made – and should have made (for the most part) 10-20 years ago…
Can – Ege Bamyasi
I really don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe Can. Suffice it to say that the album sounds ahead of the curve, insistent and infectiously flirtatious; frighteningly danceable rhythms, fluid and free – no Can, no Pavement, no Siouxsie, no mid to late period Radiohead (or a thousand other bands now at the forefront of modern “post”-“rock”). It is almost impossible to believe you are listening to an album from 1972.
Blood Orange – Freetown Sound
I don’t really like what has come to be known as R&B (as distinct from rhythm and blues), and while iTunes has it that Freetown Sound is an “alternative album,” it has strong elements of what I think of as that genre. But, what I really hear is soul. Curtis Mayfield’s version of soul, with something of his intensely political but affirmative voice, guided along the pathways opened by Massive Attack and refined by Dev Hynes in his Blood Orange guise.
It’s not an album designed, I think, to speak directly to a middle class, middle aged white man like me, but like Janelle Monàe’s The ArchAndroid, it transcends my limitations. I don’t understand it. The reference points I do get – Michael Jackson, 80s funk… – are not highlighted on my musical map. But, damn, it’s great to listen to.
Calexico & Iron & Wine – In the Reins
Phew. After Can and Blood Orange, I feel like I back on familiar terrain. Guitars? Check. Shuffling drums? Check. Pedal Steel? Check. Calexico is one of those Uncut championed bands I never quite got around to. I had a few tracks from the magazine’s Unconditionally Guaranteed CDs and, whenever they came up, I nodded along and thought “I like this.” Similarly, Iron & Wine was a band I knew more as a reference point for bands that I liked than because of any particular listening experience.
Listening to these two bands working collaboratively has led me to downloading more of each back catalogue, but this is the album I’ve most frequently come back to. I suppose at 28 minutes, I should probably call it an EP rather than an album, but it feels whole and complete. The harmonies between Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam and Calexico’s Joey Burns are tight and prove more than the sum of their parts, the bursts of stax horns on History of Lovers have the transformative quality that I find in all my favourite songs.
Case/Lang/Viers – Case/Lang/Viers
Skimming through my record collection reveals a soft spot for singer songwriters, and specifically for the literate, intellectually engaged ones, such as Thea Gilmore, Cat Power and Sara Watkins. And here are three of them, working together: Neko Case, KD Lang and Laura Viers.
I know each to some degree or other, with Neko Case being my strongest suit but Lang perhaps the best known. I know none well enough to easily pick out who might be leading each track. But that hardly matters where there is no weak link (in absolute or relative terms) and the true magic is the way they blend their voices in service of the material, the harmony’s recalling Jenny Lewis’ collaboration with the Watson Twins, while never allowing one voice to stand above.
If the Case/Lang/Viers moniker suggests the dusty offices of a regional firm of accountants, there is nothing about the songs that sounds as if bean-counters have been at work. Each song sounds crafted, the songwriting and arrangements mapped out to punch in the right places and lull in others, the guitars, bass and drums foundation supplemented by inventive string arrangements and pedal steel. Just beautiful.
Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker – Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour
I first heard of Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker via Jim Moray’s Low Culture Podcast. Like Moray, C&W take folk music in a direction where more is seen as more. However, where Moray is, on occasion, a folk McCartney with no-one to hold him back, C&W introduce a little more light and shade, though mostly shade. NCBBTH is a melancholy listen, but not a depressing on.
The key hooks here are the clarity of Clarke’s vocals (neither overly mannered, in the way that makes us impure-folkies cringe a little, nor a faux American sop to Anais Mitchell’s reviled “poppers” in Hadestown), the musical complexity of Walker’s guitar lines and Clarke’s multi-instrumental flourishes. Added to these, traditional arrangements aside, Clarke’s lyrics are thoughtful, the glass half full, but still filled with a sweet liquor. Time moves on, losses are felt and it is well worth joining Clarke and Walker on the journey.
So, I was wrong. I owe my friend Pip an apology for being so absolute in my conviction that nothing good would ever come of music by subscription. And I owe EE for dangling Apple Music before me. I will still buy music that enthrals me so that I can hold it and turn the pages of the liner (something digital has yet to provide with any great facility).
That aside, the entity I will doubtless end up owing most to is Apple. From what I can see, Apple Music pays artists around the same as Spotify, within a band running from around $0.0010 to $0.0019 and, according to data on http://www.informationisbeautiful.net, has a reach exceeded only by Spotify and YouTube.
Is that enough? I’m not sure and those that can afford to challenge the business model should do so. Doubtless the market will finally assert itself over the artist, but there is little doubt that, through Apple Music, I will listen to a wider variety of music, more often than I would have done without it. Maybe that’s a contribution of sorts.
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