This year might possibly have been the flattest year in a long, long time for album releases worth talking about. It's a wasteland out there but I have persisted through the usual suspects, continued to listen to albums released sometime between 1973 to 1978 to keep my faith intact and bided my time in the hope that something might come along and make me feel alive again.
Finally, this week, something did come along and raised my spirits beyond street level. It might have prompted a little scorn from some friends and there will be those who simply don't believe me, but Rebecca Ferguson's Freedom is an insane chopping board of sheer class. Maybe it's just the mood I'm in at the moment but I tell you from the heart as somebody who knows good music when he hears it, this is the finest album to come out of this year by a long shot. Better still, it's not only got killer production values and all that other behind the scenes magic that makes an album great but the quality of the actual songs on here outshines the competition by miles and miles. And then some.
Songs. Remember those? They were the things that used to be important to us before merchandising, posturing and shaking your booty at a video camera took over. They were the things that formed the soundtrack to a whole life before MTV redesigned the industry in exchange for a suitcase full of cash.
Loving this album as much as I do is a strange feeling. A few weeks back, the new Monster Magnet album came out. I love that band. The album was pretty good but I didn't come here for pretty good. I came to be floored in exchange for offering you my time and attention. That's the deal we make when it comes to music.
Others have said it before me, but none have meant it as much as I do right now: that voice drips honey at every twist of the knife.
Her voice does the same thing to me that Stevie Nicks' used to back in the days before it went kinda fuzzy - and it's funny how people respond to marketing. If you put Freedom next to Bella Donna, you'll find a lot of similarities - but the world will have you believe that one is a classic from an international rock star worthy of the status and the other is the result of a talent competition. While that might be true on the surface and on paper, that's not what's actually happening. People need to listen with their ears and not eyes that scan column inches in search of an opinion they can use as their own, normally generated by somebody that got mailed a CD for free and has nothing to lose.
More than this, people should listen with their hearts. It's simply so beautiful in every way imaginable, I don't have any more words than I've already written about it available for description.