He went searching for the girl down on Jubilee Street but she’d died in a bedsit in 1993

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2024.

#22 : Orquídeas - Kali Uchis

A three-year stint at Rada couldn’t get you even close to achieving the inimitable vocal delivery of Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, whose blend of withering disdain, eyelash-batting seduction and awed wonder – sometimes all at once – is something to behold. Unlike its superb predecessor, Red Moon in Venus, the majority of Orquídeas is Spanish-language, but like a melodrama with the subtitles off, anglophone listeners can still intuit so much feeling and meaning from Uchis’s actorly performances as she builds from late-evening R&B to night-out Latin dance.

My second visit with Kali after The Guardian recommended her last year and my comment was that it was similar to Jessie Ware, so I've no reason to assume I'm not going to enjoy this.

Yeah, a Latina Jessie Ware isn't a bad shout at all - it shimmered past me nicely (even if it didn't intuit an awful lot of feeling and meaning - but maybe that's just me). It's not the sort of thing I'd ever choose to put on, but if it's on I quite enjoy it.

Wikipedia tells us it's her fourth (and second Spanish-language) album and the title means orchids (which I probably could have guessed if I'd thought about it). The critics were very nice about it with it making quite a few year-end lists and it did well commercially, getting to #2 in the US, but only #99 here.

"Customers also listened to" Casey Battle, Karol G, Rosalia and Bad Bunny - I'm quite surprised I've actually heard of a couple of them. But I'm obviously an expert on this kind of thing now because I've listened to two Kali Uchis albums and enjoyed them both.

#21 : Nonetheless - Pet Shop Boys

After their banging Stuart Price trilogy of albums, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe returned to swooning, songwriterly mode on Nonetheless. Pet Shop Boys’ finest album of the 21st century opens with Loneliness, a warning against succumbing to isolation. If its authoritative electropop doesn’t stir you from solitude, then their 15th album’s tales of queer dreamers, artists and lovers who went against the odds and thrived – Russian dancer in exile, Nureyev, on Dancing Star; Oscar Wilde watching boys on the promenade on Love Is the Law; the young Tennant himself as the freshly minted New London Boy – should make clear why big leaps are always worth taking.

The eighth album I've previously heard and the third one I've written about - with my comment being "well put together with quite a strong orchestral/disco vibe (that's a thing, right?) and some interesting lyrics". I would be perfectly happy to revisit it, but I'm pretty certain it wouldn't add anything to the original post, so we'll just thank them for their efforts and move on.

#20 : Wild God - Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

Anyone who has experienced grief will tell you that life in its wake doesn’t steadily improve on a straight, proportional axis; it’s all switchback turns on a bumpy emotional journey. And so it has played out with Nick Cave’s music since the death of his teenage son in 2015. Often harrowed and angry yet still with bursts of beauty and hope, the biggest burst yet came with Wild God, a maximalist celebration of the might of existence itself. The Bad Seeds manage to mingle real heft with a still-rickety quality, like a symphony orchestra and pub band combined, while Cave, finding joy even in a frog in a gutter, is inspiringly resolute in his lust for life.

And we move on to the ninth previous visit and fourth write-up and my comment was "I feel this could quite easily be a grower - and I'm almost tempted to give it a chance" - which under most circumstances would mean that we'd be given this a revisit now. But, I've already done so several times because I got a chance to go and see him live and it was such a great gig that I'm now officially a Nick Cave fan. But the original post gives you the general gist of things - you just need to up my level of appreciation a bit now if you read it!

#19 : Night Reign - Arooj Aftab

Mingling 18th-century Urdu poets and Rumi, words by a friend and jazz standards, Arooj Aftab’s fourth album casts a spell that brings these disparate traditions into a singular, spectral whole. Sometimes, as with the close vocals and weighty piano of Na Gul, it’s incredibly spacious; others, like the fiercely intricate plucked strings of Last Night Reprise, close and frantic. Both modes are entirely gripping. The beauty of the playing and arrangements is often otherworldly: the harp on the mournful Raat Ki Rani billows expansively against the song’s bodily heft. For all the striking, idiosyncratic arrangements elsewhere, the straightforward conversational intimacy of Whiskey plucks at the most core heartstrings.

This is our second visit with Arooj after a recommendation from The Guardian back in '21 - I really liked that, so am hoping for more of the same.

Yeah, more of the same is probably a reasonable description, but it's also a bit different. I don't really know how to describe it - it's like a Middle-Eastern slowed down Sade. Does that help? It sounds very good though, even if it's unlike to be revisited all that often - it's another one that would be great as a late night album if I did such things these days.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting (109 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is her fourth album and, somewhat intriguingly, gives the genres as "Pakistani folk music" and "bebop jazz" - I mean, who's not going to be intrigued by that mix? Another nicely bizarre fact is that "Raat Ki Rani" was released as a single with a video directed by the actor (and now director) Tessa Thompson and Tessa's father also plays on one of the tracks, under his working name Chocolate Genius, Inc. The critics were very nice about the album and I feel she was unlucky not to chart here, although she did get to the dizzy heights of #36 in Belgium.

"Customers also listened to" King Hannah, Jessica Pratt, Kamasi Washington (really?) and Beth Gibbons (her album was good this year, but we ain't gonna see it). I really liked this - she's got a lovely voice and there are some super smooth sounds on here, so check it out if you fancy some Middle-Eastern slowed down Sade!

Four pretty decent albums, but after Nick's blockbuster of a show earlier in the year, he has to be the winner - but they're all worth checking out if you've not heard them (and they're very different!).

#26-23 - A lot to love from the ladies
#18-16 - An interesting mix