#18 Juan Diego Florez - The Tenor

The Tenor
I used to belong to one of those CD clubs where you start by getting half a dozen things you want really cheap and end up paying £14 each for a load of things you don't want just because you're too lazy to go to the post office or too disorganised to return the slip that says 'no thanks'.

This was one of the discs I didn't order but arrived anyway - luckily I liked the look of it.

Juan Diego Florez seems to be one of those singers (like Cecelia Bartoli) who polarizes people. I know a few people who can't stand his voice. Like it or not, however, his singing is incredible on a technical level. I happen to like it, although I need to be in the right mood. At least, that's true on disc, I'm always in the mood to hear him sing live. I've seen him a couple of times at Covent Garden: once in The Barber of Seville with the incredible Joyce Di Donato and once in Fille Du Regiment with Natalie Dessay, probably the most perfect opera experience I've ever had in the theatre.

I did make the mistake of listening to this on the way to work today - JDF has the kind of voice that my ears might need to wake up a little more to fully appreciate, especially in a disc of arias where there's a higher density of top notes than you'd get in an evening in an opera house (you'd also get other voices in the opera house).

I love this disc - it's also great to see a couple of non-operatic pieces (Amapola and Granada) that mix things up without feeling the need to go all crossover and sing something wildly inappropriate just to generate a few sales. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against crossover as such, I just think sometimes people chase sales at the expense of producing quality. Not here.

#17 Britten - Peter Grimes (Davis/Vickers)

Britten: Peter Grimes

I love Peter Grimes, love it - in the way Kevin Keegan would have loved it if Newcastle had beaten Manchester United (probably more so).

The first recording I owned was the Britten/Pears one and I loved it - still do. A couple of years later my wife bought me the John Vickers/Colin Davis recording on vinyl but, vinyl not being so portable, I ended up not listening to it as much. I finally got round to getting the CD a while ago and have spent the past few days listening to pretty much nothing else other than this (although I did watch the ENO Philip Langridge DVDyesterday).

It's wonderful to have more than one outstanding recording of any opera to listen to and it's especially great when the versions bring out very different sides of the drama as is the case here. Vickers' singing is much more muscular and brutal than Pears' and Davis conducts the score with an equal amount of conviction. The standout scene for me is Grimes' first entry after the Passacaglia ('Go there...') which hits you with the force of a gale and leaves you reeling.

Grimes features as a (relatively small) reference in the novel I'm currently writing, which is one of the reasons I've been listening to it so much - more on that later though.

#16 Radiohead - The Bends

Radiohead - The Bends
When I was at university everyone banged on about this album and I bought it thinking 'they can't all be wrong'. I listened to it a fair bit at the time but it never really got under my skin in the way I was expecting it to.

I have roughly the same relationship with Radiohead as I have with U2 - I can see why what they do is good, why it's important, why it's unique and why people love it. I just don't - love it that is. I think with U2 I know why that is. The band, Bono in particular, have spent so long creating a kind of post-modern rock-god-for-the-masses image that it actually gets in the way of me seeing them as real people singing about real stuff. Radiohead aren't the same though - they're pretty much as real as it gets.

All that said - I do love Fake Plastic Trees and High and Dry. I guess that's part of the problem with this album for me - after Fake Plastic Trees it's basically peaked for me and the rest seems like a let down.

I've got OK Computer as well and it hasn't bowled me over either. I reckon it's a bit like mushrooms or rhubarb though - eventually you have to stop trying and concede it's just not for you. There's so much music I love in this world I don't have enough time to listen to music I don't. I do still feel like it's my error though and there's something I'm missing.

#15 The Beatles - Please Please Me

Please Please Me

I love this album. Everybody bangs on about how Sgt Pepper is the best Beatles album - it's not. Neither is the white album or even Rubber Soul (much as I love them all...well...Sgt pepper not so much...)

From the count-in to 'I Saw Her Standing There' to the final ragged yelps of 'Twist & Shout', Please Please Me did as much to kick pop music up the arse as anything before or since. It set the standard for future bands and made it the norm for bands to sing well, play well, have personality, write their own songs, push the boundaries of recording blah, blah, blah...

People get tired of The Beatles as they've been round so long but this album is like a cotton bud for tired ears & heads - it shifts the accumulated crap and lets you hear clearly again. Works for me.

Plus...George's solo on 'Boys' is brilliant.

#14 Punch Brothers - Antifogmatic

Antifogmatic
For those not in the know Punch Brothers are the band formed by former Nickel Creek mandolinist Chris Thile - for those of you who don't know who Nickel Creek were, they were the band that Punch Brothers' frontman Chris Thile used to be in. All clear? Good.

Almost 4 years ago when I left my job in music publishing to work for a mate's website, I was bought a mandolin as a leaving present. Good present. I slowly taught myself to play it and started looking around for mandolin players and mandolin-related stuff to listen to. I came across Chris Thile courtesy of the splendid Woodsongs Old Time Radio Hour podcast. Turns out he was promoting his new album How to Grow a Woman From the Ground so I hunted round and bought a copy. The band on that album turned into The Tensions Mountain Boys but nobody got the joke so they became Punch Brothers.

In 2008 I was reviewing CDs for americana-uk as a bit of a sideline and wanted to review Punch Brothers first album Punch. Despite requesting a review copy (twice) it never came so I downloaded the album from iTunes and reviewed it from that - it was one of only two 10/10 reviews I gave - the other may well be Disc of the Day at some point. Read the review here

Anyhow, here we are with Antifogmatic - if I could I'd give this 11/10 but I can't as that would be mathematically incorrect (plus I don't write reviews any more). This album has almost all the things that I love about classical music and opera and miss from time to time in popular music (for want of a better phrase to cover everything from Hank Williams to Iron Maiden - ie non-classical music). It has stunning variety of texture, colour, dynamic and touch of playing. Plus the songs are also incredibly, incredibly good.

There's nothing I don't like about this album and Missy has possibly the best instrumental break ever (courtesy of Gabe Witcher on fiddle).

Punch Brothers are my favourite band currently in existence on the planet.

#13 Fairport Convention - Liege & Lief

Liege And Lief

This album regularly tops the polls of best folk and folk-rock albums of all time and for very good reason. Liege and Lief set the standard for so many of the elements of folk rock that we now expect and marks the arrival not only of Sandy Denny as one of the UK's finest voices but also of Richard Thompson as a true innovator on the guitar. Add to that a cracking rhythm section and some inspired fiddling and you get a band that's capable of everything from the taught, menacing thump of Tam Lin to the gentle washes of sound that underpin the sublime Reynardine.

Listening to the guitar solos on the longer tracks reminded me of recent disc of the Day #9 - Televisions Marquee Moon. You could drop the needle (so to speak - we are on CD here after all) at a random point in the solos to title track Marquee Moon and swear you're hearing Richard Thompson.

Brilliant stuff.

#12 (re-visited) Messiaen - Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Barenboim)

Oliver Messiaen: Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) (1940).

OK, I promised to listen to this again post-hangover so here we go (not that it's taken this long to get rid of the hangover).

I really enjoyed this second time round. As I often find with more tonally challenging music I found the slower movements easier at first. I guess it's down to being able to hear the harmonies unfold rather than being hit with them all in one go, as you often are in the faster sections.

My favourite track at this point is 5 - Louange a l'Eternite de Jesus - but there's clearly plenty in the work as a whole that will unfold as my ears get used to it and hear past the 'easier' bits.

Glad I came back to it. There will be a new disc later today