Tom Dunne: Sprints to Christy Moore... my six favourite albums of 2024
Tom Dunne: My six favourite albums of 2024. Left to right: Sprints, Letter to Self and Christy Moore, A Terrible Beauty.
They say gratitude is a key thing in life. Taking the time to appreciate the little things that bring you joy. I regard compiling my annual list of albums of the year as one such exercise. Every year I remember albums that just lifted me, some in a small way, others simply blowing me away.
You should try all of these if you get a chance:
It was the dog days of last January, the Christmas Tree dumped and Dry January beckoning with its mirthless inevitability. This was the first album I listened to as I prepared the first show of the year. Well, what a way to start.
Letter to Self is an utter joy. Colm O’Reilly’s guitar is wonderful, but Karla Chubb’s voice, bright, urgent, distinctive, simply demands your attention. It’s why you form a band. Its why bands gather in cold rooms.
Pure class, and it was still only February. Alynda Segarra, from New York, might sound like a Dylan wannabe on paper – riding the freight trains, reading Woody Guthrie – but her observations on small town America are mini masterpieces. Bruised hearts and broken dreams, naturally, but humanity and hope and love in abundance too.
And still only March! Somehow, the first two BLH albums had conspired to evade me. It’s probably another thing we can blame on covid as their debut arrived in the height of ifs first hysteria. Still, a band named for a Planxty song and featuring Anais Mitchel, I should have been front and centre.
This album was largely recorded in Levis Corner House in Ballydehob, a venue BLH describe as the “pub version of our band.” The combination of the writing, singing and playing abilities of Mitchel, Eric D. Johnson and Josh Kaufman create something that transcends each of their already huge individual talents.
If you need an album to help you deal with all that love and loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time might throw at you, this is the one. “It’s not simple. It’s messy,” says Mitchell, “and that’s okay.”
I have followed the progress of this band since Last of the Analogue Age (2014) and The D They Put Between the R & L (2019). Both were my Albums of the Year in those years. This July release makes it three in a row.
Singer Brian Brannigan once told me that he writes songs by taking long walks and singing song ideas into his phone. These he sends to guitarist Joe Chester to develop further. For two of those songs, Lemon Sevens and Black and Amber from the 2019 album to have found their way onto a Christy record is truly remarkable.
But not surprising. When you hear them on that album, they sound like songs Christy has been waiting all his life to sing. They simply soar.
October brought us Sack’s best ever album, no mean feat considering their 1997 Butterfly Effect was an indie pop classic. They were feted in the early 90s and adored by Morrissey. Success eluded them, but greatness hasn’t.
If you made a checklist of all the ingredients that great music should have – insightful, heartfelt lyrics, brilliant instrumentation, hooks, melodies and a voice for the ages- they are all here in spades. The band’s songs like Martin McCann’s voice are if anything, only getting better.
November brought a few late flourishes, The Cure’s Songs of A Lost World to name but one, but Christy’s A Terrible Beauty was the most wonderous of the late 2024 releases. The voice, the songs, the simplicity of the arrangements, it was time to pull up a pew, sit back and bathe in its beauty.
The sleeve, a Martin Gale painting, shows a Kildare country road of a winter evening. You can imagine Christy walking it, singing these songs in his head as he goes. The Brian Brannigan ones as mentioned amidst songs of Palestine, the Ukraine, Anne Lovett and the Irish ladies football team.
No one else could deliver such a varied array of songs that ache with tenderness, sympathy and solitude. A master at work.
And I haven’t even mentioned, Fontaines DC, CMAT, Waxahachie, MJ Lenderman, Kim Deal or Shelby Lynn. Nice work, 2024, nice work indeed.
