reviews

What Do The Trees Think of Enya?

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

Welcome back to NAGCHAMPA. That stands for New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful.

We’re listening to every album that was ever awarded, or nominated for, the Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album.

We’ve reached 1997, when the award went to Enya for her fourth studio album, The Memory of Trees. Between 1993 and 2007, every time Enya released an album, this award was a given. No other New Age artist stood a chance if there was an Enya album in the running. This spell would be broken in 2017, when her Dark Sky Island album lost out to the second album by White Sun. Oh, and her 2008 Christmas album wasn’t even nominated. Maybe festive albums aren’t eligible for this gong.

Anyway, for the time being, if Enya’s in town, every other New Age musician may as well stay at home. This is her game.

But did she deserve to win five New Age Grammy awards, effectively trivialising any work produced by any other artist any year she happened to win an album?

Yes. Of course she did.

Continue reading →

George Winston Sees The Wood For The Trees

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

In 1996, Christmas came early for George Winston when he took home the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album.

This is NAGCHAMPA. That’s the New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful. I’m listening to every album that ever won, or that was ever nominated for, the Grammy Award for best New Age, Ambient, or Chant album. Originally, I was doing this because I wanted to better understand just what this whole New Age thing is all about. Now I’m doing it because I really enjoy New Age music.

George Otis Winston III, who passed away in 2023, was no stranger to the Grammy Awards. As well as triumphing in the New Age category in 1996, he got a nomination for Best Children’s Music Album (for a collaboration with Meryl Streep!), and one for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, for a collection of Doors songs reconsidered for solo piano. He looks just like Rufus from Bill & Ted in his Spotify profile picture.

Despite winning the 1996 Grammy Award for Best New Age Album, and despite initially finding success on Windham Hill, George was one of those artists who dismissed the “New Age” label. So how would George have described his music?

George claimed that he always played in one of three styles: A New Orleans R&B kind of thing; a Fats Walleresque “stride piano”; and a melodic style of his own which he described as “rural folk piano”. He dabbles in all three styles throughout Forest, the album which won him his Grammy. But he mostly seems to stick to that “rural folk” sound. And what an evocative and affecting sound it is. Apparently, George first became interested in playing the piano having heard Vince Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas. It shows; not just in his uplifting lyrical style, but also in just how Christmassy much of his work seems to be.

Continue reading →

2025: The State That I Am In

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

This is a list of 10 terrific albums from 2025.

I make lists like this every year, and I finally understand why: It gives me the impetus to seek out new music throughout the year, rather than to just listen to stuff from decades ago. Because that’s the sort of thing I’d do, otherwise. This year’s Spotify Wrapped thing told me that my musical age is 70. The cheek!

But also, this year I found a good reason to write about music. To quote Ted Gioia:

“Music writers have a greater responsibility to write positive music reviews about outstanding works than negative hit pieces on bad music. The bad music will go away on its own. But good (and even great) artists often need a helping hand if their work is to survive.”

This is why, as per, I’ll be focusing on stuff that’s unlikely to get featured in many other end-of-year roundups. Because if I don’t who will?

Continue reading →

The Desert Needs a Beer

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

What’s my age again?

There’s a game some people like to play whenever Coachella unveils the lineup of that year’s festival. You can work out your “musical age” by subtracting from 80 the number of names you recognise on the poster.

Based on the 2025 poster, my musical age is 46. But if I were to calculate it based on the number of acts I’d be interested in watching… hmm!

See for yourself:

The higher your “musical age”, the more you might relate to what follows.

Continue reading →

The Winter Man Cometh

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

I’ve decided to revive the NAGCHAMPA project.

Reminder: NAGCHAMPA = New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful.

Following my foolhardy metal quest, I feel like I need some quiet and visionary music as badly as I sometimes need a cup of tea and a flapjack.

It’s been five years. But if you remember, I’m studying every album that ever won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album, in an attempt to understand what makes New Age Music so New Age. The closest I came to a definition was this: New Age Music is applied ambient music. Or, it’s spiritual ambience. It’s music that aims to make you feel better, and succeeds.

But while my back was turned, the Grammy guys broadened the scope of this awards. Since 2023, the category has been “Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album”.

“Ambient” I get, but “chant”? Will there be chanting? Was there always chanting?

I swear, I had no idea that the 2025 Grammy Awards were taking place as I wrote this thing. The BBC didn’t even include the New Age category in their roundup of the winners. It looks like it went to Wouter Kellerman, Eru Matsumoto, and Chandrika Tandon’s Triveni. A worthy winner? We’ll see, when I finally get to 2025 in this project, some 16 years from now.

Because we’ve only just made it to 1994 here, and it’s Paul Winter’s time to shine.

Continue reading →

A Good Reason to Write About Music

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

I’ve never got along with music critics.

I read about music a lot. I’m sure most music critics are wonderful people in real life. I’m sure they’re polite to retail workers, and that they’re patient and conscientious drivers, and that they’re silent and respectful of their fellow passengers when using public transport.

But in my experience, in their writing many music critics come across as miserable hand-wringers at best, or smug, self-righteous and self-serving sadists at worst. And no matter where they sit on this tedious spectrum, most music critics seem driven not by a desperate, obsessive love of music, but by an inexplicable desire to drain all the joy from the most vital, universal, and transcendent of artforms.

And yet, I often write about music. I’d do it more often if I had the time. How do I sleep at night?

Continue reading →

2024 – Bring Your Spirit Down!

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ve chosen to give up despair. It’s still terrible out there, and it seems to get worse every year. But despair is a total waste of time and energy. Take care of yourself. Be there for the people who need you, and commit to making your own world better. What more could anyone ask of you?

Anyway, this is my annual roundup of my favourite albums of the year. As usual, I’m focusing on the stuff that’s new to me, or that I don’t feel will get featured in many other year-end roundups. And the roundups I’ve seen so far – gracious! Far too many seem resigned to wallow.

I’m raising my glass, though, to offerings from certain perennial favourites: Bat For Lashes, The Cure, Elbow, Mercury Rev, The Smile (twice!), Goat, Kamasi Washington, John Cale, Jon Anderson, David Gilmour and, above absolutely everyone and everything else, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. We don’t deserve him.

Also, I suggest you listen to Civil Service. They know what they’re doing.

Continue reading →

Reading Before The Fall

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

What Happened to The Reading and Leeds Festivals?

Every year, as the August Bank Holiday weekend approaches, the Shiiine On Festival shares an old Reading & Leeds lineup to their Instagram.

Something like this:

You can imagine the comments. Some just offer a single word. “Classic,” or similar. Some share fond memories. This is often something along the lines of, “I can’t remember much but I’m told I had a good time”. They were drunk, you see.

But others say something along the lines of “what happened?”

And you get similar comments whenever Reading and Leeds post lineup updates to their own social media profiles. “What happened?”

What happened, indeed?

Continue reading →

Neck Deep at ATP

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) was a series of festivals held between 1999 and 2016.

These festivals were remarkable for a number of reasons. First, their lineups were almost entirely hand-picked by a guest curator, who was usually a musician. Second, many of the festivals took place in the most refined environments possible – Butlin’s holiday camps! Yes, this means that for one glorious evening it was possible to see Patti Smith play on a stage usually used for knobbly knees contests.

Continue reading →

DVD Review – Snow Patrol Live at Somerset House

/ ninetyeightytwo / Leave a comment

Before things got quite so bad as they are now, bands used to put DVDs out.

Mostly these would feature a recording of a live performance. But sometimes they were collections of music videos, or even specially-made “behind the music” documentaries. The best music DVDs contained a combination of the above.

Each DVD is a time capsule of an era that was very similar to our own, but also profoundly different. This is the era just before the mass adoption of smartphones, and before social media made everyone and everything significantly worse.

Continue reading →