This year had its fair share of high-profile comebacks. Some of them latched on to the spirit of innovation that we describe in our editorial above, and some of them didn’t.
Sade, the ageing ice queen of British soul, knocked out the platinum-certified and all-round nice Soldier Of Love, while Phil Collins played his decent cards all too safely with the aptly titled Going Back, a geriatric collection of Motown covers.
Others came back on the radar through different channels. The Rolling Stones made a big fuss out of the re-release of 1972’s Exile On Main St., which became the first album to return to No. 1 after its initial release. And last week, The Beatles’ catalogue finally became available on the iTunes store, following the resolution of the three-way legal dispute between Apple (the electronics company), Apple (the record label), and an apple. The immediate chart success of the band’s downloads will prompt bands like AC/DC – who refuse to upload their music to the iTunes store on ideological grounds – to reconsider their position.
But among the year’s returning stars, three shone particularly brightly. Brian Eno gave us a fairly traditional refraction of the Warp Records sound with Small Craft On A Milk Sea, which nevertheless sounds fresh. As Eno himself has pointed out, the album comes across like a soundtrack without a movie, and it got me yearning for a full new Eno score (his last was for the 1980 arthouse documentary Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung).
Elsewhere, Gil Scott-Heron came out of nowhere (or, more specifically, prison) to make the best album of his career, I’m New Here. The album is at once a fair retrospective of the artist’s troubled career (the lyrical content is overwhelmingly autobiographical) and a startling artistic reinvention: thanks to XL Recordings owner Richard Russell’s minimal production, Scott-Heron sounds as if he’s jamming with Massive Attack.
The seasoned trip-hoppers themselves released Heligoland, their first album in seven years, which served as a timely reminder of where dubstep’s moody production comes from. However, it also outlined the limitations of the trip-hop genre: the ominous urban sound that Massive Attack perfected on 1998’s Mezzanine has been subjected to the law of diminishing returns, and now sounds tired. Is trip-hop dead?
Yet for all this, great comebacks are not as common as great debuts, and this year was no exception. Why? Is it because comebacks tend to be motivated by easy profit-seeking rather than creative impulse? Perhaps because we expect more of established veterans than of unknowns? Or do musicians simply get worse as they age?
These are the kinds of questions that could prompt dozens of half-baked Cherwell articles, and I’m wary of answering them here.
Instead, I’ll celebrate 2010 as a fine year for comebacks, and express my hope that the good old times with the old timers continue into 2011: word has it that System Of A Down, Marilyn Manson and The Monkees are among those planning their return. Promising.
