Still still doing the final bits of the catching up thing, still doting the iced teas and crossing of the eyes, the clearing the decks and shall we knock on the door of the new year now? More catching up then, more better late than never for what any of it is worth. What’s words worth? Albums, more albums, more crossing the teacakes, eating yet more apples, cleaning house before the year finally does properly end and the mountain of music being released early next year can be taken on, and yes, like we said a couple of days ago, there is a mountain of it building up already…

Bab L’ Bluz – Swaken (Real World) – Hey look, we thought we had caught up with everything we needed to catch up with before we end the year, there is always one more thing though and we do need to mention this album properly before we get on with next year’s already mounting up releases. We have mentioned Swaken, Bab L’Bluz’s second album a couple of times already this year, advanced tastes, videos shared and such, we do need cover it at least semi-properly before we do finally pull down the shutters on what has been a rather good musical year though, Bab L’ Bluz are rather good, this video will tell you….

“Bab L’ Bluz are reclaiming the blues for North Africa” so Peter Gabriel’s respected Real World label tell us, they feature Yousra Mansour’s emotive vocals and a riff-heavy awisha lute backed by some beautifully powerful rhythms. They are essentially a blues band, a properly powerful band fronted by an African-Moroccan woman in what is a traditionally male role, the band are “devoted to a revolution in attitude which dovetails with Morocco’s ‘nayda’ youth movement – a new wave of artists and musicians taking their cues from local heritage, singing words of freedom in the Moroccan-Arabic dialect of darija. Ancient and current, funky and rhythmic, buoyed by Arabic lyrics, soaring vocals and bass-heavy grooves, Nayda! seems to pulse from the heart of the Maghreb”. 

Dare we say after all that that they bring Led Zeppelin to mind, not the bombastic rock beast, the World Music Robert Plant vision of the band, those more experimental less obvious left field moments that made Led Zep so good. Bab L’Bluz are nothing like Led Zeppelin of course, you just feel it in there, those things that influenced Plant and company, and all this is, as misguided as it might be, is meant as high praise for a band from Marrakech who probably are reclaiming something or at least reminding some of us as to where it all came from in the first place. hey look, as someone else said; Let go. Fall in. Follow the spiral, and find your centre. Move and whirl, headbang and hair whip, into a place that is out there and deep within, an altered state where minds open, boundaries fall away and trust – in values, principles, ourselves – is rediscovered, made real. And all this just needed to be shared on these pages before the year was done with…  (sw)

Bandcamp / Linktree

And….

The Decemberists – As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again (YABB Records) – And somewhere out beyond the melodies they planted in our heads this year, and that excellent performance back in the middle of the Summer in our local park just past the merry go round, beyond the burial ground and all the history somewhere near the devil and the devil you know. if was all about that afternoon in the sun in the park, Victoria Park,   they were just so damn entertaining, there tales, their tunes, their delight extended, just a classy blend of Americana, alt-rock and the Howards and the Seymours and don’t lose your head or your heart and this Summer did see their first new album in six years. Must confess I’ve never really taken that much notice of the US folk-flavoured outfit, the troubadours – they do feel like troubadours, until this year and that brilliant day in the park and their rather different balance of balladry, melancholy and mortality. As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is a more than decent album full of wordsmithery, full of tales, a warning or two, the treat though, the thing you need to really check out, if the unexpected almost twenty minute slow building bit of theatre that’s almost verging on prog rock at the end of the album, an epic piece of drama called Joan In The Garden at the end of it all, it is as good as anything you will have heard in 2024 – and if you listen closely, you will hear them sing hosanna as the first act builds over nine and a half minutes, and then…. and then, ten minutes in, it all goes still, the calm before the… well the song takes three or four minutes to think about it, to brood, to, well sixteen minutes in and suddenly they’re a galloping old school heavy rock band and layers of keyboards and paint and deep purples and Uriah heaps of things and as it never was so it will be again, who knew? And that, Joan In The Garden, alongside that J.D Vance tainted version of Severed they’ve been performing this year, or they were doing before the disastrous U.S election has really been one of the things in 2024… As someone else said, “Un superbe album!” (and who knew Colin Meloy was such a good frontman and that they’d be so brilliantly entertaining? One of the gigs of the year, should we have a gigs of the eyar list as well?) – Bandcamp / Decemberists.com

Previously on these pages…

ORGAN THING: Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Gossip, Say She She, Gustaf, Teenage Fanclub, the final day of All Points East is full of treats…

All of which reminds us that Sleater-Kinney, who were seriously good just before Decemberists on that Summer’s day in East London, also put an album out way back at the start of 2024…

Sleater-Kinney – Little Rope (Loma Vista Recordings) – Well this one actually came out way back in January 2024, kind of had a listen back then, thought it was okay, rather liked it without really going that deeply into it, Sleater-Kinney don’t really need us these days though and there’s never enough time, we didn’t feel the need to say that much back in January, after all they’re the North American alt.rock mainstream now aren’t they? They’re all Pitchfork marks-out-of-ten self-importance, they’re surely safe ground middle class middle age indie rock now and good luck too ’em, I like them, always have done, I like them like I like The Pixies or Jesus Lizard or all the others that don’t really need us, a bit like I like those Decemberists now, Sleeter-Kinney or indeed those Decemberists aren’t really what we’re about here at Organ, they don’t need us and we probably don’t need them. Nah, not one for us, we’re here for Flying Luttenbachers, for that excellent Extra Life album that came out this year and seems to have passed most people by, we’re hear for the return of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum or Slift or Yang or Michael or those Naked Grace Missionaries in a Hackney backroom or Cardiacs (do Cardiacs need us these days? Surely they’re bigger now then they ever were, there’s coffee table books about them now, they’re selling Cardiacs wigs in Woolworths). We’re for the bottom feeders, someone from the NME said that about us once, he meant it as an insult but then the best things are always down in the undergrowth, down in the underculture, in the back street galleries, the back rooms of East London pub venues, overcrowded Party Dozen gigs. So the Sleater-Kinney album passed bywhile we got buried under a million other releases and then they’re were added to the bill at All Points East and yeah I know, the fact that we cover that giant festival with those ticket prices is surely another contradiction? Hey, it happens in our local park, we can hear the soundchecks without getting out of bed, and anyway they invite us every year which is damn more than some of the festivals and promoters that actually might benefit from our coverage, we’re getting off track here, we often do…. 

So Sleater-Kinney were on the bill for a festival in our local park which in turn demanded Little Rope was revisited in the Summer lead up to All Points East, the songs started to stick, the words, that interplay that this almost second version of Sleater-Kinney still have here with this, the fourth album since they kind of came back – their second since forceful drummer Janet Weiss left.  They do have their own dynamic that criss-crossing chemistry of Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, that duelling of their very electric guitars, their screams that on stage never seem to be in danger of tripping over each other, that power, live they seriously rock, here’s some of what was said on these pages at the time…

“I must admit I wasn’t sure what to expect from Sleater-Kinney, saw them and really enjoyed them a fair few times back there (and the glorious Heavens To Betsy before that, did we see Heavens To Betsy or just write about them? It all gloops together as one big mass of gigs and tapes and bands and zines and photocopied Bikini Kill flyers and did that happen or didn’t it? After a while it all meshes together, I do know there’s a Heavens To Betsy tape and a letter from them in one of the the boxes in the corner where all the ancient Organ history is waiting to be explored), really enjoyed our Sleater-Kinney encounters back there but that was probably in the last century now and well Be Your Own Pet were so disappointingly middle age and mortgages last year on the very same stage in the very same sunny late afternoon timeslot. No need to worry, Sleater-Kinney more than rock! They might be a little older and maybe a bit wiser now, but they are essentially still that glorious wanting to be in charge of it all Riot Grrrl rooted band from the 90s and Olympia, Washington and yes, they are as powerful as ever, as compelling as ever, maybe even more so? They’re playing a healthy proportion of material from this year’s rather fine Little Rope album….”

And yes, they are still ripping up those patriarchal notions of what a rock band should be, older, wiser and will all that has happened, a touch more world weary, they are still Sleater Kinney though and importantly they have on this still new album, songs that want to hang around, songs that say it like they mean it, songs that have grown and grown with every revisit and as much as they don’t need us to say any of this now, this is one more album that needs to be mentioned before the year really really does end…   Bandcamp

One very last one….

C Turtle – Expensive Thrills (Blitzcat Records) – Should have mentioned this one back in March, back in March I couldn’t see the wood for the trees, I couldn’t see a thing and this album really should have been an Organ Thing, the raw London band do do their raw thing so so well. C.Turtle are urgent, they’re fractured, they matter, they should matter, that’s why this matters and turtles never sing heavy metal do they? An influence bad? They’re from London, the band, not the turtles, the turtles went back to the planet. C Turtle talk of fuzzy jumper rock, no idea what that is, something from Kensington Market probably and it really is the end of the year in of music now unless someone is about to hit the sound button (there will be something). C.Turtle deal in jagged lo-fi guitar noise and bits of sketchbook textures that kind of taste of the lose and almost lazy lo-fi alt-rock 90s and bands like Pavement, some of it feels like Cay’s early days, Cay, a band now long gone, a band never to be forgotten. Actually C.Turtle sound like a band that we night have wanted to release back there, this is now though and the last ting we want to do is release bands! This is the end of 2024 and C.Turtle are playing Two Palms just up the road from us here in Hackney on Mare Street on January 10th 2025… Bandcamp / Instagram

Actually this Cay b-side was a little more full bodied than C Turtle

Here’s an Alison Eales thing she posted two days ago…. “Through Hoops – taken from the album Mox Nox – is a song about the tensions inherent in friendships between people who are almost too alike. Upbeat and energetic, it features flute improvised by Diljeet Kaur Bhachu.”