Americana
Liz Thomson
Mary Chapin Carpenter lives these days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she sits at the kitchen table in her farmhouse and writes songs. “I have a couple of cats and dogs and I’m the hermit who lives down the road,” she explained to a capacity audience at the Barbican as she returned alone, just her and a guitar, for a final encore of “I Have a Need for Solitude”.Her songs – wonderful narratives, intimate, minutely observed – suggest a self-contained woman in touch with both her emotions and the world. Her voice – warm, low, a hint of vibrato, very distinctive – draws you in, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two minutes into The Lookout, a couple of related parallels bubble up when the David Crosby of If I Could Only Remember my Name and Gene Clark at his most sparse spring to mind. It’s not that the album’s opening cut “Margaret Sands” sounds like either but that the creative outlook is similar: a country-ish singer-songwriter setting their composition in a baroque musical frame.The rest of The Lookout is similarly conscious of how the form of delivery can shape a song. Yet such suggestions of lineage – an awareness of the classic – soon vanish. Ultimately and satisfyingly, Laura Veirs’s 10th Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
R.E.M. surprised the music world this morning by announcing an imminent new studio album, Charged. It will be released on their own record label, Around The Sun, on Friday 6th April via Spotify and iTunes, as well as a vinyl version distributed through record shops.The announcement was made via singer Michael Stipe’s press office which shared the album cover art and released the following brief statement:“That bird in the sky. It is flying over America. Distorted, unclear, far away. As with the future. We will not be back long. We will not tour. We must say something. Then we will go. Love to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Hie thee to Oxford, for it is doubtful that we will see the like of this exhibition again this side of the Atlantic. American art of the 1920s and 1930s was once disregarded in its homeland in favour of Francophile superiority, and once it fell into critical and commercial favour it became too expensive to move around at the beckoning of would-be international hosts.But the Ashmolean is – bolstered, too, by its nearly breaking the million-visitor mark last year – a master at barter: as the repository of more Michelangelo drawings than anywhere else, its loans made the Michelangelo exhibition Read more ...
peter.quinn
An album that enchants and surprises in equal measure, Heritage sees US sax player and composer Owen Broder explore the full gamut of American roots music – from blues and Appalachian folk to bluegrass and spirituals – through the prism of modern jazz.Subtitled ‘The American Roots Project’, Broder’s welcoming inclusiveness is evident from the outset, with his self-penned “Goin’ Up Home” transmogrifying from a simple folk chorale into driving swing and, neatly bookending the album, the collective improv of “A Wiser Man Than Me” which channels the singular sound-world of New Orleans.A Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It rather surprising to note that Mary Chapin Carpenter turned 60 earlier this year, which means she’s been making records for half her life, around in ours for 30 years – but it seems like yesterday. She has wisely resisted the album-a-year treadmill, which means that in assembling the “reimaginings” of songs from her back catalogue for Sometimes Just the Sky, she had a dozen studio albums to choose from.The voice seems unchanged: rich, deep, instantly recognisable, with a lovely touch of vibrato. She’s great at husky sotto voce – “Rhythm of the Blues” is a case in point – and her voice Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There were empty seats at Cadogan Hall on Thursday night which was a crying shame, for Beth Nielsen Chapman was in town and she played a wonderful set, full of warmth and charm and powerful singing, her voice always true and expressive. Chapman is one of those artists who seems completely at home on stage – casual, natural, down-to-earth, creating the intimate atmosphere of Nashville’s Bluebird Café. This was Beth unplugged, no gimmicks (unlike a disappointing Barbican gig some 15 years ago), accompanying herself mostly on guitar and occasionally on piano in a perfectly paced 90-minute set. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The delicious flame-grilled burgers and the vast array of bourbons on offer at the Lexington, hard by yet another “King's Cross Quarter”, added atmosphere to the opening night of Diana Jones’s European tour. Finger licking is (quite rightly) not allowed during the music so those arriving early for a bite might have spotted Jones herself, refuelling with friends between sound-check and curtain-up.Not that the singer-songwriter called variously “the Emily Dickinson of song” and “the female Johnny Cash” needs props of any kind. In venues far larger than the Lexington, Jones creates the kind of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is it possible to get too much of American politics? With Donald Trump’s daily tweets invading our digital space, a new Kevin-Spacey-free House of Cards on the, well, cards, and new films set in Watergate times, it might be that few will have any appetite for this revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 play set during a Democratic Party convention, and now making its West End debut. But to dismiss it completely would be a pity because, for all the creaks of its plotting, this is quite a watchable account of political in-fighting. After all, any show that has Maureen Lipman and Martin Shaw in the cast Read more ...
joe.muggs
For some a lack of development is failure; not for Kim Deal. Her songwriting and voice have influenced hordes of indie bands from the Eighties until now – indeed the “angular” clang and arch drawl of bands indebted to Pixies, and The Breeders, her band with sister Kelly, is as great a cliché as blues licks were in the Sixties and Seventies. Yet still, on this reunion album for The Breeders' 1993 lineup, the voice, sound and structures remain utterly distinctive and gloriously alien, a world away from the imitators, just as they shone out as different from all around them during The Breeders' Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1976, when his first solo album Slippin’ Away was released, Chris Hillman could look back on being a founder member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, two of America’s most important bands. He had also played alongside former members of Buffalo Springfield in Manassas and The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. Before any of this, Hillman was in the bluegrass-inclined Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and The Hillmen. Issuing an album under his own name was new. Slippin’ Away was issued when he was only 32.Slippin’ Away was followed-up in 1977 by Clear Sailin’. Both were issued by Asylum Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In a career spanning almost 40 years, Beth Nielsen Chapman has been sparing with her album releases. She’s been twice nominated for Grammys and many may still think of her as primarily a songwriter: “This Kiss”, of which she was co-writer, was a big hit for Faith Hill and artists as blue-chip, and as diverse, as Bette Midler, Waylon Jennings, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John have recorded her songs. So Americana-plus.Hearts of Glass is her 13th album – if you don’t count Greatest Hits (1999) and Liv On (2016), an album of hope and healing recorded with fellow breast cancer survivor Olivia Newton Read more ...