blues
Mark Kidel
The Dreamer is the relatively low-key swansong from one of soul’s greatest divas, a mountain of barely restrained power, who inspired and influenced several generations of singers. Why some musicians survive lives of excess and others don’t is something of a mystery. While Janis Joplin, for whom Etta James was the ultimate vocal and performance model, crashed early in her wild career, James has soldiered on, in spite of serious heroin addiction and a number of illnesses that would have felled most women of her age.James has always manifested irrepressible energy, an intense force field that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Cocaine Blues” is a song whose murky origins lie at the very roots of blues, folk, country and rock’n’roll, possibly right back to the last days of minstrelsy. When Johnny Cash performs it on his riveting 1968 live album At Folsom Prison, it fairly hums with potency, just about as heartening as popular music gets. When Merle Haggard has a crack at “Cocaine Blues” on his latest album, however, the mood is the polar opposite. The clean easy-going tone conjures a country and western version of Hugh Laurie’s recent sedate, chart-bothering take on the blues.
Then again, Haggard, at 75, has Read more ...
howard.male
I love the fact that under the “genre” tab on their Facebook page, Orchestre National de Barbès have opted for “Other” from the dropdown menu. Obviously in Facebookland “Other” simply means not rock, soul, hi-hop, jazz, reggae, classical etc. However, in a metaphysical/philosophical sense “Other” can mean that which is alien, different or exotic. But what tickled me is that the music of this Parisian-based, largely Algerian band actually embraces just about all the Facebook categories they could have clicked on, even if none of them fully sums up the multilayered din they create.Although the Read more ...
howard.male
Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara produces guitar riffs that are like quiet musical mantras from which songs seem to blossom like exquisite orchids. Or at least that’s the effect achieved by a combination of the songs themselves and the exquisitely understated arrangements which one can imagine were a pleasure for Diawara to work on with regular World Circuit producer Nick Gold.Comparisons have already been made between the Côte d’Ivoire-born 29-year-old and the Malian legendary diva she has sung backing vocals for, Oumou Sangare (who Diawara pays tribute to here with “Makoun Oumou Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"I wanted to do an album that would be very uplifting and positive, as well as inspirational," quoth the divine Miss P of her latest waxing. Starting as she means to go on, she opens with the chunky honky-tonk pop of "In the Meantime", which crams a panorama of hopes and fears behind its perky exterior. We shouldn't worry about nuclear war and Armageddon, she advises, because "nobody knows when the end is coming" and besides, "God still lives in the hearts of men". Oh, and we should take care to look after the planet, too.There's quite a lot of this sort of holy-rolling self-helpism sprinkled Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hiatt's regular band play as if they're taking a road trip from Nashville to... well, California maybe, Hiatt's former home which he sings about eloquently on the wistful country-rocker "Adios to California". Despite its title, it's the Golden State that springs to mind once again when he sings "Detroit Made", a dust-raising automobile ode not a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" and its tale of a trip out west.Hiatt has some serious stuff in his sights too. He wrote "Down Around my Place" after freak flooding wreaked havoc in his home town of Nashville last year, and the Read more ...
howard.male
The Killer B’s have been heralded as a kind of alternative supergroup (their line-up consisting of ex-members of The Screaming Blue Messiahs, Chicken Legs Weaver and The Men They Couldn’t Hang) so my expectations last night were high. But a poor sound system, in conjunction with the band’s desire to play much too loud for that poor sound system, ended up making it very hard to judge whether I was hearing the future of rock’n’roll or just another pub rock band.The irony with full-on raucous rock‘n’roll is that it’s a fine art. You might think that it’s just about plugging a cheap guitar into a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Well, there's a nice surprise. Jill Scott was feared lost to music industry machinations, more likely to succeed in her acting career than make a fourth album (she's probably best known now to mainstream British audiences as Mma Ramotswe in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency TV series). But it seems a four-year musical hiatus and change of label has done her the power of good, as this is the Philadelphia singer and spoken-word artist's best album since her debut Who is Jill Scott?It kicks off in fairly straightforward “nu soul” fashion, with “Blessed”, featuring the kind of I'm-a-strong-woman- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seasick Steve Wold (b 1941) has achieved widespread popularity over the last five years with his raw, rootsy, blues-flavoured sounds. He's also renowned for his customised guitars, such as one featured on his new album, You Can't Teach an Old Dog New Tricks, that's made from Morris Minor hubcaps, and for his stage patter which combines US Southern charm with hobo lore and anecdotes.Wold left his Californian family home in his early teens after falling out with his stepfather and spent many years hopping freight trains and working as an itinerant labourer. Over the decades he travelled Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.It's a mutual transatlantic love affair, and Laurie's triumph as the manipulative medic has given him a platform from which to record an album of his adored blues and New Orleans music, Let Them Talk. In Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I've spent the last week feasting on John Martyn via Spotify. He was a gap in my musical education. He turns out, as a large portion of you reading already well know, to be a rich, raw talent. I knew his rep but had a misguided notion he was another blueprint for whiny contemporary singer-songwriters. All that reveals is my own ignorance.There's a fair chunk of miscalculated stodge in his back catalogue but the best of it combines Britain's folk heritage with all manner of jazz, blues, funk and roiled emotion and is something that will require a great deal more investigation on my part. Read more ...
howard.male
London-based trio Les Triaboliques should perhaps be grateful that Wikipedia hasn’t included them in their entry on supergroups. There you will find a comprehensive list of so-called supergroups with leadenly histrionic names like Isles and Glaciers, Shrinebuilder and How to Destroy Angels (not to mention the super-supergroups that started it all such as Cream, Humble Pie and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But Adams, Edmonds and Mandelson are, I suppose, the alt-supergroup, representing something of an evolutionary jump forward - if for no other reason than they are musically co-operating Read more ...