singer-songwriters
Marina Allen, Cafe Oto Review - east London substitutes for 1970s Los AngelesThursday, 16 February 2023
When Marina Allen’s second album Centrifics came out last autumn, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter said her voice was the only instrument on the record. She writes on guitar and piano but beyond what she sang, everything else was played by... Read more... |
Album: Robert Forster - The Candle and the FlameMonday, 30 January 2023
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2022: Lizz Wright - Holding SpaceSaturday, 24 December 2022
Bolivian marching powder, sexual violence, fraud. As the actions of the present kakistocracy edged ever closer to that of a lost Brian De Palma film script, it was to music that we turned once again for beauty and the best of humanity.With stunning... Read more... |
Album: Debbie Gibson - WinterliciousWednesday, 14 December 2022
Those old enough will recall Debbie Gibson as a squeaky clean, flash-in-the-pan teen pop star of the late 1980s. She was globe-trottingly huge for a couple of years – a peer of Tiffany “I Think We’re Alone Now” Darwish – but then her star waned.... Read more... |
Album: Weyes Blood - And in the Darkness, Hearts AglowFriday, 25 November 2022
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster... Read more... |
Nu Civilisation Orchestra & ESKA: 'Hejira' and 'Mingus', Poole Lighthouse review - redistributing the futureTuesday, 22 November 2022
I had high hopes for this show. After all, Eska Mtungwazi is pretty much the only singer on earth I’d go out of my way to hear sing Joni Mitchell songs.Not only does she have the necessary vocal range and control, but her own sole solo album sits... Read more... |
Album: Dermot Kennedy - SonderSaturday, 12 November 2022
Not even a worldwide health epidemic could stop the meteoric rise of the Irish singer, who has managed to crack America, achieve national treasure status in his homeland and rack up streaming figures that could actually pay his winter gas bill. Not... Read more... |
Album: Taylor Swift - MidnightsWednesday, 26 October 2022
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable... Read more... |
Album: Beth Orton - Weather AliveFriday, 23 September 2022
Beth Orton has never rushed her music. Her first four albums came one every three years, then since 2002 it’s averaged at a five year gap each time. So it’s no wonder also that there can be stylistic schisms from one to the next.In contrast to its... Read more... |
Album: Loudon Wainwright III - Lifetime AchievementMonday, 15 August 2022
Celebrating, if that is the right word, his 75th year, Loudon Wainwright III offers us his 26th studio album in 52 rollicking years, Lifetime Achievement. Though he does have one Grammy on the shelf, for 2009’s double set, Charlie Pool Project,... Read more... |
Album: Ben Harper - Bloodline MaintenanceSaturday, 23 July 2022
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Ben Harper achieved global stardom, although the UK was a territory where he never achieved lift-off. By contrast, in the US, Australia and much of Europe, he’s regarded as a heavyweight (he... Read more... |
Album: Neil Young and Crazy Horse - ToastThursday, 07 July 2022
Neil Young put Toast to one side in 2001, dismayed at its blue emotional terrain. Depicting his marriage to Pegi Young hanging by a thread, it was recorded with Crazy Horse in San Francisco’s Toast studio, where Coltrane once worked, but rats now... Read more... |
