singer-songwriters
Kieron Tyler
The City: Now That Everything’s Been SaidWith early 1971's Tapestry, Carole King released a worldwide best seller which belatedly recognised that as an interpreter of her own songs, she had no peers. King had made the jump from the writer of songs for others to successful singer-songwriter. Harry Nilsson had done it. So had Randy Newman. Jimmy Webb would too. All three were based in Los Angeles.She had moved there from New York in 1968. The new home of America’s music business had supplanted the city where she had written “The Loco-Motion”, “Pleasant Valley Sunday, "Will You Love Me Read more ...
Barney Harsent
John Grant is nothing if not a confessional songwriter. On his last album, Pale Green Ghosts, there were moments of dark despair, caustic barbs and some surprisingly slinky grooves soundtracking a man who was offering himself up with a breathtaking honesty. On Grey Tickles, Black Pressure – a title that places us somewhere between mid-life crisis and full-on nightmare – he is similarly laid bare, but the literate humour has now become full-on funny and could well mark him out as the best lyricist of his generation.Although Grant says he wanted to get “moodier and angrier” on this record, he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Don’t be fooled by the header picture. Despite the relaxed poses, Iceland’s Pink Street Boys are amongst the angriest, loudest, most unhinged bands on the planet right now. Hits #1, their debut vinyl album – which follows distorted-sounding, lower-than-lo-fi cassette and digital-only releases – is so impolite and wild that once the rest of the world gets the message the story of what constitutes the current-day music of their home country will have to be rewritten.They are not an anomaly. Iceland is currently witnessing a groundswell of loosely punk–inspired bands drawing from the edgy spirit Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On paper, Richard Thompson's career seems every bit as exotic as one of his songs: At the age of 18 he helped found folk-rock pioneers, Fairport Convention. Later, in the Seventies, he and wife Linda recorded several successful records together before retreating to a Sufi Muslim commune.After returning to music, Thompson relocated to LA, where his unique combination of British folk and virtuoso rock guitar made him a connoisseurs' choice. In recent years Thompson has curated South Bank’s Meltdown festival, been awarded an OBE, and had a Grammy-nominated record. Yet he remains the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first thing that hits you is the voice. Simultaneously full and fragile; assured, but with a distinctive, backnote graze that runs along it like barbs on a feather shaft, it sounds, at times, as if it’s ghosting itself. As well as lending textural gravitas to pretty much anything Meg Baird chooses to sing, it’s the perfect instrument for this collection of self-penned songs that appear, on first listen, to be haunted by the past.Indeed, as we begin, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Counterfeiters” and “I Don’t Mind” were in fact the opening of a new album by Baird's former band, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Since her gorgeous self-titled debut album in 1979, Rickie Lee Jones has been all round the houses. Her music has plotted a sinuous path through jazz, blues, pop, soul and straight up-and-down rock. Her fortunes have soared and dipped, and the lovers apostrophised in the songs have come and gone, starting with Tom Waits, subject of “We Belong Together”. Last year she sailed past her 60th birthday without having released any new material since her 50th. The Other Side of Desire comes out on a record label of the same name, and was crowd-funded.It wouldn’t be a Rickie Lee Jones album if it didn Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Station to Station documents the transcontinental American rail trip taken by a group of musicians, visual artists, and performers in 2013. Local artists and marching bands also contributed to the series of "happenings", often enhanced by light shows and pretty effects, which included rock concerts staged at each of the 10 designated stops on the westward journey. Organised by the artist Doug Aitken, the marathon must have brought the contributors and audiences much pleasure. His film of it is underwhelming.It's not for the want of big names, indie rock being particularly well represented. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any album with a guest appearance from Eric Cantona is going to attract attention. The eighth track of Sophie Hunger’s Supermoon, “La Chanson d’Hélène”, is a sumptuous, string-infused reflection on identity with Serge Gainsbourg-style spoken interjections by Cantona. But it’s not the whole story of this by turns direct and subtle album.Head straight to what follows “La Chanson d’Hélène”. “We are the Living’s” jazzy swing and sparse arrangement suggests a liking for Jimi Hendrix’s pensive side. Elsewhere, on “Superman Woman,” Australian musical autobiographer Courtney Barnett is namechecked. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It takes a particular combination of talent, guts, perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness for an artist to take the creative decisions that Thea Gilmore has across her approaching 20-year career and get away with it – thankfully, all qualities that the Oxford-born songwriter has in spades. Since the release of her debut album, Burning Dorothy, when she was still a teenager, Gilmore has won admirers ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Joan Baez, re-recorded an entire Bob Dylan album, pioneered fan-supported songwriting and even flirted with the UK Top 40 on her 14th album.If you thought that Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The problem with many music documentaries is that they suffer from over-familiarity. In a bid to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, they end up spreading themselves too thinly on an area already well covered. Viewers tune in and, largely speaking, have their knowledge reaffirmed while they hang around on the off-chance that there may be some newly uncovered archive footage to make their investment worthwhile. There are notable exceptions to this, of course, and generally they crop close on their subject, or as in the case of Je t'aime: The Story of French Song, focus on an area that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of hits with the swaggering “Runaround Sue”. From then and into 1963 he racked up other classics such as “The Wanderer”, “Ruby Baby”, Donna the Prima Donna” and “Drip Drop”. The arrival of The Beatles in the US charts in early 1964 put paid to his run of hits. Times had changed. But in late 1968 he was back in the Top Ten with a heartfelt version of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a certain sound - one that I’d describe as “pastoral folk”, without ever being certain of what that means - that has always struck me as quintessentially English. Jenny Lysander’s debut album is one that ticks many of those boxes: sparse arrangements, ageless vocals, even a song called “Lavender Philosophy”, which is about as pastoral as it gets without involving grazing animals. To immerse oneself, dreamily, in Northern Folk is to feel as you did the first time you heard Laura Marling and wonder how one so young could create something so wise and so timeless (at 21, Lysander is just Read more ...