singer-songwriters
Kieron Tyler
Although Dark Horse is Maria Wilman’s first album, it feels as though it’s the latest entry in a string of releases. The songs are fully formed. The delivery is assured. The overall character of what’s heard is cohesive, suggesting the person who recorded these 12 tracks draws from previous experiences with framing what they want to express, and how it should be expressed. But there it is, Dark Horse is a debut.Dark Horse shares its attitudinal stance with Americana, but mostly lacks nods towards country or rootsiness though a gospel-soul feel surfaces on the pedal-steel-aided “Mastermind.” Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s probably an unconscious action. Sat on a stage-centre chair, Julie Byrne sings. The two acoustic guitars she plays for about half the set are beside her, on their racks. One hand is above the other, palms down. Each moves side-to-side in a chopping motion. It’s not simultaneous with the song’s rhythm and independent of the meter of the lines. It’s not obvious what's being complemented or ticked off, but it must draw from something concealed by the exterior.Looking for signals of what’s within at this London show by the US singer-songwriter is inevitable. The completion of Byrne’s recent Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This album promises to be an expansion of the sound and ideas of its 2021 predecessor Heart Shaped Scars, and boy does it deliver. HSS was the Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s first album in some nine years, and only her seventh in the 28 years since she first appeared with the space-dub-country-torch-song trio One Dove. And it was a delicate album, built on generations of the purest psychedelic folk, a perfect soundtrack for emerging from the shock of peak COVID, full of the intimacy of isolation and fears for the world, but renewed love of nature. Consciousology Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
First things first. The support acts at events like this usually get completely overlooked, but it would be frankly criminal not to give a mention to a superb set by the Chicks. They dropped the “Dixie” from their original name because of its now “problematic” political connotations, and their critical comments about Dubya Bush provoked a career-changing backlash, but they’ve bounced back feistier than ever.Armed with an arsenal of instruments sure to bring joy to country music fans – dobro, pedal steel, fiddle, banjo, mandolin – they surged through a set of old favourites, including “Cowboy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Summer Glass” is The Greater Wings’ fourth track. A synthesiser pulse evoking water dripping from eaves unites with glistening harp arpeggios and muted strings. The voice weaving through this is distant, shrouded in fog. Lyrics are about “being ready to travel again,” wanting “to be whole enough to risk again.” Atmospherically, there are intimations of the intense 1969 Jerry Yester and Judy Henske LP Farewell Aldebaran and Beach House at their most oblique.The new album by the Buffalo, New York-born Julie Byrne initially seems weightless. The delivery is light, nothing bludgeons, textures Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”Taking these as a way in to the fourth studio album from the UK-born but Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power is an understandable path to follow, but after Dream From The Deep Well concludes it Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Whether it’s the newly platinum tresses or the bubblegum production shimmer that make up Maisie Peters’ sophomore record, The Good Witch has a definite nod to The Wizard of Oz’s Glinda. Unlike that Good Witch of the North though, Peters’ career didn’t just pop off like a bubble. Still only 23 years old, Peters has actually been crafting songs for over a decade now.The West Sussex-born songwriter tested her craft in her teens busking on the streets of Brighton. Her stardust didn’t go unnoticed with chart-topper and MBE Ed Sheeran (perhaps, the Wizard of this story) signing Peters to his label Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Pete Fij and Terry Bickers are bathed in muted red light. They are sat side-by-side, Fij with an acoustic guitar, Bickers with a vintage 1970s CMI hollow-bodied electric. Behind them, oil wheel lighting gloops and bubbles gently, bespattered with glowing green circles cast by the stationary disco ball hanging high above them. “It’s surprising to see how much life you can fit into the back of a van,” sings Fij, dolefully, then adds, “It only took two trips.”The line, from the song “Broken Heart Surgery”, sums up part of the duo’s appeal, combining, as it does, a world-weary mournfulness with Read more ...
peter.quinn
From the celestial vocal harmonies of “Call The Tune” and insistent looped rhythms of “Omnipuss” (in which you feel the spirit of Miles’s On The Corner), to the Sly Stone-esque “Clear Water” and intensely vital “Vuma” (featuring South African vocalist and songwriter, Thandiswa, plus vibist and label mate, Joel Ross), this Blue Note debut from the singularly great multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello presents a treasure trove of musical memories.Like her 2018 album Ventriloquism, The Omnichord Real Book appears to channel a desire to transcend narrow genre Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ latest combines his apparently effortless immediacy at acoustic guitar songwriting with an orchestrated opulence that sometimes pushes the sound towards the realms of musical theatre. Lyrically, he’s in fine form too, but what will likely define many listeners’ response to the album is how they feel about his repeated and passionate belief in God, which permeates everything.This review is not the place to unpack Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ complex 50+ year journey from spiritual Sixties/Seventies troubadour to hardcore Islamic devotee to relaxed-Muslim-who’s-rediscovered-his-inner- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHRahill Flowers at Your Feet (Big Dada)Rahill Jamalifard’s debut solo album somehow transmutes autobiography into gorgeous slow-pop. Of Iranian-American origin and best-known as singer of the band Habibi, she and FKA Twigs producer Alex Epton use home recordings and pensive, sometimes nostalgic lyrics to create something unique, lolling and amiable. Beck appears on one song, “Fables”, and the magpie spirit of his best work is a good reference point. It’s a lovely album that seems at once familiar, yet strange and new, a collation that includes elements of jazz, trip hop, hip Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Paul Simon is an ornery bugger. Full of awkwardness and perversity as a person, seemingly hugely detached, but as an artist capable of as much tenderness and directness as just about anyone out there. Capable of making world-changing artistic statements but queering his pitch with bizarrely, unnecessarily reactionary statements or actions. Really, a very weird man.But thankfully, he’s never gone all the way into cantankerousness. He’s not a Morrissey, so high on his own farts that the perversity becomes his entire persona, and every action and word is layered with provocation and second Read more ...