CDs/DVDs
Jasper Rees
Loudon Wainwright III is the closest the Americana tradition gets to a stand-up comedian. It’s there in the punctilious insistence on his place in the dynasty (a dynasty which has spawned a couple of singer-songwriters of a less humorous bent). One of the gags in Wainwright’s 25th studio album in a recording career that began in 1970 is the indignity of old age, and naturally he tells it well: “Brand New Dance” is a hymn to the failing body (“Here comes the hard part here’s the bad news/You go to bend over and put on your shoes”). The observational wit is also on the prowl for life’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4This is one of the most important reissues of the year. As the year ends, it may become the most important. Troubadours - Folk and the Roots of American Music is a set of four, individual three-CD sets charting the evolution of the American folk-based singer-songwriter style from its roots and influences to when it became a default mode of expression in the mid-Sixties and later.All-encompassing are words underselling Troubadours. Everything which should be, and everyone who needs to be, is here Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Neon Jungle are a manufactured band consisting of four visually striking young women aged between 17 and 21. They have supported Jessie J in concert and, according to their press release were "were handpicked by iconic lingerie brand Victoria's Secret to perform at their legendary fashion show in New York". We can, then, discount the likelihood of them sounding musically groundbreaking, and instead start from a baseline judgement level that’s the musical equivalent McDonald's.On that basis, some of this debut album is a momentary giggle. Produced by Australian-American rapper Snob Scrilla ( Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Raya Martin's Independencia (2009) begins during the brutal Philippine-American War of 1899-1902, the prelude to four decades of US occupation. When distant gunfire interrupts a joyful Filipino national holiday, a tough middle-aged woman (Tetchie Agbayani) and her grown-up son (Sid Lucero) flee to the rainforest and set up home in a cabin abandoned by Spanish colonists.
They adapt well, breeding chickens and living off the land, though the mother is perturbed when the son finds and tends a young woman (Alessandra De Rossi) who had been raped by an American soldier. Much later, it is the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Tom Petty is one of rock’s best-selling artists of all time. However, with the exception of a couple of minor hits, his West Coast Bruce Springsteen with a Byrds fixation schtick has never really gained much traction in the UK. In 2010 his album Mojo saw Tom and his long-time backing band, the Heartbreakers, rediscover their Seventies roots with lots of blues flavours and even a hint of Allman Brothers’ extended jamming. Hypnotic Eye finds the band in similar territory, in what often feels like an homage to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil Young & Crazy Horse.Kicking off with the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Initiated in the latter part of 2011 by Jazz Warrior and multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson and pianist/sound sculptor Pat Thomas, I saw the shape-shifting ensemble Black Top play an incredible gig as a sextet at its spiritual home, Café Oto, as part of the 2012 London Jazz Festival. It was my favourite performance of that year's edition, by a country mile.The elements that so impressed that night - the mercurial interplay, the constant textural shifts, the brilliant musicianship and the playfulness with which the ensemble deconstructed and reassembled their chosen material - are all heard Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Too Late Blues has many individual aspects which, on their own, would make it notable. Released in 1961, it was John Cassavetes’ second film as a director following the ground-breaking Shadows, one of America’s first full-length expressionist art films. As Shadows had, it centres on jazz and depicts a world which was then thriving, showing it from the inside. It stars Bobby Darin, one of America’s most important and multi-faceted musical figures. When taken together, with the added impact of its female star Stella Stevens, its inclusion of black cast members and disabled children, Too Late Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The danger of working successfully in many genres is that fans come to expect something revolutionary with each release. A secondary threat is that you succumb to generic schizophrenia, and thus are never quite sure which voice to speak with. Fin Greenall, founder/leader of the folk-blues trio Fink, has a touch of both of these in this latest release, in which songs of menacing Americana sit somewhat uneasily alongside pieces of lugubrious personal reflection. He may be feted for his eclecticism; he’s more likely to suffer for failing to please all his fans. The title track and “Pilgrim Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There are two Richard Thompsons – the deft acoustic magician and the electric guitarist shaking the rafters and the bones of the most committed air-guitar headbangers. He's unique in that no other guitarist could kick out the jams on the electric and seduce and beguile with the acoustic the way Thompson does.While his records are band affairs, his stage work encompasses band and solo acoustic tours. I recall seeing him in a small club in Paris, in the early 2000s, playing one of the best acoustic sets I’ve ever heard, and though it’s more than 30 years old now, one of my favourite Thompson Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ruthann Friedman: The Complete Constant Companion SessionsRuthann Friedman’s debut album ought to have clicked. Issued in October 1969, Constant Companion arrived after her composition “Windy” topped the US charts in 1967 when it was recorded by The Association. A consummate songwriter, she should surely have been set to parallel her similarly inclined close contemporaries Carole King or Laura Nyro, both of whose songs were hits for others before they established themselves as successful solo artists.Friedman had support and connections too. She actually lived with The Association – who Read more ...
Russ Coffey
That King Creosote’s latest album was indirectly commissioned as part of this week's Commonwealth Games celebrations immediately qualifies it as one of the more interesting musical pieces to be inspired by a sports event. And that's not meant as faint praise either - this is an indisputably fine album, irrespective of context. But fans of the hirsute singer will surely want to know more. They'll want to hear how it compares to Creosote's own back catalogue - in particular 2011’s wonderful Diamond Mine.The albums have more in common than you might, at first, think. From Scotland Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
That 1971’s Harold and Maude still confounds and delights in equal measure is a tribute to its timelessness. Despite evocative, period-specific music from Cat Stevens, and settings and trappings which place it as a film conceived and completed as the Sixties still cast a shadow, it still hinges on finely honed characterisations and a story which was, and remains, unique. Although mainstream, it played with the nature of romance and what is or isn’t acceptable in the day-to-day to such an extent that it continues to be both uncomfortable viewing and engender warm-hearted feelings. Reactions Read more ...