singer-songwriters
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Readers of a certain type of lifestyle blog will be familiar with the concept of hygge. The Danish word, which refers to a state of cosiness and good cheer in which to survive the winter months, is nothing new – but this year, it’s popping up everywhere badged as a lifestyle trend. Hygge in 2016 is grey-knit blankets that look homemade, but which retail for £100; it’s steaming, monogrammed mugs of hot chocolate and rose-gold pillows. And it’s In Winter, Katie Melua’s collaboration with the Gori Women’s Choir – basic, yes; but there’s a reason nobody can resist the tie-in candle collaboration Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Regina Spector’s eclectic seventh album Remember Us To Life shows the Russian-born singer-songwriter’s brilliant knack for storytelling. Her style is stream of consciousness, melodic musings in poetic form which avoid extreme emotion in favour of intelligent observations and personal-political musings.The series of songs are partly character stories and partly existential reveries. "Bleeding Heart" is a nostalgic pop track about teen awkwardness with a synthy sound that descends into rock at the flick of a switch; "Older And Taller" simply a ditty about someone returning from the past (until Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them with context.“Literate” is word very much at the centre of his latest project, a soundtrack to the 2014 film Set Fire to the Stars, which details Dylan Thomas’s time in New York in the 1950s. Recorded around the same time as Rhys’s wonderfully expansive ode to another Welsh traveler to the Americas, the explorer John Evans, American Interior, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Johnny Lynch – the artist otherwise known as Pictish Trail – is one of the country’s most intriguing musicians. In 2010, he upped sticks and moved into a caravan on the remote island of Eigg, ensuring every appraisal of his work evermore would refer to him as a “hermit” or a “recluse”. And yet, despite the geographical challenges, Lynch somehow remains the life and soul of any party he cares to put his name to: festival curator (they come to him); label boss (releasing music into the world on the back of postcards, with coordinates rather than catalogue numbers); purveyor of the finest space- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“I don’t really care about reviews because if someone slags it off, they’ve missed the joke. How can they slag off a fictional character? It’s win-win. It’s pain-free. It’s bulletproof – commercially and critically.”Ricky Gervais there, talking about the album tie-in with his new film David Brent: Life on the Road. In many ways, he’s right: the songs, written in the guise of Gervais’ best comic creation, are meant to be bad, but entertainingly so, like, say, Spinal Tap. It's a comparison that Gervais doesn't shy away from: “Once you know the context, you can enjoy the songs without jokes, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself adrift in; the water that she had to cross between her home in Dublin and a new love in London as she pulled her third album together; and - yes, let’s go there - the water, murky and all-consuming, that typifies Aaron Dessner of The National’s production, and makes him Hannigan’s perfect foil.Like her previous work, the songs on At Swim perfectly Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Heartworn Highways was a unique document of a collection of country singer-songwriters who had rejected the Nashville establishment in favour of following their own paths, hardly anyone saw the film after its completion. Initially titled New Country, it was first seen at a Los Angeles film festival in 1977. Renamed Outlaw County, it was then screened in Muncie, Indiana and Flint, Michigan. In May 1981, as Heartworn Highways, it was shown over a week at a Greenwich Village cinema. Critic Pauline Kael devoted three pages of The New Yorker to it. From this point, the reputation of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despites odd dives into atonal sound-colour, Ryley Walker’s third album shares much with the catalogue of Island Records circa 1971 and the more edgy Elektra singer-songwriter albums from around 1969. Not that it sounds dated. The daisy-fresh Golden Sings That Have Been Sung is timeless, yet so clearly draws from a deep knowledge of maverick solo artists like Tim Buckley and John Martyn that it inevitably evokes its foundations. As it was with the similar-minded Jonathan Wilson and his Gentle Spirit album, Walker’s reconfiguration of the past confounds any suspicions that overtly embracing an Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Honestly, you wait years for a lengthy project to come to fruition, then two turn up at once. However, while The Avalanches had to contend with people tapping their watches and sighing wearily, The Earlies’ John Mark Lapham had only his own clock to watch. The measured pace and unhurried approach are reflected in the languorous song spectres he presents here.Starting out life as an idea for his short-lived 4AD outfit, the Late Cord, the project soon outgrew its shell and ended up a huge collaborative effort which sees turns from, among a Hollywood-sized cast, Sara Lowe (the Earlies), Swans’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If Kris Kristofferson had just been the writer of “Help Me Make It Through the Night”, “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, his legacy would have been assured. Each song is a classic, and each is wonderful. Elvis Presley and Gladys Knight & the Pips ensured that “Help Me Make It Through the Night” would live forever. Kristofferson’s ex-girlfriend Janis Joplin did the same with “Me and Bobby McGee” – the writer did not initially know she had recorded it. In 1969, Ray Stevens was first to tackle “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”. Johnny Cash was next. All three songs featured Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
How does Hannah Georgas’s 98-year-old grandmother feel about her collaborations with Graham Walsh, her two-time producer better known as part of Canadian electronic quartet Holy Fuck? It is, one suspects, one of a few aspects of this rich, immersive record that the Evelyn of its title might raise an eyebrow at – but in its themes of family, longing, loyalty and resilience, particularly on the gorgeous not-quite-title track, there’s plenty for her to be proud of.It was obvious from their work together on her 2013 self-titled album that Walsh had a knack for drawing out the unexpected from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Scottish singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton has always had a restless creativity, right back to his days in the Bukowskian indie duo Arab Strap. He announced a few years ago that he was sick of playing solo gigs, expected to strum an acoustic guitar and delve into his mordant back catalogue. However, after a few years rootling about with his experimental Human Don’t Be Angry project, and an album with the artist David Shrigley, he popped up this year with a new album, Summer of ’13, and for the first time in years, he’s touring.He may be creatively restless, but as a stage presence he’s Read more ...