singer-songwriters
peter.quinn
Since self-releasing his debut album Heard It All Before in 1999, Jamie Cullum has gone on to become the UK's biggest selling jazz artist of all time. Since April 2010, he has also presented a weekly jazz show on BBC Radio 2, for which he won a Sony Gold award this year.Following the pop stylings of Momentum, Cullum's seventh studio album, Interlude, sees him return to the jazz repertoire. Available in both standard and deluxe versions, the latter includes a DVD of Cullum's performance at Jazz à Vienne plus an exclusive photo booklet containing tour and studio pictures, for which Cullum Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jackson Browne's output has slowed since the mid-Nineties, and this arrives six years after Time the Conqueror. The latter was much preoccupied with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and Standing in the Breach – with a sleeve depicting a war-ravaged African village – is still stamped with Browne's social and political concerns. "Take the money out of politics and maybe we might see /This country turn back into something more like democracy," he rages in "Which Side", an extended tirade about greed and political corruption he first played at the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012. As Read more ...
joe.muggs
The story of Vashti Bunyan is a compelling one. The urbane Sixties would-be popstrel who gave it all up to ride up to a hippie community in a horse-drawn caravan, writing an exquisite album on the way, Just Another Diamond Day, which then became a lost classic, vanishing into the ether as she too vanished until she was rediscovered by obsessive record collectors and psychedelic freaks and persuaded to return to music after 30 years: who couldn't be enchanted or at least intrigued by it? And when her comeback showed her still with a crystal clear voice and intimate songwriting style it just Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
“You don’t always get what you want in life,” said Angel Olsen to a group of fans haranguing her at the front last night at the Electric Ballroom. She rarely uttered a word between songs but this was a defiant end to the evening. Though her powerful Orbison-like warbling travelled clearly across the smoky stage to the denizens a much needed intimacy was absent over the course of her fourteen-song set. A captivating presence who confidently delivers haunting vocals, she lost the connection with the audience in the final throes, who at first seemed rapt.Brazilian opener, Rodrigo Amarante Read more ...
mark.kidel
Leonard Cohen has always been, first and foremost, a poet. His thoroughly grounded mix of Vedanta, Zen and Jewish mysticism places him in a class apart. He is both rabbinical high priest and consummate entertainer. As he’s never traded on borrowed African-American sex-and-swagger or matinée idol charisma, age hasn’t made him in any way ridiculous. He carries his gravitas lightly, not least because his deft way with words keeps us delicately poised between revelation and unknowing.From the seductive drag of “Slow”, Cohen’s call to deceleration, to the redemptive Hallelujah call of “You Read more ...
peter.quinn
Recorded in the UK, Johannesburg, Paris and Tel Aviv, Sarah Jane Morris's latest album, Bloody Rain, is undoubtedly a labour of love. Hearing it performed live last night in the Union Chapel, in front of an adoring audience, confirmed that it is also her masterpiece.Devoted to the people of Africa and the music of that continent – with melodic, rhythmic and lyrical influences permeating the music-making – the album's themes ranged from homophobia ('David Kato') and corruption ('Bloody Rain') to honour killings (the heartbreaking 'No Beyonce') and child soldiers ('Comfort They Have None'). But Read more ...
David Nice
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. But if the act of “hammering out a tune” is, as he puts it, "cosmic", as, very often, are the results, last night’s performance was aquatic, and not in a good way. Swimming around in front of an over-amplified orchestra – a much-expanded Britten Sinfonia conducted by Canadian Opera Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I suspect that, a good few years after a dodgy couple of albums, Ryan Adams has reached a stage in his career where they’re all going to be dubbed a return to form. I seem to remember writing something similar about 2011’s Ashes and Fire – but here we are, three years on, and I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to it (I should probably mention that I’m writing this not just as a critic, but as somebody with his artwork tattooed on my arm).There are a few things about Ryan Adams – the album, not the man – that make the story. Firstly there’s that self-titled thing, which will always Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you listen to J Mascis’ solo work – 2011’s Several Shades of Why in particular, and now this follow-up – it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else. Which is ridiculous, of course: as frontman of still-active slacker-rockers Dinosaur Jr. Mascis has been an influential figure in alternative rock circles for years. But I challenge you to listen to the way his warm, creaky voice meanders its way through the songs on Tied to a Star, like the sound of somebody talking to himself as he fumbles his way through a musical diary entry, and tell me that it is not a perfect fit.Which is not to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I feel as though most recording artists are missing a trick when it comes to seasonal albums. Although the market for Christmas albums is - as we demonstrate here on theartsdesk annually - a growth one, there are thousands of themes out there waiting to be explored. Easter. Eid. That one Wednesday in July when the weather in Glasgow rivals that of the Med and you can only watch in envy from your office window. For her second album, Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner has produced something not unlike a Halloween album. Not the Halloween of popular culture, cutesy with cartoon ghouls and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not quite true to say no one would have heard of JJ Cale without Eric Clapton. Clapton’s cover of “After Midnight”, released in 1970 as the first single on his debut solo album, put Cale on the map as a songwriter and paved for his own inimitable recording career. But Clapton didn’t actually record “Cocaine” until Slowhand in 1977. In between Lynyrd Skynyrd slipped in with their account of “Call Me the Breeze”, the song which lends its name to this Clapton-led tribute a year on from Cale’s death.Cale was a reticent inspiration to more than Clapton. The major singer-songwriters of a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Context is everything. It’s the difference between that “lady without a baby” line that’s got everybody talking delivered straight up, and the knowing smile and cross-dressing Hollywood actresses that come with it in the song’s accompanying video. It’s why Jenny Lewis, child starlet turned indie rock frontwoman turned accomplished alt-country singer-songwriter, is that rare artist who has made not only the best album for herself at every stage of her career, but also the one that her fans needed to hear.Depending on your reading of “Just One of the Guys”, it’s a song about confounding Read more ...