singer-songwriters
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Open letters are so passe. There’s a track on Back to Forever, the second album from folk-pop crossover star-in-the-making Lissie, that addresses the recent shenanigans of Miley Cyrus and her ilk as well as the singer’s own place in the music industry. “I stole your magazine, the one with the beauty queen on the front,” she sings in that glorious, smoky voice of hers, half mocking, half angry. “I don’t want to be famous if I got to be shameless.”And yet wouldn’t a Lissie take on “We Can’t Stop”, all midwest drawl and laidback swagger, be the greatest thing? It’s easy to imagine: the singer is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a problem with Jonathan Wilson’s astonishing second album, it’s the potentially distracting presence of the stunningly heavy list of contributors. Those mucking in to help out include Jackson Browne, David Crosby and Graham Nash who gather alongside Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. Former Fleet Fox Josh Tillman is on board too. But they all take a back seat to Wilson on Fanfare, the mind-blowing follow up to 2011’s Gentle Spirit.Gentle Spirit was good, and a terrifically assured echo of LA’s early Seventies Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene. But Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dino Valente: Dino ValenteDino Valenti’s reaction to his sole solo album being credited to Dino Valente isn’t recorded, but any confusion probably wouldn’t have mattered as he had such high-profile cheerleaders. Before its release in October 1968, Ralph J Gleason, then America’s most important commentator on rock and pop, called Valenti – who died in 1994 – “an underground Bob Dylan”. After its release, Lillian Roxon, New York’s most trenchant observer of musical trends, said he was “a macrobiotics-solar-energy legend”. In Rolling Stone in January 1969, Ben Fong-Torres repeated the " Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight. With 20 albums behind him (depending how it’s counted), the first of which came Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ed Askew’s singing voice is made for melancholy. When not carrying a melody, his reedy vibrato becomes conversational, telling of a turtle laying her eggs, a baby crying in a cradle, a boy arguing with his girlfriend. The graceful, harpsichord-like tone of his Martin Tiple – a plangent, 10-string ukelele-sized instrument – makes the whole all the more wistful. Askew’s haunting, minor-key contemplations probably aren’t going to win him a wide audience but this, his sixth album in 45 years, brings Marc Ribot and Sharon Van Etten on board as collaborators.For the World is an album of great Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I have little patience with those that link mental anguish with creativity, glamorising the former as if the latter were any consolation. That said, there is comfort to be drawn from songs that spin the blankness of depression into something desolate and beautiful. It’s why I’ve had “Night Still Comes”, the second track from Neko Case’s new album, on repeat for the past week: it slips in, hopeless and otherworldly after a typically strident album opener, and runs on unchecked like the internal monologue of the depressive. “Is it because I’m a girl?” Case muses, rhetorically. “If I puked up Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is an incredibly hard album to work out. One major clue comes, though, with its second track, “Maxim's 1”, the backing for which is a dead ringer for a lost track from Cocteau Twins's 1990 Heaven or Las Vegas album. Not that any of the rest of the album sounds like Cocteau Twins, but it does hit a very similar magic formula. That is, though it ostensibly comes from an “indie” milieu, it has vast sonic ambition closer to the biggest pop/soul/R&B records of its time than to any guitar-wrangling mitherers, but it is also psychedelically alien to the point of indecipherability.Los Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nilsson: The RCA Albums CollectionThe irony with Harry Nilsson is that despite being one of pop’s most distinctive and lauded songwriters, his two best-known singles were cover versions. In 1969 he hit the American and British charts with “Everybody’s Talkin’”, written by the ill-stared Fred Neil. Nilsson’s rendering was helped on its path by being featured in the film Midnight Cowboy. Then, in 1972, his interpretation of “Without You” topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. It was penned by Tom Evans and Pete Ham of the Beatles-propagated band Badfinger, both of whom would Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This one-off appearance in a dingy, basement venue seems to be the entirety of Luke Haines’s promotional effort for his new album, Rock and Roll Animals. A few years have passed since he approached mainstream success as front man of The Auteurs and later as part of Black Box Recorder. In the intervening years he has taken the healthy notion that quality does not equal popularity to a possibly illogical conclusion that popularity had better be avoided entirely, just in case.Luckily for the enlightened few he has carried on making albums, increasingly esoteric in subject matter but which, given Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“JJ Cale will be onstage in three minutes.” With the house lights still full on, an old cove with tatty, silvering hair and an open untucked-in puce shirt shuffled about onstage, tinkering with equipment, before picking up a guitar and leaning into a flavoursome sliver of Okie-smoked boogie. Either JJ Cale didn’t give two hoots for the convention of the big entry, or he was enjoying a joke about his anonymity. Probably both.The musician whose calling card was writing songs for others has died at the age of 74. The reality is that it was a mere three songs which made Cale’s name and fortune: Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It used to be said that singer-songwriting was one style of music that would never go out of fashion. In the past few years, however, a glut of insipid twanging – Ben Howard and James Morrison, hold up your hands – has been sending many dedicated music fans elsewhere. The common complaint is that a genre that once brought so much real soul-baring is now reduced to drippy navel-gazing. And this backlash is a real shame for Jon Byrne. He may sound, on occasion, a bit like Paolo Nutini but he’s considerably more interesting.But what makes Byrne intriguing is not necessarily what his record Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Public Image Ltd: Public Image – First Issue“I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile, I think he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, that we’re not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours.” This bombshell comes 46 minutes into the hour-long interview on the bonus disc of this reissue of the debut album by Public Image Ltd, John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols combo. Recorded for the BBC in October 1978, it was edited for broadcast.It’s hardly surprising the former Johnny Rotten had strong views, but the real eye-opener is that this outsider figure – then such Read more ...