singer-songwriters
howard.male
While obviously not as seismic a Top of the Pops moment as Ziggy singing “Starman”, the almost contemporaneous appearance of the flat-capped Gilbert O’Sullivan hunched over his piano as if it were a dying coal fire certainly stuck in my memory as clearly as Bowie’s androgynous space-age carrot-top. Although the flat cap was quickly ditched in favour of casual knitwear and even a hairy chest phase (see pic below), today’s 64-year-old Mr O’Sullivan feels that his fate in the shape of his image was sealed all those decades ago, and he’s been fighting ever since to transcend it.Although a Read more ...
howard.male
I first heard Bahia-born Lucas Santtana on the best compilation of contemporary Brazilian music of the past couple of years, Oi! A nova musica Brasileira. His track “Hold Me In”, an acoustic slice of bossa nova, was a quiet interlude amonst all the dance, electronica and rock tracks. But it didn’t really give much indication of what an adventurous musical talent he might be.One curiously satisfying thing about this album is that one hardly notices which songs are sung in Portuguese and which in English (the divide is about 50/50), as focus is constantly being drawn to the sonically Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having arrived in the Golden State via Detroit and Amarillo, Texas, John David Souther became one of the architects of the Californian soft-rock sound. It didn't hurt that he shared an apartment with future Eagle Glenn Frey and lived upstairs from Jackson Browne. Souther never became a superstar in his own right, but thanks to his high-profile collaborations with assorted luminaries, his songwriting royalty cheques must have been artefacts of many-zeroed beauty.Natural History is a collection of songs from the Souther catalogue, tastefully recorded with a skilful chamber-rock ensemble using Read more ...
paul.mcgee
By and large, Adele Adkins chooses to avoid the limelight, and therefore little is known of either her personal life or her indulgences, whatever they may be. The spectacular success of 21 suggests that her audience couldn't care less either way, which I think is quite telling. Compare and contrast, on the other hand, with the shambles formerly known as Amy Winehouse. When she emerged - or rather, came out swinging - in 2003, it was with some forthright opinions on her peers in her left hand and, for a 19-year-old, an arresting line in cynical, world-weary lyrics in her right ("Fuck Me Pumps Read more ...
howard.male
So how did you survive the 1980s? I don’t mean money-wise; I’m sure you had plenty of that. I mean musically and therefore spiritually. It was a diet of Thomas Mapfumo and old Nina Simone albums that got me through the first half, until the Red Cross parcel of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs arrived in 1985. Who knows how many times that treasured piece of vinyl got lowered onto my 30-quid hi-fi in my desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching thunder of Phil Collins’s drum kit and myriad other musical abominations of the period?Swordfishtrombones was the album that marked Tom Waits’s dramatic move Read more ...
david.cheal
Paul Simon is now nearly 70 years old and as he walked onto the Hammersmith Apollo stage last night it struck me that he is beginning to look like the little old man he will eventually become: still nimble, enviably trim, but nevertheless, he was noticeably older and more fragile-looking than when I last saw him five years ago. The second thing that struck me was a certain weariness in the opening songs - a mechanical quality to the playing, and a concomitantly flat atmosphere. The opening song, “Crazy Love Vol II”, was ploddy, while “Dazzling Blue”, from his new So Beautiful or So Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prospect of seeing a band seemingly in thrall to peak-popularity Fleetwood Mac in a Shoreditch basement intrigued. Could San Francisco's Vetiver reproduce the glossy sheen of new album The Errant Charm live? The answer was no, and last night’s London show was all the better for that. As the guitars intertwined, the sonic swirl was more akin to a Seventies LA version of shoegazing than a recreation of the seductive West Coast sound.The time shift aspect of Vetiver is distracting in a live setting. It’s impossible to look at North Carolina transplant Andy Cabic and his band without being Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary commercial roots-influenced music. Allen is touring his second album, Sweet Defeat. Its beautifully crafted songs and refined production have impressed the likes of Jools Holland, and last night he took it to a new level. But Bray, whose debut Whisky and Wool wowed theartsdesk, fought past poor sound to show he’s not far behind.Both Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I'm tired of Emmy the Great being lumped in with crappy singer-songwriters who've had way too much hype but couldn't write a decent lyric if they were tied to a chair and had a pistol pointed at their temple. Emma-Lee Moss bloomed from a singer-songwritery London milieu but she's a cut above the pack.I speak as one who's sick to death of acoustic guitar-strumming whiners. Like Malcolm Middleton, another fine underrated British singer-songwriter, she doesn't throw out one-size-fits-all palliatives for mopers; her songs are grounded yet enigmatic, allegorical, and as precisely constructed Read more ...
david.cheal
How much did I like this show? Well, here’s a clue: at the end, the only really bad thing I could think of was that the bass guitar could have been a bit louder. I’ve seen David Gray on stage quite a few times now, and this was easily the most satisfying show, the one that did justice to his voice, his music, his songs, and especially his lyrics, which were, almost uniquely for such an event, audible and understandable almost word for word.Ever since he had a hit 12 years ago with the folktronic “Babylon”, David Gray has become the man that the pop cognoscenti like to sneer at; a singer- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A question passed through my mind before last night’s Donovan show. Special guests were billed for this celebration of his classic psychedelic album Sunshine Superman. Perhaps they'd include Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page, both of whom played on Donovan's records in the Sixties. Then, introducing “Sunshine Superman”, Donovan mentions the then-session player Jimmy Page, who walks on and joins in. Seeing Page reunited with his pre-Led Zeppelin, pre-Yardbirds session man self was incredible. Needless to say, he played great. Donovan shone.Although Donovan got off to a flying start, scoring a residency Read more ...