singer-songwriters
Kieron Tyler
When Marina Allen’s second album Centrifics came out last autumn, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter said her voice was the only instrument on the record. She writes on guitar and piano but beyond what she sang, everything else was played by collaborators. Seeing her live might reveal how she saw the songs away from their studio setting – maybe getting close to how they were originally conceived.Centrifics is highly arranged. Brass, a flute, strings and more weave through the songs. Though guitar leads on some tracks, piano crops up more often as the main instrument complementing her voice. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers David and Lou showed him the way. Now in his mid-Sixties, he has a considerable artistic inventory to look back on. Including The Go-Betweens, solo albums, his writing. Messrs Bowie and Reed would be proud of what they helped initiate.However, this is not the source of such retrospection. The Candle and the Flame’s opener “She’s a Fighter” lays it Read more ...
peter.quinn
Bolivian marching powder, sexual violence, fraud. As the actions of the present kakistocracy edged ever closer to that of a lost Brian De Palma film script, it was to music that we turned once again for beauty and the best of humanity.With stunning recorded sound plus an irresistible communion between singer and band, Lizz Wright’s Holding Space was the most transporting album I heard this year. Recorded live in Berlin on the final date of her 2018 European summer tour, the material ranged from her 2003 Verve debut, Salt, to her most recent studio album, 2017’s Grace.Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Those old enough will recall Debbie Gibson as a squeaky clean, flash-in-the-pan teen pop star of the late 1980s. She was globe-trottingly huge for a couple of years – a peer of Tiffany “I Think We’re Alone Now” Darwish – but then her star waned. What’s less well-remembered is that she was a self-made creation; she’s still the youngest person to have written, produced and performed a US No. 1 single.Her new Christmas album displays a similar confidence. Unlike most such seasonal outings, dominated by the usual old chestnuts, 10 of its 14 songs are originals, written or co-written by herself. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...
joe.muggs
I had high hopes for this show. After all, Eska Mtungwazi is pretty much the only singer on earth I’d go out of my way to hear sing Joni Mitchell songs.Not only does she have the necessary vocal range and control, but her own sole solo album sits exactly in the right intersection of folk, jazz and experimental songwriting to suggest she’s got the stylistic fluidity to carry it off. And she’s an amazing performer. She may have only made that one album in 2015, but her work with everyone from Grace Jones and UNKLE to Tony Allen and Matthew Herbert over many years has demonstrated that she’s one Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Not even a worldwide health epidemic could stop the meteoric rise of the Irish singer, who has managed to crack America, achieve national treasure status in his homeland and rack up streaming figures that could actually pay his winter gas bill. Not bad going.He’s managed it by being a broad strokes performer with film-star good looks and big, big voice – colossal emotion with a rough-edged burr. His appeal is deep and wide, capturing the hearts and imaginations with simple songs that render universal emotions in popular, comfortable colour schemes and Sonder, his second album, does little to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Taylor Swift’s transitions have become imperious, from the woody hush of her collaborations with The National’s Aaron Dessner, Folklore and Evermore, to the remade reclamations of her early work. Working at pace, she has assembled an impregnable coalition of critical acceptance and creative range.Her contemporary country roots remain in her focus on relatable personal stories, pushed now into a hyper-realm of total fame and universally pored-over relationships, dropped like paper trails in her lyrics. She confesses with wry assertion, a female star taking everything in her messy stride. Like Read more ...
joe.muggs
Beth Orton has never rushed her music. Her first four albums came one every three years, then since 2002 it’s averaged at a five year gap each time. So it’s no wonder also that there can be stylistic schisms from one to the next.In contrast to its rootsy, bluesy predecessors, her last record, 2016’s Kidsticks, was a clattery, electronic affair co-produced with Andrew Hung of synth noisemongers Fuck Buttons while living in LA. It felt like she was experimenting her way into a new sound that could evolve into a whole new phase of creativity.But, it turned out, the hyperactive energy of that Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Celebrating, if that is the right word, his 75th year, Loudon Wainwright III offers us his 26th studio album in 52 rollicking years, Lifetime Achievement. Though he does have one Grammy on the shelf, for 2009’s double set, Charlie Pool Project, awards made from polished metals have not littered his life path or career trajectory. Captivating songs packed with home truths, razor-sharp wit and hilarious asides, however, do litter that career, along with a family crisis or two, and Lifetime Achievement has more than enough to satisfy all long-term fans, as well as drawing in new ones who may Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Throughout the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Ben Harper achieved global stardom, although the UK was a territory where he never achieved lift-off. By contrast, in the US, Australia and much of Europe, he’s regarded as a heavyweight (he’s won three Grammys!).His career has combined the earnestness of Sixties/Seventies singer-songwriter political activism, with lively musical eclecticism, and, sometimes, a blander middle-of-the-road vibe redolent of his pal Jack Johnson. His latest album showcases the rawer end of his appeal.Bloodline Maintenance is Harper’s first “proper” album Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neil Young put Toast to one side in 2001, dismayed at its blue emotional terrain. Depicting his marriage to Pegi Young hanging by a thread, it was recorded with Crazy Horse in San Francisco’s Toast studio, where Coltrane once worked, but rats now crept in from the alley. “Toast was so sad that I… couldn’t handle it,” Young said recently, its sound “murky and dark”.Dumped with his many “lost” albums, Toast now joins Homegrown (taped 1975, released 2020) and Hitchhiker (1976, 2017) in a restored discography. Convening Booker T and The MG’s and Horse guitarist “Poncho” Sampedro in a different Read more ...