singer-songwriters
Thomas H. Green
American singer-songwriter Damien Jurado is both prolific and enigmatic. His latest album follows too many to count (OK, not really, I think this is his 20th). On his own label, it's as opaque as anything he’s done, and that’s saying something.There are 12 songs, at least half of them around the two-minute mark, all opaque and mysterious, but also often fascinating. “What is he singing about?” the listener asks themselves, a sense of what’s going on elusive but also, tantalisingly, almost within reach.A concept album, then? Kind of. There’s a very loose thematic of films sets. Possibly. Or Read more ...
peter.quinn
An artist with a myriad of strings to his bow – gifted wordsmith, multi-instrumentalist, captivating storyteller – what enables James Vincent McMorrow’s singularly personal songs to take flight is the fact that he’s also a supreme melodist.The Less I Knew is chock full of killer chorus hooks, with album opener “Hurricane”, in which McMorrow’s gloriously harmonised vocal line is supported by the additional ear candy of Alex Borwick's horn parts, being a case in point. Borwick also supplies some driving mandolin work on “Heads Look Like Drums”, as well as engineering and mixing the Read more ...
mark.kidel
I'm at the New Theatre in Oxford. Elvis Costello is playing through the final stages of his 2022 UK tour. The venue is full of memories: I saw The Kinks and Tom Jones here in the 1960s and then The Who in the early 70s. On my left, there’s Paul Conroy who first introduced me to Elvis in 1977 – when he was involved in launching his career at Stiff Records – and on my right, Tom Webber, a super-talented 22 year-old singer from Didcot, Paul’s latest passion, and according to many veterans who have heard him, a potential new star, for whom Paul has come out of retirement to manage, along with his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In these meta times when everything – EVERYTHING! – is ironic, a smirk to be replayed forever on a screen, the last thing we expect is a hippy, a proper real-life hippy, preaching oneness and love. Even yoga sorts these days mostly go on about their own “wellness”, rather than the cosmic inference of it all. Nick Mulvey’s previous albums were lightly marinaded in Baba Ram Dass and ayahuasca revelation but, with his third solo album, New Mythology, he’s gone full mystic.After creating some of the most gorgeous, original singer-songwriter music of the last decade he doesn’t let empyrean Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Songs are what feelings sound like,” Mary Gauthier told medics from Brigham & Women’s Hospital as she participated in the Frontline Songs post-Covid initiative that aimed to help doctors, nurses and first responders process their pandemic trauma. No stranger to loss and trauma herself, Gauthier had earlier worked with Songwriting with Soldiers, a programme that led to her last (Grammy-nominated) album, Rifles and Rosary Beads (2018).Gauthier’s ninth studio outing, Dark Enough to See the Stars, is as empathetic as anything she’s written. Music in its highest form, she believes, “is Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Around a decade ago, Scottish singer Emeli Sandé appeared during a golden time for original female songwriters. On well-wrought, richly-inhabited songs such as “My Kind of Love” she quickly established herself as a characterful performer able to write grown-up songs with emotional heft, in the same league as the mighty Adele. She sold millions, and maintained course, balancing elegant, thoughtful, soul-pop with more interesting fare, such as 2016’s “Garden” with Jay Electronica. Her fourth studio album, however, while rife with contemporary electronic tics, wanders steadily into the middle-of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Seems odd now, but there was a time when many Brits found country music laughable. It was a common thing. For instance, when Keith Richards embraced country, Jagger initially thought it a joke. By the time I was coming up in the Eighties, post-punk still a long shadow, my peers and I mostly felt the same; country was corny schmaltz dominated by middle-aged rhinestone blandness. I soon realised the error of my ways, but The Shires’ fifth album reminds me that, back then, we did also have a point.On their debut, The Shires sang, “We can build our own Nashville underneath these grey skies.” The Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s not breaking any secrets to note that the woman immortalised as the “Chestnut-brown canary/Ruby-throated sparrow” in Stephen Stills’ “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” will shortly turn 83. Not that you’d know it from Spellbound, her new album.Her voice has retained a youthful quality – no uncontrollable vibrato, no loss of top notes – and a general surety of pitch which singers many years younger long ago lost (and in some cases never possessed). It’s a little over 60 years since she released A Maid of Constant Sorrow, and she’s not stopped since. Extraordinarily, this is the first album featuring Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A confession – one I have made down the years to many friends, who mostly disagree. I have never much liked Joni Mitchell. Yes, she has written some good and enduring songs, but the voice? To me it has no substance, no texture. Admirers say she led the way – those intimate, confessional songs. So ground-breaking!You want intimate and ground-breaking, coupled with real musicianship? Then listen to Janis Ian, in my opinion a far greater songwriter and a more complete musician than Mitchell. Check out Leonard Bernstein interviewing her on his 1967 television documentary Inside Pop: The Rock Read more ...
joe.muggs
Michael Stafford aka Maverick Sabre is the definition of a modern journeyman vocalist. Since 2008 he’s released three albums and appeared on a huge range of British and Irish rap, dubstep and drum’n’bass artists’ records. He’s had several top 40 singles and streams into the tens, even hundreds of millions on tracks, but he hasn’t necessarily got the name recognition of some of his contemporaries.Maybe it’s that range that’s the issue: he has an instantly recognisable voice, but given that he spans soul, rap and the kind of grand sweep Celtic romanticism that almost puts him in Lewis Capaldi Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I didn’t even know what I was writing about. It was just sent to me”, John Mellencamp has said of Strictly A One-Eyed Jack, his first album in five years.Lauded by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Nora Guthrie, who sees in his work echoes of her father Woody, and Bruce Springsteen, who is writ large on this his 24th studio album, Mellencamp really does seem to contain multitudes. From the first notes of “I Always Lie to Strangers”, Jack’s opening track, you’re hooked, grabbed by the lapels, and happily held close. The style and mood are reminiscent of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his great late Read more ...