singer-songwriters
graeme.thomson
English singer-songwriter Steve Adey has taken six years to follow up his excellent debut album, All Things Real, and at first it’s hard to tell why. These 10 songs, simply constructed, are executed without any great fuss or ornament, but slowly their sense of depth and unhurried devotion to quality reveals itself. The album is aptly named. Adey doesn't do party music. “Are we laughing?” is the question posed during the second song, “Laughing”. Not on Adey’s watch, we’re not. Recorded in a 19th-century Edinburgh church, this is relentlessly downbeat midnight music. When a (terrific) Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Gig-going in the winter can be a difficult business. Plummeting temperatures call for layers, thick coats and scarves - none of which are easily stowed away at your average club show. As the venue starts to fill up with similarly clad bodies the place gets sweatier and sweatier, but by the time you realise you really should have coughed up a couple of quid and the extra wait for the cloakroom you’re probably already hemmed in.It comes as something of a relief then that, following two support acts (Jim Lockey and the Solemn Sun, followed by Tim Barry, who played a jolly little song about a Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Jam: The GiftThomas H GreenGiven his continued artistic renaissance, it’s currently rather unfashionable to suggest Paul Weller was never better than with The Jam. Nonetheless, a trawl through their back catalogue will assure most this was the case. Musically, it’s arguable but lyrically it’s definitive. The Gift was The Jam’s sixth and final album, released in the spring of 1982. The trio were at the peak of their powers, riding chart success that melded punk’s snarl with Weller’s suburban angst, including, in “Going Underground”, one of the greatest and most furious songs ever to hit Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Billy Bragg recently described Jake Bugg as “a teenager with an ear for a good tune and a chip on his shoulder". He was referring to Bugg’s evocations of council estate life, which have invited comparisons to the Arctic Monkeys. Others have sneered at the youngster’s friendship with Noel Gallagher and his unashamedly retro sound. But what’s wrong with being an angry young man with a guitar? Bugg’s major influences span folk-rock written between 1965 and 1975, with a particular emphasis on the work of Donovan. On that count alone, he gets my vote.Commercially, it’s been Bugg’s rockier sound Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To the first-time listener of Martha Tilston’s work, the “folk” tag seems like a tremendous over-simplification. Right from its opening track, “Stags Bellow”, the songwriter experiments with novel percussion and call-and-response choruses to create complex compositions that demand to be gotten lost in.These compositions do, however, blend the more traditional percussive and string sounds associated with the genre with some of its central concerns; both personal and political. And Tilston certainly has the pedigree: her father, Steve Tilston, ran a folk club with Bert Jansch and has released a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with the 1995 album, All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio. Produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring Marc Ribot on guitar (and a cameo from Howard Coward, a.k.a. Elvis Costello, whom she married in 2003), her new album of vintage material largely from the 1920s and '30s, Glad Rag Doll, features songs that Krall has spent a lifetime Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Garland Jeffreys, a 68-year old singer and songwriter, is not simply New York City’s best-kept secret but American’s music’s most consistently underrated and overlooked talent. Garland is a remarkable talent and his latest album, The King of In Between, is musical dynamite. Oddly, he has remained largely invisible in Britain for the past 40-plus years.I first heard Jeffreys on Kiwi radio in 1977 when he had a minor, reggae hit called “Cool Down Boy”. The video showed a light-skinned black man who possessed a fine voice and a sensibility more New York than Kingston. Around the same time I read Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Motherhood doesn’t always bring out the best in singer-songwriters. On the album Aerial Kate Bush, for instance, sings “luverly luverly luverly Bertie…you give me so much joy/ and then you give me more joy”. Yeuch. So when I heard that recent mum Martha Wainwright’s new album was to be called Come Home to Mama my heart sank. It needn’t have. If there’s one thing this album isn’t, it’s sickly.The title actually comes from “Proserpina", the album's only cover and the last song her mother, Kate McGarrigle, wrote before her death in 2010. In Roman mythology Proserpina was condemned to live the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Christine Tobin’s latest CD Sailing to Byzantium brings to life the lyrical magic of W B Yeats’ poems and has been widely acclaimed. Reviewing the album earlier this year, I wrote that "Tobin has created an unqualified masterpiece. Setting poems from across the entire spectrum of Yeats's oeuvre, Tobin perfectly gauges the emotional and spiritual resonances of the texts, aided by performances of incredible subtlety and understatement."In October and November, the BBC award winning jazz vocalist and her group - Phil Robson (guitar), Kate Shortt (cello), Liam Noble (piano) and Dave Whitford ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After 65 years in music, over 55 of them as a solo artist and songwriter, it’s a tad surprising that Neil Sedaka has taken until now to declare he’s revealing the real Neil. Even when his former girlfriend and Brill Building colleague Carole King was baring it all in song, he kept it less personal. The Real Neil isn’t so much a window into his soul though, but a follow-on from recent tours where Sedaka has performed solo, accompanying himself on piano.The Real Neil, a mix of old songs and newly written material, opens with a speech from Sedaka: "Hi, this is Neil, welcome to my world of music Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Sugaring season refers to the time of year when maple trees are "tapped", gallons of sap collected and boiled down to make the sweet syrup that goes so well with pancakes. The words trip off the tongue; conjure images of homeliness and those early autumnal sunsets that are by far the prettiest. As titles go it would have been hard to find one more apt for Beth Orton's first release since 2006's Comfort of Strangers; packed itself with pretty moments and the comforts of home.But before the sugar comes that sap, and the Norfolk-born songwriter's six years away have been as tumultuous. Single Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The past few years have seen the anniversary reissue, or concert tour in which classic albums are performed in their entirety, become something of a standard. Not so for Tori Amos, who this year is celebrating two decades since the US release of her debut solo album Little Earthquakes. To mark the occasion, she is instead collaborating with the Netherlands’ renowned Metropole Orchestra to rework and recreate some of her best-loved songs in an orchestral setting.The resulting album, Gold Dust, will be released next month and accompanied by a limited run of dates with the orchestra, including Read more ...