Filed under: album, review | Tags: angus and julia stone, down the way, martyn clayton
Angus & Julia Stone
Down The Way •••
Flock Music
Hailing from Newport on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia, brother and sister Angus & Julia Stone return with second album Down The Way, the follow-up to 2007′s critically acclaimed A Book Like This. They may have grown up in sunny, laidback climes, but there is an awful lot of anguished rain in their work. Downbeat and reflective, at times bordering on the maudlin, there isn’t much in the way of upbeat relief. But with clever songwriting seemingly in their bloodline and two complementary voices, they come with plenty of pluses. If the first album was all about acoustic simplicity, Down The Way moves a few notches along the production scale. Drafting in the watchful ears of Brad Albetta (Martha Wainwright) and beefing up the instrumentation, it’s an electrified statement of future intentions.
Kath Bloom
Thin Thin Line •••½
Caldo Verde
With a recording career that began over thirty years ago, Kath Bloom has been enjoying something of a second renaissance of late. During the late ’70s and ’80s she worked with Loren Mazzacane Connors, releasing a stash of avant-garde folk recordings that won them a small but impassioned following who loved the oddness of Bloom’s traditional voice with Connors’ curious guitar style. Rediscovered in the mid-’90s by virtue of Richard Linklater’s inclusion of one of her songs in ‘Before Sunrise’, Thin Thin Line is her third solo full-length. Though her voice at times sounds too fragile to bear the emotional load of her songs, she is capable of suddenly hitting the listener with an unexpected bluesy power. With intimate production values and the dial set to simplicity, Thin Thin Line is straight-up singer-songwriter fare in an American tradition that owes more to Woody Guthrie than it does the experimental.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: bridge carols, ethan rose, laura gibson, martyn clayton
Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose
Bridge Carols •••½
Holocene Music
“Where have you gone my pilot star?” asks Laura Gibson on Bridge Carols, her new collaboration with fellow Portland musician Ethan Rose, but it’s hard to imagine that the singer behind last year’s sublimely beautiful Beasts Of Seasons could ever lose sight of her guiding light. Assured in its self-knowledge, that album reflected the concerns of a precarious old-soul about to turn thirty noticing lichen growing on gravestones where before there had only been unfamiliar names. Life’s depth was explored with a short-story writer’s sense of the whole word being contained in the miniaturised version of the moment. With evocations of great American writers like Hoffman and Munro in her work, Gibson seems very much at home with words, an impression which makes Bridge Carols all the more interesting for its shared mindset with Rose, whose previous work has often been shorn of conventional language.
Scanners
Submarine •••
Downtown
We all have a sell-by date. It might not be marked on a plastic wrapper that encases us but there is no mistaking our disposability. Scanners frontwoman Sarah Daly reminds us of this fact on ’Jesus Saves’, the opening track of their second album Submarine. Reminding people of their inevitable end is an uncompromising way to begin, but it’s fairly typical of much of what follows. Scanners don’t live in a hearts and flowers kind of world it would seem. Formed in 2004 by Daly and guitarist Matt Mole, the quartet have been rumbling around on the indie scene for a number of years without a significant breakthrough into the mainstream. Sometimes it’s hard to understand why; in Daly they have a charismatic lead and the music they produce, while peculiarly angular and rarely cheerful, has both credibility and accessibility running right through it.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: corinne bailey rae, martyn clayton, the sea
Corinne Bailey Rae
The Sea •••½
Virgin
Some albums should come stickered with a large notice that reads ‘Do not listen for clues’. Corinne Bailey Rae’s second album The Sea was always likely to be listened to in the light of the death of her husband Jason Rae in 2008. That the sleevenotes namecheck him as the motivation and part-inspiration for the recording perhaps allows us to feel less guilty about trying to read the lyrical runes for traces of her loss. Sometimes knowing too much can make you feel prurient, particularly when that loss was the result of a untimely tragedy, but if the grieving artist has just one gift in the midst of their sad struggle it is the ability to relate what they are going through to those who luckily do not know what is like, and to touch those who sadly do.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: first aid kit, martyn clayton, the big black and the blue
First Aid Kit
The Big Black & The Blue ••••
Wichita
The theory that there must something in the Baltic air that imbues Swedish teenagers with maturity and wisdom beyond their years might seem like a fanciful piece of romantic stereotyping…until you take a listen to The Big Black & The Blue. Whether they’re oddly unique or an example of some larger national characteristic, there’s no doubt that First Aid Kit’s Klara and Johanna Söderberg, aged 16 and 19 respectively, write songs which suggest a much older provenance. The richness, and obvious genetic similarities, of the sisters’ vocals is laid bare right from the start with ‘In The Morning’, a beautifully wrought a cappella that has borne lazy comparisons with Fleet Foxes. That First Aid Kit became a YouTube sensation with their cover of ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’ perhaps doesn’t help matters, but it is far from the full picture. Inhabiting a similarly quasi-mystical, part-bucolic, stripped-back lyrical landscape of open pastures, the song paints pictures of wedding bands being thrown into the grey deep. The lost arcadia of a marriage on the verge is perhaps not what you’d expect from two sisters with a combined age of thirty-five, but they somehow make it sound convincing.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: eliza carthy, empire and love, interplanetary traveller, lauren hoffman, martyn clayton, matt barton, nat johnson and the figureheads, roman radio, the imagined village, tiffany daniels
In this month’s roundup, we’ll be looking at a bunch of stragglers from last year that we ran out of time to publish before Christmas, plus a few early 2010 releases in brief.
* * *
Lauren Hoffman
Interplanetary Traveler •••
Self-released
On her fourth album, Interplanetary Traveler, Virginia-born singer-songwriter Lauren Hoffman doesn’t so much warp between musical worlds as gently hop between familiar acoustic styles. But the good news is that, for the most part, she does it very well. Boasting cleaner production than her earlier releases, the title track makes for a brilliant opener with a strong melody and some warm horns couched in a tight arrangement. As ever, Hoffman’s voice is gorgeous; effortless and smooth, and the perfect match for her material. Other high points include ‘Surrender’, which transforms from pleasant sunny pop in its verses to a much more sensual chorus, its simplicity allowing the melody to breathe, and the haunting ‘Pictures From America’, which even has a slight touch of Ennio Morricone about it.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: kylie minogue, live in new york, martyn clayton
Kylie Minogue
Live In New York •••
Parlophone
Kylie live shows, like all big pop spectaculars, are visual as much as audio affairs. In a scrum of people and gaggle of crowd noise, it’s often what you see rather than what you hear that lives on in the memory. With stunning dance routines, ridiculous props, stratospherically glamorous outfits – lots of them – and knowing nods aplenty, they provide a feast for all the senses, taking the recorded glory of her mighty pop canon from the past two and a bit decades and turning it into a glitzy communal celebration. So Kylie releasing a visual-free, download-only live recording from October’s short run at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom is either a brave decision or a cynical cash-in. As sacrilegious as it may be to question the motives of Saint Kylie herself, it might make you wonder what calculations were being made by members of her clergy. That is until you consider that in all her years of hit making and dance move prompting she had never previously toured North America. Not once.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: a fool in love, florence rawlings, martyn clayton
Florence Rawlings
A Fool In Love ••½
Dramatico
Love can be a battlefield. Of that there is little doubt. As, too, can the overcrowded field of bluesy, ’60s Motown-influenced young female artists with unexpectedly voluminous voices. Stepping into the fray with her self-declared status as a lover not a fighter is 20 year old Florence Rawlings. Taken under the wing of Mike Batt, (who the reviewer’s handbook states can only be referred to if mention is made of his early ’70s work with The Wombles), Rawlings is tipped to follow in the footsteps of her impresario’s fellow young charge, Katie Melua. With a support slot with Tom Jones and Radio 2 airplay already under her belt, 2010 could be a very good year for this latest little big voice.
Filed under: album, review | Tags: martyn clayton, still standing at your back door, taxi taxi!
Taxi Taxi!
Still Standing At Your Back Door •••½
Fierce Panda
Precociously talented teenagers can be annoying. Their self-confidence and feted family status often renders them unbearable company to anyone but blood relations; add this to the fact they make you feel both old and unaccomplished, and they can sometimes be difficult to love. Swedish twin sisters Miriam and Johanna Eriksson Berhan, aka Taxi Taxi!, may only be 19 years old but they’re a far less trying prospect. Long championed by Efterklang, and with a pair of acclaimed EPs already under their belts, their debut album Still Standing At Your Back Door arrives fully formed at an age when most young people with musical ambitions are only just advertising for bandmates in the music press. The Berhan sisters couldn’t sound any further removed from your typical effervescent teenage rabble-rousers full of energy and ideas but without the ability or direction to match. Instead, they are something of an intense pair with the distinct air of very old souls: there is something eerie about Taxi Taxi!, an oddness that is as intriguing as it is unsettling.
