blues
Liz Thomson
Heavy Soul, the ninth studio album by British blues-rock singer-guitarist Joanne Shaw Taylor, is her first in two years, its 10 songs already released as singles. Produced by Kevin Shirley, whose credits include Aerosmith, Iron Maiden and Joe Bonamassa, whose indie label she joined a couple of years back with The Blues Album, its musical line-up features the fine talents of Doug Lancio, Anton Fig, Allison Presswood, Jimmy Wallace, and Rob McNelly.Recorded in Nashville, the album features both JST originals and covers, including a faithful and fabulous version of “All the Way from America”, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Towards the end of the encore, Deap Vally bring on their friend Solon Bixler. Frontwoman Lindsey Troy hands him her guitar. Despite this being their farewell tour, these two songs, she tells us, are new. The duo, now briefly a trio, go ballistic, a punk rock explosion ensues. Drummer Julie Edwards attacks her kit like Animal from The Muppets, Troy stomps like a glam rock loon before rolling about the floor, and Bixler scissor-kicks his way to stand aloft the bass drum.They’re burning with the right stuff. They have been all night.If life was fair, which we all know it isn’t, this month I’d be Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Always looking dapper and always sounding cool, Barry Adamson is a man who nevertheless seems to be perpetually of another time. Giving off the vibes of a one-man Rat Pack with a dash of the legendary Lee Hazelwood, his music certainly doesn’t have much in common with mainstream tastes.The former Magazine bassist and Bad Seed’s new album is a stylish and charismatic collection that draws on gospel, classic soul, blues and jazz through a widescreen cinematic lens that may be mature, but certainly isn’t square. Louche but sharp, Cut to Black is by turns atmospheric and soulful but wholly witty Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Anniversary is Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s sixth album (if we include last year’s lengthy EP of lullabies). Her success has not reached much beyond her native land, as is often the way with Canadian acts, but she’s a proven talent, one who deserves a higher international profile. Anniversary consists of 11 poetic folk-country meditations on love. However, anyone seeking musical representations of euphoria, joy and lust should look elsewhere for, lovely as it often is, the default setting here is a rich melancholia.The album is co-produced by her countryman Tony Dekker, of Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
The theme tune to John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing rang out as Slash and his crew of collaborators took to the stage. Unlike that film’s famous climax though, there was no ambiguity here, for these were experienced stalwarts of rock music putting on a traditional, no frills show with a minimum of fuss.Customary top hat and shades on, and adorned in a Scorpions T-shirt, the evening’s main draw was greeted with a cry from one fan of “mon Slash!”, followed seconds later by another yell of “mon Myles too!”. The night’s pecking order was thus confirmed, but if the Guns n’ Roses guitarist Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.A labour of love which Morris has been contemplating for two decades, the album presents a tribute to “my ten singers, my essential lodestars”, as she puts it, acknowledging and honouring female artists past and present who have inspired her own musical journey. Wonderfully arranged and stylistically diverse, Morris and her co-writer/co-producer Tony Rémy pull off a remarkable feat of crafting 10 songs which tell each Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Glitterbeat is home to a wildly eclectic and reliably brilliant world of artists, from Korea’s Park Jiha via Slovenia’s Sirom to Mauriania’s Noura Mint Seymali, Turkey’s Altin Gun, and desert blues masters Tamikrest. Hailing from the Sahrawi refugee camps of the Western Sahara – disputed territory for decades now – the superbly distinctive singer Aziza Brahim returns after five years with Mawja (‘Wave’), her fourth album with the label, and an excellent addition to her her catalogue, one that revisits the feel of her 2014 Glitterbeat debut, Soutak.Now based in Barcelona, with Mawja she Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it sounds more or less as you would imagine it – tasteful, discreet, soulful, reined in, but richly expressive, and celebrating the spirit of a sharing, caring Christmas.It comes with some fine orchestral settings arranged by album producer Troy Miller, recording with the Kingdom Orchestra at Abbey Road, while Porter and his excellent band – pianist Chip Crawford, bassist Jahmal Nichols, drummer Emmanuel Harrold, saxophonist Tivon Pennicott and Ondre Pivec on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In September 1955, the grandly named London Skiffle Centre set up for business each Thursday in a room above the Round House pub in Soho’s Wardour Street. A prime mover in the venture was blues acolyte Cyril Davies. Two months after the opening, Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” was issued as a single. It was previously out as a track on a 1953 Chris Barber album. Despite the wonky timeline, the skiffle boom was on.Davies – now in partnership with fellow blues enthusiast Alexis Korner – grew increasingly dissatisfied with skiffle and in March 1957 the duo renamed The London Skiffle Centre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process: he covered 700 counties using a grid system, so nothing would be missed. As well as tapes, he made lists, filled notebooks and took photos. He kept everything.After archivists at the National Museum of American History went through what was donated by McCormick’s daughter to the Smithsonian Institution in 2019, they found his collection encompassed Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom first crossed our paths in July 2021, his first streaming event, and coming little more than a year after the garden of unearthly delights that was Rough and Rowdy Ways. To enter this kingdom, you were given a key code for $25, and allowed fifty minutes, 13 songs, and the chance to revisit over the following 48 hours. Then Alma H’arel’s film evaporated into the digital ether, its noir-ish settings turning dark, apparently never to return.Two years on, and while the film itself remains for now in the dark room, the soundtrack is manifesting in traditional physical Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Reuniting with Russ Titelman, the producer of her eponymous 1979 debut and its follow-up 1981’s Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones approaches the great American songbook as if she was reuniting with an old flame, the thrill of it smouldering and concentrating itself in 10 elegant, soulful jazz-blues performances. These Pieces of Treasure open with the shimmering vibes of “Just in Time”, takes in a very different realisation of “Nature Boy”, a languid version of “One for My Baby” that burns the midnight oil, and closes up shop with a walk on “The Sunny Side of the Street” and “It’s All in the Game Read more ...