blues
Album: Abigail Lapell - AnniversaryFriday, 10 May 2024
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,... Read more... |
Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - guitar heroics against a low-key backdropFriday, 05 April 2024
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... Read more... |
Album: Sarah Jane Morris - The SisterhoodSaturday, 09 March 2024
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,... Read more... |
Album: Aziza Brahim - MawjaThursday, 22 February 2024
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... Read more... |
Album: Gregory Porter - Christmas WishThursday, 07 December 2023
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... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Shake That Thing - The Blues in Britain 1963-1973Sunday, 24 September 2023
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,... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Playing for the Man at the Door - Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormickSunday, 13 August 2023
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:... Read more... |
Album: Bob Dylan - Shadow KingdomSaturday, 27 May 2023
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... Read more... |
Album: Rickie Lee Jones - Pieces of TreasureMonday, 01 May 2023
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... Read more... |
Album: The Zombies - Different GameThursday, 30 March 2023
There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly figures in all time greatest albums lists, but it was a flop at the time and its reputation grew through a gradually... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Duffy Power - Innovations, Live at the BBCSunday, 19 March 2023
Sometime in early October 1963 John Lennon and Paul McCartney encountered The Rolling Stones and offered them one of their songs; one which became the London blues aficionado’s second single. “I Wanna be Your Man” was duly recorded on 7 October 1963... Read more... |
Album: Van Morrison - Moving on SkiffleWednesday, 08 March 2023
This double album takes Van Morrison back to one of his early muses – Skiffle and its repertoire, that precursor to the rock'n'roll years that took hold of Britain in the 1950s, having percolated across the USA through the first half of the century... Read more... |
