This is a beautiful collection of music, but quiet. It’s one for reflective evenings alone; they’re love songs sung sparsely by countertenor (falsetto) Yaniv d’Or. Dan Deutsch accompanies equally sparsely on the piano. The sleeve notes say that d’Or has previously explored the music of his Sephardic heritage, with his Spanish, Turkish, Egyptian and Libyan […]
Heath Common: Heath Common and The Lincoln 72s
Heath Common is a beat poet whose previous efforts have been a little hit and miss, but this new album is his most musical and probably the most likely to raise his profile. Admittedly that profile will go from cult figure’s cult figure to merely cult figure but we can at least recommend you consider […]
William the Conqueror: Proud Disturber Of The Peace
William the Conqueror, aka Ruarri Joseph, played the Just So Festival at Rode Hall last year and his show was so impressive that he and it are tied together in the Review Corner collective memory. He was so good we bought two of his solo albums, second hand. In his youth (he was taking his […]
Danny and The Champions Of The World: Brilliant Light
Danny and The Champions are one of those bands that make you shake your head at the fickleness of music: they should be playing big venues but last year (?) they played Biddulph Up In Arms; prestigious as that is, it’s not Manchester Apollo or even Band on the Wall. The last album was more […]
Brazilian Landscapes
This fascinating CD is nominally classical with jazz influences, but you could call it world because of the rhythm, which leans towards the Latin. It’s a quiet and reflective album. The percussion plays varying roles in the music, coming to the fore in places and dropping back in others. There’s a sense of fun about […]
Steve Earle and The Dukes: So You Wannabe An Outlaw
Outlaw country had peaked by the time the Review Corner bought Steve Earle’s fantastic debut Guitar Town, but he was in the outlaw vein, both musically (blending rock and blues with country) and with his hell raisin’ lifestyle. With this new album, he reflects on the choices he made, now free from drugs and not […]
Klyne: Klyne
We’ve waited a long time for an electro/dance/pop album as good as CagedBaby’s* 2005 Will See You Now … and we’re still waiting. We had high hopes for Klyne, as the early tracks we heard were good. Like Cagedbaby, they were pleasant pop tunes played electronically and with edge and coolness. Obviously, the early tracks […]
Wendy Bevan: Rose and Thorn
Bevan sounds like she’s from the 80s but isn’t. She writes electronic pop that’s rooted in the electronic pop of the late 70s/early 80s, the kind of stuff the geriatric part of the Review Corner bought from A&A’s indie-band shoebox. The sound of early Human League, or even Visage; too arty to be New Romantic […]
Fritz Kreisler: The Complete Solo Recordings, Vol.7
It’s slightly misleading to call this classical: it’s a bloke playing popular tunes on the violin, so it’s really pop music, just pop from the days when a new tune was Dame Clara Butt singing Old Folks At Home. Austrian-born Kreisler was busy after WWI with a comeback in America, world tours, and a warm […]
Art of Noise: In Visible Silence
Art of Noise were momentarily big in the 80s, partly because they had one good song, Close (To The Edit), which the Review Corner bought on a 12” picture disk that looked like a piece of candy Willy Wonka would peddle to small children. They were odd even then, the label ZTT’s contribution to art, […]
