Author: jerobear
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Lucius: Good Grief
Lucius — Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe — have toured/worked with the likes of Roger Waters, Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy/Wilco and David Byrne, so they’re good singers and know their stuff. We’ve found that albums by backing singers can be hit and miss — standing behind a talented songwriter for 100 gigs doesn’t mean some…
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Soyeon Lee: Scriabin, Piano Music
In contrast to a couple of recent couple of classical albums, this is an appealing and digestible album. It’s not only played well but it’s warm and flowing. Alexander Scriabin’s music was admired by Tolstoy as “a sincere expression of genius” while the composer once described himself as “all impulse, all desire”. He suffered from…
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EPs – Meadowlark, John Parry
Meadowlark: Paraffin We’ve been doing this reviewing lark man and boy for 15 years or so and Meadowlark’s last EP is one of our favourite releases over that period. It came out last year but rarely a week goes by without us playing it. It’s an aural relaxant; nice melody but chilled and the dreamy…
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Trio Ismena: Five Danish Piano Trios
Since we started reviewing classical CDs, we’ve noticed two things: most CDs get no reviews at all and many reviews that do appear don’t say much. “It’s good to have a chance to hear all five works so superbly played,” says the Music Web review of this, which is 100% true but 100% uninformative —…
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Philip Wood: Sonnets, Airs and Dances: Songs and Chamber Music
We’ve played this over and over but we can’t, sad to say, find an angle to hang a review on. It’s 24 tracks and Wood has gathered 11 years’ worth of composition; all the pieces were gifts or gestures of goodwill towards people he knows. Maybe that’s the reason it never takes off; all the…
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Christine and the Queens: Chaleur Humaine
Christine (really Héloïse Letissier, but those accents and spellings are far too European for us Brits) could build herself a house if she turned all the glowing reviews she’s collecting into bricks. (There’s an analogy that didn’t go as well as expected). It’s clearly a good album, to get all those glowing reviews, but it’s…
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White Denim: Stiff
This is such a good album it’s almost a triviality having to write anything. “It’s really good, buy it”, is about the sum of it. The name White Denim is a bad one for a band that plays such lush, classic rock, and the sleeve is pretty dire. Instead of the lairy indie rock you’d…
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Man Made: Television Broke My Brain
This album from new band Man Made is addictive as crack. At first play through we thought it was enjoyable, solid power pop. At the second play through it all sounded happily familiar and at the fourth play we had to force ourselves to take it off the CD player and do some work. Opener…
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Steven James Adams: Old Magick
One of the Review Corner’s favourite band stories concerns Steven James Adams’s former group, The Broken Family Band, back when he was merely Steven J Adams. All the band members had good jobs, so band money was band money only. One night while on tour, they went out for a meal and blew the entire…
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Sami Junnonen: The Chant Enchanted
We’ve been enjoying this album by flautist Sami Junnonen, though it’s hard to describe. It’s an album of flute music by a Finn (he was born in 1977 in Tampere) but at various places sounds English (Vaughan Williams) and European (Bach/Mozart/chamber music) and at other times exotic — one featured composer is Michio Miyagi, an…
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