Author: jerobear
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Inspiral Carpets: Inspiral Carpets
We reviewed this a few weeks ago but the release date got pushed back and it gave us time to play it a few more times. We can’t get past the fact that it’s no better than ok. The album starts off strongly with Monochrome, Spitfire, You’re so Good for Me and A to Z…
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Marmozets: The Weird And Wonderful Marmozets
Marmozets are two sets of siblings, who formed the band while at school. They still have an average age of 18. If you’re the same age and want a band that’s “yours”, these are going to press all the right buttons: loud and fast, full of spunk, and with the right mix of metal, shredding,…
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Maya Beiser: Uncovered
Beiser has been called a “cello goddess” “the queen of contemporary cello” (New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle respectively) but she grew up on a kibbutz listening to rock. She says music is either good or bad and nothing more, so she’s taken her instrument of choice, the cello, to make an album of rock…
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Andy Burrows: Fall Together Again
Our main reaction to this was “Good on yer, son!” Burrows has been gaining in confidence since leaving Razorlight, first with tentative acoustic material then a decent-but-lacking-confidence full solo album. Now this, which is impressive. The lad’s fulfilling his potential at last. Fall Together Again is a sunny pop album. It would be stretching it…
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Goldstone and Clemmow: Rimsky-Korsakov for piano duet
This latest work from the husband and wife team of Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow lifts what could be pedestrian pieces of work to a higher level. We can imagine that the pieces on this CD —Scheherazade, Antar and Neopolitan Song — could be banged out by a hack player to make inoffensive background music,…
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Famy: We Fam Econo
This is the debut album from Famy, out on 8th September and it’s the sound of a band trying hard to elevate their average music to the heights of cultdom. In sound it’s somewhere between the tribal indie of Wu Lyf and the more cerebral indie pop of Cave Painting; the former released an excellent…
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York Bowen: String Quartets
Bowen is another British composer who’s been lost to present music fans. Like Arnold Cooke from last week, this was originally released by the British Music Society and is now out on Naxos. Bowen (1884-1961) was active before WWI and seems to have disappeared without trace afterwards, which is a shame. This album from…
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The Courteeners: Concrete Love
We saw The Courteeners on an early tour, and singer Liam Fray looked as if he’d outgrown the sub-Oasis lad rock featured on the band’s debut album. In hindsight perhaps he just thought he’d outgrown venues the size of the Sugarmill, because The Courteeners never left the lad rock behind. Fray has the ambition of…
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Eric Craven : Piano Sonatas 7+8+9
We’ve not heard of Craven, but apparently he was a teacher who taught music and mathematics in secondary schools in Manchester. He has composed music since his teens, but rarely performed or published until recently. Encouraged by Mary Dullea and Divine Art/Metier Records, the first album of his music SET for piano, performed by Dullea,…
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