Author: jerobear
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Ward Thomas: From Where We Stand
Play this pop / country album through and you’ll be wondering where they’re from: Nashville? The Canadian Maritimes? Er, nope, they’re 20-year-old twin sisters and from Hampshire. They did have a Canadian cousin, though. On one hand that explains its slightly pedestrian feel: we have a theory that country is so suited to America because…
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Sunjay: Sunjay
Sunjay (last name Brayne, you can see why he’s dropped that) has the same effect on us as the first time we heard Gomez, with that unbelievable voice coming out of a boy who looked about 12. Ditto Sunjay, an Anglo-Indian from the West Midlands who looks like about 16 and is built like a…
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Charlie Simpson: Long Road Home
You’ll only snigger when we say this is really good; that’s right, ha ha, a good album by the bloke who was in Busted, and left to form a metal band you never heard of again. But it is really good, and, moreover a pleasure to listen to. We’ll say right off that while it’s…
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Plastikman: Ex
Plastikman — aka Richie Hawtin — is an exponent of minimal techno. He was born in England but later lived just over the Canadian border from Detroit, the home of techno, and had a dad who liked Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. He later lived in Berlin. He’s also into multimedia art installations. He’d retired Plastikman…
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Michael Finnissy: Mississipi Hornpipes
If the title suggests to you some folkie American Appalachian adaptations, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Finnissy — Prof Finnissy to give him his proper title — is professor of composition at the University of Southampton. We found this quote attributed to him: “If it’s a commercial success you have in your sights, lay…
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Arnold Cooke: Three String Sonatas
This appears to be a CD that was originally released (in 2009) by the British Music Society, formed in 1979 by a group of amateur and professional music lovers to promote British music in the face of indifference. Cooke was a good one to support: despite having a prolific working life over nearly a century,…
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Moscow Chamber Orchestra / Rudolf Barshai : Baroque Music volume one
The most surprising thing about this CD is the fact that its recordings are 50 years old, as they sound so fresh and new. Barshai won numerous Soviet and international competitions and was the founding violist of the Borodin Quartet in 1945. In 1955, he founded the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, which he led and…
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Lei Liang: Bamboo Lights
We like a bit of avant-garde in the Review Corner, and this garde is as avant as they come. This is a “portrait CD” of Liang’s work, which we are going to crudely summarise thus: imagine an upmarket kung fu movie with pretensions of art, and a scene where the protagonists walk through a bamboo…
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Land Observations: The Grand Tour
Land Observations, last album Roman Roads IV–XI is one of the Review Corner’s favourite albums. It’s a piece of sonic art (ambient music is too wishy washy a term) in which artist and musician James Brooks tries to convey a sense of place through music. It’s not ambient because most of the songs feature a…
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The Last Vinci
Years ago, the Review Corner used to visited the Netherlands on a regular basis, and peruse the record store in Oosterhout or even in the bright lights of Breda. Invariably there’d be something from a local band playing moderately-well recorded rock, singing in heavily accented English. It had a charm of its own but we…
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