Author: jerobear
-
Molly Tuttle: When You’re Ready
This is Tuttle’s debut, as long as you don’t count an earlier EP, and if you want slick, commercial rock/country, it’s pretty well perfect. Tuttle is a guitar virtuoso — lots of people can say that, but she was crowned instrumentalist of the year at the 2018 Americana Music Awards, and was not only the…
-
Ten Fé: Perfect, Present Tense
It’s a glorious moment when you get new music that you instantly need to play over and over. So we can’t really review Ten Fé’s new one in any objective sense: it’s marvellous from start to finish. Within two beats of opener Won’t Happen starting it’s obvious this is a good new album, the strummed…
-
David Guetta: 7
Older readers will remember a Foster’s lager advert, in which a silver fox rolls up at a bar in a Ferrari. “Don’t you want a man like that to a real potato-head” says the bartender, followed by, “I’ll settle for stupid”. (“Ah, professor!” calls out a drinker). “Most unpopular man in town!” (“Bob! Bob!” cry…
-
Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1
Foals are one of the best bands in Britain. They’ve improved and matured on every album and each release has a different sound. For this they’ve lost a bass player but replaced him with a synth, the backbone that supplies giving the music more of a groove; a lot, in fact. In some ways it’s…
-
Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow: Gershwin/Ravel, Music for Piano Duo
Anthony Goldstone died in January 2017 and in a review of one of his more “serious” collections, we lamented on lost talent. This new CD is more a cause for celebrating a life as he plays (with his wife Caroline Clemmow) some tunes that will bring a smile if not some tapping of toes. The…
-
Maria Lettberg: Zara Levina, Piano Concertos
Zara Aleksandrovna Levina died in 1976 and, as you might guess, was a Soviet pianist and composer, now sadly languishing in relative obscurity. This new CD from (mainly) pianist Maria Lettberg aims to put that right, and it’s a pleasingly varied programme of music; you wouldn’t necessarily guess it was all the same composer. The…
-
Paul Weller: Other Aspects, Live At The Royal Festival Hall
For many bands the obligatory album with an orchestra is a sign they’ve run short of ideas, their egos are too big or they’re dead. For Weller not only does it work — his songs suit gentle string arrangements — but it takes his music to a different place, that place being St Tropez, about…
-
Piano-a-Deux: Porgy, Preludes and Paris – Gershwin arrangements for piano duo
Husband and wife Robert and Linda Ang Stoodley have a wide repertoire from “the pops” (as the release notes say) to major classical works. They’re virtuoso performers. They are also accomplished arrangers. For this new CD they play arrangements of George Gershwin, with works from the serious Porgy and Bess, to tin pan alley songs,…
-
Dallahan: Smallworld
This is a tasty folk / roots album. The opener is an instrumental, Aye Chiki, which uses instrumentation typical of any folk band but — as the name might suggest — with an Eastern flavour. The beat (to our ears) is Tartar, and reminiscent of some of the music we collected following a recent trip…
-
Mariko Terashi: Piano
We perhaps were not expecting too much from a Japanese pianist playing a Portuguese (Carlos de Seixas) composer, never having heard of either, but that just shows you should never judge. José António Carlos de Seixas (1704–1742) is described as a composer during the “golden age” of Portugal, an accomplished virtuoso of both the organ…
Review Corner 