Review Corner

Author: jerobear

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    Joachim Kühn Trio: Love and Peace

    Somewhere between easy listening and classical is this new CD from jazz pianist Kühn. The music has too much melody and edge to be bland, though it only kicks off into high-energy modern jazz at the end. If you want a thumbnail for the album, imagine a simple, slightly bluesy take on jazz standard Summertime…

  • Stick in the Wheel: Follow Them True

    This is the most likable folk album you’ll ever hear; with punk folk already taken they need a name for the genre they have created. It’s not punk in sound, but they take traditional folk and modernise it, with distorted guitar, tapes and Auto-tunes, without losing the folkiness. If wandering troubadours remained in existence, this…

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    The Wombats: Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life

    Another decent album from The Wombats, who survived being lumped in with the landfill indie mob and morphed into a decent pop band playing upbeat tunes. It’s more than a decade since the band’s Let’s Dance to Joy Division was a hit, and they’ve managed to keep going despite a lack of hits. We’d guess…

  • Fleetwood Mac: Fleetwood Mac

    This was their breakthrough album, released in 1975, and a big hit, reaching No1 in the States; Say You Love Me and Rhiannon are both on here. The band’s complicated lives were already unravelling and that turmoil led to Rumours, a much better album; admittedly one of the best albums ever. This one is good,…

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    DeStijl: Debut

    DeStijl love a joke: they formed before White Stripes released their album De Stijl in 2000 and so released an album White Stripes in 2011. This album is not their debut. As you all know, De Stijl is Dutch for “The Style”, aka Neoplasticism, a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in Leiden by artists…

  • Laila Biali: Laila Biali

    We usually Google bands to see other reviews, often on badly written geeky or student sites but it was telling that Biali’s top review was a syndicated one: she plays a brand of international smooth jazz that they probably play to soothe the evil souls of delegates at Davos. Music like that often leaves us…

  • Peyton: Sinners Got Soul Too

    Chris Peyton operates in worlds with which we are not familiar, house music and talent shows, though he got his musical start in the church. Raised in the south of the US, he was brought up in a family of Pentecostal preachers and was working as the minister of music for his father’s church by…

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    Black Swan Lane: Under My Fallen Sky

    We have a soft spot for Black Swan Lane in the Review Corner. Their sound doesn’t change but they do what they do well; we should imagine they have a rabidly devoted fanbase (who must be delighted, it’s got to be several years since their last album). Black Swan Lane is a US/UK indie rock…

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    The Sad Song Co: Worth

    The Sad Song Co is Nigel Powell and Mr P is representative of what we call the Mr Bloom factor: Mr B is a gardener on kids’ television and you tend to assume he’s just some guy who can garden a bit and fell lucky. Then you see him live (or you do if you…

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    Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Young Adult

    This is a strong acoustic pop album. You should buy it. We preface the review with that in case you remember GCWCF and think, “oh no, not more average indie”. We suspect Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. (aka Sam Duckworth) is stuck with the grammatically imperfect name, which probably seemed cool a decade ago when…