Author: jerobear
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Judah and the Lion: Folk Hop N’ Roll
Take Mumford and Sons and add some scuzzy guitar and drum machine, and you’ve got Judah and the Lion. They’re big in the States — the single Take It All Back (on here as Take It All Back 2) was top of the US alternative charts for ages. Given that our own inventors of this…
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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Echo of Pleasure
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are an American indie pop band, formed in 2007, and centred around songwriter Kip Berman. This is a nice album of heartfelt 80s pop but it suffers from the fact that The War On Drugs’ new album, which travels a similar road, is so much better. This is…
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The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead
With various politicians and actors being forced to admit egregious behaviour, we thought we’d make a confession of our own: we think Morrissey is over-rated. Back in the day, we loved The Smiths, especially Johnny Marr’s guitar, but came to think that Morrisey was not a barbed wit in the style of Oscar Wilde but…
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Neil Young: Hitchhiker
This is a rather magical album: Young rolls up to a studio in 1976, on a night of the full moon, and plays some songs, accompanied only by weed and beer. Some songs go on to be classics, two have not been released before. It’s a got a bit of Clint Eastwood Man With No…
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Hawklords: Six
The whole Hawkwind / Hawklords thing is a bit of a problem: if you’ve liked the space rock mothership nonsense since 1823, when Dave Brock first strapped on a guitar, you like what you know and want what you like, and this is it. The rest of us, maybe not so. Hawklords feature former Hawkwind…
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Betsy: Betsy
“The new Cher” say some of the reviews, and that’s not just the sound. The feel of the whole CD harks back to an era when a woman could have a ship’s gun between her legs and not get mocked on social media. The sleeve art is Betsy wearing tight tops in a garage-based scenario…
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Barbara Karaskiewicz Karol Szymanowski: Piano Music
This is a nice autumn CD of piano music; the fact that it’s outstanding music played well, we’ll take as a given. Szymanowski is described in the sleeve notes as one of the most important Polish composers of the 20th century. The sleeve notes are extensive and well written, but the relevant information for those…
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Three Fall and Melane: Four
You’re just getting to think you’re going to hear nothing new, and then along comes this little treasure. We can’t find fault. For a start, it’s that rare beast, a band with no information on Google. It’s like the days before the internet, the mystery of discovering a new band and waiting for serendipity to…
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Blancmange: Unfurnished Rooms
It’s always amazing that, no matter how forgotten the band, there are people who still love them. As far as we were concerned, Blancmange had a couple of hits way back — Living On The Ceiling was the biggest — but at the time we just thought “Meh”, even with that song’s attempt at getting a…
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Simon Webbe: Smile
Webbe is an English singer-songwriter, best known as a member of Blue, with whom he sold 15 million records. This is his third solo album. He’s done other stuff: appeared in Sister Act the musical at the London Palladium, represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest (came 11th) and managed some bands we’ve never…
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