Author: jerobear
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Frank Carter and The Rattlesnakes: Modern Ruin
A friend in music radio once told us that some pretty decent bands fail because their members are so unpleasant — be mean to venues, music journalists and sound engineers and your career will be short lived. By the same token, Frank Carter must be the nicest man in music. Despite a decade-long career that’s…
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Menace Beach: Lemon Memory
The new year is not even a month old (well it is now, but not as we write) and we have already got two albums that could still be favourites at the end of the year. One is Frank Carter (see elsewhere) and the other is this. Menace Beach are certainly confident — they open…
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Kenari Quartet: French Saxophone Quartets
This fun album features pieces that used what was still a relatively new-fangled instrument in the classical form. The sax was invented in 1846 by the eponymous Mr Sax, and the pieces on here (from Dubois, Pierné, Françaix, Desenclos, Bozza and Schmitt) were written in the early to mid-20th century. French composers apparently went mad…
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The Wintertons Unmuzzled: The Life and Times of Nick and Ann Winterton by Sarah Winterton
Former MPs Ann (Congleton) and Nick (Macclesfield) Winterton are very much Marmite figures. People either detest them for their right-wing views that seem to date back to Empire days (Ann is opposed to gay marriage, abortion and euthanasia), or love them as hard-working constituency MPs who stood up to authority and always spoke their minds.…
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The Pigeon Detectives: Broken Glances
The Pigeon Detectives were big more than a decade ago, and epitomised landfill indie: predictable guitar tunes, and uninspired, often sexist lyrics (“You know I love you / Take off your clothes / It’s alright”). We were never fans, the albums seeming to contain a couple of averagely radio-friendly tunes and then filler. Landfiller, in…
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Raphael Doyle: Closer
Most albums get compared with other albums or bands; this one is a book, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. That’s the story of his life in Auschwitz and its first chapter describes how his (and by extension) the reader’s humanity can be completely taken away if someone’s a big enough bastard. It’s…
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Avenged Sevenfold The Best of 2005-2013
According to the interweb, this is a compilation banged out by the record label to spoil AX7’s latest release on a new label. Warner Bros sued them (or tried to) when the band said they wanted to leave because a majority of the executives who signed the band to Warner were no longer at the…
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Celso Garrido-Lecca: Orchestral Works
Peruvian Celso Garrido-Lecca is one of the foremost Ibero-American composers, linking the native sounds of the Andes and Western classical music. He studied with Aaran Copland and so there’s an American feel in places but I think it sounds very English at times, a sprightly Vaughan Williams writing about a jolly day out in the…
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Neil Young: Peace Trail
We read a bad review of this and feared it would be like some of his recent releases — his work rate is admirable while his quality control is not — but it’s very good. It’s not up there with his best but it’s listenable and more casual fans of Young will find much to…
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