Author: jerobear
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Elizabeth Hilliard: Sea To The West
There’s no use pretending this is an easy album to get into, though it is beautiful and calming in places. It’s an album of contemporary works for solo voice with occasional electronics, six works by four composers, all written for the solo voice. If it was purely an electronic album it would be out on…
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Jess Morgan: Edison Gloriette
Morgan is a singer-songwriter who has crowd-funded her previous albums, though this is on Norwegian record label Drabant Music. She creates rootsy folk / country / Americana music that’s beautifully simple. Opener The Longest Arm has harmonica and prompts Neil Young comparisons with its downbeat harmonica/acoustic guitar sound. It’s hard to pick other comparisons but…
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New Order: Singles
Everyone else is going to praise this, so for the sake of cussedness we’re going to dissent. You can never tell which bands are going to live for ever and which will disappear. When bands are new, it’s hard to pick the stayers, like that U2 lot, who flogged Fire round for ages and looked…
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Billy Talent: Afraid Of Heights
Billy Talent are one of those bands you only hear of when you see a long queue of young people outside a gig and wonder who the big draw is. We had them pegged as punk, albeit the grungier end, but we’re guessing that loyal fanbase is getting older and Billy Talent see the need…
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Jonathan Antoine: Believe
Possibly the best-named person to come from Chigwell, and predictably called the “teenage Pavarotti”, Antoine rose to stardom through Britain’s Got Talent, the rare exception of someone with real talent appearing on the show. Antoine has a fantastic tenor voice and on this album he sings a selection of popular classics, both old and new,…
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Oxfam presents Stand As One — Live At Glastonbury 2016
Good cause, average album. It’s raising money to tackle the refugee crisis and in memory of MP Jo Cox, with profits split 75-25 between Oxfam and the Jo Cox Fund. You can also sign a petition Fair play to the artists, who have donated the songs from their Glastonbury Festival set to this live album.…
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ZZ Top: Tonite at Midnight
Some live albums undergo more than a little studio engineering before hitting the shops; as one might hope with ZZ Top, they seem to have pressed “record” and what they played is what you get. The mix on opener Got Me Under Pressure sounds a bit raw and if a drum fill starts a fraction…
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The Ramona Flowers: Part Time Spies
This album is an odd mix of cool electronic dance and 80s synth pop: one minute it sounds like a tune from Rob da Bank on the radio (or think Delphic), the next a Duran Duran B side. Opener Dirty World is not bad, despite having an intro that melds Kim Wilde’s Kids in America…
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Smokey Joe and the Kid: Running To The Moon
Well, we might have gotten us right here our most played album of the year. Yessir. It makes you talk like this because it drops in bits of dialogue from top movies and is a bit 1920s. The opening track has lines from O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “You work for the railroad, Grampa? I…
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