The song title is not a proclamation of bellicose intent but a lyric from a track about a man who is lost and simply needs a reason for getting his life back on track. That twist is typical of the songs and the approach of this album, which is both muscular and tender. We listen […]
Sunjay: Devil Came Calling
Sunjay has been seen at award ceremonies: he was a young folk award finalist in 2012 at Radio Two and the same year won the young performers award at the Wath Festival, as well as being a winner at the New Roots competition in St Albans. In 2014 he was nominated three times at the […]
Chas Rigby: Pearls
This is doubtless unfair on Chas, who’s probably 6’ 4” with pecks like a gladiator, but we imagine him as one of those underweight singers with less hair than they once had, who turn out to have led interesting but ultimately tragic lives, maybe some drugs and an arrest or two, but all giving them […]
Mak Grgic: Balkanisms
Solo classical guitar albums are not our favourite bag but this one looked like it might be better than average and so it is. The Balkans are famed for their folk music, noted for complex rhythms; you normally hear it in electric “gypsy” folk or punk bands. While the album consists of Mr Grgic noodling […]
Luke Sital-Singh: A Golden State
Sital-Singh is clearly a man who is serious about making music, and is good at it. He has a sound he wants to make. As with all music now — and Amazon is appalling for this — it’s apparently become illegal to give people bad reviews unless it’s someone you want to snigger at, like […]
David Gray: Gold in a Brass Age
We can’t have been unusual in seeing Gray at Glastonbury (on the telly) promoting White Ladder and buying the album; we seem to remember that while he was doing ok before, the Glasto show pushed the album out to the masses. Like other bands before and since (Dido, James Blunt) Gray was then everywhere — […]
Ben Bedford: The Hermit’s Spyglass
This album tells a day in the life of Ben and Darwin the Cat in a farmhouse (“The Hermitage”), a proper little house on the prairie (Illinois). Some of the tracks are short — opener Morning Rise is only 1:20), and he gulps Morning Coffee in the same time. Some are instrumental, such as The […]
Danny Schmidt: Standard Deviation
We thought Standard Deviation was a song about two girls falling in love over a shared fondness for physics but the release notes say it is a “romance set in the multi-dimensional realm of theoretical physics”. Schmidt goes on to say that it “touches on the pushback” that smart women face in traditionally male-dominated arenas, […]
Johnny Lloyd: Next Episode Starts In 15 Seconds
Lloyd is the former Tribes frontman: Tribes were an indie band, formed in 2010 and splitting in 2013. They might not have bothered your pop radar much, but it’s all part of a learning curve for a musician. Lloyd next appeared (to us anyway) with the Eden EP in 2017, which was a flawless pop EP, showing […]
Ward and Parker: One
Ward, or it could be Parker, was in Nizlopi, who had a massive hit with the JCB Song (don’t play it, you’ll never get it out of your head). The general tenor of that was a wise but homely narrator who knows what life’s about, doing the right thing. There’s the same kind of air […]
