Review Corner

Category: Acoustic

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    Neil Young: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971

    This is part of the Neil Young Archives Official Bootleg series and it’s excellent. The last album we reviewed was good but mostly interesting for the now-classic songs played early in their careers, the crowd mysteriously silent as Young rolled out future bangers. This new live release conversely is genuinely enjoyable, and we’ve had it…

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    Rich Jacques: Everything Must Change EP

    This is a nice EP, like really nice. Almost too saccharine, but not quite. It’s just about Americana / pop as opposed to folk, although Richy boy has a delicate voice and is often to be found on acoustic guitar; he adds other effects and harmonies to move away from the folk feel. A slightly…

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    Mean Mary: Portrait of a Woman (Part I)

    This album is so good we forgot to review it; we played it and played and got to know it so well we thought we’d written about, but we never did. It is, as one might expect, really good. Mary James is basically a country singer, leading on her banjo, but if you can tolerate…

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    The Lucky Ones: The Lucky Ones

    The Lucky Ones sound like they come from Kentucky or some other Appalachian area, playing what is musically straight bluegrass / roots string music, but they’re actually from the Yukon, Canada, made famous by the Klondike Gold Rush and more latterly by Ice Road Truckers. (We once went to the Motown Museum in Detroit, where…

  • Ben Bedford: Portraits
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    Ben Bedford: Portraits

    This is Bedford’s sixth album; his last, Hermit’s Spyglass, was excellent and this is even better. Perhaps not surprising, as he has picked songs from his first three albums to create a collection of songs, the intention’s clear from the album title. Hermit’s Spyglass told some good tales – it mapped daily life on a…

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    Georgie: At Home

    We like Georgie in the Review Corner. With that name and her appearance, she could be one of those X Factor clones (that type of voice, that mild RnB) but she’s not. She can really sing, needs no Auto-tunes and her rich, soulful voice is at home singing pop, jazz or blues. If you like…

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    Michael Bernard Fitzgerald: Love Valley

    This is Fitzgerald’s fifth album but we’ve not heard of him before; he’s a Canadian singer-songwriter so he’s been honing his craft over there. It’s a nice little album, in the best senses of “nice” and “little”: it’s a cosy musical companion that will bring comfort to fans of Americana and folky roots in these…

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    Tim Fredericks: Singer Songwriter 2

    This is a follow-up to an album that came out last year; they gave away the last one and we guess the same is true of this. It came out before lockdown, so now they can’t even give it away. The songs are by Tim Fredericks and his band, who are from Crewe, Macclesfield, Stoke…

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    Damien Jurado: What’s New, Tomboy?

    This is the 15th studio album from singer songwriter Jurado, and it’s a more solid musical offering than we were expecting. It’s still a fairly stripped-back sound, but it just seems a little more forceful, although we guess Jurado fans buy his albums for the lyrics. All the songs are about relationships and many of…

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    Ben Avison: Lovers’ Leap

    Avison has a gentle voice and writes gentle tunes, which means there’s a danger his songs could be merely bland. We receive albums that are so unutterably dull that we can think of nothing to say about them (good or bad) but this is not one. Although on a couple of occasions he does veer…