Category: Uncategorized
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The Wombats: Glitterbug
Time travel does exist: The Wombats are in fact a cheesy 70s disco band stranded in this century. Shortly after an appearance on Top Of The Pops in 1975, they took a wrong turn and ended up in Dr Who’s Tardis, then found themselves stuck in 2007. Still dressed in Wombat suits and with Peter…
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Eska: Eska
Eska is a session singer and apparently this album has taken five years, presumably working on and off. If you Google her, you find things like “the most talked about, revered singer you’ve never heard of”. It’s an album to immerse yourself in, and one that doesn’t really lend itself to a 200-word review. It…
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The Best Of The Grateful Dead
With the Dead announcing that they’re calling it a day — three shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field from 3-5th July will be their last — it’s a good time to issue a best of. It’s probably not the first, but it’s a good ending to their career. We’re not massive Deadheads, but they are embedded…
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Gilbert Rowland: Handel: Suites for Harspichord Vol3
Having spent the week listening to Sebastien Fagerlund’s intellectually stimulating music (see this page) and the thrash punk of Gallows (ditto), and enjoying both, it’s a big jump to Rowland’s presentation of Handel’s harpsichord music, whose aim is “merely” to entertain. We’ve enjoyed this too, but there’s just less to say, at least without just…
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Sebastien Fagerlund: Darkness In Light
Sebastien Fagerlund is Finnish and his Wikipedia entry reads: “He is described as a post-modern impressionist whose sound landscapes can be heard as ecstatic nature images which, however, are always inner images, landscapes of the mind.” It says the violin concerto Darkness in Light “inhabits the zone between dream and reality” and is partly inspired…
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John McCullagh: New Born Cry
We’d expect the popular Press to pretty well go bonkers over this, and for it to figure in “best of” lists at the end of the year. His debut in 2013 was the first on Alan McGee’s 359 Music label, so he’s cool, he sounds Beatlesesque and his full name is John Lennon McCullagh, and…
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Mounties: Thrash Rock Legacy
Two albums of the year are reviewed this week — this one will be one of ours, John McClaughlin will, we suspect, be other people’s. We were expecting little of this, so were very impressed. Mounties are made up of Hawksley Workman and Steve Bays, whose previous band Hot Hot Heat got a bit famous…
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Gallows: Desolation Sounds
We never liked Gallows much. They were a punk band that decided to be the most punk band ever, like Steve Irwin deciding being the Ozziest Australian. The music Press loved front man Frank Carter but now he’s gone, leaving to form an ill-fated venture that was “destined to change music” but disappeared without trace.…
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Emerson Lake and Palmer Emerson: Trilogy
There was a conversation about punk on the Review Corner Facebook page this week and we were praising the DIY ethos of that movement, where people who were frankly not very good could still make music. ELP and Yes were the very bands punk set out to destroy, with their self-indulgent three-day long keyboard solos…
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Copenhagen Piano Quartet: Kuhlau: Piano Quartets 1&2
Unlike Henze (see above) Kuhlau seems to have been more workmanlike in his output, writing cosmopolitan pieces to entertain, and these two piano quartets are major works from the composer’s most productive decade. They’re both easy to listen to and evidence of Kuhlau’s skills as a pianist. Part of the attraction of this CD is…
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