Review Corner

Category: Uncategorized

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    Troyka: Ornithophobia

    This progressive jazz album from the talented trio Troyka (players include Kit Downes, Mercury nominated in his own right) is book ended by fairly traditional sounding jazz. Opener Arcades sounds like any modern jazz track you might care to hear, before it suddenly takes off in a prog rock direction. Prog because of the frequent…

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    Opella Musica/Gregor Meyer Kuhnau: Complete Sacred Works

    As far as we can gather from the interweb, which always speaks the truth, Kuhnau is on a par with JS Bach. While relatively unknown, he is about to become more famous and this CD of world premiere recordings marks the beginning of the first complete scholarly critical edition of Kuhnau’s cantatas, part of a…

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    Chamber Eroica: Symphony No.3 Explored

    If you dislike “classical” music because of the reverence it provokes — that whole sitting in awe at the greatness of the music thing and bring on the garage punk — then Beethoven’s Symphony No.3 is arguably the cause of it all. A ground-breaking work, it marked the start of the Romantic period in classical…

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    The Subways: The Subways

    It must be quite good being in The Subways. Despite being mocked by the NME, they probably have a solid fan base who will buy the album, pay to see them and then buy lots of merchandise. So they make a living from music without the hassle of being stopped in Tesco by weird people.…

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    Roxette: The 30 Biggest Hits XXX

    Roxette are one of those bands about whom we know nothing. This was quite a surprising fact: we asked other people, who knew equally little: they just had lots of good tunes and there was two of them. Someone suggested that the woman had a nice hairstyle; someone else remembered that a song was in…

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    David Gorton: Orfordness

    We don’t struggle with much but we did with this. Gorton is clearly a clever chap — he’s associate head of research studies at the Royal Academy of Music — and uses instrumentation, electronics and samples. Musically, it’s discordant and unsettling, the kind of music enjoyed by people who don’t just want their music to…

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    Brian Current: Airline Icarus

    Aeroplanes are a thing in culture. This reviewer wrote some lyrics for a song about a plane crashing, about that side of flying in which people don’t really like to talk to their neighbours or interact in any way, particularly on long haul (the last five minutes excepted, when you’re about to land and you…

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    Assi Karttunen: Beyond the River God

    Sometimes you’ll read about modern bands whose music closely resembles that of Bach. We think Oasis underwent such analysis once, and they stole it all from The Beatles, for whom similar comparisons can thus be made. In this case, the opposite applies, for the first part of this enjoyable CD of harpsichord music is the…

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    Ghost Culture: Ghost Culture

    This is a very cool album, though it gets a bit samey towards the end. Ghost Culture is electronic musician James Greenwood and one of label Phantasy Sound’s newer signings; he’s had help from Erol Alkan and Daniel Avery making this. It opens with the nice Avery throb of Mouth, the minimalistic sound being reminiscent…

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    The Slow Show: White Water

    An excellent, if slightly left-field album, The Slow Show present a mix of the atmospheric and arty, as if David Bowie was the Big Black Goth and not the Thin White Duke. Dresden, a former single, opens with a male voice choir sound-alike before piano and spoken word. It sounds in places like something from…