You could be in danger of hearing far too much of this likable pop album, which is basically Busted for adults and might get a lot of radio play. We’ve never heard of the band before but they are clearly all experienced musicians. Hamilton is American, and the Ghosts from the UK; Hamilton has played […]
Thomas Bartlett: Shelter
Pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett has toured the world and worked with people from The National to David Byrne and produced the likes of St Vincent and Sufjan Stevens, with whom he earned Academy award and Grammy award nominations. But like all the rest of us, come lockdown he was stuck at home with only his piano […]
Kerry Turner: Horn Works
The sleeve notes say that Turner developed his reputation as a composer with the American Horn Quartet, but has written horn and piano at the same time as his horn quartets. He performed these works for horn and piano along with Kristina Mascher-Turner, appearing as the Virtuoso Horn Duo. Since the majority of these pieces […]
Philip Hartmann: Invocazione brillante, Organ music by Carson Cooman
The lockdown could have stopped one-man organ machine Carson Cooman from composing, but it’s unlikely. He’s prolific and never stops. Normally we expect Erik Simmons to be playing Cooman’s work but for this it’s German organist Philip Hartmann, and he does a fine job. We used to find organ music hard going but repeated forced […]
Pottery: Welcome To Bobby’s Motel
This a fine album, interesting and meaty, with added cowbell for those who feel modern music lacks such percussive adornment. The title track kicks it all off, opening with a frantic snare roll and then the speeded-up soundtrack to a Tarantino movie, lots of tom toms, psychedelic guitar and a voice-over about dreams, then, after […]
Gianluca Luisi: Impressions of China – Winning Works from the 2018 Huang Zi International Chinese Piano Composition Competition
All of the works in this programme were prize winners in the competition named in the CD title, which we’re not going to type out all over again. The competition marked the 80th anniversary of the death of Huang Zi. Born 1904–1938, and dying at 34, he was a native of Chuansha (now a part […]
Justin Wells: The United States
The title is a pun: it’s about life in the USA in these divided times but it’s also about the fact that we have more in common than differences, particularly the fact that we’re all born, live and die. “This record starts in the womb, and it ends after death,” Wells says of the album. […]
Fontaines: DC A Hero’s Death
We’re often not impressed with bands billed as “the future of rock” but we can make an exception for Fontaines DC. This new album is special; so good it had us singing – SINGING – to one track about three plays through. That literally never happens. It only seems 10 minutes since their debut album, […]
Alec Benjamin: These Two Windows
Singer-songwriter Alec Benjamin reportedly made his name in 2019 with a mixtape, which was streamed 540m times worldwide. This is his debut album. Our first observation would be that Benjamin has an androgynous voice. The first few plays we assumed he was a girl named Alec; when we Googled him, we seriously considered that we’d […]
Denai Moore: Modern Dread
This is a very nice album for those who like soul, pop, RnB, even trip hop. It’s so good – and this is rare praise – it puts us in mind of Little Dragon’s album of the same name (as the band, not a this). For that album at least they played cool, genre-hopping music […]
