Review Corner

Tag: Congleton Chronicle

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    Andy Burrows: Fall Together Again

    Our main reaction to this was “Good on yer, son!” Burrows has been gaining in confidence since leaving Razorlight, first with tentative acoustic material then a decent-but-lacking-confidence full solo album. Now this, which is impressive. The lad’s fulfilling his potential at last. Fall Together Again is a sunny pop album. It would be stretching it…

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    Goldstone and Clemmow: Rimsky-Korsakov for piano duet

    This latest work from the husband and wife team of Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow lifts what could be pedestrian pieces of work to a higher level. We can imagine that the pieces on this CD —Scheherazade, Antar and Neopolitan Song — could be banged out by a hack player to make inoffensive background music,…

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    Terence Charlston: The Harmonious Thuringian

    We so wanted the harmonious thuringian to be a novelty musical instrument: in fact it’s a harpsichord from part of Germany (as it is now) called Thuringia, which David Evans rebuilt. The harpsichord, not Germany. He was looking for authentic music to play on it, so who better than Baroque composers Johann Sebastian Bach and…

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    Arnold Cooke: Three String Sonatas

    This appears to be a CD that was originally released (in 2009) by the British Music Society, formed in 1979 by a group of amateur and professional music lovers to promote British music in the face of indifference. Cooke was a good one to support: despite having a prolific working life over nearly a century,…

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    Lucius Wilderwoman

      This is the debut album from the band, who are led by twin vocalists Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig. It’s a hard one to say much about: there’s no obvious lead track and the mix of genres means it doesn’t leave much impression at first. But it’s all good and on a track by…

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    Get The Blessing – Lope and Antilope

    Jazz drumming is too hard for me to play (well, probably, never tried it) but seems to be led by the ride cymbal and not, as in rock, by snare and kick drum. Get The Blessing is another category (ii) jazz band (see Ant Law, below) but I’d venture to suggest that that difference between…

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    Ant Law – Entanglement

    There are – officially – three types of jazz, which is a style of music that attracts adherents as dedicated to the cause as Smiths fans. These are : (i) New Orleans / Dixieland / trad, which has tunes and melody, can sometimes reference hymns, features men with umbrellas, and is fun; (ii) Clint Eastwood…

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    12 Years A Slave

    This being an important film, this is not just a soundtrack it’s curated, by John Legend. So it’s surprising that he picks Hi-NRG disco as the soundtrack, a genre that’s the least suitable . . . only joking but he could have done, as this is an “audio companion” to the film, ie not actually…

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    Billie Joe and Norah – Foreverly

    Our opinion of Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong changed after watching the documentary that came with the re-issue of Tres! just before Christmas. He might be a tattooed punk with an addiction problem but he came over as a talented and hard-working musician. Plenty of musicians do projects away from their day jobs and this…

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    Manu Chao – Sibérie M’était Contée

    You can’t beat a bit of world music, says the Review Corner (ignoring the fact the Daniel O’Donnell lives in the world and makes music), so when this dropped just before Christmas, we registered high on the delight scale. José-Manuel Thomas Arthur “Manu” Chao sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Galician, Arabic, and Portuguese, and…