Tag: jazz
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Simon Callow with the Brighouse and Rastrick Band: A Christmas Carol
As a Christmas treat this is great. Fans of audible books know that a good reader can make the difference between a good and bad book (that Jane Austen we once listened to will never be forgotten, with its mispronunciation and poor edits. And poor edits./ This version of Dickens’s classic is as luxurious as…
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Skinny Lister: The Devil, The Heart, The Fight
Roaring drunk in Hamburg. Locked in a bunker in Berlin. Tearing up the road in New York and Tokyo. Dreaming of Cairo. Originally recorded in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. They get about. We saw these live at Rode Hall’s Just So festival in 2016 (we think; possibly 2015). This album was put together while they were on the…
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The Head: Space
The most interesting thing about this is the punnery in the title. As for the rest, The Head, brothers Mike and Jack Shaw, joined by Jacob Morrell, all from Atlanta, play the right notes at the right time, and make a noise that approximates to melodic stadium-pleasing rock. Except it’s a bit duller. This is…
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Tom Hingley and the Kar-pets: May Contain Nuts
A Christmas present for Inspiral Carpets fans, this is a tribute band by the band’s real singer, similar to From The Jam the other week: the covers of hits sound much better when the voice is familiar. May Contain Nuts is a live multimedia DVD/CD where Hingley and his band the Kar-Pets (presumably the Carpets…
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Aretha Franklin: A Brand New Me
This is pretty good. Some digital boffins have got Franklin’s original vocals from her classic Atlantic masters, hired the Royal Philharmonic, booked Abbey Road studios — which always sounds good in a Press release — and then mixed the new music and old vocals, with added backing vocals from Patti Austin. What you get is…
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Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal: Garden Party
This is an odd little album, but in a good way. Michala Petri (recorder) and Lars Hannibal (guitar) played their first concert in Andalusia, Spain, in 1992, and 25 years and 1,500 concerts later have selected this programme of some of the pieces they have played live. As the cover suggests, birds loom large and…
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Pet Shop Boys: Yes
This is PSB’s 10th album and it’s the latest in a series of reissues that we’ve been enjoying. We were never massive PSB fans, the early singles aside (though we have seen them live, and surely no-one actually dislikes the Boys) but being sent albums to review, we’ve been impressed at the intelligence and diversity.…
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John Turner: Christmas Card Carols
This has got to be one of the coolest things: recorder player Turner writes a short Christmas carol each year and sends it to friends and family, not in the form of a recording but as notes written on a card. They’re all musicians, so they play the music for themselves. One recipient writes in…
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Arcane Roots: Melancholia Hymns
Arcane Roots’ debut album Left Fire is one of our highlights of the last decade: loud, ambitious prog/math rock with tons of melody. Follow-up album Blood and Chemistry ditched the melody in favour of more complex but less tuneful prog, with some screaming thrown in. This new album reels back on the full-on prog but…
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Cliff Richard: Stronger Thru the Years
The title is loosely based on his 1989 album Stronger, and the double CD opens with Stronger Than That, a tight, upbeat pop tune from the late 1980s, with a fast beat and typical 80s sound: we kept expecting Crocket and Tubbs to kick the door in. After that, it’s a compilation of his hits…
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