Review Corner

Tag: jazz

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    Christmas Joy In Full Measure: Various

    This was obviously planned some months ago, but we got it too late for Christmas. Bad planning, someone. Still you can buy it now for next year. The backstory is that record label Hand Of Glory records asked 12 artists for an original Christmas song. Presumably they left the remit wide open, because the songs…

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    Ratworld: Menace Beach

    Someone, somewhere must have said something wise about music constantly reinventing itself and this is the latest incarnation of shoegazy, scuzzy, distorted guitar pop. Teenagers who are new to all this will find this to be exciting and moshpit friendly music; older musos who’ve heard it all before will find Menace Beach entertainingly enthusiastic and…

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    Team Me: Blind As Night

    This is a proper mix of styles and influences: think Arcade Fire covering Kate Bush by way of a generic American pop punk band. The first time we played it through it all just slipped by, but it’s not an album you can half-listen to. We’ve warmed to it via successive plays. Opener Ride My…

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    Aled Jones: The Heart Of It All

    He’s come a long way since Walking In The Air and now he’s almost a national treasure, appearing on Songs of Praise as he does. We’re not being judgemental (and could be wrong) but we’d guess a lot of his fanbase are churchgoers, probably members of the WI or Mothers’ Union, and perhaps their spouses.…

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    Wu-Tang Clan: A Better Tomorrow

    This has met a mixed reception: the general Press has given it good reviews, long-time fans and the specialist writers have been less generous. One long-time fan on Amazon writes: “There are no moments that make you think ‘that was a clever lyric’, that you are listening to a potential single, or even something that’s…

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    Glass Caves: Alive

    We reviewed this a couple of weeks ago, using a faulty CD that skipped a couple of tracks. Now equipped with a fully working download, we’re going to plug them again, as they’re very good. Think Arctic Monkeys with a slick polish and sparkle (which you could read as “Arctic Monkeys having lost their edge”…

  • Kasse Mady Diabaté: Kirike

    We’ve been enjoying this album from the Mali musician, which goes back to the roots of his music, which we’d guess is religious or at least mystical. Tinariwen are also from Mali, and for comparison, this is like an acoustic version of them. Like much of this kind of music, the songs here lay down…

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    Ruby Hughes, Komalé Akakpo, Martin Gester: Venetian Christmas

    Note the title: this is how they celebrated Christmas in Venice, not how we do now. We’d guess there wasn’t carol singing and reflecting on the shallowness of collecting material goods during one’s brief sojourn on Earth. Nope, it would be lavish: draw the Venetian blinds down over the Venetian windows, don the fancy masks…

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    Kill It Kid: You Owe Nothing

    We were expecting some kind of indie pop band from the name. The opening track took revenge for this preconception by beating us around the head with a length of nail-hard blues and dowsing us in spit and sawdust. They’re so hard they make Royal Blood sound like One Direction. OK, perhaps that’s an exaggeration…

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    Maya Beiser: Uncovered

    Beiser has been called a “cello goddess” “the queen of contemporary cello” (New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle respectively) but she grew up on a kibbutz listening to rock. She says music is either good or bad and nothing more, so she’s taken her instrument of choice, the cello, to make an album of rock…