Review Corner

Tag: rock

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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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    Marmozets: The Weird And Wonderful Marmozets

    Marmozets are two sets of siblings, who formed the band while at school. They still have an average age of 18. If you’re the same age and want a band that’s “yours”, these are going to press all the right buttons: loud and fast, full of spunk, and with the right mix of metal, shredding,…

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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…

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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…