Review Corner

Tag: Sandbach Chronicle

  • , ,

    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…

  • ,

    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…

  • ,

    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…

  • ,

    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…

  • ,

    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…

  • ,

    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,…