Few bands bifurcate opinion as vociferously as Belle and Sebastian. Many people simply can’t see past the image of them fostered in their early publicity shots and sleeve notes: Duffel coat donning, butterfly net wielding perma-students gathered in a gang like some Vimto version of Dexys Midnight Runners. Building that band brand was a calculated […]
You may very well not have heard of this band let alone seen or heard their 1971 album Satori. I feel obliged to put that situation to right because hand on heart this is one of those stellar overlooked gems that ought to be in every rock music collection. The band formed in Japan in […]
Released in April 2014 by two seasoned lads from Nottingham, Divide and Exit, as the title alone suggests, is akin to musical Marmite – love it or hate it – this will divide the audio marketplace. It is not something you play when Great aunt Maud or the Vicar call around for tea. On the […]
Millions Like Us is « The Story Of The Mod Revival 1977 -1989 » and it’s a wonderfully exuberant blast of tunes, many of which I know from my teens and some which are new to me. I was ten in 1977 but the mod revival was in full flow by the time I was in my […]
The music media in the early to mid-sixties were alive with talk of a « folk boom » in the UK and indeed there was a burgeoning number of folk clubs open every night of the week, to the point that pretty much every town of any size had one. I remember as late as the early […]
14 covers (10 on the normal version) and two original tunes, one penned in partnership with Jim Vallance and the other with Gretchen Peters ( this only on the Deluxe Edition) on this, the twelfth studio album from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams has tracks from writers such as Lennon and McCartney (Any Time At All), […]
Caroll Vanwelden is a Belgian singer and a graduate of the London Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but only after having passed her engineering degree in Brussels. Shakespeare Sonnets 2 is, needless to say, the second album of Vanweldens where she puts the bard’s sonnets to music. It’s out now on Jazznarts and my […]
Well, Pink Floyd’s The Endless River has certainly been a long time coming… in fact it’s some twenty years since we were treated to a studio album from the Floyd, the last was 1994’s Division Bell. It’s no surprise then that this record was eagerly anticipated by the band’s legion of followers. This copy comes […]
The Pop Ambient series of albums from Uber label Kompakt has been delivering the chilled goods since 2001 and never fails to deliver. As the title suggests the style of music herein is accessible ambience and it works very well indeed. Label boss Wolfgang Voigt is the guy that puts the collection together and he does […]
Released in mid-September on Interscope records and Columbia Records and downloaded here from HIRESAUDIO this one was a bit of a surprise for me not least because it’s not that often you get a record put together by an eighty eight year old crooner and someone famed as much for her outrageous dress sense (take […]
Thompson Twins were another band from the early to mid 80s that pretty much completely passed me by. Of course I know some of their tunes by name like We Are Detective, Doctor! Doctor! and Hold Me Now, but as the interview with Tom Bailey on the sleeve notes says “ music was more tribal […]
Goblin are an Italian progressive rock band that are perhaps best known for their work on film soundtracks, though I have to confess they are a new name to me. Beyond The Darkness is an anthology of the second half of the career of the band and spans the dates 1977 – 2001 where a […]
In 2011 Chicago resident Sarah Marie Young won the Shure Montreux Vocal competition judged by Quincy Jones and used the prize, a week at the Balik farm Studio in Switzerland, to record her first album of original material, but now she’s signed to Dutch label SnipRecords and has just released her new album Little Candy […]
I must confess that I missed out on the first wave of punk, but I do distinctly remember seeing a copy of the Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, for which Alternative TVs Mark P was the founding editor, brought into school by one of the cool kids. I also had a couple of Sex Pistol records. Mark […]
There’s a fantastic amount of great electronic music coming out of South America at the moment and here we’ve got Brazilian Gui Boratto, once a member of the band Sect, adding to that output with his album Abaporu. The opening lines of the first track immediately put me in mind of William Orbit and this […]
The Turn by Jerome Sabbagh was recorded live by James Farber at Sear Sound, New York City on June 6th 2013 to analogue tape and on this Bee Jazz release from HIGHRESAUDIO it really shows. This is a really fantastic recording in the true tradition of jazz music. There is spontaneity and freedom within the […]