What does it sound like?:

House represents the democratisation of Disco. We have to thank The Roland Corporation, a Japanese electronics company, whose relatively inexpensive equipment, the TR-808 drum machine, the TB-303 bass synthesiser and the JX-3P synthesiser provide its signature sound. A relentless 4/4 rhythm, with an off-beat electronic hi-hat, is embellished by deep bass and keyboard textures. Vocals aren’t essential but can easily be patched on from samples. Any DJ worth their salt could make records very cheaply and very quickly in their own homes (hence the term ‘House’).

This isn’t music for selling records or sounding good on the radio. Its purpose is to get the dance floor moving, each DJ having their own unique repertoire of tracks, a repertoire that changed every week. House is disposable and without any subtlety or artifice. It stimulates the communal activity of throwing your limbs about, without embarrassment, in a seething cauldron of a mass of likeminded souls as the bass thumps through your chest. Under those circumstances, House Music can be euphoric, especially when fuelled by the scene’s favoured drug, ecstasy.

The last thing you should do is sit down and listen to a 36 track 3CD » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Paul McCartney was sore and licking wounds when he made these two records in 1971 and 1973 respectively. The film, Let It Be, had shown him in a poor light, his promotional material for his first solo album provoked the headline, “Paul Breaks Up The Beatles” and it was his lawsuit, launched as he recorded Ram, that finally dissolved The Beatles partnership. He was seen as the bad guy and the critics hated his music, comparing it unfavourably to John’s and George’s early solo output. No wonder he ran off to Scotland and indulged himself in a prodigious pot habit.

Ram had been recorded with the help of a couple of guitarists and Denny Seiwell on drums. He decided he needed to be in a band again, bringing Denny Laine from The Moody Blues as permanent guitarist. Thus, with the addition of his ever present, adoring wife, Wings was formed.

Under his cloud of pot, Paul continued to write prolifically, usually strumming his acoustic guitar as his family sang along and played around him. He still had a winning way with a tune but his lyrics almost completely dried up. Detached as he » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Anthony Tombling, independent film director, is CUTS. He hails from Bristol and began his career as a singer for a band called Dragons. They released one album. He hasn’t given up singing altogether, guesting for Timo Maas, but his music-making is mainly shaping Electronica to accompany visual images. One of his pieces was used in the Ex Machina soundtrack and another in the Persons Of Interest TV show. Mainly, he composes music for his own films and this is his second release of 2018, the Exist 1 & 2 EPs being issued in April, the soundtrack to an experimental film about sleep paralysis.

A Gradual Decline has a terrible beauty. Tombling travelled to Iceland to record ice breaking from the glaciers and take advantage of Reykjavik’s perfect ambience for electronica, the land of ice and fire where two continental plates crack asunder. He uses those recordings in the manner of William Babinski’s Disintegration Loops where the sound declines as it repeatedly passes through the machines. He adds nagging beats, splintered noises and fragile, wispy melodies. Even at its most serene, the music creeps towards the edge. A synthesiser groans and creeks, a metronome ticks » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

In the year 2000, David Bowie headlined Glastonbury and played 21 of his best known songs to a crowd of at least 250,000 people. So many entered the site without a ticket, the following year’s festival was cancelled because of safety fears and by 2002 they built a fence. Those that were there described the performance as bliss. No less an authority than Emily Eavis rates it as the finest Glastonbury set in the festival’s history. It is regarded as a triumphant return by an artist whose album sales had diminished during the nineties and hadn’t played a greatest hits package for well over a decade. This release consists of two CDs, a DVD of the entire performance, nicely wrapped up in a Jonathan Barnbrook cover and notes written by Caitlin Moran, who was at the concert.

The band oozes class. Mike Garson is, by some distance, the best Bowie pianist (Rick Wakeman’s contribution to Hunky Dory was as a session musician). Earl Slick vies with Mick Ronson for the number one axeman slot. Gail Ann Dorsey and Sterling Campbell are an excellent rhythm section, second only in the Bowie parthenon to George Murray » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Everyone loves a garage band. How about one from Perpignan that sings in English, French or Italian, following a line of heritage from The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, through Jesus And The Mary Chain and The White Stripes to The Fall, a husband and wife duo who love to make a racket, literally, recording in their own garage, a husband and wife who dropped out of the rat race in 2009 to be as noisy as ? And The Mysterians and The Kingsmen?

Maria Limiñanas is as primitive as Mo Tucker or Meg White but when she sets off on her rhythm (she only really has one rhythm), she is steady and reliable and can keep thrumming for an age, a garage Jaki Liebezeit without any fancy paradiddles or cymbal work. Lionel lacks the pizzazz of, say, Jack White but he more than makes up for it with his enthusiasm and his willingness to turn his hand to anything, particularly a fuzzy organ and a variety of wind instruments. Over the years, their refreshing, honest approach has attracted a number of collaborators, including Pascal Camelade, Peter Hook and Brian Jonestown’s Massacre’s Anton » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

It’s coming up to Christmas, so it’s only natural that the hardest working man in Yuletide Show Business has a new album, this time collaborating with Marc Almond. It is, after all, his duty to provide a stocking filler for dads and grandads across the land. However, the pairing might raise an eyebrow, crossing camp Goth with boogie-woogie for 14 tracks of mostly covers with a few originals thrown in and the obligatory Tainted Love.

It actually works better than it sounds. They are very energetic for a pair of sixty year olds and are still totally in love with music and performing. Plus, they know each other well, their on/off relationship dating back to Almond’s recovery from a coma after a motorbike accident in 2004.

Marc never had the best voice but he brings a colourful theatricality and a winking sense of cabaret. Jools uses the opportunity to move towards proper big band music. He plays less boogie-woogie and more swing, controlling his restless left hand and allowing his right to flourish. At some points, somewhat unbelievably, he plays fewer notes than he could and allows the horn section to hog the » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Having endured their annus horribilis in 1967, The Rolling Stones consolidated in 1968, regrouped and hit on the formula that would fuel their imperial phase and provide them with the style and attitude that keeps them as a major draw as a live act fifty years later. Beggars Banquet and its single, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, define the rock phenomenon that is The Rolling Stones.

This remaster, by Bob Ludwig, the only extra being a mono Sympathy For The Devil, improves on the previous marginally. However, its release is an ideal opportunity to re-evaluate an iconic Rock album.

The album is beautifully recorded. Most of the credit should go to their regular engineer, Glyn Johns, but they’d also found a producer who could bring out their best. Andrew ‘Loog’ Oldham had deserted them in their hour of need, running away to America when Jagger and Richards were arrested on drug charges. Jimmy Miller became their comrade in arms as opposed to their organiser.

Keith Richards was revitalised. He ‘discovered’ 5 string open tuning and was inspired. He also started messing around with the latest technology, cassette recorders, using them as a pick » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

I have to declare an interest. Electric Ladyland is one of my favourite albums of all time. I love every single moment of its sprawling four sides of vinyl. As far as I’m concerned, it is a pinnacle of artistic achievement, a joyful celebration of music by one of the most naturally gifted musicians that has ever lived. In it, Jimi displays an effortless mastery of many different musical styles and, sonically, it is sumptuous and brilliantly recorded using the latest technology of the time, produced by Jimi himself. It sounds like the future even today.

The sound of the album is achieved by the liberal use of flanging, echo, backmasking and chorus effect. These techniques bring together similar sounds, or replicates them or turns them backwards to create a rich, shimmering texture with sweeping flourishes. Jimi wasn’t an innovator with them but an early adopter. However, he deployed them brilliantly on Electric Ladyland. There is no other album on which Jimi’s guitar sounds so good. The first track, ….And The Gods Made Love, introduces us to the collage of sound he’d use in the rest of the album.

On track two, Have You » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

The Beatles probably proposed the title A Doll’s House for their White Album because it conjures an image of multiple rooms packed with intricacies and trinkets, reflecting an album of thirty songs spread across four sides of vinyl, a cornucopia of different moods and musical styles. Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, is full of secrets, lies, blackmail, sickness, death and disordered relationships, ending in divorce. Just over a year later, after The Beatles broke up, the themes of Ibsen’s play seemed more apt. Besides the turmoil within The Beatles themselves, the unrest in the outside world of 1968 seeped through Abbey Road’s sound-proofed walls adding to the distress in its grooves. The album is an unnerving listen. Even the prettiest songs have bite.

Following Sgt. Pepper proved to be quite a problem for The Beatles. They didn’t have enough songs for a full Magical Mystery Tour album, a made for TV film broadcast at Christmas that was greeted with bewilderment, and the ones they had were Sgt. Pepper-lite. They decided to refresh their creative juices by travelling to Rishikesh in India to learn Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. The drug-free environment certainly » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Anne Marie Almedal lives in Norway with her composer husband, making a living teaching. Those long Winter nights prey on the human mind. Light Shadow is born from an innate desire to create and is flush with a characteristic Nordic cool. It sounds as though she has dedicated a lot of time writing the songs and making sure every musical moment really tells.

Light Shadow is immaculate. Anne Marie Almedal’s voice is diaphanous and translucent. When set against warm synthetic strings and gentle beats, it can melt hearts. She hits high notes with a satisfying accuracy, can ride a sinewy melody effortlessly and harmonises with herself to perfection. An echoey piano hints at past sorrow and a nagging guitar provides the whisper of an edge. The purity of her voice, the delicacy of the tunes and the comfort blanket sound disguise the fact that these songs are packed with emotional turmoil. This is an album coming to terms fear, loathing and mental fragility and trying to build a sense of hope out of trying circumstances. It captures the vulnerability of the human existence in a nutshell of ten, neatly constructed, professionally performed songs. » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

The outlaw, the lonesome cowboy, the wandering vagabond or the migrant workers of the 1930s, outsiders to society, are deeply embedded in the American psyche, an integral part of their history, their literature, their culture and their politics. In Country music there are entire sub-genres celebrating these solitary travellers: Outlaw, Cowboy, Hillbilly and Honky Tonk. The instruments are simple: acoustic guitar, banjo, peddle steel, fiddle, stand up bass and piano. Lyrics tend to focus on working-class life, with frequently tragic themes of lost love, adultery, loneliness, alcoholism, and self-pity. The rhythms reflect the gait of a cow pony: walk, trot and lope.

Joshua Pless Harris is the genuine article, an exponent of the dark arts of Outlaw Country. He uses primitive instruments, like the clawhammer banjo, and his voice is as rough and wild as his beard. He is the antithesis of the slick production line that is Nashville in the 21st Century. His songs are a frank expression of his life. Born in Alabama, he left home aged 14, hitch-hiking and jumping freight trains in search of work, turning his hand at sheet metal scrapping, labouring, logging, farming and carpentry. He wound up » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

The seventies for David Bowie were triumphant from the artistic point of view but less than satisfactory business wise. Tony Defries had managed his rise to fame with great skill but at high cost. Defries earned more than Bowie himself. They parted in 1975 but Defries continued to have the rights over half the royalties for a further seven years. Bowie was also disgruntled with RCA for a perceived lack of promotion of his Berlin Trilogy. So, after 1980’s Scary Monsters, an album collecting together virtually every Bowie party trick, a real rummage in his bottom drawer of secrets, he occupied himself acting and indulging in the occasional collaboration, waiting patiently for both contracts to expire.

Bolstered by a $17.5million advance from EMI, Bowie set about creating hits. A fresh start meant new collaborators. In 1982, Nile Rodgers was a proven hit-maker, seduced by the prospect of being involved in a Scary Monsters part 2. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s blistering performance at The Montreux Jazz Festival secured him the axe man hot seat. Let’s Dance is no Scary Monsters but its Funk-Rock hybrid exceeded all expectations. The sound was big enough to fill stadiums all » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Gregory Alan Isakov is a thoroughly modern day singer-songwriter. There is something of the wandering minstrel in him, born in South Africa, raised in Philadelphia and now settled in Colorado. He is also a market gardener, spending long days under a panoramic sky, keeping a helpless, watchful eye on the vagaries of the weather. His products include medical cannabis. In the evenings he sits in a recording studio in his barn creating music. Typically, as with many a farmer, his music is imbued with melancholy, a sense of being a tiny, insignificant speck in an enormous universe.

He is thoroughly modern in that he doesn’t shift many physical units. This is his seventh album but the total sales of all his others combined is less than 400,000. However, two of his songs have featured in adverts, six have concluded various episodes of American TV series, Second Chances has been used no less than three times in TV shows and twice in movies, and he regularly appears in Playlists, usually for sad moods, attracting millions of plays. He also tours regularly.

Evening Machines, true to form, proceeds at a quiet pace in a minor key » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Bobbie Gentry has an alluring voice, the kind that sounds great wearing just an over-sized man’s shirt. She is also a classy songwriter, capturing the gritty realism of life in the Southern Delta perfectly. Ode To Billie Joe, the spellbinding tale of a young man’s suicide told through the emotionally conflicted eyes of a family having dinner, was her first and biggest hit. The mystery in her songs only increased when she retired aged thirty-six, forty years ago.

In the sixties, she was a rarity, a woman who wrote, sang and produced her own material. For Capitol, she made six solo albums and one duet with Glenn Campbell. She was so famous, she had her own TV show on the BBC. All her Capitol work is in this eight disc box with over 75 demos and outtakes, including her ‘lost’ jazz album, material from the TV show, a glossy book, eight postcards and a facsimile of the original lyrics to Ode To Billie Joe.

Her origins are in Country but she recorded mainly in Memphis with the musicians who weaved their magic for Aretha and Elvis. She has deep brown eyes but sang » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Alan Hawkshaw is eighty-one years old. Brian Bennett is seventy-eight. They have been friends for sixty years and collaborated together musically for most of those. Alan has played keyboards for a variety of acts but has made most of his money composing instrumental music for TV, including theme tunes such as Countdown. Brian was the drummer in The Shadows but has also created instrumental music of his own.

They specialise in the smoothest of smooth lounge jazz dominated by cool Hammond organ, well-mannered drums and polite horns. In fact, jazz is probably not the correct term as that implies an element of chance, the possibility of improvisation. The musicians on this album have easily got their ten thousand hours of practice in to be impressively skilled but the music is buttoned up tight. The sound is so perfectly controlled, it goes in one ear and out of the other without leaving any impression whatsoever. The song titles suggest a panoramic journey across the world, Flying, Serengeti, Open Road, In The Clouds, On The Nile, Marrakech, Oasis, Midnight Jazz, but, in fact, Full Circe never leaves the benign atmosphere of Lounge. It is actually » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Young Waters is a five-piece band led by Theo Passingham (vocals and acoustic guitar) with Kerry Ann Jangle (vocals), Liam O’Connell (double bass), Calum Smith (violin) and Rowen Elliot (viola and violin). They are named after a traditional folk song describing the unpleasant fate of a cherubic young innocent. Their FaceBook page refers to neo-folk and post-emo-hardcore-hip-folk-hop, whatever they may be, but don’t let that put you off because, in truth, they are quite traditional, harking back to the days when there was little electricity in the West Country and no NHS, when travelling musicians entertained locals round a roaring fire, weaving their cautionary tales of back-breaking work, dysfunctional relationships and everyday premature death. They certainly look the part with their fresh faces and wearing what on first glance appear to be torn rags.

There are eight tracks, six written by Theo and two covers. However, all band members collaborate in the arrangements. The songs are elaborate, expressing some profound thoughts and casting bewitching spells. The lyrics are often in the first person or speaking directly to a third, conversational in style, looking at the world with wonder and uncertainty, making tentative, nervous » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

One evening in January 1983, more than a year before his breakthrough album and movie, Purple Rain, Prince sat down at his piano and spent forty minutes entertaining himself. He sang some new songs and some old ones, including a couple of covers. An engineer captured it on a cassette tape. It’s such an intimate recording, you can almost hear his heart beating, feel the heat of his breath and sense the whirr of electricity in his brain.

The record company bill this as a ‘rehearsal’ but Prince is toying with these songs. He’s moulding them, shaping them, stretching them to their limits. Sometimes, he bashes them about and other times he treats them with tenderness. He uses his voice and his piano as a single whole instrument, stomping his feet, pounding his fists on the keys. His vocals jump from falsetto to sotto voce, the rhythms following suit. He’s utterly committed to these performances. Even though many of the songs are mere sketches, he oozes passion. He is consumed by the desire to make the music work.

17 Days, ultimately the B side of When Doves Cry, is plaintive and percussive, a work » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

The first two Doors albums, released in 1967, established the band as forerunners in a counterculture offering an alternative to mainstream pop music. Their dark, brooding sound, fronted by a leather clad romantic poet, defined sex and drugs and rock and roll. The trouble was, by 1968 and Waiting For The Sun, they’d exhausted Jim Morrison’s legendary songbook. All that was left was the runt of the litter, Hello, I Love You, a single that flew off the shelves, dragging the album with it in its wake. As a result, Waiting For The Sun is The Doors best selling album and their only number one in the USA.

Hello, I Love You is a classic single. Even with an ear only half-cocked to the radio, it grips the listener almost immediately with John Densmore’s opening military trill. It tells its boy-meets-girl story neatly in less than two and a quarter minutes. Its catchiness, filched from The Kinks, lingers long after it’s over. However, it is also classic Doors. Its structure is strange and unsettling. The instruments sound upside down, falling through a worm-hole at the halfway point. Robby Krieger plays guitar but it sounds » Continue Reading.