Sometimes it just clicks: one song, one listen, and you know a band will grace your favorites list. That’s the experience I had with To Kill a King, the latest Communion artist to tickle my fancy. The Virgin-released My Crooked…
Category: Records
Album | Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside – Dirty Radio
“What have these people done to music? I just don’t care anymore.” Sallie Ford is not happy. She makes this abundantly clear in, ‘I Swear’, the opening track to her debut album Dirty Radio. Left cold by modern music, Ford…
EP | Sarah Blasko – Cinema Songs
If you’re looking for new material from Sarah Blasko, Cinema Songs is not going to help you out. There’s nothing new here at all. Not only are the five tracks all covers – but they were already released, at least…
Album | Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell – Kite
More than most kinds of music, folk is good at doing a genre piece. I like Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell’s Kite in the same way many people like a good murder mystery novel or a solid romantic comedy film…
Album | Josh Rouse – Josh Rouse & The Long Vacations
Josh Rouse has always been a man whose music was of a particular place – if not necessarily of one particular place. Early albums like Dressed Up Like Nebraska and Home spoke of the American mid-west where he was born.…
Album | Flashguns – Passions of a Different Kind
Wandering around the Underage Festival in 2009, I came across many bands that have since faded from memory. My search for the ‘next big thing’ seemed hopeless; that is, until I saw Flashguns. Their urgency as a live act left…
Album | St Vincent – Strange Mercy
Deviating from the ‘a picture of my head’ model that has dominated St Vincent’s cover art until now, Strange Mercy presents us with a crooked, milky mouth of death that’s a much more appropriate indicator of the experience ahead. Replete…
Album | Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire
Great news for Ryan Adams fans who have grown tired of his attempts to become a) a rapper b) a metal-head or, more recently, c) invisible. The news is Ryan is back, acoustic guitar in hand and singing actual songs…
Album | Darren Hayman – The Ship’s Piano
“On March the twenty-third, she said something so absurd, she said: you love to be in love but you never really love.” So Darren Hayman sang as lead singer of Hefner a little over ten years ago on their seminal…
Album | Thea Gilmore & Sandy Denny – Don’t Stop Singing
In 2007, while compiling Sandy Denny’s unrecorded material for what would become last year’s monumental eponymous 19CD box set, the late Fairport Convention singer’s estate uncovered several sets of lyrics unused and unscored before her untimely passing in 1978, aged…