Greatest Hits - Laura Barnett - Book Review

Greatest Hits

Laura Barnett

Book Review 

The beautiful retro cover of this novel pulled me in.  The heart of the book hit me like a ton of bricks and I couldn’t wait to get it home.  An English singer-songwriter called Cass Wheeler selects tracks for her Greatest Hits album and she picks the songs that have meant the most to her in her life.  At the start of each chapter the lyrics of each song are placed and the story of her life unfolds. 

Laura Barnett is a former freelance arts journalist with a love of rock music and this is the reason the book is so convincing. She has worked for most of the broadsheet newspapers. She spent half a year reading biographies of successful female artists like Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Chrissie Hynde.  She also spoke to publicity people and tour managers to provide a vital framework upon which she develops all her characters, their traits and real life problems of both human nature and creative partnerships. Good examples of course aren’t hard to find – Simon and Garfunkel, and Fleetwood Mac spring to mind, but you’ll know others I don’t. (Please feel free to add via comments or an email)

The story isn’t a fantasy.  It’s like reading a star biography and kept me hooked through the story of a career woman in music.  It’s a terrific second novel from Laura Barnett whose debut was The Versions of Us.

The book is also augmented by an available recording of the songs by singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams which is called “Songs from the novel Greatest Hits” . I have two of her albums Little Black Numbers and Old Low Light so I know the album will be a worthy purchase when I get around to it.  Kathryn has also more recent good form as she has also released Hypoxia which came from a writing commission and was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s book The Bell Jar.

Greatest Hits has inspired me to make my own playlist on YouTube, not only of my singles collection but also albums that have had an impact in my life.   Have you the stamina to do the same?  I’ve been called geek and nerd (these are the nicer ones) so don’t let anyone else know until you’re finished and ready to share to cyberspace!

NE

Poetry - War on Terra

War on Terra

Abandon the weapons.

Gather the shards of humanity

From the ruins of religion.

Slash the cords of hate

That bind to the grave.

Be braver 

To plant new flags to

Older world colours of kindness.

NE

Arcelia - Building on the Land

Arcelia

Building on the Land

How Now Records

“This ain't rock n roll..” David Bowie began on his song Diamond Dogs, neither is Building On The Land by Arcelia.  It’s not folk, country or easy-listening.  Instead the highly-listenable mature vocal trio of Gavin Alexander, Simon Foster, and Teresa Gallagher are trailblazing a new genre which recognizes its fan base.   It’s for people who may be over 30, who horror of horrors, still wear jeans,   and who aren’t ready for shapeless beige or corduroy, just yet.  They don’t need their trainers to be adorned with symbols or stripes of a certain angle.   It’s music for adults with themes of family and life happenings.

Gavin Alexander on acoustic guitar writes all the songs and I found the lyrics, almost poetic, which I’ll come back to later, if you’ll allow.   All three members have great voices, and together with the deft jazz –like hands of Perry White on piano and Martin Elliott on acoustic bass, the sound is melodic and endearing.   It is quite possibly an unconscious reflection upon Kent – The Garden of England, with its pastoral landscape together with embers from the Canterbury scene. 

What is not mere speculation, (Did the cover cast a spell?),  is the quality of this recording, made at Arcelia’s  own studio in Kent , which is largely down to Simon Foster, an experienced sound engineer, co-founder of How Now Productions and  present member of The Flying Pickets. 

Teresa Gallagher is also a voice artist and her reading of Dickens’ Bleak House was a Times Audio Book of The Year.  If that’s too high-brow, she’s also been heard in TV series such as Thomas & Friends.  She’s a true all-rounder, having experience also in radio dramas.

Is this a perfect album? - Not quite.  Nine out of the twelve tracks however,   are exceptional.  Workhouse was a commission (Gresssenhall  Workhouse in Norfolk) and is outstanding – “From 4am till very late, the men unpick the oakum, I scrub the laundry cloth so white, 30 lashes if outspoken” Teresa softly sings.  I was slightly disappointed at each end of the album therefore,   as each end didn’t reach the same heights as the nine.   I would have led with The World or the title track, that would have been better indicators of what was to follow.  Alternatively,   I would have used Teresa’s experience to make a reading of Gavin’s lyrics.  

NE

Carrie Martin - Folk Review

Carrie Martin

Seductive Sky

Bucks Music Group Ltd

Returning in earnest to music following the raising of her twins, Carrie Martin has released her third LP, Seductive Sky, gently encouraged by Gordon Giltrap, with whom she has shared occasional touring stages.  She shapes her self-penned songs into a cohesive and graceful groove.  I liked the originality and creativity of her output.  Her delivery of the songs is also precise in its enunciation, that helps the listener appreciate the lyrics.  It reminds me in places, of the whimsy of Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day. Maria in the Moon is inspired by the third novel of the same name from her friend Louise Beech, also from Hull, which is an intelligent piece of marketing and on the strength of this track, a full album collaboration could beckon and could emulate the success of mixed media projects between poetry and painting.  The song perfectly displays Carrie’s unique singer-songwriter credentials.  Time, in memory of her friend is a beautiful piece of music with the truth of its lyrics.  No Return to Yesterday and The Woman in Me and the excellent upbeat You Make Life Look Easy also impressed. 

I would have liked just a touch of her rock roots from her earlier career and would offer that Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Caro Emerald, and Paloma Faith arguably found success from more leftfield compositions alongside their more mainstream styles, but music is often about our preferences and each artist needs the freedom to explore their creativity in the moment which Carrie ably displays.

NE

Kiss The Gun - Nightmares - Rock Review

Kiss The Gun

Nightmares

3Ms Music Ltd

Kiss The Gun is the handiwork of bassist and Salisbury scene man, Dave South.  Together with Graham Exton on rhythm guitar, they wrote the seventh track on Nightmares, Tainted Heart which was recorded, uploaded and spotted by 3Ms and put out as an EP in April 2016.  Recruiting Rob Taylor on drums and Gerry Hearn on lead guitar, left only one chamber to be filled in this five-chamber, 72°cylinder rotation revolver – i.e. that of a vocalist.

Georgian-Armenian Nadin Zakharian flew in from Tbilisi at Dave South’s request after spotting her online and you’d be hard-clicked to find a better vocalist for this melodic rock group.  Her vocals are clean and powerful, polished and controlled throughout the album, but especially on the ballad Drowning that also features consummate acoustic guitar.

Dave South has been in the music business before.  Firstly in the NWOBHM scene and more recently in a change of direction he started writing club music.  However, he has returned once more to his first love and he has galvanised Kiss The Gun through a sense of humour, his song writing and trust in each individual member of the band, (repaid in spades and then some) to record Nightmares in just five days.

The flair and energy is palpable and James Patrick has captured both the sound and the excitement in this recording.  Gerry Hearn has a freshness perhaps gained through recent spells with Jessie J and Pixie Lott adding to his experience of playing with Uriah Heep.

Nightmares is a very upbeat album, with the same instant accessibility of another of my favourite albums Metal Rendez-vous by Krokus, where it will reside alongside in my ever-expanding music collection.  

NE

Bootsy Collins - Funk Review

Bootsy Collins

World Wide Funk

Mascot Records

Not content to take Sounds and Melody Maker as the only Gospels of music, I also bought Black Echoes in my teenage years influenced by my sister’s Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder and Shining Star by Earth, Wind & Fire (a song covered by Stryper!)

Trying to flip through the second-hand albums without losing my fingertips or my patience, at the outdoor market in Wakefield, I pulled out a sleeve that combined science fiction, adolescent humour and risqué cartoons, that being a teenager, I bought.  My mother’s knitted eyebrows of disapproval completed the feel-good factor.  It was called One Nation Under a Groove by Funkadelic and featured Bootsy Collins on bass.  I wasn’t to know that it became a funk classic but I also enjoyed the rock of Maggot Brain and Lunchmeataphobia just as much.

Funk was an expression of open-mindedness, happiness, love, dance, but also of day-to-day struggles which included a rejection of negative black stereotyping.  James Brown was the Master of Funk and Bootsy (named by his mum) became a player in his band The J.B’s.

Funk is a combination of Blues and Soul with a heavy bass line that stresses the first beat in the bar, often called the ‘one’.

The fifteen tracks on World Wide Funk provide great variety and good sequencing and whilst they employ the ‘one’ and jangly short guitar chords, the material doesn’t dwell in the past but updates it, especially through the vocals.  The musicians Bootsy gathers around him,  which includes several big names, are too many to mention here, but each song delights whether the groove is fast or slow.  I can’t remember enjoying this genre so much since Diamond & Pearls, Prince and Phenomenon,  by LL Cool J.

World Wide Funk recaptures the fun of the dance and the beat, provides Bootsy with a return to form, and concluding with a description that will appeal to the man himself, he manages to pop out a career best.

NE

Emily Askew Band - Folk Review

The Emily Askew Band

Alchemy

Askew Records

Pick at random an album from your music collection.  When were the songs written? Were they from a couple of years, twenty-five or fifty years ago? Does it feature a cover version perhaps of a classic from yesteryear?  The Emily Askew Band have crafted a thrilling debut album featuring songs and compositions from five hundred years of music from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.

Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque tunes are skilfully brought back to life through a folk music interpretation of the source music.  The band have little to influence them. They can’t tap into famous examples of their music like a jazz, rock or country artist can.  Thus, their bravery in ploughing a furrow of Early Music, knowing mainstream appeal is unlikely, has left its mark on me.

The band has a great knowledge of harmony in blending fiddle, viola, bagpipes, recorder, guitar and frame drum to perfection.  If I knew the recorder could sound this good, I would have gladly mastered a third song after Three Blind Mice and Go and Tell Aunt Nancy.  If I was a music teacher I would play this album to my students at the start of the new term to challenge perceptions that pop and hip-hop are not the only genres of music.

Each tuneful catch on this album has been chosen with great care and relevance from all walks of life. There are dances, songs of devotion, songs of love, songs of joy and songs from the Court.  English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin texts, manuscripts and melodies have been hand-picked and added to the merrily melting pot of this album, Alchemy, whose magical ingredient is a little more fun via the folk.

NE

Poetry - I still have two Sunday newspapers

- Written years ago, and submitted to a competition, but publication required payment and you can't take the cash out of a Yorkshireman ;-)



I still have two Sunday newspapers

I still have two Sunday newspapers
and it's Thursday!

Tranquility and a chance to read them
Have drifted away.

Education, entertainment, information
Lay unread,

As another day's drudgery inspires
Only thoughts of my bed.




NE
My sister has made a fabric collage of her interpretation of the poem below as an unexpected Easter 2018 present. Thanks Sis!

Rex Brown - Rock Review

Rex Brown

Smoke on This

Steamhammer/SPV

Iconic cover, kick-ass title, unexpected treasure!  Former bassist with Pantera,  Down,  and Kill Devil Hill, Rex Brown distils over forty years of life in rock music to leave a cask strength rock album.  Reinventing himself, he adds gruff vocals and driving rhythm guitar to his normal bass duties. 

I don’t think I’ve smiled as wide since hearing ZZ Top and AC/DC in their prime after Brown announces “Smoke on this..” and unleashes blues rocker Lone Rider followed by the equally catchy Crossing Lines.  Buried Alive deals with the sad loss of ex-Pantera, band-mate, Dimebag Darrell and it’s dark and deep, ranging from his acoustic to the superb lead guitar of Lance Harvill with whom he shares the song writing.  Train Song catapults the fun right back at you and I hope my grinning didn’t become gurning!  For Get Yourself Alright he commands a sitar and delivers with the swagger of Oasis and Nirvana combined.  Fault Line, his first song he tried his lead vocals on, is a slower-tempo acoustic triumph.

The second half of the album displays that his tastes can vary from “Sinatra to Slayer”.  Relax – It’s still all rock.  What Comes Around, is something Lenny Kravitz wouldn’t be ashamed to put out. Grace shows a pop-rock lighter side of the artist and So Into You is a slow burner that builds to a crescendo of riffs and lead guitar.  The penultimate Best of Me is pure Floyd, right to the fade-out, before One of These Days wraps up in style, this rather welcome return to music that doesn’t need analysis.  Play it, Hear it, Love it!  If this is too 2017, then take the artist’s advice instead which I found in the liner notes – “Live loudly and embrace your loved ones everyday”

NE

Julie Fowlis - Alterum

Julie Fowlis

Alterum

Machair Records Ltd

Don’t be put off by the still life effect of the cover, its Latin title (Other, another, otherness), or that most of the album is sung in Gaelic.  Let me assure you that these diverse rhythmic stories are easily understood through the pitch and timbre of the delicate vocals and the melodies provided by the understated instrumentation. The pipes, flutes and whistles are pared down to provide a softer acoustic sound and the guitars, including those of her husband Éamon Doorley, cellos, and double bass benefit accordingly. The faster foot-tapping dance music accompanied by the technical fast rap delivery style of Gaelic, is astonishing with the clarity of stresses and syllables.  Yet it’s the more powerful slower tempo songs that impress the most in their emotional interpretations, that include two in English, Windward Away and Go Your Way, that contains the line “May the West Wind speed your travels and the sun be on your hair” which seems a much nicer sentiment than the hurt and anger expressed in Fleetwood Mac’s similarly titled Go Your Own Way!  Julie’s voice is the bright star of this album.  She can match the exact tone of the instruments playing alongside, including a bouzouki and flute and pipes and it creates real ambience with nuances that perfectly capture the landscape and peoples of the Highlands and Islands, from where she was brought up in North Uist.

NE

Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real - Review

Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real

Fantasy Records

Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real release their sixth album which continues to build the brand of strong song writing and emotionally charged vocals.  Its appeal is broad and there is little to dislike – except for the last track which should have been left off altogether.  It’s all-the-more surprising when six of the 12 songs are really absorbing with towering performances from the band whose name is their badge of integrity.

Sharing stages with Bob Dylan, BB King and of course his father, mentored by and working on the road and studio with Neil Young, has been time well spent but it’s their own hard work that is reaping the dividends.

Two expansive tracks impress the most.  Opener, Set Me Down on a Cloud, is about loss of life which many of us must face that features Lukas on guitar and has a Southern Rock feel.  The autobiographical Forget About Georgia at the other end of the album, also over seven minutes, matches and references the best songs containing the name of the Southern state.  Possibly the best country song I’ve heard, it’s the painful tale of losing a girl called Georgia, only to be reminded of her whenever he has the misfortune of singing Georgia on My Mind with his father on tour.  Emotive vocals in the first half are matched with sombre guitar in the second and should have been the last track.

Perhaps the band are having fun, or maybe they are listening to the advice of Messrs Young and Nelson Snr about keeping your audiences keen and carving out a career.  Six outstanding tracks on an album isn’t an accident.  If I’d been in the band, I’d have been thrown out for the quaint complaint of musical differences.  I enjoyed this album tremendously but feel it could have been invincible if the choice of songs had been more consistent. 

NE