100 words music reviews
Beyond his beloved-by-producers take on funk, Labi Siffre was unusually skilled at creating subtle folk ballads. On C,L, L, L his high-pitched, drifting vocals, which have since inhabited Robin Pecknold, coalesced with serene acoustics. Each component is wrapped in his earnest songwriting—-the rushes of emotion bloom and plateau with deep sweetness. In spite of some […]
What is artistic confidence? Probably writing an album of saccharine songs, singing them with frail Canadian vocals, and somehow sounding wholly sincere and completely natural. Ron Sexsmith is a great songwriter. Similar to Nick Lowe, another great, Sexsmith expresses emotions and situations in a frank, guileless tone that also breathes out unreplicable kinks. There are […]
Body in Time has a quiet faith in itself, so that it glides beyond the stripped back production without a single step too soon, or too far. The successes of each track hinge on how well Susie Merry can inhabit a mood. Her tendency to be direct clarifies each tonal element, leaving the song free […]
This album is baffling. It’s confusing, deluded, unusual but dull—confident but insipid and stodgy. Charlie Burg seeks mastery over everything in his path, from lyrical irony to electric guitar riffs. His gloating is hollowed by the execution, which, save for an anodyne run in the second half, is torturously tangled. There are seemingly multiple breakdowns […]
On first listen, Jake Thackray’s music might seem like pure embellishment, mawkish even. The Yorkeshireman was tall, lean, and looked like a more robust Dean Martin. With his fashionably unfashionable flair, he appears into view as though a national treasure. Then comes the voice: lugubrious, rising like the Dales, and quieting into a mist. Finally, […]
TW: this record contains material on suicide and abuse ‘Riderless Horse’ is a lonely album about two people. Like Mount Eerie’s ‘A Crow Looked At Me,’ Nastasia’s first record in twelve years isn’t even an echo: it’s the initial reverberation of real life despair. The jagged candor of her writing is entrusted to expertly patched […]
Identity is formally recognised through lengthy paperwork and bureaucratic, disengaged processes. Applications, visas, green cards: each composes what is allowed to be considered a form of ‘identity’. For Cornish-speaking, Welsh psychonaut Gwenno Saunders, the ‘self’ is a jagged, highland landscape. It is captivating throughout ‘Tresor’ to consider the artist’s own journey of self-rediscovery, breathed through […]
This album is pastoral as fuck. It was not necessarily intended for release and oozes with personal, artistic cosiness. I will, however, confess to a bias, for I too have trodden ‘through boring fields of Kent’ more than once in my time. In acting like a wonderous, woodland canopy, the production package inadvertently shrouds us […]
‘Pirates’ thrills because of a rich voice, intricate arrangements, and the range of emotions evoked. The balladic, Disney-esque closer feels galaxies away from track two (which mentions a character named ‘cunt-finger Louis’). Jones’ great strength is in binding a spectrum of images and stories together with the same string, so that her best records resemble […]
100 words music reviews 