Richard Thompson - Still

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Richard Thompson

This is a very fine Richard Thompson album.  The man's a genius who has been writing great songs and playing superb music for decades now and this is a great addition to his already stellar canon.

Thompson's music is it's usual excellent self: good melodies, harmonically interesting and lyrically full of that carefree joi de vivre that always characterises Thompson's songs.  :o)  Seriously, a glance at the titles will give you a pretty strong clue that he's not deviating much from the sadness and anger which runs through so much of his work:  Broken Doll; No Peace, No End; Where's Your Heart…you get the idea.  And yet it never becomes depressing or over-bitter.  The quality of the songwriting keeps it well above that level, and it's a fine album.

The performances and production are top-class, I think.  Thompson is one of the great guitarists of our age and he's on fine form here – some fine guitar work while being quite understated and often quite far back in the mix.  This works very well indeed, I think, and the band are all excellent.

I loved Electric but I wasn't quite so taken with Acoustic Classics, although I can't quite put my finger on why.  This is Thompson back to the peak of his form, I think: a classic Thompson album of fine songs, exceptionally well performed.  It's always hard to tell for a while whether an album will turn out to be truly great as opposed to very good, but I think this may well be up there with Richard Thompson's very best – which is really saying something.  Warmly recommended.

Honeyhoney - 3

Rating: 5/5

Review:

A good album

This is the first Honeyhoney I've heard and I am impressed.  It's an album of good, well-crafted songs, very well performed and produced. 

Honeyhoney put me in mind slightly of The Civil Wars with their very good harmony singing and often rather mournful songs – although they don't have quite The Civil Wars' agonized intensity.  The vocal work is excellent and the instrumental playing is just as good, I think, with a variety of instruments and a fine backing section.  The songs are fairly varied in style from quiet, contemplative slow numbers to pretty rocky settings and the whole album has a air of class over it, I think.

Perhaps a little more variation in tone might have been welcome because it's all pretty minor-key dominated and downbeat so as a whole album it gets just a little hard going for me, but individual songs are great and listening to a few at a time means they really shine.

This is a welcome find for me, and I can recommend it – it's a quality album.

Robert Johnson - Complete Recordings

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

This is a brilliant set.  Of course it is - it's Robert Johnson, who is one of the very greatest of all bluesmen (arguably the greatest) and whose music needs no review from me.  It's magnificent from start to finish.

What you may like to know is that the transfers here seem to me to be very good.  Hiss and crackle has been reduced to a minimum without losing the quality of Johnson's voice and guitar, so they're remarkably clear and very, very atmospheric.

At this price, it's an absolute steal, too.  Very warmly recommended.

Neil Young - The Monsanto Years

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Oh dear...

I always look forward to a new Neil Young album with considerable trepidation.  He's still capable of making fine records - I loved both Psychedelic Pill and Storytone – but he's also still capable of making very bad ones.  This is a bad one, I'm afraid.  A really bad one.  It doesn't make me physically wince quite as much as A Letter Home, but I think as an album it's worse in some ways.  At least on A Letter Home the music was really good and Neil performed well, it was just the horrible mess of a recording which made it almost unlistenable.  On The Monsanto Years it's the fault of the material and the performance, which I find less forgivable.

The Monsanto Years is a long rant against environmental damage, GMOs, greedy banks and corporations and so on.  It's a message with which I largely agree and I wouldn't argue with much of what Neil is saying here – but as songs they are crude, poorly crafted, musically pretty thin and lyrically they're frankly terrible.  Really, this sounds like the sort of stuff that you might have produced when you were thirteen and then come across as an adult and burned with embarrassment that you could ever have thought it even worth writing down.  Just as an example, in People Want To Hear About Love, there's just a long, long list of things like:

"Don't talk about the beautiful fish in the deep blue sea dying…

"Don't talk about the corporations hijacking all your rights…

"Don't mention about world poverty…

"Don't say pesticides are causing autistic children…"

and so on and so on and so on.  These aren't song lyrics, they're just slogans. It's very important stuff, but there's no finesse, no wit, no depth of analysis or anything approaching crafted verse which might convey real meaning or make it a powerful song.  The same is true throughout the album; it's as though you were being shouted at by an obsessed drunk in a bar.  And this from the man who wrote the magnificent Ohio in a white hot rage in just a few hours.  That, though was a long, long time ago and seemingly in a galaxy far, far away because Ohio was an enduring masterpiece while this just best forgotten.

Musically it's pretty poor, too.  There's not much in the way of melody, and although there are some decent chord sequences, none of it sounds very fresh and The Promise Of The Real, although a perfectly competent band, just remind me constantly how very, very good Crazy Horse were.  Neil's voice is wearing pretty thin these days and at times it's cringeworthy as he reaches for high notes he has no business to be attempting and misses them by some distance.  (Try the opener, New Day For Love and you'll see what I mean.)

I've loved Neil Young's work for close on half a century now and I accept that loving it means that you have to take the poor with the brilliant – and this is really, really poor.  On the first play I turned it off about half way through and felt as though someone had stopped beating me over the head with a blunt object.  I've forced myself to listen a few times more to see whether it improved, but it hasn't.  It's still a relief to turn it off. 

I simply can't bring myself to give a Neil Young album only one star, but it's a scrape to get up to two.  I'm sorry to say it, but this isn't worthy of a great songwriter and performer.  It's just plain bad.

Madisen Ward and the Mama Bear - Skeleton Crew

 

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A quietly brilliant gem

This is a great album, and I can't quite put my finger on why. There's no spectacular guitar work, the songs aren't startlingly original and it's mainly pretty stripped-down in feel. And yet these two just get it bang on, somehow. The two, largely strummed, guitars go together perfectly, as do Madisen's excellent vocal work and his Mama's beautifully judged support singing. I think it's to do with songs that are of simple things and come right from the heart, and that these two are actually very fine musicians who do unostentatious but very musical things very well indeed.

There's still something indefinable to me about what makes this so good, but I absolutely love it. There's plenty of great smile-along, foot-tapping stuff in Silent Movies or Yellow Taxi, for example, but also more profound songs - and the two which close the album, Down In Mississippi and Sorrows and Woes have some serious things to say and are beautiful and genuinely moving, I think. The whole album is sincere, genuine and full of quiet, unshowy class. I can recommend this very warmly indeed.

Amy LaVere - Hallelujah I'm A Dreamer

5/5
Review:

Another very good album from Amy LaVere

This is a very good album from Amy LaVere. It has taken a while for it to really grow on me, but I think it's a worthy successor to the excellent Runaway's Diary.

Amy LaVere writes fine songs in a variety of styles. This is another eclectic collection, still distinctively LaVere. Her music often seems laid-back and can have a lovely, infectious swing to it, but there's real musical content and depth there. She has a distinctive sound with her upright bass playing and fine, slightly breathy and deceptively girlie-sounding voice. What she sings with it is anything but fluffy and girlie, though; she writes fine, often quirky lyrics which are always intelligent and sometimes really penetrating. The opener is a charming, almost nursery-rhyme-like piece from the point of view of a cricket circling a lamp at night, for example, but is also a metaphor for the realisation of human potential. The title track is another celebration of human diversity and individualism, musically reminiscent of Save The Last Dance For Me; The Last Rock And Roll Boy To Dance is a fabulously swung, bluesy-feeling delight in dancing, and so on...and then you suddenly realise you're listening to Red Banks, a clever and haunting a song about the victim of a violent, abusive, even murderous relationship.

And that's what you get with Amy LaVere - fine, distinctive and diverse songs which somehow come together to form a cohesive album. It's all very well played and performed, with generally restrained production which suits these songs excellently. At a time when there are a lot of very, very fine female singer-songwriters producing excellent work on both sides of the Atlantic, Amy LaVere stands proudly among them, I think. She deserves to be far better known, and I can recommend this (and her last one, Runaway's Diary) very warmly indeed.

Bill Wyman - Back To Basics

4/5
Review:

An enjoyable album

Bless him, you've got to love Bill Wyman, haven't you?  He's just got that little self-mocking twinkle in his musical eye most of the time which gives even rather ordinary stuff an enjoyable edge and makes it very listenable.  Ever since Si Si, Je Suis Un Rock Star I've felt that I shouldn't like his output nearly as much as I do – but I do anyway.

Image and style aside, Wyman is actually a very good musician.  Here, he seems to be trying to channel the spirit of JJ Cale most of the time: there's a laid-back feel to the whole thing and he's adopted that mixture of singing and whispering which characterised a lot of JJ's work.  It's a good tactic because Wyman's singing voice couldn't be described as great even by the most charitable of critics. Here it's produced with a lot of double-tracking which makes it even more JJ-like - so much so that it's sometimes a bit of a shock to hear an English accent rather than an Oklahoma drawl. 

The band are good and the material is nice without being anything special.  There's a reasonable variety of songs which are all fairly stripped back, and overall it's a very decent effort with an amiable atmosphere rather than anything particularly passionate or emotional.  Bill Wyman has produced an album of good quality material here which is very soundly played and produced.  It's not a classic by any means, but then very few albums are.  What we have here is an enjoyable collection of decent songs, well performed and produced.  It's fun and a little bit samey, but I can recommend it as an enjoyable listen.

Florence + The Machine - How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

5/5
Review:

A terrific album

Although I've been aware of Florence & The Machine in a vague sort of way for some time, I hadn't really listened to much in a serious way. Their performance of Ship To Wreck on Jools Holland's programme (broken foot and all) convinced me that I should try this album, and I'm very glad I did. After several listens, I'm a fan.

This is a fine collection of varied, finely crafted, melodious songs with intelligent lyrics, and Florence Welch is a very, very good singer who has the experience now to put those songs across with real meaning. The band are excellent - tight and gutsy but sensitive to the meaning of every song - and the production is fabulous, I think. It is often huge, to the point of being gloriously overblown sometimes, and I absolutely love the result You have to have real skill and class to create the sort of wall of sound which sometimes develops here without it degenerating into a rather generic mush, and this album has skill and class all over it, in my view.

I'm just an old git now, but after decades of devotion to music it's still great to see that real class and talent keeps coming through, and it's always a real pleasure to discover it. I'm late on the scene with Florence, but I'm an enthusiastic convert. For what it's worth, this newbie thinks How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (an apt title for the content) is a terrific album and I can recommend it very warmly.

Tracey Thorn - Songs from The Falling

5/5
Review

Truly beautiful 

I love this little EP. I really wasn't expecting much, but it took me completely by surprise: it's utterly lovely and very haunting, although it's hard to say exactly why.

Looked at objectively it sounds unpromising: eight short tracks lasting about 17 minutes in total, mostly with extremely simple chordal backing on either solo guitar or piano and with odd, minimal lyrics. Are You There, for example, is well under 2 minutes long and its lyrics are just "Girl, are you there?" repeated a few times.

And yet, it's absolutely lovely. Tracey Thorn sings beautifully and her wonderful voice is very well produced and sometimes multi-tracked to give a haunting, atmospheric effect, perfectly offset by the minimal instrumentation and simple but beautiful accompaniment. The whole thing is just...well, lovely. I know I keep using the word, but it's the only one I can find which really fits. It has haunted me since I first played it and I keep going back to it with undiminished pleasure.

I'd suggest that you try a few samples and if you like them, don't hesitate. I think this is a miniature, truly memorable gem.

Brandy Clark - 12 Stories

5/5
Review

A very good album

I tried this album on spec. because I loved Brandy Clark's song Follow Your Arrow on Kacey Musgraves' album Same Trailer, Different Park. I was prepared for it not to be very good because quite a lot of people have written one or two good songs and a lot of mediocre stuff, but I was very pleasantly surprised. This is a collection of varied, enjoyable and very well-crafted country songs which tell their stories with humour, insight and genuine pathos at times.

Brandy Clark writes good straightforward tunes and sings them well. They are very well arranged and produced here, with a fine band and just the right degree of arrangement to let each one shine in its own way. Her lyrics are very good indeed, with songs like Take A Little Pill making good, serious points about addiction and Stripes genuinely makes me tap my foot and smile (although I'd recommend that you avoid the video, which manages to drain all the dry wit from the song).

This album was a really enjoyable discovery for me. I think Brandy Clark is a genuinely talented and entertaining singer/songwriter with a rare gift for insight and wit expressed in really enjoyable melodies. I'll definitely be looking out for her future work, and recommend this very warmly.

Kacey Musgraves - Pageant Material

5/5

Review:

Another excellent, witty album from Kacey Musgraves 

I think Kacey Musgraves has achieved that rare feat of following up a terrific debut album with one which is just as good.  I loved Same Trailer Different Park for its tunefulness, musicianship, wit and subversion and this has the same qualities in abundance.

Kacey Musgraves has a very good voice which she uses to great effect again.  She sings with a warmth and a twinkle in her eye much of the time, which has real skill beneath it.  The band are excellent and the production is again pitch-perfect;  it's never overdone and sets off each song with just the right overall sound.

Again, what makes this really special is Musgraves's lyrics. With her songwriting partners Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally she has produced another varied set of witty, insightful songs which often cleverly subvert common attitudes of this genre.  The title track, for example contains these excellent lines:

"…my momma cried

When she realised

That I ain't pageant material;

I'm always higher than my hair

And it ain't that I don't care

About world peace –

But don't see how I can fix it in a swimsuit on a stage…"

All this is set in a singable, toe-tapping song which robs it of offence or any sense of taking herself over-seriously.  She's making good serious points in the best way – with humour and charm.  And she made me laugh out loud again, this time on Family Is Family which is about how family may drive you bonkers but you love them anyway, with this immortal couplet:

"They may smoke like chimneys

But give you their kidneys…"

Well, quite.  A perfect picture in very few words, which is exactly what the best Country songs do.  Musgraves adds wit and warmth of heart, too, which makes her work rather special to me.

Kacey Musgraves is a class act (as recognised by Brian Wilson, who featured her on his recent No Pier Pressure album).  This is another really excellent album which I love; it makes me smile, it makes me think and it's musically very enjoyable. Recommended wholeheartedly.

(Brandy Clark's own album 12 Stories is also well worth a look, by the way.  Her song Stripes, for example, has all the wit and musical delight of the songs on this album.)

Roger Daltrey - Daltrey

4/5
Review:

Still a good album

Over forty years on, I still have a great affection for this album.

It's Daltrey in a very non-Who mode, singing songs mainly by Leo Sayer. When the album was first released, Sayer's own recording career hadn't taken off, which meant that Daltrey got some very fine songs which, I suspect, Sayer would have kept for himself if he'd had a contract. They are typical Sayer - musically intelligent, melodically rather beautiful, often yearning and often about the bruising experiences of a young heart. I love them, and certainly tracks like Giving It All Away and Thinking spoke to my bruised and yearning young heart at the time.

No doubt this affects my judgement in <ahem> maturity, but I think the album stands up pretty well on its own merits. Daltrey sings very well with sincerity and genuine feeling, the material is good and the production is well judged to bring out the best of both singer and songs. It's not a seminal classic by any means, but it's a good album with some fine and genuinely affecting songs on it. It's still well worth a try, I'd say.

Roseanne Cash - The River and the Thread

5/5
Review:

A really good album

I think this is a really good album. I liked it on first hearing but thought that there wasn't much to distinguish it from a lot of other pretty good stuff around at the moment. I was wrong. I've listened to it a lot since then and I think it has real quality. The songs are tuneful but harmonically quite original in places, and the lyrics have genuine meaning - it's certainly a lot more than just three chords and the truth. I also think the performances are excellent with lovely singing and a fine band. They are set off by really good arrangements and production: not too rich and glossy but perfectly judged to give the songs depth and atmosphere without submerging them in too much extraneous stuff.

I think this is an album which I will be playing for a long, long time. Warmly recommended.

Sharon van Etten - I Don't Want To Let You Down

5/5
Review:

A near-perfect little gem

This is quite brilliant, I think. Sharon van Etten is a very fine songwriter and singer, and this EP is a pretty well perfect little gem of five superb songs, beautifully performed.

If you're looking at this page then you almost certainly know Sharon van Etten's work already, and you won't be disappointed in this. It has all the quality and intensity of the excellent Are We There, with thoughtful, self-revelatory songs sung with that almost agonised voice at times which gives them such power. These are generally at the more beautiful, atmospheric and evocative end of van Etten's range: I find the title track, Pay My Debts and the fabulous I Always Fall Apart all extremely affecting, and the other two tracks are excellent, too.

Just to give a flavour of van Etten's lyrics, this, from I Always Fall Apart is a fine sample:
"You know it's always been my heart,
You know I always fall apart,
It's not my fault, it's just my flaw
It's who I am."
Set beautifully, and magnificently sung with that wonderful way she has of hitting a note from below and sliding on to it, this has a really profound impact on me, and the whole EP is full of sheer quality and class from beginning to end. It's a miniature masterpiece, in my view - and I don't say that lightly. Very, very warmly recommended.

The Hillbenders - Tommy: A Bluegrass Opry

4/5
Review:

Interesting, well done and excellent in parts

A bluegrass Tommy, played in its entirety on just acoustic guitar, banjo, Dobro, mandolin and bass and with a Country swing and shuffle - you're kidding, right? Well, no they're not. The Hillbenders are a very fine bunch of musicians who treat Pete Townshend's music and the whole of this masterwork with respect, and who play and sing it very well. It's not entirely successful as a whole, but it's great in places and a really interesting take on a rock classic.

I am, sadly, old enough to have loved Tommy from the moment it was first released in 1969 and I've listened to it countless times since then, in its original version and in its other forms. I don't think the original has ever been improved on, and the same applies here, but just listening to the Overture here really shows the depth of Townshend's musical creativity. Without the huge, driving rock sound, you can see the musical architecture clearly and it's magnificent, and that's true in a lot of places throughout the album and I enjoyed that aspect of it a lot.

Other bits don't work so well, though - soon after the great Overture, at the end of It's A Boy (effectively operatic recitative) the line "A son! A son! A son!" just sounds weak and a bit pointless without its great Kit Lambert production. And that's also true in a lot of places - notably in the great finale where the magnificent, spine-tingling final drive of "Listening to you..." is, frankly, a bit feeble here and needs far more to make it work. I also found that the whole thing when played through began to get a bit samey whereas individual bits listened to on their own were often very good - which is, of course, a problem for a cohesive, continuous work like Tommy. (Oh, and because you're almost certainly wondering, Pinball Wizard is a quirky shock to the system, but I think it's really good.)

Overall, then, an interesting rather than a brilliant album, but one which I'm glad to have heard and will probably come back to parts of at least. If you love Tommy, don't be put off by the apparent oddness - this is proper, respectfully done stuff with fine vocals and instrumental work. I can recommend it - you might be surprised at how good at least some of it is.

Pete Townshend - Classic Quadrophenia

4/5
Review:

Much to enjoy, but ultimately rather unsatisfying

My judgement of this may be coloured by the fact that I still own and love my 2LP-set of Quadrophenia, bought on the day of release in 1973. My tastes have broadened a lot since then and now include a lot of classical music, so I was very interested to hear this, and I think it has a lot to commend it. In the end, though, it lacks something overall.

Pete Townshend, behind all the on- and off-stage antics, is a genuinely gifted, original composer, as has been obvious since the harmonic masterpiece of I Can See For Miles. Kit Lambert likened him to a modern-day Purcell, and it's an apt comparison - just listen to the introductions to Substitute or Pinball Wizard, with their constant bass notes with brilliantly shifting harmonies above. His music deserves proper appreciation, and orchestral settings of it stand up very well. Here, the synthesiser parts in particular lend themselves excellently to orchestration, and the originality and richness of the harmonic structures really shine. The instrumentation is neatly done throughout; the oboe taking Townshend's solo guitar part in The Rock is brilliant, for example.

Similarly, the solo vocal parts are very good: in the supporting roles Billy Idol is excellent and Phil Daniels acquits himself well. Alfie Boe himself is a superb singer, of course. He often (but not quite always) manages to get that muscular edge into his delivery which this music needs, and he gives it real energy and meaning throughout. However, there's an edge and a bite missing sometimes, replaced by very fine, operatic tone and occasionally a little too much vibrato for my taste. I don't mean to denigrate Alfie Boe in the slightest - it's what he does, he's brilliant at it and in it's place it's magical. However, in that great finale of Love, Reign O'er Me, for example, I ended up thinking it was a very fine vocal performance, whereas, as Townshend once observed of this track, "Roger gave it his bollocks."

And that's the difference pretty well throughout, I think. I kept trying to put my finger on what it needed, and it's the bite and aggression of the pilled Dr Jimmy, and the depth of his isolation in other places, all really provided by Townshend's inimitable guitar work and, most of all, Keith Moon's brilliant, brilliant drumming. Orchestral tympani parts just don't cut it, I'm afraid, and the work loses an essential component.

There's a good deal to enjoy here, but as a whole it's a bit unsatisfying in the end. It's interesting and I'm very glad to have it in my collection, but I'd recommend the original every time, and as an alternative version I far prefer the excellent Quadrophenia Live In London. Only a rather qualified recommendation from this long-term Who fan, I'm afraid.

Dave Edmunds - On Guitar...Dave Edmunds

 3/5

Review:

Easy on the ear - but what's the point?

I'm sorry to say this of a man whose work has given me so much pleasure over the years, but I really don't think much of this album. There's nothing actively wrong with it, but it never grabs the attention and doesn't add up to much in the end.

Dave Edmunds has taken some classic tracks, more or less recreated the original backing but in a much less convincing way and then played the vocal part on his guitar. He does it very well. Of course he does - he's a damn good guitarist. But really, why has he bothered? The result is just a bit dull and unconvincing, rather like when some of those popular operatic singers have recorded a few pop songs "in their own inimitable style," the style in question being pretty bland and draining most of the character out of the song. I know it sounds implausible when said of Dave Edmunds, but it really does sound like that to me. The effect of the whole album was to make me want to go back to the original, brilliant tracks rather that play what I'd just heard again. Even the rags, which are picked with genuine skill, somehow feel a bit By Numbers, with little of that old Dave Edmunds' joyous "cop this, then!" feel about them.

So - only a very lukewarm recommendation from me, I'm afraid. I'm off to listen to Get It, Repeat When Necessary, Seconds Of Pleasure and a few other favourites which have made me love the man for decades now. That should bring a smile back to my face, and I think I'll just quietly file this away and hope for something better next time.

Simpson, Cutting, Kerr - Murmurs

5/5

Review:

A lovely album



This is a very, very good album. The material is generally excellent and the musicianship is just wonderful.

These three are all superb musicians and they give the whole album a terrific feel. The rapport between them is plain and the sound they produce together is quite spellbinding, I think - and beautifully recorded, so this it's rich and very satisfying. The sheer precision and technical skill on the instrumentals Richmond Cotillon and Lads Of Alnwick is breathtaking, for example, but what you hear is just lovely, joyous truly dancing music.

The material and arrangements are good and varied - the opening of Plains Of Waterloo has the air of a dreamy Pink Floyd track about it, for example - so the familiar and new blend well. The vocal work is good, if not outstanding, but the overall effect is always very pleasing. I have to say that some of the lyrics of the new compositions here aren't the best you'll ever hear. Although I'm absolutely in sympathy with what they are saying about fracking, the killing of wild birds and so on, they are a bit clunky and crude in places.

Nonetheless, this is a lovely album of very fine music played by three giants of the folk scene. It does this old folkie's heart good to know that, four decades and more after I first started sitting in smoke-filled folk clubs and dancing the Morris, English folk music is in such a large number of excellent hands. These are three pairs of such hands, and they've made a terrific record. Very warmly recommended.

Luke Tuchscherer - You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

4/5

Review:
 
A quality album 

This is a good album. I saw Luke Tuchsherer playing solo at The Green Note in London a little while ago and liked both him and his set. I decided to try this album - admittedly somewhat cautiously - and I'm glad I did, because with a bit of band accompaniment and some nice, restrained production, the songs really shine here. Their quality shows through and Luke turns out to be rather a classy songwriter and performer.

Luke Tuchsherer has a nice voice and sings well here. There's a genuineness to his performance that brings the songs to life. The songs themselves are quite downbeat but never miserable; they are melodic and well crafted and tell good stories. A little more variation on the theme of "My baby done left me, and it's my fault because I'm rubbish" might be welcome, but it's a good set and an album I go back to more than I'd expected to, albeit usually in smaller segments.

If you like Americana, I can recommend this. It's good stuff from a talented and sincere artist, and might surprise you with its quality.

James Taylor - Before This World

4/5

Review:
Unmistakeably James Taylor, and he's still sounding good 

I am pleased to say that this is a good album. James Taylor can still write a fine song and perform it very well, and he's produced some good stuff on Before This World.

There are some very familiar Taylor themes here; love of land and family and a yearning for home are especially strong in Montana, for example, and there's a fine tribute to both baseball and family ties in Angels of Fenway. The music, also, is often very recognisably James Taylor, with the distinctive modulations and melodic fluency which have characterised so much of his work. There are less interesting tracks, I think, like the opener Today, Today, Today which doesn't do much for me but, by contrast, I found Far Afghanistan simply stunning. It's a thoughtful, original take on the war in Afghanistan; it is moving , intelligent and musically wonderful, with a dark, hypnotic melody and superb production which lends it real power. The album is worth getting for this track alone, I'd say.

Taylor is more in folk mode than his more rocky or jazzy styles here, which is just fine by me. That lovely, honeyed voice isn't quite what it was but it still sounds very good, and his guitar playing remains as good as ever, which is very good indeed. Production is very nicely judged, the whole album has a very nice feel about it. You'd have no difficulty at all identifying this as a James Taylor album if you heard it blind, which to me is a very good thing indeed.

I have loved much of James Taylor's work for over 40 years now, but after hearing a rather uninspiring performance on Jools Holland's BBC programme I was worried that this album wouldn't be very good. I'm relieved to say that my worry was misplaced: Before This World does have its weaknesses, but overall it's very good, with some superb highlights and I can recommend this.