Cat Piggott - Pretty Red Shoes

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good album

I was genuinely surprised by how good this album is.  I bought it as a blind punt after enjoying one of Cat Piggott's reviews on Amazon and then going to her website to hear a couple of samples.  I expected it to be a more of a gesture toward supporting an artist rather than an album I'd want to play repeatedly but I was quite wrong – there's real quality here and it's already repaid repeated listening.

Cat Piggot has a very nice, slightly husky and soulful voice, and her band and her own guitar work are very good.  The overall sound is great and a lot of care, skill and thought has gone into making this album.

The real test is the material, of course – and it's good.  The songs are very well crafted, Piggott writes a good tune, the arrangements and production are varied and intelligent and the lyrics are far, far better than I'd have expected.  There's a real variety of songs here, from love songs and laments of a broken heart to a very witty expression of rage at a mosquito.  There's even a song about lonely dog finding a home which could have been the sort of sentimental nonsense I loathe, but it's actually very well done and, to my surprise, rather affecting.  There's a sequence of three really fine, different songs which sums up the album's quality for me: Down To The River is a beautifully harmonised gospel-ish song (possibly a nod to Alison Krauss's Down To The River To Pray), Death And Taxes is a minor-key, more rocky number with some very nice guitar work, and Where Are You is a sultry blues which is very, very well sung.  There's plenty more good stuff here, too.

I think Pretty Red Shoes has a lot more quality songwriting and sincerity of performance than some releases on more major labels recently.  It may not be world-changing masterpiece or an enduring Classic Album, but it's a really good listen.  These are good songs, well performed and well produced.  What more could you want?  Warmly recommended – I think, like me, you might be surprised at how good this is.

Fairport Convention - Live at My Father's Place 1974

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Ruined by dreadful sound quality

David Zenbid has summed this album up perfectly in the title of his review on Amazon: great songs, great singer, rubbish recording.

Frankly, there's not much more to say about this album. It's a terrible shame that such a fine voice and good band should be let down so badly by the sound quality and the balance, but they are. I'll be hanging on to my copy, but I doubt whether I'll play it much because it really isn't a pleasurable experience. I'm sorry to have to say this about an album featuring a truly great singer, but I'm afraid I can't recommend this.

JJ Cale - Breezin' At The Café

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine live album from the Great Man

If you're looking at this page you're probably a J.J. Cale fan like me. It's 40 years since a friend first waved Naturally at me and then put on Side 2. I hated the cover and thought I'd hate the music...but 30 seconds into Crazy Mama I was hooked, by the end of After Midnight I was a fan and after River Runs Deep I was a lifetime addict. I think a lot of people considering this will be in a similar position and - come on, admit it! - you know you're going to buy this anyway. A look at the track list, perhaps, but who needs a review? But for what it's worth:

This is a recording (put out in the wake of his very sad death in July 2013) of the Great Man playing live with "friends" including Christine Lakeland, his partner and later his wife. It was originally broadcast live from a café in Minnesota in 1988 and there are three extra live tracks added from 1975. There's a little chat but mainly just really good performances of great songs. They are almost all rather more punchy and higher-energy than the wonderfully laid-back originals and some (like Cocaine and After Midnight) are significantly different from the album versions. It's a fine reminder of what a very good guitarist JJ really was underneath the apparently effortless Cool, and the songs remain truly great. The recording quality is pretty good for a live set (although the 1975 tracks do sound a bit thin) and it's a very enjoyable album.

I love the originals so dearly that I'm not sure whether I'll play this as often as the studio albums, but it's a fine record of JJ playing live and I've got to have it in my collection. If you're new to J.J. Cale I wouldn't start with this (personally I'd recommend Naturally, Okie or Shades) but no-one will be disappointed here - it's a fine live album by one of the true greats of Rock & Roll. Warmly recommended.

Putamayo Presents...Acoustic America

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A gem

I think this is a brilliant album. I tried it as a bit of a punt because it's the sort of thing I usually like and featured some real greats. It turned out to be a gem - fine songs in uniformly excellent performances.

My suggestion is that you listen to some samples: if you like what you hear, you won't be disappointed in the album. There's some really good singing in a variety of styles and fine bands who - thank heavens - aren't over-produced but just play very well and with real sincerity. There is also some genuinely great guitar work in places, for example from Brownie McGhee (of course!) and Doc Watson.

I am delighted with this album and if you have any interest at all in this genre I think you will be, too. Very warmly recommended.

Track List:

1. Luke Winslow King - You Don’t Know Better Than Me

2. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee - I Was Born With the Blues

3. Jeffrey Foucault - Lodi

4. Forest Sun - Change My Tune

5. Buck Howdy - Shenandoah

6. Doc Watson - Sitting on Top of the World

7. Eden Brent - Goodnight Moon

8. Justin Rutledge - Year of Jubilo - (Canada)

9. Red Horse feat. Eliza Gilkyson, John Gorka and Lucy Kaplansky - Wayfaring Stranger

10. Guy Davis - Everything is Gonna Be Alright

11. The Jim Kweskin Band w/ Samoa Wilson - Some of These Days

12. Clay Cumbie - Here's to the Journey

Brian Wilson - No Pier Pressure

Rating: 4/4

Review:
 A good album with flashes of Wilson genius

It goes without saying that Brian Wilson is a musical genius and that we owe him an immense debt for what he has achieved and for the colossal influence he has had on music over the last 50 years. There are flashes of that genius here, but it's fragmented and while there are plenty of great passages there is a slightly disjointed feel to many of the songs. For me that makes this a good album, but not a great one.

Brian Wilson has assembled a fine cast of singers and musicians, and there is a range of good songs here, often reflecting on aging and loss, but with an uplifting tone in plenty of places, too. His magnificent harmonic gift is still there, but only in flashes, and that distinctive Wilson sound sometimes crops up in the middle of something else where it doesn't seem to quite belong.

To take just one example, Runaway Dancer is a very decent song in many ways, but the fine, Haircut-100-like introduction is suddenly abandoned in favour of an unsympathetic, generic bass and rhythm thump which to me breaks up the song and adds nothing to its structure and excellent harmonic vocals. I know that Wilson was brilliant at fusing different sections together to form a great song, but here the fusion doesn't quite work for me. It's a feeling I get quite often on this album - a sense that all the voices and instruments don't quite match up, or a sort of jolt as we move a bit awkwardly from one sound to another which don't quite fit together.

That said, there is a great deal to enjoy here. The songs are generally tuneful and it is always a pleasure to hear those harmonies. The final track, The Last Song, is a real beauty, I think: thoughtful, beautiful and wistfully melancholic, it is superbly constructed, with lovely instrumentation and sensitive production. It comes from the heart and may well be a Wilson classic.

Overall, then, a good album with flashes of the true genius of Brain Wilson. It's not a great album, but it's well worth having, in my view.

Richard Thompson - Electric

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another really good album from a great singer-songwriter

I think this is a really good Richard Thompson album. As the title suggests, it features Thompson's lead guitar very strongly in yet another group of very fine, melodic and lyrically intelligent songs which are superbly played and sung.

Naturally, the whole album is tinged with Thompson's trademark bleak take on life. Don't look to this for an uplifting, smile-inducing bunch of songs - but then Thompson devotees will already know that. Titles like Stuck On The Treadmill and Where's Home? give an idea of the atmosphere. Breaking relationships, financial hardship and the daily grind of life all feature strongly throughout the album, but there is a great variety of moods in the music including a strong Country tinge in places (as one might expect with Buddy Miller producing). As examples, the album opens with Stony Ground which has echoes of Thompson's Fairport roots with slightly folky-sounding harmonies coupled with Thompson's distinctively brilliant lead guitar. Sally B is much more of a rocker but with a quirky, almost chromatic melody. My Enemy is quieter and darkly atmospheric, and The Snow Goose is backed by just Thompson's acoustic guitar and some delicate harmony vocals from the great Alison Krauss, and is very beautiful and haunting.

I think 2012 saw some truly great albums from vintage singer-songwriters - Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas, Loudon Wainwright's Older Than My Old Man Now, Springsteen's Wrecking Ball, Neil Young's Psychedelic Pill (let's just draw a veil over Americana) and arguably Dylan's Tempest. I put Richard Thompson in the same league as these giants and it was great to see 2013 opening with such promise. I think Electric is truly one of his great albums. Very, very warmly recommended.

(By the way, I think it is worth getting the Deluxe Version with a Bonus CD. I know that "bonus material" can often be sub-standard filler but most of this is excellent and well worth the extra cost.)

Emily Barker - The Toerag Sessions

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Superb stuff from Emily Barker

I think this is absolutely excellent. Emily Barker is a remarkable songwriter and performer who deserves to be far better known and these stripped down versions of some of her material from the beginning of her career to the present show just how good she is.

The recording is close-miked and very intimate. The songs are all recorded without overdubs or edits on two-track tape: just Barker, her guitar and her harmonica. The combination of this and the material she sings here makes the effect stunning, I think. She has always had a genius for writing about common themes like love and loss in a uniquely evocative way, and also for writing about unusual but emotive things with a rare, slightly sideways approach which gives real poignancy to everything she does. Here, for example, Letters tells heartbreakingly of a family displaced and parted by conflict, and Oh Lord I Want An Exit is in the voice of a man at the end of his life wishing for death to be reunited with his wife - and I challenge anyone to listen to this fabulous performance of it and remain unmoved. In tone the disc reminds me rather of Natalie Merchant's superb self-titled album of last year, but it's not all so intense. There are sweeter songs of love here, too, and the whole album is a wonderfully listenable, rewarding treat.

Barker is in great voice, sometimes sounding deceptively light and girly in fine and poignant contrast to what she is singing about, and she plays her guitar and harmonica beautifully and wholly appropriately for these settings.

I love Emily Barker's work with The Red Clay Halo, which I think is quite remarkable. This is up there with the best of it, I think, and I would recommend this extremely warmly - it is great work from a very, very fine and distinctive songwriter and performer.

David Crosby - Live at The Matrix, December 1970

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Some decent music but poor sound quality

I have mixed feelings about this album.  It's good to have a record of David Crosby playing live in 1970 when (in my view anyway) he was still near the peak of his songwriting and performing powers.  Some of the music here is great and some isn't, to be honest – and the sound quality is pretty dreadful.

I think whether you like this or not will depend on how much you enjoy the sort of long, laid-back, drifting jams which permeate most of this album.  They're very good of their type (of course they are, it's effectively Crosby and The Grateful Dead);  it's the sort of thing I'd have played while talking with friends late at night in my room at university in the mid-70s, probably after a non-proprietary cigarette or two.  Nowadays I find a little of it goes quite a long way so although tracks like Laughing are well done, beautiful in places and quite evocative in their way, I'm not sure how much I'm actually going to play this in the future.

Part of the problem is the sound quality.  I don't know how this recording was made, but it wasn't overseen by a professional engineer (or no one who was any good, anyway).  The overall sound is very muddy and indistinct and the balance is all wrong.  The bass is incredibly loud and sharply defined, while the guitar work is much too far back and the vocals almost inaudibly faint at times.  It's really a bit of an insult to both artists and buyers to put out such a poor piece of sound recording as a normal CD.

David Crosby is responsible for some of my very favourite songs ever (including Guinevere and Wooden Ships from CS&N), I like most of his work very much and I was delighted to see him make a very decent album recently in Croz. I can't, in all conscience, give this more than 3 stars, though.  The music's OK and probably merits four stars, but the sound is so poor that overall it's a disappointment. Crosby fans like me will probably want to have this, but I can't really recommend it as an album.

The Stray Birds - Best Medicine

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good album

This is a good album of well-constructed songs which are performed and produced with great skill.

I like the album a lot, but I do find it just a little bit similar to a lot of the very good Americana round at the moment. M Bowden writing on the Amazon page is right: "This acoustic group is just so tight and smooth, giving a really polished sound," and for me this and the incredibly slick production means that the album lacks just a little heart and genuineness of emotion. It's purely personal thing, because the musicianship is excellent, but sometimes it could do with just a bit of human rawness to bring it to life for me. You may well disagree, and no one with any interest in this genre could possibly dislike the album, but for me it's a one that I like rather than love.

Crosby & Nash - Crosby & Nash

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A lovely-sounding album

I tried this album (just a decade late!) because I have an immense affection for CSN and Déjà Vu, two albums which were a gigantic feature of my teenage years and which I still play very regularly and with great pleasure. Solo and collaborative albums since then have been rather variable, but I hoped this would be worth a punt, and I was right.

The overall sound is vintage CSN, really. There's plenty of Crosby's modal guitar sound and those utterly distinctive vocal harmonies sound great. No one else has ever quite reproduced that harmonic sound (the same is true of Brian Wilson's own distinctive harmonic sound, too) and it's an immense pleasure to hear it again here. The instrumental and solo vocal work is good, and the effect of the album is very pleasing.

The songs are pretty good. There's nothing here to stand me on my ear the way tracks like Guinevere, Wooden Ships or Carry On did 40-odd years ago, but there's plenty to enjoy. Lyrically they're OK with plenty of right-on messages, which works very well in tracks like Don't Dig Here (one of the album's strongest, I think) but can get a little self-righteously preachy sometimes. Overall, though, it's decent material, often given a big lift by the performances and production, and especially by those magical harmonies.

This isn't a classic, and that old cliché of "it would have made a better single album" comes to mind rather, but it's a very enjoyable album. It might become more of a background record after a play or two than one for close listening, but it has a lovely sound and it's good to hear two true greats making good music together. Recommended.

Bob Dylan - Where's Your Gravity

Rating: 3/5

Review:
An interesting historical record

This is a bit of an oddity. It consists of studio outtakes and (I think) unreleased recordings of the young Dylan, including some chat with engineers and producers at the start and finish of tracks, but I'm afraid I can't tell you more than that about the source of this material. As far as I can tell the album is available as a download only which comes with no cover or any other information about recording dates, venues etc. Nor has an internet search revealed anything. I would be grateful for any information that anyone else has unearthed.

As to the music...well, it's pretty good. Ardent Dylan fans will certainly want this, and as a huge admirer of his early work especially I found it interesting to hear the man at work in the studio. The selection of material is good: covers of old favourites like Woody Guthrie's I Ain't Got No Home, Corinna, Corinna and the like. It's all well performed with the odd flaw and decently recorded on the whole.

To be honest, this doesn't add much to the Dylan canon. There are no startling revelations here, nor sensationally insightful performances of great songs. I still play Dylan's early albums regularly; they remain classics and they still give me enormous pleasure. This one is an album that I'm glad to have heard and glad to have in my collection, but more for interest and reference than as an album to play repeatedly for the sheer enjoyment of it. I can recommend it on that basis: it's interesting and it's pretty good but don't expect anything sensational.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Southern Accents in the Sunshine State

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent live album

I think this is excellent.  It's a fine record of Tom Petty at his absolute peak, and it's both exciting and satisfying.

This is an FM radio broadcast of a 1993 concert in Gainesville, Florida.  It's a good, varied set with fine performances of real classics like Learning To Fly, Refugee, Don't Come Around Here No More and many others, which makes it, among other things, a great reminder of how many brilliant songs Tom and the Heartbreakers have recorded.  There is also a good smattering of more rare tracks and some covers, some of which are very good and some of which – like Something In The Air – don't work so well for me.  But that's music, and plenty of people will like the stuff I'm not so keen on and vice versa.  It's a fine set overall and no TP fan could possibly be disappointed.

The sound is pretty good.  It's certainly plenty clear enough to forget about sound quality and enjoy the music, and although occasionally there are some of the usual balance and fade problems with a live recording they don't interfere.  The engineers have done a fine job on the balance of audience noise and music, capturing the genuine excitement of the event without interfering with the sound of the band overmuch.  There are some great audience moments, like them all singing "And I'm free falling," or all yelling "Stop!" in exactly the right places in Don't Come Around Here, which really get the thrill of the concert and make me wish I'd been there.  (I join in anyway, mind you.)  There's a bit of chat in which you can feel Tom's rapport with the audience, but not too much.  It's pretty well an ideal live recording, I'd say.

I'm a bit dubious about the release of old live material nowadays after some terrible-quality recordings have been released over the last few years, but I think this is a terrific album and it's warmly recommended.

Paul Simon - Over The Bridge Of Time

Rating: 4/5

Review:
 Great music, but a very restricted selection

Any disc with music of this quality obviously deserves five stars. Paul Simon is one of the truly great songwriters of the last 50 years and a very fine performer, too. This selection contains half a dozen Simon & Garfunkel songs and fourteen of Simon's solo works. Every one is a gem, and I'm pleased to say that they haven't only gone for the really obvious stuff - it's good to see The Only Living Boy In New York and the superb and underrated Hearts And Bones here, for example.

That said, I can't quite see the point of this disc. It necessarily represents a tiny selection from what is now a large and distinguished body of work, and so it omits great swathes of brilliance. One glance at the track list will set you thinking "What - no...?" Or "Four songs from Bridge Over Troubled Water and not one from Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme?" Or any number of other questions about the selection. The problem is that you can't really do this properly in only one CD, so that many people (like me) will already have most or all of the material on the original albums, and for those who don't this probably isn't an adequate place to start.

I could be wrong, and certainly what is on the disc is brilliant. The sound quality seems excellent and the packaging (featuring, I think, the 59th Street bridge) is very attractive. If you want a skim of the surface of a brilliant musician, this will do you very well, but with all Simon & Garfunkel's albums available in a super-budget box, an excellent double CD of The Essential Paul Simon available for a fiver, and many of the original albums also available very cheaply, I certainly wouldn't start from here.

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lot Of Shakin' Going On (Very Best Of)

Rating: 5/5

Review:

A good compilation of early Jerry Lee

Really, there's not much to be said about a compilation of Jerry Lee Lewis's early Sun recordings.  This is one of Rock & Roll's true greats at the peak of his form and fully justifying the nickname "The Killer."  The music is just great – but you already knew that.

You may like to know that the quality of the transfers is good, with a sound which is pretty true to the originals as I remember them (yes, I am that old, I'm afraid) and it's a decent selection.  There are lots of Jerry Lee Lewis compilations, some much cheaper than this, but this is the one I've ended up with and I can't comment on the others.  If you want a decent compilation of early Jerry Lee I can recommend this – it's well done and gives me huge pleasure.

Richard Thompson - Live! Semi-Detached Mock Tudor

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent live album

This is an excellent live album from Richard Thompson. I'm not always that keen on live albums, but this is quite outstanding.

For a start, most of the set is taken from Mock Tudor which is a masterpiece of an album, with the addition of some other excellent songs. Then there is the fantastic guitar work and singing from Thompson himself, who really is a virtuoso and gives his all here. And to cap it all, a truly brilliant band, including the magnificent Danny Thompson on bass, who is on absolutely top form here.

Many of the interpretations are a bit more gutsy than the studio originals, which works very well in this context and with this band. I've discovered this album very late, but I'm extremely glad I have come across it. It's a gem, and very warmly recommended.

Amy Speace - That Kind Of Girl

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another fine album from Amy Speace


Update, May 2015: I saw Amy Speace live at The Green Note in London and she was superb. Her voice was magical; it had real power, tenderness and expressiveness, and a purity of tone and intonation which reminded me of the young Joan Baez at times. She has a great rapport with her audience, with witty and intelligent chat between songs which matches the intelligence of her lyrics, and with time and relaxed charm for people afterwards. The songs from this album took on a whole new power and depth when performed by just her with either guitar and piano, and having listened to the album again several times since, I think I was originally looking for something in the album that wasn't meant to be there. Judged objectively on their own terms these are excellent songs, beautifully sung and very well performed, so I've revised my rating up to 5.

I've left my initial review unrevised below because that seems the honest thing to do, but I don't think I would voice those reservations now - and if Amy needs crowd funding for her next album, I'll be there in the crowd without question. She's a really excellent songwriter and performer and I can give this album a warm recommendation. (And do go to see her if she's performing near you. It's a special evening.)

Original review:
This is a good album with some fine songs, although to my ears it's not quite as good as her last one, How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat.

Amy Speace is a very good singer/songwriter. She writes good tunes and thoughtful, intelligent lyrics. She's also a fine performer with a lovely voice which she uses excellently, and she's a talented guitarist, too. I have found her work distinctive and very rewarding, and some of Amy Speace's songs have been quite exceptionally good. (Left Me Hanging is a real masterpiece of both writing and performing, I think.)

On That Kind Of Girl, those characteristics are still evident, but she has decided not to play her own guitar here and has brought in a very fine band of musicians while she sticks to singing. In a way that works very well; the sound is great, the production is very smooth and there are a number of very good songs here including the title track and the opener, Nothing Good Can Come From This. It's a quality album, but...

My reservations are rather personal and elusive. To me there's a slight corporate Nashville gloss to the album which robs it of some of the real distinctness which I have found so exciting in Amy Speace's work. Her voice, both in her singing and what she sings, remains both intelligent and beautiful, but somehow the band and the production make her songs stand out rather less distinctly from the crowd of good Americana albums being made at the moment. I really yearn for something like the dark, sexy drive of Hunter Moon or the transfixing insight and sadness of Left Me Hanging for example.

Don't get me wrong - That Kind Of Girl is still a very good album and no-one with any interest in this genre will be disappointed in it. It's just that bits of Stormy Boat grabbed me by the ears and made me such a fan that I contributed to the funding of this album, and I'm not sure That Kind Of Girl would have done the same. Amy Speace is still a class act, though, and I can recommend this album. It's very good - it's perhaps just not truly great.

The Honeycutters - Me Oh My

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very enjoyable album

I like this album a lot. It was a bit of a random punt for me after hearing a couple of snippets, and it turns out to be very enjoyable. It's not going to change the course of music history or end up in a list of all-time greats, but it's very well done and I'm still enjoying it very much after repeat listenings.

The Honeycutters' music is in the area where Country and Americana merge, so there's plenty of pedal steel, Country harmonies and so on, but I wouldn't classify it as pure Country - but however you describe it, this is a set of well-crafted songs, very nicely performed and produced. They are varied in tone from the toe-tapping and smile-raising Ain't It The Truth to the wistful and lovely Carolina, or the beautiful closing track, A Life For You, for example. They're lyrically pretty good, too, with that crucial ability in songs like this to convey a scene or a state of mind in just a few lines. For example, this from Texas '81 a lovely, regretful song about the break-up of a long marriage:
"Don't let go yet,
Would you love me one more time
Before we raise the blinds and make the bed;
My little train wreck -
Your eyes are smiling but your cheeks are wet..."
It's not earth-shaking poetry, I know, but it's very decent songwriting and makes an emotional impact on me in context. What more can you ask, really?

If you like alt-Country or Americana, I'd suggest giving this a try. It won't change your life, but it will be an album to listen to and enjoy for some time, I thin

Red Sky July - Shadowbirds

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good album

This is a good album of well performed and well crafted songs.  It's a pleasingly varied selection, loosely categorizable as Americana but with elements of soft rock, alt.-country and folk in places.  It's quite hard to pin down, really – which I think is a good thing.  When I first heard the opening song, Lay Down Your Love, I thought "That sounds a bit like The Byrds…oh, and Trees…" and other bands as the track went on.  Then Here Then Gone's harmonies made me think of The Civil Wars…and so on.  Even Fleetwood Mac (in the Nicks/Buckingham incarnation) crossed my mind in places.

It's all good stuff.  They're very listenable songs with attractive melodies, very good harmonies and very good arrangements and production.  These three are fine musicians and they've produced a very decent album.  There is a lot of good alt.-country/Americana around at the moment and I'm not sure this stands out strongly from the crowd, but it's a good album and if you like this genre you'll like it for sure.  Recommended.

Olivia Chaney - The Longest River

Rating:5/5

Review:
An outstanding album

This is an excellent album. Even in an era when we are blessed with a lot of very, very fine female singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic, I think this is quite outstanding.

Olivia Chaney has a lovely voice and uses it extremely well. She is also a very fine instrumentalist and her guitar and piano work especially really shine on this album, but it is her songwriting which makes this really special. It is original, intelligent and genuinely profound in places - for a first album especially, it is remarkable in its maturity and individuality. There is a melodic and harmonic freshness to the music, which can sound almost improvised at times, but also passages of finely crafted melody and harmony. Parts of Holiday, for example, are simply lovely and there are plenty of equally beautiful passages.

The arrangements and production are excellent. The album opens with False Bride, the Scottish traditional song often called I Loved A Lass. It has been recorded and sung many, many times but Olivia Chaney brings something fresh to it with a lovely, musically intelligent guitar accompaniment which preserves the sense and dignity of the song while setting it off beautifully. It's exemplary work, I think, and she brings the same quality of thought and insight to everything on the disc. The production is restrained and very well judged and the sound quality is excellent, so the whole thing really shines.

Lyrically, these are songs with something important to say, often personally revelatory and expressed in striking and evocative language. She's happy to have quite lengthy passages without rhymes in the excellent Imperfections, for example. You need to be a really good songwriter to pull that off successfully, but she does so magnificently; it's a tremendously affecting, involving song, and the same could be said of plenty of others.

Olivia Chaney has been called "the English Joni Mitchell," and there are definite echoes of Joni Mitchell in the melodic freedom and the lyrical originality and craftsmanship on this album. Chaney even nods in Mitchell's direction, singing of "my Chelsea morning" in Imperfections. Joni Mitchell, of course, is one of the very greatest singer-songwriters of the last 50 years while this is Chaney's first full album, so I don't think we should get ahead of ourselves with comparisons, but there's no doubt that Olivia Chaney is a rare talent. This is an album of real quality and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

10,000 Maniacs - Twice Told Tales

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Fine performances marred by unsympathetic drums and production

There is a lot that's good about this album, but I have some pretty serious reservations about it.

10,000 Maniacs are an excellent band of musicians and this is quite an imaginative collection of fine traditional British folk songs. It's great to see Dark-Eyed Sailor here, for example; the only version I have is on the first Steeleye Span album - Hark! The Village Wait from 1970 - and I was really looking forward to hearing the one here. The same applied to a lot of these songs, but overall I wasn't all that keen.

The problem for me is really the drumming and the production mix. The instrumental work is often excellent and the vocals are great - Mary Ramsay is terrific, I think, and I like her singing on Dark Eyed Sailor as much as the lovely duet that Maddy Prior and Gay Woods made of it, which is really saying something. But...after a promising couple of opening tracks we get three in a row with truly unsympathetic drumming, mixed prominently forward and dominating the sound. It's basic rock backbeat pretty well throughout and while there's certainly a place for that in this music, to have it this prominently in a song like She Moved Through The Fair just seems wrong to me. An up-tempo version is an interesting idea - but surely not with a backbeat throughout which could have come from Rock Around The Clock? The whole atmosphere of many of the songs (including the otherwise excellent Dark-Eyed Sailor) is really spoiled for me by this.

This is a personal view and you may well disagree. Plenty of people like this style (it reminds me a little of mid-70s Steeleye Span from Parcel Of Rogues onward) but I'm afraid I was rather disappointed in this album. They are fine songs and a fine band but the drumming and production spoil this for me.

Andreya Triana - Giants

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific album

I didn't know about Andreya Triana until I saw her perform Gold on Jools Holland's programme just a few weeks ago. That was enough to persuade me to get this album, and I'm very glad I did. It's a beautifully produced set of varied, soul-based songs, all excellently performed.

Andreya Triana is a really fine singer. She has a lovely, slightly husky voice which carries echoes of people like Amy Winehouse or Macy Gray, but she's her own woman and brings her own style and personality to everything here. There are great arrangements and excellent backing musicians, all produced to make each song shine.

In short, Giants is a cracker of an album by a terrific young artist and I recommend it very warmly.

Leonard Cohen - Can't Forget; A Souvenir of The Grand Tour

Rating 5/5

Review:
A decent live album with Cohen in fine voice

This album doesn't really need a review, of course. Nearly everyone looking at this page will like Leonard Cohen, and many, like me, will have been a devotee through thick and - let's face it - thin for getting on for half a century now, but for what it's worth: Can't Forget is a decent album with some terrific highlights. It's not a classic and I think there's some rather weak stuff on it, but it's worth having, I think. The musicianship is excellent, the "sublime Webb sisters" are just fabulous (why on earth weren't they on Popular Problems?) and Cohen's voice sounds great - a good deal more resonant and less husky and broken than on recent studio albums.

This is another live album (after the excellent Live In Dublin) from the tour of 2012 following the release of the truly great Old Ideas album but there are no songs from Old Ideas here. The recordings are taken from a variety of live shows from all around the world and also several from soundchecks, which are full, properly professional performances. I found that very interesting and Joan Of Arc from the Québec soundcheck is superb; others were good but perhaps lacked some of the frisson of a live performance in front of an audience.

There are two new (or new to me) Cohen songs on the album: Never Gave Nobody Trouble and Got A Little Secret which are both competent but slightly plodding blues tracks - although the excellent lines
"Never gave nobody trouble
But it ain't too late to start"
show that Cohen still has the old twinkle and the ability to put it over in song. There are also a couple of covers here which for me don't add up to much - nice to hear in concert, perhaps, but they wore thin here after a few plays.

Which leaves decent versions of I Can't Forget and a handful of others, of which I think Night Comes On, Joan Of Arc and Light As The Breeze are quite exceptional and make this album worth owning for them alone. Light As The Breeze in particular is very, very sexy (and gives you an idea of why Martha Tilston wrote the excellent Old Tom Cat - on YouTube here)

Overall, for me this is a mixed bag of the excellent, the OK and the slightly plodding. If you just want an album of fine live performances from this tour I'd recommend Live In Dublin before this, but it's Leonard, I love him, and of course I'm going to keep and enjoy this. Recommended with some reservations - but then you've already bought it, haven't you?

Thea Gilmore - Ghosts and Graffiti

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Let's raise a toast to ragged ghosts...

Even in an age when we are extraordinarily blessed with a lot of extremely good female singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic, Thea Gilmore is one of the very best there is. She's a great performer with a wonderful voice and the ability really to put a song over, and she writes songs of real musical depth and lyrics which are intelligent, literate, often witty, often spiky and sometimes genuinely beautiful. This is an album which shows all that: it collects a lot of great songs from her 13 albums to date, together with some new material and reworked tracks with a starry line up of guests.

There is a fine selection of great material here. It's a collection which shows the excellence and variety of her songwriting with singable hits like You're The Radio and London, the polemics like My Voice, the powerful Don't Mess songs like This Girl Is Taking Bets and the exceptionally beautiful love songs like Holding Your Hand. And then there are the quite unique, almost unclassifiable strokes of utter brilliance like Avalanche and Icarus Wind (which is on the vinyl and mp3 editions). Every one of them is listenable and musically intelligent, and every one has thoughtful, witty lyrics which are remarkable for their originality and brilliant use of metaphors and images.

I find the collaborations here a bit mixed, to be honest. The duets with Joan As Policewoman, Joan Baez and Billy Bragg are excellent, as are the tracks featuring John Cooper Clarke and Kid Creosote. Those with the Waterboys and John Bramwell work less well for me, but others may disagree. Overall, though, it's a superb collection - and an excellent place to start if you want to get to know Gilmore's work.

Thea Gilmore is something of a phenomenon, I think, and deserves to be far, far more widely known. I hope this album with its starry guest list will help to gain her the wider recognition she richly deserves. Very warmly recommended.

Carole King - Writer

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Still a cracking album

This is Carole King's first album from 1970 and to me it still sounds just great. It's not the towering classic which Tapestry was to become the following year, but Carole King has always written great songs and performed them really well. That's certainly true here.

This is a fine collection. All these songs show King's magnificent melodic gift and her wonderful ability to set her melodies with intelligent, often beautiful harmonies and arrangements. Gerry Goffin wrote the lyrics, of course, and by 1970 the two of them had been writing superb songs for others for many years. Up On The Roof, for example, had been a hit for the Drifters in 1962 and is still a classic song; King closes this album with her own, excellent version of it. Goin' Back has been a standard of the repertoire since Dusty Springfield recorded it 1966 and the version here is terrific, I think. There's not a duff track on the whole album and some are simply brilliant.

Carole King is in excellent voice throughout this album and her piano playing is terrific. Any two seconds of the album would be instantly recognisable as Carole King and probably recognisable as coming from around 1970, too. That makes it just fine with me; it's a cracking collection of fine songs by one of the greatest of singer songwriters and I can recommend this very warmly.

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Buddy Holly - Collected

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine collection of great music

 Buddy Holly's music itself hardly needs a review from me. The man was a true giant of Rock & Roll both as a songwriter and performer and many of his songs have become enduring classics. They're all here on this 3-CD set (or 3-LPset, if you prefer), as is a very fine selection of less well-known material and the main reason for this review is to provide a full track list. The transfers are well done and the sound is good (or as good as it gets on these old recordings), so the titles will speak for themselves.

There's not really any need to say more; just look at the songs you get. This is simply great stuff, and if you're looking for a good collection of Buddy Holly's work this will serve you very well.

CD1
01. Peggy Sue 2:30
02. That'll Be The Day 2:28
03. Heartbeat 2:09
04. Everyday 2:07
05. Rave On 1:49
06. Oh Boy 2:07
07. Peggy Sue Got Married 2:05
08. Words Of Love 1:54
09. Crying, Waiting, Hoping 2:13
10. It's So Easy 2:10
11. Not Fade Away 2:20
12. It's Too Late 2:23
13. Ting-A-Ling 2:41
14. Last Night 1:55
15. True Love Ways 2:51
16. It Doesn't Matter Anymore 2:05
17. You're So Square (Baby, I Don't Care) 1:36
18. Wishing 2:02
19. Brown Eyed Handsome Man 2:03

CD2
01. Blue Suede Shoes 1:55
02. Bo Diddley 2:22
03. Raining In My Heart 2:50
04. Modern Don Juan 2:41
05. Ready Teddy 1:32
06. Rock Around With Ollie Vee 2:12
07. Down The Line 2:03
08. Because I Love You 2:39
09. Early In The Morning 2:07
10. Love Is Strange 3:06
11. It's Not My Fault 1:51
12. Shake Rattle And Roll 1:24
13. Valley Of Tears 2:09
14. Holly Hop 1:44
15. Gone (Version 3) 1:11
16. Reminiscing 1:56
17. Well...All Right 2:14
18. Honky Tonk 3:28
19. Look At Me 2:03

CD3
01. That's My Desire 2:26
02. An Empty Cup (And A Broken Date) 2:13
03. Rock Me My Baby 1:50
04. Baby Won't You Come Out Tonight 1:54
05. Love's Made A Fool Of You 2:01
06. Queen Of The Ballroom 2:21
07. Come Back Baby 1:49
08. Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue) 1:27
09. Girl On My Mind 2:18
10. Love Me 1:52
11. Midnight Shift 2:11
12. Send Me Some Lovin' 2:35
13. Dearest (Ummm, Oh Yeah) 1:53
14. What To Do 1:54
15. Maybe Baby 1:55
16. Slippin' And Slidin' 2:34
17. Fool's Paradise 2:30
18. Wait Till The Sun Shines Nellie 1:54
19. That Makes It Tough 2:16

Buffy Sainte-Marie - Power In The Blood

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific album from a real force of nature

Some musicians are just an unstoppable elemental force. There aren't many, I think, but Buffy Sainte-Marie is one (Neil Young is another, but it's hard to think of too many more). It's not to do with her style of music or the quality of her musicianship - although Buffy is a very fine musician and songwriter - but the sheer, enduring, almost bulldozing power of the woman herself. It's admirable and often thrilling to experience, and this album is terrifically thrilling as well as being full of thoughtful songs and fine music.  From the opening of the brilliant reworking of It's My Way you know you're in for something special. It's powerful and absorbing, and it's also very enjoyable to listen to - it always leaves me with my spirits lifted and my head held a little higher.

I saw Buffy Sainte-Marie perform live from close range way back in 1971 and she was electrifying. Judging by this, she's even more electrifying now, getting on for half a century later. We have had some superb albums from veterans in the last two or three years - Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas, Richard Thompson's Electric, Robert Plant's Lullaby..., Springsteen's Wrecking Ball and others have all been outstandingly good - and this is up there with the best of them, I think. I think it's something quite special.

Eilen Jewell - Sundown Over Ghost Town

Rating: 3/5

Review
Nice but nothing special

I quite like this album.  It's a nice, country-tinged Americana album, with perfectly decent songs, well performed by a good band and sung very well by Eilen Jewell who has a good voice which she uses very well. The thing is, there's masses of decent, well-performed Americana around at the moment and for me, this doesn't really stand out. We are blessed at the moment with a lot of truly excellent women singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic who are producing some really outstanding work (I've listed a few favourites at the end of this review in case anyone's interested.), but I don't think this album really stands comparison with them. There's nothing wrong with it at all and no-one with an interest in this genre could possibly dislike it, but...I've listened to it a number of times now and it hasn't really stayed with me at all and I confess that the last time I actually lost interest half way through and put on something else.

I don't want to put anyone off: Eilen Jewell is plainly a talented artist and it's a perfectly decent album, but for me it just fades into a pleasant but rather unmemorable background.

(Just in case anyone's interested, these are just some of the albums from female singer songwriters in the last two or three years which I think have been really outstanding.  They are, in no particular order:

Mary Gauthier - Trouble & Love
Thea Gilmore - Regardless
Amy Speace - How To Sleep In A Stormy Boat
Emily Barker - Dear River and The Toerag Sessions
Natalie Merchant - Natalie Merchant
Olivia Chaney - The Longest River
Amy LaVere - Runaway's Diary
Sharon van Etten - Are We There
Eliza Gilkyson - Nocturne Diaries
Sarah Jarosz - Build Me Up From Bones
Amanda Shires - Down Fell The Doves
Laura Marling - Short Movie
Alela Diane - About Farewell
Kris Delmhorst - Blood Test

Suzanne Vega – Close-Up Series and Tales From The Realm…
Patty Griffin - American Kid
Anais Mitchell - Young Man In America
Lori McKenna - Massachusets
Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer, Different Park and Pageant Material

Ruth Moody – These Wilder Things)

Mary Gauthier - Trouble & Love

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another excellent album from Mary Gauthier

This is another very fine album from the great Mary Gauthier. It's been four years since The Foundling and she has come up with another intensely personal album of excellent, autobiographical songs - this time telling the story of a relationship break-up, the consequent emotional damage and the beginnings of recovery.

As you'd expect, these are songs of real quality. They are beautifully crafted with straightforward, singable tunes which form great settings for the personal, emotionally powerful lyrics. Gauthier's admirers (like me) will know what to expect and won't be disappointed; she's doing what she does best here and doing it brilliantly. While perhaps not quite as raw as she was in The Foundling, this is nonetheless an album of pain seeking balm and redemption, which she expresses as few others can. How You Learn To Live Alone, for example is a profound and oddly beautiful evocation of the withdrawal from life which can follow intense emotional hurt and is an outstandingly honest and insightful song. That slightly fractured voice, her acoustic guitar and a brilliant group of musicians and singers bring all these songs to life wonderfully. The arrangement and production are pitch-perfect, making everything shine without ever swamping it.

I loved The Foundling even though it wasn't a commercial success. Trouble & Love is a bit more accessible, I think, but it shares a lot of what I loved about The Foundling - thoughtful, sincere and meaningful songs with good tunes and great performances. Here we have just eight songs and a total of about 40 minutes of music. No padding or superfluous material; Mary Gauthier has distilled what she wants to say into this eight-chapter story and it's just brilliant. It has the enduring beauty which comes from being built on noble bones, and I think I will be playing this for many years to come.

There have been excellent albums recently from two other greats of the genre with Eliza Gilkyson's Nocturne Diaries and Kris Delmhorst's Blood Test. If anything, I think this is my favourite of the three, which is really saying something. I recommend this very warmly to anyone who likes an intelligent, listenable song performed by a singer/songwriter who really knows what she's talking about and means what she says. It's truly excellent.

Sarah Jarosz - Build Me Up From Bones

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good album

This is a really good album. I liked it on first hearing, then found myself playing it regularly and it has really grown on me from there. These are songs with real musical merit and lyrical substance and they will endure in a way that many songs don't, I think.

I find it a little hard to categorize the music (which is probably a good thing).
There is a fine variety of material from the punchy and slightly spiky, like the opener Over The Edge, to the truly beautiful like the genuinely affecting love song Gone Too Soon. Sarah Jarosz is a fine musician and a very good singer, so the songs are excellently performed. She has a very good band and an excellent sense of how to arrange her songs, and the production is very well-judged and varied so the album never sounds samey and every track sounds fresh.

I would warmly recommend this album to anyone who likes a good song, well arranged and performed. For me it stands out from much of the mass of quite good Americana-ish music around at the moment. I think Sarah Janosz is a class act and I'll definitely be looking out for her work in the future.

(After seeing her live at Bush Hall in 2014 I can confirm that she is very, very good indeed. Fine songs and brilliant musicianship - I really hope Sarah Jarosz meets with the success she deserves.)

Richard Thompson - Strict Tempo!

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Unusual but brilliant

This album is a little gem in my view, consisting of instrumental tracks played almost entirely by Thompson himself on a variety of instruments, with Dave Mattacks playing drums (and piano on Ye Banks And Braes.) The music is largely traditional, but played with a real modern zing (although in strict tempo, of course) on electric guitar, mandolin, banjo and other instruments. It is hugely enjoyable from start to finish, and you would have to be made of stone not to smile with pleasure at Rockin' In Rhythm, to name but one.

This isn't what one normally expects from a Richard Thompson album. There are none of the beautifully crafted lyrics, often mournful tunes and distinctive vocals of his self-composed work so if you're looking for that you might be disappointed. What you will get is brilliant playing and truly joyful music and I, for one, love this for what it is - a one-off, different album by a wonderful musician playing music he loves magnificently.

Loudon Wainwright III - Late Night Calls (Live)

Rating 4/5

Review:
A welcome record, but not an LWIII classic

This is a recording of a radio broadcast made in Cleveland in 1972. Loudon Wainwright plays solo in a studio with a small live audience, in an extremely informal atmosphere. There's some good stuff on it, it's a nice record of Loudon's live style of the period and I'm glad to have it but it's not a brilliant album, to be honest.

There is some material which wasn't on studio albums but the songs are largely taken from his first three albums, for which I have a particular affection,. I still have my original vinyl copies bought at the time, and he signed the first two for me when I went to see him play live a couple of times on his first UK tour in 1972, so you can tell I'm a hard-core fan :o). I saw him play quite a few of these songs then, so I'm really pleased to have a reminder of that time and Loudon's witty, self-deprecating way of relating to an audience. The performances here are pretty good, but it sounds to me as though Loudon was a little disorientated by the shambolic-sounding way the recording was set up, so it doesn't quite have the electric excitement I felt at the time. The sound is decent but not brilliant, and the whole thing is one of those albums I'm glad to have heard and I'm glad to have, but which I won't play that often, I think.

LWIII fans like me will want this, of course, and no-one could be disappointed in it, but if you're just looking for early LWIII recordings, I'd recommend the first three studio albums well before this. Certainly if you're looking for a place to start with him, try the early studio albums first or Older Than My Old Man Now for a more recent gem. It's good, but it doesn't have quite the brilliance of a lot of Loudon's work.

The Beach Boys - Surfin' USA (mono & stereo)

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A welcome issue

It's good to have this on CD.  I was 9 years old when Surfin' USA first came out and it's a real pleasure to me to be able to hear it in clean, well-transferred digital sound.

The music itself is…well, it's a nostalgic record of Brian Wilson finding his songwriting feet and The Beach Boys beginning to develop that wondrous sound.  In truth, anyone coming to this cold nowadays might be pretty underwhelmed and if it weren't The Beach Boys most of it would probably just be forgotten by now - but it *is* The Beach Boys and some of us remember it with huge affection.

The transfers are good, although I'm not that keen on the stereo versions, some of which have been re-worked from mono originals.  That's OK, though – the whole thing costs next to nothing and I just play my loved mono versions, and you can play whichever you prefer, or both.

This is a really welcome issue, it's well mastered and it's a proper bargain.  Recommended – especially to nostalgic old gits like me.

Jason Isbell - Something More Than Free

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another excellent album from Jason Isbell

This is another very fine album from Jason Isbell. It was always going to be difficult to follow the superb Southeastern, but think he's done it very well.

The album is typical Isbell: fine, often slightly mournful melodies which get inside you and really speak to you, great chord sequences and intelligent, thoughtful and evocative lyrics. Add to this his very fine singing and guitar work, a very good band and slightly held-back, sympathetic production and you have a very good album indeed.

The material is typical Isbell: the life of the working man, the value of love, the pain of its loss and excoriating self-analysis - with some other, often unusual stories thrown in. He's still doing it brilliantly. The title track, with the repeated line "I don't think of why I'm here where it hurts/ I'm just lucky to have the work..." set to an emotional, rather beautiful tune and chords couldn't be anyone else - possibly other than Springsteen, whose Nebraska-ish echoes can also be heard in the excellent Speed Trap Town. Isbell's music is his own, though, and often more hauntingly beautiful and less polemically driven than Springsteen's.

This is another album of quite varied but consistently excellent songs, from the quietly lovely, very original love song in Flagship to the more rocky 24 Frames and the wonderfully evocative Hudson Commodore (which brought Neil Young's Unknown Legend to the back of my mind). There's perhaps nothing here with the extraordinary emotional punch of Elephant, nor the piercing evocation of loneliness of Ride With Me, but it's very fine stuff nonetheless.

I only discovered Jason Isbell with Southeastern, which I thought was a truly exceptional album with a quite extraordinary quality of music and especially of lyrics. This is in the same league, I think, even if it's not quite such a towering masterpiece - which are, let's face it, are very rare things. It's a really good album of great material, superbly performed and produced and very warmly recommended.

Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker - Carnegie Hall 1971

2/5

Review:
Ruined by dreadful sound quality

This is a very good concert, completely ruined by dreadful sound quality. Even as a long-term Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker fan I can't recommend it, and to be honest, I think it's a bit of a con charging fans full price for such a poor recording. The sound is badly distorted, sounding as though it's coming through a tiny speaker stretched well beyond its capacity, and very poor balance making the whole thing sound like an indistinct mush. It almost sounds as though it could be any old band in a pub somewhere, and to do that to Canned Heat is just plain wrong.

However much you may love Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker, my advice is to avoid this: it's seriously disappointing.

The Who - Live At Shea Stadium 1982

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Not a great live recording

This is a decent but not a great live recording.  I don't think The Who were ever less than good live and sometimes they were quite stunning (as they were when I saw the at The Valley in 1974).  For a variety of reasons, this isn't one of their best, but it's well recorded and a good record of the band at this time, if not much more.

There are some great songs on this album, and it's always a pleasure to see The Who perform their classics, but even those are a little lacklustre at times.  As others have noted, Kenney Jones is a great drummer but didn't quite gel with The Who so that magnificent, driving rocket behind them, which Moon provided before his death and Zak Starkey has provided more recently, is missing.  Even the great, great Who songs don't quite blaze as they should.  Also, some of the material from around this time isn't that great in my view, so there are some pretty ordinary passages.

This is certainly no Live At Leeds, and in some ways it's a little sad to see such a great band running into the doldrums slightly.  As a Who fan of 50 years standing I'm glad to have this, but it's not one I'll be playing that often, I suspect.  If you're looking for a really fine Who performance on DVD, I'd recommend Quadrophenia Live In London.  Obviously, it's very different: there's no Entwhistle and Townshend and Daltrey are 30 years older, but as a live performance it's superb and miles (and miles and miles) ahead of this.  Only a qualified recommendation from me for this one, I'm afraid.

Wolf Alice - My Love Is Cool

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very impressive debut

Just to add my voice to the chorus of praise for this excellent album of very well crafted songs: they are melodic, lyrically intelligent and very well played and sung and it's a very impressive debut.

I am genuinely surprised by how much I like this album.  I have been listening to music seriously for well over 40 years and I have seen a lot of bands hyped to bits on their debut only to vanish again quickly for lack of real substance.  I was therefore sceptical about Wolf Alice and the attention My Love Is Cool has received, but I was wrong.  They have produced an exceptionally good debut album and I think they have the talent to last for a long time.  I suspect we will be seeing a lot more really good stuff from this band, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Wolf Alice develop because they may well become something really big.  I can recommend this warmly.

Pete Townshend - Truancy: The Very Best Of Pete Townshend

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good representative compilation

This is a very good representative compilation of some of Pete Townshend's solo work over the last 45 years or so.

I think Townshend is one of the finest composers and songwriters of the last half century. His melodic and harmonic ingenuity and innovations have been a constant inspiration and delight to me. I Can See For Miles set a monumental standard in 1967 with its Purcell-like harmonic progressions and he has built on that masterpiece since then with some truly enduring work which will stand with the greatest music of the late 20th Century, I think. His work with The Who has been my constant companion for half a century and has brought me immense pleasure.

That said, I have never felt that the standard of his solo work was quite that of the stuff he produced with The Who. It has the same musical complexity and intelligent, original lyrical content (sometimes even more of both), but for some reason it hasn't spoken to me in the same way and I respect it rather more than I like it. It could be that the superlative combination of those four massive talents in The Who brought out the best in Townshend's writing and in his performances. It may also be that, great musician and guitarist that he is, Pete isn't a great singer and the rather average vocals can't really convey the depth in this material. To be honest, I don't really know why it is, but for me this solo work just doesn't quite hit the spot.

All of this is a very personal reaction and please don't let me put you off. There's nothing wrong with any of it - far from it - and you may well disagree with my view. Certainly if you like Townshend's solo work, or you are looking for a place to start with it, this compilation will serve you very well and I can recommend it on that basis.