Aretha Franklin - The Atlantic Albums Collection

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Incomplete but still fantastic

This box contains Aretha Franklin's greatest early work – and therefore her greatest work, in my view.  The woman is a phenomenon and is rightly loved and respected by millions (including me) as a genuine giant of music.  This box contains some of the best and some of the most important and influential soul music ever recorded and further comment from me on the music itself would be irrelevant and probably an impertinence.

What you may like to know is that the box is not a complete collection of Aretha's Atlantic recordings.  For clarity I have listed the contents at the end of this review.  Five post-1974 albums are missing: With Everything I Feel In Me, You, Sweet Passion, Almighty Fire and La Diva.  It's debatable how much of a loss this is, but it does seem like a missed opportunity to issue a definitive, complete collection of Aretha's entire Atlantic output.

Nevertheless, this remains a magnificent collection.  (And it comes as a welcome reminder after last year's frankly dismal Great Diva Classics album.)  The sound quality seems fine to me, so if like me you want CD versions of your old vinyl albums and you want to fill in some gaps in your collection, or if you just want a box of superb music by one of the true Greats of the last 50 years, I can warmly recommend this.

The albums:

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You

Aretha Arrives

Aretha Now

Lady Soul

Aretha in Paris

Soul ’69

This Girl’s in Love with You

Spirit in the Dark

Live at Fillmore West [Deluxe]

Young, Gifted and Black

Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings

Let Me in Your Life

Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of The Sky)

Sparkle

Rare & Unreleased Recordings from the Golden Reign of the Queen of Soul

Oh Me Oh My: Aretha Live in Philly, 1972

The Wainwright Sisters - Songs in the Dark

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but not great

I like this album, but I can't get quite as excited about it as some other reviewers.  I love Lucy Wainwright Roche's work and I was looking forward to this collaboration with Martha very much.  It's good, but not quite as special as I had hoped.

The performances are great.  Both sisters sing beautifully and the combination of Lucy's pure soprano and Martha's slightly breathier, darker-toned voice is simply lovely throughout the album.  There are some very nice harmonies and the minimal backing suits the atmosphere very well, so the overall sound of the album is really nice. 

My reservations lie in the material, and a slight sameness of sound throughout.  There's a very similar feel to many of these songs – five tracks have a title containing the word lullaby and several others are cradle songs of one sort or another.  There is variety in the tone of the lyrics, but I could have done with a bit more variation in musical tone to go with it, even if there is that overall theme.  Even Long Lankin, the traditional bloodthirsty murder ballad, sounds rather gentle and lovely; it's beautifully performed, but I'm not sure the setting is right for the content.  End Of The Rainbow is one of Richard Thompson's bleakest, most pessimistic songs (which means it's *really* bleak and pessimistic) and perhaps some of its impact is lost because of the very beautiful treatment it gets here.

I know it seems perverse to complain about how beautiful everything sounds; it's just that although individually each song is very lovely, after a few tracks I really do begin to yearn for a little variation and as an entire album I think this doesn’t quite get it right.

Don't let me put you off.  Plenty of people love the whole thing and it's certainly a very classy piece of performance and production.  I'd suggest you try it and judge for yourself, but as a whole album I didn't find this quite as great as I had hoped.

Sara Syms - Way Back Home

Rating: 3/5

Review:
OK, but nothing special, I'm afraid

I took a chance with this.  I hadn't heard Sara Syms before but I listened to some samples and liked what I heard enough to try the whole album.  Sadly, it didn't really live up to its promise.

Sara Syms has a good voice and sings very well.  She has a good band here, too, but the whole thing sounds just a bit ordinary.  I think the problem is really in the material, which is Americana with a country tinge.  They are perfectly decent songs, but to me they sound a bit generic, so nothing stands out either melodically or lyrically.  As a result, this just rather fades into the background for me with nothing really to hold my attention for long.

There's nothing actually wrong with the album; it's well performed and produced, it sounds perfectly decent and I doubt whether anyone with an interest in this genre would dislike it.  I certainly don't dislike it, but it just doesn't stand out in any way. There's a lot of good Americana around at the moment and we are very blessed with excellent female singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment;  I find this very ordinary by comparison, I'm afraid.  Others may well like this more than I do, but personallyI can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

(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 and That Kind Of Girl
Emily Barker - Dear River and The Toerag Sessions
Natalie Merchant - Natalie Merchant and Paradise Is There
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

Buffy Sainte-Marie – Power In the Blood
Kris Delmhorst - Blood Test

Ana Egge – Bright Shadow

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

Ruth Moody – These Wilder Things)

Suzanne Vega - In Concert (1993)

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine 1993 live set

This is excellent.  Suzanne Vega is a genuinely great singer and songwriter and she is a very fine live performer.  This is a 1993 recording of a concert in California and a glance at the track list will tell you most of what you need to know: great songs from the time which are very nicely arranged and well performed by a good, tight band.  Vega herself is in excellent voice and the recording quality is good – clear and well balanced with a well-judged level of audience noise to give a feel of the live atmosphere without being too intrusive.

My only slight reservation about this is whether I really need another live Suzanne Vega album after the excellent 2012 Barbican album and the recent release of the 1985 Speakeasy concert.  (Not to mention the brilliant Close-Up series which have a live feel much of the time.)  I probably do, actually, but I'm not sure that this really adds much to the Suzanne Vega canon in that there's not much here in the way of performances or insights which we don't already have available.

This is still a 5-star album for the quality of its material, performances and sound, so it's a personal matter, really, and no-one will be disappointed with this.  Oh, go on – you know you want to.

John Renbourn - The Attic Tapes

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good early Renbourn

This is a very good album of early John Renbourn, compiled from tapes found in a mate's attic, apparently.  Nice find!  Renbourn is on fine form and the sound is surprisingly good.

A look at the track list will probably tell you most of what you need to know – classic 60s guitar work, several pieces soon to be made more famous by Bert Jansch, like Anji and Blues Run The Game.  It's fascinating to hear Renbourn's take on them, and to realise that his and Jansch's styles, while still distinct, were much closer together in the days before Renbourn's deepening interest in traditional and renaissance lute music began to give him such a brilliantly distinctive sound.

These recordings come from a variety of sources, some live in front of an audience, some probably home-made in private.  The sound has survived the years very well and has been well cleaned up and transferred and it's a lovely record of a revered and loved guitarist's early years.  What it comes down to is this, I think:  if you like Renbourn you'll like this, and I can recommend it warmly.

The Specials - Specials (2015 re-issue)

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A great reissue

Just to add my voice to the chorus of praise for this excellent re-release.  Like a lot of people, I remember when the original came out (on vinyl, of course) and the electric effect it had on me.  This is an excellent repackaging of that landmark album with very good digital transfer of the sound and a lot of very valuable extras.  It also now stands as a fine tribute to the great Rico Rodriguez whose magnificent trombone playing did so much to define The Specials' sound.

A great reissue, warmly recommended.

Natalie Merchant - Paradise Is There

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Magnificent

I think this is quite wonderful.  Natalie Merchant has re-recorded the songs from her 1995 classic Tigerlily here; it could be a disastrous move to mess with such fine, well-loved songs, but it works brilliantly.  In her brief, thoughtful notes about this recording Natalie Merchant describes the profound impact which the originals of these songs had on many people, describing them as "small, courageous things that spoke about being human, about being flawed, betrayed, devoted, and bereaved."  That's exactly what they are, and their character is beautifully served by the arrangements and performances here.

The arrangements are beautiful, I think – superbly balanced, largely acoustic and very sensitive to the material.  The band is excellent throughout.  Many songs feature strings, but this is a world away from the overbearing string-wash which swamps so many arrangements with what is effectively acoustic filler; there is just a string quartet who play superbly, and what they play is genuine music.  In The Letter, for example, Natalie is accompanied by just the quartet, and what they play reminds me in places of the magnificent slow movement of Beethoven's A minor quartet Op.132 which I think is among the greatest of all music, so we're getting very, very good stuff here.

Natalie's singing is just magical.  She is one of those rare artists who can combine music, lyrics and performance to break your heart with a single phrase, and she's on superb form here.  That haunting voice is full of simple sincerity and she has the skill to make these 20-year-old songs speak freshly. At one point, for example, her voice fades and almost breaks up on the words "seven years."  The effect is heart-piercing, and it's a brilliant and courageous decision not to re-take it with a more conventionally acceptable delivery.  The album is shot through with of such moments and I find these performances absolutely spellbinding.

I simply cannot fault this album.  I was a pretty dubious before I heard this about what is effectively a remake of a classic album, but I was quite wrong - it's a very worthy successor to her brilliant self titled album, which I thought that was one of the best albums of 2014.  I think this is among the best of 2015.  It's truly excellent, and very warmly recommended.

Kevin Brown - Book Of Skies

Rating: 3/5

Review:
OK, but nothing special

I hadn't heard of Kevin Brown before but was persuaded to try this album by a rave review by Terry Roland on No Depression which said that Book Of Skies was "a strong contender for one of the best releases of Americana music by a singer-songwriter this year."  I'm afraid that for me it certainly isn't.

This is an album of nice, tastefully arranged songs: acoustic guitar, gentle fiddle, subtle banjo, a bit of pedal steel…you get the picture.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of it, but it's just rather ordinary.  The material is OK, with the odd decent line; High Horse, for example, deals with the damage done by entrenched political attitudes.  It's not bad, but it lacks much in the way of real bite either lyrically or musically, and I felt the same pretty well throughout the album.  At a time when there's so much decent Americana around, this certainly didn’t stand out from the crowd for me. 

In a year which has seen the release of really fine work by people like Jason Isbell, Emily Barker, Patty Griffin, Ana Egge and plenty of others, I'm afraid this is nowhere near contending for best Americana album.  I think it's OK but nothing more, and I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.

Edie Brickell & Steve Martin - So Familiar

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good but not brilliant

This is a good bluegrass album although to me it doesn't quite have the quality of Edie Brickell and Steve Martin's previous album, Love Has Come For You.

Most people are aware by now that Steve Martin may be most famous as a comedy actor, but he's a genuine, high-class bluegrass banjo player, too.  His skill has been clear on previous albums and is evident here, too, with some very fine picking.  Edie Brickell is a terrific singer and has a perfect voice and delivery for this material, I think: very slightly husky but absolutely clear and with the skill and experience to put a song over very well indeed.  The Steep Canyon Rangers are invariably excellent and provide tight, solid backing here.

My reservations lie chiefly in the material, which I think is just a little…well…bland, I suppose.  Previous work has had real, rootsy feel and a very distinct character.  This album is good, but the material sounds rather similar to quite a lot of other stuff around at the moment, with little in the way of real distinctness.  This isn't helped by a slightly generic feel to the production which further nudges this back toward the middle of the road.

I don't want to be too critical – this is an album of decent music played by very good musicians, but I don't think I'll be playing this as often as Love Will Come For you or the live album.  For me, So Familiar is good but not brilliant.