Ruth Moody - These Wilder Things

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good

I am new to Ruth Moody's music but am very glad I discovered this album. It is very good, and parts of it are truly excellent. It is tuneful, well performed and is exceptionally well arranged and produced, making it a pleasure to listen to.

The album is pleasingly varied. Overall it has an Americana-type feel, but opens - courageously and very successfully - with Trouble and Woe, which sounds like a traditional Appalachian tune with banjo and minimal backing. This is followed in contrast by excellent One and Only, a beautiful, band-backed modern Americana song, and the shifting mood continues throughout - one of the album's great strengths.

Another great feature is the arrangements, which are brilliant in places. Often restrained touches add immense atmosphere and character to a song - the use of minimal strings on One and Only, and the couple of brief appearances of a Brass Band sound on the fabulous title track are a couple of examples. The musicians are uniformly excellent. Ruth Moody herself is a very good singer and musician and the rest here do her proud. They are technically excellent and get the feel of the music exactly right.

I have to say that not every track is a gem. I'm not bonkers about the version of Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark, and the closing track Nothing Without Love is a pretty ordinary song, but the good bits (which is most of the album) are really, really good.

I tried this album because Mark Knopfler makes a guest appearance (unmistakeably playing and singing harmony on the lovely Pockets). It has been a delightful discovery for me and I warmly recommend it.

Neil Young - A Letter Home

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Thoroughly infuriating

I have loved much of Neil Young's music for four and a half decades now, and I admire him enormously as a musician and songwriter. But - oh Lord! - he can be a real cross-grained cuss sometimes. It's part of what makes his great stuff great, but it also means we get things like this, which is a frankly infuriating album.

What's so annoying is that it's a good idea, and, as far as I can tell, I like Neil's performances of this mix of covers of very good songs. But...he's had a whim to record the whole lot in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph recording booth, which is effectively a poor quality microphone in a phone booth with extremely crude means of recording. The result sounds like a badly recorded 78, pressed off-centre and then used for generations of kids to eat their lunch off. It's awful. I can just about cope with the hiss, the scratches and the fades but the variable speed making the pitch wander is almost unbearably painful at times, as is the ear-piercing treble distortion on some of the harmonica.

I suppose after the brilliant Psychedelic Pill and the joy of hearing the great early performances on At The Cellar Door we were just about due for something pretty grim, and we've got it. The thing is, Neil himself won't give a hoot about what we all think of this. It's what he felt like doing so he did it. We can take it or leave it - it's behind him now and he's on to the next thing he feels like doing, whatever that is. I've got to admire him for it, even if I don't always like the results.

"I sing the song because I love the man, I know that some of you don't understand..." Well, I love the man, but this time I don't understand. However, like me, I'm sure Neil's legions of admirers will want to hear this anyway (although I'd recommend listening to some samples first so you know what you're getting). Personally, I won't want to hear it often, but I'll happily just chalk this one up to experience. He'll almost certainly put out something really good before too long but, however much it pains me to say it, I really can't recommend this album.

Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer, Different park

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent album

I tried this debut album by Kacey Musgraves because it has created a considerable stir in the USA and is attracting a lot of attention here, too. I'm delighted that I did because it is excellent and well worth all the fuss made of it.

Musgraves has created a country album of very good songs with lovely, singable tunes, nice harmonies and a good variety of moods. She has a fine voice, she can put a song across very well and her band are excellent - solid, sensitive and restrained much of the time which lends more power to the songs than over-the-top performance and production.

What really makes this album stand out, though, is Musgraves' lyrics. There are a number of reasonably conventional love songs and lamentations of a broken heart, all well done and enjoyable, but she also thoroughly subverts most of the attitudes inherent in much country music. She sings of the hypocrisy and small-minded bitchiness of small town life. I truly admire the guts and independence of mind it must have taken for a young Texas woman to write country songs with lines like:
"It don't matter if you don't believe,
Come Sunday morning you'd better be there in the front row
Like you're supposed to..."
(in the excellent Merry-Go-Round), or for her to write a song about wanting uncommitted sex in It Is What It Is (which her grandmother apparently insists on calling The Slut Song) which, if written and sung by a man would raise few eyebrows but quietly and brilliantly undermines the hypocrisy in attitudes to women and sex.

I especially like that Musgraves somehow manages to do all this with a wit and a warmth of heart which means that the album is anything but a prickly polemic and is a pleasure to listen to. I laughed out loud when I first heard the opening of the fabulous Follow Your Arrow:
"If you save yourself for marriage you're a bore;
You don't save yourself for marriage you're a who-o-o-rrible person..."
which is beautifully delivered and works perfectly in a Texan accent. It's a great song and there are others on the album which are just as good.

A few people really stand out from the slew of quite good country/Americana recordings at the moment. Kacey Musgraves is one of them. I think this is a terrific album and recommend it very warmly indeed.

David Bowie 1947-2016

David Bowie 1947-2016

Go well, David, and thank you.

I will try not to mourn too hard, but to remember with pleasure a man who shaped my musical development and whose music was woven into my very bones as they grew.

Let's celebrate your true greatness and be thankful we had you for 69 years.  Let's dance.

Kirsty MacColl - A New England

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific collection

This is a really good collection. Kirsty MacColl was a terrific songwriter and a great performer of her own and other people's material, and much of the best of her is collected here.

I think MacColl's greatest strength was her ability to produce a hugely enjoyable song which is often both lyrically and musically extremely witty but still conveys genuine, important emotions. There's A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop is the classic example (and remains one of my favourite pop records ever) but there's plenty else - in the excellent England 2, Colombia 0, for example - and, frankly, anyone who can write a song called Don't Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim (which is brilliant) deserves everyone's attention.

Her covers, too, show a real intensity, always leavened and somehow deepened by a twinkle in Kirsty's eye. Ray Davies's Days and Billy Bragg's A New England are both masterpieces, in my view, and others are very good indeed.

The remastering on this album seems very good to me, with excellent sound but the original feel of the tracks preserved. I suspect that if you're looking at this page then you're already a Kirsty MacColl fan and don't need any encouragement from me, but for what it's worth I warmly recommend this as a fine collection of great songs by a great writer and performer.

Bangles - Sweetheart of the Sun

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable album

You've just got to love the Bangles, bless 'em.   They have recorded some great songs, well performed with sincerity but often a knowing little twinkle in the eye which have rightly lasted for decades in our consciousness and a couple of which are still in my mp3 Favourites file on my phone.  This album is right in that tradition, and while there's nothing here of the utter pop genius of Walk Like An Egyptian or If He Knew What She Wants, it's a good album of very decent songs, still sung in that distinctive Bangles style and with good, appropriate 21^st-Century production.

This isn't a ground-breaking classic, but that's not what the Bangles are about.  It's an album which you stick on occasionally and just enjoy (and often smile along to, in my case).  Recommended.

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez - Young Love Vol.1

Rating: 3/5

Review:
OK, but nothing new


This is OK, but a bit of an oddity.

The first thing to say is that it is *not* duets between Dylan and Baez, but a collection of very early solo performances by each of them, interspersed throughout the album. The material is largely traditional or covers, and both sound very young – Dylan especially.  The quality is generally pretty good; a little foggy in places, but pretty clear and noise-free.  (The opener, Baez singing Oh Freedom, is terrible, with the sound level varying between normal and almost inaudible.  The rest isn't bad, though, thank heavens.)

The recordings are a mix of studio and live tracks…and that's about all I know.  This is currently an mp3 download only, and it comes with no information about where and when these songs were recorded, nor even what their copyright status is.

As an album, I find this interesting but not great as a musical experience.  It's a bit like Where's Your Gravity, another release of early Dylan with little provenance given; it's quite interesting but doesn't really add much to the canon of either Dylan or Baez.  One for the hardcore fans and completists, I'd say.

Tom Paxton - Redemption Road

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine album

I really wasn't sure what to expect from Tom Paxton these days.  He's heading for 80 now, and some releases by artists at that stage of life haven't been very good, to say the least.  I'm delighted to say that this is really good, with Paxton still doing what he does best: writing good songs with fine, simple tunes and good, direct lyrics.  This is a whole album full of them, and they're very enjoyable.

It's quite a varied album, but for much of it there is a sense of looking back on life with a clear, honest eye at loves, mistakes, trials and victories.  He does it very well, with a lovely song about the optimism of youth in Time To Spare, or a genuinely affecting story of lasting love in Ireland, for example.  There's also (of course) a really good political song, "If the poor don't matter, then neither do I," which makes the point very poignantly, and The Battle Of The Sexes is a genuinely funny number (even if I don't accept its premise!) which begins:

"Back in the Garden of Eden

That never needed weedin'

Adam made himself a new straw hat,

'Twas all he was wearin'

Eve just sat there starin'

Sayin' "Adam, you can't go out dressed like that…"

Clearly, Tom Paxton hasn't lost his gift for a great lyric, and that gift shows throughout the album.

Getting on for half a century ago, The Last Thing On My Mind was one of the first songs I ever learned to play and sing, so I have been very fond of Tom Paxton ever since but I rather lost track of him over the years.  I'm delighted to re-make his acquaintance with this album; it's really good and warmly recommended.