Judie Tzuke, Beverley Craven, Julia Fordham - Woman To Woman

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Lovely sound, but a bit samey

I was looking forward to this album very much. The three fine singers do make a lovely sound together, but overall I found it a bit disappointing.

There is much to like here. Judie Tzuke, Beverley Craven and Julia Fordham are all very good singers and songwriters and they do sound beautiful throughout the album, with lovely harmonies and skilful controlled singing so that their voices blend together very well. The album closes with a fabulous version of Judie’s For You, which transfixed me when I first bought Welcome To The Cruise almost 40 years ago and which I have loved ever since. But…

I’m not that keen on the way that the material combines. Each song is good in its way (and Safe is very good indeed), but there’s rather a sameness about them; they are either about heartbreak of one kind or another or a bit sentimental, so that the whole thing gets just a bit cloying after a while and I could have done with more variety to make it a really successful album.

I don’t mean to carp: Woman To Woman shows some fine work by three really good artists whose work I like and admire. It’s just that, compared with other recent albums by female singer-songwriter trios, like Applewood Road or I’m With Her, I don’t think it has the same impact. Three stars would be very churlish, but I’m sad to say that I can only give this a rather qualified recommendation.

Mason Williams - The Mason Williams Phonographic Record

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Pretty terrible

Well, like most other people, I loved Classical Gas when it originally appeared so I tried this album to see what Mason Williams’s other work was like. Frankly, it’s pretty terrible.

The album is a mish-mash of stuff, with lots of “quirky” little bits on it which feel like a bit of a desperate attempt to pad the thing out to an acceptable length, and some full length songs which are, at best, undistinguished. Williams had a reasonable voice, but the material is pretty dreadful. When I was about 18 I am ashamed to say that I wrote a couple of songs for a girlfriend, which were absolutely terrible and which I have mercifully all but forgotten now. This album sounds a bit like those songs given a more lush production – weak melodies, slightly mystical-sounding but almost meaningless lyrics...you get the idea.

I’m sorry to be so critical, but I really don’t think much of this album. My advice is to get the single of Classical Gas and avoid the album.

Rough Guide To Barrelhouse Blues

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another fantastic compilation from Rough Guides

This is yet another fantastic compilation from Rough Guides.

Barrelhouse was a piano-based blues form which morphed into boogie-woogie and is real good time music. As ever, Rough Guides have collected the obscure and the well-known to form an authoritative and hugely enjoyable from the rough and ready (but terrific) beginnings to the sophistication of piano geniuses like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson.

The sound is as good as can be expected from recordings of this vintage, and sometimes surprisingly excellent and you simply can’t go wrong here. If you have any interest in this sort of music, don’t hesitate – this is brilliant.

Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ricky Scaggs - The Three Pickers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An outstanding album

It hardly needs saying that this is an outstanding album. These three were among the very greatest bluegrass players and there is some astonishing virtuosity here, plus a good variety of material and even a guest appearance by the great Alison Krauss. The sound quality is very good and the atmosphere of the concert is great.

Personally I find some of the down-home chat a bit cloying, but that’s a tiny reservation. The music is a marvel (as an amateur guitarist I just sit and wonder how what Doc Watson does is humanly possible) and I can recommend Three Pickers very warmly indeed.

Annie Oakley - Words We Mean

Rating: 3/5

Review:
OK but nothing special

Words We Mean is OK, but I’m afraid I don’t think it’s anything very special. There have been some terrific albums by female trios recently, most notably Applewood Road and I’m With Her, but this isn’t really in the same league.

The songs are pleasant enough, but the same musical tropes appear an awful lot, to the point when I began to think “modulation to the relative minor coming up...” and it invariably did. Similarly, the lyrics are perfectly OK but not that inspiring, with an awful lot of repetition and by the time I got to four identical repetitions of “Oh-oh-oh-oh” at toward the end of the title track it began to get a bit much.

In fairness, the singing and harmonies are good and the relatively straightforward instrumental work is fine as far as it goes, but it’s all pretty similar throughout and a bit more variety would have helped a lot. There’s nothing wrong with the album and it has its moments, but I don’t think it adds up to all that much in the end.

Lucy Wainwright Roche - Little Beast

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An outstanding album

I think Little Beast is an outstanding album. I liked There’s A Last Time For Everything very much, but after a five-year wait, this is even better.

Little Beast is an intimate, often self-revelatory album. It is permeated throughout with heartache, but the combination of excellent songs, thoughtful, intelligent lyrics and fine musicianship means that there is an atmosphere of quiet, austere loveliness and it never becomes turgid or depressing. Her songs deal with all kinds of emotional troubles from the break-up of a loving relationship in Quit With Me to a troubled relationship with drugs in the extraordinary Heroin, which contains the lyrics:

Some things that I want to say

Aren’t survivable, or advisable

Like “Happy birthday, heroin,”

But God, how I loved you

And how I still do.

That stopped me in my tracks on first hearing and the album is full of such pieces of first-class writing. As well as such superbly expressed honesty, it seems to me that Lucy Wainwright Roche has something of Leonard Cohen’s gift for writing sometimes allusive, obscure lyrics which somehow get right to the heart of things. She has a fine, haunting voice and the production is brilliant, I think. It is often minimal but has a terrific feel for the music so that each song is set off to it’s very best.

Lucy Wainwright Roche has been rather overshadowed by her two more flamboyant siblings, but she’s a very fine singer-songwriter who deserves to be much better known. Little Beast is a bit of genuine class and is one of my favourite albums so far this year. Very, very warmly recommended.

Eric Clapton - Happy Xmas

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A mixed bag

Well, it could have been worse. I was rather dreading Happy Xmas even though I’ve been a Clapton admirer for over 50 years now, and if it had been by anyone else I wouldn’t have touched this with a tinsel-tipped bargepole. With a very few notable exceptions (Thea Gilmore, Phil Spector and Kate Rusby, for example) Christmas albums are almost invariably frightful. Happy Xmas is frightful in places, but I’m pleased to say that there’s some good stuff on it, too.

The best bits of this album are three very decent blues tracks in different styles: Christmas Tears, Lonesome Christmas and Merry Christmas Baby. There are some sentimental but bearable seasonal songs and some truly dreadful things like Away In A Manger, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Jingle Bells, (which is a vacuous techno-dance sort of thing). Given that I was braced for the whole thing to be unspeakably awful, I was mildly pleasantly surprised that at least some of it is good.

Ericophiles like me will certainly want this, but the best I can say of it is that it’s good in places. Your taste may differ from mine, of course, and Eric has earned the right to record whatever he wants, but my advice is to be prepared for a lot of rather grim stuff between the highlights. Even as a believer that EC remains a major deity, I can only give this a lukewarm recommendation.