Karen Dalton - It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A true hidden gem

I spend quite a lot of time poking about in obscure corners of late 60s/early 70s music. A lot of the stuff I hear deserves to be obscure, to be honest, but occasionally I come across a gem like this which makes the search worthwhile.

This is an album largely of covers, sung superbly and excellently accompanied. Dalton’s voice has much of the cracked, slightly fragile-sounding beauty of Billie Holiday, and she can sing with the same intensity. Really – she can, and I know what a big statement that is. I find this spellbinding to listen to, with stripped back, excellently played accompaniment which is very well produced to give a great, almost torch-singer sound.

This is one of those rare albums which genuinely deserves the tag “hidden gem.” I’m delighted to have discovered it and can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Dick Gaughan - An Introduction to Dick Gaughan

Rating 5/5

Review:
An excellent selection

The “An Introduction to...” series is uniformly excellent and this compilation of some of Dick Gaughan’s finest tracks recorded for Topic is no exception. The sound quality is excellent and it’s a thoughtful, representative selection showing Gaugan’s fine voice and classy guitar work.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start with Dick Gaughan, you can’t go wrong here. Very warmly recommended.

V.A. - Hallelujah; The Songs Of Leonard Cohen

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Some very good stuff here

There is a good deal of truth in the old saying that no-one can sing a Leonard Cohen song the way Leonard Cohen couldn’t, but there are some very good covers here, along with some not-so-good ones.

Really, how you respond to these recordings is a matter of individual taste; another reviewer singles out Barb Jungr’s Everybody Knows for special praise, whereas I really don’t like it. I suspect that’s the way it will be for most of this album – people will just disagree about what they like, if anything. For me, it was better than I expected: I have known and loved Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah for years (while my sister hated it), I was very pleasantly surprised by Rufus Wainwright and Dion’s contributions and liked a lot of the others, but – again surprisingly – hated the great Nina Simone’s version of Suzanne. And so it goes.

Taste here is likely to be so individual that my recommendation may not be much use, but for what it’s worth I think this is an album I like a lot overall and which is well worth having.

Amory Kane - Memories of Time Unwound

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Uninspiring

Sometimes poking about in the dusty corners of late 1960s music unearths a hidden gem. Sadly, most of the time it doesn’t, and this is one of those times. I found Memories of Time Unwound pretty forgettable; there’s nothing actively wrong with it and the musicianship is good – as you’d expect with the excellent Dave Pegg on bass – but the material is nothing special, I’m afraid. There was an awful lot of this kind of stuff around then; most of it just washed over me at the time without leaving much impression and this does the same now.

I don’t want to be too harsh, but this didn’t do anything for me and I can’t really recommend it.