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.