Pink Floyd - The Endless River

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A lovely album

I think this is a lovely album. It's not a ground-breaking classic like Dark Side Of The Moon, Meddle or The Wall, say, (although there are musical references to all of them) nor does it have individual songs of the brilliance and beauty of Wish You Were Here or Shine On You Crazy Diamond, but in total it is a fine album with some genuinely beautiful music on it.

Put together from off-cuts from The Division Bell and then heavily re-worked and edited, this has been billed as a tribute to the late Rick Wright - and it's s fine tribute. There is plenty of his trademark keyboard sound, along with a lot of truly fabulous guitar work from David Gilmour. He's a great guitarist and there are very few people who can bring that degree of beauty and aching melancholy from the instrument. He's on fine form here, as is Nick Mason whose drumming perhaps doesn't get the recognition it deserves in creating the Floyd sound.

This is almost an ambient album in many ways, although there's more to it than that. There is an unbroken sequence of fairly brief tracks which are varied but hold together well as a unit. There are almost no vocals, just Steven Hawking speaking on Talkin' Hawkin' and a genuine song in the last track, Louder Than Words. Both are about the importance of settling disputes through talking and, appropriately, it is here that the absence of Roger Waters as a songwriter shows most clearly, because for me neither the melody nor lyrics are up to Waters' standard. It's a tiny blemish - not even a blemish at all, really, just a reminder - and the album as a whole is really good, I think.

This won't convert you if you don't like Pink Floyd, but if you do I think you'll really like this album. It's lovely music, beautifully played and produced, and I recommend it warmly.

JJ Cale - Anyway The Wind Blows

Rating: 5/5

Review:
The great man's greatest

This is a wonderful album. I have loved JJ Cale since I first came across him in the mid-70s. I still have his first 8 albums on vinyl and was looking for something to play in the car. This is nearly perfect as a compilation album, with almost all my favourites (no River Runs Deep, Gypsy Man or Katy Cool Lady, though) and not a duff track among them. Almost all the greats are there - and they really are great.

You can't possibly go wrong with this double CD. If you already know and like JJ Cale then it's bound to have 50 songs you like (and many which you love), and if you don't you've nothing to lose. An absurdly low price and you'd have to be made of stone not to be seduced by Crazy Mama and After Midnight. It's worth it for these two alone, and there are another 48, many of which are just as good.

Recommended in the strongest possible terms. Risk a few quid - you won't regret it.

Bryan Ferry - Avonmore

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff from the old smoothie

I am rather surprised to find that I really like this album. I wasn't expecting all that much, but I thought it was good on first hearing and it has grown even better with a lot of listens since. Ferry is still great singer and this is a star-studded album, with a well-publicised array of terrific guest musicians and singers and a fine producer (along with Ferry himself) in Rhett Davies. The result is a bit of class, I think.

The style and feel remind me rather of the Roxy Music albums Flesh And Blood and Avalon. 35 years on, the sound is richer and the production more modern, but there are still the beautiful vocals from Ferry and great harmonies, a fine selection of singable songs, enough harmonic originality to keep you interested, a compellingly danceable beat even in the slower numbers, and that familiar, distinctive air of yearning, melancholy and occasional real beauty pervades the whole album.

The material is very good. The eight songs written by Ferry are well up to standard musically, and they are lyrically pretty good, too. There are weaknesses: starting a song with the line "Midnight train rolling down the track" is bordering on criminally lazy, even though it's a good song musically, and I'll bet you can guess what the rhyme is, too. However, most of it is much better than that; Driving Me Wild, for example, contains lines like
"I'm dealing with a feeling
That nobody knows
With the kindness of ravens,
The murder of crows"
which I find very arresting even if it might well be pretty meaningless.

The album closes with two covers, both of which I was dreading for different reasons: Sondheim's Send In The Clowns just because it's Send In The <expletive deleted> Clowns again, and Robert Palmer's Johnny And Mary because I think it is one of the very greatest songs of the 80s and I didn't want to see it messed with. In fact, both are excellent. Ferry takes a few more liberties with the melodies than I'd like, but overall they are fine, sincere and meaningful new takes on both songs - exactly what makes a good cover version, I think.

Sorry to go on, but I was genuinely expecting this just to be OK at best. In fact, I think it's really good and I thought it was worth trying to explain why. In a nutshell, it's good material, excellently performed, arranged and produced. If in doubt, I'd suggest you listen to a few samples. If you like the sound of them, don't hesitate - this is a fine album which I recommend very warmly.

Cher - 3614 Jackson Highway

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
An interesting period piece



This is a re-release of the original 1969 album with no extras. Note that it is *not* the Rhino release from 2001 which had a dozen or so bonus tracks and singles added but which is almost impossible to find at the time of writing.

As an album...well, it's OK. It's a reminder of what a good singer Cher was, even without the gloss and electronics she went in for later. She has a fine natural voice which she uses very well, there's a good band with a quality horn section added at times and as a period piece it's decent music making. Frankly, though, the material lets it down.

It's largely good material: Dylan, Stills & Young, Otis Redding...they're classy names. However, if you're going to cover a song which a great artist has already recorded in a classic version, you need to do something very different or very special, and Cher doesn't really manage either here. After four and a half decades the generic late-60s sound and arrangements sound pretty bland, and much of the real soul, passion or eroticism is drained out of these songs. Dock Of The Bay has none of Otis's agonised hopelessness and "Lay Baby Lay" (!) lacks any of Dylan's laid back, sexy delivery, for example, and the same is true pretty well throughout.

For me this is an interesting collection to look back on, but a good singer is largely wasted here, I think. It's available pretty cheaply so you may want to give it a try, but it's not one I'll be taking out and playing much, I'm afraid.

Kelly Pardekooper - House Of Mud

Rating 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

Sometimes – rarely – I stumble across an album or artist which makes me wonder why on earth I hadn't heard of them before.  This is one such album from 2002 – a completely random recent find for me, and it turns out to be quite brilliant.

Kelly Pardekooper, as well as from possessing an absolutely outstanding name, is a terrific singer and songwriter.  It's sort of blues/country Americana, but very varied.  In various places I hear echoes of JJ Cale, Tony Joe White, Tom Petty, Jason Isbell…even people like The Beatles and Lou Reed seem to lurk faintly in some places.  Pardekooper is his own man, though, and this is an album of individual class.  He writes songs on familiar themes of lust, love, home, the country working life: it's not groundbreaking stuff, but it's really, really good.

The songs vary in atmosphere from the magnificently restrained, atmospheric Can't Go There, through the haunting, singable Drown In Alcohol to the more rocky, incredibly infectious Hayseed Girl (which gets me moving every single time).  From just Pardekooper and his guitar to full band, everything here is just a bit of class, I think.  It's hard to put my finger on exactly why because nothing is fantastically original, but a little like JJ Cale, they are unfussy, well crafted songs which carry real sincerity and are played and sung with a straightforward directness which is based in really good but unflashy musicianship.  Pardekooper's singing is just great, with a slightly husky creaky voice that he varies in tone so that it always expresses his mood and meaning beautifully, and the arrangements and production are pitch-perfect, I think.

If, like me, this is the first you've heard of Kelly Pardekooper my advice is to listen to a few samples or find a few songs on YouTube and then snap this up.  It's a terrific album and I'm really looking forward to hearing more of his work.

The Band - Carter Barron Amphitheater, 1976

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fine live album

This live album by The Band is a long overdue release of a fine concert. They were, of course, a magnificent bunch of musicians who were simply brilliant live and this is a worthy addition to their discography.

Recorded only a few months before The Last Waltz, this is still well worth having even for those of us who own and love that classic - arguably one of the greatest live albums ever issued. This is The Band alone without the starry guest list, performing a very good cross section of their greatest songs. Most are simply superb - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and The Weight , for example, have never sounded better or more sincere to my ears - and they sing and play like the geniuses they were almost throughout the album.

There are one or two weaker tracks, I think. King Harvest Will Surely Come plods and clunks a bit and This Wheel's On Fire lacks the real bite and vein of venom it really needs to work perfectly, for example, but overall it's a very fine live album indeed. The sound quality is excellent and the sense of a great band playing brilliantly together is strong. There is almost no talk between songs and the audience noise is mixed well back which I like on an album I will listen to repeatedly, but if you prefer more chat and atmosphere it may possibly be a slight weakness. For me, though, this is a fine record of a very good performance by one of the greatest bands of the 60s and 70s.

It is sobering to remember that Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Levon Helm are all dead now, but this stands as a fine tribute to them and to Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson. Very warmly recommended.

Fleetwood Mac - Original Album classics

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A fabulous set

This is a fabulous set of Fleetwood Mac's first three albums:

Fleetwood Mac (later called "Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac") (1968)

Mr Wonderful (1968)

The Pious Bird of Good Omen (1969)

These are great albums, I think.  I still have my original LPs from when they were first issued and they have stood the test of time extremely well. This is the classic pre-Buckingham/Nicks line-up of Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, and with Danny Kirwan on Pious Bird.  They were a magnificent blues band at this time; the great BB King said of Peter Green that, of all the blues guitarists of that generation, "He was the only one who ever gave me the cold sweats."  You can see why here – there's some magnificent blues playing from Green, with a wonderful tone and beautiful touch.  There's also a good deal of the more knockabout stuff which Jeremy Spencer was keen on – and that's great, too, especially some fabulous, rollicking Elmore James songs.

There's no messing about with "bonus material" here – you just get the original album as they were released, which is just fine with me.  It's excellent as it stands and at this price for 3 CDs (even if they are shortish by modern standards) don't hesitate.  This is an absolutely terrific set.