Archive | August, 2014

Album review – Kristyna Myles: Pinch Me Quick!

17 Aug

The Paris Match: Myles gives Weller’s classic a cinematic gloss and a touch of Bacharach

Pinch Me Quick! What adult pop should sound like in 2014

Pinch Me Quick! What adult pop should sound like in 2014

Former Radio 5 Live Busker of the Year Kristyna Myles has pulled out all the stops with her debut album, Pinch Me Quick! And with a generous 14 tracks of articulate and soulful pop, it’s a polished piece of work, overseen by Grammy award winning producer Ken Nelson.

Lush strings and horns weave their way through the arrangements, providing a rich setting for Myles’s fluid vocals. Soul influences dominate and are reflected in the ease with which she extemporises the melody, mercifully swerving the kind of melismatic excesses that send X Factor judges into clichéd ecstasy, and focusing on lyrical clarity.

She has co-written many of the tracks with a tasty set of collaborators, including Judie Tzuke and David Goodes (“You’ve Changed” and the bluesy “Big Love” are two of the best songs on the album, edgy and urgent), and Ben Williams (“Uninvited”, “Setback” and the country-tinged “Stay With Me” are subtle, shaded ballads about defiance and the solace of intimacy).

Elsewhere, ”Make it Right” and “Betrayal” are two solo numbers which change the tempo of the album, weaving a thoughtful and impassioned personal thread into the mix. And a couple of songs written with Tamra Keenan –“Just Three Little Worlds” and “I’m Not Going Back” – are earworm anthems equal to anything that we’ve heard from Adele or Emili Sandé so far.

The only non-Myles song is Paul Weller’s “The Paris Match”, a cover of the Style Council classic which has already earned Weller’s praise. Eloquent and fatalistic, it’s a beautiful, cinematic treatment with a touch of Bacharach in the arrangement.

Pinch Me Quick! seems a cheeky title for an album that is actually a multi-faceted exploration of life experiences and emotions – what proper, grown-up pop should sound like in 2014.

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Album review: Kate Dimbleby and friends: Love Comes Again

16 Aug

She’s gonna live the life… Kate Dimbleby gives it some of that Mahalia soul

Love Comes Again: fabulously eclectic and not a single bum note

Love Comes Again: fabulously eclectic and not a single bum note

Imagine, if you will, a voice with a light jazzy edge reminiscent of Peggy Lee. Then throw in a dash of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, burnish it with Joan Baez’s molten serenity, and you’ll end up with something like the sound of Kate Dimbleby.

After 20 years  at the mic, of course she’s her own woman and comparisons can be fatuous. First and foremost, she sounds like Kate Dimbleby. But I just wanted to give a sense of the range and texture that she has developed during that time – and offer the suggestion that despite her dynastic moniker, she is one of a considerable band of British female singers who should be much more widely known than they are.

That’s the curse of a recording industry that is still dominated by a few big labels, a handful of over-powerful executives, and relentlessly compartmentalised marketing. But Dimbleby says that during the course of putting her new album – Love Comes Again – together, she quickly realised that she doesn’t make records or perform for the money. 

Thankfully, this hasn’t precluded previous success; she has been widely acclaimed for her interpretations of Peggy Lee and Dory Previn songs, in particular. But there is a sense of liberation in an eclectic set of tracks that embraces Simon and Garfunkel, Mahalia Jackson, Rupert Holmes, The Divine Comedy, Cab Calloway and that doyenne of renegade singer/songwriters Kirsty MacColl, without striking a single bum note.

This is an album of sparkling quality, presented by Dimbleby ‘and friends’ who include Malcolm Edmonstone on a defiant version of Jackson’s “I’m Gonna Live the Life I sing About in my Song”, and The London Quartet on the sparklingly humorous “Everybody Eats When They Come to my House”- a number that rings with Lee-like inflections.

Love Comes Again is a celebration of great song-writing, selected by a singer who is completely at ease with the material. The mood shifts eloquently from regretful shades of blue (“Hello Always Ends in Goodbye”) to that poignant plea for compassion, “Be Not Too Hard”, and on to the gloriously swelling cynicism of MacColl’s “England 2 Columbia 0”. In Dimbleby’s hands, this tango ballad becomes a triumphant anti-torch song.  The penultimate track, “O Come All Ye Faithful”, is not the carol but a rich, complex look at the human condition with music by Dimbleby herself. Fabulous.

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Album review – Emily Smith: Echoes

16 Aug

“My Darling Boy”: Emily Smith explores a new Scottish sound

Echoes: Emily Smith pushes at the boundaries of genre and interpretation

Echoes: Emily Smith pushes at the boundaries of genre and interpretation

Emily Smith has the kind of kind of voice that makes an effortless bridge between traditional folk and the moodier, noir-ish tropes of today’s folk idiom. And she’s in great company. From Ange Hardy and Lucy Ward to Eliza Carthy and Kathryn Williams, we are living in a golden age of young female singers who are constantly pushing at the boundaries of genre and interpretation, creating fresh sounds that are rooted in the ancient craft of telling richly textured stories in song.

Smith’s latest album, Echoes, is a case in point – a collection of 10 traditional and contemporary Scottish songs reinvented with a 21st-century sophistication that honours the heritage they represent while hinting at the growing influence of Americana and the great troubadours of our time.

 For a second, the twanging guitar that heralds the opening track, “Reres Hill”, seems determined to drop you somewhere in the heat of the Deep South before the Celtic harmonies sweep you back to Caledonia. The arrangements are lush and plangent, the pace assured and the emotional connection between the voice and material is insistent and compelling.

Smith describes the album as heralding a “new Scottish sound” – and Echoes has the discrete confidence of a singer who is completely at ease with the organic arc of a career that has come a long way in the decade and more since she was crowned BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year.

There is an aching beauty in her phrasing, underpinned by the playing of a great band of guest musicians, including Jerry Douglas, Aoife O’Donovan and Rory Butler, which frequently tugs at the heartstrings  with a visceral urgency. The range of the material is absorbing, from the intimate tale of “The Sower’s Song” to the epic legend of “King Orfeo”, from the poignant account of “The Final Trawl” to the deceptive jauntiness of “Twa Sisters” – a story that ends in murder.

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