Hifi Pig

It’s thirty years since the first release of An Inward Revolution on MCA, an album that scored The Big Sound Authority three single releases.

The band came together after a competition in Smash Hits (a British pop magazine) had vocalist Julie Hodwen singing backing vocals with The Jam. The Jam’s Paul Weller put Hodwen together with songwriter Tony Burke and so The Big Sound Authority were born…I vaguely remember them. More »

Whilst it’s been getting progressively more difficult to describe a ‘typical’ 4AD artist in recent years, as a label it has delivered some genuinely superb albums during this time – notably including Daughter’s ‘If You Leave’, Serena-Maneesh’s ‘#2: Abyss In B Minor’ and of course Purity Ring’s 2012 debut ‘Shrines’.

I guess the first – and most obvious – thing to say about ‘Another Eternity’, Purity Ring’s sophomore album, is that it’s ‘business as usual’ – with one or two caveats.  If you enjoyed their debut, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re going to enjoy this one too.  Let’s break it down…  More »

Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin returned last year after a break of 13 years with a cracking new album “Syro”. Less than 6 months later he follows this up with a horse of a totally different colour. Here we find this incredibly creative artist concentrating more on texture, ambience and mood. Similar in many ways to Selected Ambient Works 85-92, here he is  exploring an entirely different avenue to that of Syro. More »

Matt Hales, aka Aqualung, had all but given up his recording career and moved across the pond into production & songwriting.  It’s to our benefit that he had a change of heart along the way.  ‘10 Futures’ is Aqualung’s fifth album (not counting compilations) – and also Hales’ first for five years.  Things are somewhat different for this outing though – something immediately obvious from the track listing and also during the first listen of the album.

What Hales has essentially done is invited a number of the people he’s worked with over the past few years to perform guest vocals on tracks which he’s been baking.  It’s a nice idea.  For those of you who don’t know Aqualung, it’s fair to say that their sound sits somewhere between Coldplay, Guillemots, Keane and possibly even Radiohead.  If you’re new to them, look up the tracks Brighter Than Sunshine or 7 Keys.  Over the years, I’ve recommended the band to a fair few friends and pretty much all of them told me that they couldn’t believe that they hadn’t heard of them and also that they couldn’t stop playing their albums.  More »

On her 2012 album Glad Rag Doll, Diana Krall covered a selection of 1920’s and 30’s jazz standards, inspired by her father’s collection of 78-rpm records. Wallflower, her latest album, takes a similar approach; this time with some of the songs that Krall discovered on vinyl while growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s.

Krall maintains what has become her signature style, a mix of intimate jazz ensemble playing and lush orchestration, bringing in other instrumental elements and production touches to suit the individual songs. If you grew up in the 60’s and 70’s yourself, the bulk of the material here will be instantly familiar to you: there are songs made famous by The Eagles, The Carpenters, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Elton John, 10cc and The Beatles. More »

In Modern Blues, the 11th studio album by The Waterboys, Mike Scott sums up his career to date in a single phrase: “I’m not bitter and I’m no quitter”. Right from their 1983 eponymous debut album, Scott has used The Waterboys as a vehicle to explore his own particular vision – The Big Music. By 1985’s This Is The Sea, Scott had honed The Big Music to a widescreen, anthemic sound that with a just a little bit of compromise could have morphed into arena rock and taken over the world. Instead, Scott hired a fiddle player, decamped to the west coast of Ireland and left world domination to Simple Minds and U2. More »

When deciding which albums to place in my top ten of last year (2014) there were a number that deserved a place without any doubt nor discussion. Mark Kozelek, under the pseudonym Sun Kil Moon, released one of the most emotionally demanding and yet fulfilling albums of the year. On this album Benji, Mark’s 6th solo release, the loves, lives, fights and deaths of a series of people are faced head on. He does not mince words here and the 11 songs are personal tales of all that makes us human in the true sense of the word.  More »

Occasionally, when asked to review a reissue of an album, one discovers a band that failed, for one reason on another, to show up on the radar the first time around. Some of these discoveries are similar to opening a treasure chest that has been gathering dust in a dark corner only to reveal a wealth of (musical) gems. This is definitely the case with this The Woodentops, Before During After Reissue on the One Little Indian label from May 2013.

This 52 track 3CD set includes their first album ‘Giant’, the follow up album, ‘Wooden Foot Cops on the Highway’ (both remixed with additional rarities) and a 3rd CD of other Remixes and Rarities. So all in all an abundance of treasures to explore. Treasures whose value was recognised at the time by such fans as David Bowie (who invited them to support him), Morrissey and Noel Gallagher.

In 1984 Morrissey is reported to have said, “Anyone sane living in this world will realise on hearing ‘Plenty’ that The Woodentops bring with them a new age of enlightenment.” In September 2011 Noel Gallagher curated the cover mount CD for Mojo magazine and elected to include the Woodentops single ‘Why Why Why’. More »

There are those who regard the Lowell George era Little Feat as one of the greatest American bands of the 1970s. Their musical chops and deep soulful funkiness meant that they were as much a live phenomenon as they were a 5 star recording unit.

Some would say that it all came together in the studio on the classic Dixie Chicken album that preceded this one. With Lowell’s idiosyncratic and wildly surreal lyrics and some of the finest songs he had ever written, Dixie Chicken was Lowell’s masterpiece. Feats Don’t fail Me Now is more of a band effort and in many ways is more accessible and enjoyable as a result. More »

You may very well not have heard of this band let alone seen or heard their 1971 album Satori. I feel obliged to put that situation to right because hand on heart this is one of those stellar overlooked gems that ought to be in every rock music collection.

The band formed in Japan in 1968 and are part of the Proto Metal genre that included Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Cream etc. These bands used a combination of blues-rock with psychedelic rock which would later evolve into heavy metal.

Whilst the names of bands like Cream, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf are mostly well known to us there are other lesser known and overlooked groups that demand an appraisal. Without a doubt the Flower Travellin’ Band and especially their first original album Satori demand attention.

Recorded over one day and mixed in another this album is now being re discovered and regarded as an influential album by those fortunate enough to have heard it.  More »

Released in April 2014 by two seasoned lads from Nottingham, Divide and Exit, as the title alone suggests, is akin to musical Marmite – love it or hate it – this will divide the audio marketplace. It is not something you play when Great aunt Maud or the Vicar call around for tea. On the other hand I cannot remember reacting so strongly or positively to anything else since the day I first heard “Neat, Neat, Neat” by the Damned tearing out of a cheap transistor radio back in 1977.

On that occasion my musical world imploded, like that of so many others, and this exciting new music we called Punk caused an essential musical appraisal – the rest we say is history. More »

Millions Like Us is « The Story Of The Mod Revival 1977 -1989 » and it’s a wonderfully exuberant blast of tunes, many of which I know from my teens and some which are new to me. I was ten in 1977 but the mod revival was in full flow by the time I was in my second year or so of senior school. Along with the mod revival came two tone, ska and these were heady days indeed…my first proper gig was at the Wakefield Theatre where I went to see The Beat and it was rammed and perhaps one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. Soon after I went to see The Jam at Leed’s City Hall and then I was all Oxford bags, Harrington jacket, Fred Perry shirts and pointy shoes…I wasn’t allowed a fishtail parka, would have looked daft in a mohair suit and my take on the “look” was very much garnered from what I read in the music press and what I was allowed to get away with. It was a brief love affair as far as I remember lasting a couple of years or so, but it’s brilliant to hear some of the tunes I played on my parents’ music centre and eventually my Amstrad set up getting a fresh airing on this 4CD collection. More »

The music media in the early to mid-sixties were alive with talk of a « folk boom » in the UK and indeed there was a burgeoning number of folk clubs open every night of the week, to the point that pretty much every town of any size had one. I remember as late as the early seventies as a young child there being a popular folk club in Wath-Upon-Dearne where my parents had a pub…and even they had a music room where folk music was the order of the day. A folk boom is a bit of a misnomer if we go by record sales, but, as Colin Harper’s excellent sleeve notes to The Eve Folk Recordings suggests, the folk “stars” of the day made their living not through record sales but through live performances and a life “on the road”. Harper also suggests that this movement was a true underground movement and the pressure on the performers not to sell out was huge. More »

14 covers (10 on the normal version) and two original tunes, one penned in partnership with Jim Vallance and the other with Gretchen Peters ( this only on the Deluxe Edition) on this, the twelfth studio album from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams has tracks from writers such as Lennon and McCartney (Any Time At All), Bob Dylan (Lay Lady Lay), Chuck Berry (Rock and Roll Music) John Fogerty (Down on the Corner), Bobby Hebb (Sunny), Brian Wilson and Tony Asher (God Only Knows) plus a handful of others. More »

Well, Pink Floyd’s The Endless River has certainly been a long time coming… in fact it’s some twenty years since we were treated to a studio album from the Floyd, the last was 1994’s Division Bell. It’s no surprise then that this record was eagerly anticipated by the band’s legion of followers. This copy comes from HIRESAUDIO on Parlophone and warner Bros as a FLAC file, but there are standard CD, double vinyl and deluxe box sets available.

Floyd’s keyboardist, Rick Wright died of cancer in 2008 but this record is made from concepts and recordings made during the making of Division Bell and can be taken as very much a tribute to Wright… and he is indeed there on the record. The Endless River has taken two years of adding new parts and rerecording others and can be described as an ambient record with just one track (the final track)having a proper lyric…but still it is very much a Pink Floyd record – listen to it and it could be no other band. Production duties, are taken up by  Gilmour, Youth, Andy Jackson and  Phil Manzanera and the album was completed in Gilmour’s studios the Astoria and Medina Studios in Hove (UK). It is widely accepted that there will be no further releases from Pink Floyd after this. More »

The Pop Ambient series of albums from Uber label Kompakt has been delivering the chilled goods since 2001 and never fails to deliver. As the title suggests the style of music herein is accessible ambience and it works very well indeed.

Label boss Wolfgang Voigt is the guy that puts the collection together and he does a damned good job at bringing together new names as well as some that will be recognisable to many. More »

Released in mid-September on Interscope records and Columbia Records and downloaded here from HIRESAUDIO this one was a bit of a surprise for me not least because it’s not that often you get a record put together by an eighty eight year old crooner and someone famed as much for her outrageous dress sense (take the infamous meat dress as an example) as her music. This one has “Approach With Care” written all over it and I did just that, expecting it to get a quick flick through then forever to be relegated to the dustiest and seldom ventured to virtual shelf. More »

In 2011 Chicago resident Sarah Marie Young won the Shure Montreux Vocal competition judged by Quincy Jones and used the prize, a week at the Balik farm Studio in Switzerland, to record her first album of original material, but now she’s signed to Dutch label SnipRecords and has just released her new album Little Candy Heart. More »

I must confess that I missed out on the first wave of punk, but I do distinctly remember seeing a copy of the Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, for which Alternative TVs Mark P was the founding editor, brought into school by one of the cool kids. I also had a couple of Sex Pistol records. Mark P (Perry) left Sniffin’ Glue on the cusp of it possibly going mega to concentrate on his own band and had he followed the herd down the tried and somewhat tested punk formula he’d have made it big. As it was he went down a different path. More »

There’s a fantastic amount of great electronic music coming out of South America at the moment and here we’ve got Brazilian Gui Boratto, once a member of the band Sect, adding to that output with his album Abaporu.

The opening lines of the first track immediately put me in mind of William Orbit and this is no bad thing, but the tune soon becomes its own distinctive groove which sets the scene for the rest of the record. More »

The Turn by Jerome Sabbagh was recorded live by James Farber at Sear Sound, New York City on June 6th 2013 to analogue tape and on this Bee Jazz release from HIGHRESAUDIO it really shows. This is a really fantastic recording in the true tradition of jazz music. There is spontaneity and freedom within the constraints of the song structure and the musicians are laid bare. More »

This album arrived a good while ago and I was really excited when it did as I was a bit of a fan of the Hippy Slags back in the festival days and as readers will know a huge fan of Hawkwind with who Bridget Wishart performed on Space Bandits, Palace Springs, California Brainstorm and Take Me To Your Future.

Look at the line up on Make Believe It Real and it reads like a who’s who in space rock: Daevid Allen of Gong (wishing you a speedy recovery!!!), Harvey Bainbridge, Richard Chadwick, Alan Davey, Simon House, Keith The Bass, Nick May, Twink…the list goes on and on and on. More »

Bob James is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the smooth Jazz sound and has been heavily sampled in more recent years ( NWA, Run DMC, Soul II Soul, Missy Elliot and many more). He began his professional music career at age 8 playing piano for a tap dance class but also plays trumpet, timpani and percussion.

His association with smooth jazz began in 1972 whilst working with Stanley Turpentine and Milt Jackson on the album Cherry and is closely associated with Grover Washington Jr and arranged several of Washington’s albums. If you’ve not heard of James then you may well have heard his music as his tune Angela, from his breakthrough album Touchdown, was used as the theme (he also supplied incidental music) to the US sitcom Taxi which starred Danny Devito More »

él (via Cherry Red) are an interesting label that are putting out some pretty out there and unusual recordings.

One flick through the titles of the tracks on Les Baxter’s Original Quiet Village album will give you a good indication that this is exotica as colourful as it comes; Shanghai Rickshaw, Deep Night and Gardens of the Moon are just random selection. More »