Filed under: news, trouser press | Tags: anais mitchell, ane brun, arborea, gemma ray, haunted stereo, josephine oniyama, katey brooks, kelli ali, linda draper, liz durrett, madam, marissa nadler, odetta, ora cogan, pepi ginsberg, sandy dillon, society of imaginary friends
Beautiful Star: The Songs Of Odetta
a benefit compilation curated by Wears The Trousers magazine
released November 30, 2009 (download / limited edition CD)
If you missed the first instalment of this four-part series yesterday, do catch up. It won’t make much sense otherwise, y’know? In today’s blog, Katy Carr describes the chain of events that led her to travel to Poland to meet Kazimierz Piechowski, the only remaining survivor of the 1942 Auschwitz breakout in the Kommander’s car.
Thea Gilmore
Strange Communion •••
Fruitcake / Fullfill
Is absolutely nothing sacred? As each year passes it feels increasingly as though there is nobody out there who is totally immune from making a Christmas album. But while we inwardly quake at the thought of what mind-blowing aberrations 2010 might bring (Björk’s Baubles? Deck The Halls With PJ Harvey?), we must first digest this year’s two most unpredictable entries, which just happen to lend themselves to obvious comparison. Having long been touted as a British female Dylan, it’s a particularly wry twist of fate that Thea Gilmore releases her version of a festive album within a few weeks of her songwriting icon’s first seasonal foray, Christmas In The Heart. But while the majority of Dylan’s attempt comes across as a somewhat gauche and overly sentimental throwback to a bygone era, much of Gilmore’s sounds a lot like, well, pretty much anything from her last two albums.
El Perro Del Mar
Love Is Not Pop •••½
The Control Group
Love is not pop, Sarah Assbring proclaims, and neither is this, the most recent offering from her alter ego El Perro Del Mar. Listen to it though and you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise; the album is replete with sharp hooks, bittersweet melodies, memorable choruses and soaring key changes. However, such traditional pop tropes are threaded through a web of complex, despondent songs to create a thematically sorrowful album that touches on the uncomfortable issues of loneliness, relationship trauma and the inability to form meaningful bonds. Love is clearly some distance away from easy-breezy singalongs to Assbring, and her voice betrays such a genuinely troubled and dejected nature that the ensemble is lent an authenticity lacking in many of her contemporaries.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter and occasional Wears The Trousers contributor Katy Carr releases her long-awaited third album, Coquette, today, a wildly imaginative collection that takes us back to the 1930s and ’40s, to wartime Europe, with romantic and powerful songs largely inspired by women of the era. Dodging any potential bias, we’re not going to review it; the 4* reviews in Q, Mojo and The Daily Express speak for themselves. Instead, we’ve invited the half-Polish singer to share an incredible story with our readers, a story of how the daring escape of four men from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in 1942 inspired her new single, ‘Kommander’s Car’, and how writing the song led her to an intense meeting and lasting friendship with the only remaining survivor, Kazimierz Piechowski. This connection forms the basis of a new, 23-minute documentary film entitled ‘Kazik & The Kommander’s Car’, directed by Hannah Lovell, recently submitted to London’s Imperial War Museum for their current short film season which runs until the end of December.
In this first of four parts, Katy explains the inspiration behind the song: the great escape itself.
Clare & The Reasons
Arrow ••••
Frog Stand Records
Few cities in the world can call themselves home to such an eclectic mix of musical styles as New York, a place which produces excellent artists from what seems like an unseen factory encompassing all its myriad districts. It would not be unfair or totally inaccurate to say that much of the musical output of the city has a cynical edge though, from the spiky art punk of Patti Smith to the cavernous, sepulchral Interpol, with a multitude of stops along the way. Even jazz-pop pioneers Steely Dan were the kings of dark, twisted tales disguised by immaculate grooves. It therefore often comes as a shock to see the other side of the coin – a record which dispenses with the world-weary New Yorker’s perspective in favour of fully embracing the possibilities inherent in the city that never sleeps. It is even more surprising when New York-based artists pluck their influences instead from the West Coast, as seems to be the case with Arrow, the second album from Brooklyn residents Clare & The Reasons.
Rickie Lee Jones
Balm In Gilead ••••
Fantasy
An American original, Rickie Lee Jones has quietly amassed a catalogue of serious class over the course of her thirty-year career. Whether she’s experimenting with song structure or playing it straight, Chicago-born Jones always seems to bring something unique and interesting to the table, exploring various styles from jazz and pop to gospel and R&B. Balm In Gilead, her eleventh studio album, is no different. As warm and soulful as its title would suggest, it slowly reveals itself to be an album of quiet grace and power.
Marissa Nadler had a nasty interruption to her current American tour with Alela Diane on Friday when the car in which she and her band were travelling was hit by a driver who ran a red light in Birmingham, Alabama. Although Marissa’s car was written off, no one was seriously hurt and the tour continues.
Filed under: feature, special | Tags: angie hart, frente, interview, val phoenix
re:generation #4: angie hart
Re:Generation is a monthly column about yesterday’s heroines today, revisiting some of the women who have helped map out musical history but have since, for one reason or another, fallen out of the spotlight. Over the coming months, Wears The Trousers will be speaking to these influential figures, as they make their way back into the public sphere. For our fourth piece, Val Phoenix speaks to Australian singer-songwriter Angie Hart, formerly of Frente.
In her native Canada, singer-songwriter Sarah Slean is an award-winning star whose last album charted in the Top 10 and who regularly performs in respectably large venues to adoring fans. Over the course of her six studio albums and over a decade of shows, she’s developed a reputation as a spellbinding, intelligent performer with a talent to be reckoned with. Never heard of her? The fact that she has never toured Europe once in all that time might have something to do with that. She’s visited, briefly, with a couple of concerts in Paris many years ago, but as far as Wears The Trousers is aware, she has never once played a gig in the UK.
Caitlin Rose
‘Still Feelin’ Blue’ [Gram Parsons cover]
These days, the appellation of “up and coming Nashville singer-songwriter” is more likely to send a shiver of fear up people’s spines than it is to provoke excited expectations of a new Loretta Lynn or Patsy Cline, but Caitlin Rose is one young lady worth paying attention to. Her 2008 EP Dead Flowers was a gutsy romp through generations of country music of the coarser, more genuine type than we usually hear in artists barely into their twenties, marking her out as a straight-talking, no-nonsense star with a bright future. A year later and she’s just been picked up by the good people at Names Records, home of Alela Diane, so expect that future to get increasingly interesting very soon. In honour of what would have been his 63rd birthday, Caitlin is offering up her cover of the Gram Parsons classic ‘Still Feelin’ Blue’, the lead track from his 1973 solo debut GP, as a free download. Compared with previously released efforts by the likes of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Australian country darling Kasey Chambers, Caitlin’s version is rawer and rougher and all the better for it. Caitlin is making a rare trip to play some shows in the UK this December, starting with a visit to our friends at The Allotment (at the Betsey Trotwood) on December 1. MP3 after the jump.
