wears the trousers magazine

The following reviews were all published on our old website between May 2005 and December 2006.

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Jennifer Kimball
Oh Hear Us ••••
Epoisse

That Jennifer Kimball is less well lodged in the collective consciousness than her erstwhile collaborator Jonatha Brooke (with whom she formed the acclaimed duo The Story) is doubtless down to a patchy career dominated by what in this day and age might be referred to as “work-life balance decisions”. Kimball quit The Story in 1994 at the height of their success and has since released just one other solo album, Veering From The Wave. No matter, established fans and those discovering Kimball afresh with Oh Hear Us will concur that the wait has been worth it.

Recorded in a period of emotional and physical upheaval – Kimball was pregnant during the recording and had recently lost her mother to cancer – Oh Hear Us reflects and integrates the turmoil of its conception. Conflicting feelings of joy and despair, pain and comfort, doubt and faith are all explored, with Kimball fully inhabiting the moment, the clarity of her voice creating a perfect foil for each vignette. She is a subtle performer too, never resorting to theatrics to convey false emotion and these songs are all the more powerful for their simplicity and apparent effortlessness.

The jaunty country-folk of ‘Can’t Climb Up’ belies the poignancy of the lyric exploring a daughter’s broken relationship with her dad, words that gain additional chill with the knowledge of Kimball’s own strained paternal relationship. Indeed, family is a prevalent theme that’s dealt with gracefully on each occasion. ‘Eternal Father’ (an adaptation of the hymn ‘Eternal Father Strong To Save’) and ‘Last Ride Home’ are both sombre eulogies to the death of her mum, while ‘Don’t Take Your Love Away’ neatly twists the standard tale of a betrayed wife with the final revelation: “I’m reading this too close to home / I’ve got some letters and a box of my own”.

‘Is He Or Isn’t He?’ provides a change in mood, affectionately musing on life as a singleton and the knowing pretences everyone indulges in over gentle African rhythms and Hawaiian guitar. Elsewhere, Kimball excels in painting story tableaux that explore the complex emotions of, for wont of a better phrase, “the human condition”. ‘When I Was Lost’ sees her take on the mantle of an economic migrant eking out a living, the pain of absence assuaged by the innate strength of love. ‘East Of Indiana’ and ‘Lightning Bug’, on the other hand, seem to suggest that isolation is just plain loneliness and a dose of regret, a theme echoed in ‘Ballad #61’s exquisitely dour bluesy folk.

After all this despondent introspection, Kimball employs James Taylor’s favourite trick of leavening the mood with a jazz-swing standard to close on, in this case the old Bing Crosby number, ‘Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams’. Sung with an audible smile and a knowing wink, Kimball and her band clearly revelled in the experience, with a fabulously cheesy guitar solo from producer Duke Levine and Kevin Barry hitting most of the right notes in mostly the right order with his devil- may-care whistling solo. Oh Hear Us is a fitting addition to Jennifer Kimball’s all too selective oeuvre – our fervent prayer is that we won’t have to wait another eight years for the next instalment.

Trevor Raggatt
originally published July 2nd, 2006

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Kaki King
…Until We Felt Red ••••
Velour

In the three short years since the release of Kaki King’s debut Everybody Loves You, this inventive and eclectic musician has cemented her reputation as the enfant terrible of the instrumental acoustic guitar album. After a brief and unhappy flirtation with a major label, she finds herself safely back on indie terra firma for album number three. In all honesty, that’s probably wise; I doubt the majors would take to what’s on offer here, though of course they’d be sorely wrong. King clearly adheres to the adage that if it ain’t broke, be careful you don’t get stale and start repeating yourself! Consequently, out have gone the slaps, bumps and pops of 2004’s Legs To Make You Longer. Instead, she reinvents herself by combining acoustic and electric guitars with pedal steel, drums, crashing distortion pedals, loops, bleeps and all manner of other instrumentation. This creates an ethereal and haunting – and I apologise in advance for using this word (but it’s the right one!) – soundscape that draws the listener in and cocoons them in a sort of otherworldly bliss.

The clear and present danger of King’s chosen genre is that things can veer too much into ambient, new-age frippery devoid of form or substance, or that the artist overindulges themselves to such an extent that all emotional connection to the listener is lost. Fortunately, the dynamic combo of King and Stereolab producer John McEntire’s sonic magic steers the album well away from such typical pitfalls. But that’s not all; the very first track, ‘Yellowcake’, sees King unleash her secret weapon and the album’s biggest surprise. Yes, folks, she sings! And she’s pretty damn good at it too, from her genteel folksy warble on ‘Second Brain’ to a convincing turn as a sultry jazz club singer on the post-bop-styled ‘I Never Said I Love You’.

Impressive throughout, …Until We Felt Red successfully dabbles in an almost breathtakingly wide range of styles, from the ambient industrial tones of the title track to the funky-as-you-like ‘Gay Sons Of Lesbian Mothers’, via the pedal steel interlude of ‘Footsteps Die Out Forever’ and the acoustic pop of ‘Jessica’ without ever feeling disjointed or fragmented. It’s a stunningly performed, intimately involving work and one thing’s for certain, if it isn’t up for an instrumental/vocal performance Grammy next year, it’ll certainly be getting our nod for ‘weirdest song titles in a non-prog rock category’. Heartily recommended.

Trevor Raggatt 
originally published October 27th, 2006

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Stephanie Kirkham
Sunlight On My Soul •••½ 
SLK

Stephanie Kirkham must have thought that Lady Fate herself was smiling down when she signed a five-album deal with Verve imprint, Hut Records. But the label’s implosion just a few months later proved how fickle that Lady can be. Undeterred, Kirkham returned to the day job and nearly three years on from her disarming debut That Girl, Sunlight On My Soul arrives on Kirkham’s own label and shows that determination and dedication against the odds can reap real dividends – in this case, a quirky collection of songs that resolutely refuse to be easily classified, instead rewarding the more determined listener.

Opener ‘Butterfly Song’ is a charmingly twee prelude on the fragile and fleeting nature of life, and tempting as it is to knowingly smile and place her in the Vashti Bunyan camp of delicate folksters, Kirkham refuses to be tied down so easily. Certainly, her voice still retains that winning fragility and innocence – cute and coquettish without becoming fey; winsome without cartoonish tendencies; light and delicate but still imbued with strength. Where ‘Butterfly Song’ does clue you in though is in its use of two characteristic devices that Kirkham scatters throughout the album – unison vocal/backing instrument melodies and playing around with the rhythm and tempo of the songs. Here, they work well but they do get a little distracting on their umpteenth occurrence.

Recent single ‘Show Me What You’re Made Of’ is a lithe, feline jazz number with a walking bass and mood that deftly lands (on its feet, of course) somewhere between stray and Aristocat. It’s a trick rather less successfully attempted on ‘January Day’, with its halting changes in rhythm and horn section that’s less like Coltrane than a bargain basement Casiotone. ‘Hear The Blackbird’ and ‘All For Nothing’ are open, folksy songs; the former boasting a sweet nursery rhyme simplicity and the latter a feast of beguiling backing vocals. But the centrepiece of the record is a trio of songs that mine the rich seam of 1970s Celtic folk for inspiration. Taking as their template bands like Planxty and Moving Hearts, who fused Arabic-styled melodies with traditional European instruments like the bouzouki, hurdygurdy and bodhran, ‘Bad Dream’, ‘Today’ and ‘Bonds Are Broken’ are nicely atmospheric. Even the fact that ‘Bad Dream’s virtually a cappella opening sounds a bit like the Shangri-La’s ‘Leader Of The Pack’ does not prove too much of a distraction. Elsewhere, ‘Moving & Breathing’ sounds a bit like Nanci Griffith, which is never a bad thing.

Then there’s the title track, rounding out the album with a bang instead of a whisper, a bizarre mélange of sounds that somehow successfully melds together each of the album’s themes and influences. To describe it is to think of a strange Frankenstein experiment bolting together leftover scraps of sessions from Joni Mitchell, Las Ketchup and, quite possibly, next year’s Turkish Eurovision entry, while Kirkham stands at the centre triumphantly yelling “It’s alive! It’s alive!”. Fortunately, it’s no fearsome hideous monster; what could have been a disastrous trainwreck of a track in less capable hands provides instead a gloriously luminous and uplifting close to this worthy second effort.

Trevor Raggatt
originally published February 15th, 2006 

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The Knife
Silent Shout ••••
Brille

Most people think they don’t know The Knife, a leftfield, electro-meets-calypso feminist duo hailing from Stockholm, Sweden. But they’d be wrong of course, for singer-songwriter du jour José González’s breakthrough ad soundtrack single, ‘Heartbeats’, is in fact a cover of his countrymen’s original. The Knife are certainly an interesting prospect; consciously enigmatic, they have (until now) refused to play live but for one three-song set at London’s ICA where the lighting was forced so low that they could barely even be seen. They are, in essence, anti-performance and in that respect are the polar opposite of fellow electro purveyors like Fischerspooner, Peaches and Chicks On Speed.

Compared with their two previous albums, this is a pointedly minimalist affair, and in some ways even more low-key than 2003’s Deep Cuts, a record that was rich in ice-cool synths and steel drums. Silent Shout is still characteristically The Knife, however, with a distinctive sound that’s somewhere between mid-’90s post-rave dance chart fodder and cutting-edge electro, with warped and sinister vocals throughout. But this time, The Knife seem more preoccupied with forging a vista of haunting electro landscapes than the punchy weird-pop found on their debut. The title track and lead single clearly highlights the difference; the song barely builds from where it starts out, instead preferring to simmer nastily along with its heavily distorted male/female duetting vocals only serving to feed their mysterious image.

As ever, the political commentaries are both abstract and obscure. At times it even feels that maybe, just maybe, The Knife have adopted some kind of Brechtian alienation as a means of forcing the listener to detach from emotionally engaging with the music, perhaps to enable more critical thinking of the impact of the sound. Whatever, much of Silent Shout is a decidedly cold and dark affair; ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’ proclaims “we came down from the North” and you certainly don’t doubt them. Elsewhere, ‘Forest Families’s lyrics of communists, masks and being far from the city strongly convey a sense of isolation and otherness, rendering it one of the most chilling inclusions. Intentionally difficult then, Silent Shout is much too odd in too many places for primetime radio play, despite some moments being suitably melodious. So while their work on Deep Cuts and the recent (and criminally underdistributed!) Robyn album shows their undeniable pop credentials, as ‘You Take My Breath Away’ states quite plainly, Silent Shout is here to let you know that The Knife don’t like it easy; they don’t like it the straight way.

Robbie de Santos
originally published March 17th, 2006 

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Anna Krantz
Precious Time With You ••••
Glad

A reassuringly old-fashioned affair, this debut album from London-based singer-songwriter Anna Krantz is chock full of quality songs, beautifully performed and expertly produced, a reminder of a time when music was less about product and ProTools and more about performance. With a songwriting knack that belies her relatively tender age, Krantz draws deep from a well of inspiration that burrows all the way down to the legendary Brill Building era. Indeed, producer Peter van Hooke’s comment on first hearing Krantz – “Well, fuck me! It’s the next Carole King!” – was as apposite as it was profane, before they headed into Abbey Road Studios to lay down the smooth soul-pop sounds that inhabit the album. But despite the similarities with King, a better (albeit closely related) comparison can be made with James Taylor. Like much of Taylor’s recent work, the songs on Precious Time With You move between tender vignettes, fourminute kitchen sink dramas and internal musings on love and loss. In fact, any of Krantz’s songs could be seamlessly transplanted into these records, and I can’t think of a higher compliment for a songwriter.

The performance, too, matches the high compositional standards. Krantz’s soulful vocals invariably wring just the right amount of emotion out of songs like We Still Love You and Bruises without descending into schmaltz. It helps that she has a stellar band in the form of Steve Pierce (bass), Neil Wilkinson (drums) and former Pretender / Paul McCartney cohort Robbie Macintosh (guitar) to bolster her skilful piano. These aren’t cynical session players on autopilot, and there are several moments when their pure joy of playing the music simply pours right out of the speakers. In particular, the ‘50s jazz and Motown-tinged ‘Pick Me Up’ has the quartet kicking up their heels and ripping through the refrains with abandon. Hooke’s inspired decision to, wherever possible, use the live room at Abbey Road to record the backing tracks as an ensemble to pre-recorded vocals reaps real dividends. The playing grooves in a way that lifts the performances above the sum of their parts, ensuring that the feeling in the vocal is nicely mirrored in all the other elements of the recording.

Precious Time With You should have no problem finding favour with mainstream radio playlists across the UK; it’s classy, unashamedly adult-oriented and emotionally literate and none the worse for that. In this case, phrases like ‘mainstream’ should not be confused with ‘bland’, ‘formulaic’ or ‘boring’. On the contrary, these are beautifully crafted songs delivered by an artist with a voice perfectly suited to this soulful brand of pop. More than that, it’s conclusive proof, if proof were needed, that piano-driven pop, when properly done, remains forever relevant and deserves to be appreciated whatever the prevailing fashions of the day.

Trevor Raggatt
originally published July 25th, 2006