Martha Wainwright
San Fusils, Ni Souliers, A Paris: Martha Wainwright’s Piaf Record ••••
Cooperative / Drowned In Sound
There are some bright ideas, the cultural playbook tells us, north Americans should leave well alone lest they want to invoke the angry spirit guardians of someone else’s heritage. When the legacy in question is that of someone considered a French national icon, that good advice may be especially pertinent. Particularly in the case of an icon so revered as Edith Piaf, the tragic ‘Little Sparrow’, a romantic martyr to the grand passions of the mythical Gallic soul. We don’t do popular singers in quite the same way in the Anglo-Saxon world. With a voice drenched in absinthe and cracked by gitane smoke, a demeanour gracefully wrapped in the tricolore and a place in the heart of Francophiles well beyond the physical and psychological borders of La France Profonde, Piaf is to many what French popular culture is all about. What kind of non-French artist would dare dabble with such a fiercely protected mythos?
Ólöf Arnalds
Viđ Og Viđ [reissue] ••••
One Little Indian
When thinking about Icelandic culture, people tend to connect the results of artists’ creative work with the nature that surrounds them and idealise their art as something glacial and untouchable. Snow and ice are invariably associated with a strange purity mixed with slight naïvety, the grandiose geology often metamorphosed into high crescendos, and the long dark nights are always the attributed cause of their music’s melancholic undertones. The ever-active geysers, too, get a look in, typically taken to represent a restless creative energy and melting pot of ideas. Such simplicity of thinking somehow helps us to better understand their otherworldliness and the Icelandic ‘hobby’ of using unusual instruments combined with ancient sounding melodies. This is often followed by implying these assumptions to their small, family-like art scene, where everybody knows everybody, and liken them to elves due to their ‘cute’ language and pale appearance. Ólöf Arnalds, cousin of increasingly popular contemporary classical composer Ólafur Arnalds, defies these preconceptions. Her most noticeable modus operandi is ‘beauty in simplicity’, her songs apparently straightforward, hearty and stripped to the bone.
Leona Lewis
Echo ••••
Syco
As another series of ‘X Factor’ ekes towards its conclusion and inevitable Christmas number one, another alumnus returns to remind the contestants what a little luck and lot of savvy marketing can get them. While some might view the recent chart successes from 2008 winner Alexandra Burke and mentor Cheryl Cole as having upstaged Leona Lewis’s comeback a little, the North Londoner has one thing that neither possess. For all Burke’s blasting and Cole’s ambitious wheeze, they can’t come close to her supple and powerful voice, or the impeccable control with which she wields it. Coupled with an extremely photogenic face and a sanguine, pleasant personality, Lewis has become one of British pop’s brightest stars, not least by virtue of having achieved the holy grail of pop: success in America.
Brooke Waggoner
Go Easy Little Doves ••••
Swoon Moon
Formally trained as a classical pianist from a very young age, 24 year old Brooke Waggoner deftly imbues the gorgeous vignettes of her second album with a real sense of elegance and grace borrowed from her 17 years’ grooming. While last year’s Heal For The Honey shone the spotlight on a more introspective side to Waggoner’s artistry, Go Easy Little Doves expertly plays up the classical elements in both her musicianship and her writing – the imaginative chord progressions, the intricate vocal harmonies, the swelling strings – but is never too indulgent as to forget the merits of a memorable tune.
Jesca Hoop
Hunting My Dress ••••
Last Laugh
California native Jesca Hoop has a back story so eventful that it might overshadow the music of a lesser talent. Raised as a Mormon in a large family who sang folk songs together, she broke away from the unusual strictures of her upbringing to be a homesteader in Wyoming and to work with children in the mountains of Arizona. This somehow led to a stint as nanny to the three children of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, and it was through this fortuitous circumstance that, in late 2006, her early demos reached the ears of tastemaker DJ Nic Harcourt of LA-based radio station KCRW. Her debut album Kismet followed in 2007, leading to tours with Polyphonic Spree, the similarly musically eccentric Andrew Bird, and with Elbow, the latter association encouraging her recent relocation to Manchester.
Woodpecker Wooliams
Diving Down •••
Autumn Ferment
Woodpecker Wooliams is the homemade alter ego of a rather talented young lady more conventionally named Gemma Williams. Having given up training to be a midwife following some pretty nasty seizures, the Brighton native relocated to the Devon countryside and set her sights on crafting delicate tunes rather than catching babies on exit. Luckily, she turned out to be pretty good at it, employing a formidable array of instruments to create an immersive listening experience, if not quite achieving uniqueness (she’s been compared to Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom more times than is healthy for an up and coming singer-songwriter).
Filed under: album, review | Tags: charlotte richardson andrews, rykarda parasol
Rykarda Parasol
For Blood & Wine ••••
Self-released
Rykarda Parasol is a self-professed purveyor of ‘rock noir’, a relatively young genre that can trace its creeping roots back to the more established sounds of Americana, Goth and even cabaret. Nick Cave and The Velvet Underground are cited as some of its progenitors, an allusion previously nodded to in Parasol’s 2005 mini album Here She Comes, with current contemporaries including the mighty Elysian Fields. Though her parentage is European – she’s half Polish, half Swedish – the dark eyed, blonde haired artist spent some formative years in Texas, the landscape of which served as her muse for 2006’s debut full-length, Our Hearts First Meet, and continues to shape her material with a countrified drawl and twang in this expertly crafted follow-up.
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.
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.
