SOUL SURMISE

VAN MORRISON - ASTRAL WEEKS

50 years ago Van Morrison’s iconic record Astral Weeks appeared like the rarest of meteorites appearing in a night sky without warning. It is an acoustic, ambient blues and jazz fusion with pain, death, love, romance and transcendental yelping that draws from a legacy of Woody Guthrie, evangelical Christianity and a transvestite called Madame George… among many other things.

Within the eight songs of the record’s genius it is easy to trace the themes that would keep Van Morrison in muse for the rest of his career; childlike visions, his Belfast upbringing, religion and these continual moments of spiritual epiphany even in the middle of dark nights of the soul. As you listen to Astral Weeks you can feel one young man’s pain and as you are pulled into the slipstream and viaducts of his dreams you journey with him towards redemption. 

In the midst of the common and most ordinary Van Morrison captures a vivid vibrant vision of the sacred and holy. Morrison does for the Belfast streets of Cypress Avenue, Fitzroy Avenue and Sandy Row what William Blake did for London two centuries before him. Morrison gives them transcendence, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Almost twenty five years later, in a song called Hyndford Street, Morrison calls it dreaming in God. 

1968 was an antithesis of 1967’s Summer of Love. Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Students and police clashed in cities across the world. The war in Vietnam and protests against it were escalating. There was a horrendous famine in Biafra. Northern Ireland was on the verge of The Troubles.

Morrison himself was going through it. Them, the 60s band that had given him his break, was over. He had moved to New York in a dubious record deal with Bert Berns who then died but not before making Brown Eyed Girl a hit. Berns wife then threatened getting Morrison deported until he fulfilled the 36 songs left on his contract. He recorded mostly nonsense songs! 

In the middle of a world exploding and his career imploding Morrison recorded an utterly beautiful and uniquely soulful album that garnered the social and personal pain around and within him and came out the other end with rebirth and redemption.

There was nothing like Astral Weeks and there has been nothing like it since. Morrison would later sing that he came to give us a sense of wonder, to lift a fiery vision bright. That is what he does here. 

From the same East Belfast memory of childhood geography, that CS Lewis used to artistically conjure The Narnia Chronicles, Morrison created an album that touches on holiness. Not holiness of any religious creed but an otherness of place and sensitivity of humanity. The holiness of its otherness. The holiness of its spiritual serenity.  

Back to Blake:

 

“See the Lord in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.”

JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT LIVE AT THE RYMAN

A couple of lines into Bradley Cooper singing Maybe It’s Time in the movie A Star Is Born and I was saying “Jason Isbell”. Now Isbell has been treading the boards for the guts of 20 years with first Drive-By Truckers and later his own The 400 Units. However, it was his “hello to sobriety” album Southeastern in 2013 that introduced him to the wider world. Five years and two more albums later and his work is so distinctive that Bradley Cooper can’t hide the Isbell signature sound. 

Time to welcome a live record that can collect Isbell’s best songs from those three records and give them extra bluster with The 400 Units let loose. Of course that changes the songs on Southeastern and Something More Than Free as they didn’t have The 400 Unit on their studio carnations. With Sadler Vaden and Isbell doing their guitar duelling and Mrs Isbell, Amanda Shires, giving some whirling dervish Steve Wickham-esque fiddle, this is a live show of energy and clout.

Recorded over six sold out nights at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Theatre this record doesn’t only highlight the power of the band but also the depth and poignancy of the songs. It is a quick reminder of why we love this guy. Cover Me Up, White Man’s World, Last Of My Kind and White Man’s World. Goodness me. 

In the intoxicating live bluster nothing is lost of Isbell’s nuance of heart and soul. 24 Frames’ spiritual cemtax still asks questions:

 

You thought God was an architect, now you know

He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow

And everything you built that's all for show

Goes up in flames

In 24 frames

 

 

 

The most beautiful of love songs If We Were Vampires has you reaching for your beloved’s hand:

 

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get 40 years together

But one day I'll be gone

One day you'll be gone

 

Live At The Ryman is a wonderful celebration of what Jason Isbell has achieved in these last five years. It’s a good assessment of where he’s at. It makes you grateful for the last three records and excites you about the next.

THE BEATLES (WHITE ALBUM) box set

So my Desert Island disc would always be The Beatles or as it is commonly known, The White Album. Oh, it is not my favourite Beatles’ record. That is Abbey Road. It is not the best Beatles’ record. That is Revolver. Yet, The White Album is the one I would want. 

Why? It is the eclectic mix of sounds. If you are on a desert island, on your lonesome, then you need to be able to rock out with songs like Back In The USSR or Helter Skelter. Turn it up loud. There will be other times to be reflective and Blackbird, Julia and Long Long Long can give that meditative introspection. Cry Baby Cry might come into its own and when my predicament causes me to lose sleep then perhaps Good Night will be the lullaby to do the trick. Yer Blues is for a heavily depressive afternoon and for celebration there is always Birthday. Revolution can give inspiration for change! Surely no other album ever made has this kind of sonic sprawl 

The White Album is also a perfect Desert Island Jukebox. This record has almost a history of Twentieth Century music. Honey Pie is all 1920’s music hall, the closing Good Night brings crooner Ringo into a big 50’s film soundtrack, there is a touch of Caribbean ska on Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, and country in Don’t Pass Me By. 

Children’s stories that filled Saturday mornings at the Picture Houses in Liverpool are here in Rocky Raccoon and The Continuing Story of Bungalow. 

Just back from time with the Maharishi in India, there are some folk hints in the acoustic finger picking style that seemed to have taken up some jamming time with Donovan in the ashram. 50’s rock n roll is in there with a pastiche of Chuck Berry’s Back in the USA on Back in the USSR. Beach Boy harmonies give that same song an early 60s feel too! So many genres.

Scanning the musical history that influenced them is one thing. The White Album goes further. It is not just the history of music until 1968, it takes us beyond 1968 to the future of music too. 

The embryonic stages of the Beatles’ early solo records is on here. Julia is the very personal introspection that Lennon would follow up in Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. The sweeping sounds of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a big hint at Harrison’s massive triple album All Things Must Pass. Good Night could be on Starr’s Sentimental Journey. the short experimental, and lucky to be on this great record track, Wild Honey and Can You Take Me Back not even credited are templates for some of the do-it-yourself miniatures on McCartney’s eponymous debut.

Then surely Revolution 9 that no one but Lennon thought should be here is the inspiration of samples and loops that will become central  in pop decades later and would heavy metal have got so bit with Led Zeppelin if Helter Skelter hadn’t taken Hendrix and Cream and gave it more bang!

50 years after this album there is a six CD deluxe edition that gives me even more reason to take it to my desert island. 

Giles Martin, son of original Beatles’ prouder George, has almost reinvented those scared sounds. I need to disagree with Paul Weller who has said he doesn’t need to hear this remix because the original was good enough for him. I would suggest that Martin takes one of the best albums ever made and somehow makes it even greater.  

Stereo was of no interest to The Beatles, a new fangled thing that George Martin did a lazy job of instrument separation in the speakers. Son Giles uses the fifty years of studio knowledge in-between to re-centre the sound. 

He did the same job on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, last year. These new mixes give Ringo’s drums a lot more bang and you can hear the ping in every acoustic guitar. There are sounds never before heard and everything is so bright and fresh. It is not going too far to say that you are hearing something new. The verve. The energy. The magic of The Beatles playing together. 

The extra CDs concentrate on that last line. Throughout 4 discs of demos and out-takes we get close to The Beatles than ever before. First the Esher sessions recorded in Harrison’s house at Kinfauns give us access to 27 songs that had mostly been written in India over the previous two months. It is fascinating and satisfying listen. Acoustic versions of Back In The USSR, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Yer Blues and a delicate Julia where the guitar playing goes askew but not the intent in Lennon’s soul

You got to ask too how Not Guilty and Junk didn’t make the record but you’re glad that John’s Child Of Nature waited to flower into Jealous Guy at a later stage.

The other discs throw up ten minutes plus versions of Helter Skelter and Revolution that reveal The Beatles loving a jam. There are embryonic versions of Let It Be, Hey Jude and Lady Madonna and rarities such as (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care and Blue Moon. The comedy of nonsense track Los Paranoias made my daughter question the money her dad handed over for this but I love this Beatlefest so much that I even love the instrumental out-take of Savoy Truffle!

The story has it that this was The Beatles starting to unravel. I do not doubt that the beginnings of the end are growing between these chords and melodies but I think the rumours that they were finished here are highly exaggerated. 

They have just come back from what was almost a sabbatical in India that lasted for almost two months. The communal aspect of that sojourn had not had time to fray just yet. This box proves that it was still fun to be a Beatle in the middle of 1968 and that they were cooking when they played together. You can see why McCartney tried to get them to go out live again. 

On these White Album extras, The Beatles are tight, the harmonies are sweet, the creativity as energy, angst, love and tenderness. It almost makes you want to get a few weeks on a desert island just to take it all in!

MUMFORD & SONS - DELTA

Delta is Mumford & Sons growing up record. Now of course, they have been big boys since Sigh No More dropped, to a success they never dreamed of, a decade ago. For years following that success, they lived in the bubble of the road but for the last three years admit to re-entering the real world for the first time in their working lives. 

Delta is a collection of songs by a few men who have come off the stage to find themselves living in a fallen world. Their new environment is best described in Darkness Visible, their reading of part of Milton’s Paradise Lost though the reading is actually done by Gill Landry of Old Crow Medicine Show.

How good Delta is depends. It depends if you are wanting the kind of sales that the band enjoyed with Sign No More and Babel? It depends on whether you are wanting to jig around to every song. At their Belfast gig Marcus Mumford, himself, said, “Thank you for being patient with the new songs. I know some of you just want us to play Little Lion Man 15 times”.

On the sales it is good that this band are on Island Records the label of all labels who have patience with their artists. Massive sales has never got in the way of development of art at Island. If you are wanting more and more Little Lion Men then you will be disappointed and can I ask you to not be lazy; listen to more than Guiding Light!

Guiding Light was a clever lead off single for all of the above parties. The Little Lion Man fans think the banjo is back. Let’s get a load of that and Island Records can smack a sticker on front saying “Includes Guiding Light” to draw in the Little Lion Man fan club!

Guiding Light is a powerful song, probably the antidote to Darkness Visible but this is no revival of the old sound. The old instrument is back but what they have done with it is worth a good music review in itself. Throughout the record it is used in creative ways never before conjured, the riff on Beloved, jangling in and out of Rose Of Sharon, a strong deliberate guide across Delta as the whole thing heads towards the open sea!

Producer Paul Epworth has broadened the Mumford palette with ideas and little deft touches of beats and electronica. The Wild sounds like something Elbow might conjure with that orchestral build. Darkness Visible has a mid sixties psychedelic sound somewhere between In Search of the Lost Chord Moody Blues and White album Beatles. 

October Skies with delicate autumnal piano and gentle harmonies is gorgeous and Psalmlike spiritual. Surely stadiums across the world will soon be filled with the stunning pop singalong of Forever. These last two songs are as fine a work of songwriting craft that these guys they have produced to date. 

Marcus Mumford’s voice has matured too. It laments and soars. It groand one moment and is finds slants of hope the next. His working with T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Jim James, Rhiannon Giddens and Taylor Goldsmith on lost Bob Dylan lyrics has not done his creative processes any harm!

I am always intrigued by the theology of Mumford & Sons. When I spoke about the band in American Colleges five years ago I concentrated on the darkness and light of the first two records. That battle still rages on Delta. Those are still the key words. There’s a lot of fear in these songs but a lot of shelter and refuge too.

Little spiritual gems sometimes take years to drop out of a Mumford & Sons' song into my soul but as they have called it an album about “death, divorce, drugs and depression”, to which I might add doubt, then there is a voice in the song Beloved which I might surmise is Marcus’s Grandmother that maybe put this thesis in a couplet:

 

“She says the Lord has a plan

But admits it's pretty hard to understand”

 

While we unravel that one, a fascinating, mature and eclectic album by Mumford & Sons will be a very welcome companion indeed. Like faith it is a slow burn into something more fulfilling.

PAUL WELLER - TRUE MEANINGS

There was a time round 1982 when Paul Weller was my main musical man. The punk stuff was a little contrived in places but The Jam fired my new wave imagination. I loved In The City from the get go. By the time of The Gift they had matured in lyric and sound. For me, they were a psyched up Beatles in all kinds of ways. Weller had a political and social critique that opened my late teen mind.

Not far into the Style Council I lost my Weller obsession. Though Weller’s solo career has had me dip in and out True Meanings has me rekindling my fandom. Thinking back on my love for all things Weller in my late teens I couldn’t quite believe that I had never blogged about him.

Keeping The Beatles’ comparison, True Meanings might be seen as his McCartney record. Weller has covered much Lennon - Don’t Let Me Down, And Your Bird Can Sing, Instant Karma, Come Together with the Mojo Filters and even Sexy Sadie. 

The first time I heard Gravity I thought Yesterday. With its quite tone, pop melodies and lush strings McCartney comes to mind. To be truthful though the sound is reminiscent of any acoustic song The Beatles released from 64-66.

True Meanings is a shift in musical focus after the onslaught and experimentation of Saturn Patterns and The Kind Revolution. The opening The Soul Searchers is a good sign of the rest of the piece; pastoral and spiritually reflective.

For this album Weller has extended his collaborative welcome. Dublin’s Conor O’Brien of The Villagers brought the lyrics for The Soul Searchers, as Erland Cooper of The Magnetic North and Erland & The Carnival for Bowie, Wishing Well and White Horses. A more cheerful look at the credits will reveal Rod Argent, Danny Thompson and Noel Gallagher. Northern Irish pride for the amazing job Hannah Peel does with the strings.

The collection is riven through with good songs. The Soul Searcher, Gravity, Aspects, Books, Moving On and my personal favourite May Love Travel With You.

May Love Travel With You is prayerful in a May You Never and Forever Young kind of way. It is Psalmlike;

 

“Have grace to see the virtues

Give thanks to them sometimes

And love travel with you

Forever and all time”

 

If there is theology to unpack in those lines - “grace” and “forever” then check out the “grand design” and “divine” in the these:

 

“To a time

There's no pitchers or batters

Only fine lines

All the geometry

And the grand design

While inside the wonders

Of a science so divine

What is there to change?”

 

Weller is not coming across with any creeds or professions. Yet he is always looking for something to make sense of all of this. He thanks “The Universe” in his liner notes. 

Books is an obvious preach against the hypocrisy of evil things done by those who believe they have spiritually revelational books. However, a careful listen reveals that he does not sing “There is no God” but actually, “There is no God/In these mens hearts.”

Oh The Soul Searchers is exactly what is happening in an attempt to find true meanings. The title comes from lines in aspects;

 

“To find true meanings

And patterns in things

Symbols in making

These moments exist”

 

True Meanings is an album about how something transcendent might impact the everyday here and now. The ruminations of Weller, O’Brien and Cooper makes for Weller’s best record since…  actually it threatens Sound Affects as maybe his most satisfying ever! 

SAM PHILLIPS - WORLD ON STICKS

Maybe music needed Donald Trump! Whatever you say about him, he has given us a year of the most weighty music, content wise, in a long time. Brexit might have helped a little too! World On Sticks is Sam Phillips’ contribution to the social and political commentary of the very uncertain times we are living through.

Phillips has always been a writer of some depth. Interestingly her music took on more prophetic punch after her phase as Leslie Phillips in the Christian Music world. That industry in the 80s and 90s was a little one dimensional content wise. When Phillips spread her artistic wings, was discovered by T-Bone Burnett who produced her and married her she became a songwriter of acute social observation.

Since divorced from Burnett both in a marital and production sense, World Of Sticks has the lighter production feel that made her album Fan Dance such a joy a few records back. Not that she doesn’t still reveal or eccentric Tom Waitsian nature with her percussive rhythms and instrumentation.

I have been buying Sam Phillips records for over thirty years and this might be the one I am enjoying the most. American Landfill Kings shows off her eccentricities best. An environmental apocalypse of a song asking how we got to be living on all our throwaway trash! 

 

How did we find ourselves

Living on top of the things

That we don't want any more

Screaming while we cover our ears

We can't see ahead

And we won't see behind us

 

Praying that the true-false truth

Won't find us

 

Then How Much Is Enough which I think goes to the heart of our sickness:

 

Promising the good life to hide

What’s really being sold

How much is enough?

 

Then the prayerful hopefulness of Candles and Stars:

 

If only  

With candles and stars 

And broken light from dreams like ours 

We will still find our way through 

To love. 

 

In a great year for albums Phillips has added hers!

TOM PETTY - AN AMERICAN TREASURE

My favourite Tom Petty moment, and I have blogged it before is when during his 30th Anniversary Concert with The Heartbreakers in Gainesville (available on Runnin' Down a Dream - A Film by Peter Bogdanovich 4 Disc Boxset) he covers Van Morrison’s Mystic Eyes. 

He gets to this line -“I was walking on University Avenue...” Well, to paraphrase Van the Man, I was caught one more time!!! My old college room at Queen’s University Belfast looked out onto that very avenue, just about twenty yards from the Fitzroy that he made a little less ordinary on his Astral Weeks record. I was buzzing for weeks on the transcendence of University Avenue.

Then I sought out the Them version and there was no University Avenue in their lyric. So where did Petty get Morrison’s geographical streets? Eventually having Googled ‘University Avenue’ I found one right in the heart of Petty’s own Gainesville. He was contextualising it in his place not mine. Still, about a year later I became the minister of Fitzroy Presbyterian Church and it, as already mentioned, is canonized so I can rest easy!

I say all of this because listening to An American Treasure I suddenly realised that Tom Petty, not Bruce Springsteen, is the American Van Morrison. An American Treasure is a 4 CD box set carefully and lovingly put together by Tom Petty’s wife Dana, daughter Adria and the Heartbreakers. 

The way they have compiled his career brings out Petty’s sense of place and the dropping of place names that Morrison did so well. It is right across the box set but the highlight for me is in the 4th disc where they have a perviously unreleased track Bus To Tampa Bay, followed by a a live version of Saving Grace, the studio version of Down South and an intimate version of Southern Accents for which apparently his mother was in the audience:

 

“There's a dream I keep having

Where my mama comes to me

And kneels down over by the window

And says a prayer for me

I got my own way of prayin'

But every one's begun

With a southern accent

Where I come from”

 

Wow!

Now, Petty lived in California for the great majority of his life and he throws out place names from there too. However, it is when he is singing about the formative years of his life in Florida that I resonate most with his work. Van Morrison mined those years too. Also, for me, Petty’s Deep South resonates with my North Antrim, not far from Morrison’s East Belfast, in all kinds of cultural ways.

This is all to say that An American Treasure is just that. This is not a hastily thrown together compilation to cash in. This box is done lovingly and artistically. 

Let me reassure the fans. It is worth every penny. Yes, you might scan these tracks and think that you have the most of them so you don’t really need to spend the money. WRONG!

There is a treasure trove of alternative versions that give a whole new vibe to songs like Don’t Fade On Me, Rebels or You’re Gonna Get It which has strings. Live versions like Here Comes My Girl, King’s Road and the aforementioned Southern Accents add loads of wonderful add nuance. 

Then there are the unreleased tracks, scattered throughout that make you wonder how could they be left off albums. Petty’s daughter Adria’s favourite track is Keeping Me Alive and my friend Oliver has been loving Keep A Little Soul. Bus To Tampa Bay is mine.

In the booklet full of notes on every song Adria writes about how her dad wanting to be a songwriter much more than a rock star. This box set with her dad’s songs broken into four decades, and staying away from the hits, is perhaps the strongest possible argument of the fact that Petty was one of the great songwriters. It is packed full of great songs and reminds us lovingly but forcefully of what we lost far too soon.

A STAR IS BORN

A Star Is Born is a molotov cocktail of emotion that explodes on landing in your heart at various moments. Tears seeped out of my eyes and sneaked down my cheek on more than one occasion.

The power comes in the songs and the truly outstanding performances in those songs, and in general, from Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. Who would have seen Cooper as such a singer and Gaga as such an actress. 

I remember the 1976 film version and never bothered watching it or listening to the soundtrack. Evergreen was a bit soft to a fifteen year old at a time when punk was about to descend. Even Kristofferson seems a long way from that Silver Tongued Devil.

How encouraging then that this 2018 remake begins with Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maines looking like the earthier Kristofferson rocked up and throwing guitar riffs. This is a tougher incarnation. Cooper has worked the soundtrack up with Lukas Nelson, son of Kristofferson’s mate Willie and main man in Neil Young’s recent backing band The Promise. Nelson brings some rock cred for sure. 

The songs are a vital part of the narrative. In an age where musicals are all the rage again - La La Land and The Greatest Showman - this is the kind of musical that I can deal with. The songs are not contrived. They stand alone. It is an artistic Cooper directed success. 

It is hard to believe that Cooper had never sung before. Eighteen months vocal coaching and he achieves something incredible, telling us that Lady Gaga forced him into live takes. As he strums a guitar and sings Maybe It’s Time I am thinking that he is basing the musical persona as Jason Isbell, not knowing at the time that Isbell wrote that song! 

Gaga as Ally, Maines’ girlfriend and the star being born, reinvents herself a little too. There is a scene in her room where the cover of Carole King’s Tapestry is framed on the wall. When Ally sings Always Remember Us This Way on the piano at a Maines’ gig it is King with a better voice. I fell in love with Lady Gaga at this moment. I never thought I would write that! Brilliant pieces of songwriting, emotionally delivered without some of the pop star beats and dancers that gets in the way of Gaga’s talent.

Which is actually what then happens in the movie. Pop svengali Rez enters the scene offering to make Ally the biggest star in the world. Ally is up from behind the piano, fronting dance groups with plastic pop sounds and all over the city bill boards.

The love story of A Star Is Born is one of redemption. Jackson Maines meets Ally when his ears are damaged and his star is beginning to fall. He’s got alcohol and drug problems and there is lingering trauma from a mother who died giving birth to him and a father figure that was not all wholesome. Ally becomes a near salvation.

Ally is a talent, never recognised, lacking confidence to play her own songs and insecure about the size of her nose. Jackson finds her performing in a drag bar and loves her into the star she becomes.

The music story of A Star Is Born is one of finding your voice and using it to say what you have to say. The songs in the movie do just that. They show the power of music to tell a story and move an audience. In the storyline, Maines is mentoring Ally towards such ambition when Rez seems to sidetrack her. The authenticity of life and art are at stake!

The spiritual heart of the piece is when temptation leads the story and the characters off up a crooked road. The two souls of Maines and Ally redeeming each other is fractured by the apple on the tree, the world and fame! The authenticity of art takes a hit too. More tragically one character tempts Ally away from what is most important and, when that becomes most important, Maines’ sacrifices his life for her. It’s a very twisted play on the Jesus’ Gospel but there are all kinds of threads for those with ears to hear, or eyes to see!

Like all great art A Star Is Born is a great watch as just a movie but if you are alert to the layers within it is a very satisfying piece of art indeed. 

JULES MAXWELL - SONGS FROM THE CULTURAL BACKWATER

Jules Maxwell is a quiet wonder of an artist. He’s not usually in the front preferring to play behind the likes of Iain Archer or Brian Houston, write with Foy Vance and Lisa Gerrard, tour with Dead Can Dance and worked in the theatre, being resident composer at London’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for goodness sake.

This collection of songs brings all of that back story to fruition in 12 perfectly honed songs. It is an eclectic mix but overall it a record that is sparse in instrumentation but full of lovely little flourishes with brass and strings that his soundtrack work has taught him how to use economically but with impact.

Everything is understated but makes quite a statement as a result. Maxwell comes from the traditional songwriting line that traces back to Randy Newman and Jimmy Webb. Webb for the craft and odd subject matter. Newman for the humour throughout. 

I can hear an Irish version of the deep southern spirit of Louisiana 1927 in the emigration song No Place That Rains (Quite Like Home) Quite Like Home. The quirkiness of Newman is also seeping through The Boy Who Cried For The World.

Maxwell’s strength over Newman is that the humour and quirk never gets to a point where it becomes a little over bearing. He is leaning into Jimmy Webb enough to smooth Newman’s sometimes irritating edges off. Indeed, Webb would be proud of Good Ghost and the stunningly beautiful Last Train To Limerick, on which Louise Wallace voice gently spills into your heart in the uber sparseness. Oh my, it is so utterly beautiful. If Webb write this it was be the most covered song of the next five years!

Maxwell’s sabbatical from playing supporting role to a myriad of musical worlds is an outstanding success. This a deeply satisfying album. 

STOCKI'S FAV ALBUMS OF SEPTEMBER 2018

Here are the albums that I have been most listening to in September...

BLUE RODEO - THE THINGS WE LEFT BEHIND

Blue Rodeo are a Canadian band that should be known better outside their native Canada than they are. I have been buying their records since the early 90s, Lost Together being a favourite record. A week or two back I sought out a new record and discovered they had released a live record from Massey Hall, Toronto’s Royal Albert in 2014 and a studio record 1000 Arms in 2016. In retracing their steps I re-discovered The Things We Left behind, maybe one of their strongest collections, spanning tow CDs with their Neil Young Harvest sounding alt country.

 

PAUL MCCARTNEY - EGYPT STATION

Mid seventies and still releasing quality albums. My review... HERE

 

PAUL MCCARTNEY - MY PLAYLIST

Egypt Station sent me off gathering Macca extra tracks. I discovered their were Tribute record contributions I didn’t have and that he had released a song on a soundtrack Ethel and Ernest that I knew nothing about. I sought out various curios and then compiled a playlist for CDR. I rather like it. Check it out… HERE

 

COWBOY JUNKIES - ALL THAT RECKONING

The Canadians get urgent about the state of the world and love. To be reckoned with for sure. Review… HERE

 

MATTHEW PERRYMAN JONES - THE WAKING HOURS

A new Perryman Jones album. Wonderful. Matthew’s records send me into meditation. he has a poetic flair, delves the depths of humanity and his voice and melodies sneak under your ears to steal into your heart and soul.

 

BURNING CODES - LIBERATOR

Full on guitar onslaught from Bangor boy Paul Archer’s collaborative. You know that they love the Pixies and they might not mean it but the only other band that does what they do with melodies as instant as these is Ash.

 

PAUL SIMON - IN THE BLUE LIGHT

Paul Simon redoes some of his old songs that he doesn’t feel got a fair arranging or hearing at the time of release. He the adds players like Wynton Marsalis and Bill Frisell as well as yMusic. Different settings for sure and some work very well, while one of two not so much. Overall excellent. Make it a series Paul, please!

 

ROMANTICA - OUTLAWS

Belfast born, Minneapolis living Ben Kyle is just a massive favourite. The voice, the songs, the soothing tunes. My review… HERE

 

GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS - THE WAVES, THE WAKE

A recent discovery. More Canadians! My review... HERE

 

CHRIS WILSON - DOWNFALL EP

This Indiana boy gave Belfast a couple fo his best years and got a few songs out of it. His awesome voice is now being matched with quality songs. Review… HERE