SOUL SURMISE

MICHAEL KIWANUKA - KIWANUKA

There are a few things that make a record great for me. It’s good if it is eclectic, cohesive and thematic. It is good if it is beautiful, familiar in many ways but full of surprises.

Michael Kiwanuka ticks every box on his Mercury Music Prize winning album Kiwanuka. His third record is the culmination of the development in his imagination and musical implementation from his debut record Home Again through his second record Love and Hate. Home Again as an acoustic record in the traditional songwriter style, Love and Hate brought in electric guitars and riffs and grooves.

The third record simply called Kiwanuka has all of those albums and more. It is tender at times, riffed up at other times with all kinds of intricate little joins in-between. There are all the great influences - Curtis Mayfield, Pop Staples, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway and lashings of the psychedelic guitar sounds of Jimi Hendrix. Kiwanuka throws tablespoonfuls of all of these into the most original of rocked up concoctions.

For me, I am particularly chuffed that Kiwanuka won the Mercury Music Prize as I claim him as Ugandan. Soul Surmise readers know how dear that country is to my heart. Kiwanuka’s parents were Ugandan and left to escape the oppressive regime of Idi Amin. I happened to be in Uganda when Love and Hate came out and the location of first listens added resonance.

There is a personal introspection to Kiwanuka’s work. He has admitted to self doubt and naming the album after his surname is a statement of pride in who he is and has become. There is a spiritual light to his music too and he is a not without social critique and political comment. 

Kiwanuka is everything I look for in a great record.

SUZANNE VEGA - AN EVENING OF NEW YORK SONGS AND STORIES

It is hard to believe that music buyers in the mid 80s had such artistic taste that Suzanne Vega could have been a superstar. Her eponymous debut and Solitude Standing came at a time when the songwriter was back and Marlena On the Wall, Small Blue Thing, Left of Centre, Luka and Tom’s Diner some of them as double 7” and 10” vinyl singles gave her a celebrity status she had never imagined.

Though the significant album and singles sales decreased and Vega claims she could stand outside the window of a record store with her album in the window without being recognised the quality of her art has never wained. Check out the songs on her Tales From The Realm of the Queen Of Pentacles. It is still wonderful writing.

A lazy criticism of her last decade might be that Vega has milked her early years with her four CD Close Up series of reworked songs and a live concert of her most popular record Solitude Standing. Here’s another live record stacked with the hits. 

However, Vega is never lazy with how she packages these older songs. This is very evident indeed in An Evening of New York Songs and Stories. One night at New York’s Cafe Carlyle with three players behind her Vega uses her songs almost like a play that takes us onto the very streets New York City. 

We’re inside a flat on Marlena On The Wall, we’re in the stairwell on Luka, we are on Ludlow Street itself and into playgrounds on Freeze Tag. Then there are her critiques on New York New York Is A Woman and New York Is My Destination, the latter from her album about Southern gothic novelist Carson McCullers.

She adds a few lovely touch introductions and this is a resounding successful evening made album. Vega at her best, throwing songs from every era of her career, making them all better by the specific gathering. 

HOT PRESS'S RAVE ON VAN MORRISON COVERS SERIES - a Review

I have had a late evening tradition for the past month. I have gone to the kitchen, set up my lap top, typed in Hot Press Van Morrison 75 and listened to Van Morrison songs covered by Irish artists that have been going up every evening. It has been an absolute joy and oftentimes revelation.

I have fallen in love with songs all over again, discovered ones that I haven’t given enough time to before and also been introduced to artists that I had never heard of. Ireland is crammed with excellent musical acts just now that it easy to miss a large dollop. 

Bronagh Gallagher’s The Healing Has Begun is for me the best of the entire batch, the way she grabs the soul of the song, throws in that Belfast accent and chats about listening to Van albums in the Holy Lands. 

Gary Lightbody, teaming up with my friends Iain Archer and Miriam Kauffman is a personal thrill and they takes Into The Mystic way out into the mystic. 

Joshua Burnside, currently the star in the northern sky shines bright in a transfixing version of You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push The River.

Duke Special does Orangefield, actually in Orangefield, with feeling.

Dea Matrona’s Gloria is youthful energy with a whiff of teen female attitude and amazing playing that blows the Therapy version out of the water.

Another northern teenager Conor Marcus takes his 15 year old confidence and talent to conquer Rough God Goes Riding.

Tim Wheeler and Imelda May bring the best out of Jackie Wilson Says and Wild Night respectively.

Wookilily throw all their instrumentation and imagination at a Wavelength.

Moncrieff takes the pop hit accessibility of 1978’s Hungry For Your Love, also from Wavelnegth and gives it a sound for radio in 2020.

Damien Rice gets all the love that is in it out of Crazy Love.

Mary Coughlan’s smoky jazz seduction gives a sensuality to Warm Love.

Hozier can’t fail with that big voice on Caravan.

On spoken word President Michael D Higgins is for me more believable than either Terri Hooley or Paul Muldoon but Liam Neeson’s Ballymena accent (used for Aslan and therefore God) on David Lyttle’s Hyndford Street soundscape is a wonderful evening meditation of “Dreaming In God” any night for the rest of my life!

John Spillane gives that everyday ordinariness to Cleaning Windows

Jealous Of The Birds brings Saint Dominics Preview home from San Fransisco via Buffalo to Belfast city. 

Kaz Hawkins brings soul as needed to Full Force Gale. 

Jordan O’Keefe gives a gritty vocal to Real Real Gone.

Then there is a busker feel to Brand New Friend’s Wonderful Remark and Key West’s Come Running. Loose and full of Morrison-esque feel.

Altan’s Whenever God Shines His Light adds a spirituality that personally I believe Cliff Richard lost in the original release.

Celtic trad sounds gives fascinating angles to Martin Hayes Moondance, Moya Brennan’s Beauty Of The Days, Amberlight’s Celtic New Year and The Henry Girls These Are The Days.

A quick panorama of the entire catalogue and it becomes obvious how much artists love Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece. 

Glen Hansard was a no brainer for the title track of Astral Weeks but Soak’s Beside You and Reevah’s Ballerina steal the show with their beautifully reflective transcendence. Jack L does a fine job with The Way Young Lovers Do and David Keenan’s quirky voice eeks the detail of Slow Slim Slider. I wasn’t sure about The Scratch’s Sweet Thing, The Hudson Taylor’s bite off more than they could quite chew on Cyprus Avenue and I thought Joy Crookes did a better Madame George than a favourite of mine, Luka Bloom.

Most popular of all, Veedom Fleece is the ultimate revelation. The current star in the sky Josh Burnside’s evocative voice brings a Van-ness to You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push The River. Sinead O’Connor brings Sinead-ness to Who Was The Masked Man. Papenfus’s soulful Fair Play is perfect reinvention. Mick Flannery’s Linden Arden Stole The Highlights is earthed. Cairan Lavery gives an Aghalee feel to Country Fair. Little Hours emotional Streets Of Arklow, Gemma Hayes throws a female hue across Comfort Me, Cathal Coughlan does Come Here My Love and Ultan Conlan does Bulbs.

Night after night I have been impressed not only with the performances but about how strong and deep Morrison’s catalogue is.

Ultimately Liam O Maonlai put it perfectly as he introduces his deeply spiritual version of The Masters Eyes and thanks Van for “the access you have given us to a form of the divine… prayerful intimacy”.

Well done Hot Press. An amazingly creative way to celebrate Van Morrison’s 75th Birthday in Coronavirus Days. Now make them all   available on mp3 or vinyl for a homeless charity - NOW!

ANDY THORNTON - AGES

Andy Thornton was a major influence on my life. At a particular time in my following of Jesus he arrived like an angel beyond coincidence. He articulated many of my suspicions that I was heading down a narrow road but that it wasn’t the narrow road that Jesus said led to life, more the narrowness of the legalism that Jesus fought against. He widened my soul’s vision. He got me sacked from at least one PCI Youth Board committee but that is for another blog!

Andy even had a song that expressed that spiritual crossroads. Rage in The Darkness appears in the extra Cd available with Andy’s new record Ages. It’s remastering gives even more energy to the liberation that God’s love brings and critiques the counterfeit version “That leads me into slavery while promising to set me free…. It’s a rage, rage, rage in the darkness.”

Ages is Andy Thornton as we have always known him. If you took the lyrical poetry and near jazz styling of Bruce Cockburn and added an late 80s Scottish pop sheen you’ll get the idea. His own band of that time Big Sur were contemporaries of Deacon Blue, The Big Dish, Love and Money, The Bathers, Aztec Camera, The Pearlfishers et al.  Andy probably dreams of Cockburn’s literary genius and guitar virtuoso but then Bruce would have benefitted from Thornton’s voice and pop sensibility.

Ages is a record not so much about ageing as maturity. It is an album full of insights on life, love, mortality, travel and politics. The opening track might describe that freedom for spiritually more that Andy first inspired within my own soul:

 

Maybe the world is still out there? 

Maybe the keys are all inside?

Maybe we’re hiding them away?

Come on let’s climb every mountain, 

Let’s sail the ocean wide

Seek and you will find

Hide and you will seek nothing… and find it

 

Find Me In the Birdsong gives us Andy’s mission statement, “But I was born to sing of love and search the earth for meaning”. That is what Andy does in songs. Lahore Moon is a beaut about Andy’s work in far way places and the lessons he has learn from finding a wider perspective of living. 

This Time ,This Place, This Skin asks about the accidents of post code births and wrestles with how we can make the world more just. Blood Or Money asks what the driving force of our relationship with neighbour is and Cruel Britannia rages against an arrogant British psyche that works itself out in horrific treatment of other nations. 

All this objective surmising is wrapped around subjective songs of love and faith. In Falling Upwards with its title taken from a Richard Rohr book Andy is ever seeking growth in vulnerability:

 

No man is a strong as he may seem

Though some may learn the script 

and play the scene

But when the story falls apart

it takes a broken heart for new light to get in 

 

The extra CD makes the £10 price tag an utter bargain, a Thornton “Greatest Hits”. I have to confess I had forgotten how brilliant Rage In The Darkness, Stone Cold Winter, 21 and Heartbeat In Everything were. 

Ages has been a joy of summer listening with as much stimulating content as any good book. 

LUKA BLOOM - BITTERSWEET CRIMSON

Luka Bloom is nowadays like the poet Laureate of the west of Ireland if not indeed the Republic Of Ireland as a whole. Christy Moore’s brother got the songwriting skill in the genes and for decades has been troubadouring his reflections on life and Ireland and many other countries all around the globe. Yet, in recent years he has made his home in North West Clare and his work reflects his love for land and sea and all living things.

Bloom had been a friend of John O’Donohue before the mystical poets untimely death in 2008 and O’Donohue’s influence is very real which is a very good thing indeed. 

The Old Oak Fell on the record is about the passing of another Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Bloom sings, perhaps to himself:

 

“I hope we’re digging deeper

Since the old oak fell.”

 

O’Donohue and Heaney’s love of earth and sea and sky are most evident on the meditation on life that is My Old Friend The Oak Tree and Who Will Heal The Land which is concerned that the earth is in danger:

 

“Embers are falling in Eden

The great burning time is on

Who will hear the dreaming

When all the wild birds are gone"

 

Bloom like Heaney certainly digs with his pen but his other tool is that trademark rhythmic guitar. To his own innovative playing he adds the improvisation of Steve Cooney’s too. Adam Shapiro's fiddle shines and Sligo’s Niamh Farrell’s voice is a beautiful revelation.

Though he name checks Bruach Na Haille, Gleninagh and then various places in the famine song The Hunger, don’t think that Bloom is confining himself to the west of Ireland. Mali and Palestine get songs as well and Bloom music seems influenced by such far away lands too. 

In the end Bittersweet Crimson is about as one songs puts it, the beauty of everyday things. The song finds that beauty in a the blackbird’s song, a joke with the postman, a hurler playing like Christy Ring and diving into the sea. Everyday things. That’s what he said!

You won’t listen to Bittersweet Crimson on your favourite streaming sites or buy it there either. Bloom feels his financial investment deserves a better cut. It does, so go and seek it on Luka’s website. Old school in every positive kind of way. 

KATHLEEN EDWARDS - TOTAL FREEDOM

If there are any artists out there who feel that the muse has gone stale or feel that they are not getting the deepest gladness out of their art then Kathleen Edwards has the answer. Give it up. Walk away. Open a cafe.

That is what Edwards did. Eight years ago she had a critically acclaimed record Voyageur produced by the coolest of cool songwriters Justin Vernon. She was fed up while touring it and went off to the Stittsville, Ontario and set up a cafe called appropriately Quitters.

I have no idea how that has worked in a business sense but as an artistic move it has proved genius. 

Total Freedom sounds just that. Here is a songwriter who cleaned the slate and has come back with an album of free flowing lyric, melody and Americana groove (is there a Canadana groove?!).

Edwards might be described as a direct peer of Jason Isbell or in the slipstream of her countrymen Blue Rodeo or maybe more accurately, in a less than accurate sense, the sound that would have been made if Suzanne Vega or Jonatha Brooke, instead of Stevie Nicks had been the associate member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. It’s guitar. It’s great songs. It’s poetic lyrics.

This collection is personal, Glenfern about her old days on the road, Hard On Everyone about an abusive boyfriend, Fool’s Ride about the same scoundrel, Simple Math is about the better values of friendship that faithfully lasts from childhood and Who Rescued Who about the spiritual benefits of having a dog. It all ends with the acoustic strum of the cathartic ballad Take It With You When You Go.

It is as a consistent piece of work as Edwards has released. She seems in a good place. A place to look back and around her and make sense of it from a place of freedom. Total. 

Quitters in Stittsville. I’ll take mine black with same coloured vinyl!

THE KILLERS - IMPLODING THE MIRAGE

The Killers are a conundrum. I really shouldn’t like this band. They are influenced by bands I do not love like The Smiths and The Cure and some bands I really do not like, like Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode. 

Lead singer Brandon Flowers is all bombast and sequinned shoulder pads with feathers! That K on the stage is all light bulbed up. The last time I saw kitsch like that I was driving down the main strip of Vegas with my mates Dave and Dave.

It should not work, at least for me. Yet, it so does. These guys are so intoxicatingly good. Imploding The Mirage is a great surge of a stadium sound, almost from beginning to end. Your ears and heart and soul ride a tidal wave of big brash songs.

It should not work. Yet, it so does. Why? I have been asking that as I have played this record over and over again and I think I might have my personal answer. 

Below the the synthed up 80s sounds, the bombast and Vegas kitsch is Brandon Flowers songwriting brilliance. First, he has these melodies. They are utterly crash bang catchy. 

On top this melodic bounce Flowers is simply an excellent lyricist. I love how clever he is, conjuring words and rhymes.

Then, as well as the melody and poetry Brandon Flowers adds soul. Soul is about feeling deep down. It is when the song reaches in and touches you deep. It is when the band are not just playing but creating and drilling far enough down to strike the emotional and for me best of all, the spiritual. This is what shifts the names in reviews from Pet Shop Boys to Bruce Springsteen!

Imploding The Mirage is spiritually drenched. The opening My Own Soul’s Warning is worth the entrance price alone:

 

If you could see through the banner of the sun

Into eternity's eyes, like a vision reaching down to you

Would you turn away

What if it knew you by your name

What kind of words would cut through the clutter of the whirlwind of these days

 

Flowers calls it a song of repentance. 

That whirlwind is on the cover painting Thomas Blackshear’s Dance Of The Wind and Storm which the band says influenced the choice of songs. The painting and the record seem to me about finding the eternal in the midst of the world’s clutter.

Fire In Bone is a wonderful retelling of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son:

 

When I came back empty-handed

You were waiting in the road

And you fell on my neck

And you took me back home

After all that I took from you

After all that I put you through

Here I am”

 

Running Towards a Place is says that perfect. A song of eternity but seeking to not have to wait to find all the wonder. He’s not the first rock star to quote William Blake:

 

Can you see the world

In a grain of sand?

Can you find heaven in a wildflower

Hold it in the palm of your hand?

The moment we met

… 

Because we're running towards a place

Where we'll walk as one

And the sadness of this life

Will be overcome

 

Flowers is a Mormon and I am a Presbyterian but I have never heard any of his spiritual utterances that I cannot embrace. The nature of the sound that The Killers make gives a spiritual exuberance like U2 created way back on October. It make the music so hopeful.

As I listen to Imploding The Mirage I wonder if it stands up alongside Hot Fuss. I think over time that it might. For me there was dip to Battle Born and then the graph rises again and all of these ten songs might be pushing for places in the live set list for some time to come.

It is all very signature The Killers. Yet to add tweaks there is War On Drugs, Weyes Blood and even KD Lang and Lindsay Buckingham adding breadth and other hues to the unbroken formula of 16 years. 

SNOW PATROL & THE SATURDAY SONGWRITERS - THE FIRESIDE SESSIONS

Here’s another mark of the talent and relational charm of Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody. Not long after lockdown in March he was one of the first to start Instagram gigs to see us through. When he suggested a songwriting night I sensed train crash carnage. How on earth could you write a song of any use with thousands of strangers on Instagram?

Well, The Fireside Sessions is far from any kind of crash. Considering the circumstances of its inception this is quite an achievement. Gary wrote twelve songs with his Instagram public. The Fireside Sessions give us five. There might be more on to come later Bandcamp.

It seems that in the hour after the Instagram suggestions of chords and lyrics, Lightbody worked for an hour to create the song. He then sent them to producer, and associate Snow Patrol member, Iain Archer who worked night and day to create this EP that could sit comfortably alongside the Reworked record that Archer also worked on.

My particular favourites are The Curve Of Earth and Light Years, the latter benefitting so much from Miriam Kaufmann vocals. Kaufmann’s harmonies are becoming a Snow Patrol hidden secret. More of it.

It is the lyrics that most impress me. Take the chorus from the first song written, Dance With Me:

 

The loudest silence brings a list of all our longing

Alone together in the dark

We'll ride this storm out in this quiet isolation

But the math, it can't explain our love

 

Or on Light Years:

 

Bright lights in time of darkness

Incandescent, uncompared

You could be two meters away from me

But it seems light years sometimes, dear

But even distant, I'm with you

 

These lyrics touch on the Covid 19 lockdown but not to such an extent that it won’t stand on its on long after. They songs have catalogued the time without getting captured in it.

When I had the privilege of interviewing Gary Lightbody at the 4 Corners Festival in February he quickly dismissed my suggestion that he was first and foremost a poet. I do think though that the English teacher at Campbell College, Mr McKee, who inspired him so much gave Lightbody’s lyrics as much Seamus Heaney as he did Van Morrison or Bob Dylan.

What I am fascinated about here is how much the lyrics of Lightbody have influenced his Instagram strangers. When someone looks across the Snow Patrol catalogue in 25 years time they will not see much difference in the lyrical style of The Fireside Sessions and the rest.

So this is a lovely little extra release for Snow Patrol fans, tiding us over until this is all done and the band can get back with Jacknife Lee for the follow up to Wildness. It is another little light to come out of the shadows of lockdown. Lightbody has used the time well. Apparently he has an album or two tucked away!

Not only is The Fireside Sessions good but it is good for something. All proceeds will go to the anti-poverty charity Trussell Trust doing so much with Food Banks in these difficult times.

Good works boys… and Miriam! 

BOB DYLAN - ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS

In David and Caroline Stafford’s biography of Randy Newman they quote Bob Dylan talking about Bob’s favourite Newman song Burn Down The Cornfield. Dylan says, “His style is deceiving. He’s so laid back that you kind of forget he’s saying important things”.

I am not sure that Bob Dylan ever thought we would be deceived into forgetting that he was saying important things but the line jumped off the page at me as I was reading it while digesting Rough and Rowdy Ways. 

The music is deceptively simple. Early blues and most of them in laid back shuffle mode. The band is definitely staying out of the way of the important things but I find it to be as beautiful a sonic base for Dylan’s poetry as I have heard in a long while. 

I Contain Multitudes could be from Oh Mercy. False Prophet from Time Out Of Mind and everything in between from those records though no Daniel Lanois on production this time.

Dylan’s voice is a bit like the later Leonard Cohen and Jonny Cash, what he has lost in range he more than makes up for in intonation and deliberation. The sound of his voice is fantastic. Everything is set for those important things.

The lyrics are brilliant on Rough and Rowdy Ways are everything a fan dreams, intelligent literate lines full of cultural references and intrigue. They are objective and subjective about the state of the nation and the state of the soul. We will be discussing these songs for decades!

Of course I am always seeking out the spiritual and there is much to find. I Contain Multitudes is of course pilfered from Walt Whitman’s Song For Myself and could be a Pauline confession of “all have sinned and fallen short…” but there is something of the multitude facets of American in there too.

I might be contriving it but My Own Version Of You might be amongst other things our human penchant for creating God in our own image.

I can almost hear I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You on Saved from Dylan’s “Christian Trilogy” especially with its’: 

 

If I had the wings of a snow white dove

I'd preach the gospel, the gospel of love

A love so real, a love so true

I've made up my mind to give myself to you

 

Goodbye Jimmy Reed is a little more driving but again:

 

For thine is kingdom, the power, the glory

Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story

Tell it in that straightforward, puritanical tone

In the mystic hours when a person's alone

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, godspeed

Thump on the Bible, proclaim a creed

 

Then there is Crossing The Rubicon nodding at the cross for salvation:

 

Three miles north of purgatory

One step from the great beyond

I prayed to the cross, I kissed the girls

And I crossed the Rubicon

 

And seeking the Holy Spirit too:

 

I feel the Holy Spirit inside

See the light that freedom gives

I believe it’s in the reach of

Every man who lives

 

Oh, as I have said, we’ll be listening for a long time and finding new nuggets in the couplets every time. When David Mitchell wrote, in his new novel Utopia Avenue, "One spoon of Dylan makes a gallon of meanings" he could have been describing Rough and Rowdy Ways. Isn’t that we want in a great Bob Dylan album?

PAUL MCCARTNEY - FLAMING PIE (Archive Edition)

Paul McCartney’s tenth album under his own name arrived when his stock was as high as it had been since Tug Of War back in 1982. Not only had The Beatles Anthology series brought him to a younger audience but the biggest band of the day was pretty much a derivative Beatles tribute band - Oasis!

Listening back to The Beatles as they not only edited material but actually wrote new songs and hearing that same Beatles’ sound all over the radio, McCartney got his guitar out and retro rocked some old sounds that were now contemporary again. Jeff Lynne does his job as producer by scattering sweet sheen across it.

Flaming Pie might actually be the very best of Macca’s solo records. It is song after song of great writing, looser in atmosphere than most others, rocks when it wants to rock and goes all reflective too. 

The title track has that mid 90s retro Beatle guitar riffing as does The Young Boy and If You Wanna, the latter two beefed up by Steve Miller as collaborator.  If you listen closely enough to Miller’s third contribution Used To Be Bad you might even hear echos of Rory Gallagher! 

On the other side of McCartney’s palate, Calico Pie is a beautiful continuation of the finger picking beauty that started with Blackbird. Little Willow is prettiest melancholy, written for Ringo’s children when their mother Maureen passed away. Even more poignant when Linda McCartney died less than 18 months later. 

I love the Archive Series, not so much for their remasters as their extra tracks. Here, that is a CD full of home demos that in the stripped back and raw form reveal the quality of McCartney’s melodies and show how they metamorphosed in the studio. It is very bespoke, intimate enough to have phones ringing and people walking around. We also get a rough mix of the rarity Whole Life a co-write with Dave Stewart. It is actually very like the Anthology songs, the different take on the by now familiar.

In the notes in the accompanying booklet George Martin is quoted as saying, “When I heard Somedays it immediately reminded me of vintage Paul. It’s quite difficult writing hits. Even when you’re the greatest hitmaker of all. It was nice to see that Paul was getting back to his roots. Because I think Somedays is a classic song. I think it’s one of those simple ones, deceivingly simple, very difficult to write. I loved it.’

Sir George has said it all. On Flaming Pie Paul McCartney’s mojo was back. Flaming Pie has deceivingly simple difficult to write classics strewn right the way through it. For me the extra CD might be my favourite of the entire Archive Series. There are box sets of this for hundreds of pounds. Rip off me thinks. The double CD will do me fine!