Various Artists – The Story Of Trojan Records - August 2011 August 28th, 2011

Trojan records’ vast back catalogue of essential Jamaican reggae is a valuable property, but how can Universal exploit an asset already so thoroughly strip-mined? Disc one of this five CD, budget priced, set The Story Of Trojan Records, features familiar UK reggae hits of the sixties and seventies – The Pioneers’ Longshot Kick De Bucket,…

Tinariwen – Tassilli - August 2011 August 28th, 2011

When world music artists collaborate with Western acts, our inner Rousseau, with his patronising vision of the noble savage pumping out some exotic groove from an ancient wellspring of innate good taste, is usually severely compromised. It turns out all your favourite developing world star really wanted to do was duet with some embarrassing rock…

Bill Frisell – Sign Of Life : Music For The 858 Quartet - August 2011 August 28th, 2011

Bill Frisell plays jazz, folk and blues, but there’s no dirt under these fingernails. Frisell’s considered interpretations of durable American genres are hand-tooled for the konzerthalle, not the juke joint. The sixty year old guitar guru is joined on Sign Of Life by the viola player Eyvind Kang, the cellist Hank Roberts, and the violinist…

Paolo Angeli & Takumi Fukushima – Itsunomakika - August 2011 August 28th, 2011

Paolo Angeli wrestles a giant Sardinian guitar, with hand-triggered analogue one-man band adaptations bolted to it, like Heath Robinson fusing free improvisation and soaring gypsy folk. Here, the Japanese singer and violinist Takumi Fukushima augments his signature moves, her voice fluttering and flowering like Bjork, or the great Czech improviser Iva Bittova, from rabid dog…

Stomping Nick and his Blues Grenade – Punk Blues One Man Band - August 2011 August 21st, 2011

Seasick Steve narrowly pipped his contemporary, the less marketable Jawbone, to the lone position for punk-blues one-man bands in the casual consumer’s collection. There’s no house room for more hollerin’ lonesome hobos, yet, like H G Wells’ foolhardy martians, still they come. Reverend Deadeye, Lewis Floyd Henry, and now, from the unlikely blues cradle of…

Fountains Of Wayne – Sky Full Of Holes - August 2011 August 21st, 2011

In 2003, at the mid-point of their career, superstardom winked briefly at New Jersey’s Fountains Of Wayne, when their hit single Stacey’s Mom achingly anatomised adolescent trans-generational lust. But their fifth album finds them back in the box marked ‘underappreciated guitar pop classicists’, where their understatedly sharp, and wryly witty, portraits of suburban survivors’ mid-life…