Lirium is the new project from Lisa Fury, formerly lead vocalist of Karnataka, who sang on the superb “The Gathering Light“.
It’s a very different musical style to Karnataka’s sweeping symphonic rock, but it’s great to hear Lisa’s fantastic voice again.
“Live at the Café 68″ is York singer-songwriter Heather Findlay’s second release since leaving as lead singer of Mostly Autumn in 2010. Recorded before an intimate audience of just thirty people, it’s a stripped-down acoustic album featuring fellow singer-songwriter Chris Johnson on guitar and vocals.
It’s explicitly billed as a duo rather than a Heather Findlay solo project, and includes as many Chris Johnson-penned songs as it does Heather’s, drawn both from Chris’ time in Mostly Autumn and from a couple of his myriad other projects.
The album captures the atmosphere of the evening with a lot of between songs banter and the audience very prominent in the mix. If anything, the audience is perhaps a little too prominent, in that it reminds those of us who weren’t able to be there what we missed.
Opener “Phoenix” is the sole song taken from Heather’s début solo EP, with Heather singing the instrumental parts in the intro. It works so well in simplified acoustic form it feels as if that was the way the song was originally intended to be performed.
Without the power and energy of a full band, there’s nowhere for anyone to hide, and the whole thing stands on the quality of the songs and the performance. Heather has always been a class act as a vocalist, hitting that sweet spot balancing precision with emotional depth, whether it’s fronting the full-blown wall of sound of Mostly Autumn, or the more mellow and delicate acoustic vibes of Odin Dragonfly. The feel here is much closer to the latter. Chris Johnson also deserves a lot of credit for his guitar playing, adding far more richness and depth than you often get from a single acoustic guitar. It’s also interesting hearing Heather using wordless vocals to replace instrumental parts, such as the original clarinet line on “Blue Light”.
Apart from a cover of Gillian Welch’s “Dear Someone”, which is perhaps the weakest song on the entire album, the rest of the set is made up of reworkings of older songs from Heather’s and Chris’ respective songbooks. There are a couple of Mostly Autumn standards in “Caught in a Fold” and “Evergreen”, the latter working especially well acoustically. “Gaze”, a song originally hidden away on the bonus disk of Mostly Autumn’s “Heart Full of Sky” is sublime, as is the Odin Dragonfly number “Magpie”. The latter is a great example of Chris’ subtle but effective guitar playing, effortlessly combining the flute and guitar lines of the original into a single guitar part.
Although the focus is on Heather’s vocals with Chris Johnson adding harmonies, he does get to sing lead on a couple of songs, one being the jaunty “Out of Season”, originally by his band The Evernauts. The other, the dark and intense take on “The Dogs” from Chris’s project Halo Blind (née Parade) is one of the highlights, performed as a duet with Heather taking the lines originally sung by Anne-Marie Helder on the record, and ending with a few bars of Heather’s own “Red Dust”.
The Mostly Autumn number “Silver Glass” closes the album. The original version from “Heart Full of Sky” had been a piano-led number with Chris Johnson singing lead. Transposed from piano to guitar, and with Heather taking on the lead vocal, it turns into a spine-tingling performance that makes you wonder why Heather never sung lead on the original. Not that there’s anything wrong with Chris’ original vocal, but hearing Heather sing it lifts the song to another level.
Although I was unable to be there for the recording, people I’ve spoken to tell me it was a quite remarkable experience, and his record manages to capture a lot of that magic. There’s certainly something of the chill-out vibe of Odin Dragonfly’s “Offerings” on display here, and I think it’s fair to say that if you liked that album, you’ll probably like this. But there’s also a far greater emphasis here on Heather’s and Chris’ talents as songwriters, both with keen ears for very strong and memorable melodies.
“Live at the Café 68″ will be available for order from www.heatherfindlay.net from November 14th
We’ve all heard friends like this. “There’s no good music around any more”, they say, like Homer Simpson. We know there’s all kinds of wonderful music out there in every genre from prog-rock to death metal to alt.country to electronic to solo bass to many many more that most people have never heard of. But they only know of the ITV Indie and Asda-pop of the commercial mainstream.
Steve Lawson said on Twitter
Ever heard anyone complaining that there’s no good music around any more? Those people are insane. Ignore them.
But I think Steve Lawson, thought he has a point, is still being a little bit on the harsh side, and although the people he rails about are indeed quite wrong, I can understand where they’re coming from.
When these people were in their teens and early 20s, they had plenty of time to discover new music. All the best music was well outside the commercial mainstream; they listened to the radio late at night, bought music papers, went to gigs, traded tapes with friends, all of it to discover the good stuff.
Now they’re older, with jobs and mortgages and kids, and they no longer have the time do that. All the new music they hear is the lowest common denominator slop served up by the mass media, drivel like X-Factor or daytime commercial radio.
What they forget is the mainstream media always was rubbish. At their seventies peak even huge selling acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were conspicuous by their absence from TV or daytime radio, and people who weren’t active music fans were unaware of their existence. TV was filled with the likes of Brotherhood of Man and The Nolan Sisters in the same way as today has formulaic landfill indie.
Same as it ever was, if you want good music, you have to go look for it.
I first saw Chantel McGregor very low down on the bill at the Cambridge Rock Festival back in 2010, when she wowed the crowd with a blues-based set featuring some amazing guitar pyrotechnics, and left me wonder how someone so young could learn to play guitar like that. Her début album, “Like No Other”, released earlier this year, showed she could stretch beyond blues to hard rock and even pure pop. Now in the middle of an extensive club tour taking in venues throughout the UK, she came to London’s legendary 100 Club on Thursday night.
Fronting a classic power-trio with Richard Richie on bass, and Martin Rushworth on drums, Chantel cuts a diminutive figure on stage. But one thing I immediately noticed is now much more stage presence she has compared with a year ago. She’s not just playing dazzling guitar, although there’s never any shortage of that, but she’s now putting on a highly entertaining show too.
Her two hour set covered all the varied styles from her album, her take on some classic blues standards, and even extended to a prog interlude with a very heavy take on the closing “Worm” section of Yes’ “Starship Trooper”. Her guitar playing was as superb as I’d come to expect; the extended workout on Robin Trower’s “Dreams” was utterly mesmerising, and some spectacular one-handed playing reminded me of the late Randy California. Despite her obvious technical skill, there’s more than enough fire, soul and passion in her playing too. But it wasn’t all shredding guitar. The acoustic interlude that including her cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” was beautiful, and certainly had something of an Odin Dragonfly feel about it.
Chantel is now far more than just a virtuoso guitarist, and far more than just a blues artist. The original material shows the work of a talented singer-songwriter who can write and perform in a host of diverse musical styles. And seeing her on stage it’s clear she’s rapidly developing into a confident and charismatic live performer too, a big smile on her face, exchanging between-song banter with the crowd all evening making for a great atmosphere, and rising above a few niggling technical problems to deliver an electrifying show.
I love Bilston Robin 2 as a venue. With great sound, and some seriously professional promotion that means just about everyone who plays there draws a bigger crowd than anywhere else they play, it doesn’t have a reputation as one of Britain’s best rock clubs for nothing. The length of the queue just before the doors opened showed that yet again they’d pulled in the crowds even on a Sunday night.
Though Heather Findlay & Chris Johnson were “only” the support, with an hour-long slot the gig had feel of a something approaching a double headliner. There was certainly a buzz of anticipation before she came on stage, with an awful lot of familiar faces in the front row. Just as at The Borderline two days earlier, Heather had the audience’s rapt attention from the very beginning, and you could have heard a pin drop throughout the performance.
Apart from a few numbers from The Phoenix Suite, much of the set came from the Mostly Autumn and Odin Dragonfly back catalogue, including several Chris Johnson-penned songs. “Gaze” was lovely, and “Magpie” worked well too, with Chris somehow managing to play both the guitar and flute lines on his acoustic. The songs from The Phoenix Suite came over well in acoustic form, so much so that I’ve wondered if that was how they were originally meant to be performed. “The Dogs” from Halo Blind’s album “The Fabric” was an interesting choice; with a reworked ending incorporating a few bars of Heather’s “Red Dust”. But perhaps the highlight was a sublime Silver Glass, transposed from piano to guitar, with Heather singing lead, a performance which left me wondering why she didn’t sing lead on the original studio version.
Even without the power of a full band behind her, Heather came over as a class act; a superb vocalist and charismatic performer, and there’s more than a little of the vibe of her earlier acoustic side-project Odin Dragonfly about these shows. Chris Johnson, while never a flashy lead guitarist, deserves a lot of credit for the richness of sound he gets out of that battered acoustic guitar.
Having Heather touring with Touchstone seems to work well for both bands. Heather’s own fans certainly helped swell the crowds, and she went down well with Touchstone’s audience, such that the merch stand ran out of copies of both “The Phoenix Suite” and Odin Dragonfly’s “Offerings”. Indeed, the latter is now completely sold out and is to be remastered and reprinted. I think this success of this tour shows that she was wise not to follow the advice of those who claimed that supporting a band labelled as “prog” would damage her career because of the alleged stigma associated with the genre.
Touchstone themselves proceeded to awe the crowd with 90 minutes of full-on prog-rock. They’ve come an awful long way since I first saw them support The Reasoning way back in 2007 at the now-defunct Crewe Limelight. I’ve previously described them as prog-rock with the emphasis very much on rock, and rock they did. Their set was tight and full of energy, driven by the sort of enthusiasm of a band who are clearly enjoying every minute on stage.
On this tour they took the brave move of playing a set drawing very heavily from their latest album “The City Sleeps”, released just days earlier, which meant that something like two thirds of the show was brand new material. Much of the new music is epic and symphonic, huge wall-of-sound stuff with soaring melodies, although there are still plenty of places where they rock out. Moo Bass and Henry Rogers have always been one of the best rhythm sections in the scene, Adam Hodgson was on particularly fine form with some spectacular shredding guitar, and Rob Cottingham added swathes of colour on keys. As always, Kim Seviour makes an enthusiastic frontwoman with a tremendous stage presence. But it’s the undoubted chemistry of the five of them together on stage which makes them such a great live band.
On the strength of performances like that, with a record deal in their pocket, and an album that’s made the UK Rock chart to their name, Touchstone seem poised for a major breakthrough. And I’m sure that will be a good thing for all other bands in the “scene”.
Sankara is the band formed by vocalist and keyboard player Gareth Jones and drummer Vinden Wylde, both formerly of The Reasoning, and guitarist Jay McDonald, formerly of The Bluehorses, with bassist Rhayn Jooste completing the lineup. “Enigma” is their first release.
The four track EP gets off to a strong start with the opening title track. Building from a piano arpeggio to a big soaring chorus the end result is a song you just can’t get out of your head. This and the following hard rocker “Exalted Star” with it’s growling riff and multi-layered vocal harmonies recall bands like Styx before they descended into cheese. The ballad “Lay My Body Down” is perhaps the weakest of the four songs, never really coming to life despite some good guitar work from Jay towards the end, but the EP ends on a high note with the hard rock of “Full Flow”.
This highly melodic mix of hard rock and AOR ballads is quite a way from the prog-metal leanings of Gareth’s and Vinden’s previous band. But there are still definite echoes of some of Gareth Jones’ earlier songwriting contributions for them, and his accomplished vocals prove he’s more than capable of fronting his own band, not that it was really in any doubt. On this disk he sings all the harmonies as well as lead, which makes me wonder how they’ll reproduce the songs live; I guess it depends on how well the rest of the band can cope on backing vocals.
This is a promising start for the band. Even if the production isn’t slick and polished, the quality of the songs and playing shine through, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more good things from them in the coming months and years.
A couple of years ago, I blogged about Alan McGee’s notorious column in The Guardian Music Blog, and how it had turned into self-parody.
In this column he claimed that Oasis were the greatest band of all time, Freddy Mercury was really a punk, ELO were better than The Beatles, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans was an absolute classic, and most notoriously of all, kept bigging up a spectacularly talentless bunch of indie no-marks called The Grants.
The comments sections soon turned into free-fire zones. Once people started recognising the extent that many of his columns were nonsense, he employed a legion of supporters in the comments to back him up. All of whom appeared to sock puppets, alleged to be Paul Brownell, an employee of McGee’s.
Now he admits the entire column was trolling
I’ve done blogs before in the past. One I used to write was for The Guardian and for four years most of the articles, and this is for the record as nobody ever prints this bit in interviews, were complete piss takes of The Guardian readers and journalists. Well, all bar Tim Jonze and Alex Needham.
I claimed to like Phil Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Foreigner. I actually took it so far they once put me on the phone to interview Jon Bon Jovi and I had to pretend I liked his music.
I actually feel sorry for The Grants. They were just a harmless indie band, never really destined to get beyond the toilet circuit, fronted by a lead singer whose mouth was far bigger than his talent. But the way he hyped them up as the next big thing exposed them to ridicule on a large stage, which I’m not sure they really deserved.
Atmospheric Celtic-tinged proggers Karnataka are back on the road in the new year with a new lineup. The New Light Tour runs through much of Feburary 2012. The 13 dates announced take in regular progressive rock venues like Montgomery Hall in Wath, Bury Met, and of course, The Robin in Bilston, as well as that strange little venue The Village Hall in Lowdham. A London date is also promised, with venue and date to be confirmed.
This tour marks the début of what is now the third incarnation of the band, with Hayley Griffiths as the new lead singer, and only bassist and leader Ian Jones and guitarist Enrico Pinna remaining from the band that recorded the superb The Gathering Light released in 2010.
It will be very interesting to see this version of Karnataka in action, and to see how well they manage to interpret the material from the two previous versions of the band. I’m hoping there will be some new songs in the setlist too!
I see there’s a shock-and-awe advertising campaign for the reissues of the classic 70s albums by Pink Floyd.
Yes, an album like Dark Side of the Moon is all-time classic which has stood the test of time and has finally emerged from the long shadow cast by of Punk to take its rightful place in the British Rock Canon. But let’s face it, if you really cared about the album, you’d already have it on CD, right?
September has been one of the best months for new progressive rock releases I can remember for a long, long time. In the space of two weeks there have been new releases by Dream Theater, Opeth, Anathema, Matt Stevens, Steve Hackett and Steve Wilson. That’s one hell of a lot of new music, and you can have all of it for the price of just one of the ridiculously overpriced “Immersion editions” that you’ll probably only ever listen to the once.
I realise the target market for these things is the middle-aged bloke who stopped caring about new music when he got married and had kids decades ago, and now in the throes of his mid-life crisis is desperately trying to reconnect with his long lost youth. He’s probably never even heard of Opeth.
Don’t be that guy. Don’t buy the box sets. Pink Floyd really don’t need your money. And EMI certainly don’t deserve it.