music-and-concert-reviews-you-wont-see-anywhere-else
#43 album of 2013 – Starlight by Joan Armatrading
Artist: Joan Armatrading
Album: Starlight
Joan Armatrading, who released her debut album in 1972, has had an impressively varied career. Starting with generic folk-pop elevated only by her soulful voice, she grew to experiment with Elton John-style rockers, disco, reggae, collaborations with Springsteen’s E Street Band, perky New Wave synth-pop, and — as her voice got deeper and richer — into roots-rock and blues. Starlight shows her still venturing, now into jazz-pop that sounds like the work […]
#44 album of 2013 – Look on the Blight Side by Louis Logic
Artist: Louis Logic
Album: Look on the Blight Side
The year 2012 — which is, I agree, not the one I’m reviewing currently — was to me a year of extraordinary flowering in hip-hop. That’s not a proper belief among the true hip-hop fans I know, who hold that hip-hop’s Best Year Ever cannot possibly be any year after 1995. But I am a false hip-hop fan, or at least an odd one, and hip-hop — despite […]
#45 album of 2013 – Love from London by Robyn Hitchcock
Artist: Robyn Hitchcock
Album: Love from London
As I wrote to introduce my review of Robyn Hitchcock’s 1999 masterpiece Jewels for Sophia (which is a more impassioned, therefore better, review than this one will be), “Robyn Hitchcock sings with an educated, amused English voice, and he’s uniformly regarded as quirky”. For his fans who’ve kept up-to-date, my review of Love from London can be very short: it’s in the same style, and of the same quality, as […]