Kingdoms of Folly, it is easy to conclude that Dege Legg is a musician who writes, rather than a writer who makes music, and he has an instinct for creating something both attractive and significant, and a firm control of musical dynamics.
A review of Will You Love Me Tomorrow by Danny Gillan
Will You Love Me Tomorrow is an easy, fast paced read, full of funny twists and pithy insights. There’s a musical spring to Gillan’s style that belies the seriousness of his topics, covering a broad range of topics including the impact of depression and death on friendship, love, how we move on past tragedy, the music industry, art versus public relations, and family jealousy.
A review of by Résistance by Agnes Humbert
All in all, despite any questions about her methodology, Humbert ‘s account of her wartime experience is a remarkable book, a testament to at least one woman’s ability to maintain her humanity when inhumanity is all around her.
A review of Breath by Tim Winton
Nearly every line in this novel is taut, and wrought with tender nerve-ending sensation that it’s impossible not to feel along with the characters. The power of the novel isn’t only in the stormy waves that Pikelet risks his life on. It’s in the quiet musings that take place between the Didgeridoo and the Ambulance rides later: the fear, greater than any wave, that life is just an inhalation and exhalation of breath and nothing more.
This Great Society Is Going Smash: The Books, Lost and Safe
On the album Lost and Safe by The Books, we hear isolated notes and then a whispery voice begins to issue brainy observations in the piece entitled “A Little Longing Goes Away”: “Yes and no are just distinguished by distinction, so we choose the in-between” and “Everybody’s busy waiting for the go-ahead, but by then their heads are gone.”
Conjuring Consciousness, Conjuring Change: Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn
Cassandra Wilson uses the range of her voice in unexpected ways in that song, and in Ann Peebles’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain” in which Wilson is partnered by Chris Whitley’s guitar (I loved Chris Whitley’s album Living with the Law). Throughout her album Blue Light ‘Til Dawn, Cassandra Wilson reveals the individual psyche, and the human spirit: we hear tenderness, worry, and anger as part of a consciousness of turmoil and change.
Art and Craft: Richard Shindell, Not Far Now
Richard Shindell’s song collection Not Far Now has songs of craft, imagination, and thought, and while it is a thing of beauty, it comes to us as one more in a long line of singer-songwriter works, and thus one is compelled to understand how and why it is to be valued as special. What’s new, unique?
Sexy Similarities: Van Hunt, Use in Case of Emergency
So much of popular musical art is concerned with expressing behavior and flaunting speech rather than the examination of impulse and thought; and if Van Hunt’s thematic focus is too narrow that is not an anomaly: love is his subject and it is, very typically, a contemporary entertainer’s subject as much as the traditional subject of a serious poet. Are Van Hunt’s declarations and observations supported, in his songs, by the particularities of daily or public life as evidence? (I do not think so.)
Sounds and Spaces: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
Listening to “Fine for Now,” a song that may be about time, conformity, and insecurity, I am inclined to describe the singer’s voice as mellow and expressive, but what does it express? The voice, while unique, does not seem particularly personal: the emotions and ideas suggested could belong to anyone. The jazz-influenced percussion, with each beat (or group of beats) seeming to exist on its own (or their own), rather than the linear, pounding beat prevalent in much of rock music, adds to the sense of flexibility, of a lack of confinement to a particular perspective.
Restorations: Oumou Sangare, Seya
The compositions “Iyo Djeli” and “Mogo Kele” and “Koroko” conclude the collection, and the small tumbling beats in “Mogo Kele” suggest the movements of daily life as much as music and “Koroko” seems both celebratory and deeply authoritative, as if offering advice and correction.