MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY/M:FANS (Domino) 7.5/10 Bleak is one of the things art does best. Usually starkness is a key tool in creating it (think Beckett), but it can also be done more gothically, as artists like Mervyn Peake have shown. In 1982 John Cale, whose body of work…
Category: Album Reviews – Archive
PROVENANCE (ABC) 8/10 Paul Grabowsky was Vince Jones’s musical director way back in the 1980s, and this sumptuously recorded reunion shows the rapport never went away. A joint willingness to take risks hovers in the air, disguised by a concentration on gentle songs. Jones’s voice has an inbuilt vulnerability in…
WHERE OR WHEN (ABC) 7/10 Singer Kristin Berardi has released two very different albums almost simultaneously. Hope in My Pocket, a collaboration with pianist Sean Foran and tenor saxophonist Rafael Karlen, features original material based on the letters of WWI soldiers, their sadness and yearning underpinning songs rendered with a…