Category: Album Reviews – Archive

December 23, 2023 / Album Reviews - Archive

Immersion Lure https://philslater.bandcamp.com/ 9.5/10 The desiccating effects of age are not all bad. Phil Slater’s trumpet sound, for instance has steadily become more austere, less lush and romantic, across the years. Something similar has befallen his composing, too. While this slightly compresses the music’s emotional range, it makes the spikes…

November 24, 2023 / Album Reviews - Archive

Zashto? Mara! Music 9/10 Australians have long had a love/hate attitude to migrants. While we enjoy the cornucopia of foods, racism is a rash festering just below the skin, waiting to be inflamed by the dog-whistlers. Zashto? – “why?” in Bulgarian – is a song cycle that asks why the…

October 21, 2023 / Album Reviews - Archive

The Iridescent Spree 7/10 Wearing his virtuosity on his sleeve, the young Kurt Elling liked to prove what an innovative singer he was at almost every turn, using radical vocal textures and dramatic changes of pitch and dynamics when just delivering a song, let alone when improvising. The mature Elling,…