Patrick Wolf - Sundark and Riverlight

Patrick Wolf has already been with us for 10 years & that's quite a hard thing to get your head around. I got into him fairly late in 2004 when I first heard Lycanthropy pouring out of my friends stereo and immediately fell in love with his electronic folklore. Over the years Patrick Wolf has gone under a bit of a diva transformation, gained and lost fans on every passing release & is constantly evolving his sound. The heart is still there but where it was in an incredibly bleak place before it's now dancing on the beaches of San Fran with a huge smile on it's face & good on him. This song concentrates on stripping down some old favourites to their bare acoustic roots & whilst it is for the most part a collection that provides some memorable renditions it has to be said that given most these songs were made with a showy composure in mind some of these songs simply don't work. The are moments in songs like 'Paris', 'Bluebells' & 'The Magic Posistion' in particular where he goes into chanting and without the grand composure behind the lyrics the songs begin sounding a little bit on the comical side. Some songs translate surprisingly well such as 'Hard Times' & a lot of the material from 'The Bachelor' in particular come out far better then I thought it would with it's more sombre approach foregoing to schizophrenic production on that album. Patrick's vocals are also the strongest I have ever heard them, he's certainly not the shy 17 year old any-more  he sings his songs loud & proud and that really helps carry this album. As an artist that relies so heavily on electronic beats on his songs this is a surprisingly good experiment & works as your very own acoustic session of Patrick Wolfs greatest hits & whilst they rarely improve on the originals it's a very good way to cap off your 10 year anniversary  Even the most jaded Patrick Wolf fans should give it a shot even if it's to hear some reworkings of your favourites from yesteryear. 

Song Of The Day #11: Sparklehorse - Morning Hollow

It's Sunday so I think I may start sticking to a religious regiment of songs to feel 'sorry for yourself to' as that's quite frankly what most of us do on a Sunday. A shining example of this is the very  sombre 'Morning Hollow' the very apt title is about feeling Hollow in the Morning and feel this to be a fantastic song to listen to when you're nursing a hangover. It's 7 minutes long but it'll pass you by like a freight train as you close your eyes and pad your thoughts out with the emotion felt in this song. 

Hear the rest of the 'Song Of The Day' playlist here: Pitch&Key Song Of The Day

'Morning Hollow' is from the bands 2006 release 'Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain'

Song Of The Day #10: Ugly Casanova - Hotcha Girls

Side project of Modest Mouse front man Ugly Casanova really ushered the more wholesome and folky sound the band would adopt with 2004's 'Good News For People Who Love Bad News'. This song is a particular stand out from this body of work with 2 vocals interlayering over each other over an incredibly delicate and pretty acoustic backing track. The album 'Sharpen Your Teeth' is pretty damned good but I just wished it hit these highs more often.

Hear the rest of the 'Song Of The Day' playlist here: Ugly Casanova – Hotcha Girls

Hotcha Girls can be heard on the bands 2002 releases 'Sharpen Your Teeth' 

Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man (6.7/10)

I have been quite a huge fan of Bat For Lashes for quite some time now, the first time I heard 'What's A Girl To Do' I knew I found the quirky female musician for me. Fast forward to 2012 and we see Natasha grace us once again with her third album 'The Haunted Man' and where the kookiness has left Bat For Lashes ambition has never been greater... unfortunately this leaves a distinctive lack of charm and identity. Bat For Lashes has never released a killer album, I found Two Suns to be a bit top heavy, but for me it's always been about those great moments Bat For Lashes produces on quite a consistent basis. This year it's all about the likes of 'Laura' which is an incredible conventional ballad with some real power behind it with an incredibly strong vocal performance, 'The Haunted Man' is quite an epic  , 'Rest Your Head' has a really nice dream scope underlying the driven momentum & 'Winter Fields' hits you in the face with an incredibly haunting yet driven sound. However this album falters, where the low points of previous efforts where mealy disappointing, the lulls in this album often feel soulless and lifeless & this can mostly be blamed on incredibly limp production.  The synths and drums on this album sound particularly pathetic as you hear snare hits quietly whimper in the background & with synths that leave no impression at all, I honestly couldn't pin point a single tone or sound a synth produced on this entire album despite their heavy presence.  'Oh Yeah', 'Horses Of The Sun' & 'Deep Sea Diver' are three clear examples of an idea not quite coming together  they all sound like songs with killer ideas in them but they never feel like cohesive and engaging songs threw and threw. This album is a collection of some incredibly ambitious ideas & to her credit she does have more then her fair share of moments where the album all comes together to produce something fantastic but unfortunately about half the duration of the album left me incredibly frustrated, underwhelmed and bored. I think these songs will for the most part translate really well live but I cannot stress how truly awful the production is at times & this hindrance really shows up some of the flaws of the song writing.

+ 'Laura', 'Marilyn' & a few others are really strong songs; some of her best to date
+ Shows a lot of ambition
+ Should translate well live with a lot of big moments which will sound much better without lifeless drums

- A lot of songs don't quite come together as well as I would have liked
- The production is awful, the drums & synths have no presence and it's often way too bassy
- This album lacks true identity, relies a bit heavily on sounding 80's & conventional

Stealing Sheep - Into The Diamond Sun (5.5/10)

Before this review & listening to this record I honestly couldn't tell you who Stealing Sheep were but from listening to this album I hear a band with lots of influences stuck in  psychedelic  rock from the 60s but what I also got was very dreamy and hypnotic beats which certainly add a bit of character to a genre of music which can often come across as very cliché and contrived. This album is the 2nd from the Liverpudian trio offer plenty in the way of harmonies, melodies and grooves which can really plant you into a nice little atmosphere & world if you enable to lose yourself into it. The opening 5 tracks made me an immediate fan of this band with 'The Garden' has it's somewhat sinister and hypnotic guitar and synth being interwoven amongst some very soft vocals and some very dreamy and chimey guitar sounds, it creates a very nice contrast within the song and offers some very strong dynamics. Other highlight 'Genevieve' just is the great pop song with all the 60s aesthetics that the album had hinted, but it still sound remarkably modern and not at all dated, & 'Shut Eye' sounds like a very folky build on the formula with a very strong hook and sound which draws the listener in. The thing the album does so very well at the start is it throws a lot of ideas and sounds into a base formula which creates very interesting, diverse but surprisingly cohesive start to the album. However the 2nd half of the album really fails to hold my attention as it just starts to sound all a bit monotonous, the ideas feel like they have dried up and the songs no longer grab or hold my attention as much as those that proceed it in the first half of the album. The thing I found after every listen is that I come out remembering the songs on the first half but I remember next to nothing about the closing half & after 4 listens that becomes a bit telling. In my opinion this album falls a bit short of the potential shown at the start but for the most part it's still an enjoyable listen, you have a great EP here but a fairly luke warm album, that being said I do look forward to hearing more from the band.

Recommended Tracks

Eleni Mandell - I Can See The Future

It's taken me a while to acquaint myself with 'Eleni Mandell', in fact this album is my first taste of here & after hearing some pretty great things I can't help but feel a slight bit disappointed with this album. It's not that it' bad, far from it, the opening track 'The Future' is a thing of beauty & 'Magic Summertime' more than makes up for this gaping Camera Obscura hole in my heart right now, but quite often the album sort of finds it's self stuck in a kind of aimless rut with many songs laying down the same foundations as 'The Future' but with a structure of a kind of slap dashed construction and end up feeling almost incomplete. I guess what I'm trying to say is whilst this album is a good listen on a sunny day, it just doesn't quite get me going in the way I thought it would; but I'm still glad I listened to this album as it introduced me to a couple of very good songs. 

    

Album Review: The Soundtrack Of Our Lives - Throw It To The Universe

This album just feels like a very traditional album, I don't know how to put it into words but it gives the feeling that this could have been released in any other decade and it'll probably fit. As a result this album does feel a tad nondescript and really does nothing to stand out but, if you give this a few listens, you will find a few choice moments start to come out and reveal themselves. For example the piano driven 'Solar Circus' is an incredibly beautiful song which just holds your attention with it's simple yet effective melody and sincere vocal work. The album starts off pretty strong as well with 'Throw It To The Universe', 'You Are the Beginning' & 'When We Fall' all jumping at you from the get go with their strong guitar riffs and strong song structures, that whilst nothing remarkable, do a good job at investing your attention into the album. However I have to say that fair share of this album proves that first impression aren't always wrong and the majority of 'Throwing It To Universe' does indeed just sounds a bit too safe and nondescript.

Album Review: Jesca Hoop - The House That Jack Built

To say this album was a bit of a curve ball would be accurate, I became familiar of Jesca Hoop after someone recommended me 'Silverscreen Demos' which, hinted at by the name, was an incredibly lo-fi collection of folklore sounding tracks. Now whilst at it's core Jesca Hoop retains her folklore sound on this latest record it's certainly a lot more pop and rock influenced then before with lots of incredibly up tempo'd and polished songs creeping threw, whilst for most artists this will strip them of their charm, Jesca Hoop's songwriting helps her pull threw the transistion coming out stronger then ever. This sounds like a breakthrough album with some interesting little riffs, lyrical ideas and sound hiding underneath the abrasive uptempo pop sound. It's a very enjoyable album and somewhat of a evolution of Jesca Hoops sound that I'm sure existing fans will lap up; whilst attracting an entirely new fanbase.

Album Review: The Walkmen - Heaven

I've always been one of these people who will always say 'I enjoy but do not love The Walkmen'. I don't know why this is the case, they produce music that sound like my cup of tea and the sort of thing I should go wild for, up until 'Lisbon' I never really considered them a band worth following but here's the thing 'Lisbon' really grew on me and showed me more of what I liked about The Walkmen then ever before with some really nice interplay between band and vocals. This album though, frankly, is a choir to sit through. It's not bad it's just very dull with the exception of a few songs such as the fantastically brooding and building 'Line By Line', 'Heaven' & 'The Love You Love' but for the most part this album comes off very predictable & flat and is the first album I've heard of theirs where I felt this way. It feels over long as well even though it's only 47minutes & to me seems like  a shadow of their discog up until this point, fans however, appear to really enjoy it so maybe I don't know what I'm going on about but for me this a load of songs I think I should enjoy but don't actually enjoy. 

Album Review: James Blackshaw - Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death

James Blackshaw's guitar playing style is one you can pick off a mile away, for starters he rock as 12 stringed acoustic and he just has this way with it, the way he plucks and constructs a melody is fairly unique and bespoke to him. It has to be said that 'All Is Falling' his last album released in 2010 really didn't do much for me & was the first release of his to leave me feeling that way but I'm glad that this album seems to have gone back to what makes James so unique and stand out and that's those songs mostly constructed with nothing more than his 12 string and a couple of keys thrown in for good measure. Unlike many guitarists that noodle and frantically pluck at their guitars this album doesn't do it at the expense of emotion or song structure. This album is just here to swallow you in sheer acoustic beauty and it does it so well that if you like the sound of that in anyway then I suggest you pick this record up, though the heavy breathing you can hear which many might describe as intimate can be a bit distracting at times.

Album Review: Hush Arbors/Abouretum - Auerola

I've never been that much of a fan of split LPs, it often feels like an excuse to basically combine 2 bands set of B-Sides in one easy to digest package, whilst some bands have a catalogue of B-Sides to salavate over other bands do no,  & whilst I acknowledge this may not a collection of songs that both artists wrote a while back but couldn't fit them on their earlier recordings it sort of feels like it. This album contains 8 painfully bland songs with none of them doing anything for me. It's the usual indie rock meets folk song writing type of fair & all feels very uninspired, as a fan of Hush Arbors I had hoped for stronger songs from at least these guys but whilst they clearly try to hit the harmonious pop note they strike so often they fail here in an explosion of mediocrity. As for Arboretum it's slightly better but only slight, his collection of songs play off with distorted guitars dragging a sprawling mood but none of it rubbed off on me, this split LP is the very definition of average.

Album Review: The Imagined Village - Bending The Dark

The thing about most world acts is that they often translate quite poorly onto record & lose a lot of that raw earth energy that translates oh so well when you run across it on the Park stage at Glastonbury at 1pm carrying a flagon of cider. However when it does work I often find it's the bands who embrace new genres into their world of world music & this is what 'The Imagined Village' do here on 'Bending The Dark'. Combining their traditional English gypsy folk with world music and techno really makes for a sonically pleasing and interesting album. Check out the 12 minute epic 'Bending The Dark' and you'll really get a sense for what this album is really about & whilst I still feel this music is really needed to be seen live to really be appreciated for what it is I still do recommend you check out this album.