Aaron Embry - ‘Your Heart and Mine’. Looks and sounds like an old tape dug up from a buried archive. It’s not, it’s new. It’s lovely too.
Keaton Henson’s version of ‘Always on my Mind’ is heartbreaking.
Almost as heartbreaking as Willie Nelson’s.
Just got my Foreign Fields ‘Anywhere but Where I am’ CD (see post on 28th May) in the post from Nashville.
The CD is in a beautiful hand-printed sleeve - and also inside the sleeve were three photos, each with handwritten notes on the back about the significance of the locations pictured to the making of the album.
I’m still smiling two hours after I opened it.
Er - YES.
Called ‘The Physics House Band’ and they are from Brighton
YES!
SPINNING CLASS - No.2
I think the time is right for someone to come along and really blow the doors off - like The Strokes did, but given what’s happening in the world right now maybe now it needs to mean something. Songs that reference the weird and difficult times we are living through, but offer up some kind of redemption too. No irony or knowingness - just sincerity, proper storytelling and amazing songs. Sounds deeply uncool but you never know.
Until they do, we have ‘The River’
“Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Ain’t nobody like to be alone
Everybody’s got a hungry heart…”
Alt-J ‘An Awesome Wave’. Album of the year already? Will take some beating.
Properly exciting to hear a British album bursting at the seam with confidence, flair, originality and skill. And really, really good songs.
Foreign Fields. Two guys from Nashville via Wisconsin who just made an album called ‘Anywhere but where I am’. They did it all themselves at home - it took them a year and it really was worth it.
Bon Iver at Air Studios - such good songs, so beautifully re-imagined. Need this in your life.
1. Hinnom, TX
2. Wash.
3. I Can’t Make You Love Me
4. Babys
5. Beth/Rest
SPINNING CLASS - No.1
First day of summer and reached for The Apache Relay’s ‘American Nomad’ - made me think of the sticky Texas heat when I first saw them.
“Home is not places - it is love”
Fink plays ‘Yesterday was hard on all of us’ backed by The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. A lovely but slight song becomes a swelling, surging, brassy epic. Quite something.
Michael Kiwanuka, The Staves, Ben Howard and gang doing John Martyn’s ‘Over the Hill’ in Austin Texas.
This is like something from another era - no bad thing as it turns out. Vibey with a capital ‘V’.
Have a moment alone with this piece of music. So beautiful, and made even more so by Marco Mirandi’s animation
Joe Banfi’s ‘Olive Green’ - stripped back and raw in St Stephen’s Church. An exciting new voice.
“That sound makes me turn off all other things”
