What are you listening to? June 2019

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The (English) Beat - I Just Can't Stop It (1980)

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Irresistible debut album from Birmingham's ska revival masters. For some reason, the UK version omits "Tears Of A Clown", the attention-grabbing single that started the Beat. Accept no substitutes. :elisabs:

:5.0: on the Sam-O-Meter.
 
Mary Halvorson - Away With You (2016)

OneRYM Reviewer said:
On Away With You, the band expands to an octet with the crucial addition of pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn. That addition forms the key fulcrum of Away With You, as Halvorson and Alcorn push and pull with and against each other while the rest of the band set the scene around them. On album closer “Inky Roberts,” the two guitarists dance across an ascending scale, Halvorson’s guitar intricately picked while Alcorn’s pedal steel stretches like elastic.
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A Different RYM Reviewer said:
The spacey, hazy tone of Alcorn's guitar is a wonderful addition to the band and brings another dimension to the sound of Halvorson's wonderful compositions. The benefit the steel pedal guitar brings is perhaps most emphasized in the opening four minutes or so of "The Absolute Almost (No. 52)", with Alcorn opening the tune, playing slowly and beautifully as Halvorson's guitar and the bass, which is picked and eventually bowed, join her. Around the 4:40 mark, the rest of the octet get in on the fun, with Halvorson occasionally accompanying Alcorn note by note before the song descends into a free chaos that Ornette Coleman would be proud of.
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Her fans LOVE her albums. I merely like and appreciate them ... and am intrigued by what I can't easily figure out, but satisfied enough with what I am able to grasp that the remaining unknown doesn't obscure my overall enjoyment.
 
^ Enjoying it, muchly. :cheer:

Gwenifer Raymond has a PhD in astrophysics, lives in Brighton and designs video games for a living. No ordinary human, she also has mercury in her fingertips. You can just about see it glisten as she plays guitar on There Will Be Blood for an introductory 2016 acoustic session. By early 2018, the song had evolved into Sometimes There’s Blood, and a video treatment with creepy Victoriana and taxidermy. Such is the Welsh-born Raymond’s very British take on a niche form known as the American primitive style, where guitars embark on flowing instrumental extemporisations, often ending up somewhere very eastern, sometimes sounding like Indian ragas.

Having discovered the guitar aged eight, when her mother gave her a cassette of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Raymond traced the idols of her idols back to the Delta blues, and then sideways into this folk form. Her immersive debut album pays tribute to the Delta and Appalachia at the same time, on the banjo workouts Bleeding Finger Blues and Idumea, and raises a battered hat to the godfather of the primitive scene on Requiem for John Fahey. Throughout, Raymond takes this roiling, rhythmic traditional sound and stamps her own imprimatur on it.
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www.theguardian.com

Gwenifer Raymond: You Were Never Much of a Dancer review – an immersive debut

(Tompkins Square)
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
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