Lindi Ortega - Cigarettes & Truckstops

Bigger Boots

Relatively hot on the heels of debut album Little Red Boots, reviewed here in August 2011, Ortega’s follow-up Cigarettes and Truckstops is more of the successful same, her Partonesque vocal warbling its homage namecheck in the opening title track, a gentle country love ballad where she puns in the narrative’s recollecting, I’d hear Dolly singing, you and I were islands in the stream.

The following track The Day You Die is an upbeat country standard where the lyric You said you’d love me till the cows come home, well I’m hoping that they all go blind reflects the whimsy of this and other delights on the album, the double bass and guitar outro an additional musical witticism. Fourth Don’t Wanna Hear It rocks us to another place in Ortega’s rich vocal geography, guitars romping along for the ride. This terrain is revisited in sixth Murder of Crows, the acoustic slide guitar providing a classy blues support to Ortega’s echoed vocal swagger – she really can soar in such sassy singing.

The Dolly Parton resonance is most pronounced on seventh Heaven Has No Vacancy, but this is no mere repetition and Ortega’s voice is beautiful here, capturing a similar but distinctive clarity in pitch and tone. You can’t escape comparisons and reflections in such a long musical lineage, and this is all compliment in its mentioning. Indeed, next song High is a good example of Ortega’s individual breadth, this a folkish ballad and her singing having a whispered core before it rises to those crystal clear peaks in the chorus.

This is a classy vocal performance, a second strong album building on the excellence of her first. In the musical sense, those little red boots are getting much bigger.

Chastity Brown - Back-Road Highways

After the Afterburner

This is a solid album, driven by Brown’s mildly hoarse vocal but also the songwriting and arrangements, an ordinary enough combination but not always the case in all that’s out there. Another appeal is the mixture of genres embraced by the songs: soul, gospel, folk, blues, a tinge of country. Not one dominates and not one palls by being in the mix. It is consummate in its variation, though there isn’t an obvious clincher in terms of original and/or stand-out melody. Opening track House Been Burning suggests a soulful, blues depth but this isn’t sustained though the quality of overall singing is.

There are very effective arrangements in the supporting vocals, for example second track When We Get There where the sound is similar to early Rickie Lee Jones [and the harmonica of Neil Young], though I hear that echo also on third track Solely when Brown is singing at her higher, and smoother register, this song benefitting from the atmospheric musicianship of plaintive violin, echoing guitars a la Daniel Lanois, and its tight harmonies. It truly is a sweet vocal from Brown here and these opening three tracks are a strong start. Fifth I Left Home is a blues peach with juicy acoustic slide guitar and slightly echoed sultry vocal: my favourite on the album.

It is worth being aware that this is an album of essentially restrained songs – it doesn’t present belters or raucous renditions, though I suspect Brown could go there with some sense of a dynamic range in Lift Us where she does project. The album ends on a gospel If You Let Me which is earnestly emotive rather than soaring and Brown will I suspect need to flick on the Joss Stone afterburners at some stage in her career, rightly or wrongly, to get the notice I think she deserves.

Aerating Faces

This afternoon I have been mostly aerating the lawn - just me, my fork, an echo of Monty Don explaining it's a job I could./should be doing, and the Faces on the mp3 player.

The music is a compilation of their four great albums: First Step, Long Player, A Nod's As Good As A Wink....To A Blind Horse, and Ooh La La. I've probably done a quarter of the garden so there are plenty of songs to entertain when I continue tomorrow.

What a brilliant rock band. Nothing complicated and a whole lot of fun. Rod Stewart is without doubt one of the great rock vocalists, whatever crooning he now pursues. Ronnie Wood plays his sharp riffs and then there is his superb slide. And Ronnie Lane is wonderfully witty and gifted as one of the main songwriters, his singing also distinctive. No pretence, simple yet memorable songs, occasional sassy covers, and that persistent undercurrent of sheer rock'n'roll enjoyment.

David Hidalgo, Luther Dickinson, Mato Nanji - 3 Skulls & The Truth

Trio

As threesomes go these guys are a reasonable magic 3, and fit neatly in the middle to make a musical three of similar and recent blues-based releases: ZZ Top’s La Futura and The John Spencer Blues Explosion’s Meat + Bone. 3 Skulls... isn’t as dirtraw as ZZ or as punkraw as JS, but the stomping and guitar-rich basic blues gets a powerful churning out by axemen David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, Luther Dickinson from various and the North Mississippi Allstars, and Mato Nanji from Indigenous. The guitar riffs are consistently sound as one would expect, and vocal duties are shared, solo and obviously as harmony, but it does lack the grit-in-the-throat appeal of a Billy Gibbons. In many ways it is standard if mature fare, like fifth track Coming Home, but there are stompers like opener Have My Way With You, and the powerchug of Mississippi Clean. There is a fine walking blues with penultimate track Woke Up Alone.

Bobby Womack - The Bravest Man in the Universe

It Feels Like The Sky Is Falling

Ahead of tonight’s Later....With Jools Holland on which the very great Bobby Womack is appearing, I’ll make a brief observation on BW’s recent fine album The Bravest Man in the Universe.

It is a musical marriage between Womack’s striking soul vocal and dub beats with other electronic overlays/samplings provided by the likes of Damon Albarn, who I know a little about, and Richard Russell, who I don’t. A stunning example of this partnership is second track Please Forgive My Heart where Womack’s strained but powerfully plaintive soul voice works its magic above a pulsating deep bass and other punctuating sounds, including simply struck piano chords. Most of the songs on this album follow such a pattern and sound, the Womack narrative building emotively in the unravelling of its storyline but also the rising sentiment of the singing – and at this song’s end Bobby briefly plucks an acoustic in his distinctive style. That guitar gets its main workout on next track Deep River, a solo gospel anticipating death and made all the more poignant by Womack’s ill health and age, though it is reported that he is now cancer-free after a colon scare. There is a video circulating on the net of him singing this at his California home and it would be special if he plays this again tonight.

The rawness of that acoustic track is contrasted sharply with fourth Dayglo Reflection featuring the guest vocal of Lana del Ray, and her haunting tones combined with the smooth jazz orchestration reflects the polish that, for me, detracts at times from Womack’s strength – his vulnerable but honest solo performance. That said, such ‘polish’ is more engagingly exercised in tracks six and seven, respectively Stupid Introlude and Stupid, the former a voice snatch from Gil Scott-Heron, and the latter Womack’s musical elaboration.

I’ll finish where the album begins on its title track. When Bobby sings the opening line The bravest man in the universe is the one who has forgiven first - with a cello briefly empathising - the soaring soul in his voice is spine tingling, and as the album concerns itself lyrically with Womack expressing regret for some of the dark excesses of his life, it is a poignant start. I hope he does this one live as well – perhaps we’ll see 2 or 3 on Friday’s extended show.

Aphrodite's Child - 666

Asylum

Having escaped the Melodic Care Facility via the Blues Explosion Nightclub I made a visit to the Aphrodite Asylum at 666 Aural Avenue this morning where I was strapped down and treated by Dr Vangelis and Nurse Roussos.

The medicine on offer is as effective as its progressive discovery in 1972, the psychedelic ingredients familiar now but certainly adventurous and dramatic in its day. Based loosely on The Apocalypse of John 13/18, this conceptual fancy leads to equally grand surgical explorations with keyboard, synthesiser and rampant percussion. Roussos’ vocal is wonderfully apt for the journey though hard at times to abstract from its latter pop emergence.

It is an eclectic mix within its double album origins: the track Loud, Loud, Loud is a young person’s spoken narrative accompanied by a simple piano and the background chanted chorus of loud, loud, loud. This leads into the first hearing of Roussos’ angelic vocal on The Four Horsemen with twinkling bells and organ adding to the soar and warble. Instrumental The Lamb introduces the Vangelis signature keyboard and synth orchestration, and then an adult narration talks the listener through its story, and the precise enunciation provides an anchoring then but seemingly mocking today credibility to the continuing musical journey. There is further spoken atmospherics in Aegian Sea where rock guitar merges with the synthesiser.

A highlight surely is the orgasmic mantra of Infinity Symbol [which is just the symbol] on what was Side 3 of the original record. This is Greek actress Irene Papas chanting I was, I am, I am to come continuously in the throes of frenzied shrieks and cries and moans for over five minutes – edited down from 39 apparently - in what could be an early version from a porno film When Harry Met Supersonic Sally. It was the subject of claims of obscenity, and the record wasn’t in fact released by Mercury Records until a year after its completion through their other label Vertigo Records.