Bastards of Soul - Corners, album review

In the Balance

This is a beautiful album of sweet soul, knowing lineage in the excellence of its originals, and, sadly, has a tragic backstory with the passing of its frontman Chadwick Murray in September 2021, just after the birth of his first son who he never got to meet.

Not a tribute album as such but certainly covers that with a genuine depth of talent preserved in these recordings. All the soul touchstones are evident in the listening so do not need my signalling.

 

I would assume it is obvious that I have gleaned these details from reading others’ detailed information and revelations, but it is a genuinely moving story and the music stands entirely on its own as memorable.

 

 

Eye Music 59

 

An Evening with Silk Sonic, album mention

Cloned OK

As a recreation of oldschool soul and funk, this does it well enough to be an enjoyable listen.

I write this as I am listening to Bastards of Soul Corners, and of course it can be done with originals based on a template and I am most pleased about that.

Balances.

Cadillac Music 4

 

Shawn James - A Place In The Unknown, album review

Raucous Road with Sweet Detours

More roar and rock – to invert the tagline for variation (and for context, read my other reviews of James’ music here) – and thankfully there is no change to the raucous provided on this latest, much of that tone delivered yet again through the vocal. Otherwise, the songs are generic in their heaviness: accepting the familiar range. After two weighty openers Ghost (You Don’t Know My Name) and No Blood from a Stone, there is Lead the Way which is a thoughtful if rather naïve examination of America as having lost its way as a world leader (thus the exhortation of its title for a change in order to reclaim…). This is followed by Not Alone, a far less contentious hopefulness to one ruminating on the conventionally romantic, and as rock ballad I do prefer this, including another familiarity in its Country incline. A fine song. Old-school, worship-at-the-Black-Sabbath-alter Sodom and Gomorrah roars back after the lighter asides; The Devil’s Daughter delights in riff and some near-thrash vocal; a cover of War humphs with righteous venom (superb track); there is great grunge in Only Cowards Drop Bombs – and this is the road well-travelled on this album. Penultimate Attached and closer What Dreams May Come do, I have to add, make genuinely beautiful detours.

 

Steering Wheel Music 16

 

Oh Yes, Oh Yes

Another stunning release from The Delines.

 

Over-indulging an analysis of the album’s title, one word is totally apt and the other far less so: drift perfectly reflects the lives of each song’s persona/s as they aimlessly move through life, literal and metaphoric, without any anchoring and despite whatever positive hope they might hold; sea is an unnatural fit with its number of positive connotations, and even the dual balance of ‘ebb and flow’ overstates when Willy Vlautin’s characters are inescapably stuck in the former direction.

 

As ever, the beauty of The Delines music frames unavoidable disappointments. Opener Little Earl is classic Vlautin storytelling when a car journey is placed within two dark poles where ‘The AC don’t work and Earl’s sick in the Gulf Coast heat’ and then the seemingly desperate drive to a hospital to perhaps save Earl’s life from an unknown injury

‘Little Earl don't know what to do
He's looking for a hospital even though his brother don't want him to
He's starting to panic he's too scared to stop
He's never driven at night and he keeps getting lost’

 

These lines are Carver-eque in their lack of explaining detail yet brooding tone. This of all songs on the album contains an ironic musical injection, the ‘Oh No, Oh No’ following the verse above – and once more after the third of four – as a choric and bright-sounding response, though clearly a universal empathy for its tragic propulsion.

 

The string and horn arrangements by Cory Gray make an additional prettiness as gesture to the overriding lament of the stories being told – those horns with a TexMex flavour and also plaintive harmonising as in Drowning in Plain Sight.

 

Amy Boone’s vocal is never more emotionally attuned to dislocation and loss than in the gorgeously sad All Along the Ride. A song about the breakdown in a relationship, this car journey is narrated through her perfect capture of life’s inevitable imperfection. The mainly horn instrumental Lynne’s Lament that follows, consolidates the beautiful despair. And then there is the simple acoustic guitar backdrop to Surfers in Twilight, that is until the horn lament weighs in with yet more sweet indifference to its storyline of the sudden disruption to an anticipated everyday meeting.

 

Sorrow and beauty / beauty and sorrow.