Category: Reviews
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A Next Set A Rockers album review – 2000 Black
Major labels make it painless for fans to buy their wares anywhere in any format. Wanna download? iTunes and Amazon are primed to take your cash. Prefer a CD? You can buy one while doing your weekly shop at Walmart. But in the case of Dego and Kaidi’s new album, punters will suffer; A Next […]
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…broadcasting album review – various artists (Karen P)
Compilations are like movies. Most are the musical equivalent of blockbusters, serving up songs people already know; others are like arthouse films, endeavouring to educate their listeners. There are, of course, exceptions that do both — and that’s what Karen P tries to accomplish with …broadcasting. On this album, the former colleague of DJ Gilles […]
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New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War album review – Erykah Badu
There’s been a lot of ballyhoo — bordering on hysteria — surrounding this album. That’s because Badu is neo-soul royalty; the kind of artist blessed with fans (or should that be subjects?) who’ll unquestioningly buy her work because, let’s face it, R&B has hit a creative brick wall, unless you count the auto-tuned warblings of […]
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Planet Pimp album review – Soil & “PIMP” Sessions
If you’re not already familiar with this Japanese sextet, they apparently play “death jazz”. The band says the term was coined “in the hope of alienating Japan’s polite, noodling, straight-ahead jazz cognoscenti”. Whatever its origins, never has a more inappropriate moniker been given to a sound. Many words spring to mind while listening to Planet […]
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Jazz Re:freshed Vol. 1 album review – various artists
This compilation by London promoters Adam “Rock” Moses and Justin “TopRock” McKenzie is a studious snapshot of nu jazz and broken beat sounds, genres long snubbed by major labels. Without this album, where else would you hear Femi Temowo’s poetic Wood And Things, the head-nodding broken beats of Kaidi Tatham or the psychedelic soul of […]
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Sketches Of A Man album review – Dwele
Dwele loves vowels. The neo-soulster likes nothing better than taking a vowel, any vowel, and wrestling with it. So phrases like “with you” are, in Dwele-speak, pronounced “weeeeeed yhoooooo”. Add some crisscrossing harmonies and a hip-hop beat so leisurely it would send most into REM sleep, and you have an aural hangover cure to ease […]
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This Thing Of Ours… album review – Fanatix
Back in the day, an artist only had to knock out eight or nine songs before releasing an LP. (Wasn’t Off The Wall 45 minutes long?) But with CDs, musicians feel compelled to give punters value for money, which means This Thing Of Ours… weighs in at 16 tracks. With so many tunes to wade […]
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Then What Happened? album review – J-Live
Like R&B, most hip-hop is so mainstream it could be considered a subgenre of pop. Rhymesters like 50 Cent and Lil’ Wayne are little more than breathing brands who’ll endorse everything from sneakers to video games, before the obligatory Hollywood roles come a-knocking. So there’s no room for the reflective J-Lives of this world. Indeed […]
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Guaranteed Niceness album review – Sonar Kollektiv Orchester
To celebrate its tenth anniversary, jazzy Berlin label Sonar Kollektiv has released a collection of old tunes that sound remarkably new. A lush blanket of strings and horns transform songs that were once enveloped in electronic wizardry. Jazzanova faves No Use and Run have been stripped of their club-friendly oomph and replaced with a live, […]
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Loud… Louder… Stop! album review – Neil Cowley Trio
This album is sandwiched between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Fans of nu jazz, who favour a mains-powered instrument in the mix, will be put off by an acoustic trio. Meanwhile “proper” jazzers — those musos who listen to suites rather than songs — will find Loud… Louder… Stop! too damn catchy for […]