REVIEW
Fruitful Earth
Rising Sun Big Peach Records
It’s great how some music can take you away if you focus hard enough. You get lost and imagine yourself being at different spots, living your own adventure, right in your head. Especially when an album takes me to my favourite city ever. Tat’s exactly what Te Fruitful Earth’s latest does. Smoky, classic 70s rock, influenced by bluesy lyrics and pace, with some good ol’ country to boot. An album that would serve greatly as the soundtrack of London. A lot of bands struggle with the discussion of where they want to lay the emphasis. On music, or vocals? Te Fruitful Earth, however, don’t seem to have this problem at all. Te music gets enforced by the lyrics, whilst the vocals get more emotional because of the music. Complementary creativity. Shifting music, shifting pace, shifting emotions and even shifting feet make it hard to remain static on this album. Te lively song ‘Honey Bee’ changes its pace extremely fluently using the dexterity of the piano, while ‘Love’ is a masterly crafted sing- along ballad. Each track is totally different from the previous one, which results in a very enjoyable album. Sarah Blair, lead singer of the band, has proven she can handle her piano as smoothly as the music she gets out of it. Assisted by a (bass) guitar and a good ol’ set of drums, she has created a sometimes rainy, sometimes sunny album that changes its colour as quickly as the weather. Creative and diverse, just as we like it.
Raglans
Raglans Independent Records Ltd
Raglans are named after the famous Raglan Road in Dublin and since forming in 2010, the four-piece have seen something of an elevated rapid rise in fame, since performing during their humble beginnings at Whelan’s (in Dublin). ‘Raglans’ contains all of the jingly jangly high- energy pop rock of Te Kooks with some anthemic choruses, Bastille-style, thrown in for good measure. It is a crowd-pleasing debut, that’s for sure, that has their-own blustery raw edged brashness about it to make it sound extremely fresh and very original. Tink of Te View and Te Libertines’ confident swagger and poise mixed in with a bit of Britpop nonchalance. Te exquisite 'Down', was the first track that they ever recorded and it gets a fresh reworking here, not that it was needed. I haven’t heard a mandolin being plucked this well since R.E.M’s ‘Out Of Time’ album. Kelly’s dreamy beautiful sand gravelly voice on ‘High Road’ has a real honesty about it, while 'Te Man From Glasgow' is a crazy tale about a mad, legendary and notoriously bad Glaswegian music promoter from the 70s! Tey are soon to set off on an already sold tour with Te Strypes and judging by this excellent debut I am sure that they will have many more fans at the end of the year triumphantly bawling out this batch of songs. It’s a cracking debut that’s jam-packed, full of well- written tunes that well and truly suck you in.
Grace Jones
Nightclubbing Island Records
As her 2008 release of ‘Hurricane’, a whole album of new work proved, Grace Jones doesn’t have to rely on retrospective. Completely relevant, on point and as experimental as ever, that album reasserted Grace as a creative paragon of fresh ideas. So why a re-mastered, re-release of her 1981 bestseller, ‘Nightclubbing’? 2013 proved to us that we weren’t done with the heavily synthesized, electro-funk of the 1980s; Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ alone corroborates that notion, as does Kavinsky’s ‘OutRun’. While peers of her most prolific period like Whitney Houston and Tina Turner were filling arenas with their knockout soul voices, Grace Jones was putting setting fire to the declaration that suggested she should be following one musical path. Can you imagine Whitney covering Iggy Pop’s ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’? No, nor me, but Grace Jones eschewed the expectations of her colour by hoovering up the rock, art-pop and new wave palettes like cheap cocaine, to complement her own disco / soul background when she reimagined Iggy’s ‘Nightclubbing’, the album’s title track. Reggae, funk and new wave co-exist on ‘Nightclubbing’ to timeless effect. Tis reissue includes a collection of rarities, including the previously unreleased version of Gary Numan’s ‘Me! I Disconnect from You’. Tis album is a must-have for fans of Grace. Or Daft Punk. Or Santigold. Or Hercules and Love Affair. Or… Te list is endless.
Yarreth Plysier
Steve Plunkett
Emma R. Garwood
40 / April 2014/
outlineonline.co.uk
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