One in a blue moon the need for a bit of country needs to be filled with a song like The Yellow Leaves of Autumn. JT Trawick covers all the bases: love and loss, twang in his voice, fiddle, pedal steel, upright bass and the like. It was written by his grandpa, who has every reason to be proud about his grandson who can bring melancholy to life. He can even make it sound comforting.
It turns that Metal Book wasn't the debut album by rock noir band Alberteen. The actual debut was called It Felt Like Forever, which was deleted after some legal trouble. But now it returns as a digital only release. From the band's Facebook:
n 2008 the three original members of Alberteen got together for the first time at Stay Free Studios in Leicester and recorded the sprawling 15 track debut album It Felt Like Forever. Released at the time on CD and briefly on digital, it was soon deleted due to some legal wranglings. This Friday - 10 years on - the album is re-released digitally on all platforms. It's a melodic and ambitious album, very much the sum of historic influences, but we are still fond of it, and it pointed the way to what would be our 'real' debut Metal Book four years later. You can buy and stream it from Friday.
Dutch jazz ensemble De Raad van Toezicht ("The Supervisory Board") make it look that they are aiming high with their second full-length 84. Capturing George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four into music has been tried before, and the results were mixed. David Bowie was cut short by Orwell's widow and turned a proposed theatrical album into a couple of songs that would make up side 2 of his Diamond Dogs album in 1974. Eurythmics made a soundtrack for a movie adaption directed by Michael Radford. 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) was the weakest album of their career. Suffice to say that the film itself is pretty bad too.
With that in mind the twelve musicians thankfully get it right on most counts. The music is funky and close to jazz rock at times or deceptively soothing to indicate that the powers that be aren't paying attention. But wait, 84 isn't about Orwell's dark vision as such. The music is about death in the family - bass guitarist Teun Creemers wrote Mirror as an ode to his grandfather, dreams (Colours and alienation (Hamburg. And while those themes can be traced back to the book - yes, this is pushing it, naming an album after it might not have been such a smart move after all. Disregard it and the album can hold its own a nice mix of adventurous and mainstream jazz.
Phish
2018/10/21
Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, VA
English-American duo avant-garde duo Churn Milk Joan have shared their 17 minute movie in 16 parts for their latest album Der Traum eines Kindes on YouYube. The film will be shown as part of a live event at The Golden Lion in Todmorden, On 1st November 1st.
While the footage is all in black & white, the music made by American Richard Knutson (Plum Flower Embroidery. Neutral Sons, The Chacers) and Englishman Colin Robinson (Big Block 454, Jumble Hole Clough) is in full-colour: "a far cry from Disney-fied candy coloured landscapes, rainbows and unicorns. An unnamed Grey Man is up to no good, toys are playing with themselves and then - surprise - the child does not meet an untimely demise, but is carried home instead, fast asleep as those little brats are capable to do".
