A Short Album About Love

In 1990 Neil Hannon started recording and releasing under the name The Divine Comedy. Thirty years and twelve great albums later, Hannon is rightly adjudged one of the finest singer songwriters of his generation. To celebrate, Divine Comedy Records are remastering and reissuing nine of the band's classic albums.

Sea Level recorded their fourth album for Capricorn on the cusp of the label's 1979 bankruptcy, and Long Walk on a Short Pier went unreleased in the United States for nearly 20 years, finally issued in 1998 by a resurrected Capricorn, with distribution through Mercury/Polygram. The album continues down the path of the band's third album, 1978's On the Edge, caught up in a disco-fied era and trying a little bit of this, a little bit of that, hoping that something might catch fire…

This “short diary (of loss)”, as drummer Sebastian Rochford calls it, is offered as “a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.” It is dedicated to Rochford’s father, Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford, 1932-2019, and to his family. Seb, one of ten siblings, wrote most of the music shortly after Gerard’s death and delivers it here, in performances of deep feeling and hymn-like clarity, together with pianist Kit Downes. The final wistful piece, “Even Now I Think Of Her” was composed by Gerard Rochford. Sebastian explains: “It’s a tune my dad had sung into his phone and sent me. I forwarded this to Kit. He listened, and then we started.”

One of the most acute and savagely satiric songwriters of his era, Warren Zevon was born in Chicago on January 24, 1947. His formative years were as colorful as the scenarios played out in his music: his father was a professional gambler, a lifestyle which forced the family to move frequently, and Zevon spent most of his formative years in California and Arizona. He learned to play piano, focusing primarily on classical material before a disintegrating home life led him into pop music, as well as a few run-ins with the law; …

Various Artists - Love Me or Leave Me: The Bethlehem Records Story 1958-1963 (2013) {3CD One Day Music DAY3CD040}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 0.98 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 462 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 9 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1958-62, 2013 Bethlehem Records / One Day Music / Not Now Music | DAY3CD040
Jazz / Cool / Bop / Others

An excellent budget compilation of the wonderful Bethlehem Records label - what a roster of artists they had. Very good sound too. The Bethlehem label focused on jazz releases, and this set collects some great examples of jazz–vocally and instrumentally–between the years 1958-62. One look at the artists on this 60 track 2 CD set shows how many fine artists released music on the label. Like other collections from One Day Music, there's no booklet, only a short paragraph about the label and a few of the featured artists. The digitally remastered sound is good overall within the limits of recording styles of the era.