Flood.2007

The band Texas Flood was founded in 2004 by guitar player and lead singer Nenad Zlatanović. Since its early beginnigs, this band cherished a fierce blues rock sound. After several changes regarding band members, the Texas Flood band performs as a power trio since last fall, with a rhythm section that consists of drummer Vlada Golubović and bass player Ivan Čukić. The band performed on many important blues and rock festivals in Serbia and in neighbouring countries, the most important of which are Voxstock 2007, Blues Summit Podgorica 07, Danube Blues Fest Novi Sad 07, In Wires Užice 2008, Mostar Blues Fest 2008 and BluesStock 2009. The first album, „Grinnin’ In Your Face“, issued in January 2009 by Blues Time Records.

It seems odd that Salvation Blues is Mark Olson's first true solo recording. After his tenure with the Jayhawks, Olson left the band to spend more time in Joshua Tree with his then-wife, fellow singer/songwriter Victoria Williams. Olson released a quartet of recordings with the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers (aka the Creekdippers), always with Williams either sharing the billing or in the band. Olson and Williams divorced in February of 2006, and he lost the home he built in Joshua Tree as a result. He took off on a solo tour of Europe where the sketches for a number of the songs on Salvation Blues were written.

Is a four-CD box set of Fairport Convention 1967-1974 BBC recordings excessive? After all, even the Beatles only got two CDs of Beeb tracks into official release. But it really isn't too much for fans of the band, for the quality of most of the stuff here is truly good, even if the very best of it was already issued on the Heyday compilation…

The quiet ones are always the scariest. Polly Jean Harvey's appearance on the cover of White Chalk – all wild black hair and ghostly white dress – could replace the dictionary definition of eerie, and the album itself plays like a good ghost story…

With the flood of recordings devoted to the freethinking Salzburg Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, it is not surprising that his predecessor as Salzburg music director, Andreas Hofer, has been resurrected. There is nothing here to rival Biber's outlandish and fascinating programmatic ideas; Hofer's sacred music, as represented on this disc, falls much closer to the Venetian-derived German mainstream inherited from Schütz. That said, this is an ideal purchase for anyone who likes Schütz, Biber, or the south German Baroque in general. The album reproduces a hypothetical Vespers service of the area, featuring the music Hofer, as kapellmeister, might have drawn together for a festive event – mostly his own, but also including works by Biber, Giovanni Valentini, and Johann Baptist Dolar.