Continuing with the stylistic developments of Stranded, Country Life finds Roxy Music at the peak of their powers, alternating between majestic, unsettling art rock and glamorous, elegant pop/rock…
At last the long awaited official CD anthology containing a unique audio history of Smokie's blistering career spanning the last 40 years. This box is a fitting tribute to a group who have defied all odds to earn their rightful place amongst those few artists who have helped to shape and define an era. CD package 'GOLD' has entered the German album charts at number 36.
Köhnzert Zünd puts together is a sumptuous box set, all the band's official live shows, recorded between 1975 and 2000. On top of which are two extra records made of excerpts from shows given between 2005 and 2011, as well as two unreleased records of the unforgettable 2009 concert given at the Alhambra in Paris. Also comes with an 80 page booklet.
Colin Vearncombe will forever be preserved in pop aspic as the maker of 1987’s melancholy worldwide hit Wonderful Life – No 1 in Austria! – but he hasn’t stopped working, despite his not having breached the top 40 for 27 years. Blind Faith, his seventh album under the Black flag, is a marvellous little thing – a less temperamental, less self-regarding cousin to Scott Walker’s first four solo records. Like them, it’s steeped in European balladry, and filled with delicious arrangements – the swooping strings and jazzy shuffles of Womanly Panther are a delight. Vearncombe’s slightly frayed baritone is a perfect match to the music, steering it clear of pomposity, filling it with humanity, even when the regrets well up – “I am not the man you want me to be,” he sings on Not the Man, “Here comes the talking / Slamming doors you then have to throw open.” Pop stardom is a long way in the past for Vearncombe, but Blind Faith is an album by a man very much in control of his gifts.
A Baroque West Side Story, Tancrède tells of the absolute but impossible love between two young people brought together by their passion but separated by their origins. We are in the time of the Crusades: Tancredi is the champion of the Frankish army, and Clorinda the passionaria of the Saracen troops.
In the labyrinth of sentiments, the magic wand of the sorcerer Isménor confuses the issues, luring the two heroes into the enchanted forest to better prepare their downfall. Dances, choruses and arias merge in a subtle, poetic mixture, magnified by the dialogues sung in the grand tradition of French prosody and the tragédie lyrique. With Tancrède, André Campra established himself as one of the great opera composers between Lully and Rameau.
Bandleader Simon Jeffes composed the leadoff track "Music for a Found Harmonium" on a harmonium he found abandoned on a Tokyo street, which offers an inkling of the musical inspiration that sprang from this remarkable Englishman. As usual, he gathers a loose aggregation of musicians who create stunning, free-flowing acoustic sounds that defy categorization…