John Mayall has been playing blues literally for my entire lifetime and at 64 years old proves that he's still among the best. On this CD, Mayall displays the many blues attitudes of which he is capable. Lately, many of his songs decry urban decay and violence. He continues here in that vein with the hard-driving Dead City and the old Eddie Harris R&B song, How Can You Live Like That. Stone Cold Deal is a shuffle driven by saxophone, organ and drums. Its infectuous rhythm will have you dancing and its incisive lyrics will have you thinking. My other favorites are the title cut on which Mayall's prowess on the piano is showcased, One In A Million which is a rocking paean to his beloved mother, and I Don't Mind, a song in the rollicking piano-driven Southern style for which Mayall is justly famous. There isn't anything I really dislike on the album though It Ain't Safe and Some Other Day seem out of place and Trenches, though lyrically gripping, is musically weak. If you are a blues fan, you are sure to like Blues For the Lost Days, another strong effort from master bluesman John Mayall.
Weighing in at 19 tracks, Repertoire's 2005 collection Ayla: The Best of Flash and the Pan is the most generous compilation yet assembled of Harry Vanda and George Young's impish post-Easybeats new wave creation, Flash and the Pan. Not only is it four tracks longer than the previous best F&P comp, 1994's plainly titled Collection, but it's more carefully assembled too, boasting good liner notes from Chris Welch and eye-catching comic book artwork. If F&P didn't have any other song as immediate or memorable as "Hey St. Peter," their gloriously ridiculous new wave novelty, they did have a number of good oddities and robotic new wave pop before sinking into coldly slick anthemic pop at the end of the decade.
After the stripped-back collection I Often Dream of Trains, Robyn Hitchcock slowly formed a backing band called the Egyptians with ex-Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe and Morris Windsor, and keyboardist Roger Jackson over the course of the next year. Fegmania!, the Egyptians' first album, was a distinct departure from both the Soft Boys and Hitchcock's previous solo work, featuring layered, intertwining guitars and keyboards that created lush and thick sonic textures. Even with the more detailed arrangements, the songs remained twitchy and off-kilter, with melodies that usually went in willfully unpredictable directions, yet remained catchy all the while. Fegmania! was Hitchcock's most consistent work to date, featuring such highlights as the Eastern-tinged "Egyptian Cream", and the creepy "My Wife & My Dead Wife", and the relatively straightforward "The Man with the Lightbulb Head".
Have you heard The News? The sweet pop/rock/soul sound of San Francisco's Huey Lewis & The News has sadly gone silent in recent years, thanks to its one-of-a-kind frontman's battle with Ménière's disease, which causes intermittent hearing loss. But a surprise new reissue campaign courtesy of Universal Music Group's Japanese division promises the most comprehensive look at the band's blockbuster catalogue of the '80s and early '90s.
One of the band's masterworks, Juju sees Siouxsie and the Banshees operating in a squalid wall of sound dominated by tribal drums, swirling and piercing guitars, and Siouxsie Sioux's fractured art-attack vocals. If not for John McGeoch's marvelous high-pitched guitars, here as reminiscent of Joy Division as his own work in Magazine, the album would rank as the band's most gothic release. Siouxsie and company took things to an entirely new level of darkness on Juju, with the singer taking delight in sinister wordplay on the disturbing "Head Cut," creeping out listeners in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek "Halloween," and inspiring her bandmates to push their rhythmic witches brew to poisonous levels of toxicity.
Harp master Billy Branch has been a figure of the note on the Chicago blues scene since he was discovered by Willie Dixon in 1969, and after more than four decades, he's grown from a young buck bringing new blood to the blues scene to an elder statesman who stands tall for the music's traditions. Blues Shock arrives ten years after Billy Branch last released an album, but it sounds like he and his latest edition of the Sons of Blues are still in fighting shape, playing tight, straight-ahead blues with force, imagination and wit. Blues Shock shows there's plenty of fun and fresh ideas to be found in a form as time-tested as Chicago blues. It's a great set.
Some years ago Austrian radio ORF started a series of recordings with polyphony from the renaissance on its own label. The ensemble The Sound and the Fury has recorded music by well-known masters like Nicolas Gombert, Pierre de la Rue and Johannes Ockeghem. But they have also paid attention to some forgotten composers of the 15th century. One of them is Guillaume Faugues. As so often there is quite a difference between his reputation in his own time and in modern times. It is very likely nothing of his oeuvre has ever been recorded before.