Selah Sue has taken five years to follow her acclaimed debut. Five years of live performances, studio sessions, and five years of writing, revising and honing her voice. But now she's ready. New album 'Reason' arrives on June 3rd, and it's a supple, languid return, languishing in a torpor of sound that recalls early Portishead, or even Massive Attack's more soulful cuts.
When the Czech composer Petr Eben died in 2007, he was renowned and performed the world over as a composer for choirs and organ. Nevertheless, 15 years on, this album inaugurates the first attempt at a complete survey of his output for the organ – an output so rich and individual that it has come to define a late 20th-century sound for the instrument as characterfully as Marcel Dupré achieved some six decades earlier.
Sue Foley pretty much sticks to her guns on New Used Car – her tenth album and second for Germany's Ruf Records – resisting the urge to go pure pop and turning out instead another set of blues-inflected roots rock originals that prominently feature her laser-guided electric guitar leads. This is certainly good news, and things get off to a great start with the spunky opener and title tune "New Used Car," which cooks along on Foley's guitar and sharp lyrics that are fully aware that a car is just a metaphor for getting where you want to go and that the back seat is full of all the baggage a life brings.
Yeah, Kingdom Come were a bit too enamored with Led Zeppelin on their first album, and their career didn't last much longer after that, but at the very least they were one of the very examples of what was storming the rock charts back in 1987-1988. Zep-styled riffs and that sorta watered-down boogie-guitar swagger were everywhere, and Kingdom Come were just one of the many bands getting loads and loads of criticism from purists. Oddly, though, the kids (for a short time) loved it, and the records sold enough to convince those at Polydor to release this collection of some of their more well-known tunes.
Ten tunes with an all-star cast including Ronnie Earl (guitar), Kim Wilson (harmonica), Greg Piccolo (sax), Wayne Bennett (guitar), and other excellent players. Plenty of fine guitar, keyboards, harmonica, and uptempo blues music.
In an era before the Page and Plant albums and Jimmy Page's reworking of Zep songs with the Black Crowes, this CD garnered a lot of attention by sounding very much like Led Zeppelin. With an audience hungry for the hard-rocking kings of the '70s, a disc billed that way was guaranteed to sell quite a few copies…
The cover's cutout silhouette of these guitar-slinging soul/blues women is a succinct visual overview of the rather ambiguous contents within. Recorded in preparation for 2007's Blues Caravan tour featuring journeywomen singer/songwriters Sue Foley and Deborah Coleman along with the comparatively fresh-faced Roxanne Potvin (whose first widely distributed set was released earlier the same year), the disc seems more like a respectable concert souvenir than an actual collaborative affair. The 11 tracks break down into three solo cuts from each participant, one shared and joyous effort on the closing cover of a Chess oldie, "In the Basement," and a crackling instrumental dominated by Foley's always impressive guitar. There are many fine moments here, especially as Coleman lays into an easy funk groove on James Brown's "Talking Loud" and on Potvin's emotionally charged ballad "Strong Enough to Hold You".