Vivian Ezeh

Swedish vocalist Vivian Buczek has been on the Scandinavian jazz scene for over a decade, releasing her first album, Can't We Be Friends (Skandia Music) in 2003. Live At The Palladium is her fourth solo album, though she's also recorded with the Artistry Jazz Group. The Palladium in question isn't the world- renowned London theatre, it's the one in Buczek's home town of Malmö, but this concert sparkles with such energy and vivacity that it could readily have graced the venue's more famous British counterpart.

Four years out of the Bonzo Dog Band, Viv Stanshall's debut album arrived more than two years after he first started work on it, a long gestation that even he acknowledged was punctuated by some dark droughts of inspiration. "It's all about frustration," he continued, "It's one long squawk." The scars did not, however, show. From the moment the single, the Afro-centric "Lakonga," hit the airwaves, it was clear that Stanshall's characteristic eye for both intriguing melody and infuriating experimentation had not been diminished. The key to the album was the opening "Afoju Ti Ole Riran (Dead Eyes)," a painfully personal tirade directed against the music business. Despite his fame and reputation, Stanshall continued to be marginalized by the industry at large, at the same time as he himself hated the demands that it made upon him…

When the post-punk revival of early-aughts Manhattan (think bands with “The” in their name) yielded to the Brooklyn DIY scene later that decade, Vivian Girls were leading the charge, expertly blending scrappy lo-fi punk with ’60s girl-group harmonies. The all-female trio was also on the front lines of the cesspool that was music blog comment sections, and not incidentally, the group disbanded after their third record. But with Memory, their first record in eight years, they pick up where they left off—namely, rough-around-the-edges garage and surf-rock jams that spiral off into dreamy tangents (perfected on songs like the echoing, reverb-drenched “Lonely Girl”). And they do it all ever so coolly, as if all three rolled out of bed one day and decided to make a comeback album for the hell of it.