Starring
Bobby Bazini, Caribou (Our Festive concession this week!), Der Assistent, John P Strohm, Liz Lawrence, Marina Allen, Penguin Cafe
The Front Runners
Pearl : Bobby Bazini
Bobby Bazini’s 2023 collection of big ballads shows that great music can come from surprising sources.
By rights this is an album I should hate. I feel it’s taking me away from my pop DNA. I’m drawn to small scale indie pop full of little touches - a riff here, a memorable line there, a new electronic sound in the corner. Bobby Bazini aims for concert halls not intimate venues. In years to come hese are the songs that you’ll hear talent show contestants murdering when they need a big number. They’d have been at home on BBC 1960s Saturday evening light entertainment variety shows, Cilla, or Dusty, or Lulu looking on approvingly from the wings. Coming up to date, you might expect to hear Bobby sweating in the July heat of recording Jools Holland’s Hootenany.
In fact, I thought it was great, a genuine guilty pleasure. I was tempted and seduced into its world. Go on, drag me out of Radio 6 and into the comfort of Radio 2.
This is an album with a smooth, but impeccable opening song in ‘Pearl’. He teases out the opening before launching into a perfect lush ballad. It’s not so much influenced by the classic singer songwriters of the 60s and 70s as seeming to be a rediscovered nugget from the era.
He’s a Michael Kiwanuka for the heart, a Ray LaMontagne versed in soul rather than country music. He has a satin huskiness in his voice, accompanied by some of the best backing vocals I’ve heard for some time. They’re soulful and straight from church. The songs may be too lush and epic to be truly intimate, but ‘I Don’t Talk To My Mother’ is achingly confessional.
Musically he gives each ballad its distinct flavour. ‘Take It Out On Me’ is the perfect Sunday Morning 11:00am song. ‘Ojala’ may take its cue from elevator bossa nova, but, my, it works well. The hand clapping rhythm of ‘I Don’t Talk To My Mother’ is infectious.
So, what’s the lesson here? I’d say that sometimes you should judge an album by its cover and not be ashamed to succumb to what lies within. You won’t always regret it.
Taster Track : Pearl
Honey : Caribou
No one makes better, gentle dance music than Caribou, and ‘Honey’ does not disappoint.
His songs have all the melody, rhythm and fancy tricks you could hope for in a dance record. Inevitably, what you sometimes find is that the songs feel like fragments. That’s just because these beats and rhythms could carry on forever without losing their appeal.
What marks him out as someone special is the feeling of being human, and soul that he invests in all his music. You can hear it in ‘Dear Life’. In ‘Come Find Me’ there’s a heady ebb and flow of musical waves that are full of warmth, hope and optimism.
‘Campfire’ is a song to bring people together. It begins with the sound of electronically treated strummed guitar. He starts to sing, an uncommon feature on Caribou records and I wonder why. He’s among friends. The words are taken over in a rap before female vocals float into range. Each part works magic and it creates a sense of community that you want to be around you.
‘Volume’ is special. It’s based on M/A/R/R/S’ ‘Pump Up The Volume’ which he credits as the record that switched him onto electronic dance music. It’s the clear starting point for the song, but it’s too reworked and expanded to be a straight cover. The samples from the original song are, themselves, given fresh life. It’s a masterclass in musical transformation.
Caribou is one of those artists that no longer has to try to impress. He doesn’t need to make a point to create a buzz. He's relaxed into making music he loves so that you can love it too. He’s also one of those artists whose every record brings the possibility that it will contain a song that makes your year.
I quietly loved this record.
Taster Track : Come Find Me
Amnesie am Amazonas : Der Assistent
As unavoidable tensions loom large in front of you - how can Christmas take you by surprise every year ? - Der Assistent’s mix of dubby and chilled electronica is exactly what you need to recharge your batteries, temporarily at least.
Der Assistent is Tom Hessler, a Berlin based producer. To pinch a phrase from his Spotify bio, he makes music to occupy the sweet spot where melancholy meets bliss. Now that I’ve tried it, I know that claim to be true and it is quite lovely.
It’s magical, the way that day to day stress melts magically away within a few bars of opening track ‘Klinik Unter Palmen’. It’s smooth enough to describe as yacht chill, carrying the sound of lapping waves and warm air, and a distinct flavouring of French electronic band Air. ‘Lava’ is the most perfectly chilled tune I’ve heard this year. It’s a song of mild dub bass, the sound of woodwind and soft beats across the water and on the breeze.
The tunes are based around pre-programmed bass grooves. Hessler adds just the right amount of embellishment. The tunes are neither too busy nor too dull. By the time they begin to float and drift towards library music, I no longer care - in a very good way!
This music is so effective that even the German lyrics and vocals sound like a romantic, loving language. I don’t want to know what they mean, because I don’t want to be distracted out of my relaxed state.
There is a jaunty energy that creeps into ‘Das Kamel, set against a Lemon Jelly type of guitar. ‘Blaue Stande’ manages to whoosh by slowly and gently, like the sound of a beautifully crafted email heading for the ether.
Der Assistant should be available on prescription. Is it OK to like it so much?
Taster Track : Lava
Rain Before Seven : Penguin Cafe
The Penguin Cafe’s collection of tunes from last year provides an uplifting listening experience. It’s happiness in musical form.
Penguin Cafe pride themselves on being hard to define. That doesn’t make the reviewer’s life any less challenging. They sound orchestral, but not classical. Their pieces are structures like intelligent dance music, but they’re primarily acoustic. Their tunes play like a soundtrack and yet they succeed perfectly without the need for pictures.
They feel as if they carry the weight of centuries of celebratory music and culture in everything they do. ‘In Re Budd’ has the feel of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Boys Own adventures. ‘Goldfish Yodel’ could be folk music from the 18th century, capturing the feeling of townsfolk rushing to the harbourside to greet the return of a ship after months away. And yet, sprinkled across the album, is a whisper of someone like Sebastian Tellier in the strings, and of Hania Rani in the momentum possessed by each song.
These are mini symphonies, lush, romantic and brimful of excitement at the prospect of new adventures. Every note of a track such as ‘Temporary Shelter From The Storm’ draws you in. Songs such as ‘Find Your Feet’ showcase an act that cannot bear to let a song finish. They’re having too much fun to allow that to happen.
There’s so much about this album that is drawn from classical and yet it could only ever, indisputably, be pop. Layer upon layer is piled onto the song before it fades away and those layers are allowed to evolve and mutate so that it almost feels as if you’re the beneficiary of a buy one get one free offer.
This is music you could have danced to at any time in the last two or three centuries. You’re unlikely to find an album as exuberant and exhilarating in any genre. It’s a treat and a joy. Make the most of it.
Taster Track : Temporary Shelter From The Storm
The Chasing Pack
Something To Look Forward To : John P Strohm
John P Strohm is an American immersed in the music business as a performer, lawyer and record company President for the best part of thirty years. These likeable songs feel like a passion project to help him unwind and recharge his love for music.
This is what it sounds like when indie poppers grow up, and the melancholy of middle age replaces the bright eyed, devil may care optimism of youth. The songs are a little slower, more fuelled with a sense that there are greys in the world as well as blacks and whites. They’re also songs bitten by experience and that gives them a darker tinge.
It’s also the record of a man who has been able to withdraw from the bustle of daily life to hone his songwriting craft and fully understand the elements of song that work. I love the guitar whoomph that opens the record and that’s just the first of many touches that feel like square pegs in square holes. If it makes the songs a little safer, they’re also more hummable and memorable.
None of this is a problem. It’s a journey taken by indie bands before him and others will follow in his wake. By the time you reach ‘When The World Sang Along’ the road is signposted to The Eagles. Think, also, of the more melodic Americana leanings of Fountains of Wayne, or Trashcan Sinatras and Teenage Fanclub in their later and solo works. Regular readers - there could be some! - will know just how much I love those bands.
This is an album that is undemanding, but listenable and likeable.
Taster Track : Ready For Nothing
Peanuts : Liz Lawrence
Liz Lawrence could outperform any AI algorithm in fashioning perfect pop. Her latest album is testimony to that!
It’s only a couple of months since I first dipped into Liz Lawrence’s work with Avalanche. That was her previous album, released in 2021. ‘Peanuts’ shows more confidence in her songwriting. It’s bigger, noisier and pure poppier than before, clattering its way out of your speakers from the start with ‘Big Machine’.
The songs are still a little quirky but she shares the knack of making something a little different that mutates into a brilliant chorus. She’s like your favourite 80s / 90s artist at the top of her game, an individual who stands out in the mainstream. She’d have been at home in the first surge of new wave too. There’s not a weak track. It’s as if she’s discovered the elixir that makes perfect pop and is sharing it with us one song at a time.
‘No One’, in particular, is highly infectious. And that may be her Achilles Heel because, very occasionally, this feels like too much of a good thing. It’s full of the kind of hooks and earworms that bedevil the rest of your day
She’s worked with a producer on this album rather than doing it herself, and Ali Chant hasn’t let her down. The sound he’s achieved with her helps all the songs to gleam.
On ‘Names of Plants and Animals’ she sings “I’m crossing my fingers for a 90s revival”. At this rate she may become its leading light.
Taster Track : No One
Eight Pointed Star : Marina Allen
This short album epitomises quietly confident, classic songwriting.
I’ve reviewed Marina Allen before, in 2021 and felt that she qualified as an exciting prospect. She’s delivering on that potential. Coincidentally I last reviewed her in the build up to Christmas, and there’s something about her music that fits the season well. It’s not Christmassy, but it suits those times when you need a respite from exaggerated jollity and the pressure to exceed expectations.
On X, she claims to have been compared to every other female singer songwriter there ever was. I’m not going to do that but, to help, I’m going to share a few thoughts on who she is not like. She’s not like Bjork. There isn’t a hint of fingernails scraping down blackboards in her voice. She doesn’t have the worn husky voice of Joan Armatrading. She certainly doesn’t have the rage and aggression of Amyl from Amyl and the Sniffers. Her vocals present no threat, but they do encourage you to pay attention and listen.
It’s true that her vocals are more suited to the intimacy of the keyboard. The slightly more energetic sound of ‘Swinging Doors’ has her voice stretching, but as the cover photo shows, stretching is a challenge she can pull off very well.
Of course, it’s not just about her vocals. Her way with the piano is inviting, as if you’ve heard its sweet sounds coming through an open studio door, peeked in and been beckoned to join her. It’s the sweetly unfurling melodies that make this album along with her appealing vocals.
These are quality songs and arrangements. It’s indulgent music in the sense that it invites you to indulge in it, repaying the time you take to listen to it.
It’s easy to fall completely in love with these songs. Promise fulfilled.
Taster Track : Red Cloud
Playlists
As ever this week's Taster Track playlists can be accessed at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7cSveL7NpVp1xgrKxPe4av?si=SkFlSnvySeuYFpgG0WJFmA or via the Spotify link on the Home Page.
The link to the Youtube playlist is https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwV-OogHy7Eh_sy55y6i18Qj7w_Z3CQft
Comments