Latest news with #StrapOriginals
Scotsman
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Album reviews: Peter Doherty Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Peter Doherty: Felt Better Alive (Strap Originals) ★★★ Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales (Warp) ★★★★ Rebecca Vasmant: Who We Are, Becoming (New Soil) ★★★★ Whether Camden Town or Clerkenwell, Margate Pier or coastal Normandy, Libertines/Babyshambles frontman Peter Doherty hoovers up influences from his 'hood and imports them straight into song in gonzo reportage style. His latest solo album, Felt Better Alive, is awash with songs written but rejected for the most recent Libertines album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade. He's not bitter - he simply uses them more appropriately under his own name, including The Day The Baron Died, which is essentially All Quiet track Baron's Claw as he hears it. Peter Doherty | Bridie Cummings Home life just across the English channel has inspired a number of tracks. Doherty's location has changed but his eye for the man on the street/country road remains the same on Calvados, a holistic hymn to brandy-making, while he samples the sound of the sea and the voice of his local priest to create end-of-the-Normandy-pier number Prêtre de la Mer. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But the old country makes its presence felt on Ed Belly, a breezy pub rocker which adds a touch of Dixieland jazz, skiffly drums and characterful sax to the mix. There is a spaghetti western saunter to the title track. Even better, irrepressible guest vocalist Lisa O'Neill, a vaudeville singer for our times, conjures dark mischief in London's historic Irish community on Poca Mahoney's. Doherty, of course, is a villain or at least anti-hero in his own romantic story and doesn't even pretend to varnish the truth on Pot of Gold, a candid lullaby for his daughter, which assures her that 'we'll forget about the time when they always tried to run me out of town'. Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard | Pierre Toussaint Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and electronica composer, producer and remixer Mark Pritchard collaborate on a suite of songs inspired by Pritchard's archive of analogue synthesizers. Pritchard has some adjacent form here, scoring a Top Ten hit in the early Nineties (as Shaft) with a rave version of the Roobarb and Custard theme. Tall Tales triggers some nostalgia for kids' TV themes and the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but it is far from kitsch. A Fake in a Faker's World is closer to the lo-fi soundworld of post-punk synth pop with bonus celestial organ coda. Bugging Out Again is a very Radiohead title for a glacial, almost proggy soundscape with Yorke at his most fragile and desolate. Back in the Game is a flintier proposition with minimalist modulation, while The White Cliffs is a serene yet dark synth odyssey. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In contrast, Gangsters features a cheeky synth riff and Happy Days emasculates the language of financial scams using perky piano and terse drum fills to create a toytown march. Visual artist Jonathan Zawada has made an accompanying feature film to be screened pre-release in cinemas. Rebecca Vasment | @elliekoepke_photography Glasgow jazz maven Rebecca Vasmant is equally adept at creating an immersive soundtrack, though she tends to find her featherlight spiritual jazz style and stick with it across her second home-recorded album Who We Are, Becoming. Home-recorded doesn't mean lo-fi. This is a sumptuous, silky suite with breathy vocal incantations, percussive shimmers and brooding brass from a who's who of the grassroots jazz scene, including singers Emilie Boyd, kitti, Terra Kin, Paix and Gaia Jeannot, drummer Graham Costello, saxophonist Harry Weir and new collaborators including flautist GOkU and harpist Amanda Whiting, all in raptures at this fluttering mood music for a sunny spring day. This time it's extra personal for Vasmant, who adds her own spoken word to Mother Earth and Poem for My Grandparents, both Holocaust survivors who have inspired her own prayer of gratitude and defiance. Vasmant is determined to inspire in turn, deploying joyful piano, iridescent harp and dubby brass to contend that Goodness Does Shine Through. CLASSICAL Viadana: 1612 Italian Vespers (CORO) ★★★★ Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In 1612, Venice was rocked by the death of Giovanni Gabrieli, doyen of the city's signature luxuriant polychoral style. In the same year, one Lodovico Grossi da Viadana issued his own collection of music for the evening service of Vespers. These two composers play a central role in I Fagiolini's liturgical re-creation in which, besides Viadana's sequential psalm settings and Gabrieli's centrefold Magnificat, motets by Palestrina, Barbarino and Monteverdi and plainsong Antiphons contextualise the moment in time. Viadana's own music exudes a fascinating individuality, its rich diversity emphasised through director Robert Hollingworth's freely prescriptive use of his choral and instrumental forces. Where mezzo-soprano Clare Wilkinson offers a sublime solo presence in O dulcissima Maria, fuller voices animate the contrapuntal vocal theatre of Laetatus sum. I Fagiolini's intimate precision is offset by the fullness of Cambridge's De Profundis plainchant choir. Gabrieli's extravagant In ecclesiis provides a thrilling conclusion. Ken Walton JAZZ Jacqui Dankworth: Windmills (Perdido) ★★★★★
Irish Independent
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Kerry folk artist Junior Brother announces Tralee concert scheduled after release of upcoming album
The Kilcummin native, who recently signed with the Strap Originals label founded by English rocker Pete Doherty, will play at venues across Ireland, the UK and Europe in celebration of his upcoming release. The lyricist will play at Tralee Lasta Festival at Síamsa Tire on Friday, October 10 as part of the upcoming string of shows. Junior Brother's new album, titled The End, is due out on Friday, September 5. The work has been described as a deeply instinctive yet carefully considered response to the chaos of modern life. 'The sound of the album is supposed to take the organic instruments of Irish traditional music and lift them somewhere else, like the otherworldly Irish music sometimes heard from Fairy Forts at twilight on country roads, impossible to recreate upon hearing,' the artist said. Much of the album's inspiration was drawn from UCD's Folklore Collection on 'I delved into the manuscripts—endless eyewitness accounts of Fairy Forts being stepped into and the land altering, the familiar mutating,' Junior Brother explained. 'Farmers, teachers, the sober, the smart—all losing their way home one way or the other.' In these tales of displacement and confusion, the artist said found striking parallels to the instability and distortion of contemporary life. The End is said to explore forces that work against nature, the rise of the far-right and confrontations with mortality. 'The title The End represents the moment after being led astray, when the grip of madness releases you and you suddenly see your way home. It may reflect the doom of a world gone mad, but it also represents the end of darkness, and the start of a new road,' Junior Brother said. The upcoming work will include his renowned single from last September 'Take Guilt' and his latest offering 'Small Violence', billed as a track which addresses the growing influence of misinformation and the escalating wave of conspiracy-fuelled hatred. The singer/songwriter said the song follows a character pulled in by a small few who enjoy using violent words to stoke real violence further down the line. 'The intro riff was heavily inspired by the opening titles of The Blood on Satan's Claw, a folk horror from 1971 which I highly recommend to anyone except the sensible,' Junior Brother said. The new song is available on popular streaming platforms and the music video for the track, directed by Ellius Grace and Junior Brother, can be watched on the artist's YouTube channel. Tickets for Junior Brother's upcoming concerts are available at
