Tag: A Choir Of Ghosts

EDDI READER releases a new EP, Starlight (Reveal) which lifts the title track and ‘My Favourite Dress’ from her recent Cavalier album and adds three hitherto unavailable covers from the same sessions.

First up, featuring assorted friends and relative son backing vocals, is James Grant’s ‘Scarecrow Song’, a slow waltz lament of an old soldier, home from the wars with no sense of purpose and no welcome. Grant plays guitar on both that and John Douglas’s jauntier waltztime honky tonker ‘No Reply Dot Com’ with John McCusker on fiddle and John Douglas on ukulele. The third stays in waltz mode, but slows it down again for ‘Build High, Build Wide (In Contempt)’, a new musical setting of a folk song by the poet Aaron Kramer and Betty Sander written in protest to the jailings by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee.
http://eddireader.co.uk/

JOHN MOSEDALE says he spent “half a lifetime chasing the dream” in other areas of the business before an encounter with Richard Digance set him on the route to acoustic music.  Twenty Seven is his debut EP. Nothing is overworked and the songs are gentle or gently humorous like ‘My Dog Has 3 Balls’. ‘The Old Man In The Mirror’ is a reflection on aging and the fact that John has begun a new life in his mid-fifties, a theme continued in ‘The River Of Life’. ‘Four Left Feet’ is a charming, if perhaps slightly dated, portrayal of youthful romance and the title track is the first song John that wrote and is one he always finishes his set with. This version was recorded live at Bromsgrove Folk Club.
www.johnmosedale.com

Out at the start of May, BEN MORGAN-BROWN self-releases his fourth EP, Nameless Gold, recorded live in the studio on a January morning, all first takes with no edits or overdubs, and featuring three songs and two instrumentals.

One of these is the opener, ‘Windowsills’, a reflective fingerpicked open-tuned number that sets the mood for what follows. The title track continues the mood weaves memories inspired by Ben’s wedding ring, recast using gold from his late father’s, and traces an emotional legacy and heritage from father to son.

Looking back on the past, and how quickly a decade can fly, is also at the heart of ‘Ten Years Passing’, is a lively upbeat circling melody fingerstyle blues that recalls a summer spent living in a caravan, listening to folk music, teaching himself guitar selling fudge and ice-cream and working in the country’s largest bookstore in Piccadilly Circus, the song musing on how the experiences we have shape who we become.

The tempo shifting between slow and frisky, the second instrumental, the fingerpicked ‘Let A Sleeping Dog Lie Pts 1 & 2’, was the only piece of music that Ben’s young rescue Border Collie Jake would settle down to, clearly showing how canines can have great musical taste. It ends with another fingerpicked circling melody number about the passing of time, ‘Only So Young’, inspired by two photographs of his father, one of him holding Ben the day he was born, the other of the two side-by-side shortly before he died, as, punctuated by whoo-hoos, he softly sings of not letting life can pass you by while you wait for it to happen.
https://benmorganbrown.co.uk/

Live At St Giles is the new EP from the remarkable BRICKWORK LIZARDS who blend middle-eastern sounds with a love of pre-war jazz. ‘Nikriz Longa’ is definitely in the former category with Tarik Beshir’s oud to the fore before Stephen Preston’s trumpet muscles its way in. ‘I Want To Spend The Night With You’ takes us back to the thirties with four close-harmony voices, that distinctive percussion sound and Preston’s trumpet again. ‘Roses’ requires a singer in a white dinner suit while ‘Sama’i Waltz’ takes us eastwards again – an swirling eight-minute epic featuring improvised lyrics by Beshir.
www.brickworklizards.com

Birmingham’s BOAT TO ROW offer a second taster of forthcoming album Rivers That Flow In Circles with ‘On Your Own’, further indication of their journeying into new, unexplored territories. A gorgeous, summery sound with breezy guitars and brass flourishes, as well as backing vocals from Katherine Priddy, it conjures the heady days of 70s Laurel Canyon and the SoCal sounds of Joni, James, CS&N and Seals & Croft.
https://www.boattorow.com/

We enjoyed ‘Holding’, he last single by Irish singer-songwriter SIVE. It reappears on her eponymous EP but gives ‘Quietly’ the honour of opening the show. Sive has an MA in community music with a special interest in healthcare which emerges in ‘Do It All The Time’, possibly the best song in the set. Sive keeps her public and private lives separate but we do know that she already has two albums to her credit.
http://www.sivemusic.com/

As a prelude to his new album, Songs From Aurora, DAVE FIDLER releases a single of the radio edit and the full album version of ‘Skylark’. It’s an upbeat song featuring finger-picked guitar and just a hint of slide. “The skylark only calls when it’s climbing” is the take-home message and it seems very appropriate for these troubled times.
http://www.davefidler.com/

Co-written with Jules Fox Allen and arranged for acoustic guitar and violin, MARINA FLORANCE releases ‘One More Day’ (Folkstock), a yearningly simple, heartfelt song of regret at not saying what you feel or doing what you want and then finding it too late.
https://www.marinaflorance.com/

Written over Christmas, which probably explains the festive sway feel to the melody, Ulsterman ULTAN CONLON offers up ‘In The Blink Of An Eye’ (DarkSideOut), which, conjuring familiar mainstream Irish country singalongs, offers encouragement that, whatever trials and tribulations beset us, we will all ultimately recover.
www.ultanconlon.com

You’d think that butter wouldn’t melt in IZZY DERRY’s mouth then you hear her sing! ‘Learn To Grow’ is her new single – a taster for her new EP. It’s a pounding slab of folk(ish)-rock with thumping drums, singing electric guitar, bass and piano and a huge voice. This woman will be a star.
http://izziederry.com/

The upbeat melody that TIMOTHY HOAD has written seems inappropriate for a title like ‘Dance The Hempen Jig’ but this is a song of survival not a man’s sorry end. “I was never one to dance the hempen jig” emerges as the defiant message after the instrumental break – just keep on going.
https://www.facebook.com/timothyhoadmusic/?ref=page_internal

FIELD MEDIC (aka Kevin Patrick from Los Angeles) releases ‘The Bottle’s My Lover, She’s Just My Friend’ from his new album Fade Into The Dawn. He backs a suitably cracked vocal performance with a lazy strummed guitar and some rather intriguing sounds in the background. We’ll be reviewing the album very soon.
https://fieldmedic.bandcamp.com/

“Oh you are not well, you cannot string your thoughts together” are the opening lines of CHLOE FOY’s new single ‘Oh, You Are Not Well’. Here in the editorial catacombs we know the feeling. Chloe is building quite a name for herself and this richly orchestrated song can do her nothing but good.
https://chloefoy.com/

Author, actor and musician Larry “RATSO” Sloman steps into the limelight at the age of 70 with an album, Stubborn Heart, and a single, ‘Our Lady Of Light’ which features Nick Cave. There’s a lot of Leonard Cohen and a hint of Dr. John about this song, which is more than enough to make you investigate the long player.
http://www.ratso.org/

‘Southwest Of The Moon’ is the new single by A CHOIR OF GHOSTS from his debut album, An Ounce Of Gold. He is probably Swedish and there is only one of him but there is very little else we can tell you that makes much sense. It’s a good song, though, and you can watch the video at…
http://www.achoirofghosts.com/