Demob Happy

I never thought it would happen to me but finally I’ve succumbed to external pressures and have been unable to update this blog with any regularity. Firstly, I’ve been concentrating efforts on a new English-language website for my new home town, Grenoble, in south-east France. Secondly, I’ve recently become a father for the first time. [...]

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Album Review: Richard Swift - Atlantic Ocean
8/10
Often compared to Harry Nilsson, Richard Swift shares the 60s maverick’s category-avoiding, highly melodic and eccentic brand of pop rock. Swift, who prefers the analogue four track production techniques of the Nilsson era, recorded ‘The Atlantic Ocean’ - his latest for Secretly Canadian - in Wilco’s loft (Wilco’s [...]

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Mr Blue Sky !
8/10
My ongoing love affair with Wilco began at the time of Sky Blue Sky’s release, but not, oddly, with the album itself, which received fairly mixed opinions at the time. Sifting through those variable reviews I found myself tracking back to their earlier album ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘, for me their masterpiece, and [...]

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Jackson Toth waves his Wooden Wand goodbye?
8/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT:
Previously leader of the New York-based experimental jazz-folk collective Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, James Jackson Toth’s solo debut is a lush take on alt-country informed by blues, soul and, occasionally, punk. Whereas Wooden Hand … was very much an avant-garde [...]

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