While a new Roxy Music studio album remains a tantalising pipe dream for persons of a certain age, Live--featuring 22 sonically-consummate tracks recorded in 16 plushly-upholstered auditoriums, from Stuttgart to Adelaide via Vancouver--proves to be just the ticket for the luckless majority who missed the band's much-feted 2001 reunion world tour. When the news filtered out from the Strand in London that Roxy (Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson but, alas, no Brian Eno) were reconvening, headshaking sceptics anticipated a perfunctory nostalgia trip by superannuated globetrotters looking to increase their off-shore equity holdings. How wrong they were. While Live is consummately professional and exhibits an enviable attention to detail (Lucy Wilkins supplants Eddie Jobson's violin virtuosity on "Out of the Blue" and there are even revving motorbike noises on "Virginia Plain") it is far from clinically sterile. The grand old godfathers of glam still manage to stoke up a fire behind the likes of "Remake Remodel" and Brian Ferry continues to sing with all the sensory shudder of a man either handling a poisonous spider or having his back scratched by some delectable supermodel. Their influence is still palpable--Suede, for example, must have rewritten "Street Life" three times over. Pretty much everything on Live--from the art-rock chic of the early years to the urbane charisma of "Avalon"--sounds as topically fresh as today's edition of the six o'clock news. --Kevin Maidment
£9.49
Show Detail »
Seasick Steve is Steve Wold, a moustachioed American bluesman who, on Dog House Music, plays American roots music with the tight-belt economy and authentic spirit of the genre's originators (there's a lineage here, too – Steve was taught his first chords by Delta bluesman KC Douglas). A long-term street-dweller, Wold's instrumentation is simplistic in the extreme: a three-stringed trance guitar, a slide instrument known as 'the one-stringed diddy-bo', and the Mississippi Drum Machine, a wooden box that provides the most rudimentary percussion. In the true blues spirit, Seasick Steve sings his life. For an autobiography of sorts, head for 'Dog House Boogie', a phlegmatic timeline that commences at the age of four with his parent's divorce, and rambles off through several decades of vagrant living and downhome manners. 'Hobo Low' is perhaps the sharpest, best distilled take on Steve's drifter philosophy, his voice raising to quivering, booming peaks over sparse stabs of blues guitar. 'Save Me', meanwhile, sees the diddy-bo make an appearance – a taut, trembling twang that resembles an amplified rubber band. If this review makes Dog House Music sound bare-bones, well, it is – but everyone from blues aficionados to White Stripes fans should find something to love here. --Louis Pattison
£6.05
Show Detail »
A full-bodied selection of songs from the world's premiere wine countries
£10.99
Show Detail »
Top Search
Last Search
