CD reviews of the latest music album releases | York Press

Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires Of The City (XL) ****

12:30pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

DON’T you just love it when bands emerge fully formed from nowhere? Alt-J, The XX, and before them New York’s Ivy League smart boys Vampire Weekend with their preppy pop and African guitars on 2010’s Contra.

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Union Jill, Respectable Rebellion (Union Jill Music) ****

12:29pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

THIS first great Yorkshire folk album of 2013 deserves a wider audience.

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Frank Turner, Tape Deck Heart (Xtra Mile) First half **; second half ****

12:28pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

RATHER alarmingly, this album kicks off with a pure Scouting For Girls lift.

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Primal Scream, More Light (Ignition) ***

12:29pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

THE Primals’ output in the 13 years since XTRMNTR – their best album; Screamadelica was their best social statement – has been patchy if we’re going to be kind, which makes it unsurprising that More Light can be more than a bit messy.

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Seasick Steve, Hubcap Music (Fiction) ****

12:27pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

GOOD OLD Seasick may look the same, from his tuft-tangled face to his checked shirt (the one he never seems to change), but there is a new man in evidence on this album – easily his best yet.

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Caro Emerald, The Shocking Miss Emerald (Dramatico/Grandmono) *****; Laura Mvula, Sing To The Moon (Sony) *****

12:27pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

CAROLINE Esmeralda van der Leeuw, but more commonly known as Caro Emerald, has not only become the biggest-selling artist in her home country, but an international star with a UK number one album to her name.

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Ian Chalk & Dan Clarkson, The Nearness of Two (Home Record) *****

12:20pm Thursday 23rd May 2013

Ian Chalk is one of York`s highest-profile musicians, playing trumpet and flugelhorn with his own bands, with Huge party band, Kate Peters Septet and Scarborough-based General Cluster.

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Agnetha Falstkog, A (Polydor) *****

2:54pm Thursday 16th May 2013

PRODUCERS on the Michael Parkinson television show were understandably incandescent on hearing that after months of negotiation, the one and only interview to promote Agnetha Falstkogs’s last album was cancelled at the eleventh hour.

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Rod Stewart, Time (Capitol) ****

2:53pm Thursday 16th May 2013

ROD STEWART’S autobiography is an engaging read, full of anecdotes and amusing tales. T

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Lord Huron, Lonesome Dreams (Play It Again Sam/I Am Sound) ****

2:54pm Thursday 16th May 2013

LORD Huron is not an English noble but Michigan songwriting prodigy Ben Schneider, whose initial solo endeavour in 2010 has since enlisted the aid of his “best amigos” for this debut album of wides-creen Americana.

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Gabrielle Aplin, English Rain (Parlophone Records) **

2:53pm Thursday 16th May 2013

OH DEAR, this feels unkind. A 20-year-old brings out her debut album on which she has written or co-written nearly all the songs. She plays most of the instruments, too. And along the way she scores a number one hit with her cover of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power Of Love (courtesy of a cutesy TV advert for John Lewis).

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Treetop Flyers, The Mountain Moves (Loose) ****

2:52pm Thursday 16th May 2013

HAILED as a new band of heartfelt harmonies, Treetop Flyers are much, much more than just choice voices.

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Savages, Silence Yourself (Beggars Banquet) ****

2:51pm Thursday 16th May 2013

LISTENING to Savages is like stepping back into the 1970s. There’s a snarl about this four-piece’s debut that sends you spinning right back to punk’s peak, and it’s got the hype-merchants spilling forth into their keyboards.

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Public Service Broadcasting, Inform, Educate, Entertain (Test Card) *****

11:45am Thursday 9th May 2013

WHITHER corduroy-clad, self confessed boffin J Willgoose Esq and his drumming companion Wrigglesworth? Hadn’t they completed their mission to weave samples from 1940s public information reels around ambient electronica and guitar of the present with the spectacular War Room EP? Where could they go from there?

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Ghostpoet, Some Say I So I Say Light (Play It Again Sam) ***

11:44am Thursday 9th May 2013

THE second album from Ghostpoet, aka Obaro Ejimiwe, is a mix of electronic dance beats and laid back not-quite-rap, and makes for a moody, compelling listen.

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Rudimental, Home (Asylum/ Black Butter) ****

11:43am Thursday 9th May 2013

RUDIMENTAL are the coolest band in the UK now, so they were quite a coup for last weekend’s YO1 Festival in York.

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John Fullbright, From The Ground Up (Blue Dirt Records) ****

11:42am Thursday 9th May 2013

YOU DON’T share the same home town as Woody Guthrie without absorbing something into your blood. So it proves with John Fullbright, a 25-year-old singer songwriter whose relative youth belies the musical grit in his old soul.

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David Bowie, Aladdin Sane (RCA) *****

11:41am Thursday 9th May 2013

REMASTERED, re-released and – yee-haa. After the mid-1980s Berlin beauty of Heroes, Aladdin Sane remains my second fave from the Bowie canon.

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Woodpigeon, Thumbtacks And Glue (Fierce Panda) ****

11:40am Thursday 9th May 2013

WOODPIGEON’S fifth album is their first proper full-length studio set since 2010, since when the prolific man who is Woodpigeon, Mark Andrew Hamilton, has flown off from Calgary, Alberta to Vienna, Austria.

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Michael Bublé, To Be Loved (Reprise) ***

11:00am Thursday 2nd May 2013

PERHAPS one of the quirkiest measures of an artist’s success is the number of tribute acts trading on the artistry of another.

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Counting Crows, Echoes Of The Outlaw Roadshow (Cooking Vinyl) *

11:00am Thursday 2nd May 2013

THE prospect of a new Counting Crows album has me planning a long car journey through rugged countryside where I can howl along tunelessly to my heart’s content. But as this collection of live recordings from their latest tour begins with a rehash of Dylan’s Girl From The North Country, I experience echoes of disappointment.

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Low, The Invisible Way (Sub Pop Records) ****

10:57am Thursday 2nd May 2013

LOW, the eternally underground trio from Duluth, Minnesota, mark their 20th anniversary with their tenth studio album. Recorded in The Loft, the Chicago studio of fellow American veterans Wilco, it was produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in a marriage made in melancholia heaven.

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Paramore, Paramore (Fueled By Ramen) **

10:56am Thursday 2nd May 2013

SOME lead singers are the band they represent. Debbie Harry was Blondie, Mick Hucknall will forever be Simply Red, and so Hayley Williams should be known as Paramore.

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Wiley, The Ascent (Deluxe Edition) (One More Tune/Warner Brothers) ***

10:56am Thursday 2nd May 2013

THE so-called Godfather of Grime releases his ninth full-length album, with extra tracks on the deluxe edition.

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Iron And Wine, Ghost On Ghost (4AD) **

10:55am Thursday 2nd May 2013

IS Log Cabin Musing the new Britpop? You can’t move, musically speaking, at the moment for rustic pluckers using campfire imagery to tell their homespun tales from the backwoods.

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CHARLI XCX, True Romance (Asylum) ****

11:13am Thursday 25th April 2013

HOW much attitude makes an album work? It’s not an easy trick to pull off. Too little and you fluff your lines by sounding meek; too much and you end up as So Solid Crew, never a good thing.

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Steve Earle & The Dukes (and Duchesses), The Low Highway (New West) ****

11:13am Thursday 25th April 2013

STEVE EARLE doesn’t do anything here he hasn’t done before, aside from add the ‘Duchesses’ to his band’s title. What you get is the usual mix of growling vocals, gentle country with a spiky message, and workmanlike rock-outs, such as Calico Country, actually one of the least successful songs.

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Kurt Vile, Wakin On A Pretty Daze (Matador Records) ****

11:12am Thursday 25th April 2013

IF EVER a record came along at just the right time, Wakin On A Pretty Daze does, as the seemingly inescapable winter makes way for a belated spring and, all being well, summer.

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Electronic, Electronic (EMI) ****

11:11am Thursday 25th April 2013

IF you could have put together a dream song-writing team as the sun set on the Eighties, who better than a combination of New Order, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.

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Robert Vincent, Life In Easy Steps (DB Industries) ***

11:10am Thursday 25th April 2013

LIVERPOOL’S new-wave figurehead is not lacking in confidence. The cover alone on his debut album would be worthy of Roger Dean in his halcyon Yes and Osibisa days. But is this style over substance?

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