Skip to main content

Jen Cloher

Very often I need to hear an unfamiliar song several times before its charms or its annoyances become fully apparent to me, which is partly why radio has been such a crucial medium in forming and changing my musical tastes. If a DJ whose taste or knowledge I respect plays a track repeatedly and it doesn't appeal to me at first hearing, then I'll be open to a second, third, or subsequent encounter to change my mind about it. When exploring music on-line, there's much less likelihood of my giving a song a second chance it I don't care for it the first time.

Jen Cloher is a case in point. Her song 'Analysis Paralysis' had slipped past me a couple of times before it stuck its hooks in me. It sounded even better when I heard her band play it in a live radio session: soon after that, I ordered a CD copy. It isn't, for me, a perfect album - I love about half of it. Having said that, the first twenty-two minutes or so taken up by its opening four tracks is excellent stuff. The disc gets off to a strong start with 'Forgot Myself', then gets better still with my two favourite tracks coming back-to-back ('Analysis Paralysis' & 'Regional Echoes'), with the wistful 'Sensory Memory' being almost as good.

Out of the remainder of the album 'Loose Magic' is another favourite of mine. I quite enjoy the likes of 'Strong Woman' and 'The Great Australian Bite', but care less for 'Shoegazers'. The band combine to great effect, with guitarist Courtney Barnett especially impressive in her role as sidewoman.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...