BBC Review of Liane’s solo album Slow Down
It doesn’t just tug at your heart strings, it rips them out...
Following hot on the heels of her Best UK Female Singer accolade from Ronnie Scott’s, Slow Down was recorded in just a few studio hours, and it confirms that Liane Carroll is all things to all ballads.
With just her piano and her voice (and a little help from fellow singer Ian Shaw on one track) Liane conjures up an amazing range of expression to match her huge vocal range. The standards “Memphis in June” and “All of Me” are given a bluesy makeover and sound astonishingly fresh and celebratory, while Donovan’s “Catch The Wind” is in turn heart-rendering and life-loving.
On Slow Down Liane sings her way through the whole spectrum from jazz diva to fragile victim. Van Heusen and Cahn’s “All The Way” and Duke Elliington’s “In My Solitude” are remade as torch songs, with vulnerability oozing out of every verse, while “Lazy Afternoon” perfectly captures her molasses low tones and silken high ones – her sparse electric piano accompaniment creating a brooding, hypnotic tension.
Liane dedicates the tender “If I Loved You”, from the film Carousel, to her grandmother who sang it with her when Liane was a child. Ian Shaw helps out on piano here, and Liane’s almost-whispered, lump-in-the-throat intro develops into a thumping soul ballad. A natural storyteller, Liane gives Tom Wait’s “Take It With Me” a dose of Kirsty MacColl understated passion, personality and dry humour.
Slow Down just doesn’t tug at your heart strings, it rips them out by the roots (then apologises with a sheepish grin).
Kathryn Shackleton
www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/r43n
For music tracks and videos visit www.myspace.com/lianecarroll
POLAR BEAR
BBC Review of Polar Bear’s latest album Peepers
Talented musicians reworking the rule book with hearts and minds at play
Polar Bear sit as something of an anomaly in the UK jazz community. This is a band notable for their youth, but real knuckle-down players, not crooning heart throbs, experimentally minded, but not regimented to the familiar squeal and squall of free jazz-inherited improvisation.
Instead, Polar Bear feel more cast in the mould of an experimental rock band – a fairly makeshift and mischievous five-man unit, bringing together drummer Sebastian Rochford and tenor saxophonist Pete Wareham (both also of the more fiery Acoustic Ladyland) alongside electronica head Leafcutter John, plus second tenor Mark Lockheart and Tom Herbert, also of The Invisible, on double bass. Peepers, the quintet’s fourth album, sees familiar jazz styles – bebop, cool jazz, free improv – exhumed, tampered with and gleefully crossbred with little regard for tradition or idiom.
So, Happy For You marshalls perky, beat group guitars and jaunty saxophone, although Rochford’s skittering drums and sudden swells of percussion give things a constant sense of jazz motion. Drunken Pharoah adopts a stumbling, stop-start rhythm, sometimes halting a half-beat as Leafcutter John conjures all kinds of collapsing electronic sounds out of the ether.
There is abrasion here, but usually it’s employed with a certain tongue-in-the cheek – Scream opens with saxophones clucking like angry chickens, and ends 30 seconds later with a single shrill squeal. Just as common, though, are moments of disarming beauty. The Love Didn’t go Anywhere is subtle and gorgeous, yearning sax lines and quiet whispers of percussion that recall Miles Davis at his more wistful.
This is the sort of patchwork, irreverent treatment to a genre that will see an outfit critically overlooked, or even maligned. Polar Bear, however, have already drummed up plaudits from such a wriggly approach – 2005’s Held on the Tips of Fingers, you will recall, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize – and Peepers is every bit as good, with talented musicians reworking the rule book with hearts and minds at play.
Louis Patterson
www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/9cgw
For music tracks and videos visit www.myspace.com/sebastianrochford
RICHMOND JAM
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