JOHN HENRY LAMBERT: 'GONE AWAY'
JOHN HENRY LAMBERT: JHL63447929409
RELEASE DATE: MONDAY 7th APRIL 2008
Gone Away is the debut album by Devon-based singer-songwriter John Henry Lambert, which will be released on his own label on Monday April 7th 2008.
Gone Away is a collection of songs, tone poems and discursive elements that is utterly unlike anything else you’ll hear all year. It is an album where the mood and tone, brilliantly sustained throughout, predominates. Against simple musical frameworks, Lambert, alongside his musical cohorts Ian Ritchie (saxes, vocals) Isabel Lambert (harmonium, piano), Kathleen Willson and Natalie Williams (backing vocals), conspire to construct a spacious and uncluttered sound field, with a melancholy, crisply autumnal feel. Lambert’s producer, Richard Ashrowan, also designed the beautiful sleeve that tastefully reflects the albums’ musical and lyrical themes.
Ashrowan explains in the album sleeve the rationale behind the recording and the nature of the album:
“We recorded Gone Away slowly, over a two year period, on location at John Lambert’s farm on Dartmoor. From the ouset, we decided the process was more important than the outcome. Nothing was rushed, atmosphere was everything. We applied quite arbitrary rules to the production from the beginning – we would neither use percussion nor electronic instruments, we would not overdub anything. Every thing would be recorded live in single takes; we would play and record it all in the house, we would aim for a consistency of mood, and we would enjoy being with each other…but most of all, we arrived to create and capture those subtle moments in which the musicians entered into a shared psychological or spiritual space, a space inhabited by the atmosphere of the song rather than the individuals playing it. Not everything is perfect in these recordings – we made many decisions that favoured atmosphere over technical perfection. But this is how we like it, this is how it was. When it came to mixing the record, we also resisted the temptation to edit, to add or to take away. We hope the process of minimal intervention has presented a sense of being true to the players, true to the heart of each song and true to the moment.”
The end result is more akin to the subtle soundscapes of recent Scott Walker recordings, or even the darker singer-songwriter creations of solo Nico, or an acoustic John Cale circa Music For A New Society. It’s a challenging work, but a rewarding one.
For more information,
please contact Alan and Lesley at Indiscreet PR on
07813 290 474 or via this site for further details.
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NAZARETH: 'THE NEWZ'
EDEL: 0188272ERE
RELEASE DATE: MONDAY 14th APRIL 2008
Seasoned Scots Rock heroes Nazareth are to release their first studio album in nearly ten years in the shape of The Newz, out on the Edel Records label on Monday, April 14th 2008.
Lining up with original members Dan McCafferty (vocals), Pete Agnew (bass) and Agnew’s son Lee Agnew on drums (who replaced original drummer Darrell Sweet, who died on tour in 1999) and terrific guitarist Jimmy Murrison, it’s a pleasure to report that The Newz is a splendid restatement of Naz hard rock values, with all concerned acquitting themselves with a panache and aplomb that is a joy to behold.
Although Nazareth are not necessarily as highly regarded in their native UK as they should be, across the world they are held in high esteem – Guns N Roses covered their classic Hair of The Dog on their Spaghetti Incident album, and other hard rock acts have acknowledged the bands’ no-frills, direct approach, with strong choral hooks, crunching guitar and rhythm, and McCafferty’s granite-hard vocals. On The Newz, the band belie their near decade-long break from the studio with Goin’ Loco, a slab of gutsy hard rock with a funky marbling that kicks proceedings off in some style. Elsewhere, there’s the anthemic Day At The Beach, the explosive Liar, See Me and the menacing Warning. It’s great stuff, utterly triumphant, and for a band with a career dating back over forty years, is a fantastic celebration of their longevity.
Nazareth broke through to the higher echelons of the Brit Rock arena with hits in the early 70s such as Broken Down Angel and Bad Bad Boy. They consolidate their success by way of cracking albums such as Rampant and Hair Of The Dog, and, although Punk sidelined them from the UK British music press to some extent, their international reputation expanded, scoring multi-million sales in Canada, the USA and even making inroads into South America.
Nazareth are available for interview in support of this release.
For more information,
please contact Alan and Lesley at Indiscreet PR on
07813 290 474 or via this site for further details.
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EVELINE: 'WAKING UP BEFORE DAWN'
SONIC VISTA: SVRCD004
RELEASE DATE: MONDAY 21st APRIL 2008
From Bologna, Italy, Eveline come to the UK to proffer a bunch of fragrant pastoral musical nosegays, with their second album, Waking Up Before Dawn, to be released on Monday, April 21st on the UK indie label, Sonic Vista.
Their music evokes the kind of layered, subtle and allusive musical colourings of hallowed ‘Canterbury Scene’ acts such as Caravan, and the mordant musings of Robert Wyatt and early Soft Machine. In fact, Robert Wyatt has said that Eveline are his favourite band!
Eveline formed in 2000 in Bologna, Italy, a collective of talented musicians from all over the country, and with antecedents in other Italian underground bands such as the Orange, Trabant, Ensemble Ivan Illich and more recently, Surfing Machos and the Terje Nordgarden Trio. Eveline is a new and groundbreaking project presenting alternative pop music and cool jazz, indie rock and electronics.
They recorded their first EP in 2001, entitled "Oh My Friend Please Call Me 'Cause My World Is Full Of Joy" and the second EP, titled "The Jeffy J. Jeff's EP." between 2002 and2003. The band chose parts of this second important EP for its first official album, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EVELINE!!!" which was released by the independent Venetian label Shyrec in 2005, and enjoyed great critical success in Italy.
In October 2007, the German indie label Sopot Records Ltd. released “HAPPY BIRTHDAY EVELINE!!!” and distributed it across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The German critical milieu welcomed the album as one of the most interesting independent releases of 2007 and the band started a tour which reached several important German clubs in Berlin, Hannover, Bremen, Frankfurt and other important European cities.
2008 sees the release of Waking Up Before Dawn, with the avowed intent of spreading the Eveline virus to a UK audience.
Resource magazine described Eveline as “an elegant, eclectic, experimental band moving through calm and damp classical fields”; Die Zeit magazine said: “Eveline plays with different identities, a strange and cool diagonal humour, in the tradition of the novel figures of Pirandello and Flann O’Brien.” The UK publication Strummer opined "that Eveline may have brdged the gap between 70’s indulgence and noughties post-rock - a rare and precious album, a beautiful Steinbeckian pearl of a record.”
For more information,
please contact Alan and Lesley at Indiscreet PR on
07813 290 474 or via this website for further details.
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TONY PALMER: 'ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE' (DVD)
VOICEPRINT: TPDVDBOX 1
RELEASE DATE: MONDAY 21st APRIL 2008
FOR THE FIRST TIME ON DVD:
TONY PALMER’S CLASSIC SERIES 'ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE'
THE STORY OF POPULAR MUSIC:
Undoubtedly one of the music DVD releases of 2007 was the Tony Palmer directed 1968 documentary, All My Loving.
Roundly acclaimed in the Global music press, it brilliantly revived an era when Rock music carried a genuine meaning, and sought to place Rock music and the counter-culture in a context that had not been considered until then. All My Loving was hugely controversial in its time, and nearly forty years after its original broadcast, was still a vibrant and colourful document of its time, carrying a powerful resonance in the here and now.
It is with great pleasure, therefore that Indiscreet PR announce the DVD release of Palmer’s documentary series All You Need Is Love - all 14 hours and forty-five minutes of it – on a five–disc set.
All You Need Is Love was originally broadcast on prime-time TV in the mid-seventies, and its brief was nothing less than the detailing of the history of popular music up until that point.
Therefore, there are episodes dedicated to Ragtime, Blues, Jazz, Vaudeville, Swing, Tin Pan Alley, The Musical, Country Music, and contemporary rock music, including interviews with many of the leading luminaries of the various genres including John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimi Hendrix, Stephen Sondheim, Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, Mike Oldfield, The Beach Boys, Tina Turner, Sam Phillips, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Richard Rodgers, Roy Rogers, Benny Goodman, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Phil Spector, Bill Monroe, Bill Graham, Bill Wyman, Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton and many many more.
As such, given its scope and reach, it is unlikely that, in this day and age, such as series would ever be commissioned; certainly not on mainstream television, and equally certainly without the series’ high-quality production values, just another unique facet to this revealing TV series.
All You Need Is Love will be shown in its entirety at the NFT on London’s South Bank across the May Day Bank Holiday weekend. Tony Palmer, the director of All You Need Is Love, is available for interview in support of this historic release. His acclaimed documentary on the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams was show on channel 5 on New Year’s Day this year.
For more information,
please contact Alan and Lesley at Indiscreet PR on
07813 290 474 or via this website for further details.
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MARTIN STEPHENSON & THE DAINTEES: 'WESTERN EAGLE'
BARBARAVILLE: BVCD14
RELEASE DATE: MONDAY 28th APRIL 2008
Twenty years ago, when the world was a bit younger, Martin Stephenson & The Daintees illuminated the British music scene parlaying a deceptively light and breezy semi-acoustic rootsy pop music that was a strong and viable antidote to the arid mainstream.
Their live shows were delightfully loose-limbed, discursive affairs, with the irrepressible Martin and his cohorts tearing up the set list, one song morphing into another. The sets could last for over two hours, but it never felt like it; they had charm in abundance, and a certain North East England wit – songs were played with a smile and a knowing wink. Sadly, despite building up a diverse and dedicated following, the band never made the big time break that was surely their due. Besides which, Stephenson himself had a predilection for playing more intimate venues, and would frequently perform at small Folk clubs and pub back rooms to tiny audiences to keep that intimacy going.
The band sundered after their final album, The Boy’s Heart, in the early 1990s. Since then, Martin Stephenson has pursued a wildly variant solo career, regularly releasing albums and ploughing a peripatetic path through club venues throughout the UK and abroad, and is now located in Northern Scotland.
Anyway, after too, too long, Martin Stephenson & The Daintees have reconvened in recent years, and returned to the recording studios with a brand new album, Western Eagle, released on Monday, April 28th 2008, on their own Barbaraville label, distributed by Voiceprint.
Like all of The Daintees recorded works, it inveigles its way into your consciousness by stealth. There is no grand-standing, foot-on-the-monitors type hectoring; just subtle playing, strong melodies that insinuate their way into your heart, but repeated plays deliver and reveal an immensely satisfying, ruminative selection of songs which show that the inspirational strand that was left hanging on their The Boy’s Heart album back in the early 90s has been picked up and added to with Western Eagle.
In conjunction with his fellow Daintees - brothers Anthony and Gary Dunn (guitars and vocals), drummer Paul Smith, and several guest musicians, including Ken McCluskey, Kevin MacDermott and Blair Cowan, Martin Stephenson has crafted a bunch of melodic gems in his customary Folkie / Country Rock stylings – there’s understated, but high quality musicianship, and a reprise of their early song Indian Summer, a reggae-tinged lilt, that like the rest of the album gently finds its way into your pleasure centres. Unassuming it may be, but it is music of soul, heart, and of lasting value, and one of the more welcome returns to the fray from a band with a modicum of unfinished business to attend to.
Martin Stephenson is only too happy to talk about this excellent new album.
For more information,
please contact Alan and Lesley at Indiscreet PR on
07813 290 474 or via this website for further details.
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