I began my music blog Some Diurnal Aural Awe on 6^th January 2011. In that year I made 432 album review posts (maybe a live gig or two). This year I have made only 23 posts – most being my themed album cover ones – with only 7 album reviews.

In this genuinely potted history, I do want to balance that ‘decline’ detail about reviews with the announcement that my site has to date had ONE MILLION page views! That’s 1,016,779 to be precise: a figure I have only confirmed today (having last checked and posted when it was just over 700,000).

I have always loved and listened to loads of music, and do so today as much as back in 2011. But back then, I wanted a place to write (love of writing and a need to write) and thus set up the music blog. I felt I had a lot to say about past and contemporary music.

Having retired from teaching in 2010, I had more time to write, and did so intensely on Some Diurnal Aural Awe (that daily reference the impulse and design). Long story short, my writing focus has shifted from music reviews to poetry, but domestic commitments have changed over that period to significantly lessen the time I have for album reviews. I listen to the music when writing other things. As I write this piece, it is St. Vincent – Todos Nacen Gritando.

To celebrate this history, I am posting this year’s 7 album reviews here on gravyfromthegazebo (a site where I used to also write quite a bit about education and politics: how things change).

If of further interest, do visit SDAA here: https://somediurnalauralawe.blogspot.com/ Perhaps you’d like to check out the Prolific Period!

36 – Reality Engine, album review (2.8.24)

36 Ambient Words…

Reviewing ambient music like this would, it seems from those who normally do, require a flamboyant mix of technical jargon refined to ‘ambient’ synonyms and further refined (or exploded) to philosophical ruminations.

Take the tags on Reality Engine’s Bandcamp page for this release: ambient / ambient electronic / atmospheric / dark ambient / deep / drone / electronica / electronica ambient / ethereal / meditation / minimal / dub / soundscape / soundscapes / techno / Indianapolis

I presume this is produced by an algorithm? Whatever the source, it is itself fascinating. The ambience in the list of ambient is a necessary torchbearer for meaningfulness, though the adjectival dark would be better replaced as a qualifier if it was meditative. Atmospheric is quite apt, though I would shape this with emotive somehow. Dub? Surely digital is a more apt d-word. I like the sense of important difference implied by soundscape and soundscapes, though this is clearly tautological. Minimal? I think it is the opposite: expansive or loop-large… Yes, neologisms would do.

My favourite tag-word here? Ethereal.

To this I will add gorgeous, peaceful, restful, restorative.

Done.

A Lily – Saru l-Qamar, album review (7.4.24)

Haunting Beauty

The tracks on this affecting album are mysterious and often haunting, their past origins as reel/cassette tape recordings infused with the distortions of their distant times as well as the effects used in re-presenting them within new musical soundscapes.

Here is a slice of the background details presented on A Lily’s Bandcamp page:

From the 60’s until the modern era, it was common for Maltese families to receive reel tapes from relatives abroad. Maltese emigrés resettled in Australia, the UK, Canada etc. would record their news onto cassette – often in the form of għana, traditional Maltese song – and mail the tapes back home.

The musical backdrops are ambient and repetitive, loops of sound wrapped around long ago and relayed into the present. It is the voices that carry a sonic past with most impact, seemingly lyrical intonations now molded in preserving electronica. Most are carried on pulses of sound like heartbeats resurrected from beyond. Obtained from

Archival recordings provided by Magna Żmien Foundation  / Dan il-proġett huwa megħjun mill-Kunsill Malti għall-Arti

they are now their own archives of memorial music.

Daniel Herskedal – A Single Sunbeam, album review (10.4.24)

Beats of Beauty

This is an album I keep coming back to for its instrumental serenity and mesmerizing vocal from Marja Mortensson, a South Saami Norwegian singer. With its percussive pulses and her wordless incantations, the tuba and bass trumpet playing of Herskedal meld to a haunting of melodic threads across all tracks. There is ambient programming as constant backdrop, and the percussion continually drives. Horns take on loops of their sweet melody, and Mortensson punctuates this with startling vocal idiosyncrasies. Gorgeous. With title track A Single Sunbeam, gentle drumming and other rhythmic beats support a solo horn emerging from the quiet to an increasing rise with programmed strings.

Willie Nelson – The Border, album review (1.6.24)

The Songwriter

Willie Nelson’s latest The Border is like a set of swan songs as it reminisces on a long life and a lifetime ago – this nostalgia so redolent in the continual reference to hearing music (often of his own) on the radio, and more poignantly in the many references to musical legends and friends who are literally in the past,

Once upon a yesterday
We were children working hard at play
Tomorrow was a world away
Time was standing still
The magic of the radio
Taught us songs we didn’t know
We sang ’em loud and we sang ’em low
Once upon a yesterday

We heard them sing on Saturday night
Kitty and Roy and Hank
And for a lot of what we know of love and truth
We have them to thank

(Once Upon a Yesterday)

Perhaps rather than swan songs it is about writing such – though also the lifeblood of songwriting in general – and all on this collection reflect and reveal everything in that, especially the intensely emotional.

On the title song, Nelson’s vocal in its lower level has that gruff edge of older age, but when rising higher, he sings as purely and sweetly as ever. And he swings too as on What If I’m Out of My Mind, but one of the real beauties in this collection is the simply touching, I Wrote this Song for You,

I wrote this song for you
I poured out my soul
I hope you hear it on some lonely
Late-night radio
I hope it makes you smile
When I’m not there to hold on to
That’s the reason why
I wrote this song for you

I worked out the melody
On my old guitar
Then I finally found the words
At the bottom of my heart
I know that that’s not much
But you know it’s what I do
The music speaks for me
So I wrote this song for you

I found this remarkably tender in its predictability and, for example, the childlike linking of ‘melody’ with ‘guitar’.

One of the most evocative is Hank’s Guitar where Nelson dreams of being Williams’ Martin D-28, and the metaphor/personification plays perfectly in the comfortable cliché of honest belief (the writer’s and ours); the referring to tears and crying tugging at other kinds of strings,

Last night I had a dream
That I was Hank’s guitar
He held me close against his chest
And he wrote “Your Cheatin’ Heart”
He drank a lot of whiskey
As he wrote down all that pain
When he sang it back to me
His tears fell on my strings

He picked me up and tuned me
And he played me all night long
He cried while he was singing
All those lonesome songs
Funny how a dream can be so real
And make you wonder who you are
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank’s guitar

Then he put me in my case
We got into that blue Cadillac
As we pulled out of Montgomery
I had a feeling that he wouldn’t be coming back
Next thing I knew
I was given to the Country Music Hall of Fame
That’s when I woke up
To the moanin’ of a lonesome midnight train

He picked me up and tuned me
And he played me all night long
He cried while he was singing
All those lonesome, lonesome songs
Funny how a dream can be so real
And make you wonder who you are
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank’s guitar

Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank’s guitar

The Texas swing of Made in Texas reminds that Nelson’s signature instrument is of course a real thing too

It started in the back of my daddy’s ol’ car
I was born beneath that old lone star
I hit the ground pickin’ this old guitar
I was made in Texas
Like Bob Wills sawing on San Antone Rose
Dance hall rhythm’s all in my soul
Tell everybody everywhere I go
That I was made in Texas

and the rest of the song evokes those other legendary C&W influences and peers who helped to shape his musical history.

Lest it all seems rose-tinted, there is the ruminative actual or imagined in a song like Nobody Knows Me Like You, as here from its second verse,

When my heart turned to stone
The lonesomeness you must have known
Wounds I’ve caused with deep regret
The pain of loss I can’t forget
Nobody knows me
Nobody knows me like you

There does seem to be an overarching, autobiographical reckoning in the closing song How Much Does it Cost where the ‘songwriter’ both asserts as much as reflects. The title’s question is surely rhetorical when the ‘heartache’ as much as all the other thoughts and feelings of Nelson’s lifetime have been his constant musical fuel and bounty,

How much does it cost to be free?
Free from the heartache still living in me
I’ve given my heart, my soul, and my mind
How can I pay up and quit doing time?
And why am I always trying to make it all rhyme?
‘Cause I’m a songwriter and always will be
But how much does it cost to be free?
How much does it cost to be free?

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness, album review (8.8.24)

Bagedai – Bagedai, album review (27.9.24)

Exuberant

From China’s Ximeng county, a remote area of the Wa people (using information online), this is a delightful collection of musical tracks made especially exuberant by the joyous singing of five leading female singers. There is a wonderful merging here of traditional and modern music traditions, the latter a recurring, reggae infused highlight. To also highlight the vibrant performers:

Line up

Li Chunlong (Guitar)
Li Weiwei (Percussions, Winds, traditional folk instruments)
Na Hong (Vocalist)
Na Hongjing (Vocalist)
Na Long (Vocalist)
Nido (Keyboard)
Tang Zhongwei (Guitar)
Wang Jidong (Bass)
Yang Zijie (Drums)
Ye Wu (Vocalist)
Yue Haotian (Trumpet)
Zhou Lifang (Vocalist)

Peter Evans – Extra, album review (20.11.24)

Romp

On opening track Freaks, an echoing horn wrestles with the pulsing bass until it breaks free to blast its sound at pace – a lively start. On next I See, the drums pick up the pumping beats, and Evans’ horn dances along with staccato bursts – more jostling to share the energy. This is the full-on template for an album of eight Evans originals. There’s playfulness too – near the end of Boom, the pip and squeak of horn sees out another rouser; on Nova, the horn imitates a soprano sax in places, and on Movement 56, electronics kick into the mix for the fun of it, becoming an airplane landing. A delightful collection.

Peter Evans; piccolo trumpet, flugelhorn & piano / Petter Eldh, bass & synthesizer / Jim Black, drums & electronics