Second collection of old-school country and western covers from Norah Jones and co. ..By sheer dint of the fact she plays the piano and occasionally dips into the Great American Songbook, Norah Jones finds herself marketed as a lounge jazz singer, a category error compounded by the fact that her sales have all but bankrolled the Blue Note label for more than a decade. Of course, she’ll be the first to admit that she’s not a jazz musician.
Club Uncut’s final night in Brighton can’t quite match the high of Josh T. Pearson’s performance on Friday, but a strong, diverse bill of female talent doesn’t disappoint.
It may be a touch rash to suggest that Oneohtrix Point Never are challenging, say, Lady Gaga for influence and ubiquity all of a sudden. Nevertheless, more and more psychedelic records I’m sent seem to follow levitational synth patterns rather than more rockist jams, and there’s even been a few weird instances of PRs dropping the Oneohtrix name as an eyecatching influence, when the actual music sounds nothing like him (last week: a very lame pop-dubstep thing with faint ethereal trim).
The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions.
