Wow, the Gainsbourgs have been busy this year, and I’m so not complaining. I adored Jane Birkin’s new album “Home” earlier in the year, no messing around, just pure old-fashioned Jane Birkin, and now this one from her daughter comes out of the blue. The Gainsbourg/Birkin blood is evident all around, with very “Bonnie & Clyde” like strings (if not the original strings re-sampled) on “The Songs that We Sing”, eg, and Charlotte’s voice astonishingly like her mother’s (in “Everything I Cannot See”, I kid not, we have a serious challenger for “Je T’aime (Moi Non Plus)” – if I hear a sexier song this year it’ll be the first time music has literally … uh … ‘pleasured me’ ... lol …). But then you look at the other credits on the album – Air on the music, Jarvis Cocker on the lyrics, and more – and this is truly a chocolate box of an album which will definitely, definitely make my best of list at the end of the year. Must seek out “Lemon Incest”.

A surprise (well, not a surprise anymore :P) entry in my halfway best songs list for this year will be something from Jane Birkin’s new album, which I discovered yesterday. It’ll likely be the first track, “Home”, which is so classic Birkin, but the other tracks are growing on me too – “Waterloo Station” has a wonderful homage to The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” in it. I haven’t even thought about Jane Birkin really in years since I picked up a “best of” collection in Border’s after they first opened a store in York, but hearing her voice again makes me want to listen to her more. So sexy, and so … French! Even though she’s thoroughly British, at least she was the last time I heard her speak on “The Frank Skinner Show”, even when she’s not singing French, she’s somehow so French to me, lol. I guess it’s ‘cos her voice is so synonymous with the stuff she did with Serge Gainsbourg, and Gainsbourg being so, so, so French, it’s to be expected. There’s also a kind of “broken englishness” to the way she sings, I think, reminds me of the first songs Vanessa Paradis sang in English (I think there’s even a note in the back of the M&J liner notes that says something like, “it’s broken English but we like it,” lol, so cute). I love this album, though, and recommend “Home” heartily … you’ll be into it within bars, I promise. I hope she tours and comes near me, that would be a cool show to go to.

Apologies if this “review” sucks … I toyed with the idea of just incorporating it into a regular blog entry but I really wanna keep up the music reviews as best I can, and I’ve gotta get back on the horse some time.

I’ve probably planned to get into Belle and Sebastian on at least their last 3 releases but I just never got round to it. This one, however, could well become the soundtrack to my year. Having listened to it about 10 times over (and it shows no signs of leaving my iPod), I cannot wait to get into their back catalogue.

I’m one of those people who, if I really love an artist, I tend to adore the first thing I hear by them more than anything else, so I’m probably being a little overpraising here by the simple fact that this is my first time … but I don’t care. This is one of my favourite albums of 2006, every track perfect and most importantly, it all works as one work, and there are so few albums that do that these days. Favourite track is “Funny Little Frog” but the more I listen to it, the more I find to love.

My long overdue first experience of this show … I’ve never had even one iota of interest in “Blood Brothers”, despite not really knowing the story (I definitely recall at one time thinking it had something to do with the Krays, lol) or anything else about it, and despite its long-running status which really speaks for itself: it was simply a case of, almost literally everyone I ever heard talk about it with any enthusiasm happened to be just the kind of people whose opinions really didn’t fire me up. It struck me as a musical a lot like the dire stage version of the movie / TV show “Fame”: something filled with upbeat pop songs, designed to make the audience come back unnecessarily again and again, sing along, dance on their seats, in general be annoying, lol. Cheesy as hell, simple as a soap opera.

The funny thing, it is kinda exactly that, and yet I’ve found myself going back to listen again and again and I will dive happily into any other recording I find (after the first listen, the only thing I could think of was, “did Maria Friedman ever do this!?!??!?” ... I can’t find anything online about her ever having done it – I think her as the mother would be effing amazing) It’s so earthy and real, it just totally straddles the line between cheese and art perfectly. I was astonished to learn that Willy Russell not only wrote the lyrics but also the music (apologies if I’m sounding like a musical neanderthal right now) ... the music is one of my favourite things about it, in this recording in particular, it’s so airy, like it’s been recorded in a forest or something … “Long Sunday Afternoon” is just gorgeous, a disembodied saxophone creating instant mood.

I imagine this is a killer experience live, there’s no way you couldn’t get wrapped up in the story and the anthemic tunes. I’ll be going to see it as soon as I get the opportunity, no matter who’s in the cast, and I urge everyone to give it a listen … I can only speak for this recording, but I imagine others are the same if not more inclusive of the whole plot – this one does get a little hard to follow around the point of “The Robbery” – ... you still get the gist of it, it’s pretty simple to begin with, but utterly moving. If I ever get round to making a list of my all-time fave musicals, I’m still getting over the surprise to say this will be in the top ten, I think.

Ahhhh … just ‘cos I’d love to have not just a silly Disney sequel, not just Drake and Josh, but also Will Young on the front page of my site tonight

I was surprised enough by how much I liked the Arctic Monkeys album, I’ve gotta say, I feel positively ashamed by how much I enjoyed Will Young’s “Keep On”. I’m honestly inclined to use the word ‘beautiful’ in describing it. It’s truly an album – the songs gel together and ultimately connect, there’s a real sense of beginning and end, of a theme, of a mood, etc. I stand by my opinion of shows like “Pop Idol”, the show which propelled Young to stardom; but I’ve gotta constrain my accusations to the system, not the product, here. If he continues going the way he’s going at this point, he’s going to end up making something I have no misgivings about calling beautiful. My only complaint here would be that it’s a little too slickly produced – it has that tinny dance/pop sound when I think it could be so much fuller.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t think I write stuff like this too well so please if you’re of a sensitive nature and prone to being offended easily or can’t handle grey areas of morality, don’t bother reading on.

This was one of those cases of, once I heard about it, I had to give it a listen. Prussian Blue are, in laymen’s terms, Smoosh gone Nazi (I have kinder words, I promise). They’re two young girls who love to sing and love, love, love to be “weiss, weiss, weiss”. Little Hitler-litas (I apologise, that came into my mind and I just had to use it). Sounds horrendous, right?

Mostly? Yes, it is. But I want to be quick to point out that it’s certainly not that bad as far as the morality, the seeming racism, is concerned. While the thinking behind some of these songs can definitely lead to horrific things, and I guess that could be a reason not to promote it, there’s no major indication to me that Prussian Blue are condoning violence or hateful or indeed any kind of racism per se. Hard core racists might listen to their music, sure, and they’ll probably love it and interpret it and use it. That’s their problem.

These girls are proud to be white. It’s a little, urhm, different, but I actually don’t hear anything too harmful. There are plenty of examples of people who are proud to be of other ethnic origins. Of course, the German language in places and the Nazi-ish font on the cover and talk of Aryans in the lyrics doesn’t help this argument But to be honest, it’s possible to listen to most of this album without even noticing all this.

Sometimes it really sounds horrendous. I like listening to Courtney Love and Hole sometimes, but sometimes her wailing makes me stop and say to myself, “What the f**k am I listening to and why?” and there’s more than a few such moments on this album.

Will I listen to it again? I don’t know. I might check out their next album, though. This whole review was way too long considering the subject but consider that I’ve had it as a draft for like 3 weeks or something. I really wanted to write this review to say it’s not that bad – it does have a modicum of artistic merit – and that small fact kind of surprised me.

Kick. Ass. This album came out in the same year as Janis Ian’s Miracle Row. Could this be my favourite year of music?

I was worried about listening to more Cat Stevens because his songs for Harold and Maude were so amazing to me and I don’t hear so many people singing his praises outside that movie, so I was beginning to think maybe those songs were the exception or something. This album, at least, is as good as those songs – I hope I’m not disappointed as I listen to more (I started listening to “Back to Earth” this morning and it’s sounding good).

I picked this one to begin with because of the cover – it just looks immediately like there’s fun inside. Not only was I not let down – I was blown away. Some people might find it a little too synthesized in places, and I could maybe do without the instrumentals Kypros and Was Dog a Doughnut? (good in themselves, but gimme more Cat singing!) but this album contains some of the most lively and romantical songs I’ve ever heard and they’re arranged and produced with the kind of power and confidence only the 70s had.

I mentioned this one in the review of “The McGarrigle Christmas Hour” so I thought I’d write a little about it. It may just be a totally personal thing since I don’t have a Christmas in my memory when we didn’t have this record playing in the house, but to me this album is as essential to Christmas as the tree and everything. It’s a real shame it’s not widely available anymore (and to be honest, I don’t know if it ever was – I have no idea where we got our copy) – at the time of writing, I can find just one copy on eBay.

Even putting aside the collective voices of the girls, which for me at least is always gonna be disarming (though some of the solos here I think will never be matched for the cute factor), the arrangements and production of the tracks here always makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. They even have coconut shells on “Little Donkey” and a bone fide recorder in “Away in a Manger”, what more could you ask for!? I plan to put a Christmas playlist on my radio thing before Christmas, and I’ll probably throw one of these tracks into the mix. I’m almost tempted to stick the whole thing up on Christmas Day or something unless someone wants to object, lol.