New Music 2015 - Part 17 - Suzanne Jarvie - Spiral Road

This next album is interesting. It was great to see it reviewed by Netherlands-based blog De krenten uit de pop. It beat me to it, I should have got my act together on Thursday, but that is just fine; we seem to share similar tastes in music.
This is a début album with a difference. In an age when artists get younger and Taylor Swift has released five LPs before the age of twenty-six, this is a début LP by a Canadian artist born in the 1960s. Its genesis is both tragic and an interesting story of how music can be inspired.

Spiral Road is released by independent label Continental Song City, one of those independent labels that can now be relied on to produce interesting fare, on 23 February in the UK. It is already released in North America.
Can I pick favourite songs here? Well no, at least not yet, but it is early days. That is a good sign; were the LP marginal in any sense I would be stating my stand-out(s) and then cutting loose.
Not so long ago I wrote about another Canadian artist, Lynne Hanson and her latest LP Rivers Of Sand. That was also released by Continental Song City and it looks like the label has more interesting releases forthcoming.

New Music 2014 - Part 40 - Lynne Hanson - River of Sand

'River of Sand', released in September 2014, is actually the fourth LP from Canadian folk-roots artist Lynne Hanson but the first that I became aware of. What took me so long is the obvious question. My weak excuse is that is the first she has released in four years.

Back in 2010 I was nowhere as inquisitive about new music as now I am - no doubt about that - but also with that change the range of music that I like and, at least to some extent understand, has burgeoned. I have not yet listened to this LP enough times to make stable comments on individual tracks but my inclination is that I never will. It is certainly not the polished 'Nashville product' and quite deliberately so. Suffice to say that if you like an album with a lot of meaning and a good dose of darkness and light then this as good as any I have found this year.

Hope is a just four-letter word when the feeling just ain't there.

'This Too Shall Pass'.

These are songs lived-in; well worn through good and bad, scruffy in places and threadbare in others, therefore now totally comfortable. This is music for the season, as winter approaches, to be appreciated seated near a real fire and with a glass raised to the passing of such times.

'This Too Shall Pass'. The Guitar Bar, Nottingham, September 2014.