New Music 2016 - Part 45 - Lady Nade - Hard To Forget

When you are at a little gig and you hear something that seems too important to ignore...  I am glad to say I have been in that situation plenty of times. Some of those artists are now well known, some are not. There seems to be little rhyme or reason concerning which fall into one category or the other.

Any which way, this is one such; Bristol artist Nadine Gingell whom I first saw play live here in Frome, Somerset way back in 2011. This is her first full length release.

Lady Nade - Hard To Forget (Kitchen Sink Records/Lady Nade, 12 August 2016).

• Hard to Forget
• Waiting for You
• Mind's Made Up
• Those Late Nights
• Don't Make Him Wait
• I Got You Daddy
• Complicated
• Kiss This Troubled Mind
• 6AM
• Get You on My Own

The genre floats effortlessly between acoustic soul, pop and folk and that's not remotely a problem. The lyrics raise the bar and then the voice that sings them nails it.
That's what made me take notice back then. In that sense alone the title of the album is absolutely spot-on too.

Mind's Made Up

2006 - My 'Top Ten' Albums

The reason these choices are in alphabetical order is that they are just my current 2006 favourites.

Amy Millan - Honey From The Tombs
Bat For Lashes - Fur and Gold
Corinne Bailey Rae - Corinne Bailey Rae
Hafdis Huld - Dirty Paper Cup
Ilya - Leaving Sans-Souci
Lily Allen - Alright, Still
Nerina Pallot - Fires
Shakira - Oral Fixation (Volume 2)
The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes
Yeah, Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones

I could easily have added half a dozen others and the order is merely determined by my mood at any particular time. I have likewise also excluded several very recent additions to my collection as they have an insufficient listening profile for me to have formed a proper opinion of them. Corinne Bailey Rae and Karen O (of Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs) could however hardly be more different in vocal style but are both on record as being a big fan of the other. I have also just noticed that, although these albums span a wide spectrum of musical styles, there is not a male vocalist in a predominant rôle on any of them!

Two of these albums should in truth be excluded. Shakira's album was due for release in the UK and Europe in November 2005 but was postponed for three months. Genuine 'European' copies were however avilable from Singapore from mid November and mine is one of those. Nerina Pallot's album was also released in 2005, on her own label 'Idaho', but frankly nobody took much notice until it got a major label release on '14th Floor Records' in 2006. This was a re-mixed version - as the artist put it 'more spangly'; the version I have is the original one.

I'm pretty confident I'll still be listening to all these albums this time next year. This begs an interesting question - which albums that I bought in 2005 do I still regularly listen to?