Santigold’s (previously Santogold but that name was already taken by a jewellery retailer, of all people) second album starts with a magnificent, euphoric rush that would be near impossible to sustain throughout an entire 40 minutes. The appropriately named ‘

‘Go!’ conjures up memories of Lene Lovich, Bow Wow Wow and Burundi Beat and has a dancing vocal melody which makes me want to pogo wildly in the kitchen (not advisable, very small space). The two melody-strong tracks that follow, ‘Disparate Youth’ and ‘God from the Machine’, establish a more downbeat mood and energy utilising ska, world music and reggae which is the overall influence on this album generally and is more of a cohesive and richer sound than that found on her debut which often went in some odd directions sonically that maybe didn’t work in quite the way that Santigold may have wanted them to.

After this strong opening it takes some time before the only other real standout track appears; a sing-a-long 80′s-reminiscent track called the ‘The Keepers’ with a big chorus and Talking Heads lyrical reference (‘We’re the keepers, whilst we sleep in America our house is burning down”) that does make me wonder why the trio of ‘Freak Like Me’, ‘Look at These Hoes’ and ‘Big Mouth’ are here. All 3 are Diplo and/or Swith produced and carry the frantic, rhythmic, sharpness of ‘Creator’ and ‘You’ll Find a Way’ from her debut but these tracks feel slight compared to the emotional heft of the remainder of this album.

Also all 3 continue a lyrical theme of bashing young female artists based either on looks or talent (‘You look good in Photoshop as long as it’s a day when it’s not sunny’ is a typical example) whom surely Santigold doesn’t consider her contemporaries? Lyrically it seems mean-spirited and at odds with the general tone and sentiment of the album. And the dour ‘Fame’ sounds so much like MIA that I thought she was the guest vocalist.

It’s been pretty well documented that this was a difficult album for Santigold to get finished explaining the four year gap between this and her debut. Big name pop producers were hired to oversee the project the results of which were subsequently scrapped; she may have a strong pop sensibility but Santigold is not just a pop artist and is certainly not a manufactured puppet. There is enough that is good here, just, to have faith that she will remain an intriguing and gifted artist who will finally deliver what she’s been promising.

Meanwhile, we have our first reader contribution from Klare Stephens who loves “Kora Jazz Trio Pt 3″, which is so closet that there aren’t any Spotify links, but we have managed to locate a few YouTube links.

Kora Jazz Trio are Abdoulaye Diabate, Djeli Moussa and Moussa Cissoko and were formed in France.  Djeli Moussa, the kora player comes from a long line of Griots, (African, in this case Guinean, troubadours) but with no liner notes or other information, biogs are hard to give other than that the pianist and percussionist originally hail from Senegal.  To the uninitiated, the kora is the African cousin to both the guitar and harp and its rich instrumentation and has been played for centuries.  It seems fitting that the Afro-American style of music, Jazz should here be played with such a traditional instrument, it seems bizarre that it has not been recorded like this before to my knowledge.

Of course African Jazz has been around and recorded for decades but usually with western instrumentation.  Moussa is a true original adapting his kora to 32 strings instead of the usual 21, giving it an even greater harp like range and magical sound; and on this album he also plays guitar on some tracks.  My initial concerns that the kora would compete for lyrical space with the piano were easily overcome, whether the kora is the natural complement to the piano or the product of its player’s harmony in this trio, I suspect the answer is both.  The hand drums ground the music perfectly as well as completing the traditional African sound.  Each player is given room to solo as is usual with a Jazz trio and the kora also makes a great instrument to accompany the others.  Production values are clean and crisp but I can’t help fancying them live rather than live in a Parisien studio as this album is.

My stand out tracks are the instrumentals ‘Xam-Xam’ , ‘La Musse’ and ‘Chan Chan’ , unfettered by vocals the music can really fly and the vocal tracks alternate with instrumentals on the disc.  The vocals as well as distracting one from the beautiful musical sound are uninspiring whether it is because I’m unaware of their content, I think it’s more because I’m unaroused by the emotional frequency and vocal sound; however this is a great collection overall.   On their first CDs, Kora Jazz Trio Pt 1 (2003) and Part2 (2005), they stayed closer to American Jazz with compositions from the likes of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, where the kora takes the brass part, but on their third album they are confident enough to stride out with mainly home grown tunes although, ‘Chan-chan’ written by Francisco Repilado comes from the fine stream of Latin Jazz.

All the songs on this album are uplifting and upbeat and left me with the conundrum of whether I should file them under the genres of Jazz, African or Dance music, in the end I settled for World Fusion but these really are the roots of Jazz with the instruments it would have been originally played on.  Perfect for early morning coffee and equally good with late night wine, Kora Jazz Trio are a band to track down and I suspect to see them live, judging from the limited YouTube footage, would be a musical treat.

“Moonlight” opens with clinically clean guitar arpeggios followed by equally shiny single overlaid guitar notes, then a breathy, ethereal vocal.  From here onwards, the verse builds steadily towards  a chorus underpinned by the dirtiest, most distorted guitar sound this side of Swedish death metal; and then back to the clean sound again for the next verse.  It would be easy to fall into goth-by-numbers territory with this formula; the difference here is that it’s a great song and a very powerful vocal performance from Anna-Christina.  The song goes through another couple of cycles (echoing the cycles of the moon?) before winding down with a smattering of picked guitar notes reverberating into the distance.

As a single, “Moonlight” works; it’s dynamic and melodic and when it’s over you want to hear it again.  As a taster for the album, again, it works perfectly.  After hearing this, I can’t wait to hear the album and the live shows are looking like a pretty good bet as well.  And if you don’t want to take my word for it, you can watch and listen for yourself here “Moonlight” and find out more about the band here Lilygun.  Enjoy.

This album is being marketed as an EP but it’s almost 40 minutes long with 10 tracks (including an intro and outro) and is longer than many traditional albums, not that length is any indication of quality (ahem). Richard has also stated that it’s the precursor for her first album proper “Golden Heart”, out later this year, which will be the first of three conceptually linked albums. This may sound a little cumbersome and ambitious for a first time solo artist but judging by the talent shown here, maybe not.

“Black Lipstick” is apparently a metaphor for the music industry, ‘she smelled of temptation and made me impatient’ and is a moody, softly drum and bass skittering groove which quickly establishes the tone for the rest of the album. Strangled tribal yelps at the end of the track bleed into the first single’s introduction, the appropriately militaristic “Bombs” which is one of the more straight forward and commercial dance tracks here but the steeliness of Richard’s vocal and the subtle but dramatic string motifs insure that it’s anything but generic.

The looped sirens of “Automatic” with a scolding Stepford wife-charged Dawn pushing her inconsiderate lover aside morphs into the fractured piano notes of the sonically diverse and exhilarating trilogy  of “Change”, “Heaven” and “Faith”. Samba, Italian house, world music, soul and disco are influences that shade and propel these tracks using some of the most creative, cutting edge production that I’ve heard in a while in respect to the RnB genre. The two slower, closing tracks are probably the most fully realised and powerful songs here and are both magical. The cinematic, coolly restrained “Scripture” and the stark, hip hop-influenced “Save Me from U” (reminiscent of Kanye West at his most melancholic) are an exercise in quality control and subtle detail.

Although Richard may not possess a full throttle soul voice such as Mary J Blige (she actually sounds very like Brandy), her vulnerability and impressive falsetto work beautifully with the material; exactly as it should be. So, welcome Dawn Richard, a modern R‘n’B superstar in the making.

Highly recommended.

We’ll be launching an occasional series of galleries of pictures from events covered by Music Riot plus some very, very interesting archive shots from the late 70s and early 80s which are about to see the light of day for the first time. Look out for the first gallery in the very near future.

As always, if you have any live photos of bands that you want to share, we’d love to hear from you.

The album is sequenced by genre with the first being what’s best described as hardcore, mix-tape Nicki and probably the most representative of the Roman character. This abruptly switches to what can only be described as euro-cheese rave, predominantly produced by Lady Gaga’s original main-man, RedOne, and closes with a run of Katy Perry, Rhianna (at her blandest I must stress) and Jessie J type American-produced power pop tracks which are to be heard all over mainstream radio and media at the moment. This could be a fascinating collection and really show what Minaj can come up with working with such diverse sonic components in the hands of hugely prolific song writers and producers. Instead this degree of genre shifting feels so cynical and insincere and with the exception of a handful of tracks (including the completely ludicrous and amazing ‘Starships’) there are very few decent songs here.

In the first and most successful third of the album rap Nicki explores nothing new lyrically but in the aggressively buzzing ‘Come On a Cone’ she really does do something quite exciting. Towards the end of the track she starts singing (not rapping it as she does earlier in the track) ‘Ooh, my dick in your face’ over and over in a sweet, soulful coo, it’s as if she’s both taking the piss out of the Nicki persona and also the ridiculousness of the current state of chart music. It’s a funny and sharp track and unlike the majority of the album sets Nicki apart from her contemporaries as an artist with something to say, however ridiculous. The following track ‘I Am Your Leader’ is another great diss track with a lyrical pay off referring again to a particular male body part.

So we go from this to the ‘let’s take pills and dance’ Aqua/The Vengaboys/Whigfield (no really) section which is RedOne extending ‘Starships’ over 4 tracks with little deviation and even less imagination. There is some astoundingly ugly, uninspired music here, some of the most disposable I’ve heard in years. I hope she isn’t a sign of something bigger that’s yet to come in mainstream pop. Missy Elliott was one of the first hip hop and rap artists to explore house and dance music and incorporate it into her work in 2001 but you always knew that along with producer and musical soul mate Timbaland, Elliott knew her references and was paying homage to a genre whilst also wanting to push r n b and hip hop as far as she could sonically with often awe-inspiring results. With Minaj you get the feeling that she wanted to hire the producer who made Lady Gaga a superstar to get her ‘Barbs’ to become as obsessed about her as the ‘Monsters’ are about Gaga and to continue expanding the brand (which is how she refers to herself on the album) as much as possible regardless of any compromise that’s been made to the actual music itself and how Minaj portrayed herself 18 months ago.

I hope that Nicki Minaj can figure out who she is and just doesn’t get replaced by the next Minaj (Rita Ora?). She can make a massive impression and initially was an exciting new presence in a market where successful female rappers had all but disappeared; Missy Elliott for example hasn’t had a new album out in 7 years.

Many loved Minaj’s early mixtapes and guest raps (Trey Songz ‘Bottoms Up’ and Kayne West’s ‘Monster’ are just 2 examples where she out shines the actual artist) but pop stars are appearing bigger, bolder and faster than ever before (Lana Del Rey, Gaga, Adele ; already all of them considered to be ‘icons’ after a maximum of 2 albums) and I hope that Nicki is as focused on her musical output and where this may lead 4 albums down the line as she is on the marketing of her first perfume, out later this year.

So she’s definitely made it then, at least for now.

During the summer of the following year I was visiting the first love of my life in that wicked London place and I had a bit of time to kill on the way home.  The first Virgin megastore had just opened at Marble Arch and that had to be worth a look; there were so many records I didn’t know where to start.

The only album I picked up that day was a cut-out import copy (on blue vinyl) of “Stealing Home” by Ian Matthews.  I recognised the single “Gimme an Inch Girl” and thought it was worth a couple of quid for that even if everything else was unlistenable, which was pretty unlikely.  I never thought for a second that it would be an album I would love instantly and forever; the first time I listened to “Stealing Home” from beginning to end was a musical epiphany.

The album was recorded in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire but was aimed squarely at the American market; you can hear it in the lyrics and the arrangements and you can see it in the sleeve design.  There wasn’t a chance that it would sell significant amounts in the UK in the aftermath of punk, but that was never the objective.  An album with great session players, tasteful (bordering on minimal) FM radio-friendly arrangements and lyrics dealing with American themes was never a commercial proposition in post-punk UK; throw in a singer with a plaintive high tenor voice and, in 1978, USA becomes the target market.

Ian Matthews didn’t really have a reputation as a great songwriter at the time, but he was already known as an interesting interpreter of other people’s songs.  He had already scored a UK No.1 in 1970 with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” and had a stab at Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” which, unbelievably, made no impact on the charts.  Nothing I’d heard before prepared me for the beauty of “Stealing Home”.

The album opens with the 1 track I’d already heard, “Gimme an Inch Girl”, which sounded better on my hi-fi than on the radio (no FM in 1979), so I knew I was on to a winner straight away.  There isn’t a track on the album that I don’t love, even now.  I have to be honest and admit that I’m fairly partial to a melancholy song and this album is full of them.

I admit that I didn’t realise in 1979 that the theme running through the album was the failure of the American dream (and it should have been obvious because I loved “American Graffiti” and “The Last Picture Show”).  Ian Matthews picked out songs about the party set, car fanatics and sports groupies to form the backbone of this album.  It’s a melancholy album because it looks back at the unfulfilled promise of American lives in the same way that Bob Seger did with songs like “Hollywood Nights” and “Night Moves” and Jackson Browne did with “The Pretender”.

“Don’t Hang Up your Dancing Shoes” is a Terry Boylan song about an attempt to persuade the Homecoming Queen to take one last chance a former beau and sets the tone for the rest of the album, musically and lyrically.  “King of the Night” is a poignant ballad written by Jeffrey Comanor (a cult figure at the time who also collaborated with Shel Silverstein on the Dr Hook song “Makin’ it Natural”), which focuses on the plight of the forgotten former street racer and is followed by Matthews’ funky version of the great John Martyn song “Man in the Station”.  Side 1 of the album (I bought it on vinyl, so I’m sticking with that format) ends with a fairly rare (at that time) Matthews composition, “Let There be Blues” which keeps the melancholy mood nicely on track.

And then I turned over to Side 2 for the real revelations.  The first track, “Carefully Taught”, is a perfect example of Matthews’ ability to completely remake an existing song.  The original is a workmanlike Rogers & Hammerstein song from “South Pacific” with very good intentions, played as a fast show song, which Matthews strips back to a half-tempo a cappella version while editing the lyrics to fit everything in to an extraordinary 60 second masterpiece; if you don’t appreciate this, you have no soul.  Listen to the original “Carefully Taught” and decide for yourself.

This is followed by a strong Matthews original, the title song, “Stealing Home”, another melancholy song which deals with a disintegrating relationship.  The most commercially successful song on the album, “Shake It”, is next, moving the tempo up a few notches while keeping up the theme of nostalgia for a happier era.  It’s one of Terry Boylan’s finest moments and was a deserved American chart success.

Next up is another of the album’s revelations and a great example of Matthews’ ability to fit songs to his own mould. “Yank and Mary(Smile)” is a medley which combines the verses from a Richard Stekol song about two ingénues moving to California with the chorus from the Charlie Chaplin song “Smile”.  It’s a perfect mix because the two songs blend seamlessly into a beautiful whole.

The two songs which round off the album, “Slip Away” and “Sail my Soul” , are both co-written with Bill Lamb.  The first is a mid-tempo song aimed at the same market as “Shake It” and the second is a soulful ballad with some lovely slide guitar which finishes off the album with a positive message that relationships can work sometimes.

If you love great songs, great singers and great arrangements, you should listen to this album.  It may be really unfashionable in the current musical climate but this is a beautiful album and it’s one of my closet classics.   If you want to find out more about Iain Matthews (as he’s known again now) have a look on his website.

We always welcome feedback at Riot Towers so let us know if you listened to the album and liked (or hated) it.  Even better, send us your feelings about your own closet classic and there’s a good chance that we’ll use it on the site.

Also, let us know what you think of using Spotify links to featured songs and albums.  How quickly did the links work?  If you downloaded Spotify from the link provided, how quickly did it download?  Do you like the idea of having instant access to the songs being reviewed? Your feedback will help us to give you a better and more responsive site.

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It’s all about those albums in our collections that we love but everyone else hates or no-one else has ever heard of.  The albums that we loved the first time we heard them, the albums that we play when we’re trying to impress with our musical eclecticism or just to show that we know more about music than everyone else.  Those albums usually have a story to accompany them and we’re going to reveal the innermost depths of our music collections to you; but it’s not just a one-way street.

As an added bonus, we’re also going interactive with this one.  First of all, we’re giving you links to the featured albums so that one click takes you to the featured songs.  We’re doing this through Spotify, which you can download free here:

https://www.spotify.com/uk/.

The second bit of interactivity is that we want you to tell us about your own closet classics.  Send us your thoughts about your guilty pleasure on CD or vinyl and we’ll publish as many of them as we can on MusicRiot with links to live streaming from Spotify.  We want to hear about the music, but it would be great to know about any personal associations that the album has for you as well.

Watch out for more details on how to tell the world about your closet classics.