the felice brothers - 'meadow of a dream'

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I haven't blogged the Felice Brothers in a long time so let's put that right now. The folky Americana outfit who hail from high up in New York State have an album out this year, 'Favorite Waitress' that I've dipped into occasionally of late and whilst it's never going to set the world alight with a slightly more introspective look at life than their previous albums, if you're a fan of this genre then this is a must listen to album, in my opinion. I do love how they manage to remain quite a political band yet not lose themselves in some sort of preach-fest. The message never stops the good music from coming through.

hello soho

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My office has just relocated to very near Soho and I've been taking advantage of this by exploring the music shops nearby. There's a few well known ones, notably Sister Ray but also some smaller, mainly dance oriented record shops. I particularly like BM records. I looked in Sister Ray today and I was impressed with the range of tunes but to be honest the prices they were asking was a bit steep for a lot of stuff. It's all well and good them tarting up an album by marking it as 'rare' but I wouldn't say CDs are collectable in the same way as records are and the quality of some of the CD cases weren't great. I'm doing the shop a disservice here because it's the music that's important after all. I bought the following albums:

Felice Brothers - Celebration, Florida

Steve Mason and Dennis Bovell - Ghosts Outside

Holy Other - With U (this is an EP)

Interpol - Interpol

Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly

Rodney P - The Future

The last 3 albums were filling gaps in my collection. Christ knows why I never got round to buying Interpol's album last year. I should have got that at the time. I've always loved Hope Sandoval's voice and this Mazzy Star album is the only one I don't have. I'm glad I've got the set now. The Rodney P album was a completely random purchase. It was sitting there in the downbeat section, it looked quite groovy so I bought it. Time will tell if it's any good but I've got a very good success rate from random buys so I'm not going to stop even if this is a dud. 

The Holy Ghost EP is going to be a grower, I can tell. My newly-12 year old son described it as the opposite of minimal techno - kind of maximal. I know what he means as it has a lot of layers to it. I need to grow into this little number, I think.

Now onto the last two. The new Felice Brothers album - Celebration, Florida is quite simply excellent in every way. They go from strength to strength and cover so many bases with this long player. There's some old fashioned country and even a bit of yodelling, there's a sub-dancey 'I Feel Love' soundalike, there's everything. Buy it - you won't be disappointed.

I wish someone would upload the 'Dallas' track but this, the opening song ' Fire at the Pageant' is a lovely backup.

The other album is a Dennis Bovell dub remix of Steve Mason's Boys Outside album that the ex-Beta Band lead singer released last year. I think I mentioned it a few weeks back actually. It's co-produced by Richard X who also did the Foxbase Beta album a year or two back. I really wouldn't have thought that the deeply personal and haunting Boys Outside would have been a contender for a dub remix but bloody hell, this absolutely hits the spot.