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Friday 6th April 2012
All Day BBQ Festival

Sparrow and the Workshop
6 Day Riot
The Nuns
Singing Adams
Y Niwl
Colours
Dignan Porch
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The Windmill
Brixton
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On Our iPod

Golden Grrrls - New Pop 7”

Chris Devotion & The Expectations - Amalgamation & Capital (album)

Trailer Trash Tracys - Ester (album)

Throwing Up - Mother Knows Best 7”

Howling Wolf - Complete Chess Masters 1951-60

The Ketamines - A Rotten Bond/1 Yr (from Oddbox Singles Club Pt 2)

Cardinal - Hymns (album)

Proper Ornaments - Taking the Gamble Out of Buying 12”

Darren Hayman - January Songs (album)

Various: Marshall Teller EP 12”

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Album Review

Suzanne Vega
Close Up Vol.1, Love Songs Cooking Vinyl

Article written by James G - Jul 4, 2010

Susanne Vega: Close Up Vol.1, Love Songs

‘Close Up Vol.1, Love Songs’, is a collection of parts of Ms Vega’s back catalogue, but recorded utilising just her vocal, acoustic guitar, sometimes bass and another guitar. This enables that cut-glass voice and the precise steel-strung chords and harmonies to shine through – clear as crystal. This is the first of four ‘stripped down’ albums planned for release, each one with a theme – this being, as the name suggests, her songs about love, relationships and the like. Suzanne Vega’s parents divorced shortly after her birth in 1959. And so began a long relationship with the absolute heartbreak caused by the ending of a relationship. ‘Love Songs’ contains 12 tracks, including ‘Small Blue Thing’ ‘Marlene On The Wall’ and ‘Harbor Song’.

There are 12 great songs here. The voice is stunning. The interpretations are superb. And yet… yet… I don’t know. Although she’s obviously one of the good guys… it all seems a bit, I dunno, New York cool and clinical to feel like there’s any REAL emotion being analysed here. May I draw a comparison with David Gedge? Thanks. On ‘Brassneck’, when David, dealing with NOT dealing with rejection, utters the line … ‘I kept so many old things… I never quite stopped hoping’ you KNOW that pain, that futile, masochistic refusal to face the awful truth, whereas when Suzanne sings ‘I am asking if you might still want me’ on ‘Bound’, yes, it’s pretty enough, but raw? Hardly. And again, on ‘My Favourite Dress’, when DG mentions ‘a stranger’s hand on my favourite dress’… That almost unthinkable, nightmare scenario of someone else being closer to the one you love than you ever will be again – it’s there, for all of us to suffer. Yet when Suzanne refers to ‘that something that happened between you and me, so much more than a long time ago’ on ‘Songs In Red And Gray’, again, it’s almost plaintive, yet just too studied and clean for me – especially when set against a master of the depiction of lost love like DG. Maybe I’m being hard on her, and I reckon the next 3 albums – ‘People, Places & Things’ ’States of Being’ and ‘Songs of Family’ will probably work well. I feel her ‘storytelling’ type material tends to be better than her attempts to deal with, well, personal misery… We shall see.

And, that, my friends, is my last review for SoundsXP. Six – maybe seven – years, of opining that ‘it was better in my day’ end here, as I am off to another place. I’ve enjoyed it, and hope you have too.

Links:
http://www.suzannevega.com/