With the passing of Richard H. Kirk last year and Stephen Mallinder keeping himself busy with his own projects, Cabaret Voltaire will be no more. This final album, basically with Kirk alone programming the music, is a fifty-minute track that has much more in common with it’s early Industrial past than it does with the techno-funk sound that made them so popular in the 1980s.
There is, apparently, a documentary film coming out on the life of Shirley Collins, the grand dame of British folk music who worked with such artists as disparate as Davey Graham and Current 93. This compilation is tied to the film, and features artists like Lee Ranaldo, Alasdair Roberts and Angel Olsen, but the standout track is The Murder Of Maria Marten, eerily performed by Ela Stiles. 45 tracks of well-done covers.
England’s Pressure Sounds continue to release mind-blowingly good reggae compilations. This one features the production work of Bunny Lee pairing up with such luminaries as Eric Donaldson (whose raw version of Cherry Oh Baby adds grit to the warmly produced original. From the Bandcamp release website: “In 1971, despite his run of hits, Bunny Lee was still having to support himself with freelance producing at Dynamic Sounds, but by 1974 he was fully independent and poised to dominate Jamaican music in the mid 70’s. The tracks on this compilation capture that moment of transition, when the smaller ghetto producers were…
The York Waits are a group out of York, England (no surprise there, right?), who specialize in Renaissance music from the 14th Century. This album is a reissue of a 1996 album where they paired with vocalist Deborah Catterall, who, 25 years after the release of this disc, served as Choral Director at Higham Hall, Cumbria and Voice Teacher at the Royal Northern College of Music before embarking on a private career. The music is not badly recorded – perhaps a bit compressed for choral music, and not as bright as it could be, but otherwise, the tunes are well-played…