John Shand Posts

May 4, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY/M:FANS (Domino) 7.5/10 Bleak is one of the things art does best. Usually starkness is a key tool in creating it (think Beckett), but it can also be done more gothically, as artists like Mervyn Peake have shown. In 1982 John Cale, whose body of work…

May 2, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

PROVENANCE (ABC) 8/10 Paul Grabowsky was Vince Jones’s musical director way back in the 1980s, and this sumptuously recorded reunion shows the rapport never went away. A joint willingness to take risks hovers in the air, disguised by a concentration on gentle songs. Jones’s voice has an inbuilt vulnerability in…

April 27, 2016 / Concert Reviews - Archive

Camelot Lounge, April 14 9/10 A shattering champagne bottle signals the launch of a ship, and albums are usually launched by playing the music they contain. But what if one has multi-tracked oneself playing 52 instruments and one’s brother playing a further 11? This was Joseph Tawadros’s dilemma in launching…