Rebecca Schiffman - Before The Future

New York born singer-songwriter, Rebecca Schiffman, releases her fourth album on 25th July entitled Before The Future.

Born and raised on the East Coast, Schiffman has seemingly found her musical home on the west coast and the city of Los Angeles. This album features a multitude of guest artists and collaborators ranging from Deerhoof's Chris Cohen and Tim Carr (Perfume Genius) to name a couple. These new collaborative forces also changed her style of recording from the ten day relocation to the studio as she did with her first three albums; instead this album was recorded in more piecemeal due to the input of others. 

Starting with the title track and another with Cohen, creating this euphoric and anthemic sound for said title track that runs to nine plus minutes (an usual feat to front end an album with a long track). That track is about the grief from the untimely death of a childhood friend. It is the difficulty of grief and understanding of that emotion that is the underlying theme of the album throughout, as heard on 'Rudy's Song' which is about her bereavement for her beloved dog.

Schiffman has a gorgeous lilting voice, a soft delivery that works well with the pleasant melodies being played. Reminiscent of Margaret Glaspy in terms of singing style and Lori Anderson from yesteryear; Schiffman has crafted an album of a sunny disposition but with a more serious undercurrent to proceedings.

And yet there is joy such as 'Little Mr. Civility' about her two year old son, the new life in the world can change your outlook on many things. For Schiffman she did not want to become demonstrative in terms of making the rules and being strict, and this juggling of nature and nurture is the touchstone of the song.

All in all, this is an album of being aware of your feelings, expressing them the best way and how moments can channel or alter creative output. Schiffman is seeking balance between her long in the tooth East coast attitude and new found West coast sensibility; and in some ways she may have found it.

Before The Future is out on all platforms from 25th July

My thanks to OneBeatPR for the review opportunity.

Friend or Foe? - Ken Lussey

 

New entry in the Bob Sutherland WW2 series, 

out July 14th from Arachnid Press

Ken Lussey returns with Bob Sutherland and Monique Dubois with another thrilling, fast-paced tale set amidst the height of World War Two in Scotland.

It’s late June 1943. Bob and Monique Sutherland’s journey home from Malta is interrupted, first in London to hear Soviet claims of a German spy in Scotland and then by a shoot-out between US military units in Lancashire.

 

Having returned to Edinburgh, they remain only briefly before travelling with a Military Intelligence 11 team to Galloway to track down the spy. How best to catch a ghost who may already have uncovered vital military secrets? Can they find him before it’s too late? 

When two Soviet agents arrive in Galloway to help, Bob and Monique need to work out the difference between friend and foe. Does the German spy exist, or is he a Soviet invention intended to lure MI11 into danger?

Lussey as ever writes with such an assuredness in proceedings ranging from rations and the ability to drink champagne during wartime. This is thanks to his diligent research which even touches upon precise train times in Scotland. It is these details that help elevate this work above mere folly/

The most enticing entry of the book is the beginning when the Battle of Bamber surfaces; a real life occasion when Black American GIs had a fight with British civilians. This melding of fact and fiction always raises Lussey's works to that of importance and how we should look to the past to better understand our present, and how little has been learnt in nearly 80 years of passing.

Enticing and frantic, Lussey has again written a thrilling book of action set in real-life incidents a melding of fact and fiction in great unison. Another pleasing entry in this unique and special series.

Friend or Foe? is available from Arachnid Press now 

Getting Away - Kate Sawyer

New summer read by Kate Sawyer

This was a very pleasing read. A word of caution though, you will require a family tree/understanding of genealogy to remember the names and relations of all the people. However, once you get your head around that - this book was entertaining and enlightening. 

Using family holidays as the means to show familial relationships and how they alter over the years, decades and generations coupled with the ever-changing types of family holidays - from day outs to the beach by train, to the growing market of package holidays booked on Ceefax, to the globe-trotting gap years of the grandchildren.

Indebted to the work of David Nicholls, nevertheless Sawyer has crafted a work that is original yet familiar, comforting but challenging and by the end the reader would have developed a lump in their throat. Delicately handled with poise and guile by a writer with nuance. As you get nearer to the present day, the writer is able to incorporate the ever changing landscape of communication - using tweets, emails and magazine articles as a changing style of writing from by-gone eras of postcards and diary entries.

Sawyer writes with assuredness having an ear for how characters talk to each other, and she does this well with her plethora of protagonists ranging from the overweight police officer, to the shy retiring teenager who was born premature and must keep on fighting for his place in society

This is a book that will stay with the reader after completing it, and is a real find and a must for the summer of this year.

My thanks to Compulsive Readers for letting me be part of the blog tour for this title and the preview copy in advance.

Getting Away is published by Zaffre/Bonnier Books, thanks to them