Gwyneth Herbert - All The Ghosts

Styles: Vocal
Year: 2009
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 42:02
Size: 96,7 MB
Art: Front

( 3:36)  1. So Worn Out
( 3:54)  2. Annie's Yellow Bag
( 3:40)  3. Lorelei.
( 3:37)  4. My Narrow Man
( 3:04)  5. Jane Into A Beauty Queen
( 4:42)  6. Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is..
( 3:00)  7. Nataliya
( 4:34)  8. My Mini And Me
(11:51)  9. Some Days I Forget..

On her fourth album, Gwyneth Herbert builds on the strengths that made her last release, Between Me And The Wardrobe, a success. Focussing on her folk-jazz vocal style and on her own compositions rather than cover versions, All The Ghosts should see her career continue on its recent upwartrajectory.Herbert's songs are rightly starting to draw comparisons with those of 60s Ray Davies and Paul McCartney. She has a fine sense of melody and her latest songs tell stories that equal ''Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night'' or ''Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins''. The songs create a cast of inner-city archetypes, each with an intriguing tale to tell. Many of the protagonists are society's losers or victims. Unlike Davies or McCartney, Herbert unfailingly sees the world from a woman's point of view. It is no coincidence that four of the track titles contain women's names. Her voice and phrasing are often reminiscent of Joni Mitchell, noticeably on Nataliya. The elasticity of her voice perfectly conveys the songs' emotions and softens their occasional bleakness. Men are either objects of desire, as on My Narrow Man, or contempt, as on Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is. The accompaniment from pianist Steve Holness, bassist Sam Burgess, percussionist Dave Price and guitarist Al Cherry is subtly understated, complementing the voice well. Rarely in the limelight, the music impresses when it is featured. Cherry's acoustic guitar is the highlight of My Mini and Me, notably the slide guitar coda. 

Previously available online in 2008 as a download-only album entitled Ten Lives, this expanded and retitled version is a coherent and compelling song suite. One of the added tracks comes as a surprise after the nine Herbert originals. Almost as an afterthought, the album closes with a raw version of Bowie's Rock 'n' Roll Suicide.It seems an odd finale given Herbert's age. She was born years after Ziggy Stardust gave his last performance. Nonetheless, as on the original Bowie release, it brings this impressive album to a suitably emotional and rousing conclusion. http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviewsGwyneth Herbert – vocals, piano (on "My Narrow Man")

Personnel:  Gwyneth Herbert – vocals, piano (on "My Narrow Man");  Al Cherry – guitars;  Dave Price – percussion;  Sam Burgess – bass;   Steve Holness – piano and organ;  Jonathan Bierman – "droid" electronics on "So Worn Out"

All The Ghosts

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Gwyneth Herbert - The Sea Cabinet

Size: 119,3 MB
Time: 50:30
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Released: 2013
Styles: Jazz/Folk Vocals
Art: Front

01. Sea Theme (2:13)
02. The Regal (3:20)
03. Sweeter (3:49)
04. Alderney (4:30)
05. I Still Hear The Bells (4:04)
06. Fishguard Ladies (3:00)
07. Plenty Time For Praying (2:02)
08. Drink (1:55)
09. The King's Shilling (6:45)
10. Promises (5:11)
11. Lorelei (6:40)
12. Drip (4:04)
13. Sea Theme (Reprise) (2:51)

Gwyneth Herbert may be only 31, but the singer and songwriter had already lived several lives when she decamped from her Dalston flat for a week in a Suffolk cottage as part of an artistic residency with Aldeburgh Music. Evenings were dedicated to midnight seaside walks, including a trip to the drowned village of Dunwich, and befriending fishermen in the local tavern. Days, meanwhile, were spent at the piano, down the road in Snape Maltings. She was nursing a broken heart, and the finishing touch it was blowing such a gale that she was forced to play in fingerless gloves.

Gwyneth emerged from her week in Aldeburgh with a spectacular concept album: The Sea Cabinet. The songs weave themselves around the imagined story of a woman who walks the beach every day alone, she explains, picking up all the discarded and washed up objects and taking them home, logging them with archeological rigour. She keeps them in a shack: her ""sea cabinet."" These items are kind of semaphore signals and each one resonates with the memory of a secret sea-set story.

A full decade after her debut album First Songs, The Sea Cabinet finds Gwyneth at her most mature as a writer. The songs, inspired by the Suffolk coast, are timeless and immersive. And the album, knitted together by field recordings, is as unbroken as a shoreline. The Sea Cabinet calls to mind English folk artists from Jacqui McShee to Tunng. There are also touches of Joni Mitchell in Mingus mode, Edith Piaf and the leftfield pop of Psapp, not to mention Ray Davies and Mara Carlyle. Gwyneth herself says would put the record on the shelf marked bluesyfolkypoppyjazzystorysongs but, as on the album itself, she s only half-serious.

Album centrepiece Fishguard Ladies takes its inspiration from the late 18th century, when, legend has it, a handful of local Welsh women headed off an invading French fleet by flashing their red petticoats. They were apparently mistaken for British Grenadiers.Alderney, by contrast, tells the chilling story of the Channel Island following its occupancy by Nazis during World War Two. Elsewhere we have the tender chamber folk of The Regal and, in Drink, a rum-soaked sea shanty. Alongside pop artist Fiona Bevan who collaborates on I Still Hear the Bells and The King s Shilling, the album also features Gwyneth herself on piano and ukulele, multi-instrumentalist folk duo The Rubber Wellies and her regular band: Al Cherry (guitars), Sam Burgess (bass) and David Price (percussion, strings and co-production).

Gwyneth is relishing the fact that, in 2013, a musician s artistic remit can and should extend well beyond the music itself. Crowd-funded and self-released, with shows at Wilton s and Snape Maltings that feature prose, multiple voices and live cymatic projections, The Sea Cabinet is the most ambitious project she has ever attempted. And she is, she says, more creatively fulfilled than ever.

Album number six from Gwyn Herbert is so chock full of delights that you're reaching for the repeat button even as the reprise of the delicately floating 'Sea Theme' draws to a close...Not so much ploughing her own furrow as plotting her own course, The Sea Cabinet is one of the most beguiling collections of songs you'll hear this year - **** --Peter Quinn, Jazzwise, June 2013

The Sea Cabinet

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Gwyneth Herbert - Bittersweet and Blue

Styles: Vocal Jazz
Year: 2004
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 49:44
Size: 114,3 MB
Art: Front

(4:05)  1. Fever
(3:36)  2. (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night
(4:14)  3. The Very Thought Of You
(3:11)  4. It's Alright With Me
(4:17)  5. Bittersweet And Blue
(4:18)  6. Glory Box
(2:41)  7. Every Time We Say Goodbye
(2:57)  8. Almost Like Being In Love
(4:48)  9. At Seventeen
(4:44) 10. Into Temptation
(3:22) 11. A Little Less
(4:08) 12. Fallen
(3:16) 13. Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Gwyneth Herbert sounded like a star from the first time she opened her mouth in the Soho Pizza Express Jazz Club last year; this is the first product of her signing to Universal. Herbert mixes Broadway songs with a few originals and torchy classics such as Fever, Portishead's Glory Box and Tom Waits's Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night. Backed by a fine band including saxist Nigel Hitchcock and guitarist John Parricelli, she has a precociously powerful chemistry of taste and meticulous care for every sound from a whisper to an exhortation. 

Fever sounds as if it was right inside your head; her Tom Waits interpretation is subtle and warm; The Very Thought of You floats like smoke; the original title track, Janis Ian's Seventeen and Herbert's own Fallen all purr with the singer's remarkably tender composure. Although Herbert is an immensely moving interpreter of good lyrics on conventional songs rather than an improvising jazz singer, not many listeners are going to mind the difference. ~ John Fordham  http://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/sep/24/jazz.shopping1

Bittersweet and Blue

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Gwyneth Herbert - Clangers and Mash

Styles: Vocal
Year: 2010
File: MP3@320K/s
Time: 32:51
Size: 75,2 MB
Art: Front

(3:07)  1. Perfect Fit (Radio Edit)
(4:38)  2. My Mini & Me (Polar Bear Remix)
(2:53)  3. So Worn Out (In the Bedroom)
(3:49)  4. Narrow Man (Girl After Shower Remix)
(3:18)  5. Perfect Fit (Mr Solo & The Voluntary Butler Scheme Remix)
(3:29)  6. Petite Cacahuete
(4:43)  7. So Worn Out (Temper D Remix)
(3:15)  8. Perfect Fit (Original Version)
(3:36)  9. Midnight Oil (A Cappella Version)

Last year's All the Ghosts album was a coming-of-age for Gwyneth Herbert, the autobiographical Hackney singer-songwriter who had sidestepped being marketed as a saleable jazz chanteu se to explore her own poetry, folk-song, variations on Hackney pirate-radio beats, and dark Tom Waitsian whimsy, among many things. This mini-album (occasioned by Herbert's forthcoming single, Perfect Fit) invites producer and engineer Robert Harder, pre-Ziggy Bowie fan Mr Solo, west country electronicists Girl After Shower, and Polar Bear's Seb Rochford to remix several All the Ghosts songs – which make it a fascinating set of variations on the familiar for Herbert regulars, or an appealing introduction for jazz-averse newcomers. Rochford's transformation of Herbert's bluesy roadsong My Mini and Me draws the singer's voice into a whirlpool of electronic hummings and thundering tom-tom patterns, Girl After Shower strips down the lyrical My Narrow Man to its title phrase amid squeezed electronic sounds and backwards-tape noises, Mr Solo's version of Perfect Fit turns it into a Bowie song. For all these radical transformations, though, Herbert's unfussy soulfulness and personal vision always glow through. ~ John Fordham  http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/16/gwyneth-herbert-clangers-mash-review

Clangers and Mash

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