Tír Na HiFi

Looking forward to hearing this tonight. The concert in the Grand Canal Theatre last year was excellent!

Whoops! Can't seem to post the image from here! It's the Waterboys and An Appointment with Mr.Yeats

JAW wrote:Looking forward to hearing this tonight. The concert in the Grand Canal Theatre last year was excellent!

Whoops! Can't seem to post the image from here! It's the Waterboys and An Appointment with Mr.Yeats

Hope you have a great time Johnny. Haven't been to the GCT yet myself, maybe sometime soon.....

From Boomkat, a little piece of vinyl magic.....last copy and on vinyl only too ;-)

Since the vinyl dept. in Tower was closed for stocktaking I had no option but to buy a 'normal' Lp ;-) This time in Celtic Note and very nice it is too with most of the material devoted to P A Green.....I was very tempted with Wilco's new album but I'm not familiar with their stuff at all believe it or not!

Got this in my local HMV this morning. They had a lovely display of all the albums just inside the door and I had to pinch myself! Anyway I was hoping that somebody here would have had a report on the remastering by now! I don't have a proper cd player so I'm not in a position to judge....All I can do is listen to the Lp I already have and somehow arrive at a conclusion of sorts....
Tower are selling the sets for €16.00 each, whereas HMV are doing them for €13.99....don't know about the rest.

got that this morning , so far so good album . Hope to see LP release in near future ........

Always beware the senior rock musician who becomes too fascinated with the intricacies of his craft. Chris Rea has already released one album devoted to a guitar, 2008 'comeback' album The Return of the Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes, along with the whopping 137-track Blues Guitars collection that appeared in 2005 following his battle with pancreatitis.

Santo Spirito Blues, then, follows a similar trusty, hoary old path. The cover art, a painting of a blue guitar that you might find in a Spanish art gallery aimed at English tourists, points to this, as do track titles that are straight out of the canon - Rock and Roll Tonight, The Last Open Road, Electric Guitar, and so on.

As a straightforward homage to blues traditionalism, Santo Spirito Blues can't really be faulted. Rea's playing is exemplary, his songwriting accomplished, the boxes ticked. Yet it's hard not to feel that there's something missing from the endeavour.

Money starts with atmospheric jazz, complete with added vinyl scratches, but becomes lost in bombast, lyrics that run "it's all about the money!" feeling a little too close to the bone. Electric Guitar is in the tradition of songs devoted to the six string, strangely male, and doing a merry dance with lyrical clich�: "Got me a box with a speaker / Gonna make that angel sing", "Every song about a railway track / Every song about not going back", and so on. With the master of modernising the blues, Tom Waits, about to return with a new album, Rea unfortunately strays too far into pastiche.

What's frustrating is that there is one standout track here that shows just what Rea is capable of when he's not overly focussed on playing, and eulogising, the guitar. Alright, so The Chance of Love is remarkably similar to Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing, but it's a pacy, heady track reminiscent of Rea at his 80s best. Crucially, the simple guitar lines and sax allow his greatest asset, that gravelly voice, to breathe. It's a shame that, elsewhere in this album, it so struggles to be heard.
BBC Review

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Sounds good on CD, would sound better on vinyl.

Derek wrote:

First impressions Derek? I hope to be picking this up tomorrow.