If Cruel World saw Phoenix O’Neill opening up her soul in a cathartic and confessional way, a slice of from the heart, honest emotion, I Need You navigates some more expected pop waters. This track from the same debut e.p. Out of the Ashes, is the perfect balance to the more considered and understated strains of the aforementioned track, riding on a more obvious commercial pop ticket but still blending her now trademark mix of tried and tested commercial elements with cutting edge and cultish approaches.
On the surface it is an infectious and accessible number one that is going to charm the pop audience, wow the indie kids and with its confident back beats and solid grooves will be a firm favourite with the more dance audience set of clubland. But as this is Phoenix O’Neill you can guarantee that the song is cleverer than it first appears. It’s main trick is out in the open, an inspired use of dynamic. It accelerates and slows in staccato bursts moving from strident drives to brooding lulls, from spiralling crescendos to sultry lows at a turn. The result is a song which at first keeps you guessing but once you have your ear tuned you can just revel in its rich tapestry of textures and tones.
It temptingly holds back when you expect it to run wild, breaks free when you thought you had it under control. It builds big sounds without swamping the song with too much instrumentation and the depth and texture it carries is the result of creating enough space to let the songs individual components breath and flow, to have time and room to let the listener become beguiled by its heady mix of restraint and drive. It also weaves subtle piano, electronic washes, delicate musical motifs and supple musical detail around the songs main sonic trust.
It hooks, it zings, it pops and it certainly grooves, it is infectious and accessible but it is also cleverly put together, sassy, soulful and groovesome, and it adds an unexpected lyrical astuteness to this often misunderstood genre, so much so that the end result is nothing less than deep and meaningful pop. In short it is pop in an evening dress, okay maybe not an evening dress but in the classy attire of an up-scale clubber, pop with an eye on the long game, pop reaching its full potential. Pop with a PhD? On first listen you may think that it is just another throwaway pop song, but before very long you will realise that its a throwaway pop song that you will want to keep forever! Whatever will they think of next?
Land of Clouds is one of those songs that underlines the power of the digital music revolution. There was a time when synthesisers and samples, music created from non-analogue sources, sounds drawn from the ether rather than for physical dexterity of the player was viewed with suspicion, especially by guitar wielding, narrow-minded, nostalgia freaks. But that was their loss because the studio itself has become an instrument in its own right, one limited only by the imagination of the creator rather than the sonic limitations of the instrument at hand.
It maybe a cliche that the best things are worth waiting for, but in the case of Rob Ashley the 25 or so years he paid his dues gigging around the North-East of America before striking out to write his own album Premiere. Farewell. The Drugs Didn’t Last for Every is the opening salvo and lead single from that album, a considered, spacious and understated number of the sort that Leonard Cohen would have been proud to have written in the 70’s, though Ashley’s voice is one that is more universally accessible than the Canadian’s dulcet and melancholic tones.
I’ve been saying it for a while now, there is something in the air, a change, a need to comment, something borne out by the fact that I seem to be receiving more and more music which has a message about the darkness gathering in the world at the moment and the need to push back against it. Music has always been a potent force to inform and energise people, to call to arms like minded folk and to put your thoughts and observations on record for all to see. Some bands make music which counterpunches with rhetoric and rabble rousing, some makes music which examines and debates and some, like Skip, fights back in the sweetest, gentlest way possible an approach which seems to make it all the more powerful in a sort of David and Goliath fort of way.
I remember Joshua Ketchmark’s last single, 
Take a female singer/songwriter/producer from Delhi in India, give her a musical education from London and drop her into the boiling pot of influences of a city like, oh I don’t know… New York, and it would be pretty interesting to hear what she came up with, well Rivita is that woman and her new five track EP is currently being played into my ears.
I once heard a folk tale that every place on the map has its own voice and tale to tell. Not just natural features such as rivers and trees, rocks and mountains but even man made structures and the more ancient they are the more they have to tell. It is for this reason bards and storytellers would travel from place to place listening to the song of the land, learning its message and then use it to inform and entertain. India’s top guitarist Kapil Srivastava seems to be on just such a mission. The founder of India’s largest chain of Guitar Schools, 
Any track that is topped and tailed with the strains of Withnail and I wins my respect irrespective of what they do to fill the space between those soundbites. For these are clearly people of taste and didn’t a wise man once say that there are two sorts of people in this world, those who know it to be the greatest, not to mention most quotable, film of all time and those who have yet to see it. No, well they should have.
