It’s been a quiet period for Belle & Sebastian since their last tour, including a Hollywood Bowl triumph, in summer 2006. Stuart Murdoch has got married, turned 40 (!) and continues towards completion of the soundtrack to his musical ‘God Help The Girl’. Good time for some appropriate filler, then, and while this BBC Sessions collection is by no means complete - absent is the celebrated 2002 sixteen track live Christmas session including a version of ‘The Boy With The Arab Strap’ curtailed when Murdoch accidentally sets off his keyboard’s drum machine and culminating in a toy and animal voice aided gang cover of ‘The Twelve Days Of Christmas’ - there’s more than plenty of interest. Continue Reading

 ’Part 1, first chapter!’ yelps singer Aaron by way of introduction to ‘Nothing’s Gonna Spoil My Day Today’, the album from his band Olympus Mons. On opener ‘Martial Law’ indie-styled guitars mix up with a punky chorus before leading into, well, more indie. The band is clearly not striving for musical originality, as already admitted in their own press, but they do have enough in them to make their music sound individual. Whether they’ve arrived too late to hitch a ride on the twangy guitar gravy train remains to be seen, but they’re making a reasonable stab at it with ‘Nothing’s Gonna Spoil My Day Today’. Continue Reading

The almond-eyed tortured seductress Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, is back. Her early decidedly indie, arguably flaky, and musically lo-fi years had passed me by, but the opening bars of previous sultry outing’s The Greatest had me snagged hook, line and sinker. It survived to remain among my albums of that year despite emerging early in January. So, two years on, I approached this new release with a massive sense of expectation. She has vanquished some demons and found some stability in both her personal and professional life. What next? Well, somewhat disappointingly to those initial expectations, it’s a covers album, the second in her career, and this time a tribute to those vocalists who have provided inspiration down the years. My second gripe was that most tracks on the review copy had been specially butchered with jarring premature fades. With so much of the enjoyment here being of tone and atmosphere, it did set this reviewer’s teeth on edge more than once.

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Some albums roar out of the speakers and tear at your guts. This timidly creeps out like a fluffy little kitten. But you just want to scoop it up and cuddle it all the same, making encouraging goo-goo noises and patting its pretty little head. Or maybe that’s just me then. Ames Room is a restrained album largely formed of understated vocals cooed over a threadbare but melodic and perfectly formed sound collage - delicate and wispy as spun sugar. It somehow seems appropriate at this time of Christmas wonderment, evoking thoughts of twinkling fireside reflections and giving in to the nagging lure of winter slumber.

Silje Nes is a Norwegian multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter who grew up in the small community of Leikanger on the banks of the stunningly scenic Sognefjord, before moving to the comparative metropolis that is Bergen. The natural beauty of her surroundings infuses her work. Songs are breezy when upbeat, rumbling like distant thunder when brooding, and beats land like drops of snowmelt. She began by recording onto her laptop no more than a couple of years ago, with no previous experience of any instrument other than piano - thus often stumbling across unconventional sounds. Apart from the opening track, this debut release is entirely self-recorded and produced. The wealth of sampled musical noises include mechanical typewriters and blown bottles. She does perform live, though quite how she can capture the atmosphere here is only to be guessed at.

Imagine Bjork with a chill pill. Words are often hardly discernable: her voice used as texture not a mere means of delivery, but it just sounds lovely. Only “Giant Disguise” has a menacing shadowy fist of a repeated riff - but wrapped in a velvet glove. “Bright Night Morning” is wilfully hazy and charmingly stumbling with a hypnotic chorus, while “Dizzy Street” and the title track are pure ethereal pop distilled almost to nothingness. There are a trio of wordless soundscapes - not usually something to hold my attention, but here they fit into the bigger picture without being disruptive. At times they have something of Sigur Ros about them, with drunken brass and slow paced acoustic guitar.

Ames Room has been sneaking its way onto my playlist a whole lot recently. This is definitely a case of less is more, and bizarrely an album which makes a virtue out of making you feel drowsy. I’m left all Norwegian blue and pining for the fjords, and wondering just what will come from Silje Nes in the future.
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Links
Silje Nes [official site] [myspace]