Reviews

Nocturnes for Empty Halls

Brekke, Aurelio, Santoro; Ilva Brandt, Kestrel Ensemble

Here is something I have not run into before. Plenty of records pay tribute to a composer or a performer; this one pays tribute to a room. The liner notes in the physical edition run to fourteen pages of history, but the short version is that everything here was believed to have been played inside a single concert hall in Trieste between 1691 and 1804. That window means late Baroque, and late Baroque here means Brekke, who at thirty-one minutes accounts for nearly half the runtime. Kestrel Ensemble bring a fuller, warmer sound than I expected from a period group, though the real draw is mezzo-soprano Ilva Brandt. The programme notes suggest… More

Longhand

Marisa Oyelaran

The record opens on a victory lap — a montage of guest verses playing under the first track to remind you how much of the decade she quietly wrote for other people. Look closer and the problem announces itself: of the seven songs in that montage, exactly one is hers alone. Oyelaran came up as a hook writer, and she still sounds like a guest on her own album, drifting through whole verses without ever planting a flag. It is always pretty, because that voice is always pretty, but pretty is not the same as… More

Fold the Map

Denver Thistle

Third album, first one recorded away from the coast, and you can hear the room change. The reverb tails are shorter, the drums sit closer to the front, and Thistle has finally stopped burying the vocal under two guitars doing the same thing. "Sabbatical Weather" is the one that will travel — six minutes, one chord change, and it earns every second of it. The back half sags where the tempo does, and I could lose the spoken interlude entirely, but this is the first of their records I have played twice in a… More