Ed Ache presents The Vogon Poetry Sessions – Work For Tesco Or Die (punk/ acoustic)

Brace yourself. Ed Ache plays punk songs of such finely honed, cutting sarcasm that he’ll make your brain bleed; often very funny, always witty, usually politically targeted, his songs have catchy melodies that drive home their meanings and convince you of their truth as they get you singing along. They are performed in kinetic, driving style, often at the speed of old school hardcore, and they basically make you want to leap around and get sweaty and smash into things. All of which is enough to make this record well worth listening to as it is…

Ed Muirhead – Cage For The Clouds (roots rock)

The songs collected on this album are personal, individuated reflections: often concerned with love, their perspectives are firmly located behind the eyes of well imagined characters, and even when there is celebration in them (as in ‘Paradise’), there is insecurity and doubt as well. There is a tendency in popular song to express the everyday in melodramatic terms, and while Ed Muirhead does trade in big musical gestures, he bucks that trend by investing his songs with a strong sense of the particular.

Fit And The Conniptions – Sweet Sister Starlight (blues rock/ folk rock/ singer-songwriter)

Although I have written elsewhere about the singularity of the song as an artistic form, and the fallacy of regarding it as merely a fusion of music and poetry, it can be observed that most singer-songwriters focus their efforts more on one aspect of their craft than another. Some are principally instrumentalists, some singers, some emphasise composition, and some are primarily poets.

VK Lynne – Whiskey Or Water (blues rock/ singer-songwriter)

VK Lynne plays to the mythical archetype of the strong but vulnerable, hard drinking rock chick: how much of that is VK Lynne the narrator of this sequence of songs, and how much of it is VK Lynne the writer and woman is above my pay grade to speculate, but there’s a powerful sense of sincerity in this music.

Eleanor Williams – Orange Peel And Paper (acoustic/ singer-songwriter)

Naplew Productions, 2010, DD album, 29m 8s, £name your price (all proceeds donated to the charity Women’s Aid) http://m-s-b.bandcamp.com/album/orange-peel-and-paper I’ve … More

She Makes War – Disarm (gloom-pop/ singer-songwriter)

War isn’t the first thing that springs to mind: there’s a lot of female performers out there with a far more aggressive image, but there’s certainly a strength and a sense of resistance in the persona that Laura Kidd articulates through her music as She Makes War. This is dark music, in its way: not gothic, horror tinged dark, nor emotionally indulgent, angsty dark. It’s the darkness in the dusty corners of imperfect relationship…