Winning our album of the year in 2011 with the devastatingly awesome “Dancing on Needles”, Charlotte Martin returns with “Hidden Places”, an EP/Live Concert hybrid that’s sure to excite fans.
The live concert is superb and although it only clocks in at just over an hour, showcases a lot of songs from last years album and a few others in piano/vocal fashion. Each song translates effortlessly across and sounds fresh and new. In particular Animal, Dancing on Needles, Truth Cerium and The Dance show such raw emotion, power and range you are frequently blown away. What is apparent however is that the concert is filmed from two static cameras and while there’s good production values to try to keep things from looking very static, the camera work doesn’t quite do the concert justice. Interspersing the songs are little clips of Martin chatting away about her music, her ordeals and her inspirations which is great to see.
The CD accompanying the concert has eight tracks. Three of which are acoustic versions of previously released tracks. “The Dance” and “Stromata” are massively powerful and sound brand new. “Animal” actually feels more fragile when stripped back and feels newer and sadder than before – something I didn’t feel would be possible! Of the new tracks “Mission Control” feels like a natural progression from her more recent work, once again veering towards the more electronic edges of her world with catchy choruses and sweeping electronic workings. “Tough” is delicately beautiful and feels like a lost song from aeons back as does “The Last Song” are they both feature some beautiful piano work and have that whimsical reflective sway to them. “In a World” features some big tom drums to up the ante which pound out hard towards the end of the song which feels like Charlotte Martin’s ode to Lion King in some ways. “Warrior” closes the EP in typically disarming fashion with some light pads and strings supporting a fragile song in which the vocals absolutely win you over from start to finish.
As always with Charlotte Martin, you know you are getting something special. While the bonus tracks are great to have and should find their home in any fans collection, the concert shows a truly magical live performer in her element, that even a budget recording cannot blemish it.
Charlotte Martin returns next month with a CD/DVD album entitled “Hidden Places”. You can hear the track Mission Control here. My winner of best album in 2011 may well have it 2 years running…
It’s that time of year again – a wrap up of the top 10 albums I have had the pleasure of buying. This list is for musical artist album releases only. A separate one will be done for game soundtracks. Here goes:
10) Zola Jesus – Vessel
A fantastic culmination and one of my most recent new discoveries, it just edges into the top 10 by providing me with one of the few dark and damp albums of 2011. Her voice harks back to generations of old and the electronics and dramatic song structures make it a treat to visit the darkness every time.
09) Faun – Eden
Band members have left and been replaced and while you can tell that Faun’s sound has changed forever. It still sits firmly in the Pagan Folk genre they’ve helped create but the vocals are more hymn like, English is introduced and the overall sound is one more of a forest pixie raging war on humanity. Either way, it’s still utterly superb.
08) St Vincent – Strange Mercy
St Vincent makes the most clumsy, sloppy and seemingly out of control music seem to still have order, beauty and integrity. Her third studio album is full of all the quirks, embellishments and random freak outs we’ve come to expect but in a more assured manner and with more layers than ever before!
07) Gregory Douglass – Lucid
Having watched Gregory over various live net shows introduce, change, develop and grow Lucid from a concept into a fully evolved being, it’s a fantastic dream concept album that works from start to finish. Showcasing some great technical wizardry, it features some of the most catchy numbers and some of the most heartbreaking from his career to date.
06) Amiina – Puzzle
From what I thought was a lovely, quaint but slightly one-sided debut, Puzzle lifts Amiina into a new level. The quartet have perfected their craft of weaving the most unlikely of instruments together into lullabies but now also into powerful epic seven minute masterpieces.
05) Bjork – Biophilia
Never one to sit still, Biophilia is a career spanning genre bending full flow freak out. Never compromising, always challenging – it contains highlights of Bjork’s most beautiful, most powerful and most scary moments of her musical career.
04) Tori Amos – Night of Hunters
Tori Amos remains my favourite musical artist of all time. The reason this hasn’t reached the top spot is purely because it’s an album that requires a lot of time and effort to digest and I’m not really there yet. The string arrangements are beautiful and the songs are fantastic. Many have called it a return to form but I never saw her falter. A bold new direction and one that pays off.
03) Lamb – 5
The return of Lamb was unexpected but much appreciated with the perfect blend of Lou’s own solo styles and Andy’s more electronic edges. The album is much more direct and approachable with instant hooks throughout, making it by far my favourite Lamb album to date and hopefully will give them confidence to continue on.
02) tUne-YaRdS – W H O K I L L
Only discovering the sheer genius of this lady last year, being able to enjoy the growth from début to album number 2 was phenomenal. All the funky vocal collages are still here, as is the home ramshackle production but this time fused with brass and some more tip-top production too. It just seems like such a natural bloom. Magical.
01) Charlotte Martin – Dancing on Needles
The album that keeps giving with all the b-sides being released online, it’s a perfect merger of all Charlotte’s previous works of piano, guitar, keyboard and pounding drums. Her voice is an absolute marvel and every song is as achingly beautiful and painful as the last. Without doubt my album of the year.
Narrowly missing out were PJ Harvey, Kate Bush, Sarah Slean, The Go Team and Omodaka.
As a return from my several week hideout writing and recording my own album (and not getting nearly as far as I’d like to have but being very happy with everything that went on) I present the amazing Charlotte Martin with “Animal”, possibly my favourite track from the new album.
Some artists just seem to never make a poor album and one of those is Charlotte Martin. From leaping from piano based melodies to synth rock anthems from her previous albums, Martin’s latest “Dancing on Needles” carefully merges the organic with the synthetic and makes one hell of a rocking album seeping emotion from start to finish.
Opening with “Any Minute Now” Charlotte’s piano and vocal delivery are harsh and bold in this ever twisting tense and taut track. The ever present rumblings of low pianos are joined by guitars and pounding drums as Charlotte’s vocal layering pushes to the fore in a great opener. Single “Volcano” swaps sides from organic rock to heavily processed drum samples and etheral electric pianos yet the underlining current is one of pain, grit and detirmination. Even through its spacious angelic chorus (with a fantastic riff may I add) nothing ever feels settled and its this pinprick edge that carries the album and elevates it further.
“Truth Cerium” returns to the band sound with a strong pounding track showcasing Martin’s penchant for sticking an slightly detuned chord in her riffs that give a certain rush to the brain. It’s great to see this side of Martin’s music because it shows she’s a master of all different genres of music and I can see this being a great live track. Title track “Dancing on Needles” has a fantastic funky bassline while the backbeat thumps away like a ticking clock while all kinds of atmospherics swirl around – this is the album footstomper arm waver anthem as it continues to evolve and build. This leads effeortlessly into “Animal” which is an absolutely stunning track. Full of drama, intrigue and an epic chorus – the verses chart their course the crawl inside your veins and then coupled with Charlotte’s quivering vocals, the choruses just steal your pulse away.
The album hits a quieter period which starts off with the devastingly beautiful “Life Vest” which is the first piano/vocal led track. Charlotte’s high singing register against the piano easily brings you to tears of emotion in what is a heart wrenching performance. You can hear every nuance and second of pain in her every word. “Tremble” is not so much quiet all the way through but its as equally emotive as instrument upon instrument is slowly added into the mix until we reach the final hurrah where the electric guitars, pianos and vocals all whail together with a marching drum beat pulsing through your body and its almost like hitting a state of euphoria. The songs construction is fantastic and is a perfect juxtaposition to the solo version available on youtube. “Starlight” has a beautiful synth piano sound much like someone has crossbred a steel pan and an electric piano. This electro-rock ballad is beautiful for its constantly flowing with different raising chords that feel slightly eastern but quite gritty too. It’s quite a unique sound and stands out because of it.
“Ready for a Flight” is a dark track with a full on growling chorus which comes across like a gigantic stand off in a bull arena with stimping drums and grizzly bass backing her up as the dischordant piano rumbles behind them all. The most abstract song on the album is the most hair raising. “Complications” is another lighter waver rock ballad and its here where the electronic and acoustic collide 50/50 and combined with excellent songwriting the merger of most of Martin’s backcatalogue is sewn together seemlessly. If this song doesn’t becomes a romance movie ballad then a crime has been made against humanity.
“Language of God” is the big rocking finale on the album with pounding toms and all kinds of fun synths bursting out in the middle. Throughout the album the vocal layers are core but here they also form part of the background hum of music – almost like a background chant. The middle eight is like an electro-Eden. The album closes with “Weird Goodbye” which is an emotional piano/vocal track that doesn’t just tug on the heart strings, it rips them out and jumps up and down on them and is classic early Char Mar.
“Dancing on Needles” is mindblowingly fantastic. From the opening note to the closing whimper you can feel every emotion, every word and every teardrop of pain and there’s nothing quite like it. Easily the first must have album of 2011 and early contender for album of the year. It’ll leave you breathless.
Charlotte Martin’s back with the magnificent single Volcano which is available as an instant downloadable video if you preorder the album via her Fan Club website. She’s offering two tier packages, both of which are sumptuous with bonus goodies. Head over to charlottemartin.com and grab what is easily one of my most anticipated albums of 2011 by far. Volcano is absolutely mind blowing by the way with Stromata Evolution!
The album Dancing on Needles is due February although pre-ordering gets you it much earlier!
Char Mar has a new album coming. Dancing on Needles is due 1st February 2011 and she’s already annouced a tour to go along with it. Charlotte Martin is one of those midas touch artists so I’m sure it’s going to be a killer album! Tour dates cover Chicago, New York and Los Angeles but I’m sure they’ll grow and expand.
The ever wonderful Charlotte Martin looks set to return with a brand spanking new album this year after being quite unwell the last few months. We wish her a speedy recovery but she’s released “Tremble”, a new song, free as an acoustic version for download from her bandcamp website. There’s also this beautiful rehersal video of it. It’s great to have her back!
Charlotte Martin loves to give. Rarities-6 is the final part of a 6 piece almost single like set of unreleased materials. Having only been able to buy the first 5 on tours, the last one was made available to buy online. HPM will now be officially campaigning to get the other 5 released online – these are fantastic!
“Shrink” reminds me of a cross between very early electric CharMar and Stromata’s era, almost like a crossing bridge over between the two. It’s catchy, full of neat embellishments and a little bit of funkiness to it too.
“Dangled” is a piano/vocal track and features some beautiful trademark layered vocals and ever rising and soaring choruses. There is real attention to little pace changes in this track and its what makes it much more punchy and emotional than your usual singer/songwriter stuff. Add to that Charlotte’s blood-on-your-sleeves vocals and you have a tremendous combo.
Finally “No Words” reminds me of the work from “Orphans” and has a great sparseness and emptiness to it and all the keyboards have a harsh coldness to them. Combined with Martin doing a lazy slur over the verses and then giving it welly in the choruses it makes for a great end to the trio.
Obviously big Charlotte Martin fans should be the target audience for these mini-cd’s and everyone should lap these tracks up but each song is so strong, you could easily use this as a starting point for getting into her music too.
Charlotte Martin’s instrumental album Piano Trees will be released digitally on 10th November. Two of the gourgeous songs can be heard on her myspace page. With Tori’s album out the same day, its a great day for HPM! Also Charlotte’s rarities.6 will be released on the same day. There is talk of getting all the rarities together for one big CD release and that would be relished by her overseas fans (like HPM!)
HPM is a huge fan of Charlotte Martin and while being UK based we’ll not get to see her tour, to see a rehersal video is almost the next best thing! Watch Charlotte’s piano rendition of “Cut the Cord” from Stromata and enjoy. Her tour dates are available on the same page.
This month was the most busiest month to date with HPM hitting over 2,000 hits for the first time! Vienna Teng & Ayumi Hamasaki’s new releases news were top of the agenda with Winifred Phillips’ latest release and inteview coming in quickly behind. Here’s this months top 10 viewed artists.
Last month was Higher Plain Music’s biggest month to date with almost 2,000 views in the month alone and two of the busiest days of the sites history. In December Sarah Slean topped the tables after threatening to do so for the past few months. However due to region restrictions we were unable to buy The Baroness Redecorates to review it so we will have to wait until its released over in the UK for download/CD release before we can do so. Nevertheless – Happy New Year and here’s Decembers top 10!
01) Sarah Slean (2nd Last Month/ 3rd Month on Charts)
02) Hiroki Kikuta (6th Last Month / 3rd Month on Charts)
03) Charlotte Martin (1st Last Month / 3rd Month on Charts)
04) Vienna Teng (New Entry / 1st Month on Charts)
05) Gackt (New Entry / 1st Month on Charts)
06) Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (7th Last Month / 2nd Month on Charts)
07) Aoi Teshima (New Entry / 1st Month on Charts)
08) Julia Marcell (New Entry / 1st Month on Charts)
09) Stephane Picq & Pierre Esteve (Re-Entry / 2nd Month on Charts)
Although it was a relatively quiet month for releases, it was the third biggest month in page views for HPM and with a review blow out of all the 2008 albums we’ve (well just I’ve) bought, December looks like being the biggest month for the website to date. Here’s the top 10 most read artists for December and congrats to Charlotte Martin who topped out with her excellent Orphans EP for being the most viewed post. In the brackets is their position relative to last month and the amount of months they’ve been on the chart.
01) Charlotte Martin (- / 1)
02) Sarah Slean (8 / 2)
03) Utada Hikaru (5 / 2)
04) Lou Cowell (- / 1)
05) Brendan Perry (- / 1)
06) Hiroki Kikuta (7 / 2)
07) Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (- / 1)
08) Sarah McLachlan (- / 1)
09) Lisa Gerrard (9 / 2)
10) Akira Yamaoka (2 / 2)
Other stats:
~Last months most viewed artist Emiliana Torrini was just outside the top 10.
~More artists were viewed this month than last despite overall traffic being 120 page views lower.
Charlotte Martin rounds off 2008 with a release of old offcuts from the cutting floor. Songs that didn’t make her previous records have clubbed together to form “Orphans”, an 8 track EP showcasing that even cast aways from great artists shouldn’t be ignored.
Opening with “Is This Called Desire”, a song that despite being relatively relaxed always has an undercurrent of fight and flight about it, its clear that these aren’t just quick rehashes. The song also reminds me very much of Bjork’s Vespertine which is certainly no bad thing. “Galaxies” is certainly no throw away and quickly establishes as a favourite and a song that manages to completely encompass Charlotte’s musical styles in one song. We love the latest electronics but we also love piano and electronics together! “Habit” recoils back to just piano and vocal in a heartfelt and spacious song where taking her time to express each line, every note is worth so much more – it’s almost like a live performance. Beautiful.
“Outerspace” is funky! The keyboards sound like the theremin used in b-movies about aliens. It’s fast paced, full of percussion, has an uplifting chorus and is one of those songs you can lose yourself in. Juxtaposed with the purity of “Snowflakes”, the two songs really shine off each other. The latter song has a gorgeous flowing piano hook.
The final trio are interesting inclusions. “The Stalker Song” finally gives a full release of the “I’m Normal Please date Me” lyrics which is on a lot of Charlotte’s merchandise. The song has a humour and tongue in cheek arrangement which suits it so well. We then have “Raven” which is an old master of the song that found itself on “Test Drive Songs”. Cutting out the piano intro, electronic ending and including guitar and minimal percussion, it’s funny to hear the original after these years. It has a slightly different vibe to it, still just as sinister, but different. Finally rounding of the Test Drive era is a “Many Rivers (2005)” which takes away all the trimmings and has just Charlotte and the piano which is a nice way to end.
This is the second helping of b-sides from Charlotte Martin and once again we’re left wondering why these weren’t out long ago! However once you’ve finished listening you’re just glad you’ve heard them now and they’ll quickly become just as treasured as the rest of her collection.
Charlotte Martin’s “Orphan’s” gets its release date as 11/11/08. The EP (so probably 5-8 songs) will contain songs that she hasn’t put on other records or have been left unrecorded. There is a beautiful clip of one of the songs, Galaxies, on her myspace page for you to listen. It’s lovely to hear her back with just herself and a piano after her technical touring! You can get the album at her music store.
Charlotte Martin popped up today on a video blog explaining “Orphans”, her new EP which is as we predicted a compilation of more b-sides and outtakes. We’ve seen snippets of unreleased songs before and the songs are all of stellar quality so we look forward to this new release with anticipation!
She’s always so busy! Charlotte Martin has just announced on her website that a new EP entitled “Orphans” is in the works. Its a studio one so we presume it’ll be new material but we wonder if the current electro-alt-piano-all-of-the-above will remain. Whatever it will be, we are already dribbling at the thought! There’s no release date as of yet.
Charlotte Martin is back on the live vault this week with an unreleased song called “Tough”. It’s great when artists pull various bits of their catalogue out for their own reasons and you discover another beautiful song you never knew existed. So here it is: “Tough”
Charlotte Martin’s instrumental album Piano Trees will be released digitally on 10th November. Two of the gourgeous songs can be heard on her myspace page. With Tori’s album out the same day, its a great day for HPM! Also Charlotte’s rarities.6 will be released on the same day. There is talk of getting all the rarities together for one big CD release and that would be relished by her overseas fans (like HPM!)
Last month was Higher Plain Music’s biggest month to date with almost 2,000 views in the month alone and two of the busiest days of the sites history. In December Sarah Slean topped the tables after threatening to do so for the past few months. However due to region restrictions we were unable to buy The Baroness Redecorates to review it so we will have to wait until its released over in the UK for download/CD release before we can do so. Nevertheless – Happy New Year and here’s Decembers top 10!
Charlotte Martin rounds off 2008 with a release of old offcuts from the cutting floor. Songs that didn’t make her previous records have clubbed together to form “Orphans”, an 8 track EP showcasing that even cast aways from great artists shouldn’t be ignored.
