Previews by Mike Davies

Tuesday January 12

OK Go

It’s been almost four years since the Chicago outfit were here busily promoting sophomore album Oh No. Back then they were power poppers who mingled pop punk with Britpop and Franz Ferdinand funk, now they return with Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky (Capitol), a hefty musical homage to Prince.

Titled after The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky, a 19th century book claiming blue light cures all illnesses, it sets out its funky stall from the get go with WTF?’s falsetto, bass throbbing and sexual prowl rhythms, a groove echoed on I Want You So Bad I Can’t Breathe, End Love, and the slinky slower tempo Skyscrapers. Interestingly the psychedelic funking White Knuckles also seems to channel Spandau Ballet in their Musclebound phase and there’s definite traces of a varied CD library to be heard around the album.

Back From Kathmandu has a Beatles quality while its crunching rhythm recalls Lennon’s work with the Plastic Ono Band, the vocoderised lounge beats Before The Earth Was Round hints at Daft Punk, While You Were Asleep is a narcotic otherwordly croon from Tim Burton’s nursery, the spare acoustic Last Leaf harks back to their Ray Davies affections, while the hooks laden tumbling chunky pop of All Is Not Lost and the slow stompy, fuzzy bass and guitar fuzzed up Needing/Getting could have come from a Guillemots session.

What with the potential for this to go bombastic and having picked up new admirers from their Shooting The Moon contribution to the New Moon soundtrack, this must surely be the last time they’ll be playing in such small venues. See them while you can afford it. 7.30pm. £12.50. O2 Academy 3

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Wednesday January 13

The Minnikins

It’s been far too long since Canada’s Minnikin siblings and former Guthries mainstays Ruth and Gabe shared a stage hereabouts, and their welcome return is doubly blessed with the release of  Ruth’s new album, Depend On This.

Recorded with her regular backing crew (now dubbed Bandwagon) of Gabriel, Brian Murray, Dave Christensen and Anna Plaskett with Craig Buckley on bass, as it’s not out here until May promo copies weren’t available but it apparently weaves around a theme of death (accepted as inevitable rather than morbidly so) melding the familiar bluegrass, country, 40s retro and folk with shades of jazz, chamber pop, tango and latin with gypsy violin, horns, handclaps, flutes, bontempi organ shuffles and computer effects. If it’s up to past form, it’ll be rather wonderful and copies will be available on the night.

Opening proceedings is KTB aka Katy Bennett returning to her old stomping grounds after getting hitched, leaving Little Sister and decamping to Bewdley last year. She’ll be dipping into last year’s fine debut album Indelible Ink and such numbers as Willow Tree’s wheezing tale of betrayed love, the hymnal Perfect World, River Run Through Us and the bittersweet The Girl With The Sad Shoes. 8pm. £8. Kitchen Garden Cafe, Kings Heath

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Saturday January 16

This Beautiful Thief

Staking an early claim to the next big thing from Birmingham tag, the four piece have already given away their 2008 debut album, The Earth Terminal Sessions, as a free download and picked up critical nods for last year’s Say Something EP. They hit 2010 with new single No Love Lost (Magpie), a soaring burst of heavens vaulting anthemic indie chiming guitar that justifies those Interpol, Editors, Maximo Park, U2 and Placebo references while Everyone Loves A Tryer confirms their ability to cram their songs with stadium size hooks and choruses. They should steer of the dance beats that mar the remix of Falling Down, but other than that there seems little to stand in the way of a triumphant year. 8pm. £5. The Rainbow, Digbeth

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Monday January 18

Fyfe Dangerfield

The man clearly never sleeps. As if writing a new classical solo cello piece (Eggshell Walker, given its world premier by Natalie Clien), working on material for the band’s third album and playing an assortment of Guillemots, Gannets (his free jazz project)  and one man shows wasn’t enough, he also found time to put the finishing touches to his solo album.

Recorded in the space of five spare days back in 2008 and titled Fly Yellow Moon (Geffen UK), he launches it tonight with what promises to be something of a gig to remember if he’s in the same spirit as the giddily exuberant Mika-ish crunchy pop opening track When You Walk In The Room where he laughs between lines and positively seems to be bursting with joy.

Indeed, while the tempos may shift between breezy and mellow it’s an upbeat experience from start to finish as Dangerfield dips into his eclectic bag of influences to produce a variegated but musically cohesive album of classic carefree pop softly streaked with folk.

The soaring Spanish tinged warmth of So Brand New mingles Roy Orbison, The Smiths and Burt Bacharach, piano ballad Barricades nods to Lennon, Faster Than The Setting Sun corrals the Stereophonics and Coldplay while chest-bursting new single She Needs Me marries Paul McCartney to ELO and a hint of Sly and the Family Stone’s Everyday People, and High On The Tide is dreamy swaying 60s  John Barry pop complete with seagulls. Mind you, Any Direction is a tad blatant in recycling Electronic’s Getting Away With It.

With the full blooded orchestrations with which he often coats his material, it also makes a nice change to find him stripping things back to simple balladry on the folksy piano backed Firebird (which borrows from Greensleeves and lyrically quotes from music hall chestnut Daisy Daisy) and the reflective poignancy of the acoustic guitar and brushed drums of Don’t Be Shy.

  Whatever the weather conditions outside, the songs here ensure you’ll feel like summer’s come early. 8pm. £12. Glee Club

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Tuesday January 19

Erin McKeown

Sharing the bill with Vermont label-mate Anais Mitchell, the Massachusetts singer-songwriter  arrives to promote her eighth and latest album, Hundreds Of Lions (Righteous Babe).

Her best yet, it gathers her familiar cocktail of pop, folk, jazz, swing, cabaret and tin pan alley and stirs in some new playful, sly magic. To A Hammer opens with pizzicato strings and sounds a little like a classical gavotte as she skips through a childlike love song lyric about devotion that ends on the wonderful line 'to a hammer everything is a nail'.

Percussion skittering like tap dancing mice, Santa Cruz is a buoyant pop song before she heads into folk territory on the strumming seafaring imagery of You Sailor while, another offkilter romantic lyric, the shuffling swishy Foxes has a slight cabaret feel, a gorgeous sunkissed chorus and all manner of sonic colours adding to its good to be alive vibe.

Taking the mood to its polar opposite, the mesmerising (Put The Fun Back In) The Funeral conjures the terror of being buried alive to a slow bossa rhythm and a spidery vocal while the 'I can't breath' refrain is surely borrowed from Dido's, er, I Can't Breathe.

Elsewhere, homophobia-themed circus acrobat romance tale The Lions is burlesque tango, All That Time You Missed is littered with scratchy sonic tics that scamper around the track like mischievous sprites, The Boats conjures a cobwebbed cloaked Hebrew lament to a pulsing bassline while The Rascal bubbles like a playschool clapalong baked with a crumb or two of Shortnin' Bread and a nakedly exposed Seamless is a bittersweet fractured relationship sign off  with a musical box motif echoing the Harry Potter theme. 

Marking a magnificent end to her first decade as a recording artist, it’s also a tantalising taste of  a truly exciting future and you should really be there to celebrate the start of the next leg of the journey.  8pm. £9.50. Glee Club

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Tuesday January 19

Wolfmother

The rhythm section having split, only afro-haired frontman Andrew Stockdale remains from the Australian bluesy hard rock trio’s original line up, returning with a three new members and a belated follow up to their self-titled 2005 debut. However, little else has changed, Cosmic Egg (Modular) still mining the 70s for recycled metal riffs.

California Queen hits the road running with a driving dose of rock n roll radio swagger before New Moon Rising turns on the heavy blues, White Feather opens the Free valve (complete with cowbell), and Sundial, 10,000 Feet, Pilgrim, and the choogling title track all take communion at the churches of Sabbath and Led Zep even if In The Castle opens with a dash of early Status Quo psychedelia

They like a bit of Rush-style cosmic prog too, as evidenced by Phoenix while, showing they’re not entirely defined by their metal affections, In The Morning harks to George Harrison’s Asian colours and The Magical Mystery Tour and Violence of the Sun hooks into the Fab Four influences of Oasis.

Nothing original perhaps, but nor do they sound lumberingly dated and they certainly have their hooks and melodies sharpened to perfection, suggesting that, if Stockdale can hang on to the new members, the future looks bright. 7.30pm. £17. O2 Academy

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Tuesday January 19

John Mayer

He wins Grammys and fills stadiums in America but here his albums fail to make the top 30 and he’s never had a hit single. Not even duetting with Taylor Swift on Half Of My Heart seems to have persuaded the UK to descend on the music stores and downloads.

It’s hard to explain why he can’t break down resistance. Fuelled by his break up with Jennifer Aniston (titles include All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye, Friends, Lovers Or Nothing, Perfectly Lonely and the war metaphor heavy Heartbreak Warfare), current album Battle Studies (Columbia) is a perfectly fine collection of tasteful glossy bluesy tinged AOR pop that, on such numbers as  War Of My Life, Who Says and Do You Know Me, variously conjures comparisons to Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and Jack Johnson while a Robert Palmer styled cover of Robert Johnson’s blues classic Crossroads is ample evidence of his guitar chops.

He has a warm, wittily self-deprecating personality, he has the looks and he clearly has the talent, all he needs now is that one break though radio dominating song and the pin up posters will be all over the place. 7.30pm. £28.50. W’hampton Civic Hall

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Thursday January 21

The Imagined Village

 

An intriguing folk ‘supergroup’, the project was initially developed by Afro Celt System cittern player Simon Emmerson as a loose collective of musicians, with a debut album that featured a variety of guest singers, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra, and Paul Weller among them.

Since then the personnel has stabilised into a 10 piece line up featuring Martin Carthy, daughter Eliza, Chris Wood, Emmerson, sitar player Sheema Mukherjee and Johnny Kalsi on dhol and tabla.

Setting out to interpret traditional folk material in non-traditional, world music, beats friendly fashion, they lay their cards on the table with an impressive six minute reworking of My Son John which, laying tabla and sitar over a crunching march rhythm, updates the song’s Napoleonic setting to the present day war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Close on eight minutes, the sitar driven Sweet Jane billows around a 60s psychedelic vibe, a mood that’s also true of their reimagining of Scarborough Fair which sounds as though it might have come from a trip folk remake of Zabriskie Point.

A similar cosmic vibe informs the quirky Space Girl, a Ewan McColl curio about intergalactic miscegenation on which Eliza Carthy takes lead to a backdrop of  bleeps, clanks, Ottoman market fiddle and snake charmer sway.

If this all has the Arran sweater brigade breaking out in hives, they’ll be relieved to know that, other than the tabla drone and hand percussion, The Handweaver And The Factory Maid is more reassuringly traditionalist while Mrs Preston’s Hornpipe shows that some folk forms brook no tinkering.

On the other hand, a relatively conservative reading of Byker Hill with Martin Carthy leading it through the hiccupping rhythm does suddenly erupt mid-section into a goblin rave with fiddle and percussion frenzy!

They’ll be doubtless peppering the new material with numbers from the debut, most likely to include the  electro-reggae asylum seeker rejig of  Tam Lyn, a fiery rework of John Barleycorn and the ever timely Hard Times of Old England. The one to watch out for though has to be Carthy Snr deconstruction of Slade’s Cum On Feel The Noize, reinventing it as a slow, world weary lament that could have come from a broken down music hall. You’ll never hear the song the same way again, but then that’s true of pretty much everything they touch. 7.30pm. £16.50. B’ham Town Hall

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Thursday January 21

Japanese Voyeurs

 

Fronted by Romily Alice, the London five piece are patently in thrall to the 80’sSeattle grunge scene of torn jeans and angry disenfranchised youth with guitars. Last year saw the release of Dumb, a raw and dirty sonic assault that crossbred the Stooges and Babes In Toyland. Proving they can be relatively more subtle, new single That Love Sound (Slimeball) is a tightly leashed quiet/loud bluesy prowl of  pulsing bass and surging guitars with Alice at her most kittenish. Fear not, though, after a deceptively hushed intro, Blush shows they can still do low slung distorted guitar, metal riffing and screams with the best of them. 8pm. £4. Flapper & Firkin

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Friday January 22

Ocean Colour Scene

 

pic by Joe Dilworth

Continuing to annoy their detractors by confounding constant predictions of their demise, the lads launch their tenth album, their first in three years, with an intimate hometown gig. Saturday (Cooking Vinyl) finds them in blistering form, staying true to longtime influences but filtering them through a driving classic rock dynamic with Steve Craddock’s guitars scorching everything within a fine mile radius.

Tackling the economic crisis,  muscular psych folk opening track 100 Floors Of Perception wears its early Who colours proudly while rock n rolling boogie piano Mrs Maylie’s retro pop surely has its foundations rooted in seminal 60s Brum cult heroes The Idle Race.

Save for Postal’s two molten minutes protest at post office closures, the rest of the album is more a mix of mid tempo and gentler pacing, but with no drop in quality or impact.

The title track’s vintage OCS tumbling pop with a soaring chorus that sends you out for the weekend with a lift in the heart while, elsewhere, you’ll find the anthemic Just A Little Bit Of Love, loose limbed mod pop boogie Old Pair Of Jeans, the gospel hued Sing Children Sing, and, harking to the Gibb brothers’ early dramatic ballads, Harry Kidnap’s poignant tribute to the late John Weller.

The Northern soul beat of Magic Carpet Days provides the first single, leading on to psychedelic folk pop swayalong The Word, the darkling folk of the ominous Village Life,  vaudeville tinged waltzer What’s Mine Is Yours and piano and lap steel bruised romantic ballad Fell In Love On The Street Again before climaxing on the rousing Rockfield which, with sitar, backward strings, and psychedelia, shakes and bakes Baba O’Riley and Tomorrow Never Knows for a tribute to the studio where the album was recorded.

Most assuredly something for the weekend, and already one of the best albums of the new decade. 8pm. £20. The Rainbow, Digbeth

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Saturday January 23

Feeder

Following the muted critical response to Silent Cry and its rapid disappearance from the album charts, the Welsh trio have had a bit of an up and down two years, coming to a head last May with the departure of drummer Mark Richardson to rejoin Skunk Anansie.So it is that, without a UK record deal, they re-emerge  on their own Big Teeth Music label with a new EP, Renegades and a back to basics raw, rough and ready live show.

That same spirit is evident on the raging storm the barricades fists in the air title track where, curiously, they sound a bit like New Model Army, and the bluesy metal heavy riffing Sentimental, both of which bode well for the album due later in the year.  6.30pm. O2 Academy 3

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Saturday January 23

Way To Blue

 

After the success of last year’s Birmingham Town Hall commission, the Nick Drake tribute show takes to the road with Vashti Bunyan and Robyn Hitchcock joined by a new collection of devotees bringing their reinterpretations of the tragic Tamworth folkie’s fragile, melancholic songs.

Adding their voices to the mix this time round there’s Wolverhampton’s Scott Matthews, Green Gartside from Scritti Politti, Sea Sew songstress Lisa Hannigan and Teddy Thompson backed by a house band that includes bassist Danny Thompson.

One name you’re unlikely to recognise is Krystle Warren, a  Paris based Kansas City native whose debut album, Circles (Because), is getting the critics in a lather and has seen her octave ranging cocktail of funk, folk and jazz compared to a meld of Jeff Buckley, Erykah Badu and Nina Simone. With influences that also embrace Bill Withers and Odetta and songs like the gospel hued Sunday Comfort, the edgily romantic folk-soul Year End Issue and the jazzily waltzing Some Trivial Pursuit, it’s patently obvious she’s going to go nova and, while she won’t be performing her own music tonight, you’ll want to make a note to be sure you know when she’s back in her own right. 8pm. £27.50-£22.50. Warwick Arts Centre

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Sunday January 24

The Tenebrous Liar

 

Entering 2010  trimmed down to a quartet with Richard Warren adopting the producer’s role, Tom Glendining and Brendan Casey the new rhythm section, Tony Ash remaining on guitar and songwriter Steve Gullick now taking total charge of the vocals, they also launch a new album, Jackknifed & Slaughtered (TV Records).

What remains constant is their dark, brooding, emotionally charged sound which, on the likes of the splenetic Suffer You, Cut Down Your Love,  the clattering tribal rhythmic chant of Freedom Reign, the bass fuzzed No Guiding light and the six minute guitar distortion and declaimed howl of the title track channels the influences of The Birthday Party, Captain Beefheart and Jim Morrison and the Doors at their most shamanistic.

Offering plenty of new fuel for their incendiary live performances, this is going to be a vortex of intensity live. 9pm. Free. InSpire Cafe Bar, New Union St, Coventry

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Sunday January 24

Laura Veirs

 

Named after a peach variety, new album July Flame (Bella Union) finds the Colorado songstress losing the glasses, ditching her old Seattle band, recording at home in Oregon with producer and partner Tucker Martine and returning to the unadorned, folksy fingerpicking style of Carbon Glacier.

It’s all very serene and bucolic, variously wrapped up warm against the winter chill and enfolded in a summery haze as her voice floats across open space arrangements and lyrics that trade in her customary predilection for natural world imagery.

Ever one for writing about matters of the heart, there’s some lovelorn wistfulness and occasional shades of lonely while (suitably phrased with euphonium intro and plucked banjo) Where Are You Driving  flirts with spikes of jealousy and, a little musically darker with its brooding strings, furrowed brow electric guitar and melancholic vocal,  the piano backed Little Deschutes has her dithering ‘one foot on the floor and one foot outside the door’.

However, doubtless reflecting domestic contentment, it’s a woozy romanticism that dominates with numbers like the languid Sun King, an airy dappled When You Give Your Heart, and the descant, whirly Fleet Foxesish I Can See Your Tracks which, like closing duet Make Something Good, features My Morning Jacket’s Jim James on harmonies.

By way of a lyrical tangent that will only mean something to those who scour musician credits, Carol Kaye is a song in admiration of  the session bassist, but, by and large, the album theme and mood is pretty much summed up by the giveaway titles of barber shop quartet backed Life Is Good Blues and raggy waltz Summer Is The Champion.

Peppering the set list with new and old material alike, both the album and the gig should fit  down nicely with the arrival of the slightly more clement weather. 7.30pm. £12. The Assembly, Leamington Spa

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Wednesday January 27

Holly Williams

 

She may not share the same first name, but, five years after confounding expectations with an introspective debut album of the singer-songwriter persuasion, sophomore release, Here With Me (Humphead), finds Williams maintaining the family tradition by waving the country standard.

However, unlike granddaddy Hank, dad Jr and half-brother III, she's keeping clear of the honky tonks and rowdy saloons in favour of a more alt-country sound streaked with steel guitar and (especially on the kickalong Chris Janson duet A Love I Think Will last) splashes of mainstream Nashville.

Not that she's kicked autobiographical introspection out of the window. Driving along on a shuffle drum beat and a twangy chorus Mama reflects on how, following her parents' divorce, mum stayed strong and, preaching forgiveness, refused to turn her kids against their father. On an equally personal note, the uptempo Let Her Go is a plea to a much loved daddy to let her fly free on her own wings while Without Jesus Here With Me looks back on the car crash that almost killed her and her sister and the faith's that since sustained her.

But if there's the spiritual, there's also the carnal as, on Three Days In Bed, she sings of a hot time with someone she met in France while, the afterburn of relationships gone down inform Gone With The Morning Sun, the swaggery Keep The Change and, conjuring the heartbreak ballads of Mary Chapin Carpenter, He's Making A Fool Out Of You.

Closing out with a simple, piano accompanied cover of Neil Young's Birds that shows her voice at its naked best, it's clear that the Williams legacy is in no way bound by gender. 8pm. £14. Kitchen Garden Cafe

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Wednesday January 27

Andrew Vincent

 

The fact that on the Nobody Else the lyrics reference Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World, should give an idea of which era this beardy Canadian singer-songwriter and PhD student’s coming from on Rotten Pear (Kelp).

If you don’t get the picture from that, then there’s always its chugging Velvet Underground melody, the Tom Petty sings Buddy Holly of Fooled Again and the unabashed influence of Jonathan Richman on such numbers as Hi Lo, Going Out Tonight, Diane and the simple plinking acoustic strum of Sleep To Dream.

Now working solo after four albums as Andrew Vincent & The Pirates, it’s a fair bet that most won’t ever have heard of him before but, if you’ve an affection for  70s/80s punk and New Wave, then he’s worth exploring.

Under Your Thumb’s another driving slice of Velvets rock n roll, though fans of underrated Coventry outfit The Primitives might detect a touch of Crash in there too while the reverb guitar of Ruffian is early Bragg and Canadian Dream recalls The Cars before they collapsed into a slough of AOR polish.

Strapping on the accordion  to eke out the rhythms for the title track  doesn’t really work but  there’s an energy, enthusiasm and genuine joy in the music that’s impossible to dislike, and  you have to admit that  his decidedly different  drum free, rumbling and smoke curling synths and voice version of Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love is certainly likely to prove something of a memorable live experience. 8pm. £1. Tin Angel, Coventry

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Friday January 29

Anais Mitchell

 

Having just completed her joint tour with Righteous Babe labelmate Erin McKeown, the Vermont singer-songwriter with the girlish warble is playing just two solo headline shows before heading back to the States. Fortunately, one of them in this neck of the woods, so, if you want a second helping after the Glee Club date or you’re kicking yourself for missing it, then make the most of the chance to catch up songs from The Brightness and Country, her 2007 album and 2008 EP respectively.

Folk country is, indeed, her chosen musical mien, keeningly clothed with banjo and pedal steel alongside the acoustic guitar, albeit as evidenced by O My Star from the EP and album tracks such as Your Fonder Heart, Changer, the banjo and fiddle driven Hobo’s Lullaby, and Shenandoah, of the variety filtered through the same sort of  mountain streams and forest air as Gillian Welch, Nanci Griffith, Victoria Williams and, in parts, even Dolly Parton.

Also likened to Joanna Newsome (but with rather more bite) and (as Namesake reveals) much inspired by Ani Di Franco, that she cites Laurence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet as the album’s major influence, has Hemingway, Joyce and Miller on the bookshelf and has written an opera, Hadestown, from which, I’d assume, album track Hades and Persephone comes, will tell you that she’s as  literate as she is musical.

With the chance of bluesier material like Mockingbird and  Quecreek Flood from early album Hymns For The Exiled colouring the set list, this should be a gig to cherish until she returns with an overdue new album. 8pm. £8. Tin Angel, Coventry

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Saturday January 30

Kerrang Relentless Energy Tour

 

An aptly named package for those looking to sweat off a few pounds. Baltimore’s pop punk quartet All Time Low are on hand to batter out the Green Day and Blink 182 influences that provide the engine for the Nothing Personal album with its adenoidal vocals, chugging guitars, and generic spiked melodies.

 They’re joined by London fourpiece My Passion who Corporate Flesh Party a cocktail of stabbing hardcore riffs and industrial electro-rock  with the occasional resemblance to Lostprophets. The line-up’s completed by Welsh post-hardcore boys The Blackout, giving some more stick to last year’s The Best In Town, and, ahem, ‘full on’ Memphis rockers Young Guns. 7pm. £15. O2 Academy

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Sunday January 31

Hamel

Looking much younger than his 32 years, you may already be familiar with  baby faced young Dutch contender Wouter Hamel without realising it, since the 40s flavoured skittering See You Once Again was the music for the recent BBC iplayer advert. He’s now looking to expand awareness with his first UK release, Nobody’s Tune (Decca), a compilation of material from his self-titled debut and last year’s follow-up.

He cites Jeff Buckley as an inspiration, but you’ll look for comparisons in vain since his swinging style and laid back crooning delivery is more likely to conjure thoughts of Harry Connick Jr, Jamie Cullum, Bobby Darin, Mel Torme,  and, at times, Barry Manilow, Kid Creole and Billy Joel, with strong Burt Bacharach influences filtering into the music itself.

Opening with the Latin sway of Don’t Ask, Hamel swings his way through a collection of polished, finger clicking jazz-pop (Breezy also showing his hip hop awareness) with melodies that instantly adhere to the memory stem cells and get the limbs moving.

Featuring a warm sax break, March, April, May will, as the lyrics say, indeed make you sing and sway while a sashaying In Between, jazz trio boogie Details, the snappy One More Time On The Merry Go Round and closing piano ballad Amsterdam all guarantee to spread smiles around the room. And don’t be surprised if tweenage girls suddenly start developing an interest in jazz.

Back at the club after supporting Roachford last year, opening the show will be Essex singer-songwriter Leddra Chapman giving a second taste of debut album, Telling Tales (ALC). Acoustic folk-pop is her stock in trade, decorated with strings, piano and guitar, and, as numbers like the brass and violin backed Story, the reflective Wine Glass and Picking Oranges illustrate, she’s no slouch in the writing department when it comes to penning affecting intimate love letters.

However, listening to Easier and the musical box swirl of Jocelin it’s hard not to find yourself thinking of Dolores O’Riordan while elsewhere you’ll hear echoes of Alanis and Tori, which may  make it harder than it should be to establish herself as an original voice. Try and listen with the comparisons switch turned off, though, and the likes of Wrap Me Up and Saving You should easily persuade you this is a name with a bright future. 8pm. £7.50. Glee Club

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Sunday January 31

Buffy Sainte-Marie

 

There'd been a 16 year gap between albums when the Cree singer-songwriter released 1992's 'comeback' Coincidence And Likely Stories. Now, another 17 years on, comes her follow up, Running For The Drum (Cooking Vinyl). Of course, she's been a little preoccupied between times with her work as a Native American activist and for the Cradleboard Teaching Project, so a little time out's forgivable.

It opens in full blooded style with No No Keshagesh, a stinging attack on corporate greed in which, set to a driving tribal rhythm and 'powwow' vocals, she sings about those who've "got Mother Nature on a luncheon plate, they carve her up and call it real estate."

She's in equally powerful protest mood on the funky dance mojo working R&B streaked Working For The Government which addresses "that age-old money-laundering enterprise called war", stomping the groove like a Cree version of Tina Turner while the spooked hypnotic mantra Little Wheel Spin And Spin comments on how individual prejudices are the building blocks for hate movements.

It's not all about rant, though.  Her cultural, ethnic and musical roots again in evidence, Cho Cho Fire is an urgent number about having fun, a sort of  Native American party hard that, references the drumming frenzy of the pow wow experience. In similar frame of mind, Blue Sunday's a rock n rolling homage to the young Elvis whose slap-back recording sound changed her life. Musically, it's something of an inconsequential throwaway, but it gets the blood jumping, and sounds like it was written to be felt live. The same holds true of I Bet My Heart On You, a ragged barrelhouse New Orleans boogie.

For the rest, she's in quieter, more melancholic, romantic or, on Still This Love Goes On's folksy homespun dreams of home, wistful mood. With a guitar line that echoes In The Ghetto, a notable highlight is Too Much Is Never Enough, a  soaringly tender love song that showcases that Sainte-Marie warble while of no less merit you'll find To The Ends Of The World, a bluesy torch number that evokes Skeeter Davis classic The End Of The World, and the touching Easy Like The Snow Falls Down , a sort of Lean On Me dedicated to hospice workers helping families struck by dementia and Alzheimers.

She’ll be leaning fairly heavily on new material, but you can be pretty sure that, given the rarity of her tours, she’ll find space for memories like Until It’s Time For You To Go, Soldier Blue and maybe even Universal Soldier. 7.30pm. £17.50. Wulfrun Hall

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Sunday January 31

Nanci Griffith

 

Having confessed that she’d lost the passion for songwriting in recent years, it’s good to see that, after the underperforming jazz and torch flirtations of Hearts And Minds and Ruby's Torch, current album The Loving Kind (Decca Rounder) finds her pen very much in evidence on a return to the 'folkabilly' sound of her formative years.

She's also refocused attention on topical and social issues with the Louvins-like title track’s   tribute to Mildred and Richard Loving, a Virginian couple who defied the ban on interracial marriage back in the late 60s while Not Innocent Enough is a powerful death penalty protest inspired by the case of Philip Workman, executed for the  murder of a Memphis police officer despite new evidence proving his innocence, and Across America is a jangling folk rock celebration of the post Obama positivity among the nation's working men and women.

Indeed, American Presidents loom large. LBJ is referenced in Cotton's hymn to America's backbone while Still Life is a thinly veiled swipe at George W. They're not the only real life figures to provide material for the songs. She pays tribute to Townes Van Zandt on Up Against The Rain while the gently circling Sing and wistful ballad Things I Don't Need are clearly autobiographical.

Of the songs she didn’t have a hand in, old school honky tonk Tequila After Midnight sounds like a vintage Gram and Emmylou number while Pour Me A Drink is a beers and tears waltzer from Edwina Hayes and sometime Blue Moon Orchestra guitarist Clive Gregson.

A flawed return to form perhaps, but a welcome sign that the old juices still run in her veins and well worth the petrol money to hear in the flesh. 7.30pm. £30. The Assembly, Leamington Spa