Laura Veirs - Galaxies Nonesuch PRO15592
Single taken from the Album ‘Year of Meteors’
‘The Singles Club’ is a new-ish venture from Nonesuch. Just when we thought the single was on its last legs – sales near zero, charts cheapened by sponsorship, and only really reflecting the tastes of teenyboppers or people not affluent enough to buy albums, they come out with the idea of starting selling them. Weird, eh? But maybe not so weird after all. The label is noted for high quality acts of all sorts including contemporary classical composers and jazzers as well as some of the more classy acts from the popular music field. Steve Reich and Philip Glass – 2 of my all time heroes both issue stuff on this label for instance. These artists are often not fully exposed to popular view on daytime radio.
I suppose the idea is to give people an idea what certain artists sound like whereas they’d otherwise never know. It’s a good idea but to make it work they need to explore how they can put the product into the public eye. Perhaps selling their singles at a discounted price would be one way to do it – after all we often see singles priced at 3 or 4 quid and say, ‘No thanks – they’re selling albums in the supermarket for £7 or £8.” No - singles need to be about £1 maximum to revive the flagging market. Perhaps Nonesuch should set the ball rolling and start a trend. Let’s all write and tell ‘em!
Anyway (climbing down from soapbox), this record is a good one.- Laura has a haunting but lilting voice which grooves along, the backing is high quality sleazy jazz-rock and the remix featuring rapper Kotos the Rock Thrower [would you believe!] takes it into a quite different dimension. Such inventiveness needs to be rewarded with success. I hope it gets some airplay and people either buy it or go and seek out the album as I will be doing very soon now.
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