Hannah Scott
Absence Of Doubt
(self-released)
★★★

HAVING recorded a Radio 2 live session and had one of her songs played on US TV series Grey’s Anatomy, Suffolk-born singer-songwriter Hannah Scott returns with her third studio album.

Co-produced by Adrian Hall and largely made up of melodic, largely acoustic music, it’s an accessible set, enhanced by Scott’s impressive vocal range. 

Big opener Bigger Than My Body is a heart-on-sleeve anthemic love song, while Broken Homes is a philosophical look at marital breakdown.

“Sometimes you have to break a home to mend a family,” she sings. Elsewhere she rocks hard on Stone In My Mouth and sings of her father’s death on moving closer Carry You Out (“You carried me into this world, I will carry you out”).

An earnest record that has much to offer fans of MOR contemporary folk acts like Katherine Priddy.

Porridge Radio
Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me
(Secretly Canadian)
★★★★

“ONCE more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Porridge Radio’s fourth album finds us, once again, traversing the angst-ridden depths of Dana Margolin’s broken heart. 

The frontwoman and lyricist says most of the songs are “about a more frenetic and desperate kind of love” and they hit all the right buttons. She starts by singing herself hoarse with the line “I don’t want to know anybody else” on soon to be live favourite Anybody, and ends the set on a hopeful note: “I’m sick of the Blues/I’m in love with my life again.”

With indie guitar music a shadow of its former self, it feels like the Brighton band have built up their dedicated fan base under the radar. In another era their cathartic anthems would surely be big hits. 

Despair and depression shouldn’t sound this life-affirming.

Jimi Hendrix
Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision 
(Sony)
★★

THIS three-CD box set provides highlights from summer 1970, when Jimi Hendrix was putting together his next album in his newly built New York City studio. He died that September.

While a lot of the material turned up on the 1997 release First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, these alternative takes and demos are nearly all previously unreleased.

The guitar god delivers some serious riffage when he properly rocks out. Astro Man is a glorious bluesy stomp, while Dolly Dagger highlights the funk influence of contemporaries like Sly And The Family Stone. The hard-driving cover of Dylan’s Drifter’s Escape is another highlight, though of course can’t match his apocalyptic-sounding version of All Along The Watchtower.

A few gems, then, though they are difficult to find among repeated songs and half-formed ideas. 

One for Hendrix fans only.