STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Album Reviews: Martin Frawley's Undone at 31, Cass McCombs' Tip Of The Sphere, and Lily & Madeleine's Canterbury Girls
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
Martin Frawley
Undone at 31
(Merge Records)
★★★★
ON HIS first solo record Australian singer-songwriter Martin Frawley breathes new life into that pop music staple, the break-up album.
Having formed the now defunct indie band The Twerps with his new girlfriend Jules McFarlane, the relationship — and Frawley, it seems — came undone when he was 31.
With its Dylanesque drawl, intensely personal lines and twee instrumentation, opener You Want Me? is so good it threatens to overshadow the rest of the broadly chronological song cycle. Other tracks examine problem boozing, “meeting the parents” and the inevitable crash of the relationship with McFarlane.
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