Jack Ellister – When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease/Supernaut (Ltd. 7”)

Double A-sided 7” covering songs by Roy Harper and Black Sabbath!

Odd juxtapositions, you just gotta love 'em! Whether it's a Public Enemy/Anthrax collaboration, 'Long, Long, Long' following 'Helter Skelter' on The Beatles' White Album, or even Mel Smith and Kim Wilde putting out a Christmas single, sometimes putting incongruous ideas, genres or artists together can yield surprising results. This new 7” by Jack Ellister is a case in point. On one side you have a lovingly heartfelt piano-backed reading of Roy Harper's most famous song. Flip the record over and there's a version of a Black Sabbath album track ('Supernaut' from Black Sabbath IV). While the Harper track is suitably sentimental and elegiac, the Sabbath cut is a space-race inspired heavy-riffing juggernaut, featuring distorted bass guitar, lead synth lines and clattering drums played by Jack's brother Tomasz. Somehow in an inexplicable way the pairing works. For me, being the sentimental type, the Harper cover edges out as favourite but I'd encourage you to have a listen and pick your own winner.

Oh one more thing before I sign off - there's an lovely back-story to the recordings on this single as told by Jack on the press release which I feel is worth including here...

"The grand piano used on 'Cricketer' belonged to my grand father in Torun, Poland.
In 1990/1991 my father took me and Tomasz to Poland to get it over to Germany. We had to smuggle it out because it was forbidden to transport instruments across the border, as they might be valuable collectible items or state property. We did it in two turns using an old Mercedes 9-seater. On the first trip we took the inner metal works and mechanics out and hid them under lots of other stuff. On the second journey a month later we got the wooden frame, which appeared like a sort of cheap big wardrobe when not inspected properly. Luckily the wooden outer parts fit into the lift in Stuttgart and didn't need to be carried up the stairs to our flat on the 6th floor where we lived in at that time. It was great to have it around and we used it a lot on early recordings.
 

My brother Tomasz was then made to play classical music on that thing for about seven years, and he recorded me playing 'Cricketer' in the living room in Stuttgart (not the same flat) just before it went back to Poland for good, together with my parents.

'Supernaut' is one of those Sabbath tracks that doesn't seem to belong to their obvious classics, but for me it somehow earned itself a special place in their canon. Tomasz sent me the drums recorded in his cellar studio/rehearsal space and I added all the rest at home."

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Elfin Bow and Gary Lloyd – Who Knows Where The Time Goes (7")

LOVE this record! Late contender for single of the year!

Never a label to do things by the book, Fruits de Mer Records release this 7” single on the final day of the year. Quite fitting given the record's title track and the fact that the year has (for me anyway) flown by. I've written about Elfin Bow before. Her delightful debut album was self-released in 2017 and is well worth tracking down. Blessed with a beautiful voice and great songwriting skills, it turns out she's also a fine interpreter of other people's songs. For this version of Sandy Denny's 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' she's collaborated with composer and producer Gary Lloyd and is backed by the Scottish Session Orchestra, an amazing ensemble of hand-picked principals from Scotland's top orchestras.

It makes my list as one of the finest 7” singles released this year. A sublime reading of a classic song. No surprises, no bells and whistles, simply a beautiful song, sympathetically performed and with a vocal and arrangement that gets right to the song's emotional core. The B-side is awesome too, a re-working of 'The Wisdom', a track from her eponymous debut album made all the more sumptuous by Gary Lloyd's orchestral arrangement. This single marks Elfin Bow's debut as a FdM artist though on it's strength I'm hoping there will be more records to come. Well done and thanks to all concerned.

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Kris Gietkowski - songs from the first LP by Egg

Polish muti-instrumentalist releases a bizarre but lovely labour of love!

I have to admit I'm not that familiar with the first LP by Egg, being still in nappies when it was released. My earliest musical memories coming a few years later and limited to the glam pop and tartan-clad boy bands prevalent on AM radio at the time. Anyway thanks to the powers of the Internet I've learnt that Egg were a three-piece prog band who signed to Decca in 1969 and released and eponymous debut LP a year later.

Fast forward 47 years and in a bizarre labour of love, Polish multi-instrumentalist Kris Gietkowski has decided to record a full length LP featuring most of the songs from Egg's first LP. Notice that that's most and not all, as the press release explains - “it's only 'most of' as one of the tracks would have taken him months to learn and he didn't fancy the ten second intro track on the original album.”

Reading that I knew I'd just love this LP, regardless of how it sounded. But anyway it sounds pretty good. A fully instumental album full of jazz-prog organ fugues, proto math-rock and quasi-classical passages in what I'm led to believe is a fairly faithful replica of the original LP. And it comes as a colour-in-colour vinyl LP, yellow in white to look like a poached egg. How can any self-respecting vinyl freak not dig that right!?!

Released as a colour-in-colour vinyl LP on April 17th. (300 copies only)

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