Word review
Thursday, 14th January 2010
DANNY & THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLDStreets of Our TimeUplifting uproar from Danny Wilson and his band of conscripts.Some albums harbor no greater ambition than to help you hear the beat of your own heart a little more clearly. Danny Wilson makes tremendously human music, the open-throated melodies matching the open-hearted sentiments: Henry The Van, a rolling paean to a knackered tour bus, descends the scales like a VW camper with a dodgy handbrake, while on Wandle Swan Wilson's weather-beaten tones - pitched somewhere between John Hiatt and Neil Young - make the plea to "meet me at the graveyard tomorrow night" sound sweetly noble. Driven by banjo, pedal steel and drums that sound like a Cossack ricocheting through the steppe, it's the kind of music best heard in a small room with a bunch of like-minded souls drinking each other under the carpet, stopping occasionally - as on the sad, circuitous title track - to gaze in the middle distance as the memory of another unfulfilled dream floats past.Graeme Thompson
“there’s always been a sense of a tasteful restraint to the studio albums but unleashed on stage with their raspy vocals and heartland rock and soul, they’re like a power station on steroids.”
“This is a proper old school live album, makes you want to go to a gig”
ROBERT ELMS, BBC LONDON
“songs like This Is Not a Love Song and and Stay True which come at you one after the other; are destined to make ‘new fans’ wonder why these kids aren’t topping the bill at Glastonbury with their magic formula and bittersweet songs.”
THE ROCKING MAGPIE