Kate Prascher – Jubilee
A warm, truthful voice, along with a strong handshake and direct, friendly eye contact, are things that may get you far in life. And if you don’t possess this kind of honesty, it can be faked- no worries. There are millions of courses and hundreds of gurus willing to take your money and train you in the art of appearing truthful.
These people must have a lot of singers and songwriters as clients because the same kind of strategy is used across pop music nowadays. When it isn’t, it’s hard not to tell the difference. When someone is actually making an effort to say the truth in song and when they arrive at their sound through an honest approach, it’s hard to forget the interaction.
There’s just something about Kate Prascher’s singing voice that makes you want to try and ring her up and ask whether she wouldn’t mind lending you her diary. It’s a wonderfully soulful and rich tone that drives “Jubilee” into a kind of dream world. But it’s Prascher’s observations and the incandescence of the love affairs she only hints at that make this a song worth returning to like the company of an old friend that always tells you the truth.
Zan Lipinski – Gumtree
The best minds of this generation are still getting destroyed by madness and starved of proper excitement; for the most part, they’re just getting bored with all the cross that they have to bear, and they were told a long time ago by their parents or their teachers that would, eventually, turn them into someone special whose words would be rewarded with gold and pictures on the evening news.
The smartest people would like to be the first line to book flights to an island where the internet connection is bad and where everybody speaks a different language from everyone else and communication is done through sign language and grunting. But the smartest people can’t stop their minds from spinning around the same ideas for one moment.
Zan Lipinski’s done his best, and look where this got him? It made him write a truly inspired, funny and heartbreaking modern folk song, “Gumtree,” that in another era would force me as a music reviewer, inevitably, to compare him to Bob Dylan. And, while Lipinski admits to wanting to trade in his sanity for a glass of red wine, he must surely know that the wheels must keep spinning and that there’s plenty more work to be done, especially when you happen to possess this kind of talent.
