SECONDSMILE
Years
(Big Scary Monsters)
CHRISTENE LeDOUX
Dust n' Branches... Songs From A Wanderer
(www.christene
ledoux.com
)
RORY ELLIS
Two Feathers
(Villainous)
THE BLAKES
The Blakes
(Light In The Attic)

THE common link between all of the musicians featured in today's round-up is that they are due to swing through the south of England imminently.

Where Secondsmile are concerned, they are actually coming home. Hailing as they do from Bridport, they have opted to launch their second album Years in the town's vibey Electric Cinema on July 4.

The album in question, recorded in New York with Grammy-nominated producer Andrew Schneider at the helm and mastered by Sterling Sound's resident genius Greg Calbi (Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Ramones, Sonic Youth), is a bit jaw-dropping in the enormity of its remit, its masterful confidence and its substantial, weighty presence.

Heartily sick as the band must be of comparisons with the sadly-missed At The Drive-In, the short-fused El Paso firecrackers would have felt very much at home with Secondsmile's minor-chord intensity and well-deployed bursts of incandescent release.

I was also pleasingly reminded of Jeff Buckley in the hushed, quasi-religious ethereality of Good Night, Sleep Tight, the convoluted time signature of Aspen Fears and the epic sweep of the six minute-plus Soundtrack To Your Life.

There's some terrific guitar playing on here also, distinctive and thoughtful - the wide-interval hammer-ons of Smokestacks and Long Road Home, the dropped-D tuning of the title track, the fingerpicking of Halfman and the evocatively Nick Drake-ish To The Sea.

On this evidence, they can return home with their heads held high - and they deserve a heroes' welcome.

The next road warrior in today's pile lives the kind of charmed life that makes you feel like there just might be a benevolent God up there somewhere, as opposed to the vengeful spanner-chucker who you tend to blame for every obstacle that gets placed directly in your path.

Folksy singer/songwriter Christine LeDoux is based in Austin, Texas and Innsbruck in Austria, either of which would suit me fine, I should imagine. You'll find her at the Rondo Theatre in Bath tomorrow evening, and I strongly suggest that you do just that because, well, she's just brilliant.

What a truly beguiling voice. I put on Dust N' Branches... Songs From A Wanderer when I got home from work yesterday and didn't realise I was swooning until I fell right over on to my face. I was still captivated, though. "Ouch..." I muttered distractedly.

I mean, it's not as though she's a high octane, million-decibel belter - quite the reverse, in fact - but she could melt the walls of the strongest fortifications with the warmth of that voice. In all honesty, I can't even point you towards an album highlight because the minute you put this on, its quiet, delicate, enveloping surfaces engender a complete mood that you won't want to interrupt until the album is finished.

If the toast catches fire behind you, you'll stoically let the house crumble into ashes around you before you even consider pressing "eject".

The great Australian singer/songwriter Rory Ellis - who you'll find at The Brook in Southampton on Tuesday - possesses a beguiling voice of an entirely different stripe. Rory sings with such basso profundo resonance that in the old days some record buyers would have been jumping up to switch the turntable speed to 45rpm, only to discover that they had also voided their bowels in the process.

Rory's new album Two Feathers is, not surprisingly, superb - so thoroughly suffused with rootsy character, downhome integrity and proper old-school humanity that it's like listening in sepia to an altogether better and more dignified world. From the sawing country blues of Bringing Daddy Home to the brooding, ruminative acoustica of the title track it's a piece of work alright, setting the film reels in your mind flickering into life and unrolling an endless highway vista before your subconsciousness.

Also blowing through the south as we speak are Seattle noise pop trio The Blakes, due to support The Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth tomorrow.

I was charmed by their debut album straight away when opening track Two Times nonchalantly borrowed Argent's time-honoured Hold Your Head Up riff while vocalist/guitarist Garnet Keim threws up his lungs over the top. I was further charmed by the second verse, wherein Keim layered the time-honoured Riverboat Song riff into the mix, then threw up his trachea over the top.

Elsewhere, their offhand drawl and fondness for direct, straight-from-the-hip riffing calls to mind Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, but The Blakes are a considerably less stodgy proposition. Run and Streets even sound as though Joey Ramone was the vocal coach, which is never a bad thing.