Victoria Hart - Whatever Happened To Romance?

Never mind romance, whatever happened to careers that took a while to get going? At the end of May Victoria Hart was a waitress in a London restaurant, earning £6-an-hour and utterly anonymous. Now, in early July, she has her debut album out and is resolutely famous. She was plucked from this obscurity by George Clooney of all people, who heard her singing after her shift at the restaurant and hired her to sing on his yacht at the Cannes festival party for Ocean's 13, in front of the likes of himself and Brad Pitt. Needless to say, this brought plenty of attention and with attention comes the possibility for a record company to make a quick buck (by the way, Paul Potts has his debut album coming out soon too, unsurprisingly), so by the middle of last month she was signing a SIX-album deal on the same day as handing in her notice at her old job and just three weeks later the first of those albums is flying out onto the shelves. They don't hang around do they? But how does it sound? Well, the initial hype around her is of an old-fashioned performer, full of 1940s glamour and romance, and the title track certainly evokes those kind of themes, which is great for those of us who love music from that era. Unfortunately it doensn't stand up across the rest of the record, with the old-timey flavour making way for a more generic pop-jazz feel, leaving Hart too often coming across as just another Katie Melua. A Girl Like Me (co-written by her) is better, with a swinging brass section giving the song plenty of kick and colour, but producer and main songwriter Geoff Gurd (Hart's version of Melua's Mike Batt) too often plays it safe with her talents, rather than stretching them to come up with something different to what's already out there, which is what it seemed was being promised. However, Hart's voice is smooth and soulful enough to paper over the cracks, with hints of Ella and Billie at times, while the cover of Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks is surprisingly good and both Wonderful and Not My Fault have that swinging feel to them. It's definitely the upbeat jazzy numbers that work best here, so hopefully when Hart and Gurd come around to that second album and have more than a fortnight to make it, they'll be able to come up with something a bit more cohesive and consistent than this debut release, which has promise but doesn't always deliver on it.

Nick Drake - Family Tree

Nick Drake, along with the likes of Jeff Buckley, is one of those artists whose early death prevented them from ever being as popular in their lives as they are now. Indeed, Drake sold more albums in the month after Pink Moon was featured in a car advert in America in 2000 than than he had in the previous thirty years. So, when someone dies early and leaves only a limited collection of music released in their lifetimes, you will always get cash-in albums brought out to market the music that never did get released. Family Tree is the first official collection of home recordings by Drake and his family from the 1960s, which have already been the subject of plenty of bootlegs. As you'd expect from songs that were just recorded at home mostly, the 28 tracks on Family Tree are far from polished or spectacular, but they are still relevant and interesting, even those that last less than a minute, or those that are just unusual, like Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio, which features his sister Gabrielle and mother Molly, with Drake playing the clarinet. Gabrielle (who has since become an actress) joins him on one track, while Molly performs two songs on her own, which might sound like something only a very devoted Drake fan would want to hear, but they're quite nice in their own right. Of course, it's Drake himself that we want to hear, and Family Tree presents him at his most organic, covering songs by people who influenced him, like Dave van Ronk, Bob Dylan and Bert Jansch, as well as trying out his own compositions and early versions of tracks that would make it onto his proper albums. The fact that Drake is the kind of artist whose actual releases weren't exactly Wall Of Sound productions means that even the most lo-fi of the music on here doesn't really sound that bad, while some of them could easily be official recordings. 28 tracks of home demos might seem like a bit much for casual fans, but the truth is that Family Tree is a very listenable album, while many of the songs aren't really that long, making it a very worthy purchase for anyone with an interest in Nick Drake, and an essential one for his hardcore fanbase.

Luke Toms - The Forever House

We've already had one Freddie Mercury impressionsist hitting the charts this year in the writhing form of Mika, so can we stomach another flambouyant showman apeing the Queen star while mining Elton John's songbook? Well, thankfully, Luke Toms isn't all flash and no heart, unlike Mika, so he doesn't become irritating seconds after you first hear his music. That's not to say that he's not eccentric, because there's probably no-one in the music industry who looks even remotely like him, with his incredible moustache and 1930s fixations, but he doesn't get carried away with it all to the detriment of the songs. They are all slightly OTT, and clearly influenced by prog rock as much as the likes of Elton John and David Bowie (who he quite often vocally resembles, particularly on early single Fools With Money). The almost constant orchestral swirl around the songs certainly shows that he is not averse to seeming 'uncool' at the expense of creating pretty songs. One problem that The Forever House has is that it's a bit too samey, with almost all of the tracks fitting into the description of slightly camp ballads with 'everything plus the kitchen sink' production values, and that means that as a whole, the album suffers slightly from a lack of variety, with most of the songs blurring into one. It's still a heck of a lot more palatable than Mika, of course, and Toms certainly has the legs to outlast him, he just needs to expand his repertoire slightly.