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A short conversation this morning while we were paraphrasing some of the things Sebastian "says":

Hey Elvis!
Yeah, Helga?
Elk needs food badly...

Abbe May is a singer, guitarist and songwriter from Perth, Australia. I first saw her here in Canberra when she was featured in Deborah Conway's Broad Festival in 2007. If you haven't seen or heard Abbe May before there are also a couple of RocKwiz TV performances that are definitely worth watching (these are the solo performances - the duets are also well worth a look). Howl & Moan is Abbe May's debut album released in 2008. It features her band The Rockin' Pneumonia playing a range of roots-based rock tracks, predominantly quite heavy, grunge-inspired blues-rock.

This album opens with the title track Howl & Moan, a very solid blues-rocker that starts the album nicely. This is followed by the rockabilly inspired You Gonna Get It. Neither of these songs hang around for very long. In fact the longest track on the album is a little more than 3:30, with several around 2:30 or less.

We'll Take A Trip Up The Country follows and we hear Abbe May doing slightly heavy, but fairly standard Australian country music - it's extremely well done. This is followed by one of the rockiest 2 songs on the album Costanza, a song of love gone wrong that proclaims "I can't stand ya no more". Yes, the title is a play on a Seinfeld episode. The contrast between these 2 tracks is well done... and this effect is used throughout the album. Half the songs are heavy, with fresh, light songs interspersed between them.

Speaking of which, Ma is a lovely little acoustic guitar and voice interlude that lasts just over a minute and Old River is a short, slow blues featuring both whistle and guitar solos. Many songwriters have tendency to try and turn a good, short snippet into a longer, but weaker, though hopefully more radio-friendly song. Abbe May doesn't suffer from this problem - she recognises that some things are better left simple and often just gives you a minute or 2 of something special...

The stand-out track on this album is A Blackout In Your Town. It starts as a slow acoustic-based blues, introduces drums and dirty guitar, and then just simmers for a few minutes. A great combination of alternating restraint and freight train blues-rock.

Storm has Abbe May playing ukelele in a folk-country setting, and whistling an outro that finishes the song nicely. Sidesteppin' is a sub 2 minute acoustic track, with another whistling solo that meanders to its logical conclusion. You don't hear whistling much in modern music... :-)

Howl & Moan closes aptly with another nice, heavy blues-rocker Lay Me Down.

This album is over before you know it, partly because it is very short (27:27), especially by modern standards, and also because it rocks along at a good pace. That said, I much prefer a good, tight album that one that has been extended out using filler. I've mentioned that many of the tracks are short and I think this a feature, especially because the arrangements are quite simple and, therefore, they might labour in extended studio versions. That said, I could imagine some of these songs turning into extended jams in a live setting.

The title of the album does a good job of describing Abbe May's voice. In the ballads it can be just a plaintive moan and at other times it is like a freight train. While listening to Howl & Moan a couple of weeks ago a friend wondered whether we were listening to Janis Joplin or PJ Harvey. There are similarities with both of these performers, though Abbe May's voice is more locomotive than Joplin's jet engine, and she's more rootsy than Harvey's indie.

This is an excellent album that leaves me wanting to hear much more from Abbe May.

My introduction to Even came via some performances by singer-songwriter-guitarist Ashley Naylor on SBS's RocKwiz. I found his solo performance very entertaining but when the first couple of lines of Get Off My Cloud came out of his mouth I was stunned. It was just so clear that Naylor "got" the song - he's obviously a big fan of music. So I went searching for some of Even's albums.

This self-titled album released in 2007 opens with I Am The Light, which is reminiscent of a psychedelic-era Beatles pop-rock track. However, like many of the songs on this album, it isn't that simple. There are influences from a lot of music, particularly from the late 1960s and the 1970s, and all of these these influences are infused into the music.

I'll skip through the tracks a bit because if I rave about every song then this is likely to get boring very quickly... :-)

I Walk On features an excellent guitar riff, vocal harmonies, and nice variation between verse and chorus. Superstition Blues features harmonica and slide guitar. It sounds like US southern rock played by a late-1960s British blues-rock band.

It is hard to pick favourites on this album, but one of mine is Which Way To Run, featuring wonderful playing by the whole band and some Wurlitzer piano contributed by one of the album's many guests. It is one of the album's bigger songs. For contrast this is followed by the acoustic and steel guitar based The Fool Who Made You Sad. I can't tell if this is a perfectly executed country song or if it is a perfectly executed spoof of a country song - I don't know enough about the band! Whatever the case, it is brilliantly executed.

I also think Tangled Up and the closer Pinnacle are exceptional songs... but then I think this album has no weak songs on it.

The production on Even is stellar. Some of the songs have a lot of guitars but they all occupy their own space and never become overbearing. The big songs have just the right amount of everything. The other thing that is brilliant about this album is Ashley Naylor's guitar playing - he plays rhythm and lead across all of the songs, managing to be continuously interesting and inventive.

I've already mentioned the 1960s and 1970s influences that pervade this album. There are influences from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, Led Zeppelin and many more - I can hear a lot of music I like in there. Other bands like Oasis and Jet have also displayed a combination of similar influences but I think that Even do it in a more straightforward yet interesting way. There's also also a strong indy rock feel to the music, which gives it a slightly more interesting edge.

OK, enough superlatives! Almost. Ashley Naylor and his band are students of rock music who have mastered the art-form. They pay homage yet still manage to play interesting, new music. This is one of the best recent albums that I've heard in a long time. Recently I've listened to this album more than any other... and I heartily recommend it.