Whyte Horses - Hard Times - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Straight from the praries of Kortrijk, WHORSES have buckeld themselves firmly in the sadlle of the Belgian rock scene since they struck their fiorst note, somewhere back in 2017. These four cowboys found each other in a mutual quest for something new. As boundless as their music, WHORSES debuts with an 18-track double album, and although there might be some signs of schizophrenia showing, this true pièce de resistance breaths honesty and pure expression through every pore. WHORSES is a band of extremes, bringing out the roughest and softest in themselves and in everyone who dares to dive into that pool of blunt, deep cutting, ever evolving and limitless sounds.

2020 . Welcome to Hard Times is perhaps even more potent proof of his literal heartbreak than the scar on his chest. After undergoing open heart surgery that saved his life, Charley says he considered calming down for Inchjust a minuteInch but once he recovered he did just the opposite. He states boldly with one eyebrow raised, InchI wanted to make an album that would change the entire conversation about country music.Inch That album is Welcome to Hard Times, an aptly-named collection that perfectly fits these troubled days even though it was made just before the pandemic hit. The music was shaped by his heart issues and producer Mark Neill's desire to make Incha dark gothic country record.Inch Charley certainly knew how to deliver that. InchI think you can hear that deep, dark sadness in this record,Inch he says, Inchbut I think it's the kind of darkness that will uplift others.Inch

Eero Heinonen has long been a champion of the composer's neglected output for piano. With this recording he continues to make the case for music that does not easily give up it's secrets but, in the right hands, sings with Sibelius's unique voice. Sibelius was not himself an accomplished pianist, but he wrote for the instrument - at which he composed - throughout his career, and maintained that, while often overlooked, it's time would come. In recent years his prophecy has come true, especially with the Op.75 suite of five pieces which he composed in 1914 and titled 'The Trees'. They move from a Tchaikovskian melancholy common to much of his earlier piano output, through impressionist studies of light and darkness, to the kind of sombre, dissonant harmonies in the final piece ('The Spruce') which call to mind orchestral masterpieces such as en Saga and Tapiola. Rather than cherry-picking from a considerable output, Eero Heinonen has chosen to present four complete opus numbers which nevertheless encapsulate the range of Sibelius's piano writing. In the Six Impromptus Op.5 of 1890-93 he successfully integrates elements of Finnish folk music within the idiom of fantasy inherited from Schubert and Chopin. The 10 Pieces Op.24 were written between 1895 and 1903 - formative years for the composer, in which he moved away from his German-influenced training and discovered for himself a more distinctively Finnish voice, but in this context still within the genre of salon pieces. These are the works most directly comparable with Grieg's Lyric Pieces. Then, before the Op.75 masterpieces, he wrote a trio of Sonatinas Op.67 in 1912, around the same time as the troubled Fourth Symphony. The first of them, as played here by Eero Heinonen, shares some of the symphony's austere idiom and introvert nature.