Preorder Michael Chapman’s 50 (Jan. 20, 2017 release date):
$9.00 – $31.00
Other ways to purchase this release: Bandcamp (LP/CD/all digital formats) | Digital (MP3/streaming)
The Mallard has landed.
The critical acclaim for Michael Chapman’s magnificent forthcoming album 50 continues with unanimous praise from the UK, including MOJO, Uncut, The Wire, and BBC Radio.
50 earned a 4-star Album of the Month review in MOJO, with a beautiful essay by Andrew Male:
“4/5 stars. Album of the Month (Feb. 2017). Alongside the album’s end-of-days feel there is also a valedictory mood, the sense that, as with Blackstar and You Want it Darker, here is a man closer to the end than the beginning, haunted by memories and auguries, and communicating something of their uncanny twilight power.”
Pick up the February issue to read the whole thing.
Likewise Uncut contributed a lead review and feature to the record.
8/10 (Lead Review). 50 is a finely tuned piece that surveys the looming thunderclouds of mortality and the biblical gloom of the times, and —quietly, unshowily—transcends both… the downhill trudge of declining years reimagined as a stately victory parade. Vindication here we come.
– Jim Wirth, Uncut
4 stars. The 75-year old’s voice can render homespun parables as biblical portents, in much the same way that Rick Rubin reinvented Johnny Cash as Nostradamus.
– Spencer Grady, Record Collector
A brilliant collaborator. “Falling from Grace” floats out on a gorgeous cloud of fingerpicking and lap steel… “The Prospector” gets a kind of Crazy Horse treatment from Gunn and his group, Chapman’s verses playing call and response with an equally long, gnarled Zuma-like lead, round and round for seven minute the could be 17.
– Sam Davies, The Wire
Michael recently performed his song “The Mallard” (featured on 50 in a very different full-band version) for BBC Radio. You can watch that here. Marc Riley has been playing the record regularly on his show on BBC 6.
HEAR “THAT TIME OF NIGHT” AND “SOMETIMES YOU JUST DRIVE”: