Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Various Artists, ISC 2021.
If you enjoy good songwriting and variety then I recommend that you give this album a listen.
Every year the International Songwriting Association hold a contest to determine the best songs of the year.
They draw entries from many different genres and from artists from all over the world, they also include instrumental pieces.
The winners are always announced the following year and the purpose of the album is really to bring these, often unsigned, artists to the notice of the big wheels in the music industry.
Last year’s winning entries have been compiled on this CD and they include a few songs from Australian artists.
Jarred Taylor (Tamworth, NSW) and the Crawford Brothers combined for I Won’t Sleep Tonight, which made a big splash on the country charts last year.
The Crawford Brothers are Newcastle locals and have already achieved considerable success for their pop/rock influenced songs.
Lucy Parle is a 17-year-old Australian singer/songwriter from the NSW central coast and her track Back Up exhibits her love of acoustic textures and honest straight forward lyrics.
Tamsin, at 19 years old, has already sung at venues like the ANZ stadium alongside Delta Goodrem at the Fire Fight concert as well as on SBS with her choir Gamilaraay.
Her song SOS is a beauty with its sparseness and deep synth bass.
The fourteen tracks cover genres as broad as the jazz of Jazzmeia Horn, a jazz luminary from the USA, with her skat song Where Is Freedom to the new age cinematic instrumental, Carriage, from international composer Ahmad Mirmasoumi and on to the Latin beats of Bien Bien from Ania, Peru’s newest urban pop artist.
Her song was created with Majk, a collective of songwriters and producers from Bogota, Columbia.
Rhiannon Hopkins is from England and she says of herself that she mostly writes silly songs about silly men and her song Naked Pictures certainly lives up to that descriptor.
She’s a female version of Tim Minchin and the song is great.
The final song on the disc is from American blues artist Zechariah Lloyd and he’s a real find for blues fans.
Down To The River contains some very classy guitar work with a suitably dirty guitar solo.
