Album Review: Sofie Livebrant, "From Here to Here"

The cover art strongly hints at Swedish songbird Sofie Livebrant’s musical talent.

Looking like death warmed up (and in dungarees!), she’s obviously not trying to get by on her looks.

Her songs, created from a template soaked in folk, bluegrass, and Americana—not to mention the lyrical inspirations of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Charles Baudelaire—seem born old.

The high lonesome sound of Alcohol is more like a lost recording from Appalachia than something from present-day IKEA-land. With a voice that evokes comparisons to Alison Krauss and early Joni Mitchell, Livebrant is able to tackle songs from a number of interesting angles.

On the wistful and moving I’m Yours, she trills and pleads, soars and whispers against the gently throbbing instrumental backdrop of country blues guitarist Svante Sjoblom and the heartbreakingly beautiful fiddle of Lisa Rydberg. But looking at the album sleeve again, I'm not sure I want her.

Colin Liddell

Metropolis

3rd June, 2010

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!