★★★★★
Randy Newman is the cranky but loveable uncle everybody ought to have. He says inappropriate things that make the rest of the family cringe, but he has a heart of gold and will tell you the truth when you need to hear it. His songs have that kind of irascible integrity about them. Harps and Angels, his first album of (mostly) new material in nine years, is a most welcome offering by an artist who should visit more often. Over the past 40 years, Newman has become an American institution of sorts...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Randy Newman tends to travel light when he visits these shores, a solitary performer needing little more than a venue with a decent piano to greet his head full of songs and witty anecdotes. A rare exception was this show, filmed for BBC4 in 2008, which finds him taking to the stage of St Luke's Church with the London Symphony Orchestra...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Randy Newman was talking about the relationship between his film music, for which he has won two Oscars and 18 nominations, and his songwriting. "My father, who was not a musician, worshiped his brothers who did (film scoring)," he recalled in a recent NPR interview. "He thought it was the great art form of the century. He kept asking me, no matter what kind of acclaim I got early on for my songs and records, 'When are you gonna do a picture?' It was like that was the pinnacle of music...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2011-06-27
★★★★★
By and large, when Newman makes the journey from his Los Angeles home to the UK for live shows, he's travelling ligh. Rarely is he accompanied by the bands or orchestras heard on his albums, so a second collection of piano-only re-workings of celebrated songs has the air of a concert souvenir...
- www.recordcollectormag.com
2011-05-23
★★★★★
This second Songbook volume puts further works from Randy Newman's career through the solo piano treatment. Newman's music has always been based on a wonderful understanding of sentiment and an ability to affect; whether reaching deep into the emotional banks or serving up humorous insults. His writing doesn't need anything as grand as a band to support his compositions and his voice, paired with a piano, was only ever going to yield spectacular results...
- www.musicomh.com
2011-05-09
★★★★★
Bad news first: Randy Newman's latest has only 30 minutes of new material. Perhaps Nonesuch, his record label, applied pressure to produce something new three years after signing him (his previous Nonesuch effort was the retrospective Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1). Newman has never been prolific, but almost all his work is memorable...
- www.offbeat.com
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Plenty of our greatest composers have had their gloriously romantic music notoriously counterbalanced by completely ill tempers in real life. Randy Newman has as fine a flair for a lovely melody as anyone since Richard Rodgers, but ? fortunately for his fellow misanthropes ? he's never felt the need to privatize his bad will toward man...
- ew.com
2010-08-27
★★★★★
Randy Newman may take his time recording an album, but nobody can fault his sense of timing. It's been 9 years since his last collection, Bad Love, but as befits a man who's at his best when he turns his beady eye on the absurdities and injustices of the world, he releases Harps & Angels just as the planet seems to be going to hell in a handcart.He may be better known for his film soundtrack work these days, but Newman is at his considerable best when penning his satirical vignettes...
- www.musicomh.com
2010-08-23
★★★★★
"Hasn't anybody seen me lately?" As opening line for someone's first studio album of new material in nearly a decade, it begs any number of smart responses. Randy Newman has not been idle since 1999's diffident masterpiece Bad Love...
- www.uncut.co.uk
2010-06-19
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