Thank you for your Music💜 @jam_tako3 @The_Future_Us @Oloye_Coldman @Thinker_Fox @TheTrophyMules @roguefxsynth @Yoyo_xno @rizobalic @survival410 @Lunar__Plexus @TeleyIrons @jodanmusic Vibe Variety🎶 open.spotify.com/playlist/4T…

Ryan Fox - The Ashford Affair It’s fair to say that Kentish singer-songwriter Ryan Fox sounds somewhat unlucky in love. The Ashford Affair - named we presume after Fox’s town of residence - might as well be his Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan’s eviscerating heartbreak album I first came across Fox on social media, as is increasingly the way of all things, in 2022, shortly after I was released from prison. I had spent four and a half years inside, released halfway through my sentence as per the current policy, and when Fox heard about why I was maintaining innocence, he wrote the sublime Allegation. The post-#MeToo nature of this wonderful song attracted a good deal of derision from the parts of social media where young(er) ‘liberal’ women congregate, but Fox proved he was able to deflect the harassment, and stand by his art There are not many artists whose covers beat the originals, but to my ears Fox’s version of Sam Fender’s Will We Talk, released some time before The Ashford Affair, surpasses the original in its purity and desperation for relationships to have more depth. Sinead O Connor ramping up the minimalist desolation in Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U springs to mind The Ashford Affair is a somewhat cracked mirror of the current division between the sexes, delivered in Fox’s plaintive, Robert Wyatt-esque style. Fox’s songs are consistently catchy; the pain on the inside, with a shimmering smile nonetheless. He also has a compulsion to genre-hop, which when the tunes are so effortless, is a lively and fun way to play A highpoint on The Ashford Affair for me is You and Your Bit, Fox snarky about an ex who has seemingly ‘moved on’, reminiscent of Joe Jackson or even Paul McCartney in a bad mood. I Can’t Make You Stay is excellent, like The Beautiful South-go-country, but far more fun than that sounds. Thanks Be To Jack is a wry ode to friendship, and I suspect Jack’s surname might be ‘Daniels’ (but I could be wrong) The album opens with Devil In A Black Dress, lyrically self-explanatory, but riffing off Billy Idol or even Suicide in tone and treatment, a propulsive dirge about the scales falling from infatuated eyes. Tears In The Mirror is terribly sad, like Billy Bragg’s golden years; The Letter and Canterbury Kiss on similar lost love lines. But there is always a silver lining with Ryan Fox, and closer Meet Somebody Tonight is such a proper 80s-style floor-filler I can almost smell the hairspray and Lynx though my laptop screen Music has ever been a cathartic way to process the pain of lost love, or even devotion, and @Thinker_Fox is a low-fi, pure and honest master of it substack.com/@ryanfoxmusic/n…

One doesn't want to believe in crazy conspiracy theories, until it becomes inescapably evident the Zionist billionaires run the country.