MANY have sung of the healing power of music, but Brian Wilson must be the most dramatic embodiment of its rehabilitating properties. As little as a decade ago, the Beach Boys founder was regarded as a lost cause, the fragile genius who had fallen vi
ctim to mental illness and destructive influences at the peak of his creative powers and was considered too damaged to face his adoring public again.
But instead, with the nurturing love of his wife and a new band, Wilson has completely turned around his fortunes, leapfrogging from almost total musical blackout to what he describes as a "creative explosion" in the last few years, touring more and more ambitious projects to rapturous reception and, most impressively, completing his song cycle Smile, a task that had sent him over the edge 40 years ago, but that is now his great lost album no more.
Following this triumph, Wilson has expressed a desire to write something more commercial. While his 21st century output has consisted so far of raiding the archives, That Lucky Old Sun comprises almost exclusively new material, which was debuted live last year at the Royal Festival Hall. Inspired by the old standard of the same name and sticking with the concept-album format, Wilson has composed what has been described as a "love letter from southern California," in collaboration with his longtime musical foil Van Dyke Parks and his band member Scott Bennett.
Parks provides the occasionally florid spoken word interludes, which are recited by Wilson, Bennett channels the Brian Wilson experience to create a rather clichéd lyrical narrative that is equal parts abstraction and autobiography, while Wilson himself is responsible for a soundtrack that could be regarded as sophisticated, if judging by standards other than Wilson's.
There is an overall nostalgic haze to the work, which chimes cosily with Wilson's return (like Glen Campbell) to Capitol Records, whose iconic "record stack" building remains a romantic Los Angeles landmark. The Beach Boys recorded there in the early 60s and it is this wholesome era that Wilson has set out to capture.
Following a characteristic opening featuring gorgeous interwoven harmonies and Wilson's strained, vulnerable rendition of the title track, he moves into Morning Beat, a sunrise symphony that presents a rose-tinted evocation of rush hour in the city in which he has lived his entire life.
California Role paints his home, as so many have before, as a playground of opportunities ("every girl, the next Marilyn, every guy, Errol Flynn") which, despite its anachronistic – and misleading – message, might strike an optimistic chord with a USA facing a potentially historic regime change.
Everything about That Lucky Old Sun is comfortably familiar to Wilson, as it will be to his fans. Live Let Live has the doowop swing of Sail On Sailor. Forever My Surfer Girl is blatantly self-referential, as is the closing Southern California, on which Wilson relates that "I had this dream, singing with my brothers, in harmony, supporting each other". However, it feels a little unfair to call out Wilson for continuing to mine territory that he initially pioneered.
When he moves across the border for Mexican Girl, he runs into musical trouble, producing the most trite track yet, stuffed with predictable bursts of mariachi trumpet, snatches of Spanish language and guitar and a token tequila reference. Hopefully, it is intended to be that silly.
At times, the bloated production is far from pretty. Goin' Home is only salvaged by the trademark celestial harmonies. In contrast, Can't Wait Too Long – an excerpt of a track originally composed in the late 60s for Smile – is a too-fleeting masterclass in swooning falsetto male harmonies in the style of Wilson's beloved Four Freshmen.
However, there is one new track that many agree is premium Wilson. Midnight's Another Day is a luscious, swelling piano ballad, which swims in dark autobiographical waters before finding its way to the surface. "All these voices, all these memories, make me feel like stone, all these people, they make me feel so alone, lost in the dark, no shades of grey, until I found midnight's another day," sings Wilson, with great pathos. He reiterates similar sentiments in Goin' Home: "At 25 I turned out the light cos I couldn't handle the glare in my tired eyes, but now I'm back, drawing shades of kind blue skies."
This is heartwarming but patchy stuff that elicits an ambivalent response. Wilson's emotional health will only improve if he continues to make music, while his pristine legacy may suffer if he maintains this derivative form. Listening to this unabashed blast from the past, I guess Wilson really wasn't made for these times.
ALSO RELEASEDPOP
BLOC PARTY: INTIMACY **
WICHITA, £12.99 FOLLOWING in Radiohead's wake, Bloc Party are the latest lot to sneak an album out with barely a squeak of forewarning. Intimacy, their third album, will be available on CD at the end of October, but it can be downloaded right now, jumping out the traps with a flea in its ear about something or other. This terribly serious quartet have always been a band to make the right sounds – in this case, loud, clattering drums, urgent, distorted guitar and Kele Okereke's strangled voice – without ever threatening to actually produce a decent song. Current single Mercury, for example, is a clamouring mess, which sounds more like a remix than a tune. Superficially, this is their "experimental" album, but the likes of the quasi-classical choir on Zephyrus has already been utilised with more success by Biffy Clyro. Only Better Than Heaven, with its heavy electro funk climax, is worth an ounce of your faith.
JAMES YORKSTON: WHEN THE HAAR ROLLS IN ****
DOMINO, £10.99 IS THIS really only James Yorkston's fourth album? His mesmeric music has created such a blueprint for indie folk singer/songwriters that it feels as if he has been producing his gentle, sad, quirky yarns for decades. By his stripped-down standards, When The Haar Rolls In is a feast of sounds, featuring vibraphone, timpani, bouzoukis and, not least, a bewitching mix of voices, including the wonderful Norma Waterson and others of her clan. If that's not enough, the album also comes in a limited box set edition with extra CDs featuring Yorkston songs remixed and covered by other artists and, for one lucky recipient, the chance to have a song written especially for them.
LITTLE JACKIE: THE STOOP ***
PARLOPHONE, £10.99 NATIVE New Yorker Imani Coppola released her audacious debut album ten years ago but her career failed to catch fire. Now she has teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Adam Pallin for her latest major label incursion as Little Jackie. The Stoop is a bright summer record that mixes the old-school sunny Motown sound with some of Outkast's pop quirks, while dissecting neighbourhood and nationwide culture with playful lyrical bite.
FIONA SHEPHERDCLASSICAL
PALLADIANS: THE DEVIL'S TRILL ***
LINN, £13.99 DON'T be put off by the Palladians' opening performance on this disc of Tartini's sonata The Devil's Trill, which takes the "affetuoso" in the first movement title to almost queasy extremes. For elsewhere, not least in the same composer's G minor sonata Didone abbandonata, this stylish baroque ensemble – Rodolfo Richter on violin, Susanne Heinrich on viola da gamba, Silas Standish on harpsichord and William Carter on lute – makes amends with playing that captures the sensual element of the Italian baroque without pulling it out of shape.
Indeed, when it comes to Francesco Maria Veracini's A major sonata, the performances are to die for – lean and clean, but softened with a genuine flair for the stylistic latitudes of the time.
DEBUSSY: PRELUDES POUR PIANO, LIVRES 1 ET 2 ***
PARATY, £13.99 THE order of performance may be individually set out, but there is much in American pianist Ivan Ilic's performances of Debussy's Book 1 and 2 Preludes to draw fresh responses from such well-known works. The clarity in his playing, and minimal use of pedal, gives sharp definition where others prefer a more reverberant haze. If that occasionally robs the more ephemeral Preludes of saturated warmth, the reverse is also true of such character pieces as General Lavine – eccentric, where Ilic's personality is at its most decisive.
KENNETH WALTONJAZZ
DONALD HARRISON: THE CHOSEN ***
NAGEL HEYER, £13.99 ALTO saxophonist Donald Harrison was one of the so-called Young Lions who emerged in the wake of Wynton Marsalis in the neo-bop resurgence of the 1980s. He has continued to mine that vein in assured and inventive fashion over the ensuing decades, and this latest collection brings together his love of classic bop with the older tradition of his native New Orleans.
A sparkling account of Coltrane's Mr PC sets the tone for a strong selection that mixes standards and classic jazz tunes with half a dozen of Harrison's own compositions, two of which feature four New Orleans parade drummers. He is accompanied by a core rhythm section of Victor Gould on piano, Max Moran on bass and drummer Joseph Dyson Jr, in an album that covers familiar ground, but does so in fresh and enjoyable style.
FOLK
THE DUPLETS: TREE OF STRINGS ***
POND CHICKEN MUSIC, £13.99 THE Duplets are harpists Fraya Thomsen and Gillian Fleetwood, both originally from Inverness. They have been attracting a fair bit of attention, and this debut album reveals both considerable facility and a pleasing musicality in their playing.
Their attractive instrumental sets combine revivals of traditional tunes such as O'Neill's March and three Gaelic tunes from the Angus Fraser Collection (one is the album's title track, Croabh nan Teud / Tree of Strings) with contemporary material, including their own compositions and tunes by pipers Allan MacDonald and Jarleth Henderson.
They call on an expanded ensemble with fiddle, banjo, double bass and drums on some tracks, although their playing arguably comes over most strongly when it is just the harps. The vocal music on the disc is disappointing – their singing is underpowered and not always secure.
KENNY MATHIESONWORLD
KAYHAN KALHOR AND BROOKLYN RIDER – SILENT CITY ***
WORLD VILLAGE, £13.99 THE city explicitly referred to is the Kurdish village of Halabja, which Saddam Hussein half exterminated, but we are meant to take it as meaning all the cities throughout history that have been destroyed, either by human actions or by natural disaster.
The group performing this work has a fascinating provenance, in that they were first brought together by globe-trotting cellist Yo-Yo Ma as part of his Silk Road Project. Kalhor is a virtuoso on the kemancheh spike-fiddle, and spends more of his time in New York than in his native Iran, and he's become a tireless innovator and composer for combinations of Eastern and Western musicians.
With a string quartet plus a percussionist setting off the kemancheh, the sound-world of this work is subtle; its alternation between furious energy and slow-moving harmonic shifts makes for an emotionally powerful hour.
MICHAEL CHURCHThe full article contains 1841 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
