Album reviews: Love & Money | Errors | Music from the Age of Louis XV | Lau

Published on 01/10/2012 00:00

IN THE same week that Deacon Blue release comeback album The Hipsters, their Scotpop contemporaries Love & Money break an even longer silence with their first new album in 20 years.

Love & Money: The Devil’s Debt

Vertical Records, £12.99

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The Devil’s Debt spans the gap comfortably – tracks such as This Is The Last Time and Sin Of Pity are originally of late 1980s vintage and lose little of that essence in translation. Elsewhere, their painstakingly produced Caledonian take on the sounds of Memphis and Nashville is garnished with nice arrangement touches such as heady strings on Piglet and tremulous Crosby, Stills & Nash-style harmonies from Monica Queen on Modigliani Baby.

Errors: New Relics

Rock Action, £8.99

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INDUSTRIOUS electro trio Errors pass comment – in a largely instrumental kind of way – on how quickly new technology becomes old technology by releasing their second album of the year on VHS (as well as the usual viable formats). New Relics finds the band on less playful form, floating on a sea of ambient synthscapes which are neither as rhythm-driven nor hook-laden as their earlier album, Have Some Faith In Magic. Over the course of a nicely crafted half-hour, the stately Grangehaven stands out among the spacey shoegazey wash and aqueous minimal electronica with its subtle dusting of early 1980s Eurosynth influences and fragrant Oriental flourishes.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Music from the Age of Louis XV

Delphian, £13.99

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BESIDES the stylish flamboyance of John Kitchen’s performances, the other big star in this recording of music from the age of Louis XV is the fruity and wholesome Pascal Taskin harpsichord, built in Paris in 1769 and now proudly housed in Edinburgh University’s Russell Collection at St Cecilia’s Hall. It’s weighty sonority is perfect for music written in France when the harpsichord was at the height of its popularity – a souped-up high-performance vehicle for the dashing music of François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Antonine Forqueray and the lesser-known Jaques Duphly, all of whom feature on this meaty disc. Kitchen captures their magnetic essence with interpretations driven by supple and characterful phrasing, and a lively feel for keyboard ornamentation.

KEN WALTON

FOLK

Lau: Race The Loser

Reveal Records, £10.99

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FANS of the powerful contemporary folk trio’s often hectic live sets may be puzzled by this intriguing but not entirely satisfying offering, which finds fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, accordionist Martin Green and guitarist-singer Kris Drever working with US producer Tucker Martine to further explore tone and texture and at times sound positively orchestral.

Some tracks, such as Beer Engineer, meander pleasantly along like programme music. Far From Portland drifts through electronic effects to sound jauntily over the syncopated wheeze of Green’s bellows, while the brief Missing Pieces sounds like a telephone holding signal. There is real drama, however, in Save the Bees, the accordion burbling like a Hammond organ as the fiddle whips up the tension, while Torsa works itself into a nice ringing of Scandinavian-sounding strings.

Drever’s song The Bird That Winds the Spring is winsome and haunting, if enigmatic (no edification in the minimally informative sleeve insert), beguilingly couched in background hand-clapping and a lyrical fiddle hook.

JIM GILCHRIST

JAZZ

Ivo Neame: Yatra

Edition Records, £12.99

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THE pianist follows his earlier quartet release on this label with a more ambitious undertaking, an Octet featuring a number of the brighter new talents on the London jazz scene. Neame has already demonstrated that he is a very resourceful composer, and the expanded instrumentation allows plenty of scope for experiment with sound and texture. He augments the four reed players – Jason Yarde, Shabaka Hutchings, Tori Freestone and Jon Shenoy – with his own occasional contributions on clarinet and alto saxophone, underpinned by his inventive piano (and accordion) work and Jim Hart’s fine vibes playing. Bassist Jasper Høiby (Neame’s bandmate in Phronesis) and drummer Dave Hamblett complete a strong unit. The pianist’s colourful and intricately developed music is bold in execution and often cinematic in scope, utilising the resources of the band in notably interactive fashion.

KENNY MATHIESON

WORLD

The Rough Guide to Highlife

Rough Guides, £8.99

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HIGHLIFE was one of the few African musics to percolate through to London in the 1950s, which is when I first heard it, and, as I haven’t heard it since, this CD is a pleasant trip down memory lane. What struck me then, and does so even more now, is its relaxed and irrepressible cheerfulness. The excellent liner note accompanying this CD (why doesn’t the writer get a credit?) sets the genre in context, and incidentally explains why I came across it when I did: it was brought back to London on the 78s (of which I had two) by people who had heard it in the colonial context, as this was the music the embassy types danced to, and they gave it its title. But its origins lay in Ghana and Sierra Leone in the early 20th century, where it was born out of a fusion of American jazz and “palmwine” music. Palmwine was typically performed in open-air backyard sessions where the musicians swapped stories and drank fermented palm sap; its sound was dominated by voice and acoustic guitar, and one of its most celebrated exponents, Koo Nimu, demonstrates its appeal with his song Se Wo Nom Me (Tsetse fly, you suck my blood).

A recent, much more celebrated exponent, was the great Fela Kuti, who opens this CD: his highlife days were the foundation for his later Afrobeat success. And indeed, highlife has been the foundation for much of what is now known as Ghanaian music: it was the soundtrack for independence, and when its bands hit hard economic times in the 1970s it migrated into the churches, where gospel-highlife became a huge craze.

MICHAEL CHURCH