Album reviews roundup: Karine Polwart shows her songwriting strengths on Traces

Published on 13/08/2012 00:00

Karine Polwart: Traces | Spector: Enjoy It While It Lasts | Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes | Dylan LeBlanc: Cast the Same Old Shadow | Wagner: Die Walküre | Béla Fleck and the Marcus Roberts Trio: Across The Imaginary Divide

FOLK

KARINE POLWART: TRACES

HEGRI MUSIC, £12.99

*****

THIS eloquent and at times heart-­stopping album firmly consolidates Karine Polwart’s stature as a songwriter of eminence. Apart from her own confident delivery, these songs are beautifully ­arranged – her core accompanists, ­Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson, being supplemented by keyboards, brass, woodwind and percussion.

In Cover Your Eyes, outrage at Donald Trump’s boorishness prompts a lyrical childhood evocation, with the sly hope that “the haar will stumble in”, while the Occupy movement’s camp at St Paul’s Cathedral in London prompts a fable in King of Birds. The hugely moving We’re All Leaving, co-written with Dave Gunning, emerged from the visionary Darwin Song Project, while I could never have imagined the Mordor-like smokestacks of Grangemouth evoked in such magical terms as in Tinsel Show – “minarets of industry / spinnerets of alchemy”.

I found myself baulking slightly at Half Mile, questioning whether a song dealing with a child’s murder, albeit compassionately (and apparently with the encouragement of the victim’s parents), stirs up too much old heartbreak. Nevertheless, this album shimmers with poetry, humanity and what I can only describe as sheer wonder.

JIM GILCHRIST

POP

Spector: Enjoy It While It Lasts

Fiction Records, £10.99

***

SPECTOR frontman Fred MacPherson – a veteran of several failed guitar bands – makes a note to self with the title of his latest group’s debut album, exhibiting a sense of humour which will see him through when Spector are no longer the toast of the indie disco with their perky throwaway headbanger Chevy Thunder. MacPherson is fonder than the average fop of cars and automobile imagery, but the indie boy angst, when it does set in, is playful and knowing – Upset Boulevard asserts “true romantics sleep alone” – but overall there is more of a drive towards Killers-style bluster. God help us if they ever get the budget to realise their overblown ambitions.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes

4AD, £11.99

****

SOME background on DIY pop maestro Ariel Pink: he wishes he was taller, has a side-project called Klu Klux Glam and has written a 15-minute post-9/11 odyssey called Witchhunt Suite For WWIII. So you might think twice before accepting his jabbered offer to “step into my timewarp.” But there are rewards for those who enter Ariel world. Mature Themes, his second, marginally more hi-fi album, since signing to 4AD, features his usual surfeit of sonic ideas lashed together like a fever dream with an extra dash of weird. Like fellow prolific minstrel Stephin Merritt, he exhibits a love of bubblegum pop and lo-fi synth pop on several tracks, while the chiming Byrdsian single Only In My Dreams and smoochy cover of the rapturous Donnie and Joe Emerson number Baby are irresistible.

Dylan LeBlanc: Cast the Same Old Shadow

Rough Trade, £11.99

****

DYLAN LeBlanc is an old head on young shoulders who grew up around the talented session players at the famous Muscle Shoals Studios in his native Alabama. Since arriving fully formed in 2010 with his gentle country soul debut Pauper’s Field, he has taken an even more easy listening direction. Cast The Same Old Shadow is awash with the languid twang of pedal steel, sultry sigh of strings, occasional celestial coo of female backing vocals and his own heavy-lidded country crooning, which is, by turns, soporific, soothing and sensual.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Wagner: Die Walküre

Hallé, £29.99 (5CDs)

*****

SIR Mark Elder’s acknowledged prowess in the world of opera is fully ignited in this latest of the Wagner Ring opera recordings, which he is stacking up with his own Hallé Orchestra and a clutch of Wagnerian singers equally up to the task. In this scorching Die Walküre, Stig Andersen and Yvonne Howard bring a fiery potency to Siegmund and Sieglinde, matched by Clive Bayley’s unyieldingly fearsome Hunding. In Susan Bullock, the casting of Brünnhilde is little short of perfection. Without the glacial backing of the Hallé and Elder’s cool and crisp handling of the score, however, the impact would not be so feverishly gripping.

KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ

Béla Fleck and the Marcus Roberts Trio: Across The Imaginary Divide

Rounder, £12.99

***

WHAT looks an unlikely partnership was born in a late-night jam session at the Savannah Jazz Festival, when banjo wizard Béla Fleck sat in with pianist Marcus Roberts and his trio. They enjoyed the experience, and subsequently set about writing new music specifically for this recording – an indication of how seriously they took the collaboration, and the possibilities they saw within it for doing something new. Both are known for working across genre constraints in any case (especially the omnivorous Fleck), and the 12 tunes here explore an intriguing range of possibilities not only for the two principals, but also bass player Rodney Jordan and drummer Jason Marsalis. Jazz of various stylistic shades, bluegrass, gospel, blues, Latin and African music all feed into the mix, to be re-shaped and dispatched with scintillating individual virtuosity and intricate group interplay.

KENNY MATHIESON