Album reviews: The Pictish Trail | Cuddly Shark | Songs by Hubert Parry | Alasdair MacIlleBhàin/Alasdair Whyte

We roundup the latest album releases

POP

The Pictish Trail: Secret Soundz Vol.2

Available from fencerecords.com

* * * *

JOHNNY Lynch, aka The Pictish Trail, is Fence Records’ label manager – and also the maker of its best-selling album to date, Secret Soundz Vol.1. This follow-up is another mess of DIY wonderment, recorded in a caravan on his adopted home of Eigg for that home-cooked taste you get from a blend of drum machines, analogue keyboards, accordion and, who knows, maybe old coathangers and sticky back plastic. Lynch’s sweet, sorrowful voice binds it all together with a mix of tenderness and vulnerability when he sings of fitting in (or not) on The Handstand Crowd and the death of his mother on the dubby lo-fi electronica lament Wait Until.

Cuddly Shark: The Road To Ugly

Armellodie, £8.99

* * *

BANISH the winter blues with these Glasgow-based purveyors of instinctive, angst-free thrashy pop. Although not rocketing away at quite the helter-skelter pace of previous Cuddly Shark offerings, The Road To Ugly still delivers a spontaneous, no-strings ride. Broken Arm sounds like a slacker take on Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and the jabbering Body Mass Index offers a quirky angle on body image (“she says I’m attractive in the wrong direction”), while country punk number The Devil In You and acoustic lament Local Hero are carried off with a sobriety which tempers the novelty appeal elsewhere.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

From a City Window: Songs by Hubert Parry

Delphian, £13.99

* * * *

HUBERT Parry, to give him the shortened form of his longer aristocratic title and names, has never enjoyed the greatest press. As an establishment figure of the late Victorian age, his compositions have often been dismissed as of less importance than, say, his directorship of the Royal College of Music. Yet there are buckets of treasure among his output, not least these songs, performed variously by three very different singers, all embraced by the no-nonsense accompaniments of pianist Iain Burnside, and recorded in the grandeur of Parry’s childhood pile, Highnam Court in Gloucestershire. Soprano Ailish Tynan, mezzo soprano Susan Bickley and baritone William Dazeley offer clear and affectionate performances, stating strongly the case for Hubert Parry, master song setter of English lyrics.

KEN WALTON

JAZZ

Gilad Atzmon: Songs of the Metropolis

World Village, £12.99

* * *

IF YOU are accustomed to associating the Israeli-born, London-based saxophonist and clarinetist Gilad Atzmon with fiery and frenetic post-bop energy, this album will shift that perspective. It is an evocation, often serene and suffused with nostalgia, for a time when places had their own individual identity, and their own characteristic sound.

Atzmon, accompanied by his Orient House Ensemble, choses seven capital cities, a non-specific location Somewhere in Italy and (slightly incongruously in the context) Scarborough, via an expansive variation on the familiar Scarborough Fair. He paints each in its own shimmering colours and atmosphere. While often languorous and sensuous in these depictions, they take a more urgent approach on Tel Aviv, and the brief Berlin has a raucous, anarchic feel. Buenos Aires is reflected through a breath of tango, Manhattan bustles, Vienna is elegant and Moscow darkly melancholic.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

Alasdair MacIlleBhàin/Alasdair Whyte: Las

Watercolour Music, £13.99

* * * *

AN ATMOSPHERIC drift of electric guitar harmonics and plangent fiddle introduces the passionate singing of Mod-winner Alasdair Whyte. The album title, Las, means to kindle or impassion, and Whyte certainly throws himself into his songs. His delivery, combined with the electric guitar and drums accompaniment at times evoke the anthemic passion of early Runrig, although with additional instrumental eloquence courtesy of Megan Henderson’s fiddle.

These songs, several of them his own, deal largely with traditional themes of love, longing and loss, as in Forcan na Fèille, which nevertheless romps along to a rockabilly drumbeat. At a gentler pace, Chi mi Bhuam is a fond remembrance of his native Mull delivered with great warmth.

Whyte delivers, consistently, straight from the heart, and while things may occasionally get a little drum-heavy, his final track, the catchy Tuathal – it means “widdershins”, more or less – drums and sings itself into a pretty irresistible spin.

JIM GILCHRIST

Alasdair Roberts & Friends: A Wonder Working Stone

Drag City, £11.99

* * * *

MOURNFUL folk minstrel Alasdair Roberts casts off the skeletal sound and solitary nature of some of his previous albums in favour of original songs, talented company and even guitar solos on this thoroughly sociable album. Members of Tattie Toes and Trembling Bells guitarist Ben Reynolds give Bellowhead a run for their money with their vibrant playing, while Roberts makes mischief with the black humour and witty rhymes of The Merry Wake. His quavery tone, generally so well suited to his music, sounds a little puny against some of the meatier arrangements but it is a pleasure to feast on the blues rock guitar, keening violin and Olivia Chaney’s rich guest vocals on Fusion Of Horizons, the colliery brass and Welsh language rap on Song Composed In December and the lusty hoedown of Scandal And Trance with its recommendation to “get over your tiny self”.

FIONA SHEPHERD

WORLD

Rough Guide to Samba

Rough Guides, £8.99

* * * *

WE ALL know about samba these days – but as the liner note to this CD makes clear, there is a lot almost no-one knows about it. Samba’s route via international acceptance to its unchallenged niche as Brazil’s “national rhythm” has been long and tortuous, and began when it surfaced in the favelas in the early years of the 20th century. But performances there were restricted to small audiences, and were often violently suppressed by the police, with the result that it was obliged to retreat into the safety of Candomble religious ceremonies. By the early 1930s, however, it was becoming acceptable in salon society, after leading sambistas had begun to work in silent films and for radio. Meanwhile, coinciding with the arrival of radio in Brazil in 1922, the modernismo movement had begun in Brazilian culture, with the aim of projecting the country’s traditional arts. That campaign was echoed through America’s Good Neighbour Policy as it strove to win hearts and minds as war loomed: this led to Carmen Miranda’s eruption onto American cinema screens. Thus did samba become part of Brazil’s international image, with the Rio Carnival completing the job. I had not realised how many different versions there were of samba: from dance-hall samba to the small-band favela form; from pagode – played on the beach – to boy-band samba; from samba enredo (“scripted samba” that tells a story) to samba Paulista with its Neapolitan overtones. This CD offers a very beguiling selection of voices and styles, beginning with the magnificent sound of Alcione and including such rarities as Samba Chula de Sao Braz, a Bahian group which deploys Bantu vocal and drumming styles. Other highlights include the lazily graceful Marisa Monte, the kittenish Odilara, the mysterious Moyseis Marques, and the cheerfully ungovernable Samba Um. The bonus CD introduces the multi-instrumentalist Ruivao.

MICHAEL CHURCH