Album reviews: Errors | Beth Jeans Houghton | RM Hubbert | Classical | Folk | Jazz | World

Published on Monday 30 January 2012 00:00

Our critics take a look at some of this week’s new releases...

POP - Reviews by Fiona Shepherd

Errors: Have Some Faith In Magic ****

Rock Action, £11.99

GLASWEGIAN trio Errors continue to build on their promise with their third and best album to date. Have Some Faith In Magic is awash with luxurious, glistening synthscapes. The starry-eyed Blank Media could be the love theme from some retro-futuristic Japanese film, Earthscore and Cloud Chamber sound like they have been beamed in from the soundtrack of some neon-lit 80s cop flick, while the trancey techno odyssey Pleasure Palaces recalls the refined club soundtracks of 808 State, and the euphoric electronica of Tusk makes for an irrepressible pop opener. For the first time, vocals are woven into the arrangements but these dreamy incantations add texture rather than definition to this wholly satisfying sound

Beth Jeans Houghton: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose ****

Mute, £10.99

YOUNG Newcastle songstress Beth Jeans Houghton (her real name, apparently) is blessed with a naturally gymnastic voice and a musical sense of adventure. On her debut album, she comes across like a toned-down Florence Welch and a pimped-up Laura Marling, embellishing winsome folk tunes such as Dodecahedron and The Barely Skinny Bone Tree with playfully plucked strings, martial rhythms and subtle male harmony choruses, while the ease with which current single Lilliput shifts up a gear from delicate breathy folk to pastoral pop flourish puts me in mind of fellow female chameleon Alison Goldfrapp. Yet through all these contemporary echoes, Houghton emerges as her own artist, and one with intriguing potential at that.

RM Hubbert: Thirteen Lost & Found ****

Chemikal Underground, £11.99

ACOUSTIC guitarist RM Hubbert has quietly gained a reputation on home turf for his spellbinding instrumental compositions, comprising deft Spanish-style picking and percussive taps on the body of his guitar. So much so that an impressive array of Scottish musicians have lined up to make guest appearances on his new album, which has been produced by Franz frontman and old pal Alex Kapranos. The instantly recognisable voices of Aidan Moffat and Alasdair Roberts are far from unwelcome but tend to overshadow Hubbert’s playing on their contributions. Emma Pollock, however, sounds as heady and slinky as her accompanist on the alluring, enigmatic torch song Half Light.

CLASSICAL - Review by Kenneth Walton

Mozart: Keyboard Music Vol 3 *****

Harmonia Mundi, £13.99

KRISTIAN Bezuidenhout plays Mozart on the fortepiano like no-one else. Here he performs an assortment of solo works – the B flat and F major Sonatas, the Fantasia in C minor and the variations Ein Weib ist das herrlichste Ding – with all the sensitivity, expressivity, flair and stylistic integrity that has marked him out as a supreme master of the early keyboard. None of the fragility or superficiality that so often lets fortepiano recordings down is present. Instead the tone is vibrant, the music thoroughly engaging, and the genius of Mozart is brilliantly and eloquently served.

FOLK - Review by Jim Gilchrist

Miranda Sykes & Rex Preston: Miranda Sykes and Rex Preston ***

Hands On Music, £12.99

A SWEET-sounding debut album as Miranda Sykes – best known as double-bassist with the widely popular outfit Show of Hands – shows herself to have a light, limber voice that she deploys in duet with mandolin wizard (and occasional singer) Rex Preston, with whom she also plays in the string band the Scoville Units.

They cover almost entirely contemporary material here, such as an anthemic delivery of Kate Rusby’s Old Man Time. There are occasional lapses towards blandness – Love is not a Flower sung by Preston for instance, but these are largely convincing interpretations, with nice contrast between the brightly ringing and woodily resonant tones of mandolin and double bass.

Interestingly, it’s the edgier songs that come over best, like their slick, stealthily accompanied cover of Karine Polwart’s Only One Way and the snappily stirred-up Trouble, both featuring dexterous mandolin work.

JAZZ - Review by Kenny Mathieson

Zoe Rahman: Kindred Spirits ****

Manushi Records, £13.99

THERE is nothing unusual in finding musicians exploring multicultural influences these days, but this exceptional English pianist has an intriguing mixture to draw on within her family lineage alone, encapsulated here in Forbiddance and Imagination, based on works by Rabindranath Tagore, and the Irish tune Butlers of Glen Avenue (her father is Bengali, and her mother is English of Irish extraction). Stevie Wonder’s Contusion adds another cultural reference, but there is never any doubt that Rahman is very much a contemporary jazz musician – albeit with a wide frame of reference – and a very gifted improviser as well as composer. This is a further impressive confirmation of her growing stature, built around the central core of a piano trio with Oli Hayhurst and Gene Calderazzo, but with assured contributions from her brother, clarinetist Idris Rahman, and a guest slot for Courtney Pine playing alto flute on Conversation with Nellie.

WORLD - Review by Michael Church

The Rough Guide to the Music of Morocco ***

RGNET, £8.99

THE Compagnies Musicales de Tafilelt start their track with the sound of their leader Charif El Hamri’s mandol – softer in tone than our mandolin, and more delicately evocative – before breaking into antiphonal chant: this music comes from the deserts of southern Morocco, and dates back many centuries. The music of Maalem Said and Gnawa Allstars may be coarser-grained, but it goes just as far back and derives from the Sufi brotherhood tradition which permeates much of Morocco’s traditional culture. Meanwhile the lothar four-stringed lute underpinning a track from Les Imazighen speaks from the Berber mountain tradition: riding over the top, the vocal timbre of Mohammed Rouicha, one of Morocco’s greatest Berber singers, is wonderfully plangent.

The florid sound of Samy Elmaghribi, on the other hand, comes out of a far richer tradition. This great Judeo-Moroccan singer, who was born in Rabat in 1922 and died only four years ago, carried the torch for the andalusi music which was this region’s classical genre ever since the Moors – having inherited it from Baghdad – took it into the Iberian peninsula they conquered a thousand years ago.

I have picked out the plums from this interesting compilation – I might also have added the charming track from the Master Musicians of Joujouka, whom Rolling Stone Brian Jones “discovered” in 1968 – but the present-day contributions are also enjoyable. Many of them came of age in the early Noughties, and have drawn their inspiration from the urban youth styles of the West. Fnaire (featuring Salah Edin) call their style “rap traditionnel”, melding Gnawa and hip hop beats; Amira Saqati grew out of the dub and electro foursome Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects; U-Cef may be Moroccan-born, but they are London-based and here acknowledge Jimi Hendrix as a key influence.

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