Ablum reviews: The Charlatans | Paul Heaton | Ray LaMontagne | Classical | Jazz | Folk | World

Published on Sunday 5 September 2010 19:31

The Charlatans: Who We Touch *** Frinck Recordings, £12.99

ELEVEN albums down the line, former Madchester favourites The Charlatans are torn between plodding on in the same old pedestrian vein or shaking up the mix a little. For the most part, they tread carefully, testing out the 1960s-influenced pastoral pop of Your Foolish Pride, dreamy prog ballad Oh! and the blissed-out coda You Can Swim as alternatives to the more forgettable business-as-usual tracks. The rollicking ELO-meets-Magazine-on-the-terraces number Sincerity adds a jolly string to their bow, but it's the demented hidden track, I Sing the Body Electric, composed in collaboration with Penny Rimbaud of Crass, that suggests The Charlatans could do with losing their marbles more often.

Paul Heaton: Acid Country ***

Proper Records, 12.99

THE latest solo outing from the ex-Housemartins/Beautiful South frontman is country in name and ostensibly in sound and style, but it's really just the musical dressing in which Heaton cloaks his usual bittersweet – or just plain bitter – vignettes and satirical sociopolitical barbs. As standard, he employs jaunty tunes and a couple of female foils in Hem's Sally Ellyson and Ruth Skipper of the Moulettes to leaven the mood, but left to his own devices this angry old(er) man puts the boot into Brighton on Welcome To The South and wages class war on the eight-minute title track's unforgiving portrait of a nation.

Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs: God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise ****

Columbia, 12.99

RAY Lamontagne puts that soulful husky voice to good use on his fourth album as he drifts further away from the snoozy MOR with which he made his name into duskier, dustier roots territory, soundtracked by the mournful reverberation of the pedal steel guitar. He sounds utterly at home on the stealthily funky nu-blues opener Repo Man, on the careworn country amble Old Before Your Time, with the unobtrusively epic scope of the slowburn title track, tripping back to 60s country folk rock on Beg Steal Or Borrow and tapping into the plaintive spirit of Neil Young on For The Summer. And when Ray is happy/sad, we are happy/sad too.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica ****

ECM New Series, 13.99

THIS highly original disc by Gidon Kremer and his stellar Kremerata Baltica casts the quiet modernity of Serbian composer Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer and Georgian composer Giya Kancheli as tender, atmospheric bookends to the warm, late-Romantic lustre of Csar Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor. Tickmayer's Eight Hymns In Memoriam Andrei Tarkovsky – for solo violin (Kremer himself), strings, vibraphone and piano – barely rises above a whisper, its tolling melancholia deeply moving and emotive in this timeless performance. The older Kancheli's Silent Prayer – for an ensemble that adds bass guitar and ethereal "voice on tape" to the string core – contains more effusive writing, even a wickedly sardonic wit at its central climax. Franck's Quintet, with its teasingly progressive twists, is no cuckoo in the nest

KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ

Steve Smith, George Brooks, Prasanna: Raga Bop Trio ****

Abstract Logix, 12.99

JAZZ has been primarily a harmony-based music, but various experiments since the late 1950s have focused on combining melody and rhythm as the primary means of expression. The combination of jazz and Indian music lends itself well to that approach, and this new trio makes a significant contribution to that fusion. Jazz-rock drummer Steve Smith (Journey, Steps Ahead, Vital Information) and saxophonist George Brooks team up with Prasanna, who has adapted the Carnatic tradition of South India to the distinctly non-traditional electric guitar. All three are well-versed in both sides of the equation, and explore a diverse range of approaches across the nine original compositions featured here (including a dip into a Rollins-like calypso in Brooks' Miss Oma). The inventive soloing and the rhythmically charged group interplay from all three players is continually absorbing in a very impressive debut.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

KLA: SOISN ***

KLA RECORDS, 12.99

A BAND known for live performances so fast they all but meet themselves coming back, Kla eschew interstellar overdrive for this collection of mellow instrumentals, named after a young Irish woman who became a Zen Buddhist saint. It's pleasant listening, if sometimes verging on the bland, with the band's core of pipes, fiddle, acoustic and electric guitars augmented variously by trumpet, musical saw and assorted percussion. Much of it is atmospheric rather than melodically memorable, with occasional incursions by sighing winds or murmuring tides. The wordless female vocals in The Kissing Gate progress over ticking percussion into an eerie chorus of whistling saw, the gentle guitar chords of St Germain enter to a backdrop of howling dogs, the whistles and pipes of 1st Ave drift amid lush strings while trumpet and pipes enter into eloquent dialogue in Miles na bPobair. Think of an intriguing soundtrack looking for an eligible film.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

Cheikh Lo: Jamm ****

WCD, 12.99

JAMM means "peace" in Wolof, the main language spoken in Senegal and one of the four sung here. Maverick Sufi troubadour Cheikh Lo has picked up musical elements wherever his career has led him, from his birthplace in Burkina Faso, where he sang and played percussion in Afro-Cuban bands, to Senegal and on to Paris, where he worked as a session drummer for Congolese bands. This CD – his first new album for five years – is blissfully light on its feet, as his high, breathy voice blends with the acoustic accompaniment plus some additional electronica; it has been built around simple demos recorded at the house of his friend the bass player Thierno Sarr. He himself describes it as "like a big basket, with some cheese here, some bread there, some chocolate and a cocktail on the side". We get a song about jealousy sung in a Mande dialect called Jula; a cover for a 1960s hit by Guinea's celebrated Bembeya Jazz; a tribute in Spanish to the Senegalese Afro-rumba singer Laba Sosseh; and other lyrics excoriating corruption, deriding materialism, and praising Allah.

Hassan Erraji: Awal Mara ****

World Village, 13.99

THIS blind Moroccan musician – now based in Leeds – is about to embark on a British tour to launch his new album, but it's so good it needs no special pleading. His sound-world is infinitely harder than Cheikh Lo's, as befits the hard land which gave birth to it. He was born near Marrakesh in the Atlas mountains, brought up on the music of feasts and weddings through which he learned the Berber repertoire, and though his own first instrument was made from a tin can and a piece of wood, he went on to study in Casablanca and Brussels, before returning home to develop his own particular take on Arabic pop. His singing is emphatic and infectiously exuberant, as is his playing on the oud; at moments you catch echoes of the British North and the Highlands.

MICHAEL CHURCH