Album reviews: Kylie | Don Letts | Jorja Smith | MALKA

Kylie manages to recapture some of the gleeful innocence of her earliest hits on new album Tension, writes Fiona Shepherd

Kylie PIC: Erik Melvin

Kylie: Tension (BMG) ****

Don Letts: Outta Sync (Cooking Vinyl) ***

Jorja Smith: Falling Or Flying (FAMM) ***

MALKA: Anatomy of Sight (Tantrum) ***

Following the relative commercial disappointments of her below-par country album Golden and the excellent, under-appreciated Disco, Kylie is done with musical themes for the moment, but still very much on the dancefloor for the duration of her latest album, Tension.

Summer sensation single Padam Padam is a highly effective distillation of clubbing ecstasy – the thumping heartbeat, the anticipation of seduction. Although she didn’t write the song, she colonises it completely, seasoning with lashings of that Kylie Minogue special sauce which turns a serviceable dance tune into an anthem.

She did, however, co-write half of her latest tracks, including the arena trance pop of Hold On To Now, the Eighties-inspired Things We Do For Love, an aerobic routine of a track with a passing nod to Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, and You Still Get Me High, forged in a similar spirit.

Jorja Smith PIC: Romany Francesca

The title track teams an Italo house piano line with a deeper bassline and autotuned vocals. The tension here is strictly sexual, and it’s clearly not a time for eloquence as Minogue intones “touch me right there…hot like chilli”.

In contrast, One More Time has some of the gleeful innocence of her earliest hits with ecstatic brass and tambourine shakes galore, while the hip-pop of Hands is bottled joy and Green Light skips along in the same lane with a sprinkling of disco fairy dust and saxophone solo.

She flexes her gay disco credentials on Vegas High, written for her forthcoming inaugural residency in Sin City – the closing double whammy of 10 Out of 10, with its vogueing chorus, and the helium Europop of Story will do very nicely in whatever extravaganza she has in store.

Kylie may be bossing it in her mid-fifties but punk videographer, filmmaker, DJ and Big Audio Dynamite member Don Letts is still exploring new avenues, releasing his debut solo album Outta Sync in his late sixties. “I’ve finally come to realise I might not be so old and wise,” he reckons on the dub and ska-infused soul searching of the title track. Elsewhere, he duets with the heavenly Hollie Cook, daughter of Sex Pistol Paul, on the rockier Something Coming Off and his own daughter Honor Letts on the dub pop number Civilisation. Other guests include late Specials frontman Terry Hall on the bouncy Two Tone sound of The Doorman, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, with whom he forms an odd couple on Present Dilemmas and, best of all, Alabama 3’s Zoe Devlin Love providing a gritty vocal on the meatier dub track Situationist.

MALKA PIC: Demelza Kingston

Cool and collected Wallsall vocalist Jorja Smith showcases her ability to sit happily across various genres, from grassroots hip-hop to chamber pop, on her second album Falling Or Flying, which encompasses the sultry slow jam of the title track, laidback R&B of Greatest Gift and elegant string-laden ballad Backwards. Highlights include the controlled melodrama of Broken Is the Man, the pacey rock push of GO GO GO and the peppy mix of Latin rhythms and club culture on recent single Little Things.

During lockdown, Glasgow-based musician Tamara Schlesinger, aka MALKA, founded Hen Hoose, a supportive collective of female and non-binary musicians and producers. At the same time as this empowering move, she was wrestling with the debilitating effects of Long Covid – the track Flashlight on her new album Anatomy of Sight is about the illuminating support of her husband during this period. She also draws succour from her Austrian grandmother on Tramlines and a Ukrainian mum trying to preserve some normality for her kids on War Coffee, while acknowledging her own multi-tasking roles on Matriarch. All of these tributes are delivered in an airy electro pop style which translates most effectively on the cheerleader mantra of What You Get Out.

CLASSICAL

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos 9 & 24 (Ondine) *****

It’s a year since the pianist Lars Vogt died of cancer at the age of 52. He hadn’t long taken up his role as director of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris, choosing during treatment to record two of Mozart’s concertos with them – the early Piano Concerto No 9 “Jeunehomme” K271, and the later C minor, No 24, K491. The result is extraordinary. The “Jeunehomme” lives up to its name, Vogt’s crisp but firm musicality capturing the easeful spirit of the young Mozart, the articulation as fresh as a daisy, forever mindful of the music’s potential for explorative interpretation. Where the wit here owes much to The Marriage of Figaro, the more gravitational C minor Concerto preempts Don Giovanni, stormy, impetuous but equally graced with golden lyricism. In both cases, Vogt tempers conversational virility with fundamental elegance and impeccable style. A fitting testimony to a fine artist. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Sinikka Langeland: Wind and Sun (ECM) *****

Following her solo album Wolfe Rune, Norwegian folk singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland casts beguiling new spells, joined by the cream of ECM’s Scandi-jazz stable in peerless settings of poetry by renowned Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. Trumpeter Mathias Eick, saxophonist Trygve Seim, double-bassist Mats Eilertsen and drummer Thomas Strønen intertwine wonderfully with each other and with Langeland’s delicately passionate and poised singing. The opening Row My Ocean sees Langeland’s tremulous vocals couched in a near-orchestral setting with twin horns, bowed bass and the ever-glittering kantele, while Seim’s saxophone sounds as vocally as a duduk in Wind and Sun. The Love shuffles languidly to a bossa rhythm, trumpet blowing a complementary song of its own, then moaning like a wolf over clicking percussion in Wind Song. Langeland’s kantele establishes the stillness of A Child Who Exists before she sings, delicate, melancholy and ballad-like, with spellbinding saxophone commentary. Jim Gilchrist