Anohni and the Johnsons: My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross (Rough Trade/Secretly Canadian) ****

Joe McAlinden: Where The Clouds Go Swimming

(STHQ) ****

Current Affairs: Off the Tongue (Tough Love Records) ****

Some time before New York LGBT and AIDS activist Marsha P Johnson, aka “the mayor of Christopher Street”, was widely recognised for her campaigning work, a shy English-born singer named a band in her honour. That singer is now an internationally respected artist and activist who has got her chamber group back together - with a different line-up – for the first Anohni and the Johnsons album in over a decade. My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross features Marsha on the striking sleeve, the giant on whose shoulders Anohni stands.

Her own activist concerns are wide and ambitious, promoting dignity for all humans and raising red flags for the planet. And so she follows the electronic eco-geddon of her 2016 solo album Hopelessness with a glimmer of usefulness. Inspired by Marvin Gaye’s evergreen What’s Going On, she seeks to sound the alarm and soothe the anxiety in one mellow, soulful package, delivered in collaboration with guitarist/producer Jimmy Hogarth.

You can clearly hear the Gaye influence on first single and opening track It Must Change, with its gentle, soulful guitar, delicate drumming, sighing strings and a vocal delivery which is simultaneously defiant and pleading. Anohni sounds less like the quavery torch balladeer of old and more a strong soul presence as she holds a conversation between her reasoned speaking voice and resigned singing.

Next, she declaims without melody on the 90-second dissonance of Go Ahead but the soft sonority returns on Sliver of Ice, an end-of-life snapshot of her old collaborator Lou Reed (“I love you so much more, I never knew it before”) titled after his heightened appreciation of simple senses like ice on his tongue.

Much of the album follows in this vein, couching soulful ire and pain in bare but balmy guitar-led arrangements, though the prowling burnished blues of Rest becomes every stormier and the beseeching Why Am I Alive Now teams mesmeric vocals with swooning strings to devotional effect.

Lesser-spotted Scottish songwriter Joe McAlinden, formerly of the indie hub that is Bellshill but resident in rural Argyll for many years, makes a welcome return after a protracted period of memory and coordination problems whichaffected his ability to write music.

Where The Clouds Go Swimming is the product of a new way of composing for McAlinden, which involves creating sounds as building blocks rather than writing and arranging songs – though he does include 209, a resonant piano ballad written prior to his creative block with wistful lead vocal and choral effects, and a new version of an old song, Sparkle, by his former band Superstar, which became his path back to music and composition.

From sonorous keyboards to holistic harmonica, angelic vocals to soulful guitar solo, everything on the album is sung, played or created by McAlinden. He may have had to go round the houses to get there but the result is a fine set of filmic pop songs with hints of plangent gothic ambience.

Those echoes of The Cocteau Twins’ diaphanous sound world are explicitly referenced by Current Affairs on No Fuss, the unapologetically post-punk indie salvo which opens their debut album Off The Tongue.

A debut it may be, but this Glasgow-based band, with Berlin outposts and London roots, are clear where they are coming from, with clamorous frontwoman Joan Sweeney swooping between Siouxsie stridency in her lower range and the energised shrieking of X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene. The rumbling bass, clanging guitar, propulsive drumming and glacial synths of Reactor are pure Banshees, Casual Radicals a nod to femme punk trailblazers The Slits and Regardless reminiscent of the punk cheerleader vibe of latterday torchbearers Le Tigre.

CLASSICAL

Bach: Partitas and Sonatas (Delphian, DCD34300) ****

If musical keys relate instinctively to specific moods, it’s important tobuild into that a composer’s own creative response to them, and the distinctive properties of any given instrument.

What better way to test the ground in Bach than in this probing survey of the solo violin Partitas and Sonatas performed on a period instrument by Croatian-born Bojan Čičić.

Hear in the three Partitas a material shift from a sombre B minor and confidently stoical D minor to the bright-lit exuberance of E major; or in the three Sonatas Bach’s distinctive responses to the thoughtful melancholy of G minor, the pining instability of A minor, then a vibrant, safety-first C major.

But the ultimate defining elements are Čičić’s gut-stringed instrument, gutsier in tone than a modern one and presenting a natural sense of danger in the higher registers; and his affirmative, if very occasionally over-confined, interpretations.

Ken Walton

FOLK

Simon Thoumire & Dave Milligan: Portraits (Big Bash Records) ****

On their third album together (and first in 16 years), the unlikely sounding but highly creative folk-jazz partnership of pianist Dave Milligan and concertina player Simon Thoumire exudes charm and affection, its tunes, composed by Thoumire bar two by Milligan, dedicated to relatives, colleagues and inspirers.

The reedy melodiousness of Thoumire’s concertina contrasts and interlaces with Milligan’s inventive keyboard elaborations in compositions such as the gentle waltz of Come On, Let Us Sway Together, inspired by an Edwin Morgan poem, or Su-a’s 50th Year, dedicated to genre-spanning cellist Su-a Lee, their graceful lilt reminiscent of old Scotch airs. The perky King Bill’s Hornpipe is dedicated to an influential piano teacher, while Milligan’s suitably quirky Misha celebrates Misha Alperin, the late founder of the renowned Moscow Art Trio and there’s a snappy strathspey for photographer Louis DeCarlo, a familiar figure around the Scottish folk scene.

Jim Gilchrist

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Album reviews: Anonhi and the Johnsons | Joe McAlinden | Current Affairs

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