Album reviews: Charlie Simpson | Baxter Dury | Fionn Regan | Classical | Folk | Jazz | World

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

POP

Charlie Simpson: Young Pilgrim

Pias, 11.99 **

HAVING successfully made it out of teenybop incarceration in Busted, Charlie Simpson went on to make the turgid emo rock racket of his dreams in Fightstar. With those guys currently on hiatus, he has slung on a tank top, picked up his acoustic guitar and pitched up somewhere between Snow Patrol and Mumford & Sons on his debut solo album – pretty crowded territory these days.

Consequently, Simpson struggles to make an impression. Even though his way with a tune has not deserted him after six years of wall-to-wall faux metal angst and he's trying so hard to be noble and anthemic on closing track Riverbanks, Young Pilgrim is anonymous and innocuous in equal measure.

Baxter Dury: Happy Soup

Regal, 10.99 ***

BAXTER Dury grabs the attention by not sounding like anyone else around right now, but with that strangely mournful more-spoken-than-sung delivery, the sparse funk/ska backing and those domestic pen portraits he could only be his father's son. Were it not for a hint of modernity in the beats and production, Happy Soup could have been unearthed from Ian Dury's post-punk heyday.

The combination of uncluttered, and in some cases lo-fi, electronic arrangements coupled with Dury's seamy mutterings and the blank backing vocals of Madelaine Hart can be downright creepy in places.

In contrast, the moody title track sounds like a Cockney slant on a Nouvelle Vague film soundtrack.

Fionn Regan: 100 Acres of Sycamore

Heavenly, 13.99 ****

THIS Dylan fan had his going-electric moment on previous album, The Shadow Of An Empire; 18 months on, he pares things back again and returns sounding like a one-man Fleet Foxes with this consistently beautiful suite of longing, regret, blushing romanticism, and the sweetest self-recrimination on a track called Sow Mare Bitch Vixen.

Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel are elegantly invoked in the melodies, For A Nightingale shares the plaintive mellifluousness of Ron Sexsmith and Vodka Sorrow is six stately minutes of plangent piano balladry, the second half of which consists of the title sung over and over again with an audacity that not even Jeff Buckley could muster.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Songbook: Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum

Delphian, 13.99 **

IT IS PRETTY clear from this latest recording on Delphian by the trebles of Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum that director Benjamin Nicholas is less worried about the blend of voices than simply getting them singing. For theirs is a curious sound – a mix of prominent, vocally-coiffured individuals vying with a majority "ripieno" of rawer, boyish tone – that gives this broad miscellany of music a rough-edged bravado.

The choral confections run from Purcell to Bernstein (Somewhere from West Side Story) via James MacMillan, punctuated by the extraordinary, mature-before-its-time treble voice of Laurence Kilsby in such challenging solos as Quilter's Love's Philosophy. Ambitious, but lacking finesse. KENNETH WALTON

FOLK

Seudan: Seudan

Greentrax, 11.99 ****

SEUDAN'S core quartet of notable pipers – Angus MacKenzie, Angus Nicolson, Calum MacCrimmon and Fin Moore – tap into the pre-military roots of Highland piping, playing reproduction 18th-century pipes. They're joined by piper, singer and pibroch scholar Allan MacDonald, while other guests include Gaelic singer Kathleen Macinnes and Cape Breton pianist and step dancer, Mac Morin. This may sound like an academic exercise but, as the cracking opening rendition of the old strathspey Tullochgorm makes abundantly clear, there's nothing dry about this often exhilarating music.

The reproduction pipes, made by Fin and his father Hamish Moore, play in the more mellow-sounding key of A rather than the usual B flat, but there is no shortage of drive. Some of the more unusual repertoire includes the evenly-measured quicksteps popular at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as Macdonald's persuasively lyrical explorations of the links between Gaelic song and pibroch, as he sings while accompanying himself on small pipes. JIM GILCHRIST

JAZZ

Martin Speake: Live at Riverhouse

Pumpkin Records, 12.99 ***

SAXOPHONIST Martin Speake usually succeeds in bringing something unusual to his interpretations of the standard repertoire, and that is generally true of the eight selections here, although his assertion that "none of these tunes get played very often" seems odd – Round Midnight is done to death, and most of the others turn up pretty regularly. Their clever tinkering gives a fresh twist to familiar warhorses like When You're Smiling, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Smile and Strangers In The Night.

Despite the repertoire, it's maybe not one for those who like their jazz full-on – Speake's supple, cool-toned alto and his quartet with pianist Barry Green and the rhythm section of bassist Dave Green and drummer Jeff Williams combine to bring an understated subtlety and intelligence to the music, using the natural acoustic of the Riverhouse Barn in Surrey to good effect. KENNY MATHIESON

WORLD

To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora 1916-1929

Thompkins Square, 29.99 *****

THE story of this fascinating triple-CD begins and ends with tears. It begins with the flight of Turkish-Armenians from Turkey in 1915, when hundreds of thousands were murdered or driven into exile; it ends when the 1929 Wall Street crash threw most of America's new immigrants onto the scrap-heap. In between, a remarkable musical culture flourished wherever Armenians, Turks, and Greeks were clustered together: here we encounter the unmistakeable sounds of all three cultures, fundamentally one and the same.

Almost everything here was recorded in Manhattan. These musicians moved among the cafes of New York's Little Armenia and its Sephardic quarter, playing with and listening to each other, surrounded by men wearing fezes and smoking water-pipes. Many were also peddlers, or engravers, or waiters, or fruit-sellers; they played to recover their sense of identity, and to accompany their traditional dances.

"Ah, I wish I had never gone, /Ah, I wish I had never seen/ Darling you, America," sings Achilleas Poulos from Anatolia in 1926: this was a very strong love-hate relationship. One of these CDs consists of American releases for Ottoman migrs of music by their compatriots back home: record companies made a killing this way, trading on the nostalgia market. The other two are of the genuine thing – migr stars performing for their communities.

Some of the recordings are very rough in quality, others surprisingly good, but two tracks stand out. The first is by the Greek singer Marika Papagika (1890-1943), one of the most popular immigrant singers in America. The other is by Armenag Chah-Mouradian, a blacksmith's son whose sweet rendition of a Komitas song literally tugs the heart. MICHAEL CHURCH