Album reviews: Justin Timberlake | Billy Bragg | SNJO

Our roundup of the latest releases

POP

Conquering Animal Sound: On Floating Bodies

Chemikal Underground, £13.99

***

This Glasgow-based electronic duo, nominated for the Scottish Album of the Year Award for their debut Kammerspiel, have refined their diligent, somewhat forensic approach to composition on this intriguing follow-up. On Floating Bodies is an album of contrasts, evoking the visceral and the mechanistic in both concept and delivery. Anneke Kampman’s lithe vocals are often and understandably likened to Björk’s. Kampman adopts similar choppy phrasing, but occasionally breaks into very sweet legato moments, while the lyrics draw on Biophilia’s blend of the micro and macro as the backing flows seamlessly from glitchy whirr or foreboding hum to tribal incantation.

Justin Timberlake: The 20/20 Experience

RCA, £12.99

***

In contrast to rigorously focus-grouped recent albums by his fellow Mickey Mouse Club contemporaries Britney and Christina, Justin Timberlake sounds like a liberated man on his long-awaited third album. The 20/20 Experience is a lengthy seduction, comprising ten protracted numbers which encompass electro jazz, swingbeat, Latin funk, swooning symphonic strings, woozy electronica and just one pure pop outing in the form of underwhelming current single Mirrors.

The intention, one presumes, is to fashion a 21st century soul concept in the Stevie Wonder/Marvin Gaye/Isaac Hayes tradition. The result comes up short in the song department and sounds more like a sleek remix album, immaculately produced throughout by Timbaland and J-Roc, but Timberlake is at least to be admired for aspiring rather than conforming.

Billy Bragg: Tooth & Nail

Cooking Vinyl, £11.99

***

When Billy Bragg was touring to mark Woody Guthrie’s centenary, he learned the value of beckoning an audience to him rather than rallying the troops with gusto and has applied that technique to his first album of new material in five years. Guthrie’s words are here in the form of his scarily relevant double dip recession blues I Ain’t Got No Home, while the humble likes of Do Unto Others and the simple, stripped back love ode Handyman Blues are written in the same back porch philosophy spirit, blending the personal and political to create an intimate, touching, if occasionally sleepy, country-infused album which makes demands on one’s conscience but not one’s ears.

CLASSICAL

Robert Mackintosh: Airs, Minuets, Gavotts and Reels

Delphian, £15.99

****

Robert Mackintosh, otherwise known as Red Rob by virtue of his hair colour, has been described as “a composer who missed greatness by a small margin”. Active during Edinburgh’s 18th Century heyday, he was a fiddler in the illustrious Edinburgh Musical Society, and going on the evidence of this couthy new release by Concerto Caledonia of Mackintosh’s traditional Scots dance music, he had the knack of casting his numerous airs, reels, minuets and gavotts in the refined art music style of the time. David McGuinness’s four-piece ensemble, typically swarthy in capturing the catchy crossover subtleties of the music, present a convincing case for Red Rob, particularly such consuming numbers as The Duchess of Gordon’s Delight or The Diamond Reel.

FOLK

The Bowhill Players: The Joe Corrie Project – Cage Load Of Men Own Label, web only

***

With his play, In Time O’ Strife being revived by the National Theatre of Scotland later this year, the Fife miner poet and playwright Joe Corrie receives further, overdue exposure in these song settings of his poetry, arranged by Cowdenbeath teacher William Hershaw and double bassist Erik Knussen.

Oddly, many of these arrangements seem to owe more to Woody Guthrie than to homegrown tradition, not least in the freight train drive of the opening I Saw Joe Corrie, written by Hershaw. Other arrangements, such as Mitherless Bairn and Ain’t No More Bings in Bernartie, draw directly from blues and gospel, while To a Pitheid Lass is unashamed rockabilly.

Among various vocalists, the singing of Roseann Gooder shines out. Straightforward guitar, mandolin, fiddle and drum accompaniments include some gentle clarsach from Jenn Knussen heightening the spit and sawdust poignancy of the recited poem In Hunter’s Bar.

JAZZ

SNJO: In The Spirit of Duke

Spartacus Records, £11.99

*****

The Scottish National Jazz Orchestra have managed their quickest ever turnaround from recording concerts to releasing a disc. The music here is drawn from the outstanding live performances on their Scottish dates last October. Under the direction of Tommy Smith, they cover a wide ranging selection from Ellington’s immense output, from the 1920s up to the suites from the final phase of his career (he died in 1974). As ever, the band’s soloists – including guest pianist Brian Kellock – are outstanding, but it is the richly textured and beautifully idiomatic ensemble playing that really catches the ear, capturing Ellington’s dazzling use of musical colour, harmony and rhythm. Excellent recorded sound captures the full detail and the celebratory atmosphere of the concerts.

WORLD

Carlos NÚÑez: Discover

RCA Victor, £13.99

***

This double-CD is extraordinary in its scope, representing a series of journeys through strikingly different musical domains. And for this musician to have been dubbed the Seventh Chieftain only reflects a part of his achievement.

His musical odyssey began when he picked up the bagpipes in his home town of Vigo on the Atlantic coast of Spain and started to explore the music of the Galician folk heritage, where the pipes are a cross between the Irish and Scottish versions. The encounters which first set Núñez on the road were during what has been called the Celtic renaissance, with the Chieftains and with the Breton singer Alan Stivell. The Chieftains invited him to collaborate on the soundtrack for a film of Treasure Island in which Charlton Heston and Oliver Reed were starring; then he collaborated with Sinéad O’Connor and Ry Cooder in things such as the charming version of The Foggy Dew we hear here.

Next came some flamenco collaborations, and then Núñez went to Cuba, where his collaborations with Buena Vista stars Compay Segundo, Omara Portuondo, and Orlando “Cachaito” López led to equally beguiling results. On, then, to Argentina and Mexico, before returning home to duet with the great soprano Montserrat Caballé and then with the early-music pioneer Jordi Savall. It makes a fascinating two hours.

Koby Israelite: Blues from Elsewhere

Asphalt Tango Records, £15.99

***

This latest release from this celebrated Jewish multi-instrumentalist makes interesting connections between American blues, bluegrass, and country ’n’ Western, and sounds from the Balkans. The musicianship is virtuosic and the results have a pulsating immediacy.