Album reviews: Wiz Khalifa | Dam Mantle | Udagawa plays Khachaturian & Lyapunov | Nick Keir

A roundup of the latest album releases.

POP

Wiz Khalifa: O.N.I.F.C. Atlantic, £11.99

* * *

GIVEN the sheer number of weed references on this album, it is hardly surprising that O.N.I.F.C. is such a laidback, leisurely and lengthy listen. However, it wouldn’t be the first hip-hop album to outstay its welcome. While Pittsburgh rapper Wiz Khalifa doesn’t have much to add to the vocabulary of hip-hop – if he’s not rapping about dope, he’s bragging about his conspicuous consumption – there are some cool sonic ideas, especially when the album hits an interesting woozy mid-section, Khalifa’s puffed-up boasts contrasting with the dream-like backing and girlish vocal on Fall Asleep and the soothing old school electro funk of Rise Above. Overall, though, this is the sound of a rapper who has become far too comfortable with his situation.

Dam Mantle: Brothers Fowl

Notown, WEB ONLY

* * *

GLASGOW-BASED electronica producer/remixer Tom Marshallsay, aka Dam Mantle, has crafted a gently inviting debut album in Brothers Fowl, shot through with subtle hooks which get under the skin, such as the nagging, circular woodwind sample on Lifting, the lyrical jazz piano on Spirit or the keening strings on RGB. Without such melodic interest, the ambient title track is more navel-gazing than meditative but the stuttering arpeggios and psychedelic synth showers of Canterbury Part 1 and Part 2 are reminiscent of the inventive cut-and-paste compositions of The Avalanches.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Udagawa plays Khachaturian & Lyapunov

Signum Classics, £9.99

* * *

THE coupling of violin and orchestra works by Aram Khachaturian and Sergei Lyapunov offers an intriguing contrast between the late Romantic style of Russia’s Romanov Empire (Lyapunov) and the edgier austerity of the Soviet influence on the younger, Armenian-born Khachaturian. This feisty disc by the Japanese violinist Hideko Udagawa and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is full-on in every sense – Udagawa’s vigorous musicality is at its most intense in Khachaturian’s Concerto Rhapsody (a shade too overwrought at the start), and wholesomely effusive in Lyapunov’s Violin Concerto. Ultimately, as Udagawa bites equally hard and grittily into Khachaturian’s Sonata-Monologue for solo violin, one yearns for a moment of gentle, passive reflection: a little less brashness.

KEN WALTON

JAZZ

Breach: Borders

Breach, web only

* * * *

THE combination of guitar, Hammond organ and drums has a long pedigree in jazz, and especially in the funky sub-genre of soul jazz. Breach are one of a number of trios currently pushing that canonic instrumentation in very different directions. The Edinburgh-based band features Scottish guitarist Graeme Stephen, Englishman Paul Harrison on organ, and Canadian-born drummer Chris Wallace, an international mix that provides a diverse musical outlook as well as an amusing cover image. Harrison wrote four of the eight compositions on the disc (with a duly acknowledged apology to Duke Ellington for pinching the melodic hook on I Smell Something) and Wallace three, while the album opens with Stephen’s infectious arrangement of a Macedonian folk tune. Their approach to all of the music is energised and inventive, but with an air of subtle restraint that almost amounts to understatement at times.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

Nick Keir: The Edge of Night

Laverock Records, web only

* * * *

FORMER McCalman and a seasoned performer and songwriter in his own right, Nick Keir writes and sings straight from the heart and with engaging clarity. This fourth solo album continues his love affair with his Auld Reekie in songs such as Crooked Smile or the Slow French Waltz he hears drifting from an Old Town howff. The waltz is laced through with Dick Lee’s clarinet, while other accompanists include Aaron Jones, Frank McLaughlin and singer Madelaine Taylor, while Keir handles guitar, mandolin and much else.

Other songs include the piquant Middle-Aged Men, infused perhaps with the insight of someone who has been dealing with cancer, while the poet McCaig is evoked in Norman’s Malt. Covers include a delicate rendering of the Proclaimers’ On Causewayside and the wistful musings of Tom Waits’s Green Grass, while the slightly disclocated-sounding title track is a brief, unaccompanied reprise of Billy Boyd’s melancholy ballad from Lord of the Rings.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

Perunika Trio - A Bright Star has Risen

ARC, £11.99

* * * *

FOR something to listen to which is festive but not tawdry, rooted in reality but redolent of an engagingly different world, this CD fits the bill. The a cappella songs sung by these young women come straight out of Bulgarian tradition, and they are delivered with few concessions to Western European intonation; they have harmonies in common with Georgian songs, but rely for their effect on a hard, pure, “whitened” tone which is quintessentially Balkan. This was the music which, performed by Le mystere des voix Bulgares, paved the way for the world-music boom in the Nineties. Eugenia Georgieva, their leader, sings other things besides this music – she’s also a rock and electronica performer – but as co-leader of the UCL East European Choir she’s spreading the Balkan gospel. Dessislava Vasileva recently graduated from the Academy of Music and Dance in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Jasmina Stosic was born in Serbia but graduated from the Guildford Conservatoire and has a track record in straight theatre, which means they bring a rich variety of experience to the songs here.

The Bulgarians converted to Christianity in the ninth century, and the Greek Orthodoxy they embraced allowed no musical instrument apart from the human voice to praise God. Liturgical texts were translated into Bulgarian, and set to pre-existing music; this spilled over into secular folk music, which reciprocally fed its influence back into the church; this CD reflects the 
confluence of these two traditions, sometimes in the same song. One of the most arresting is Peperuda, in which the solo part is traditionally taken by an orphaned girl, dressed in green leaves: her song is a prayer to the goddess of rain. Other songs deal with those timeless village matters: courtship, unrequited love, and leaving home.

MICHAEL CHURCH