Album reviews: C Duncan | Carpenter/Fowlis/Polwart | Curtis Miles

The fifth album from Helensburgh chamber pop maestro C Duncan is another ravishing affair, writes Fiona Shepherd

C Duncan | Harrison Reid

C Duncan: It’s Only A Love Song (Bella Union) ★★★★

Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart: Looking For The Thread (Thirty Tigers) ★★★

Curtis Miles: What Could’ve Become Of (Lost Map) ★★★★

Chamber pop composer C Duncan continues to conjure sophisticated sonic rapture from his Helensburgh home studio – writing, arranging, playing most of the instruments and layering his heavenly tenor to transcendent choral effect. His fifth album, It’s Only A Love Song, is another ravishing affair, inspired by marital bliss but also by the loss of loved ones and imbued in places with the spirit of Seventies MOR pop.

The opening title track, described by Duncan as “a love song about love songs”, has that retro Top of the Pops feel, from the lyrical piano intro to the lavish strings contributed by his parents, who are both classical musicians. Duncan takes the wistful lead, crooning the title repeatedly as the song swells with the easy listening air of The Carpenters.

Lucky Today is another Seventies reverie, with swooning backing vocals intimating the bliss of romantic satisfaction but elsewhere this sumptuous sound is employed as a self-soothing mechanism, specifically on the beatific Worry, the elegiac Sadness and the expansive psych country catharsis of Delirium, written at a time of distress with Duncan pleading “take all this madness away”.

Triste Claire de Lune may be inspired by lunar legends but it is earthed by dramatic harpsichord, haunting brass and driven, waltzing vocals in the style of a cool Sixties movie theme. Duncan is a confirmed fan of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Space Between Us sounds like an interlude from a romantic musical, while the blithe ba-ba-ba of the pacier Think About It heads up, up and away like the Fifth Dimension and Surface of a Fantasy, a song which is almost brazen in its bliss, sets phasers to full-on Star Trek intergalactic ecstasy. The emotions which fire these songs may be earnest and extreme but the results are playful, imaginative and transporting.

Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart | Contributed

Esteemed folk vocalists Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart have formed the singer/songwriter supergroup of many dreams, banking a number of co-written songs across their post-pandemic collaboration. However, their debut album Looking For the Thread majors on individual original songs of sky and sea, flora and fauna, drifting and migration, plus a version of Gaelic standard Gradh Geal Mo Chridhe recorded for the funeral of accordion player Fergie MacDonald. Fowlis is a native natural but the magic happens when the harmonies (learned phonetically by Carpenter and Polwart) infuse the haunting landscape.

Carpenter leads on the gently questing title track and A Heart That Never Closes, which is very much in her MOR roots pop lane, while Polwart shines on Rebecca and Fowlis helms the mellifluous Silver in the Blue, which flows like the salmon migration it celebrates, with plangent guitar lines worthy of Gerry Rafferty or Clannad.

Curtis Miles | Tash Lizak

Curtis Miles is a fourth generation baker with a significant sideline playing in Glasgow punk band Kaputt. But he is right to trust his gut about the quality of his solo debut album, home recorded in his southside living room and arriving on Lost Map Records with bags of spirit and seductive songsmithery.

What Could’ve Become Of takes autobiographical inspiration from his family. The resonant, bluesy Easy Street looks back to the fracturing of his parents’ marriage, while lonesome lo-fi folk pop ballad Wendy tracks his grandmother’s story across nearly nine minutes right through to its immersive outro.

More playfully, Something & Nothing is his bakery blues and Nicotine is a country ode to his first drag, while The Estuary pays tribute to his Cornish roots and Sixties psych strum Don’t Leave Me Here Lying in the Sun is his acoustic Born to Run, Teenage Kicks and We Gotta Get Out of This Place all rolled into one.

CLASSICAL

Peoma - Ad Astra (ANALEKTA) ★★★★

Far from giving us simply another recording of Richard Strauss tone poems, English-born music director Alexander Shelley and his Ottawa-based National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada have designed a cycle of recordings, Poema, which partners each Strauss masterpiece with a contemporary response by a living Canadian composer. Ad Astra is the series’ opener and is promisingly refreshing. In answer to the ecstatic, extrovert sparkle of Strauss’ Don Juan, Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Dark Night, Bright Stars, Vast Universe captures the same dizzying textures and driving intensity, but with challenging insights that find reflective warmth in golden moments of calm topped with spectral luminescence. Kevin Lau’s The Infinite Reaches, both darkly introspective and monumentally - often cinematically - heroic, acts as a powerful preface to Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. As for those Strauss performances, Shelley’s musicians invest them with luxurious passion, narrative zeal and moments of unadulterated lyrical exquisiteness. Ken Walton

FOLK

Simon Thacker & Justyna Jablonska: Songs of the Roma (Slap the Moon Records) ★★★★★

The venturesome partnership of Scots classical guitarist Simon Thacker and Edinburgh-based Polish cellist Justyna Jablonska further extend their musical questing in this dazzling collaboration with Lublin-based singer and violinist Masha Natanson, plus Hungarian guests, cimbalom virtuoso Gyula “Julius” Csik and double-bassist Gyula Lázár. Thacker’s vividly textured re-imagining of songs from Balkan and Romanian Romany culture is at times urgently percussive, plucked, bowed and hammered strings alternating with nimble soloing and Natanson’s lithe vocals, as in the opening Abre Ramče. Jolta, on the other hand, alternates between dramatic instrumental dialogue and moments of eerie stillness haunted by harmonics, slides and muted cimbalom chimes. Intense yearning suffuses Natanson’s singing of Ederlezi – possibly written by prisoners en route to the terminal silence of a concentration camp. In contrast, fiddle and cello duet wildly around her impassioned delivery in Anii mei și tinereţea. Jim Gilchrist