Album reviews: Deacon Blue | Alison Krauss & Union Station | Butler, Blake & Grant | Peter Capaldi

Released to mark their 40th anniversary, Deacon Blue’s new album manages to look back without getting bogged down, writes Fiona Shepherd

Deacon Blue: The Great Western Road (Cooking Vinyl) ★★★★

Alison Krauss & Union Station: Arcadia (Down the Road Records) ★★★★

Butler, Blake & Grant: Butler, Blake & Grant (355 Recordings) ★★★★

Peter Capaldi: Sweet Illusions (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★

Deacon Blue mark their 40th birthday like a band with ageing portraits in their attic. Their tenth album, The Great Western, is a vibrant celebration of a classic sound, which manages to look back without getting bogged down. Recent single Late ’88 arrives with champagne in hand, its swirl of disco strings and soulfunk guitar transporting the listener back to the commercial gilded age for Scottish pop music with the same vivacious, nostalgic energy they last summoned on 2012’s The Hipsters.

Deacon Blue | Cameron Brisbane

Still, there is ample latitude for the thoughtful urban romance which frontman Ricky Ross does well, with the title track referencing the appropriately named Glasgow highway where you can see for miles and miles. Their hometown continues to inspire with Ross pledging a city tour on Up Hope over handclaps, bold brass and a perky piano line, while the extrovert soul pop blast of Turn Up Your Radio! takes a leaf from the Wet Wet Wet playbook, with an acid soul guitar coda in the Curtis Mayfield tradition.

Of the more meditative offerings, Curve of the Line has a soothing, Mark Knopfleresque quality and Wait On Me offers gentle country comfort. The latter’s title becomes a breathy incantation and there is a Nashville blush to its luxurious electro piano and organ textures, while Underneath the Stars is laidback southern soul with a sentimental touch. Elsewhere, Ross sounds wide-eyed and open-armed on Ashore (“I will not hurt you or desert you”) over a buoyant rhythm guitar before pondering alternative realities and what the future holds on the closing If I Lived On My Own.

Contributed

Bluegrass titans Alison Krauss & Union Station reconvene for the first time in over a decade, picking up intuitively where they left off with 2011’s Paper Airplane. Arcadia features ten new songs in the old style, written by the likes of JD McPherson, Viktor Krauss and Sarah Siskind, which reflect timeless sentiments and cyclical concerns.

Krauss’s voice sounds particularly bittersweet on the bleak and beautiful Looks Like the End of the Road while she hovers between plaintive and comforting on the supersoft There’s a Light Up Ahead. Throughout the album, she tag-teams with new co-vocalist Robert Moore, an award-winning singer in his own right, who brings a gritty soul to The Hangman. He also fronts Granite Mills, a cautionary tale of industrial accidents and corporate negligence inspired by the 1860 Pemberton Mill disaster in Massachusetts, and leads the roistering on upbeat love lamentation North Side Gal.

Singer/guitarist Bernard Butler, Teenage Fanclub frontman Norman Blake and Love & Money mainstay James Grant mine their campfire chemistry as vocal harmony supergroup Butler, Blake & Grant, writing separately and collaboratively on their eponymous debut collection. There are predictable but welcome shades of Crosby, Stills & Nash in this songwriters’ circle but also much more, from the austere folk stylings of The Old Mortality and windswept acoustic rocker There’s Always Something You Can Change to the epic keening instrumental Rosus Posus and Butler’s anti-tribute to the decade which made him on The 90s.

Peter Capaldi | Ray Burmiston

Peter Capaldi brought much to his portrayal of the twelfth Doctor, not least a tendency to whip out an electric guitar at the drop of a Tardis. In a previous art school life, Capaldi fronted Glasgow punk band The Dreamboys (with Craig Ferguson on drums). He indulges his musical kicks again on Sweet Illusions, a second solo album suite set “in a city a lot like Glasgow”, which marries synth pomp, post-punk disturbia, catchy jangly guitar hooks, squalling solos and a touch of knowing melodrama in his lyrics and delivery, not least on raucous rebel odyssey Through the Cracks.

CLASSICAL

JS Bach: The Complete Violin Concertos, Vol 1 & 2 (ANALEKTA) ★★★★★

It’s little surprise that this comprehensive two-volume survey of Bach’s complete concerto works involving violin is so good. With violinist James Ehnes in the hot seat, you get Bach with absolute perfection. The technique is effortlessly spot-on, the musicality issued with melting clarity and stylish nuance, Ehnes’s generous charisma gleaning a matching response from the musicians of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. The two popular solo concertos - E major and A minor - are so joyous they would brighten up the darkest of days, but there’s a blissful surprise with Ehnes’ inclusion of the obscurer D minor and G minor concertos, better known in their later versions for solo harpsichord. The famous Double Concerto finds concertmaster Yosuke Kawasaki and Ehnes duelling with scintillating finesse, as do fellow contributors in other multi-instrumental showpieces. The glossy sound world is slightly retro, but who’s complaining when the results are so exuberant. Ken Walton

FOLK

Gigspanner Big Band: Turnstone (Own Label) ★★★★

A fine flourish of olde English folk rock as veteran Steeleye Span fiddler Peter Knight once again leads his Gigspanner Big Band, an impressive six-piece with accordionist John Spiers, guitarist Roger Flack, the Edgelarks duo of Hannah Martin and Philip Henry and drummer Sacha Trochet. The album title suggests trawling through traditional repertoire, much as the titular wader sifts through shore debris. The resulting imaginative arrangements set off Martin’s rich vocals in particular, without compromising clarity, as in the opening Suffolk Miracle with its zesty, Cajun-accented accompaniment. Martin also does dramatic justice to the highwaygirl tale of Sovay Sovay, Flack tearing a howling guitar break out of it, while the old “Sacred Harp” hymn Wondrous Love becomes a percussive chant with winsome violin epilogue. Fiddle and dobro both take elegant flight in Silver Dagger while Henry also provides a striking slide guitar prelude to Hind Horn. Jim Gilchrist