Album reviews: Kyle Falconer | Candi Staton | Olly Alexander | Krept & Konan

Kyle Falconer: The One I Love The Most (La Sierra Recording Co) ★★★

Candi Staton: Back to My Roots (Beracah Records) ★★★

Olly Alexander: Polari (Polydor) ★★★

Krept & Konan: Young Kingz II (Play Dirty) ★★★

The View’s rascally frontman Kyle Falconer has written a lot of songs about girls over the years. The One I Love the Most is his tribute to all the girls he’s sung before, bringing together new recordings of his varied paeans just in time for Valentine’s Day.

He opens with one of this best known, the beloved View track Grace, teaming choppy, rhythmic acoustic strumming with Johnny Marr-like chiming electric chords, then goes on to straddle his catalogue from early View number Claudia, dispatched in louche Libertines style, to the desperate desire of Dixie from the band’s most recent album, Exorcism of Youth.

Falconer is largely unsentimental. Many of these songs are character studies rather than love odes. Kelly deals with an adolescent’s struggle with gender identity, while the rollicking 5 Rebeccas (“the one I love the most has turned into a junkie”) becomes a solitary Rebecca, reworked as a finger-popping beat number with a brief, ringing guitar solo.

Often these new renditions start with a tantalising teaser, such as the soulful opening to Lily Anne, before reverting to peppy indie strumming but rapper PROSE adds an edge to Lucy, there is a Latin troubadour seam running through a lightning-paced Penny and the one new track, Angelina, is awash with shimmering strings and heartache vocals.

Candi Staton | Alan Messer

Candi Staton’s new album, Back to My Roots, delves further into the past to celebrate her Southern Baptist heritage via gospel songs previously recorded by the likes of Elvis Presley and Al Green. The veteran soul diva repurposes The Rolling Stones’ devotional Shine a Light and duets with Stax legend William Bell on My God Has a Telephone, a new song in the old style by Brooklyn-based singer Aaron Frazer.

Staton offers her own new track, a smooth blues original called I Missed the Target Again, replete with her husky rasping determination to score in this life or the next. Production is slick, occasionally overly so, throughout the album but the bare gospel piano plea Reach Down and Touch Heaven For Me is where Staton’s vocals come into their own.

Best of all, she channels her own recollection of the Ku Klux Klan bombings of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church into the stealthy anger of 1963, concluding ominously that “we find ourselves again in 1963”. Along with her peer Mavis Staples, Staton is the dignified resistance.

Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander ditches the band moniker to go fully solo on Polari, named for the carny slang adopted by the gay community in the early 20th century. The title track is 90 seconds of Eighties electro funk before Alexander heads into the more predictable territory of thumping Eurobanger Cupid’s Bow. His 2024 Eurovision Song Contest flop Dizzy finds a happier home here in a collection which also flirts with bubblegum pop on Make Me a Man and Archangel. Alexander’s reedy tenor tones are best deployed on Shadow of Love, a track which sounds like Michael Jackson gigging in a sweaty London club.

Contributed

Enterprising hip-hop duo Krept & Konan belatedly follow up their hit 2013 mixtape Young Kingz with the album sequel. Twelve years on they can command guests galore, from fellow UK rappers Chip and Ghetts to Jamaican sensations Sizzla and Popcaan. The latter makes a silky intervention on Smooth Lovin and elsewhere Young Kingz II hops comfortably from the brooding orchestration of 100 Mistakes to the spitting lyrics and pitchshifted background vocals of Snap City. Keeping it family, Nala’s Song is Krept’s pledge to his daughter, the inspiration for launching his own baby skincare range no less, while Delroy’s Son is Konan’s message to his late father, the ska singer Delroy Wilson.

CLASSICAL

Richard Rodney Bennett: Orchestral Works Vol. 5 (Chandos) ★★★★★

John Wilson’s survey of Richard Rodney Bennett gets better and better. Volume 5, again with the BBC SSO, continues the deserved championing of a considerably undervalued voice of the 20th century British avant-garde. Bennett’s skill was in reconciling steely modernism with genuine soulfulness. To him, melting melodies needn’t fall victim to the hegemony of fashionable dissonance. You hear the spiciness and flamboyance of Walton, but also sumptuous echoes of Delius. These are impassioned performances by the SSO of three works from the 1970s and ‘80s. Wilson captures the multi-coloured essence of the Concerto for Orchestra, whether in the coruscating energy of its outer moments or the searing lyricism that tames the Adagio. Cellist Jonathan Aasgard is sensational in the concerto Sonnets to Orpheus, the outcome of a troubled period for the composer. Diversions for Chamber Orchestra - lusty variations on a weel-kent Scots song - is a veritable hoot. Ken Walton

FOLK

Frances Morton: Sliocht (Ollamh) ★★★★

Sliocht means “lineage”, and this fine tune collection, played with deftness and sensitivity by Donegal-based, Glasgow-raised flautist Frances Morton, reflects richly her Irish heritage. She’s accompanied crisply by musicians including producer Eamon McElholm (formerly of Solas) on guitar and much else, fiddler Ciarán Tourish (Altan) and Malcolm Stitt on bouzouki. Largely Irish (although the strathspey Miss Ramsey’s enjoys a rare flute excursion), her fleet tune medleys include the East Galway Set, for example, the first reel slipping seamlessly into the second with measured ease over guitar and piano, a limber trio of jigs, The Lost and Found Set, and a deft whistle selection. A solitary sean-nós song, Malaí Mhómhar (also known as Boolavogue) from Doimnic Mac Giolla Bhríde, salutes the County Tyrone origins of Morton’s Irish-speaking great-grandparents, and her beautiful rendering of Gan Ainm is one of those heart-stopping Irish airs that seems to hang in the air. Jim Gilchrist