Album reviews: Peter Doherty | Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke | Rebecca Vasmant

He may be living in France these days, but judging by his latest solo album, Felt Better Alive, Peter Doherty’s eye for the man on the street remains as sharp as ever, writes Fiona Shepherd

Peter Doherty: Felt Better Alive (Strap Originals) ★★★

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales (Warp) ★★★★

Rebecca Vasmant: Who We Are, Becoming (New Soil) ★★★★

Whether Camden Town or Clerkenwell, Margate Pier or coastal Normandy, Libertines/Babyshambles frontman Peter Doherty hoovers up influences from his ’hood and imports them straight into song in gonzo reportage style. His latest solo album, Felt Better Alive, is awash with songs written but rejected for the most recent Libertines album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade. He’s not bitter - he simply uses them more appropriately under his own name, including The Day The Baron Died, which is essentially All Quiet track Baron’s Claw as he hears it.

Peter Doherty | Bridie Cummings

Home life just across the English channel has inspired a number of tracks. Doherty’s location has changed but his eye for the man on the street/country road remains the same on Calvados, a holistic hymn to brandy-making, while he samples the sound of the sea and the voice of his local priest to create end-of-the-Normandy-pier number Prêtre de la Mer.

But the old country makes its presence felt on Ed Belly, a breezy pub rocker which adds a touch of Dixieland jazz, skiffly drums and characterful sax to the mix. There is a spaghetti western saunter to the title track. Even better, irrepressible guest vocalist Lisa O’Neill, a vaudeville singer for our times, conjures dark mischief in London’s historic Irish community on Poca Mahoney’s.

Doherty, of course, is a villain or at least anti-hero in his own romantic story and doesn’t even pretend to varnish the truth on Pot of Gold, a candid lullaby for his daughter, which assures her that “we’ll forget about the time when they always tried to run me out of town”.

Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard | Pierre Toussaint

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and electronica composer, producer and remixer Mark Pritchard collaborate on a suite of songs inspired by Pritchard’s archive of analogue synthesizers. Pritchard has some adjacent form here, scoring a Top Ten hit in the early Nineties (as Shaft) with a rave version of the Roobarb and Custard theme. Tall Tales triggers some nostalgia for kids’ TV themes and the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but it is far from kitsch.

A Fake in a Faker’s World is closer to the lo-fi soundworld of post-punk synth pop with bonus celestial organ coda. Bugging Out Again is a very Radiohead title for a glacial, almost proggy soundscape with Yorke at his most fragile and desolate. Back in the Game is a flintier proposition with minimalist modulation, while The White Cliffs is a serene yet dark synth odyssey.

In contrast, Gangsters features a cheeky synth riff and Happy Days emasculates the language of financial scams using perky piano and terse drum fills to create a toytown march. Visual artist Jonathan Zawada has made an accompanying feature film to be screened pre-release in cinemas.

Rebecca Vasment | @elliekoepke_photography

Glasgow jazz maven Rebecca Vasmant is equally adept at creating an immersive soundtrack, though she tends to find her featherlight spiritual jazz style and stick with it across her second home-recorded album Who We Are, Becoming.

Home-recorded doesn’t mean lo-fi. This is a sumptuous, silky suite with breathy vocal incantations, percussive shimmers and brooding brass from a who’s who of the grassroots jazz scene, including singers Emilie Boyd, kitti, Terra Kin, Paix and Gaia Jeannot, drummer Graham Costello, saxophonist Harry Weir and new collaborators including flautist GOkU and harpist Amanda Whiting, all in raptures at this fluttering mood music for a sunny spring day.

This time it’s extra personal for Vasmant, who adds her own spoken word to Mother Earth and Poem for My Grandparents, both Holocaust survivors who have inspired her own prayer of gratitude and defiance. Vasmant is determined to inspire in turn, deploying joyful piano, iridescent harp and dubby brass to contend that Goodness Does Shine Through.

CLASSICAL

Viadana: 1612 Italian Vespers (CORO) ★★★★

In 1612, Venice was rocked by the death of Giovanni Gabrieli, doyen of the city’s signature luxuriant polychoral style. In the same year, one Lodovico Grossi da Viadana issued his own collection of music for the evening service of Vespers. These two composers play a central role in I Fagiolini’s liturgical re-creation in which, besides Viadana’s sequential psalm settings and Gabrieli’s centrefold Magnificat, motets by Palestrina, Barbarino and Monteverdi and plainsong Antiphons contextualise the moment in time. Viadana’s own music exudes a fascinating individuality, its rich diversity emphasised through director Robert Hollingworth’s freely prescriptive use of his choral and instrumental forces. Where mezzo-soprano Clare Wilkinson offers a sublime solo presence in O dulcissima Maria, fuller voices animate the contrapuntal vocal theatre of Laetatus sum. I Fagiolini’s intimate precision is offset by the fullness of Cambridge’s De Profundis plainchant choir. Gabrieli’s extravagant In ecclesiis provides a thrilling conclusion. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Jacqui Dankworth: Windmills (Perdido) ★★★★★

This beguiling album features vivid arrangements as Jacqui Dankworth’s regular quartet - with husband, pianist, singer and, here, arranger Charlie Wood, bassist Oli Hayhurst and drummer Ralph Salmins - rope in the BBC Big Band, Carducci String Quartet and Bedazzle sting section. Despite these instrumental forces and Wood’s imaginative settings, not a lyric is blunted as Dankworth enriches each song with unmatchable pitch and poise, reprising classics but throwing in some surprises. The beguiling invocation of London By Night is dreamy with piano and strings but with a swingy big band interlude, while that Sixties chestnut, Windmills of Your Mind, sparks with fresh magic, Dankworth scatting over percussive piano and handclapping. There’s sumptuous swing in Lucky to Be Me, while Raglan Road gains an engrossing arrangement of Kavanagh’s poem, Dankworth spinning sadness with tender articulation; further eloquent regret as strings drift behind the stilling wistfulness of Send In the Clowns. Jim Gilchrist