Album reviews: Sam Fender | All Seeing Dolls | Dean Owens

Sam Fender: People Watching (Polydor) ★★★

Dean Owens: Spirit Ridge (Continental Song City) ★★★★

All Seeing Dolls: Parallel (A Recordings) ★★★★

Tyneside roots rocker Sam Fender returns with a third album of kitchen sink vignettes fitted out for festival consumption. He may cleave appreciatively to his geographical heritage but he furthers his love affair with the big open canvases of US driving music by co-producing with War On Drugs’ frontman – and fellow Springsteen acolyte - Adam Granduciel.

The pert arena rock of the opening title track is a prime example of those worlds colliding. People Watching is a personal tribute to his mentor/mother figure, the Byker Grove actress Annie Orwin, but rattles along like the Killers, recalling his previous hit anthem Seventeen Going Under.

From here, the road trip takes in the good, the bad and the boring. Fender drops the pace to admire the scenery on the beguiling jangly Nostalgia’s Lie, a solid example of good old-fashioned songwriting craftsmanship. Wild Long Lie is similarly evocative. Fender sounds burdened as he reckons with dead end drug consumption (“I think I need to leave this town”) set to a blistering guitar solo and trademark squalling saxophone.

But much of the journey drags along. Chin Up evokes the pacing and phrasing of an Oasis non-anthem, while a burst of harmonica can’t save the bland, plodding Arm’s Length. A Little Bit Closer starts off like stadium Dylan before digging into stodgy indie rock territory and the Eighties over-production takes Crumbling Empire into Mike & the Mechanics territory.

Rein Me In trips along with lithe vocal phrasing and tinkling piano, while bluegrass mandolin is discernible in the general roots rock rabble of Something Heavy. Best of all, the Easington Colliery brass band provide the emotional heft on closing ballad Remember My Name, which is inspired by Fender’s grandfather and allows for a degree of quiet vulnerability to shine through all the hearty bellowing.

Dean Owens | Mirk One

The grandfatherly inspiration continues on Edinburgh Americana artist Dean Owens’s latest album. In contrast to his recent collaborations with Arizona outfit Calexico, Spirit Ridge was recorded in rural Emilia-Romagna in Italy, with thoughts of his Italian circus performer great-great-grandfather on the bluesy Tame the Lion. But his Tex Mex tastes are evident on the stormy Spirito, while panoramic country rocker Light This World is garnished with mellifluous mariachi trumpet.

Mood and tone switch on the rougher, tougher The Buzzard and the Crow with its brooding strings and trembling percussion, while Burn It All is an outright commercial blues rocker. He may not have the mainstream appeal of Sam Fender, but Owens has carved his credible place as a songwriter who comfortably inhabits the US/Mexican borderlands in his beautifully arranged music. Chamber pop ballad My Beloved Hills is a particularly fine example of his art, while a plangent new version of an old ballad Spirit Of Us is a reminder that those skills are long honed.

All Seeing Dolls | Contributed

Scottish singer/songwriter Dot Allison and Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe have forged a new odd couple collaboration called All Seeing Dolls. Their debut outing Parallel is an intoxicating advert for their contrasting styles, with Allison’s breathy soprano set against Newcombe’s heady backdrop on opening track That’s Amazing Grace and teamed with a big, resonant drum sound and lysergic guitars on Blossoms In Her Mind.

In general, Allison brings the pastoral fragility while Newcombe creates sonorous psychedelic soundscapes such as the languorous orchestral sampledelia of Lady Buzz Killer. Sirens Echo In An Iron Lung sounds just as it says, with Allison’s harmonised wordless vocals piercing the gothic garage rock dissonance.

Psych folk number I Believe You About the Moon is Vashti Bunyan with bells on and the dreamy Sixties fantasia of What Do Dolls Dream could have been culled from the soundtrack of a cult European arthouse film.

CLASSICAL

Benjamin Britten: Canticles (Delphian) ★★★★

The complex intimacy of Benjamin Britten’s five Canticles, written for and inspired by his partner Peter Pears, is exquisitely captured in this new recording led by tenor James Way and his pianist wife Natalie Burch, with mezzo Lotte Betts Deans, countertenor Hugh Cutting, baritone Ross Ramgobin, hornist Annemarie Federle and harpist Alis Huws. Although written separately, they form a powerful grouping, especially in a set of performances whose honesty and purity remain consistent throughout. Beyond the bittersweet loveliness of My Beloved is Mine come the sublime duetting of Abraham and Isaac, the encroaching mischief of Still Falls the Rain, the feverish theatre of The Journey of the Magi, then the ethereal harp-accompanied The Death of Saint Narcissus. Way closes the programme alone in Priaulx Rainer’s unaccompanied Cycle of Declamation, written for Pears in 1955. The similarities to Britten in her soul-seeking settings of John Donne is inescapable and fitting. Ken Walton

FOLK

Fiona Soe Paing: Sand, Silt, Flint (Own Label) ★★★★

First issued digitally, this extraordinary exercise by Aberdeenshire singer, producer and multi-media artist Fiona Soe Paing is out on CD but is much more than a recording, the sleeve including QR codes linking each song to a “sound walk”, detailing history and location. Soe Paing’s dramatic re-imaginings are founded on the balladry of her native Aberdeenshire, her hypnotically haunting vocals – at times becoming what Burns might have termed “an eldritch croon” – cusped in electronica and musicians such as cellist Alice Allen and fiddler Paul Anderson. The Ballad of John Hosie sets the tone, her melancholy eloquence underpinned by bass and sinister snare drum. Elsewhere, Bonny Udny becomes a chant over chiming guitar, with snatches of recorded speech from John Strachan, the source singer (to whom Soe Paing is related). Tifty’s Annie, meanwhile, spells out its misogynistic tragedy to bitter effect over inexorable snare-drumming. Jim Gilchrist