Album reviews: Twin Atlantic | The Script | Hifi Sean & David McAlmont

Twin Atlantic | Stevie Kyle

Twin Atlantic: Meltdown (Staple Diet Records) **

The Script: Satellites (BMG) **

Hifi Sean & David McAlmont: Daylight (Plastique Recordings) ****

Fans of the familiar Twin Atlantic sound may be relieved to hear the band return with newly beefed-up line-up to full pop/rock throttle on their seventh album. Meltdown is a departure from previous outing Transparency, which was itself an outlier in their catalogue, recorded remotely as a slimmed-down duo with Jacknife Lee producing from the States.

Its relative boldness was not received with quite the affection they could normally count on. Meltdown restores that balance by giving the audience exactly what you might expect, hitting the ground running with the brawny Asleep and further shaking the listener awake with Stuck In A Car With You. Frontman Sam McTrusty has said he loves his Springsteen driving metaphors but this is kitchen sink drama rather than the romance of the road.

The punky tail wind prevails on recent single World Class Entertainment before they relent on Sorry, a song with words of encouragement from a parent. The title track is among the album’s other mellower moments, like a male-fronted Chvrches in sound and sentiment.

Meltdown was produced and engineered by the band in their own studio in as close to hermetic conditions as they have ever encountered but that purism has simply resulted in more of the same with the familiar flag-waving and commercial chest-beating of Harder being the most generic example of their safe, anthemic tendencies.

Irish pop rockers The Script have also experienced line-up upheavals in recent years. The death of founding member Mark Sheehan in 2023 was an immeasurable blow to his childhood friend Danny O’Donoghue but creatively it has opened the way to co-writing with non-band members and their pithy if pedestrian new album Satellites, though infused with grief, sounds youthful, as if his collaborators have performed a nip and tuck on the tracks.

The Script

The trim perky funk pop of Both Ways is a catchy disposable jam with shades of Bruno Mars and Maroon 5. Falling Flying apes the twinkly pop momentum of The Weeknd. Inside Out sounds like Ed Sheeran in breezy skiffly mode and they keep up the manicured pop pace with Unsaid and Home Is Where the Hurt Is, leaving no lasting impression.

Gone is O’Donoghue’s song for Sheehan, a starburst pop number with a dash of dance music, a hint of Celtic influence and a fair bit of autotune for good commercial measure, making no demands on the listener.

Among the vast array of pandemic-birthed collaborations, one of the most glorious was the sublime partnership of Hifi Sean & David McAlmont. Their debut album Happy Ending was essentially Scots expat Soup Dragon-turned-DJ/producer Sean Dickson meets torch song supremo and art and architecture academic McAlmont at the top of a London tower block for some urban soul romance.

Hifi Sean and David McAlmont | Jason Arber

Follow-up Daylight puts the sampledelics and trip-hop on the backburner in favour of sleek euphoric dance pop. The modular electro intro of the opening title track leads into an ecstatic dance track with gospel soul uplift and McAlmont testifying from the front. They carry that sense of exultation through Sun Come Up and add lashings of choral effects to Coalition. The blithe electro pop romp USB – USC offers more on connection, while the pacey synth pop of Meantime recalls the Pet Shop Boys in its perceptive waspishness.

Sad Banger is a defining track for the duo though there is not much that is melancholic in this collection. Summery delivers on its promise with its Seventies disco funk lightness; Celebrate is a hypnotic hands-in-the-air invocation. McAlmont is on stunning vocal form on the stratospheric torch soul song You Are My and turns up the glitz on closing track The Show. Best of all, sister album Twilight is soon to come.

CLASSICAL

The Past & I: 100 Years of Thomas Hardy (Delphian) ****

The Past and I, quoted from Thomas Hardy’s The Ghost Of The Past, celebrates the English poet’s influence on composers over the past century. The common factor in much of this music - settings by Ivor Gurney, Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst among others - is their illuminating arrangements by living composer Arthur Keegan, who oversaw the project during a residency at Britten’s former Aldeburgh home, The Red House. Keegan’s own responses to Hardy - Elegies for Emma [Hardy’s deceased wife] and String Quartet  No 1 “Elegies for Tom” - are strikingly insightful. The disc also features the specially-commissioned The Echo Elf Answers by Kerry Andrew, enchantingly scored for mezzo-soprano and guitar. Interesting also to hear Britten’s At The Railway Station, Upway recast for the same duo. These are commendable recordings, performed in various combinations by vocalist Lotte Betts-Dean, guitarist James Girling and the Ligeti Quartet. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Pat Metheny: MoonDial (BMG Modern Recordings) ****

Twenty-time Grammy-winning guitarist Pat Metheny completes his trio of solo albums played on baritone guitar, on this occasion with a custom-built, nylon strung model using unorthodox tuning. From the gently unfolding, ambulatory opening title track, you get the impression Metheny is relishing the exploration of this new sound world. Nothing is hurried, as he mixes his own compositions, including the titular MoonDial, with classics such as Bernstein’s Somewhere or Lennon-McCartney’s Here, There and Everywhere. He dwells affectionately on the Beatles number, and on Everything Happens to Me as it morphs almost imperceptibly into Somewhere. The Londonderry Air also reveals itself gradually, initially tentative before the familiar melody emerges, while another Metheny composition, the briskly strummed Shōga, is the sole excursion into faster tempo, the pace reverting to gentle in a dreamy account of the Raskin-Mercer number My Love and I, from the film Apache. Jim Gilchrist