Album reviews: Manda Rin | The Pictish Trail | Calexico | Britten: Piano Concerto | Howard Skempton | Curios | Tom McConville | Lakshmi Shankar | The Rough Guide to Turkish Café

POP

MANDA RIN: MY DNA

***

THIS IS FAKE DIY, 9.99

MORE than a decade on from that bouncy appearance on Top Of The Pops, former Bis miss Amanda McKinnon retains her stage name, trademark hairclips, her love of electronica and that high-pitched vocal tone, but has moved away from lyrics about sweeties to slightly more sophisticated concerns on her solo debut.

Her cute, girly voice suits the perky electro pop of DNA but wanders off key and gets a little wearing over the course of a whole album, particularly when paired so often with tinny toytown synthesizers. But she keeps things on track with some nicely integrated punk and New Romantic influences, plus a bunch of catchy tunes.

THE PICTISH TRAIL: SECRET SOUNDZ VOL 1

****

FENCE, 12.99

"SORRY it's taken me a while," apologises Pictish Trail mainman Johnny Lynch on the sleeve of his about-bleedin'-time full-length solo album. Lynch is King Creosote's trusty sideman at Fence Records HQ in Anstruther, so he tends to get distracted facilitating other Fence releases and the annual Fence Homegame.

But at least he is not short of musician buddies to lend a hand. Members of The Earlies help flesh out Into The Smoke into an electro-tinged rampage and Lynch toys with overwrought Bright Eyes-style angst on Words Fail Me Now, but mostly Secret Soundz is a collection of lo-fi, intimate, routinely lovely introspection.

CALEXICO: CARRIED TO DUST

****

CITY SLANG, 11.99

ARIZONA-based duo Joey Burns and John Convertino steep their music in a sense of place – usually the desertscapes of the south-west states of America and into Mexico (Calexico is also the name of a Californian border town).

Carried To Dust has plenty to love in its effortless evocation of this laid-back Americana and mariachi territory but also casts the net wider, inspired by the band's travels in South America and the Hispanic musicians with whom they collaborate on a number of tracks. The Latino likes of Inspiracion and Victor Jara's Hands, about the Chilean theatre director murdered during the Pinochet regime, are only one atmospheric facet of this rich album, but take Calexico to new and enticing places.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

BRITTEN: PIANO CONCERTO / YOUNG APOLLO / DIVERSIONS

****

HYPERION RECORDS, 12.99

THIS disc gathers Britten's three works for solo piano and orchestra, the Piano Concerto in D major, Op 13, Young Apollo, Op 16, and Diversions, Op 21. They are brilliantly performed by Scottish pianist Steven Osborne and the BBC SSO under Ilan Volkov, in a vivid recording made in Glasgow's Henry Wood Hall.

These pieces have never really moved to the centre of the repertoire, and have not always convinced even those amenable to the composer, but it is hard to imagine more persuasive advocates for the music. Osborne is dazzling in the showier passages (of which there are many) in all three works, and all challenges are met head-on in exemplary performances. Both the original third movement of the Piano Concerto and the later replacement are also included on the disc, allowing the programming of either version.

HOWARD SKEMPTON: THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

***

DELPHIAN RECORDS, 13.99

ALTHOUGH an avowedly experimental composer, Howard Skempton's compositions have often revealed an easy-on-the-ear focus on consonant sound and melody rather than the knottier qualities usually associated with anything tagged as "experimental" music. That is certainly true of his vocal music on this beautifully recorded and performed disc, featuring the Exon Singers under conductor Matthew Owens, who commissioned much of the music, some while Master of Music at St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh.

Most have origins in the Christian religious tradition, with only a setting of Burns' O Life! for baritone and organ and four pantheistic Emerson Songs drawing on secular sources. They are also characteristically short (only the Lamentations exceeds ten minutes, and several are under two minutes long), and employ a simplicity of means and lack of conventional development that will strike listeners as ethereally beautiful or maddeningly static, according to taste.

KENNY MATHIESON

JAZZ

CURIOS: CLOSER

****

IMPURE MUSIC, 8.99

PIANIST Tom Cawley attracts less attention than colleagues Pete Wareham and Seb Rochford in his other band, Acoustic Ladyland, but his debut album with Curios was one of the best records of last year, and their win in the Best Band category at the BBC Jazz Awards in July has raised their profile considerably. This second disc confirms the promise of the earlier release from this acoustic trio with bassist Sam Burgess and Joshua Blackmore.

Their music occupies analogous musical territory to EST or the Neil Cowley Trio, but with a subtler creative edge and more intricate development of their harmonic materials that is closer in concept to the Brad Mehldau Trio. Cawley's compositions have an understated quirkiness, but the trio are adept at teasing out the less obvious developmental possibilities from these simple building blocks.

FOLK

TOM MCCONVILLE: TOMMY ON SONG

**

TOMCAT MUSIC, 11.99

I TEND to think of Newcastle's Tom McConville as a fiddler, but as the title indicates, this latest disc lays the primary emphasis on his singing, although there is plenty of his excellent fiddle work thrown in.

Most of the songs he has chosen to interpret are contemporary rather than traditional. He opens with a fine version of Mark Knopfler's effervescent Why Aye Man, but the rest come from more obviously folk-related writers, including Jez Lowe, Allan Taylor, Kieran Halpin, Ewan McVicar, Phil Ochs, and Archie Fisher's eulogy, Fiddle Farewell.

His unaffected and emotionally honest approach to the songs is very effective, while the instrumental sets allow him to parade his own tune-writing talents, as well as pay tribute to his hero, 19th-century Tyneside fiddler James Hill. Claire Mann and Aaron Jones are among the supporting musicians.

KENNY MATHIESON

WORLD

LAKSHMI SHANKAR – DANCING IN THE LIGHT

****

WORLD VILLAGE, 13.99

FROM the first notes of the first track of this lovely CD, we are transported into the beguiling Indian landscape, as this celebrated singer launches into a slow song, of a kind designed to show off her improvisatory skill. Lakshmi Shankar, now over 80, is one of India's best-loved singers, and her vocal art has been enriched by her early grounding as a dancer in the bharatnatyam style which is practised in the temples of South India. She acquired her surname through marrying the brother of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, and the second song she sings here was actually composed by him.

Two of the tracks consist of songs attributed to India's medieval poet-saint Mira, whose devotion to Krishna caused her jealous husband to attempt to poison her. But he failed: the poison simply intensified her love for the deity, which is most eloquently evoked here with the aid of the tabla, sarangi, and tanpura drone.

THE ROUGH GUIDE TO TURKISH CAF

****

RGNET, 9.99

AS THE notes to this CD make clear, Turkish music is a melting pot for an extraordinary variety of different musical traditions, reflecting both the ethnic mix of its population, and the scope of the Ottoman empire when at its height. Quite a few of these tracks echo club culture, but most imbued with cultures going way back in time – Gypsy, Byzantine, Polish, Azeri, and Kurdish being just some of them.

It opens with a lovely a cappella song by Tatiana Bostan – showing strong Armenian influences – after which comes a rousing solo, delicately accompanied by mini-solos from his band, by the singer Orhan Hakalmaz. Then come divas like Sezen Aksu, Aynur Dogan, and the aptly-named Sultana.

MICHAEL CHURCH