Album review: The Proclaimers | Keane | Classical | Jazz | Folk | World

The Scotsman’s music critics lend their ears to this week’s new releases

POP

The Proclaimers: Like Comedy

Cooking Vinyl, £11.99

Rating: ****

PROVING that a lack of surprises does not have to mean a lack of musical audacity, The Proclaimers serve up more uncomplicated joy, plaintive passion and a sliver of mischief on their ninth album. Like Comedy takes subtle aim at its targets with the straight-talking eloquence of I Think That’s What I Believe and the helter skelter humour of current single Spinning Around In The Air. But the main concern remains affairs of the heart, and the blushing romanticism of Simple Things, with its delicate arrangement, hushed harmonies and killer falsetto, and the sincere, almost bashful sentiment of Dance With Me are as beguiling as anything in their catalogue.

Keane: Strangeland

Island, £12.99

Rating: **

THOUGH overshadowed these days by the glitzier stadium incarnation of Coldplay, the stoic Keane fight their corner with another album of solid, unchallenging MOR indie lighter-wavers with which they hope to win over/anaesthetise the summer festival crowd. On The Road appears to be the obvious radio hit of the bunch, being both rousing and vacuous. Power pop number Disconnected, 70s-influenced piano ballad Watch How You Go and the lingering Sea Fog are better but never quite tip the scales towards the truly memorable fluency of the early singles, no matter how pounding the piano or lung-busting the vocal.

Richard Hawley: Standing At The Sky’s Edge

Parlophone, £12.99

Rating: ****

RICHARD Hawley’s solo albums to date have demonstrated his unlikely talents as a torch song crooner but, while his capacity for a luscious love song and for chiming retro balladeering is represented here by Seek It and Don’t Stare At The Sun respectively, Standing At The Sky’s Edge is much more about showcasing his guitar playing (and effects pedal collection). He comes out with the psychedelic swagger of Paul Weller on She Brings The Sunlight, unleashes the lysergic rock’n’roll on Down In The Woods and bears witness to a country noir stand-off inspired by his native Sheffield on the title track. This is a kick-ass riposte to the dark devastation of the brilliant Truelove’s Gutter, but it’s more broad than deep.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Stéphane Denève conducts Debussy

Chandon, £22.99

Rating: *****

The RSNO has immortalised its recent live survey of Debussy’s orchestral works on this exceptional double disc, and the care and attention that has gone into making these recordings is nothing short of perfection. There’s always a danger that the science of the studio can result in sterility, but not here. Stéphane Denève, in what is effectively his most tangible legacy on leaving the RSNO this month, has pulled out of the bag a stream of deliciously coloured performances of the attitudinal Images, the mellifluous Nocturnes, the fascinating twists and turns of Jeux, the immortal L’après-midi d’un faune, La mer and other jewels such as the jaunty Marche écossaise. Debussy is portrayed in all his infectious guises. Truly one for the collection.

KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ

Floratone: Floratone II

Savoy Jazz, £12.99

Rating: ***

The prolific Bill Frisell is one-quarter of the collaboration with drummer Matt Chamberlain and producers Lee Townsend and Tucker Martine, that constitutes Floratone. Both musicians have notably wide-ranging musical interests, and lay down basic tracks which the two producers then expand and augment in a back-and-forth interchange, with additional contributions from guest musicians, including trumpeter Ron Miles and violinist Eyvind Kang. The music dips into a welter of genres and styles in the course of the 13 tracks, and is very much predicated on an exploration of texture, timbre, rhythmic grooves and the intriguing possibilities that can be realised through studio technology rather than virtuoso soloing of the kind that Frisell has displayed in other contexts. The swirling soundscapes are delivered with greater rhythmic urgency than on their debut five years ago.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

Ewan McLennan: The Last Bird To Sing Fellside, £12.99

Rating: ****

THIS follow up to 2010’s-debut album Rags and Riches can only consolidate this Yorkshire-based Scottish singer-guitarist’s reputation. Grainy, delicate yet authoritative, McLennan’s voice really communicates, getting straight to the heart of well-tried traditional songs and contemporary compositions.

The title track, his own composition, eloquently evokes the mire of intergenerational unemployment while Joe Glenton is his taut account of a soldier who objected to fighting in the current Afghan war. Well-weathered old songs such as Lichtbob’s Lassie and Jamie Raeburn are delivered with great poise and conviction, the latter with Martin Simpson’s slide guitar threading plaintively through the timelessly heartfelt lyric.

Sympathetic fiddle from John McCusker, bass from Laurence Blackadder and a solitary harmony vocal from Karine Polwart (on Rolling Hills of the Borders), not to mention McLennan’s own deft guitar playing, all conspire to make this a nicely rounded recording, full of heart.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

Issa: Moucharabieh

Institut du monde arabe, (pre-orders only)

Rating: ***

ISSA plays the buzuq, transliterated as the Greek bouzouki and cognate with the Turkish saz: it’s a long-necked fretted lute with a warm sound, and lends itself ideally to the microtones of the maqam music typical of the Middle East. And Issa’s provenance is interesting. Although he’s never set foot in Kurdistan, he is now one of its traditional music’s principal exponents. He hails from a Kurdish tribe famous for its musicians and dancers; under political pressure with which Turkey’s present-day Kurds are painfully familiar, his grandparents left Turkey for exile in Lebanon, whence Issa himself was sent to the safety of Paris when civil war broke out. And it was in the audio archives of the Kurdish Institute in Paris that he began researching the melodies which he and his pianist Elie Maalouf have arranged here. He describes his music as Kurdish-Parisian-Lebanese, but it also has elements of jazz and flamenco. The pace is lazy, and the sound sumptuous, with the buzuq’s spare and sinuously bent notes tenderly underpinned by oud, guitar, piano, bass, and smoky percussion. Improvisation, says Issa, is essentially about letting melodies develop without explicitly establishing them, and that is what happens in track after track. Issa likes to focus on a particular aspect of melody or rhythm – chromatic acrobatics, or unexpected scale-changes – and landscapes and village dances are suggested by the track titles; sometimes it feels like film music, but most of the time it evokes a gentle nostalgia, even though, as Issa claims, he is showing the way for the Kurdish music of tomorrow. And this musical world is a good place to be – as is the indispensably useful Institut du monde arabe, where it was cooked up.

MICHAEL CHURCH