Album Reviews

POP

The Cranberries

Roses

Cooking Vinyl, £11.99

Dolores O’Riordan and backing band return after an absence of ten years as if nothing ever happened. This might be a comfort to those waiting patiently for another serving of Linger or Zombie, but it’s a grave disappointment to anyone hoping for something new or even a little bit different.

A tune such as Show Me The Way takes up the middle ground between the Irish band’s best-known songs, but disappears into no man’s land as you might expect.

O’Riordan’s breathy Celtic whimsy only goes so far on So Good, without ever getting to the guts of the matter. As comebacks go, very disappointing.

Download this: Show Me The Way

Shearwater

Animal Joy

Sub Pop, £10.99

*****

Jonathan Meiburg’s group is like an enema for all those clogged up by too much contrived mainstream fodder, recalling 1960s and 1970s British folk pop, and American indie rock. They may be my new favourite band from Austin, Texas.

Simple inventive songs such as You As You Were, Animal Life or Breaking The Yearlings have passion and poise. There is a flavour of Scotland’s Phantom Band, and the angst-drenched agony of Talk Talk, to what they do, a torrent of musical surprise – check out the fragile fury of Insolence, or Immaculate’s punk-pop sensibility with its thrilling turbocharged bass guitar runs.

Download this: All of it

JAZZ

Louis Armstrong

Louis, The Best Of Louis Armstrong

Decca 2781919, £12.99

This two-disc, 41-track set is designed as an introduction to the greatest jazz man of them all, but it is limited to his post-1935 work (he signed to Decca in 1935). His pioneering 1920s recordings, which are regarded as the DNA of jazz, aren’t included so this can hardly be seen as a comprehensive collection of greatest hits. Rather, it’s an unsatisfying mix of mainly 1950s and 1960s output plus a smattering of 1930s and 1940s. There is no chronological order and no sense of the evolution of this jazz legend.

Alison Kerr

Download this: I’m In The Mood For Love, East Of The Sun

FOLK

Simon Bradley Trio

Grogarry Lodge

Sheem Music SHEEM01, £11.99

****

Recorded over the light May nights of last summer in a South Uist hotel, this album carries a balmy charge – a joyful, unhurried expression of music-making. Simon’s youth in Donegal and England gave way to years in Edinburgh, then as fiddler in a great Asturian group. He now lives with his wife, Anna Wendy Stevenson (here playing fiddle and viola), in the Outer Hebrides. Completed by young mandolin/banjo and guitar maestro Matheu Watson, the threesome have created an engrossing album of Simon’s original compositions, all perfectly paced and here beautifully performed.

Norman Chalmers

Download this: Waltz: Libby Shaw Of Lochawe

CLASSICAL

Edvard Grieg

Music For String Orchestra

Naxos 8.572403, £5.99

*****

When it came to composing music for strings, Edvard Grieg’s approach was “The bigger, the better”. Not for him music for concert orchestra or specialist strings; instead he wrote for – and often stipulated performance by – the joined string sections of a symphony orchestra. Sixty was a good number.

The result is music that is full of body, with different string sections able to play competitively or in support of one another.

Grieg’s Holberg Suite was one result: there is real volume and strength in the work, and this, together with the careful referencing of Baroque and Rococo styles and themes, has helped make it hugely popular.

Alexander Bryce

Download this: The Last Spring