By Fiona Shepherd

Published 17th May 2024, 09:44 BST

Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown (Domino) ****

Barry Adamson: Cut To Black (Barry Adamson Incorporated) ****

The Pearlfishers: Making Tapes For Girls (Marina) ****

There is something both earthy and elemental about Beth Gibbons’ debut solo album yet, despite its ethereal blues, its music is no cathartic conjuring. Lives Outgrown has been a meticulous ten years in the making, its songs of motherhood, menopause and mortality carved and whittled from experience to produce a memento mori for the trip-hop generation.

For those who have forgotten or never knew in the first place, Gibbons is the shy singer with Portishead, a band who soundtracked many a moody moment in the Nineties, yet remain timeless in appreciation. Gibbons has rarely been spotted outside their realm, though she did collaborate with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, aka Rustin Man, on the 2002 album Out of Season and deliver a couple of curveballs – singing Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and, more recently, guesting on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale & the Big Steppers album.

Gibbons has collaborated with another former Talk Talk member, drummer Lee Harris, as well as producer James Ford on the tremulous torch songs and eerie psych folk of Lives Outgrown. Haunting opener Tell Me Who You Are Today is almost pagan in conception, while bare, bending strings form the bedrock over which Gibbons reflects on the breathy baroque pop of Floating on a Moment.

Heady strings and sonorous drums embellish the insightful jazz ballad Burden of Life and there is further broad but enduring wisdom on Lost Changes. Gibbons enunciates as though delivering a gothic musical theatre number on For Sale. “Just ask yourself, how would you want life to be?” she demands to know over dramatic gypsy violin, hand bells and foreboding wordless vocal intimations.

Beyond the Sun whips up eddying organ, squawking sax, taunting backing vocals and martial drum patterns like a Wicker Man fever dream, while the intoxicating Whispering Love binds you in its inescapable clutches before releasing you to a run-out groove of bucolic farmyard sounds.

The many-splendoured Barry Adamson has been post-punk bass hero for Magazine and The Bad Seeds, a composer of filmic instrumentals, a lounge lizard crooner and now, on the opening track of his first new studio album in eight years, a 21st century rhythm’n’blues man. “Lady, you shot me” he accuses, with northern soul verve, on The Last Words of Sam Cooke.

Cut to Black is a confident, varied affair from the big, brassy strut and blues guitar solo of Demon Lover via the luxe disco of Manhattan Satin to the Hammond-driven roots rock of One Last Midnight. Adamson goes Barry White deep on Mancunian funk number Was It a Dream? while the epic swagger of These Would Be Blues is what Kevin Rowland thinks he sounds like, with its cleansing, uplifting gospel soul chorale, guitar twang and minimalist strings.

There are strings aplenty and golden melodies to spare on the latest album by The Pearlfishers – no surprise to anyone familiar with the cult oeuvre of Davie Scott, one of our greatest tunesmiths and stylists, who cleaves to the harmonic greats of the Sixties, from The Beach Boys to Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb.

David Scott of The Pearlfishers PIC: Stefan Kassel

The sepia tones of Making Tapes For Girls contain a comforting salute to the power of music and its role in making sense of the world. “I didn’t know how to say the right thing, so I left it to Joni and Paul” Scott sings on the title track, over subtle strings and plangent guitar. He is also happy to indulge more esoteric influences such as Billy Childish, who is referenced on the girl group-meets-country pop vibes of Hold Out For A Mystic, and to hymn The Word Evangeline with a flamenco-inflected guitar solo and a shout-out for songs using the same name. What, no Icicle Works?

CLASSICAL

Samuel Sebastian Wesley: Sacred Choral Music (Delphian) ***

Born in 1810, the same year as Schumann and Chopin, Samuel Sebastian Wesley found himself at a relative disadvantage to such European contemporaries, born into a comparatively somnolent musical Britain, especially in the church circles he inhabited as a cathedral organist and composer. Wesley was nonetheless a revitaliser of the English choral tradition, paving the way for later Victorians such as Stainer and Parry. That, in itself, justifies this hefty tribute by the Choir of the National Musicians’ Church under Toby Ward, with organist Richard Gowers, who combine well-known Wesley’s anthems (Blessed be the God and Father, Wash me throughly, and the epic The Wilderness) with psalms and other liturgical settings. These are radiant and wholesome performances, mindful of Wesley’s quasi-operatic leanings, his technical craftsmanship. That said, this is music that will appeal mostly to church music aficionados. There are mountainous heights to savour, but stretches of desert too. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Fred Hersch: Silent, Listening (ECM) ****

Silence and stillness do indeed frame these thoughtful solo piano excursions by a master improviser – mainly Hersch’s own creations, plus four covers. The title track itself encapsulates what this recording is all about, its nocturnal sounding, delicately impromptu deliberations suggesting a keenly poised ear, as they emerge out of silence. Other compositions by Hersch include the quirky bossa nova delicacy of Little Song; then there’s his starkly atmospheric Night Tide, its striking of both keyed and plucked piano strings suggesting the clang of a warning buoy, and the faintly spooky Volon, much of which suggests mood music for a haunted house. Of the covers, further tintinnabular delicacy informs Russ Freeman’s The Wind and there’s a playful cover of the Romberg- Hammerstein classic Gently, As In A Morning Sunrise, followed by a stealthy introduction which slips into a pensive treatment of Alec Wilder and Ben Berenberg’s Winter of My Discontent. Jim Gilchrist

Album reviews: Beth Gibbons | Barry Adamson | The Pearlfishers